Eric Groft Lectures at Metro Hort Group’s September Meeting

Eric Groft encouraged gardeners at Metro Hort Group to pick up their paint brushes and get inspired by art in his lecture The Artful Garden: Creative Inspiration for Landscape Design at the Arsenal in Central Park. Dagni Senzel, who serves on the Board of Metro Hort, complimented Eric on the talk’s ‘fresh approach” of looking at design through the lens of artist’s quotations.

Images of vibrant perennial combinations entertained the audience, proving as Duke Ellington sang, “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.” The highlight of the evening for Eric was seeing Frederick Law Olmstead’s original, competition winning Greensward Plan from 1858. Executed in pen and ink and laying out so many of the spaces we know today, the plan currently hangs in the Arsenal, the headquarters of the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. Among those in attendance were long-standing friends and collaborators of OvS, including Carole Rosenberg, Jeff Jones, John Knowlton, and Robert Johnson who met for dinner afterwards at the Boathouse in Central Park for a lake-side dinner.