Fourteenth Annual Garden & Landscape Symposium 

The King’s Garden at Fort Ticonderoga presents the Fourteenth Annual Garden & Landscape Symposium on Saturday, April 18, 2026. This program features practical strategies for expanding and improving your garden and landscape. We invite you to join us, whether you are an experienced gardener or you are just getting started, for helpful insights from garden experts who live and garden in northern climates.

STREAMING THE GARDEN & LANDSCAPE SYMPOSIUM! Those who are unable to travel to Ticonderoga for the symposium can sign up to participate online  using Zoom.

Featured Speakers: 

My Earthwork: The Permanent Ephemeral— A sculptor in many media, a writer, and sculpture park owner, Thea Alvin seeks to organize nature’s chaos into beautiful shapes, identify the natural rhythm of spaces, and dynamically shift broken or disrupted gardens such that the energy and natural movement is restored. By working together with the land and its stewards, Alvin tunes and enhances parks, galleries, and pathways allowing the unexpected through and pushing a little impossible into view.

Symposium Schedule:

9:00am Welcome

9:10-9:20am Challenges of the 2025 Growing Season—Fort Ticonderoga’s Horticulturist-in-Residence Ann Hazelrigg presents a brief review of the challenges gardeners faced in 2025.

9:20-10:20am My Earthwork: The Permanent Ephemeral— A sculptor in many media, a writer, and sculpture park owner, Thea Alvin seeks to organize nature’s chaos into beautiful shapes, identify the natural rhythm of spaces, and dynamically shift broken or disrupted gardens such that the energy and natural movement is restored. By working together with the land and its stewards, Alvin tunes and enhances parks, galleries, and pathways allowing the unexpected through and pushing a little impossible into view.

10:30-11:30am Gardening in a Changing World—In this presentation, Helen O’Donnell discusses her relationship to gardening in terms of horticultural and agricultural practices. She touches on ideas of gardening as both an artistic practice as well as an ecological one, and how we wrestle with making the “right” choices in our gardens. She discusses some of her own growing and gardening practices and gives some examples of other ideas that inspire her. Helen is a professional gardener, designer, and grower. She owns and manages the Bunker Farm in Dummerston, Vermont, along with her husband, sister, and brother-in-law. She manages Bunker Farm Plants, a specialty plant nursery, as part of the farm operation, offering unusual annuals and perennials, natives and non-natives, primarily grown from seed. In her gardening business, Helen designs, installs, and maintains gardens for private clients, works as a consultant, writes, and lectures. Helen believes that design, maintenance, and growing are symbiotic practices and that a garden is an ever changing, interspecies collaboration! She loves plants—especially the unkempt wild ones—and is a painter and printmaker and spends time each winter making art.

11:45am-12:30pm Lunch—Included in the registration fee.

12:30-12:40pm What to Expect in 2026—Fort Ticonderoga’s Horticulturist-in-Residence Ann Hazelrigg shares what to expect in the 2026 growing season.

12:40-1:40pm Abercrombie’s Rock to the Ethan Allen Gate: Ticonderoga’s 19th-Century Landscape—Explore Fort Ticonderoga’s landscape through the eyes of 19th-century tourists with Vice President of Public History Stuart Lilie. Discover the amenities the Pavilion Hotel offered to generations of visitors and the gardens that supplied the menu. See the shadows of railroads and steamboat docks that dot our landscape today.

1:50-2:35pm The American Revolution, An Environmental Perspective: Five Landscapes that Shaped the War for Independence—What happened to forests, wetlands, and gardens during the Revolutionary War, and how did the natural world affect the conflict? Explore the American Revolution from an environmental perspective, focusing on five distinctive landscapes that were instrumental in the struggle for independence. The natural world played a significant role both on the battlefield and in the battle for hearts and minds. Blake McGready is a Ph.D. Candidate at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Before pursuing his doctorate, he worked for the National Park Service.

2:45-3:45pm The Wonderful World of Flavor—Insert yourself in the world of professional tasting to explore fruit and vegetable flavor quality like the experts do. First, you will be trained as a human instrument to objectively assess the aroma and flavor of food products. Then, we will explore the flavor quality of a set of fruits and vegetables together while learning what creates success in the market. Roy Desrochers is a global sensory expert based at the University of Vermont Extension with over 42 years of experience training tasters around the world.