On January 9, the Wakefield Estate kicked off the first session of our winter Homesteading series with a workshop on Backyard Fruit Trees. The course covered the four P’s of growing fruit trees: purchasing, planting, pruning and providing. Participants learned how to grow healthy, productive fruit trees and then braved the cold for a live pruning demo on some of […]
On December 17, the Wakefield Trust hosted its first annual open house in the Davenport Mansion here at the Wakefield Estate. Visitors stopped by for an informal gathering and some holiday cheer. Wakefield staff used greens collected from the property, strings of lights and antique bird decoys to make the mansion house look festive for the holidays.
Several participants enjoyed a fun, hands-on kite-making and flying workshop led by Blue Hill Observatory Program Director Don McCasland Sunday, November 1st. After first constructing high quality Tyvek and fiberglass sled kites at the Wakefield Estate, participants took a tour of the Observatory and tested out their new kites. It was a clear day and the visitors could see landmarks […]
This year’s Holiday Decorations & Tablescapes demo did not fail to dazzle the enthusiastic participants who attended on November 19th for our first evening gathering. Lisa Ahern of Cedar Grove Gardens demonstrated some of her great ideas for easy and festive ways to make your home and table “shine” during the holidays. All the arrangements created during the workshop were raffled […]
During the first two weeks of November, the Wakefield Estate hosted the final BPS school visits for this fall. Since early October, we hosted over 900 elementary students from Boston Public Schools. Funding for bus transportation was provided by Boston Youth Environmental Network’s Get Out and Learn Program. It was both humbling and powerful to witness these young peoples’ response […]
The Wakefield Estate is excited to have received support from the Boston Youth Environmental Network’s pilot grant program, Get Out And Learn (GOAL) which helps fund Environmental Field Experiences for Boston Public Schools. GOAL seeks to catalyze partnerships between Boston-area organizations and Boston Public School teachers to plan field experiences that are in support of the BPS science curriculum. The Wakefield Estate has partnered […]
Wakefield Estate summer research fellow, Rebecca Bertrand, inspects a lady¹s work table from the Isaac Davenport House’s collection of furniture. Bertrand, a second year Lois F. McNeil Fellow in the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture, working with furniture conservator Robert Mussey, cataloged a collection of furniture at the Wakefield estate in the summer of 2009. The collection is comprised […]
How do you paint a 200+ year old house that has a dozen or more layers of old, deteriorating paint? Carefully! After conducting a thorough paint study and analysis that used a microscope to document the structure’s paint history since 1794, the old wooden clapboards were stripped of all the old paint, treated to restore some moisture, and then applied […]
This summer’s interns have already been busy making their mark at the Wakefield Estate. The interns are students from Milton, Hyde Park and Boston who will work a total of 7 weeks on a wide variety of projects including weeding invasives, rehabbing various “garden rooms,” pruning, hauling, and creating trails within our successional woodland. The members of this year’s crew […]
On July 15th, sixteen teens from Hyde Park and surrounding neighborhoods worked with Wakefield staff interns on maintaining and upgrading areas around the estate’s Entry Circle as part of their service with the Southwest CDC Green Team.