Grow native—anywhere! Join us at Rolling Hill Park for a hands-on container gardening workshop where we’ll show you how to create beautiful native plant gardens for porches, balconies, or any space. We will provide soil and native plants—just bring your own container (a few extras will be available).
Free for members, $15 for non-members. Please consider supporting future programming with a donation or by becoming a member!
Kick off the outdoor music season with a laid back evening of bluegrass in the park!
Local favorites Midnight Flyer Bluegrass will join us at the top of Rolling Hill Park to play some tunes. Light refreshments provided. Bring a blanket or a chair and cozy up around the camp fire with friends. Light refreshments provided as well as tables for plant info/swaps and kid friendly crafts.
Free for members, $5 for non-members. Please consider becoming members or making an additional donation, which will go towards the band and future LMC programming.
Place your cursor on the image below to navigate the StoryMap. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation to support the Conservancy’s work.
We are partnering with Black Rock Middle School as they participate in the “Trout in the Classroom” program. Students have been raising trout from eggs in the classroom and will join us in late spring for a field trip to release their fully grown trout into Darby Creek. We will be visiting students to give an introduction to watershed health, discussing how stormwater runoff impacts freshwater life. Students will learn about the Conservancy’s origins, inspired by Dr. Arthur Wolfe’s concern over declining trout populations.
Lower Merion High School environmental science classes will join us at Mill Creek in the spring to study water quality through chemical testing and macroinvertebrate surveys – a wonderful opportunity to participate in real field work, and also the first field trip for the class since before COVID! As part of our National Fish and Wildlife (NFWF) funded salt study with Villanova University, we will visit Lower Merion High School to introduce the students to the impacts of road salt on our waterways before they start their fieldwork.
February 28th, come view the wonders of the night sky as a planetary alignment takes shape! Lester Carriere, who is an outreach coordinator with The Rittenhouse Astronomical Society and telescope operator at the Ryan Observatory, will greet us at the Conservancy Cottage in Rolling Hill Park. He will give us a short talk, titled, “Making Sense of the Night Sky.” Afterwards, we will walk to the top of Rolling Hill Park where Lester will have his telescope set up for viewing. If you have a telescope of your own, please feel free to bring it! The more, the merrier. We will have a bonfire going to gather by, warm up, and chat about the wonders of the universe!
This event is free, please RSVP. Donations to support the Conservancy are appreciated. In case of cloudy skies or bad weather, we will contact registrants to meet the following evening, March 1st.
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Thank you for making a gift to the Lower Merion Conservancy. Your year-end contribution is 100% tax deductible and supports our work to preserve the natural and historic resources of Lower Merion and Narberth. We appreciate your generosity!
Come visit the yellow cottage in Rolling Hill Park for an insider look at Deirdre Murphy’s climate action artist studio. Paintings and prints will be discounted for the holidays with 20% of sales benefitting LMC programming and the historic yellow cottage. See more about Deirde’s process and her work here.
All ages are welcome and encouraged to make a pinecone birdseed ornament or Winter Luminaire. Light refreshments will be available.
As an architect, how might one go about working creatively with the past? That architects could find in the work of the past – both near and far – inspiration for contemporary design is not a new concept. The early architects of the American republic turned to classical forms to embody an architecture of democracy. A century later, as the forces of industrialization and finance came to dominate the shaping of the urban environment in cities like Philadelphia; new materials drove architecture to new heights – literally – and energized new building types. Here, originality of artistic expression flourished. By the turn of the twentieth century, a younger generation of the city’s architects – energized by travel and the close study of renaissance and vernacular forms – turned, again, towards history. Their work formed new expressions in building, both monumental and domestic in scale, that reflected the presence of the past along with a sensitivity to place and a sophistication of material expression.
No architect better exemplifies this turn to the past than Frank Miles Day (1861-1918). Trained at the University of Pennsylvania, Day traveled to Europe and through drawing and other means, closely studied the forms he encountered in England, France, Germany and, most importantly, Italy. His “eye” for detail brought a lively sense of invention to his work – an approach that resonated with that of his contemporaries, Wilson Eyre, Walter Cope & John Stewardson, among others, in both building and garden design.
To explore this vital and creative era, please join William Whitaker, Curator of Penn’s Architectural Archives, for a lively discussion of Day’s work, his contemporaries, and the current state of preservation of his work.
William Whitaker is curator of the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design. He is coauthor (with George Marcus) of The Houses of Louis Kahn and Uncrating the Japanese House: Junzo Yoshimura, Antonin and Noemi Raymond, and George Nakashima (with Yuka Yokoyama). Trained as an architect at Penn and the University of New Mexico, Whitaker works closely with the archival collections of Louis I. Kahn, Lawrence Halprin, and the partnership of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, in support of teaching, scholarship, preservation, and public engagement.
He has co-curated over forty exhibitions including Anne Tyng: Inhabiting Geometry (Graham Foundation and Penn’s ICA), and Design With Nature Now (with the McHarg Center) – a major program of exhibitions, conference, and public programs that highlight the dynamic and visionary approaches to landscape design and development in the face of climate change and global urbanization. Most recently her served as project director for, What Minerva Built, an exhibition and book project charting the life and work of America’s first independent female architect, Minerva Parker Nichols.