John Mickel, one of the foremost authorities in the country on ferns, will be the spring keynote speaker in the Rocky Hills Lecture Series.

His free talk, “My Favorite Ferns for the Northeastern Garden,” will be presented at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, April 16 at the Chappaqua Library.

Mickel, senior curator emeritus with the New York Botanical Garden, is the author of the definitive “Ferns for American Gardens” (Macmillan, 1994, Timber Press, 2003).

He and his wife, Carol, have planted more than 140 varieties of ferns in their Briarcliff Manor garden. Here’s a photo of them by our Tom Nycz (he took all the photos here of their garden).

Another part of their garden, with a great old Japanese maple:

Ferns are among the easiest plants to grow in the Hudson Valley: deer resistant, shade tolerant and practically maintenance free.

Rocky Hills is the name of Henriette Suhr’s wonderful 8-acre garden in Chappaqua, which she first began to cultivate more than 50 years ago with her late husband, Billy Suhr.

Suhr has agreed to eventually turn over her garden to Westchester County, and the Garden Conservancy has accepted a conservation easement as a first step in the preservation of Rocky Hills.

Suhr’s 12.5-acre property will one day become a horticultural education center for gardeners throughout the Lower Hudson Valley and the rest of the state.

Mickel and Suhr have been friends for years and, like all good gardening friends, they swap plants. Mickel has been particularly instrumental in introducing new ferns into the landscape at Rocky Hills.

Here’s Mrs. Suhr in her main fern garden (photo by Steve Schmitt).

“She had three or four native ones — all the rest I brought in,” Mickel says. He’s introduced about 60 new ferns to her garden since the early 1990s.

“I try to bring her a few new ones every year,” he says. “I try to find something that I think she may not have.”

Mickel has long been a fan of Suhr’s much-admired garden.
“It’s just delightful over there,” he says. “She has such a good eye for design and she has so many different habitats there, so you’ve got a great playground.”

The goal of the Rocky Hills Lecture Series is to explore the intersection and interplay of horticulture, garden design and the environment in the region.

Previous speakers have included Marco Polo Stufano, the retired director of horticulture at Wave Hill in the Bronx, and Timothy Tilghman, the head gardener at Rocky Hills.

The Chappaqua Library is at 195 S. Greeley Ave. in Chappaqua. For more information, call the Garden Conservancy at 845-265-2029 or the library at 914-238-4779, Ext. 119, or visit www.chappaqualibrary.org.

Oh, and here’s John’s license plate.