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 through Fort Ticonderoga’s Center for Digital History using Zoom.

Featured Speakers: 

Making a Garden Room—Garden designer Gordon Hayward shares his ideas about how to design a garden room—that is, a comforting and somewhat enclosed place within your existing garden. The years since COVID have taught us the power of a garden room to provide a place outdoors for respite and calm. A garden room is that place, a place to be with friends and family or alone. It is a living place to tend, a place with chairs or benches and framed views to other parts of your garden or to distant views. Flowering shrubs and perennials provide fragrance and color. Overhanging branches act as a ceiling; stones, brick or pine needles become a floor. Birds and their songs and bubbling water add their own magic. Explore several garden rooms Gordon and Mary have created over the last 40 years in their garden in southeastern Vermont as well as others across New England. Gordon Hayward is a nationally recognized garden writer, designer, and lecturer based in Westminster West, Vermont. He wrote for Horticulture Magazine for 25 years and has published over 100 articles on garden design in a wide variety of publications. He has lectured in 40 states and is the author of eleven books on garden design, two of which have won national awards. Website: haywardgardens.com.

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.

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 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.