BUILDING FOR THE NEXT GENERATION

By Felix Carroll

Upon a scrappy corner of land during an ill-tempered winter, Berkshire Botanical Garden broke ground and successfully underscored its commitment to educating the next generation of environmental stewards and gardeners.

From bare boughs and painstakingly milled and scribed posts and beams, a barn has been built, a thing of beauty, the new heart of BBG’s popular Farm in the Garden Camp.

“The youth camp is an important part of the Botanical Garden’s mission,” said Thaddeus Thompson, BBG’s executive director. “It’s truly an honor to be able to create this really beautiful, inspiring, open and welcoming place — and a fun space.”

Held for eight weeks in the summer and on the two weeks corresponding with public school February and April breaks, the day camp serves children age 6 through 14, providing the opportunity to care for plants and animals, go on nature walks, create botanical crafts, and learn about the natural world.

With the new building, Berkshire Botanical Garden now can increase the number of campers from 30 children a week to 50.

The new building embodies BBG’s 89-year-long mission to fulfill the community’s need for information, education and inspiration in the art and science of gardening and the preservation of our environment. The building also embodies a cherished aesthetic that intertwines old ways with innovative new engineering and craftsmanship.

‘A PIECE OF ART’

“My thought from the beginning was that this building and camp ‘campus,’ if you will, would give our day campers a really rustic experience but in an aesthetic way,” said Matthew Larkin, chair of BBG’s Board of Trustees. “We have a certain way we like things to look around the Garden. I’m super excited that with this building we’ve been able to create a piece of art beyond what I was originally anticipating.”

Larkin, who did the initial building designs, had originally envisioned a simple structure with sliding barn doors set on a concrete slab, all built to match the height and roof pitch of the adjacent Education Building. The new building certainly includes those elements. But in the meantime, Larkin had presented the project to A.J. Schnopp Jr., Construction Inc., of Dalton, Mass. That’s the same company that served as general contractor for BBG’s renovated and expanded Center House, which artfully incorporates one of the oldest structures in Stockbridge into a new state-of the-art facility.

Gregg Schnopp had a suggestion for this newest project. He introduced Larkin to two men with the expertise to create a structure that matches BBG’s overall creative and utilitarian philosophy.

Scott Brockway, a sawyer and owner of Berkshire Wood Products in Windsor, Mass., is one. Adam Miller, a carpenter and consultant from Vermont who specializes in timber and log framing, is the other. Both men are members of the Timber Framers Guild and have worked together on similar projects before. With finalized plans in hand, Brockway and Miller set off into the

Berkshire woods. They assembled most of their materials from two properties whose trees had been tagged for harvesting, with Brockway noting these trees would have been considered firewood by most people. “What we do is walk through the woods and look up into the trees. You have to see the trees — and the plans — through the forest, and then pick out what works.”

“What we do is walk through the woods and look up into the trees,” he said. “You have to see the trees — and the plans — through the forest, and then kind of pick out what works.”

Brockway harvested and milled eight species of trees for the project, including Eastern White Pine, red maple, sugar maple, white ash, black cherry, black walnut, and shad. The pegs used to fasten pieces together are made of red oak.

In modern times, he noted, builders have gone “from craft to construction. What we do is very tedious and repetitive, but there are craftsmen that carry on this tradition out of passion. We are not using any modern construction materials. There are no steel pegs or joinery being used here. Back when they created buildings 150 to 200 years ago, folks had to use what they had.”

By May, the project was complete. The new building has an outdoor accompaniment that includes wheelchair-accessible raised garden beds and a 15-by-30-foot outdoor classroom assembled from locust posts by the craftsman and designer Aaron Dunn.

OLD AND NEW, INTERTWINED

The main portion of the L-shaped camp building is 30-by-50-feet.

Utilizing Miller’s expertise in timber and log framing and complicated, innovative work in organic form scribing, that main portion functions as an unheated pavilion.

Sheathed in vertical boards, its creative design is best appreciated from the inside. In the rustic interior, traditionally planed and squaredoff Eastern White Pine timbers are

In Honor Of A Beloved Mother

In the moments before the final truss was hoisted and set into place in January for the new Farm in the Garden Camp building, two women were invited to step up and affix a coniferous bough upon it.

The ceremony’s significance was two-fold.

The bough, traditionally referred to as a “wetting bush,” had been snipped from a nearby white pine and tacked onto the truss to symbolize the joining of land and building, thereby paying homage to the building’s “roots.” But this also marked the first public acknowledgement that this remarkable new structure was built in honor of the late Anne Leonhardt, who died peacefully at the age of 92 on April 26, 2017.

Those two women are her daughters, Barbara and Melissa Leonhardt, who, through New York Community Trust, donated the construction funds for this project.

“They had been looking for a way to honor and celebrate their mother, who was a big promoter of education and nature,” said Matthew Larkin, chair of BBG’s Board of Trustees. “This project couldn’t be more appropriate.”

Anne, who married the late Frederick Leonhardt in 1955, raised four children in Connecticut. The family spent summers at their lakeside home in Becket. With her husband’s encouragement, Anne directed the family’s many philanthropic endeavors.

“She had a lot of passions,” said Barbara, who lives in Stockbridge. “Children’s education, the environment, helping people who are underprivileged, and empowering women and girls” were chief among those passions.

“She loved having the opportunity to give where there was a need,” Barbara continued. “And now, to keep her legacy going: this building. It will be here hopefully forever and be instrumental in helping a lot of people of all ages and backgrounds.”

Melissa Leonhardt called the building “amazing.” supported by varying species and sizes of tree forks, those Y-shaped sections of trees that bifurcate in the trunk and give rise to two roughly equal diameter branches.

“She’d be so happy,” she said of her mother.

At the barn raising in January, in a quiet moment away from the crowd, Larkin had a surprise for the Leonhardts. He presented them with a wooden hummingbird that he had carved for the occasion. Hummingbirds serve as an intimate reminder of the Leonhardts’ mother, “who was a big proponent of trying to make everything beautiful in this world,” said Larkin.

One of the final details of the construction this spring included carefully placing that hummingbird up high within those gorgeous trusses, a purposefully discreet detail, but a detail that, like that wetting bush, represents deep roots.

“It’s a very nice hierarchy of sizes of timbers as they go up, defining smaller and smaller segments of the space in the roof,” Miller said. “The square timbers are all joined together with what’s called the square-rule layout method, which is a traditional layout system indigenous to New England. That method developed around the turn of the 19th century. All of the organic elements, all the fork trees, are scribed. We use a variety of different techniques for that, which derived from both French and English timber framing traditions and from Scandinavian log building traditions.

“We were able to move beyond simply recreating the historical processes that were used here, and integrate new things,” he said. “I like to keep my carpentry practice an evolving craft rather than just sort of be trying to recreate things as if they were museum pieces.”

The small portion of the L-shaped building consists of a bathroom wing, about 14 feet by 12 feet in size. While that portion of the structure is built with standard lumber, it includes a fun surprise for BBG’s horticulture team: a root cellar beneath it.

“We’ll be able to winter-over dahlia tubers and chill bulbs for the annual Bulb Show,” said Director of Horticulture Eric Ruquist. “And then, of course, root cellars were made for storing vegetables, such as potatoes and cabbage and other root vegetables, and we’ll be able to do that as well.”

The trusses for the main building were assembled in Brockway’s Windsor shop and trucked in January down to Stockbridge, where, on a chilly, wet Saturday, Jan. 21, BBG hosted a “barn raising” — live guitar and fiddle music and apple cider included.

On that day, the final truss was put into place by means of an hydraulic hoist. As a crowd of BBG staff, trustees and friends watched and cheered, Larkin did the honors of hammering in the final oak peg for the framed-out structure.

Miller and Brockway incorporated one final touch with a nod to tradition.

They embedded a penny under a post. As per tradition, that penny was dated with the year the frame was constructed, in this case 2022.

Brockway found the penny face up outside of his shop two days before the barn raising. It’s a happy coincidence, and a symbol of good luck for this exceptional new building.