The Garden Club of Evanston has teamed up with Northwestern University to sponsor a symposium on the challenges, solutions, and opportunities relating to Lake Michigan.
The event, “Making Waves: Our Water, Our Legacy,” will be held Sunday, Nov. 1, from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. at the Norris Center, Northwestern, and is free and open to the public.
It is one of the club’s Centennial Celebration gifts to the community and celebrates 100 years of helping to restore, improve, and protect the quality of the environment.
The symposium features a three-person expert panel that includes J. David Rankin, vice president of programs at the Great Lakes Protection Fund; Dr. George Wells, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Northwestern; and Debra Shore, a longtime environmental advocate serving her second term as Metropolitan Water Reclamation District Commissioner.
The panel will be moderated by Sue Durburg, representing the Garden Club.
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The club has a long-standing relationship with the university that dates back to the year of its founding, 1915, when the university donated land for the club’s first project, a Shakespeare garden.
Mrs. Daniel Burnham and other founding members chose plants and flowers mentioned in the Bard’s plays and sonnets.
In support of their sisters in war-torn England, the club hired Jens Jensen, the famous landscape architect, to design the garden, which is now on the National Register of Historic Places.