Welcome everyone. Thank you for coming tonight. My name is Hillary Bassett. I'm the Executive Director of Greater Portland Landmarks and I'd like to welcome you to the 2016 lecture series. Our mission at Greater Portland Landmarks is to preserve and revitalize Greater Portland's remarkable legacy of historic buildings, neighborhoods, landscapes, and parks. And I'd like to thank you for joining us this evening. We have had a very busy year at Landmarks. We've been active in research, education, and advocacy. This summer we conducted an architectural survey of over 350 properties in the Oakdale neighborhood, which is the area just beyond USM. And the interns were so enthusiastic they did research, deed research on 350 properties for you researchers. You will appreciate that. That's quite an undertaking. You may have heard about a lot of the projects going on in the India Street neighborhood. That area was just designated an historic district back in 2015. There are many projects that have already gone through historic review. And our city council actually expanded the district in order to include additional properties that would benefit from historic tax credits. So our work in promoting historic districts has had an important impact. We are also very active right now in the discussions of the Master Development Plan for the Portland Company site, which is underway currently, and will be slated for approval, final approval by the end of the year. I'm also very pleased to announce that the Portland Observatory has had its absolutely best year ever in terms of attendance. It's also a great year in other ways, but we've had over 14,000 visitors to the observatory. And it's just been an extraordinary year. Those of you who are docents, thank you. It has just been a great, great season. For the off season, we're actually working on some exciting programming, which will include workshops, tours, and special lectures that focus on the theme preservation and action. And you'll be getting information on that soon in the mail. Now, we'd love to be in touch with all of you for future programs, so if you aren't yet on our email list, make sure you give us your email address. And if you aren't already a landmarks member, I would like to personally invite you to join. There's information on the table as you came in. Now, we're also trying a new thing this year, which is some evaluation forms, and I will credit architects. I want to show you these little cards. There's some cards on the table, and there's a green thumbs up. Green thumbs up is for good. Red thumbs down is for needs improvement. So we'd like to get feedback from you on how you like the lectures and how we could make it even better for you, and also any ideas you have for future programs are welcome. Now, I'd also like to take this opportunity to thank our sponsors, Ocean Gate Realty, and Ed Gardner is here. Thank you, Ed. The Portland Public Library, who generously offers us the use of the room, which is fantastic. And also to CTN Channel 5, this is going to be broadcast as being recorded as we presented tonight. And I'd like to mention also that we have our next lecture in the series, which is going to be on November 15th. It will be by Bill Culina of the Booth Bay Botanical Gardens, and the topic will be Why You Can't Buy a Forest in a Can. So put that on your calendars. And also, as you're leaving, if you haven't already, please consider a donation to cover the costs of producing and promoting this lecture series. I'd like to thank also our landmark staff members who are here, Alessa Wiley, who has greeted you at the door, who's our education manager. Julie Larry, our director of advocacy, and not here, but also very appreciated. Kate Lewis, Lorena Coffin, and Chloe Martin. And I'd also like to mention Ruth Story, who over the years has been primary organizer of the lecture series. She unfortunately can't join us. Now to introduce our speaker, Lucinda Brockway is an award-winning historic landscape specialist, residential landscape designer, and author. And she lives just right down the road in Kennebunk, so Maine has got incredible treasures of people who are within our borders. Since in 1988, she has been the owner and principal of Past Designs, a firm which specializes in creating attractive outdoor spaces for working, living, and recreating. Her firm is dedicated to protecting the environment and preserving the rich landscape legacy that defines the Northeastern United States. Since 2011, Lucinda has served as the program director for cultural resources for the trustees of reservations in Massachusetts. And in that role, she is responsible for the organization's 111 properties and more than 26,000 acres of Massachusetts cultural landscapes, including five national historic landmarks. So it must be quite a fascinating role. She is a summa cum laude graduate of the University of Rhode Island and Boston University. And her work with Past Designs, her firm, includes such well-known public projects as Fort Ticonderoga, Newport's Public and Private Bellevue Avenue Estates, the Fells in Newbury, New Hampshire, the Battle Green in Lexington Mass, and several projects for the National Trust, including the opening of Philip Johnson's Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut. Her private residential designs have won recognition throughout the country. She's written two books and numerous articles on popular and professional journals. And she is a strong believer in the principle that most successful designs are built out of collaboration between client, contractor, designer, and resident. Please join me in welcoming Lucinda Brockway. Thank you so much.  So we'll take a journey and then maybe you'll be really hungry after all this gardening and you can go find a wonderful place to eat and all the great, the restaurants that are here in Portland. I am really, really glad to be here tonight and I'm glad to share a little journey with you. There's a couple of things that I want to do with you all tonight and that is I want to look a little bit at our backyards and I want to talk about what that tradition is of our residential gardens and how it's evolved over time. And then as part of this journey, we're going to look at some contemporary designs that were inspired by some of that legacy. I really feel that there is a nice symbiotic relationship between the past, the present, and the future. And a lot of our historic gardens are never static, especially gardens, unlike buildings that always want to change and Mother Nature has her own idea about what she really wants to do with them all. So I really want to be able to have you feel comfortable when we leave tonight with the possibility of going out, looking at your own backyard, and then maybe being inspired by some of these things that I'm going to show you, or going and looking at places like the Longfellow Garden here, the cemetery here, and really understanding that these are three-dimensional textbooks for you that tell history that you can go and explore and enjoy and maybe find out a little bit more about the details around them. So to start with, I love this quote because history is always in the eyes of the beholder in many, many ways. And what we want to talk about, we tend to focus on, and what we want to ignore, we do. And so sometimes we look at the past and we want to really remake it in our own desirable way, and over the years we end up preserving those legacies and those stories that we all want to be able to remember, and we forget the bad parts or the things that we choose to ignore, and sometimes they're not so pretty. So sometimes when I was doing just design work, and even now when working for the trustees, I'll have people that say, oh, I really want to have a historic garden. I have a historic farmhouse, and I really want a 19th-century garden to go along with it. And so I show them this picture because this is really what a 19th-century farmhouse in Maine really looked like. And so there's a lot of artistic license when it comes to looking at some of these historic gardens, and so being able to really understand fact and fiction and tradition and legacy and inspiration are a very important part of this journey we're going to take. If we start in the 18th century and the early 19th century, a lot of the early gardens that were here in New England, especially in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and on up into the southern parts of Maine, they all began with this simple garden design, and it's still a great garden design for today, because these beds are designed to be six feet wide and 12 feet long. If you reach into a garden bed, you reach in three feet, so you can stand on either side of those raised beds and you can reach into the middle without having to step into the garden. You can fill it with all the greatest compost and the greatest soils that you can find, so you're guaranteed to have a really good garden.  But this is a classic image and this actually comes from an early 17th century gardening book, so you can see how sometimes our traditions really don't change all that much. Now if you want to wander over to the Art Museum here or you want to go down to the MFA or even down to New York, you can start to look at American paintings and you can really see a whole wealth of information about gardening in them if you start to pay attention.  If you want to go back into the archives in Sacco, here is what a main version of that garden looks like. This is a really wonderful picture of what the ferryman's house looked like in Sacco and he was the man that would get in his boat and go to Bitterford and row you across the river before I-95 showed up and you could just take your car and zoom all the way to Augusta. But here you see this combination of working landscape and garden and if you pay attention to the words that are in here, you see garden down on that lower right hand side down in this corner here. But you also see the wharf, you see the goose yard, you see his warehouses, they're all jumbled together just like that 19th century farmhouse picture I showed you where the laundry yard and the garden and the fields and the work yards mix themselves together throughout most of the 18th and 19th century. So this notion that we have about pleasure gardening is something that comes along mostly in the early 20th century with the colonial revival because we were looking backwards. And so our thinking is that this is really more what an 18th century garden looked like. This still has some of the plant contents and some of the arrangement that I was showing you in those other things but you can see that it's been refined and dressed up a little bit in order to really be a welcoming entry into this 18th century house. The contents that are in here are a lot of herbs, a lot of really hearty plant material that will survive almost anything that you throw at it. And in many ways the nice thing about these board edged gardens is that you don't have to edge the edges. And one of my gardening friends who was taking care of a big estate for years always had the garden looking beautiful and I asked her how with so little staff she could always make the garden look great and she said it's all about the edges. If the edges look neat everybody believes you've done a lot of work in the garden. So you could have a lot of weeds in this garden and you would never know it because the edges are nice and neat and they look really great. Now this happens to be a garden that almost 30 years ago we discovered through archaeology. So this is a 1690 Portsmouth backyard and we did have the archaeological documentation to go with it. But interestingly enough as we were looking at those gardening manuals from England and from the early years here in America but mostly English gardening manuals and they were giving you instructions on how to lay out your garden. And then we looked at the archaeological record without telling the archaeologists the record matched what was going on in those gardening manuals. So again 12 by 6 foot beds raised high. These happened to be 12 inches. Good soils on the inside and then a path around the edge. And in this case there's a small 3 foot bed that ran around the inside of this tiny backyard in urban Portsmouth. This happens to be at Strawberry Bank. And you'll notice that the fence is sort of an interpretation of a board fence but a lot of the fence advice that you were getting and in fact if you go through the early records in Portland or Portsmouth around fights about fencing and keeping your animals out or your garden in you'll find that there was a lot of descriptions of early fence styles and in fact in Portsmouth we could go all the way back to the early years of the city and find good references to what the fences all looked like. In this case this is a solid board fence but it's got a very crooked top so that chickens wouldn't sit up on top of the fence and then jump down into the garden and get at your garden plants. Always something fun. Now if you have a home today and you don't want to have a pure museum garden you might want to be able to look at that 18th century plant pallet and put it around the edges of your yard and just create a very simple almost vernacular style garden that fits with one of your 18th century houses. This is in Ipswich, Massachusetts but it could be in many streets and communities along the sea coast here in New England all the way up into Maine. And you'll recognize a lot of the plant material here. There's peonies, there's iris, there's foxglove, there's some lavender and some herbs in here. There's simple bushes, junipers, blueberries, berry bushes, some roses once in a while but a real combination just very subtle and very simple. This is literally all the yard that this house has and so in fact one of the requirements that the clients had was they wanted a place to be able to sit but they didn't want to sit on a bench that looked right at the street with everybody going by and so over in the corner here where you see the lilacs and things there's actually a little nested spot where we put a bench so you could sit out there in the garden and not have everybody looking at you as they went by. Here's another one. This is a historic New England house and this is in Ipswich. It's on Water Street in Ipswich. A wonderful, wonderful early house that had its own version of gardening going on in the front yard and the clients when they called me said I really want something that looks nice but this is just a mess. My poor garden has just gotten overgrown and I can't figure out what I want to keep and what I want to get rid of but they also lived close to the street and they wanted to be able to feel like they had a little bit of privacy if possible. So we tried to figure out how to make a landscape that was sympathetic. They were also much older and had a hard time with walking so needed solid surfaces everywhere you went. So that's why this brick walkway went in. In a true museum garden this would not have had bricks on the ground. It probably would have had either hard-packed sand more than anything else. But again, this is a summer pallet so you'll see things like Aster's and Black Eyed Susan's and Bella Ward coming into bloom here but simple borders on either side of this pathway and then making sure that the furnishings fit the house we came up to a stone yard that has antique stones in Elliott Main and found a wonderful cap for the well that was still sitting out in front of the yard. And honestly this became the real garden art for this garden and it fits so beautifully with the period of the house that it really helped in the furnishing of the garden and how we pulled it all back together again. We also put little slats over it so nobody would fall in. And here's one of these little sitting spots on the other side. So as this garden grows up these are very tall plants and we did put a hedge around the front edge so that this has now grown up and the hedge is about three and a half feet tall and you can sit on that patio and again be near the street but feel like you're in the middle of a tiny enclosed garden space. And a lot of the plants that you see here are a mix of 18th century and 20th century plants that fit with some of that 18th and early 19th century pallet. One of my particular favorites is there on the far left and you see a little bit of it even here on the right hand side. That little blue flower that you see wandering through the other things is a little geranium called Roseanne. And it's a perennial geranium that blooms literally all summer and it's got a beautiful blue flower to it. So very dependable, usually very small and in this case it's wandered through and mixed itself with some of the stackies and again the Rudbeckias that are here. But a good combination of solid hardy plants to be able to pull you through that still have that look and feel of an 18th and early 19th century garden. Here's another example. This happens to be again at a museum down in Rhode Island but you can see not only a beautiful spot to be able to have a garden but also the same themes that are running through this. And now this is moving up into the early 19th century. You can see the fence is becoming a little bit more refined. There's a lot more garden beds in here and a lot more space around you where you can have the larger field crops and garden crops or large pleasure grounds as we move into the 19th century these become much more typical. But again, this is still a pallet of really hardy sturdy plants. When I was doing the garden at Fort Ticonderoga it had not been garden in 25 years and I was out there in November to see it and said, oh yes this is a fabulous garden even though it was all falling apart. And then in the summer when I went back to take an inventory of what might still be surviving in there the hardiest plants were still coming up in that garden and they included the peonies were still there, there were some irises, there were some really early basic green hostas that were coming up in the garden, there were a couple of roses, a frowed damask rose was coming up and there was hollyhock still coming up in the garden and then a lot of helianthus. And helianthus for any of you that want something that blooms beautifully in the summer with a pretty yellow flower on it, it's a good solid hardy, fill the spaces kind of a plant to be able to use in your garden. Here's another combination of things. These are starting to move more into the mid 19th century now. More rather than basic herbs and even vegetable foliage in the 18th century garden we've used sometimes. This is much more in what we think about now is even colonial revival gardens with the hollyhocks and the butterfly weed and asters and a lot of bellwort, pearlwort, boltonia, asters all coming up now in the early to mid 19th century in the door yards of New England. Just for fun I wanted to show you an 1804 print from a gardening book and I bet you everybody that's here can name every tool that is in this plate because you can see that in many ways except for our new motorized weed whackers and our lawn mowers and our leaf blowers these are still the basic gardening tools that we use all the time and our best gardening tools are often those that we inherit from a parent or grandparent because they have the original wooden handles and really sturdy iron ends to them. They can really do the job and get the job done but really remarkable that for more than 200 years here's the kinds of things that we find in our shed. Again as you move into the 19th century you can start to look at portraiture. This is a wonderful painting of a garden in Newcastle, New Hampshire.  So this idea in the 19th century of fruit becoming an active and really viable and passionate part of gardener's lives feeds its way into everything from putting grape vines on your hill and Portsmouth to planting pear trees in your garden that you might have bought from a nursery outside of Boston and you've maybe read about them in the proceedings of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society who were really convinced that if we planted pear and apple trees they could be the stalwart plants of any orchard or any backyard garden and still provide you both beauty and pleasure and food in combination. Again here's another picture from the 19th century I really love the midwives tale book and if you all are gardeners and you want a good book to read by the fire this winter this ballad of Martha Ballard who was living on the frontier in Augusta, Maine at the turn of the 19th century is rich with a lot of her gardening details and this is one of the quotes we did a history of gardening in Maine and looked at some of the things that she was finding so in May just to make you feel better May 10th she said a heavy frost but we planted beets, parsnips and onions I removed my garden roots we washed seven pounds of cotton boiled 40 skeins of lining yard and I had felt fatigued so at least we don't have to do all the spinning and weaving after we finish in the garden these days. Now if you understand some of the furnishings and some of the basic arrangement of elements in a 19th century garden you can create something believe it or not this house is an early 19th century house it's a simple little cape it sits just above bath on the river there on the Kennebec River beautiful, beautiful maple tree in the front yard but all the landscaping here was put in in the 1970s and it was put in by an owner who was a set designer who understood the value of simple things in order to be able to create a picture that of what she really wanted it to be and so if you put up a roll a rod fence, a rail fence why don't you buy the green pieces of wood not the good ones because then they sag that much more quickly and they give you that feeling of antiquity that you might want even out of a simple fence that you put in your yard and the other thing that I love that she did here first she just framed the yard this is not a huge garden it's really just about creating the door yard and framing it in such a way that it feels like it's a landscape statement amidst the larger spaces that are all around you and so it's in keeping with the scale of the house but she bought these old orchard ladders that you see here there's a couple of them and then there's an iron trellis that you see leaning on the other side of the fence and those became she's got rose vines and some of the things that grow in the garden and they just climb up those orchard ladders but it makes it look like somebody came in from pruning the apple tree and just left the ladder by the side of the fence and yet it becomes part of the furnishings here so sometimes it's not as much about how many plants you have in your garden but how you use the elements and put them all together and here's her little door yard garden a very vernacular very simple garden so perfect for Maine where it's not too overdone and kept very simple and in fact the gas tank is right there in the corner and it's just hidden by a little bit of lattice as practical and as basic as we all want things to be here in Maine sometimes also it's just about one moment in one season and so here's just a combination of those old orange day lilies and some Queen Anne's lace all blooming together in a giant bed in the middle of this yard and it makes an incredible statement for one moment for about 10 days in the middle of July and yet what a moment it really is here's another example of just using those elements in simple ways and deciding where you want to mow the lawn and where you want to let the lawn get long and really appreciate this incredibly beautiful landscape that we have up here depending on whether you have a tiny little urban garden or lots of space around you you can do some simple things in order to be able to create the feeling that this garden has been here for a very very long time now as we move into the 1830s and the 1850s right before the Civil War we had celebrated the revolution we'd celebrated the victory of the revolution we were beginning to establish ourselves as a new country and we were looking to our friends in France and saying I wonder what you're doing over there that looks interesting that we can bring back into our gardens but because we're New England and not New France we like to take those French ideas and then fill them with perennials and fill them with some color and not have just the simple Italian or French parterre gardens but fill them with some of those English perennials in the middle so we created a garden of our own that was really this combination between the English heritage and the French fashion that we were so passionate about at the time these are a couple of wonderful sketches by Arthur Scherkliff who was the landscape architect that did all of Colonial Williamsburg in the 1930s but before that in his early years of his career he lived in Ipswich and he was documenting some of these gardens that he called true New England colonial gardens but they were really these gardens that were built between 1830 and 1850 and you can see there's a very simple arrangement here with the house at the bottom of both screens and then you see the parterre it's fairly small and very intricate and very geometrical and then you move from that to the cut flower garden and then eventually to the vegetables and then off to the fruit garden where the flowers get stabled in a paster in the very back. Now the one here on the right is very narrow and very long because many of our federal houses and this is very true on high street in Newburyport they had a big box of a house that they built in the federal period usually between 1800 and 1820 with a front door on the street but they also put two side doors on either side and if you picture those big box houses if you have another generation and you have two sons and they might want to both inherit the house you can run your property line right up the middle of the front path right through the front door right down the hallway out the back door and split the barn in half too and so in Newburyport you get these gardens in these houses that are very dynamic they're almost the ultimate duplex because you can divide them in half or if you have another generation where there's only one family you can open them back up again and narrow gardens with these pattern designs in them and here's a picture of one of these gardens this happens to be the garden that was in that photograph on the right hand side this pattern if you want to do a traditional New England garden and even a traditional American garden whether it be tiny scale or large scale you will see this circle in a square design whether it's a plantation in Tennessee or a little backyard garden here in New England very simple arrangement and in the early years this center bed often was a water cistern or a collection spot for water and you could dip your watering can into it and then have it ready and available to water the plants that are on the four squares around it later it becomes the spot for the Victorian urn and then in the Colonial Revival the B-Skept gets put there but it's a very simple design and it's very dynamic it can grow and it can shrink based on how big or how small your gardens are so you'll see that a lot when you look here's another good example the other thing that's really interesting about this what I call the New England antebellum period is that often there's a small orchard on the side of the house and as these pleasure gardens start to come into our vocabulary they move in under the orchard trees so sometimes these ornamental trees that you see that are standing in the middle of the garden are really small pairs or cherries or apples that had been growing there all along and the garden has just split itself in and moved underneath the small family orchard there here's some examples in real life so you can see how very dynamic they are these gardens are very interesting because you know since we have almost nine months of no gardening and about three months of good gardening weather because of their geometry and their patterning and if you do use any kind of evergreen edging to them like these small boxwood you don't notice the geometry when the garden is all in bloom and then when the garden goes red the geometry pops itself back up and you still have something that is really enjoyable and beautiful 365 days of the year but it changes its character and its dynamic and these are beautiful gardens in the snow and the snow lays itself down and rises up over these boxwood hedges and it never hurts if you want to have a nice little garden house with a little Victorian flair to it to be able to add one of these into it as well I mentioned this passion for the fruit industry and there was a garden that was operating in Newton Massachusetts from 1790 until 1870 that was growing almost 400 varieties of pears and William Kendrick prided himself on these Belgian pears that were being developed bringing them over as science growing them in his nursery and then offering them for sale in simple catalogs like this and you can find these catalogs at the Massachusetts Horticultural Society plant palette from the 1830s you can go and pick up one of these gardening catalogs and leaf through it and you'll recognize a lot of the plants that are here but you'll see there's a much heavier emphasis on fruits and fruit trees and dahlias believe it or not so lots of dahlias coming in at the same time but he's offering these plants through the New England Gardening Journals and through the rural farmer and so there's a very active trade mail order trade that's coming through for sale and was another one that was very prolific and very well known and the shaker industry here in Maine also offered a lot of seeds and a lot of plants for sale and so there's wonderful catalogs through the Maine Memory Network here at the Maine Historical Society that you can see and images of some of these shaker buildings and shaker gardens all part of that rich heritage of being able to sell seeds to Maine gardeners now as a modern version of what one of these shaker gardens looked like. And it was a work that as they say was very charming when it was bought. It was very tired and it had a lot of work that needed to be done but still a wonderful spot on the corner of a street right in a very, very busy part of Kennebunkport. But thinking about those geometric gardens and those combinations of heavily flowering plants and boxwood edging we began to arrange a garden for these owners who had come up and tried to take that vocabulary and put it into these little spaces around this house. So what you're seeing here is a space that's probably 15 or 18 feet wide from the front of the house to the edge of the sidewalk but it's the fencing that helps to give you that little bit of a barrier to all the pedestrians that walk by that sidewalk on a regular basis. And then again simple hedges, they happened to really like these round boxwoods so we kept the boxwoods round rather than trimming them into small hedges which is what this looked and then we filled the beds with some roses and dahlias and bigger flowering plants that could get up over the top of the boxwood hedges. On the back of the house there was literally six feet between the wall of the house and the back of the garden and so this is a little tiny two foot path with very simple combinations of bleeding hard and ferns and some small spring flowering bulbs and then shady perennials for the summertime here that don't take up a lot of room so stay small. It's mostly a spring garden. The other thing that you have to think about when you're designing gardens is that spring flowering plants tend to be small and mid-summer plants tend to be bigger and then fall plants tend to be very big because they've had the whole season in order to be able to grow. So this is not a place where we would put a lot of asters or heliathas or things that bloom later in the season because they just would have been too big and you would have to beat your way down this path here through this tiny little space. This is a really fun garden and one of the things that I love about gardening, whether it's New England or anywhere in the country, is that your personality comes through in your own backyard and in your own spaces and so it's a combination of your own history and the history of your house and the history of your space and the things that you like that combine to really make these very special places that you're so fond of and this happens to be a Chinese puzzle garden. They call it this is a garden in Portsmouth, New Hampshire and the grandfather in this family was a sea captain and he had brought back one of those little tannogram puzzles that you may have played with your children that are just seven tiles with different shapes and you have to make different pictures with them and so these garden beds are all the shapes of those seven tiles in that game that was very much a part of their own legacy and their own history. This was a late 19th century garden. The Victorian period just like Victorian houses gets big and splashy and bold and romantic and dripping with everything. As many urns as you can put into a garden as many pieces of garden art that you can fit in a garden and almost as many kinds of textures and colors of flowers and foliage that you can find go into these Victorian gardens. So here's one, I'm trying to just pull examples anywhere from Portsmouth all the way up north here for you. This is a garden plan from 1860 of a garden in Portsmouth. It happens to be part of Strawberry Bank and then the garden itself is down here in the lower right-hand side but you can see that those geometric beds that we were looking at that were smaller now get opened up a little bit and the paths get wider and the planting combinations in the beds the hedges go away and the planting combinations become a riot of color and often they're heavily dependent on annuals because it was very easy to find seasonal annuals whether it was spring flowers or summer flowering annuals and then fall mums. You could get color in your garden all year long by just replanting it and you often had a gardener to be able to help you do that because you made all of your money either in shipping or in industry. Here's another example this is the house in Springfield Massachusetts and you can see they love shrubs and trees and so there's almost any kind of shrub or tree in their yard that they plopped in all over the place but really fun to look at and then this is the ropes garden in Salem so you can see these combinations of color and boldness that come out of these Victorian gardens.  This is a picture from the York Historical Society and if you look at this this is again another case of good furnishings telling the tale so simple you know steam freight lounges and then a simple chair and a hammock and a few vines over the back fence and that's all you need to create your Victorian vignette in your backyard but if you want to do a little more than that and you want to do more than gaming then you can even look to create a small garden bed like this that's filled with this riot of color and combination honestly truly the bolder the better and some of the best Victorian combinations I've seen are bright orange impatience mixed with really deep crimson canna and a lot of blue lobelia just lots of color and lots of bold striking combinations this is not a period when the soft pink and the soft blue and soft white was preferred it was definitely a period where they like those heavier stronger colors and if you don't want to have all the annuals and you want to try to interpret the same using shrubs and foliage and perennials then you can really look to things like costa or hydrangeas and look for things that will have those big bold flowers and the big bold foliage that can really carry your garden through the Victorian period in another combination of things in the early 20th century we start to look backwards again and we look back and we start to reinterpret those colonial gardens that we were talking about but there is a period after World War I when the arts and crafts movement becomes very strong and we have some wonderful examples of arts and crafts architecture and equally good examples of gardening that was supposed to go along with these arts and crafts houses and so the craftsman magazine not only gave you the plans for a house but they also instructed you on how to be able to plant in that house and so you see in these gardens a real celebration of natural materials whether it be natural woods natural stone or indigenous plant material from any given region and that's what they're promoting lots of little these are called lynch gates they're just little arbors with a gate on them that allow you to have a little privacy from the street and open up and close your garden but you see a very different look to the fences here now and many of these were meant for you to build yourself so this was also a do it yourself time for gardening. The other thing that happens is that Gertrude Jekyll is an English gardener and she begins to write a series of books that become very popular both in England and in the United States called Wall and Water Gardens there's one on roses and her gardening advice is all about thinking about the tones of flower color and where you can garden so this happens to be an illustration of her wall garden it's essentially a rock garden with the plants planted in the crevices of the stone wall she was the woman that promoted tonal garden so a white garden or a blue garden or a yellow garden was part of her palette now I was lucky enough to be able to work in Newton and an arts and crafts house that really did come out of the pages of the craftsman magazine and so they had a huge vegetable garden on the side of the house which is a very much a part of this arts and crafts movement and they wanted to be able to enhance it and beef it up a little bit and they were sick of pulling all the weeds out of their lawn dirt and gravel paths that they'd put between their garden beds so we actually put grass back as the path material because if you were weeding in the garden bed and dirt got out on the path if it was a gravel path you saw the dirt if it was grass you didn't see the dirt anymore and you could easily clean up and these were paths that were just built for the width of the lawn mower so you could run down through and take care of your paths in the garden lickety split this rope business on the poles here is something again that came out of the craftsman magazine and out of another Gertrugico garden in England but it's meant for roses so climbing roses go up the post and they're trained along the rope and I actually bought all of this rope right here in Portland at the marine supply store I went in and asked them for the biggest natural hemp rope that they had and I think it's the rope that they put on the steamships that show up here in town but it was huge and it was perfect for what we needed to drape across those poles so here's some little scenes of that garden both pieces parts of the garden were there and then these little enhancements that we did to really add to it so we sort of massaged it back to life the garden itself is really full of vegetables there's a lot of broccoli in this garden there's a lot of beets in this garden there's a lot of tomatoes and then we mixed in some very strong zinnias and then this plant here is Nicotiana Sylvesteris it's a wonderful Victorian plant but it does beautifully when mixed with a lot of other larger vegetables in the garden and again blooms for a long period of time and smells so it was a nice addition into this arts and crafts style of the garden other simpler versions of this might be like this so a simple stone path with cobbles and then ferns on both sides and in this case pear trees that are going down that are left over from the back corner of this garden that have been here for about 80 years now this is another one this happens to be another small this is a crab but there were some apple and pear trees in this garden as well and then a couple of simple arbors that are sort of the remnants of the garden that used to be there and sometimes if you don't want to have a full-blown garden you can put in just remnants and you can say you know this is my interpretation of the ruins of the garden that used to be here but this is about as much as I want to take care of so it's okay if you're off in the mountains and you have if you're up in Boltonboro, New Hampshire here's another version of a rural kind of an arts and crafts garden these are very hardy very tough plants and if you look there's only about six perennials in this garden total and if you notice they're things like threadleaf choreopsis and sedum autumn joy and Boltonia is the little purple flower that's dancing across the top there it's an annual that seeds itself in the ground cover is low bush blueberry and then there's some time that's crawling along the ground in things like inkberry here so again these native plants getting combined with some good sturdy hardy perennials in seasonal color that can really create a simple garden out of some of these native materials and here's a rock garden I have yet to find a property that went through the period from about 1910 to 1930 that did not have a pile of rocks in the corner somewhere and everybody wanted to have a rock garden or some form or another this one happens to be at Blythold in Bristol Rhode Island if you want to go see a wonderful period garden that is the place to go but any kind of pile of rocks became one of these rock gardens it was another theme for the early 20th century here's a tonal garden this is a new garden this was put in the 1980s but this is an interpretation of a salmon and a yellow tonal garden in the spirit of Gertrude Jekyll and then here's another double English border with the same kind of spirit to them and here's a simpler version of just a backyard with really a flower border that's combined to the edges and in this case it's mostly large hydrangeas and then a simple small boxwood hedge and the lawn but in this case again it's that art that just adds that accent that allows this garden to have just one step up from a simple lawn with a hedge and then the hydrangeas behind it I have to give tribute when I'm giving any gardening lecture to this the Stalwart Garden Club members that have really been the leaders in great gardening and great gardens in this country since the early 20th century this happens to be the Piscatica Garden Club and if you look at their mission when the club was founded back in around 1910 it was for cleaning up the roadside and picking up trash and so these are the women in their gardening talks out picking up trash on the side of the road so when you put on your jeans or your yoga pants and go out gardening think of what it was like to go out in this kind of an outfit to go gardening but really truly a remarkable legacy that these women left behind and some men for really setting the standard for good gardening and good horticulture in many ways in the backyard and you've got a great example of that right here in Portland at the Longfellow Garden as well these little door yard gardens again start to look back to those colonial gardens in the early 19th century and you see these small little grandmother cutting gardens now simple fences much more ornamental and a little more ornate from the posts themselves to the styles of the pickets that are there on the sides of the yard but nevertheless a small little walled garden full of things that remind you of your grandmother's garden sweet smelling things love lies bleeding irises roses lots of roses in these gardens lots of platycodon and bell flowers and things that just bloom for long periods of time they tend to get very leggy and tall but they always are this sort of romantic memory of what a colonial garden was really all about here's one believe it or not up in Platsburg New York so if you can garden in Platsburg you can certainly garden in Portland and here's another one you know wisteria is one of these things that either you love or you hate and it's often beautiful when it flowers but this is a garden down in Kennebunk and this wisteria had been planted on the side of a porch on the front of this early 19th century house and it had literally gone up gone under the eaves of the porch and was so heavy it was pulling the porch right off the front of the house and so a new owner came along and said I've got to get rid of this porch is leaking into my you know they expanded out the house they cut away the wall and all the water was just coming down through where the porch was separating from the house itself and she wanted to go back to the 18th century facade of the building so we took down the wisteria but you know those roots are in the ground and they're there to stay they're not meant to really be gotten rid of very easily so we got some umbrella standards and grew the vine on those standards and turned them into a standard tree form instead of something that grows on the house and they became a nice hallmark the community loved this wisteria when it came into bloom every spring it was something that everybody looked to see so we didn't totally get rid of it but we tamed it and we put it in a much more much easier format to deal with and this is a wonderful little colonial revival garden this is also in York this is the Elizabeth Perkins house and you can see here those raised beds again she's looking back at those earlier manuals but in this case rather than filling with herbs and symbols she's filling them with all of her favorite gardening flowers down both sides they all sweep at the end so very romantic long garden not very practical very beautiful but not very practical and when the York Historical Society was thinking about restoring this one of the members that had remembered this garden said well she was never a very good gardener and the garden always looked terrible why would we want to put it back so we had a lot of discussion around the value of this garden and you can see the old postcard up there with the roses growing over the simple iron arbors and again here's a wonderful picture with this arbor and this garden here in Portland is such a treasure just to go in and enjoy but also to really use as your textbook for what you can do with an early 20th century garden and here's another one this is the Hamilton House in South Berwick another beautiful combination of 1909 perennials and borders this actually had a wonderful huge pergola that went all the way around the outside of it it was there sort of nod to the Italian but it is the borders here again another good combination this is an earlier summer border so you see some early flocks and then daisies and some some lilies in this combination here this happens to be over at the Fells again another 1910 combination so visiting these museum houses and looking at their gardens as well as their antique collections is always a really fun thing to do this is just a smattering of some contemporary gardens but they're taking some of these ideas this set of stairs is actually old curbing that was thrown away in the backyard and we needed to go from one level to another so it's sort of a modern interpretation on that rock garden movement that we looked back to and then a little nod to the Victorian foliage plant garden over there and then some of these rose gardening, day lily gardening, iris gardens they all became part of this movement in the early 20th century so you can see some new contemporary interpretations of some of these movements in history and as you move into the early to mid 20th century I didn't want to forget about this mid-century modern movement and what that really is all about because it's becoming so popular now both for furnishings and for the styles of houses and we have such a plethora of houses that were built between 1930 and 1960 that are now all becoming part of our historic palette here it's important to really think about this very simple very plain very stylized easy landscaping that went along with these houses and also this idea that a picture window was put into these houses to create a picture that you looked out on in your backyard so very often some of the garden design that went with these mid-century modern houses was really designed from looking out the living room window out to what you were looking at in your yard that they were meant to be very simple and very straightforward not full of a lot of flowers and not full of these rides of color that you saw earlier in the century because they're really the counter point to that movement so almost as simple and plain as you can be and in some cases as simple as some evergreen shrubs like used and a green lawn and that was going to be the end of it but one of our best examples of really a high style work of landscape architecture is here in the Camden amphitheater and if you think about that arts and crafts movement and that use of natural materials and then you take that up to a level where a landscape architect is thinking about gardening as a fine art that is really what Fletcher Steele did here in this garden. The palette that he used here was birch trees some evergreens and then these beautiful huge stones and boulders that are brought in and create these sweeping seats and you see an example looking back to the this is an amphitheater he built outside of the library up there a really magnificent work of landscape architecture now a national landmark right here on our own backyard that is really worthy of going to see and you can see how stripped down and bare now some of these gardens are becoming in the 1930s and 1940s. Lastly I just want to say a little bit about invasives because it's hard to give a talk about historic gardening without really appreciating both the good and the bad things that we brought into our gardens over the years and so I call this the triumvirate of successful plant material in New England and that is poison ivy on the lower left, honey suckle on the upper left and then this is of course Asian bittersweet here on the big picture on the right and this combination you all know very well and I'm sure you've all fought back in your gardens in some form or another in some cases they were plants that really came to us as oh this is such an incredibly beautiful plant it has wonderful fall berries it you know it's very hardy it does very well and now we know when it's really happy where it really goes to or even some of our native plants like the poison ivy as simple as it is this time of the year when it turns that beautiful scarlet color is not necessarily something you want to put over your arbor in your door but I wanted to show you what happens with some of these when they're allowed to have their do and I also want to give a credit to this fellow down here in the lower right hand corner this cow this is star island out at the Isles of Shoals and so here you have a small island environment that we are so familiar with here on the coast of Maine and who is the gardener of this cow because he's browsing the little bits of grass that are able to grow between this rocky bony soil that is here on this island and yet he successfully gardened and kept things at bay while he was here but when he left this is a picture of star island island in the 1930s when he left what started to creep in was good old poison ivy because it loves that rocky bony soil it could come in either by seed because seagulls could drop it in or it may have come in as a cutting or something else you know that came off of a boat who knows how it got here it may have just been indigenous right from the very start but these dark patches that you see here are the beginnings of the poison ivy is it starting to move in and take over those old grasslands that now the cow is not here to mow anymore so this is 1960 and then here's the view from the mid 90s and you can see how the poison ivy is so successful and has really moved over and now what is what happened is that the seagulls love this habitat because it makes a nice protected area for them to nest and if you are one of the lucky folks that gets to go to star island for a week on a week long retreat or they have week long programs that you can go out and stay in the island for the week you don't want to go out here a because you're going to get poison ivy and b because the seagulls are going to dive bomb you when you're there and so you stay away which means that the poison ivy is what it takes over more and more and it's a little bit like this you know creeping halloween kind of a plant that has taken over this corner of the island and so the island folks said this is terrible we're getting too busy there's too many people coming to these conferences we've got to limit the number of people that are on the island and when we really looked at this series of pictures and saw what had happened it they actually had half the number of people on the island that they had in the 1930s but they were all sharing this little tiny space around the buildings because the poison ivy had taken over this island so it's important to watch that happen and watch that transition happen and it happens with old farm fields turning into forest it happens with gardens going into invasives there is always transition and change happening but by being able to look back and look forward you can almost anticipate where you're going so one of the recommendations for taking care of this landscape was to bring back goats first and maybe think about keeping a cow on this island because somebody needed to eat in order to keep some of these invasives at bay and goats have been used in a lot of places to really be successful about that so in closing I really just want you to be able to look around and A see how beautiful and how inherently beautiful the scenery is that we have here that we're so lucky to have and you can garden with as much or as little as your heart's desire and your back will let you but I really want you to be able to think about going and looking at these museum spaces going to the long fellow garden going to the cemetery here and looking at the trees and the fence styles and the other vignettes of a period of time that are right there in front of you that are three dimension you don't have to look up this all in a book and if you want to go through those archives in the main memory network or look here at the library or in the files of the greater Portland landmarks because there's a rich story to be told there that might inspire you for your own backyard in your own garden so thank you very much for having me tonight I enjoyed being here and I hope I've made you hungry enough to either want to go home and work in your garden or go to dinner have any questions we might have time for a couple of questions if anybody has any yes this is Chote Island this is part of the crane national wildlife refuge so this is this is an early 19th century house that's out there and probably one of the best moments to really be able to understand what the coast of New England look like in the early 19th century without a lot of other things in your way this is part of my day job anybody else alright well listen thank you very much I'll be here for a little bit if anybody has questions but thank you


Hello everyone, welcome to the course of business forecasting. Today as a part of introduction to business forecasting, we will discuss the importance of business forecasting in management and different application areas where business forecasting people use and the detailed course outline. So, so the first question would be what is business forecasting? Business forecasting is a technique through which you can analyze the business scenarios, the past data and you can get insights of the data and you can make a better decision making or informed decision about the organization's prediction and future action plans. Using business forecasting techniques and the algorithms, you can actually understand the interrelationship between the different departments. For example, suppose how the sales are being estimated that will have an impact in your marketing plan. How the demands are being estimated that will have an impact in your inventory decision making and production planning. So, it is all about the prediction using the past data and the expert's opinion and implicating of that concepts through different techniques of business forecasting, you can actually remain sustainable in the competitive advantages. Now, you know why we need to study the business forecasting. So, here I have created three different segment you can understand that you know what are the different domain or different aspect that you can actually address through this course of business forecasting. In the recent development of predictive analytics and machine learning, you can use the techniques of data science or say business forecasting which will study throughout our courses and you can analyze the historical data and you can make a better decision. So, this is what the start of business forecasting then what insights you will get. You can manage the risk, you can manage the resources effectively whether it is a manufacturing system, production system, sales, marketing everywhere you need business forecasting. In the project management domain also it is one of the important aspects of planning of your time, cost, budget, everything. Gantt chart preparation through which you can make a better planning of your day-to-day activities. So, they are also unit forecasting. So, in every segment resource allocation say supply chain cost optimization, every unit demand planning, for marketing unit sales planning. So, everywhere you need some sort of business forecasting aspects then only you will be able to take a better insights or better decision about the organization. Look at the last part using the data of organizations, past data organization and the techniques of forecasting or methods of forecasting. You can actually analyze the data behavior as well as the scenario analysis you can do through which you will be remain sustainable in the competitive advantages. What opponents are doing, what competitors are doing that also you can analyze by analyzing the data and the market trend through the process of business forecasting and you can help in designing a better decision making planning for the organizations with the help of different techniques of business forecasting. Now the application area, to some extent you know here I have listed couple of area whether it is a retail, whether it is a finance, manufacturing, healthcare, energy, telecom you know supply chain, everywhere transportation system, media everywhere you need forecasting. So, in fact whatever the business domain you go or industry engineering aspects you capture or you analyze you need the forecasting first. This is the foremost important aspects of business planning and the decision making strategies. Think about retail, if you cannot calculate the demand planning or say you know the sales planning effectively how will be able to take a production or you know storing of inventory or warehouse management you cannot do it right similarly in finance. If you do not do proper you know budgeting as well as the stock price analysis or say you know prediction about your future growth or net present value etcetera you would not be able to take a better financial planning decision also. Think about healthcare, perhaps in India we have not done much research in healthcare as well as the analytics in healthcare aspects. If people do more research on analytics in healthcare using different techniques of predictive analytics or say you know business analytics probably this sector will grow faster and they will remain more practical or you know consumer oriented by analyzing the data analytics in their day to day business process. Here I have listed three segment like demand forecasting. This is common it can be whether it is a banking sector, whether it is a finance sector or say supply chain sector or even in marketing. These are the common aspects that you need to capture through business forecasting courses or techniques of business forecasting. What is the first aspect that is called demand forecasting. If you can do a better demand planning or demand forecasting think about say ACN pens. ACN pens use data analytics at most Hindustan Unilever. In our day to day operations we use products of Hindustan Unilever right. So, the consumer test can be assessed through data how consumers are consuming the products. If Hindustan Unilever or say ACN pens can use data analytics in their decision making process probably they are using it maybe because of that they are remaining sustainable or top in the competitive advantages. Similarly, sales forecasting. In marketing you know if you do not do sales planning effectively you cannot do the marketing plan also as well as the strategies of marketing. So, sales forecasting, demand planning even earning. earning is also very important right. So, how you will make your enter earning and the future growth of the sales forecasting. So, for that you need the past data and you have to analyze the data pattern as well as experts opinion. If you can integrate them then you will be able to do a better sales forecasting or sales planning of your organization. Another important aspect is called the financial forecasting. So, budget calculation, your forecasting of say you know different costing part as well as balance sheet preparation, net present value calculation. In one session I will show you how the net present value can be forecasted using the different techniques of business forecasting under risk environment. We will discuss that. So, these are the couple of applications area in different domain sectors through demand forecasting, sales forecasting and financial forecasting. In forecasting I have raised that questions why you need to study business forecasting right. It is all about prediction and analyzing the data pattern their behavior and making informed decisions.  For that you need some approaches to adopt the forecasting to calculate the demand to calculate the cost to calculate the sales etcetera. So, company follow couple of approaches. Here I have listed couple of popular approaches through which company assess their sales demand and the financial planning forecasting planning. What are the approaches? First is the bottom up method. I can give one example for each of them you will be able to relate better about these techniques or say you know approaches. First one is the bottom up approach. It is think about say project management industry. In that case what happens you know the bottom level of the organizations like say you know the project manager of the unit of different divisions they estimate the cost, they estimate the budget, they estimate the forecasting related informations like demand planning, sales planning, the representative. They calculate all these budget and then that means segregated. From each unit you can segregate the data, the forecast of the you know total budgeting plan and then you can after you know integrating all them after adding all them you can pass it to the top management. Then top management will take a decision after having a group decision making. So, this approach is called bottom up approach. From the bottom level of your organization in a hierarchy you goes up to the top and the top management take the decision. But in top down method it is other way. Here top management take the decision first. How much cost should be allotted for a project? What could be the tentative timeline for completion of the project or say you know what could be tentative demand plan, sales plan whether you should go for a new product launch or not. Top management will take a forecast and take a decision about that. And then that budget, that time, that cost or that forecasting planning will be passed or the amount will be passed to the bottom level through different divisions and through your different channel. Think about historical analogy. This is also very important aspects historical analogy and many organizations follow that actually. So, here what you depend on the past data and whatever has happened in the past that will be a reference for you. And accordingly you can implement with the new project or the new timeline or you know new product line extension you can follow similar approaches. So, it is called historical analogy. Now deductive method is other is different than historical approach. In deductive method you actually do not rely on the past data. Here experts says that or experts believes that whatever has happened say in Nagpur whatever the project you have executed that may not be relevant in Bombay. Because in Nagpur the rainfall part is less. So, if you the diameter of the pipe size of pipe may not be the same in Bombay. So, here you need to you know increase the diameter of the pipe for water flow in construction of a bridge say. Because here you could see that there will be heavy rain during Mansoons. So, you need to change the policy. So, here you know to some extent experts says that we will not rely on data rather we will rely on based on our experience. And the current situation current situation what they demand accordingly we will modify and plan our business planning and the strategy and the forecasting plan. So, these predictions under deductive method is also very popular. But here everything depend on the experts experience and there to some extent confidence level and different principles they have learnt throughout their career and that they implement through a deductive method. So, these are the four approaches that I have mentioned here. But remember these are not the techniques. These are only approaches like bottom up or say top down or historical analogy or say deductive method. These are the execution process, the decision making process by the organizations, but not the technique. In order to execute these four, five approaches whatever the approach you follow you need some methods, you need some techniques that you need to implement through this or the managers need to adapt these techniques through which they can execute these processes. So, what are the techniques as a part of business forecasting you need to learn or as a part of predictive analytics you need to learn that we are going to discuss throughout this course. So, what are the techniques? Here in this slide I have put almost all the topics of business forecasting that we are going to cover different techniques, different methods, different approaches that I have mentioned here. First I have categorized the entire course into two components. One is the subjective approach another is the objective approach. In subjective approach we will discuss the qualitative aspects of forecasting like group decision making, Delphi method etcetera. In quantitative approach or objective approach we will study time series methods almost all popular methods that is available in industry and the you know in the science of literatures. We will cover all of them in time series module and then we will study the regression analysis techniques also detail of them and then we will study the simulation approach of forecasting also. So, first we will study the essentials of predictive analytics or say essentials of business forecasting and then different steps of data different decision making. We have allocated two sessions on that from the next class onwards we will concentrate on that understanding and then we will discuss the introduction of machine learning as a part of predictive analytics where we will cover two aspects the unsupervised learning and the supervised learning. As a part of business analytics or say business forecasting you should know the minimum information of machine learning that we will cover in one session detail about it after giving the information about machine learning in the session of data different decision making. And once that introductory information of essentials of predictive analytics, steps of data different decision making and what are the techniques that you should know one should learn to become expert in data science or say you know business analytics domain. Once that part is over then we will enter into different techniques of business forecasting. The common techniques the popular techniques of business forecasting one should know to become expert in the industry or to apply these techniques in the industry and solve different case applications or practical problem. So, what are the techniques as I mentioned under qualitative methods we will cover four methods one is that you know the market survey method and then jury of experts opinion or say to some extent you know panel of experts and then sales force composite. So, here you can see the market survey what happens you know you create Google say it or you know directly go to the consumers and interview them and collect the data from them. So, sometimes geographical or the demographic issue comes or the sample size create a problem in terms of your decision making final decision making and the predictions. Because you know age group could be a issue, gender could be a issue to some extent you can see the location the demographic aspects could be a issue in which month you have collected the data that could be a issue and then only you can make the forecast. So, consumers of market survey is a very popular method it is evergreen method, but sometimes it has a limitation. But when you go to the sales force composite what happens here you know you actually rely on the representative who actually manage or handle the consumers or say retailers. So, if you can take their opinion on a holistic manner you are able to understand the sentiment of the people. So, through them you can capture the demand or the sales and accordingly you can make a predictions. So, this is called sales force composite method we will discuss detail of it then jury of experts opinion the panel the committee which is very popular in any segment you go whether it is a business forecasting business aspects management or the politics or say you know even academic domain. Wherever you go the organizations form a committee and the committee sits for a brainstorming session and they come up with the decision. Under that they might use some different approach like bottom up approach I talked about top down method historical analogy different deductive method you know say time series techniques causal models like regression analysis etcetera they can use, but it is a group decision making right. And then the last option is the Delphi method which is very popular method the superset of enter all the methods of you know qualitative approach where you know different layer of iteration comes into effect. And different groups are being formed and each group come up with their forecast in the initial level then there will be a panel coordinator the panel coordinator will give feedback to each group why you are deviated from the other groups. And then each group will come up with their revised forecast by using any techniques of time series or say you know forecasting approaches or a machine learning approaches. Then after a couple of round of iteration there will be a consensus among the groups. So, when you have when you take a decision throw iterative process among the groups where the identity of the groups are not been disclosed and if you come up with a consensus this process are called Delphi method and it is very popular in industry. We will discuss detail of Delphi method in one session as a part of qualitative approach of forecasting methods. Then we will enter into the time series method. In time series method there are dozens of forecasting techniques are available but what are the most popular that is been used in industry that we have listed based on my experience and the different application domain I have listed here couple of them we will study one by one in our forthcoming sessions like name method moving average methods under moving average methods there are different like you know techniques also like you know simple moving average then weighted moving average which is better than simple moving average and then there will be another extension called the exponential moving average. In industry specifically in the stock market people use every day the exponential moving average they do not use simple moving average. So, how the exponential moving average works that also we will study with applications and then we will enter into the exponential smoothing method. In exponential smoothing method you know there are different approaches like single or simple exponential smoothing approach then double exponential smoothing then triple exponential smoothing when you have basic data you can use simple exponential smoothing and then when you have a trend in the data you can use double exponential smoothing in that case you can use hold model right to analyze that trend and then if you have a trend and seasonality together then you can use winter method or say decomposition method. So, both method will discuss winter method and decomposition method when there will be seasonality analysis. In seasonality analysis you need to calculate the index of each season and then you have to aggregate it and then you have to do the decentralization process and then you have to make a forecast for the forthcoming years or forthcoming quarters. In India you know most of the products earning sales etcetera follow seasonality because in India there are various seasons like you know say quarter to quarter basis season you can define like quarter one quarter two quarter three quarter four you can define season basis like like Mansun season summer season winter season this way also you can you know festival season you can define different type of seasonal aspects of data. In India it actually happens most of the company follow seasonal pattern and their sales and earning comes under seasonal basis. So, how to analyze all this type of data with different techniques of seasonality analysis will understand that like quarterly average method winter method and then decomposition method will study all of them and then we will discuss the detail of ARIMA model which is one of the most popular technique of machine learning techniques or say predictive analytics will study detail of it under ARIMA method like auto regressive integrated moving average process what are the steps of air process what are the steps of MA process what I stands for the differencing process we will understand detail about that and then we will understand why SCF and PSC function are so important in in analyzing ARIMA models. So, we will understand the technical aspects as well as the application aspects of SCF function and PSC function through correlogram diagram which will be one of the important assets for you in managing different time series models of say in a practical examples through ARIMA process. Then one of the important aspects that I I liked most that is called human judgment in time series.  So, which model to select for this type of data pattern to make a future forecast you have to select the model right. So, these are all time series data whether it is ARIMA or decomposition method or hold model winter method moving average method whatever method you follow it is actually the based on the past data you understand the data behavior and you make the forecast for the future. But what is going to happen in future that your time series data cannot capture only field experts can understand that. So, if you can integrate the future event through a contextual information and if you can integrate that with your time series forecast and if you can revise your time series forecast that forecast could be very effective. For example, we do outlayer right we remove the outlayer in time series data. So, why we remove the outlayer because we feel that in the past particular years or particular month something wrong happened and because of that there is a spike in sales or say demand or say down in say because of corona or whatever or say Ukraine war or say you know say Palestine war maybe because of that there will be a spike in say stock price or energy crisis. So, next year it might not be there. So, it is a outlayer we delete that if you can do that for past data. So, why can to integrate the future event also if you know that something is going to happen. If you know that you know for world come match final match there will be a huge crowd in Amidabad city or say if you know that you know because of Ukraine war there will be a spike in crude oil price. Your past data does not know that and you cannot make forecast based on that and experts only know that. If you can integrate that concepts along with the time series data and we can modify the revise your time series model and the revise forecast could be much more effective than the basic time series time series data dependent forecasting process. So, that we will study in one session under the heading of human judgment or experts judgment in time series forecasting. Then we will discuss different regression models we call it is a causal models also econometric models will study detail of simple linear regressions and its ingredients like you know measure of accuracy, coefficient of determination, R square, standard error, confidence interval, prediction interval all these things we will study detail and then we will enter into multiple regressions. In multiple regression we will study the basic multiple regression, we will study the multicollinearity, we will also study the normalization process under multiple regression. So, all three aspects of multiple regression we will study and then we will enter into the logistic regression. In one session I will discuss details about logistic regression in simple linear regression or say multiple linear regression what we do? We actually consider the independent variable and dependent variable and we find their causal relationship right. How much the dependent variable is explained by your independent variable? There could be one independent variable, there could be many independent variable and that process are called the basic regression. But in logistic regression your output variable will be dichotomous kind of thing say yes or no not the actual value of y will come or the output dependent variable will come or you need to forecast. You need to forecast whether there will be yes or no whether there will be say 0 or 1 kind of situation. So, in that case example could be say you know in banking sector whether the company would like to or bank would like to give a loan to a you know customer or not or say insurance sector say you know whether the insurance claim is a fraud claim or right claim. In Titanic example you know whether some person whether you know you can use the machine learning technique or say as a part of logistic regression and you can predict how many people died or how many people have survived. So, this type of you know different examples or popular examples are there which we will study couple of these examples through the session of logistic regression. And then we will study the detail of Monte color simulation and business forecasting. Under Monte color simulations we will understand the steps of simulation process and then the application of that both in discrete case and continuous case through system dynamics approach also as well as the you know Excel illustration. In discrete case we will study different applications in say voting line analysis. In continuous case we will see different demand planning or the sales planning or say stock price or sales price fluctuation we will study all of them through dynamic nature of business environment under the context of Monte color simulation and system dynamics approaches. Then we will enter in the last session or say last module we will enter the detail of risk analytics part using simulation as a part of business forecasting. In that module I will give the introduction of the software called Adrix software or say Palisade Decision Tools software. Under that different statistical analysis can be done whether it is a exploratory data analysis whether it is a predictions or whether it is a prescriptive modeling also. So, all three aspects can be covered using this software we will study detail of it and then we will analyze couple of case applications whether it is a cost estimation whether it is a product line extension in manufacturing sector whether it is a NPV calculation under risk or say insurance industry applications like insurance analytics couple of applications we will study through the software as a part of risk analytics using simulations and essentials of business forecasting. Now, let us see what are the steps involved in making a forecast. First you need to understand the context of the problem and then once you know the context the data collection process and you know the time horizon that you need to make the forecast whether you look to forecast for say short term prediction or say for some long term prediction or the entire annual year. So, that you need to find finalize first like you know horizon of the data and before that you know the context of the problem the objective that you need to set first in which context you are making forecast whether it is a you know financial problem or stock price prediction or whether it is a weather prediction or whether it is a gold price prediction or say you know GDP calculation. So, context you need to understand once you understand the context then you have to find the time horizon. Once you know all these parts then data collection and the preprocessing is very important like different components of time series you need to understand and the causal relationship between regression like you know independent variable and dependent variable that you need to understand effectively. So, once these first three steps are ready then you can think about selection of a model. So, all these models we have discussed right based on experience or the practical illustrations you will be able to understand for a practical problem which model to select. So, once you select the model that in a separate session we will discuss about it. So, how to select a model for a particular context and which model to select. So, that aspects need to be covered in a effective manner so that you can find a bridge between your you know model as well as the practical case application that part we will discuss in a separate session. And then once you select the model model selection are done then model evaluation model training and testing you have to do and then once the training and the evaluation part are done you found that there is a less like you know error and better measure of accuracy or higher R square or lower RMSE once you finalize that with your data and the model and the basic training and testing part are done validation are done then next is that implementation we call it is a forecast or to some extent you know commissioning part. So, that part you have to do. So, once the forecast are done the last part is also very important the monitoring and controlling part because whatever the forecast you do based on the current data right once you have a more data new technology comes into effect or new machine learning techniques are there with your hand probably you need to modify your forecast for better accuracy. Now the question is that what are the best practices that you should follow? This is one of the unique aspects that you need to understand that what are the best practices available to remain sustainable or remain competitive in the market. You can follow any business forecasting technique right or you can understand the detail of business forecasting. But you need to understand how to remain in the top you may be a good doctor you have it so much of knowledge but you do not know which medicine to give for which patient. So, that the understanding is very important and how will enhance that knowledge or experience through best practices right what are the best practices steps or some sort of factors here we can see data quality and the accuracy this is very crucial if you maintain the data quality and the accuracy the completeness of the data the auditing part the cleaning process of the data regular auditing very important if you can do that probably you will be able to make better forecast or you know to some extent you can do a better scenario planning here I mentioned scenario planning you do not know what is going to happen. So, that situation you can manage in a better manner through scenario planning with better accuracy if you maintain the data quality effectively. Then advanced technology and the analytical approaches in these days what happens you know every day we get to know that different type of new techniques of machine learning AI process are being coming up right or data analytics techniques. So, if you can understand these techniques and if you can integrate with your data or you know if you can upgrade your software probably you will remain sustainable in competitive advantages. So, these are the best practices you have to follow actually here you can see the consider the external factors. Tomorrow if RBI come up with a new policy of report that will have an impact in your NBFC forecasting planning right growth or say you know metal sector or say you know banking sector. So, how to analyze that even IT sector also if US take a decision US take a decision that will have an impact to the IT sector also. So, external you have to be very careful about the external factors also. So, that you have to keep in mind what is going to happen tomorrow in Middle East you do not know. So, that will have a big impact in your say crude oil or say you know chemical products. So, you have to very careful about the market condition you do not have any control over that, but you can analyze that through experts opinion and you can modify your business planning effectively. So, these are called best practices you have to you know look at the economic conditions, trade market trade and all these things external factors you do not have any control, but you have to be careful about your business planning as well as you know modification of your forecasting approaches. Then collaborative forecasting whether it is internal division whether it is a marketing team, sales team, project management team you need to coordinate with each other. Then regularly update your models that I have mentioned that you know since new data are been coming or new technology have been developed every day. So, you need to make sure that you should make happy of your stakeholders, consumers etcetera by updating your models otherwise model may become obsolete. Then last part monitor and evaluate the accuracy this is very important what are the KPIs involved in your data right or in your model forecast that you should understand if some parameter are making very impactful outcome I will show you in the risk analytics session you will get to know maybe particular one parameter on one variable will have a maximum variation to your total cost or total profit. So, how to capture that particular how to identify that particular factor or parameter k key performance indicator which will have a big impact to your overall performance of your system output system. So, you need to capture that you have to monitor that. So, these are the couple of best practices. Now, when you go to different sessions as I mentioned we will cover many models business forecasting models whether it is a name, method, time series, simple times, moving average process, weighted moving average process, exponentials, moving average process, exponentials, smoothing, hold model, winter hold model, decomposition method, regression, multiple regression, you know Arima model, simulation different models will be covering in different sessions with practical applications and also illustration of them through Excel. So, here I have shown you one screenshot of one session, one such session how we will illustrate different models. We will select different data, this data you can see, this data follows seasonality and trend because the seasonality and trend. So, there is a trend as well as the seasonality also. How to select the best model for them and how to make the best prediction which will follow seasonality as well as the trend. So, your forecast of a data would not be like this or would not be like this. This forecasting will be like also in a similar pattern. For each and every sessions we will take some practical problem or say illustrative examples and we will study them using Excel. So, that will be an integral part of each and every session of our course. When we will open the software, a badric software, different analysis of say you know statistical inferences you will draw also like you know turner to grab analysis, scatter plot, how to feed a distribution of the data or what type of distribution the particular data is following the trend that also you can analyze, what could be the confidence interval, the standard deviation, the skewness, cut-offs is all you know explorative analysis, predictive modeling as well as the prescriptive analytics also will cover during the module of risk analytics part. So, these are the overall you know aspects of course content and the course planning that I have discussed today and in the forthcoming week onwards one by one we will execute all these techniques forecast methods of you know business forecasting in our course. So, these are the books that you can refer the text book that we are going to recommend is the business forecasting by John Ankey and Dean Wieser. The remaining two books are also very popular like you know essentials of business analytics as well as the business analytics by you know Albright. This is very good book as well as the essential of business analytics are one of the very popular book like you know descriptive predictive and prescriptive all part are been covered by them, but we will be covering majorly the predictive analytics part as a part of business analytics. So, this is the overall introduction, the importance of business forecasting course, the course outline and the implementation of different modules of business forecasting techniques using Excel and the reference text book. So, this way we will cover the entire course of business forecasting and today we have given the introduction about the course and the course outline from the next class onwards will enter into different topic or different module of business forecasting. Thank you.


Today's focus is Future Fair 23. It's a combination career fair slash four-year college transfer fair. We have 70 exhibitors that are going to be here today. This event is huge because students, alumni, and the community are invited to come on campus today to meet with employers and also meet with four-year colleges. Hi, how are you? What are you studying? They are ready to meet with employers to hopefully land that first program-related job. It gives them the chance to meet with all kinds of people in one place. I'm an IT support specialist doing as well as cybersecurity. Okay, we have a lot of need for IT on that set of things, but cybersecurity is also something that our company has actually grown and we're doing a lot more of. Marine Park has a very good reputable name, reputable professors, things like that. So just all around great technical school that we like to work with and we have close connections with the Tech College and we have actually hired a lot of good employees from here. We want to make sure that they know that we have opportunities. We're right down the street. If they're looking to stay local, stay in the community, we're happy to have them. All of the employers that are here today are definitely recruiting for open positions, part-time, full-time, opening, seasonal jobs, internships. Are you graduating in May? It's really a good opportunity to get those new grads right out of college. Start their journey and their career right away. Typically when we get a student from here we know that we're getting someone who's working hard, who has really put a lot of work into their studies, and I know that when they graduate from MPTC or other technical colleges that we're getting a higher standard of candidate. I'll also throw you my card too, so that if you have any questions or want to check in, you can reach out to me there. I do believe that if students and alumni come in here today and are prepared, they can approach a table and introduce themselves and have a resume ready to go. They could get interviewed here today. That is our ultimate goal here at the college is to train them and get them ready for that real first job in their program area.