ANTIQUE SHOW

The Glastonbury Exchange Club will hold its 31st annual Gala New Year's Antique & Collectible Show Jan. 1 from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. at Glastonbury High School on Hubbard Street. The show features 138 dealers from New England and New York, with booth chats on restoring antique lighting and on Oriental rugs.
Admission is $7. Call 860-342-2540.
ANTIQUE NEEDLEWORK
Carol and Steve Huber, guest curators of an exhibition on schoolgirl embroidery from the Connecticut River Valley, now at the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, will give an illustrated lecture Jan. 15 at 2 p.m. The fee is $7. Attendees are invited to bring a work of needlework for identification and discussion. For reservations, go to FlorenceGriswoldMuseum.org, or call 860-434-5542, Ext. 111.
Before the lecture, from 10 a.m. to noon, the Hubers will hold an open house at their gallery at 40 Ferry Road in Old Saybrook.
LOOKING AHEAD
Spring and a new gardening season will be here before you know it. Some events to mark in your new 2011 calendar:
GARDEN LECTURE SERIES
The Friends of Elizabeth Park will hold their winter garden lecture series, with eight lectures, beginning Jan. 19 at 7 p.m., when Ron Aakjar, horticulturist with the Sharon Audubon Center, discusses pruning techniques.
Future speakers and topics are: garden writer and photographer Steve Silk, on crazy mixed-up borders (Jan. 26); garden designer and coach Deborah Kent, on "What the nurseries don't tell you" (Feb. 9); legendary Avon gardener Chrissie D'Esopo, on her own four-season garden secrets (Feb. 16); Margery Winters, educator at the Roaring Brook Nature Center in Canton, on "Saving Our Wild Areas, One Yard at a Time" (March 2); rosarians Marci Martin and John Mattia, on the business of roses, including how new roses are created and propagated (March 9); Bill Duesing, executive director of CT NOFA, the Northeast Organic Farming Association in Connecticut, on organic gardening (March 23); and Louis Lista, chef and Pond House owner, on cooking garden bounty (March 30).
All lectures are at 7 p.m. at the Pond House hall at the park.
The full series, including a dinner buffet on March 30, is $85. The fee for individual lectures is $10, $40 for the March 30 dinner lecture. Go to www.elizabethpark.org to purchase tickets (and for snow dates).
RELATING TO SOIL
Michele Owens, a gardening writer from Saratoga Springs, N.Y., and co-founder of Garden Rant, a popular gardening blog, will talk about good garden soil - what it is and how to attain it - Jan. 20 at 7:30 p.m. at a meeting of the Connecticut Horticultural Society.
The society's education committee also will hold a swap of horticulture-related books at the meeting, which will be held in Emanuel Synagogue, 160 Mohegan Drive, West Hartford.
The fee for nonmembers is $10.