If you were riveted by The Hot Zone, this Harvard Museum of Natural History program is for you. Science author David Quammen explores how a litany of pandemic diseases like Ebola, SARS, and Hendra share a single pattern: they are transmitted to humans by bugs that originate in wild animals. He will speak on Friday, October 19 beginning at 6 pm, and a book signing will follow. Free and open to the public, Geological Lecture Hall, 24 Oxford Street. Free parking in the 52 Oxford Street garage.
Were Thomas Jefferson to walk the grounds of Monticello today, he would no doubt feel fully at home in the 1,000 foot terraced vegetable garden where the very vegetables and herbs he favored are thriving, Extensively and painstakingly restored under Peter J. Hatch’s brilliant direction, Jefferson’s unique vegetable garden now boasts the same medley of plants he enthusiastically cultivated in the early nineteenth century. Peter reveals the Monticello garden’s bounty and legacy and its continuing impact on the culinary, garden, and landscape history of the United States. A Rich Spot of Earth will be available for purchase and signing at this lecture, taking place Thursday, October 18 at the Hunnewell Building of the Arnold Arboretum, 125 Arborway, Boston. Free parking. Co-sponsored by the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University, Friends of Wellesley College Botanic Gardens, The Garden Conservancy, and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc. Fee to attend for a member of any of the participating sponsors is $20, non-members $25. To register, call Wellesley at 781-283-3094, or you may visit www.arboretum.harvard.edu.
Join The Arnold Arboretum for a captivating journey into the lives of plants—from the colors they see to the schedules they keep—with renowned biologist Daniel Chamovitz. Director, Manna Center for Plant Biosciences, Department of Molecular Biology and Ecology of Plants at Tel Aviv University. Highlighting the latest research in plant science, he will take us into the lives of different types of plants, and draw parallels with the human senses to reveal that we have much more in common with sunflowers and oak trees than we may realize. Covering touch, sound, smell, sight, and even memory, Chamovitz considers whether it’s too much to ask if plants are aware. His book, What a Plant Knows, is a true field guide to the senses for science buffs and green thumbs, and for anyone who seeks a greater understanding of our place in nature. Books will be available for purchase and signing. Fee $5 member, $20 nonmember. Register on line at www.arboretum.harvard.edu.
Identifying tree species can be challenging when the traits typically used to describe them—leaves, buds, and twigs—are not clearly visible or, in the case of leaves, not even present. On Saturday, September 29, from 9 – 1, join Michael Wojtech, author of Bark: A Field Guide to Trees of the Northeast, for an exploration of bark, the tree characteristic that provides clues in every season. You will learn how to differentiate six different bark types, how to use the book’s identification keys, and begin to discover why such a variety of bark characteristics has evolved—Why do some species have smooth bark, while on others it is thick and broken? Why does bark peel? After a classroom session you will practice identifying native tree species on the grounds of the Arboretum. Open to naturalists at all levels of experience. Bark: A Field Guide to Trees of the Northeast is required for the class and can be purchased at the time of registration. Purchased books will be distributed in class. Birch bark photo from www.fondofsnape.com. Fee: $40 member, $55 nonmember and $17.00 per book. Register at www.arboretum.harvard.edu.
On Saturday, September 22, beginning at 2 pm at the Harvard Museum of Natural History , 26 Oxford Street in Cambridge, oceanographer and award-winning photographer Chris Linder will recount his four polar expeditions to remote and extreme environments of the Arctic and Antarctica. Regular admission rates apply. Free for members of the Harvard Museum of Natural History. For more information visit www.hmnh.harvard.edu.
Neal Sanders is retired from the corporate world. His ‘second act’ is writing mysteries. Inspired by his wife Betty who is a master gardener and former garden club president and her stories, he has set two of those mysteries within a garden club. Neal will speak about writing a mystery with a garden club setting which is woven with garden stories and information. The free event is sponsored by the Mattakeesett Garden Club of Pembroke, and will take place at the Pembroke Public Library, Center Street, Route 14, Pembroke, Massachusetts on Tuesday, September 18 from 7 – 8:30. For information, visit www.mattakeesettgardenclub.org.
In a stunning slide presentation on Wednesday, September 12 at 7 pm at Porter Square Books, 25 White Street in Cambridge, National Book Award-winning author Phillip Hoose takes us around the hemisphere with the world’s most celebrated shorebird, showing the obstacles rufa red knots face, introducing a worldwide team of scientists and conservationists trying to save them, and offering insights about what we can do to help shorebirds before it’s too late. With inspiring prose, thorough research, and stirring images, Hoose explores the tragedy of extinction through the triumph of a single bird.
Hoose is the author of the National Book Award winner Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice, which is also a Newbery Honor Book, a Robert F. Sibert Honor Book, a YALSA Finalist for Excellence in Young Adult Fiction, and an ALA Best Book for Young Adults, among other honors. His other books include The Race to Save the Lord God Bird, winner of the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, and We Were There, Too!, a National Book Award Finalist. Mr. Hoose lives in Portland, Maine. For more information visit www.portersquarebooks.com.
Dr. David Schuyler will discuss New York’s Hudson Valley as America’s first iconic landscape, while unraveling a history of idealization, revolution, pre-environmentalism, and creative power in the 19th and early 20th centuries, on Saturday, August 18, beginning at 4 pm on Olana’s East Lawn. Olana, the historic home of Frederic Edwin Church, is located at 5720 Route 9G, Hudson, New York. He traces how an emerging sense of place, aesthetic identity and American historical associations became synonymous with the Hudson Valley, and increasingly ingrained in national consciousness – ideas advanced by popular authors such as James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving, and Hudson River School painters including Thomas Cole and Frederic Church. David Schuyler has been a professor at Franklin and Marshall College for over thirty years. He also serves on Olana’s National Advisory Committee. He is the author of Apostle of Taste: Andrew Jackson Downing 1815 – 1852, and The New Urban Landscape: The Redefinition of City Form in Nineteenth-Century America. Presented by The Olana Partnership. Call 518-828-1872, x 103, to reserve, or email rsvp@olana.org for more information.
The Harvard Museum of Natural History welcomes Emily Monosson on Thursday, August 16 at 6 pm for a free lecture and book signing at The Geological Lecture Hall, 24 Oxford Street in Cambridge. Toxic chemicals: They have shaped our bodies, our world, and all life around us. Today, species are rapidly evolving in response to toxins like PCBs, dioxins and pesticides. Emily Monosson, adjunct professor at UMass Amherst and author of the new book, Evolution in a Toxic World (Island Press), will discuss how life on Earth survives in the face of increased amounts of both age-old and new synthetic chemicals in our environment. Dr. Monosson is an environmental toxicologist. A diversity of past research experience, and data synthesis of the health and environmental impacts of contaminants from nanoparticles, to organochlorines, and personal health care products have laid the groundwork for Monosson’s current academic interest – investigating the evolutionary history of the toxic response.
Beyond academics her interest in increasing public awareness about their role in the environment and the importance of science education, has led to her service on the Gill-Montague School Committee and on the board of the Montague Reporter, where she occasionally contributes as a writer. For more information, visit www.hmnh.harvard.edu. Photo from toxicevolution.wordpress.com.
When a head injury obliterated twenty-two-year-old Molly Birnbaum’s sense of smell, it destroyed her dream of becoming a chef. Determined to reawaken her nose, she bravely sets off on a quest to rediscover the scented world. A moving personal story packed with surprising facts about the senses, Season to Taste brims with the scents of Molly’s world–cinnamon, cedarwood, fresh bagels, and lavender–lost and finally found.
Birnbaum is the recipient of the Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship in Arts and Culture from Columbia Journalism School. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, O, The Oprah Magazine, and ARTnews magazine, and she writes the popular food blog “My Madeline”. Hear her discuss her book on Thursday, August 16, beginning at 7 pm at Porter Square Books, 25 White Street in Cambridge. For more information call 617-491-2220.
