Boston Flora

Tag: Andrea Wulf

  • Sunday, June 14, 10:00 am – Founding Gardeners

    Join Historic Beverly on June 14 for a special Sunday Morning Book Talk with award-winning historian and bestselling author Andrea Wulf.

    Discover the fascinating story behind Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation and learn how George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and James Madison viewed gardening, agriculture, and nature as central to the creation of the United States.

    Andrea Wulf brings history to life through an engaging exploration of plants, politics, and the Revolutionary generation. Wulf reveals how America’s founding fathers understood the natural world not simply as a backdrop to history, but as central to the creation of the nation itself. George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison considered themselves first and foremost farmers, gardeners, and botanists. Their deep passion for agriculture, plants, and the landscape shaped both their personal lives and their political vision for the new republic.

    Through vivid storytelling and rich historical detail, Andrea Wulf examines how nature became political in Revolutionary America, how native crops and species emerged as patriotic symbols, and why James Madison can be considered the forgotten father of American environmentalism. Blending politics, horticulture, and biography, Founding Gardeners offers a fresh and compelling perspective on the Revolutionary generation and the world they cultivated.

    Andrea Wulf is an internationally celebrated historian and author whose works include Founding Gardeners and the bestselling The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World, a New York Times bestseller published in 27 languages and winner of fifteen international literary awards, including the Royal Society Science Book Prize and the Costa Biography Award. Her newest book, The Traveler, will be published in June 2026. Wulf is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in London.

    Learn more about Andrea Wulf at www.andreawulf.com.

    Light brunch fare included in ticket price, $10 for Historic Beverly members, $15 for nonmembers.
    Book signing following the lecture
    Tickets here: https://tinyurl.com/4ecpz279

    Funding provided by the Massachusetts Office of Travel & Tourism Massachusetts250 initiative.

  • Tuesday, October 6, 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm – The Brother Gardeners

    Historian Andrea Wulf will speak at the Hunnewell Building of the Arnold Arboretum on Tuesday, October 6, from 7 – 8:30. Bringing to life the science and adventure of eighteenth-century plant collecting, The Brother Gardeners is the story of how six men created the modern garden and changed the horticultural world in the process. It is a story of a garden revolution that began in America. In 1733, colonial farmer John Bartram shipped two boxes of precious American plants and seeds to Peter Collinson in London. Around these men formed the nucleus of a botany movement, which included famous Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus; Philip Miller, bestselling author of The Gardeners Dictionary; and Joseph Banks and David Solander, two botanist explorers, who scoured the globe for plant life aboard Captain Cook’s Endeavor. As they cultivated exotic blooms from around the world, they helped make Britain an epicenter of horticultural and botanical expertise. The Brother Gardeners paints a vivid portrait of an emerging world of knowledge and gardening as we know it today.
    Fee: free for sponsor members, $20 nonmembers. Register at my.arboretum.harvard.edu or call 617-384-5277. Offered with the Massachusetts Historical Society.

  • Monday, October 5, 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm – The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World

    Andrea Wulf reveals in her new book the extraordinary life of the visionary German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) and how he created the way we understand nature today. She will speak on Monday, October 5 beginning at 5:30 at the Massachusetts Historical Society, 1154 Boylston Street in Boston.

    Though almost forgotten today, his name lingers everywhere from the Humboldt Current to the Humboldt penguin. Humboldt was an intrepid explorer and the most famous scientist of his age. Wulf traces Humboldt’s influences through the great minds he inspired in revolution, evolution, ecology, conservation, art and literature. In The Invention of Nature, Wulf brings this lost hero to science and the forgotten father of environmentalism back to life. Fee: free for Arnold Arboretum and Massachusetts Historical Society members, $20 nonmembers. Register at my.arboretum.harvard.edu or call 617-384-5277.

  • Tuesday, March 19, 1:00 pm – 3:00 pm – Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation

    The Concord Museum and the Concord Museum Guild of Volunteers will host author Andrea Wulf on Thursday, March 19 at the Concord Museum, Cambridge Turnpike at Lexington Road in Concord, for a lecture beginning at 1 pm.  The talk is the 2013 Mary M. Lesneski Memorial Lecture, on Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation. 

    Founding Gardeners offers a fascinating look at the revolutionary generation from the unique and intimate perspective of their lives as gardeners, plantsmen, and farmers. For the founding fathers, gardening, agriculture, and botany were elemental passions, as deeply ingrained in their characters as their belief in liberty for the nation they were creating. Wulf’s stories of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and James Madison reveal a guiding, but previously overlooked, ideology of the American Revolution.

    Andrea Wulf was born in India and moved to Germany as a child. She lives in Britain where she trained as a design historian at the Royal College of Art. Her most recent book, Chasing Venus, was published in 2012 in eight countries in conjunction with the last transit of Venus in our century. Wulf has written for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, and many other newspapers. She has lectured widely to large audiences at the Royal Geographical Society and Royal Society in London, the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, Monticello, and the Chicago Botanic Garden, among many others. She is a three-time fellow of the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello and the Eccles British Library Writer in Residence 2013.

    During her visit to Concord, Ms. Wulf will be a Scholar in Residence at the Concord Museum, exploring both the Concord Museum’s collection and the collections of other area institutions for research for a new book.

    As is tradition, Afternoon Tea organized by the Concord Museum’s Guild of Volunteers follows the lecture. The annual Mary M. Lesneski Lecture, begun 34 years ago in memory of a dedicated Concord Museum volunteer, has brought nationally renowned speakers on a variety of topics to the Museum each March. Tickets to the lecture and tea are $30; $25 Concord Museum Members. Reservations are required as space is limited; (978) 369-9763, ext. 216. Books will be available for purchase in the Museum Shop, with a book signing to follow the lecture.

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  • Wednesday, May 30, 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm – Chasing Venus: The Race to Measure the Heavens

    In her new book, Chasing Venus, Andrea Wulf tells the extraordinary story of the first global scientific collaboration, set amid warring armies, hurricanes, scientific endeavors, and personal tragedy. On June 6, 1761 and June 3, 1769, the planet Venus passed between Earth and Sun – each time visible as a small black dot against the burning face of the Sun for six hours. Transits of Venus always arrive in pairs – eight years apart – but then it takes more than a century before they are seen again. In the 1760s the world’s scientific community was electrified because the transit would allow them for the first time to calculate the distance between the planets in our solar system. This would require triangulated data to be compiled from various exact points around the globe – all taken simultaneously during the short period of the actual Transit. Join us for an intriguing glimpse at the spirit of the Enlightenment and the collaborative race to measure the heavens. Chasing Venus will be published in May 2012 in conjunction of the Transit of Venus on June 5/6, 2012.  Andrea Wulf will speak on Wednesday, May 30, from 7 – 8:30 at the Weld Hill Research Building at the Arnold Arboretum.  Register at www.my.arboretum.harvard.edu.  Fee $10 sponsor organization member, $20 nonmember.  Offered by the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Historical Society.

    The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics is holding a special Observatory Night for viewing the Venus transit. Learn more. In 2004 we were treated to a sunrise view of Venus crossing the disk of the sun. On June 5th, we will enjoy a sunset Venus transit. If you miss this one, you won’t get another chance to see it until 2117 – and that’s a very long time to wait. The Center for Astrophysics will hold a special rooftop viewing of the Venus transit beginning at 6:00 pm. The transit will be visible from 6:03 until the sun sets at 8:19. Viewing is weather-dependent so call 617-495-7461 to check for cancellation.

  • Thursday, May 26, 5:30 pm – Founding Gardeners: How the Revolutionary Generation Created an American Eden

    Andrea Wulf’s new book Founding Gardeners. How the Revolutionary Created an American Eden will be published in  late March 2011 by Knopf.  Ms. Wulf will travel to Boston and speak on Thursday, May 26, in a program co-sponsored by the Massachusetts Historical Society and the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University.  The talk will take place at the Massachusetts Historical Society, 1154 Boylston Street in Boston, with a reception at 5:30 pm and the lecture at 6:00 pm. The program is free but registration is required :  log on to www.arboretum.harvard.edu for more information.

    The Founding Gardeners offers a fascinating look at the revolutionary generation from the unique and intimate perspective of their lives as gardeners, plantsmen and farmers.

    For the founding fathers, gardening, agriculture and botany were elemental passions, as deeply ingrained in their characters as their belief in liberty for the nation they were creating. Andrea Wulf reveals for the first time this aspect of the revolutionary generation. She describes how, even as British ships gathered off Staten Island, George Washington wrote his estate manager about the garden at Mount Vernon; how a tour of English gardens renewed Thomas Jefferson’s and John Adams’s faith in their fledgling nation; how a trip to the great botanist John Bartram’s garden helped the delegates of the Constitutional Congress to break their deadlock; and why James Madison is the forgotten father of American environmentalism. Taken together, these and other stories are a revelation of a guiding, but previously overlooked ideology of the American Revolution.

    The Founding Gardeners adds depth and nuance to our understanding of the American experiment, and provides us with a portrait of the founding fathers as they’ve never been seen before.