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.