Boston Flora

Tag: Susan Haltom

  • Fridays, July 24 and July 31, 10:00 am – 12:00 noon – Writing in the Garden

    Rich in sensory experience, a garden is an especially inspiring place in which to write. In this two-hour workshop, to be held twice on July 24 and 31, from 10 – noon, participants will visit two gardens at Tower Hill and write spontaneously in response to prompts inspired by the surroundings. Both aspiring and experienced writers are welcome.

    Instructor Jane Roy Brown is an award-winning writer, editor, and landscape historian who lives in Conway, Massachusetts. Jane works part-time as director of educational outreach at the Library of American Landscape History, a nonprofit organization based in Amherst, Massachusetts, which publishes books, produces films, and organizes exhibitions about American landscape history. Her workshop series, The Heart of Story: Writing Stories of Our Lives, focuses on how to write memoir.

    With Susan Haltom, Jane is co-author of One Writer’s Garden: Eudora Welty’s Home Place (University Press of Mississippi, September 2011), which won the 2012 Eudora Welty Award. Jane also wrote Drawing Lessons, a history of the Conway School of Landscape Design (CSLD via lulu.com, November 2011, work for hire).
    Her articles on travel, gardens, and landscape architecture have appeared in numerous periodicals, including Architectural Record, the Boston Globe travel section, The Christian Science Monitor, Garden Design, Harvard Magazine, and Preservation. She is a contributing editor for Landscape Architecture, the magazine of the American Society of Landscape Architects. She received a 2008 Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Gold Award from the Society of American Travel Writers Foundation. She edited the 2003 Journal of the New England Garden History Society and worked in various editorial staff positions at AMC Outdoors, the magazine of the Appalachian Mountain Club, from 1995 to 2004, where she received a 2004 national Gold Award from the Society of National Association Publishers.  After earning a B.A. at Middlebury College, Jane completed the certificate program in landscape-design history at Radcliffe Seminars (now the Landscape Institute at Boston Architectural College). As her final project, she documented the history of the 1926 Jens Jensen landscape at Skylands, the former summer home of Edsel and Eleanor Ford in Seal Harbor, Maine.

    Tower Hill member price is $20 per session, nonmembers $35 per session.  Register at www.towerhillbg.org.

  • Wednesday, December 7, 3:00 pm – 5:00 pm – One Writer’s Garden: Eudora Welty’s Home Place

    Eudora Welty’s Mississippi garden ran riot with the camellias, roses, and daylilies that she tended as zealously as her prose. The novelist, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for The Optimist’s Daughter, cultivated characters for her stories along with the flowers that she grew in her modest Jackson garden.

    A fine new book by Susan Haltom and Jane Roy Brown looks at Welty’s enduring relationship with her garden, to which she turned as a respite from her travels and the pressures of making a living as a writer. The garden and house where Eudora Welty (1909-2001) lived and wrote is now a museum, and the garden has been restored to its heyday in the 1920s through the ’40s.

    Welty’s letters, published for the first time in this book, reveal witty and telling observations about not only gardening, but also fellow gardeners. She wrote to a friend, “The delphiniums I planted in my ignorance have all bloomed like everything and are getting ready to bloom for the second time and Mother says the ladies of the garden club come over each day to worship and grit their teeth.”

    On Wednesday, December 7, from 3 – 5, come hear Jane Roy Brown speak about Miss Welty’s garden and how its formation also offers a compelling look at the broader social trends of the time, including the flourishing of womens civic involvement through garden clubs and the development of streetcar suburbs. Brown serves as director of educational outreach at the Library of American Landscape History. Her writing has appeared in the Boston Globe as well as in national publications.

    Admission to the book talk is free but an RSVP is requested to mhorn@masshort.org. The event is co-sponsored by COGdesign (www.cogdesign.org) and the Massachusetts Horticultural Society (www.masshort.org).  The event takes place at the Massachusetts Horticultural Society at Elm Bank, 900 Washington Street in Wellesley.