The New York Public Library
presents
An Art and Literature Series Event
Hear the Gardeners Voice
Writing the Garden: A Literary Conversation Across Two Centuries
Elizabeth Barlow Rogers
in conversation with
Laurie Olin and Paula Deitz
Wednesday March 14, 2012
6:00 P.m.
Margaret Liebman Berger Forum
Room 227 (2nd Floor)
The New York Public Library
Stephen A. Schwarzman Building
5thAvenue at 42nd Street
New York, NY 10018
Room 227 opens to the public at 5:30 p.m.
All events are FREE and subject to last minute change or cancellation.
Gardens are a series of transitory delights, temporal transactions between humans and nature. Luckily, the creation and development of a garden is sometimes recorded by its maker or, in some cases, by the discerning visitor. Books by and about true gardeners constitute a special genre of literature. Paula Deitz is a distinguished journalist whose personal responses to numerous gardens have been gathered in her recent book, Of Gardens, a collection of essays that brim with sensory description. Distinguished landscape architect Laurie Olin writes descriptive appreciations and annotates the gardens he visits as well as the ones he designs with exceptional drawings. They will join landscape historian Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, author of Writing the Garden: A Literary Conversation Across Two Centuries, in a discussion of the ways that they and others represent the marriage of garden art and nature through words and illustrations.
Focusing on gardeners’ words about the art of gardening, Writing the Garden: A Literary Conversation Across Two Centuries by landscape historian Elizabeth Barlow Rogers brings together a diverse array of authors. For the most part they are not professional landscape designers or how-to horticulturists but rather hands-on gardeners who write with their own gardens in full view. Thus, the books Rogers discusses are ones that constitute a love affair between the gardener and the garden. Although horticultural love affairs are often tumultuous (nature can be frustratingly fickle, and in dealing with weather, pests, and other adversities, some garden writers assume a comically beleaguered persona), the authors of these books are lovers of place, the space in nature the writer-gardener claims as home ground, an arena for personal creative expression. Ranging in time from Enlightenment France to modern-day New York City, they invite the reader into the natural world of soil and flowers, insects and sun, pride and frustration.
Copies of the book are available for purchase and signing at the event.
Paula Deitz is editor of The Hudson Review, a magazine of literature and the arts published in New York City. She writes about art, architecture, and landscape design for newspapers and magazines here and abroad. Of Gardens, a collection of her essays, was published in 2010 by the University of Pennsylvania Press. These essays record her great adventure of continual discovery, not only of the artful beauty of individual gardens, but also of the intellectual and historical threads that weave them into patterns of civilization, from the modest garden for family subsistence to major urban developments. She describes how people, over many centuries and in many lands, have expressed their originality by devoting themselves to cultivation and conservation.
Laurie D. Olin, RLA, FASLA, is the founding partner of OLIN, a Philadelphia-based landscape-architecture and urban design firm. The former chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture at Harvard University, he currently holds the title of practice professor of landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania where he has taught for over thirty years. Olin, who has written widely on the history and theory of architecture and landscape, co-authored with Benedetta Origo and John Dixon Hunt La Foce: A Garden and Landscape in Tuscany (Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture, 2001); Across the Open Field: Essays Drawn from English Landscapes(Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture, 1999); a memoir and series of essays on the evolution of English landscape; Transforming the Commonplace: Selections from Laurie Olin’s Sketchbooks (Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture, 1997) and, with Witold Rybczynski, Vizcaya: An American Villa and Its Makers (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), and the history and design of James Deering’s extraordinary Italianate mansion in Coconut Grove, Florida, and A Life Spent Changing Places (2011).
Elizabeth Barlow Rogers is the president of the Foundation for Landscape Studies. As a landscape preservationist, she is best known for her role in founding the Central Park Conservancy in 1981. As president of the Conservancy, she guided the restoration and management renewal of Central Park until 1996 when she returned to her earlier career as a landscape historian and educator. Her published works include The Forests and Wetlands of New York City(Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1971), Frederick Law Olmsted's New York (Whitney Museum/Praeger, 1972), Rebuilding Central Park: A Management and Restoration Plan (The MIT Press, 1987), Landscape Design: A Cultural and Architectural History (Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2001),Romantic Gardens: Nature, Art, and Landscape Design (Morgan Library and Museum and Foundation for Landscape Studies in association with David R. Godine, Publisher, 2010) and Writing the Garden: A Literary Conversation Across Two Centuries (New York Society Library and Foundation for Landscape Studies in association with David R. Godine, Publisher, 2011).
Conceived and organized by Arezoo Moseni, Art and Literature Series events bring forth pollinations across the literary and visual arts with readings and discussions by acclaimed artists and authors.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Mail submissions to [log in to unmask] For information about joining ARLIS/NA see: http://www.arlisna.org/join.html Send administrative matters (file requests, subscription requests, etc) to [log in to unmask] ARLIS-L Archives and subscription maintenance: http://lsv.arlisna.org Questions may be addressed to list owner (Judy Dyki) at: [log in to unmask]
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~