Gardening Author To Lecture At Meeting House

The Horticulture Club of Newtown invites the public to “Garden Stewardship: Preserving a Legacy,” a free program to be presented early next month.

Speaking at Newtown Meeting House on Thursday, November 9, at 7:30 pm, will be Tovah Martin, a garden editor for The Litchfield County Times. Ms Martin also writes frequently about pleasures of the soil for La Vie Claire, Country Living, Country Living Gardener, Perennials Magazine, Garden Design, Horticulture, Yankee, Renovation Style, Connecticut Cottage & Garden, Old House Interiors and The Sunday New York Times as well as many other publications.

The lecture will focus on garden stewards and how gardeners grapple with change. During her talk, Ms Martin will explore the challenges of bringing landscapes into the next generation.

She will discuss issues and answers to topics including gardeners who have inherited a landscape or created a garden over decades and now face mature trees and shrubs that require preemptive pruning or relocation. The lecture will also look at woodland gardens and grand estates, explore gardens great and small, tackle sticky wickets such as rehabilitating overgrown boxwood hedges and coping with plants that are now considered invasive.

Finally, discussion will also center on specific plants and the people who have worked to preserve heirloom varieties so they will become the superstars of future gardens.  

Ms Martin has written many gardening books including Tasha Tudor’s Garden, Tasha Tudor’s Heirloom Crafts, Heirloom Flowers, Garden Whimsy and A Time to Blossom:  Mothers, Daughters and Flowers. Her most recent book is View from a Sketchbook:  Nature through the eyes of Marjolein Bastin (2004), published by Stewart, Tabori & Chang.  Several of her books have received awards from the Garden Writer’s Association (GWA), including Tasha Tudor’s Garden, which received the GWA’s highest award.

Ms Martin is the recipient of a Gold Medal from the Massachusetts Horticultural Society and has served as a judge for several flower as well as the GWA Quill and Trowel Awards. She has recently served on the Honorary Medals Committee for the Massachusetts Horticultural Society.  

She lectures extensively and has spoken aboard the QE2. She has appeared on several gardening television shows – most recently with Sean Conway on PBS’s Cultivating Life. Additionally, Ms Martin dallies in professional photography and somehow finds time to garden fanatically indoors and outside around her Connecticut cottage.

Reservations are not needed. For additional information contact Horticulture Club president Mavis Davis Hart, 426-6492.