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Writing the Garden: A Literary Conversation Across Two Centuries

May 14, 2011-February 15, 2012

co-curated by Harriet Shapiro and Elizabeth Barlow Rogers

Book: Writing the Garden: A Literary Conversation Across Two Centuries by Elizabeth Barlow Rogers. Preface by Mark Bartlett; afterword by Harriet Shapiro

Co-curated by Harriet Shapiro, Head of Exhibitions at the Library, and Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, principal founder of the Central Park Conservancy, this exhibition opened fresh vistas into the world of garden publishing. On display were books written by writers whose creativity showed both on the page and in their own gardens. Selected from the Libraryís collection and Ms. Rogersís, the books represented the best of a special genre informed by personal experience and a passionate love of nature and horticulture.

The exhibition included books by Jane Loudon, Celia Thaxter, Gertrude Jekyll, Reginald Farrer, Vita Sackville-West, Russell Page, Katharine S. White, and other hands-on gardener-writers. Collectively, their work constitutes a lively conversation over more than two centuries.

This exhibition was funded in part by Deborah S. Pease.

Credit: Photo by Karen Smul

Credit: Photo by Karen Smul

Credit: Photo by Karen Smul

Head Librarian Mark Bartlett with co-curators Elizabeth Barlow Rogers and Harriet Shapiro (photo by Karen Smul)

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Elizabeth Barlow Rogers (photo by Karen Smul)

In coordination with the exhibition, the Library and the Foundation for Landscape Studies in association with David R. Godine, Publisher, published a new book focusing on gardeners' words about the art of gardening. Writing the Garden 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. Ranging in time and place 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.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau, Gertrude Jekyll, Vita Sackville-West, Russell Page, Lynden Miller, and Michael Pollan are among the fifty writers whose works are excerpted and discussed by Rogers. An essay by Harriet Shapiro highlights the New York Society Library's rich collection of historic and contemporary books by garden writers.