For the Garden's 81st Annual Meeting, we are thrilled to host renowned Los Angeles-based garden designer, historian, and writer Wade Graham, whose work on the environment, landscape, urbanism, and the arts has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, Los Angeles Times, Outside, and other national publications. Graham's sought-after keynote speeches focus on the themes found within his latest book,
American Eden: From Monticello to Central Park to Our Backyards, What Our Gardens Tell Us about Who We Are (HarperCollins)
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From Thomas Jefferson to Edith Wharton, Michelle Obama to our neighbors, Americans throughout history have revealed something of themselves in the gardens they create. Rooted in the time and place of their making, as much as in the minds and identities of their makers, gardens offer records of the tensions and energies in a constantly changing society. In a unique presentation that melds biography, history, and cultural commentary, Graham tells the story of America — and Americans — through its most significant gardens and their creators.
Beginning with Thomas Jefferson's Revolutionary Virginia, Graham guides his audiences deftly through time and place — from the 19th century Hudson Valley to the Gilded Age, from early Central Park to the Arts and Crafts movement, from the Depression era to 1960s suburban California — as the story plays out across the diverse American landscape. In every age, old money and new, established social groups and ascendant ones negotiate their shared spaces in part through questions of taste, style, display, and the narratives that we spin around them. What was true in Jefferson's time was true in the Gilded Age, and remains true in our era of Hamptons hedge fund billionaires and reality TV makeover shows. As Graham proves endlessly in his presentations, Martha Stewart has nothing on our Founding Gardener, Thomas Jefferson.
Graham received a BA in comparative literature from Columbia University, and an MA and PhD in U.S. history at UCLA. Since 1999, he has been a trustee of Glen Canyon Institute, based in Salt Lake City, Utah, dedicated to restoring the canyons of the Colorado River, and the editor of Hidden Passage, the journal of Glen Canyon Institute. He teaches urban and environmental policy at the Pepperdine University School of Public Policy.