CGLHS is proud to announce the upcoming lecture in our series at The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Garden: "California and the Birth of the Modern Garden."
Wade Graham, author of American Eden: From Monticello to Central Park to our Backyards: What Our Gardens Tell Us About Who We Are, explores the birth and career of the modern garden in California between 1920 and the 1960s. Starting from his mother’s transformation of the family’s Santa Barbara home from 1967, he charts the pre-war origins, postwar evolution, and global influence of this unique garden idiom, the first truly American landscape style, from pioneers R. M. Schindler and Richard Neutra, to modern masters Thomas Church, Garrett Eckbo, and Lawrence Halprin. He will also reveal the surprising kinship and cross-pollination between the Modernist garden and its seeming antithesis, the Arts & Crafts garden.
A book signing will follow the lecture. American Eden and Dream Cities will be available for purchase at The Huntington store.
This event is free to the public. No reservations are required.
PHOTO: Wade Graham at the Office of the Head Gardener in the Boboli Gardens, Florence (Courtesy Wade Graham).
More about our speaker, Wade Graham:
Wade Graham is a writer, historian and landscape designer with a practice based in Los Angeles. His writing on cultural history, environment, urbanism, landscape, art and other topics has appeared frequently in the Los Angeles Times, the New Yorker, and Harper’s, among other publications.
His books include Braided Waters: Environment and Society in Molokai, Hawaii (University of California Press, 2018), Dream Cities: Seven Urban Ideas That Shape the World (HarperCollins, 2016), and American Eden: From Monticello to Central Park to Our Backyard, What Our Gardens Tell Us About Ourselves (HarperCollins, 2011).
He has a Ph.D in American history from UCLA and has taught urban and environmental policy at the School of Public Policy at Pepperdine University since 2009. Since 1999, he has been a trustee of Glen Canyon Institute, a Colorado River restoration group based in Salt Lake City, Utah.
