Winter Gardens Book Club

Tuesdays, December 19, January 16, February 20, & March 19

Now that the garden work is settling down, it’s a great time to read those books you’ve been meaning to get to! Join the conversation as we discuss four acclaimed books with nature at their core. We’ll conduct these conversations via Zoom, so anyone can participate regardless of where they spend their winters. Just sign up, read the selection and then join the group by logging into the Zoom meeting that day.

Tuesday, December 19, 2023

This Other Eden by Paul Harding

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize and National Book Award for Fiction, This Other Eden is the latest novel from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Paul Harding. This historical fiction is inspired by the true story of Malaga Island, an isolated island off the coast of Maine that became one of the first racially integrated communities. Harding’s powerful descriptions of the landscape and the community living on “Apple Island” paint a picture of the forces, both natural and human, that threaten the community.

Tuesday, January 16, 2024

What We Sow: On the Personal, Ecological, and Cultural Significance of Seeds by Jennifer Jewell

What We Sow is the latest book from gardener and garden writer Jennifer Jewell, who was also the guest speaker at this past year’s Annual Ina & Lewis Heafitz Endowed Lecture. In What We Sow, Jewell takes readers along on her exploration of seeds—the smallest forms of the plants we love. Structured by the months of the year, Jewell shares her thought-provoking personal observations about seeds and what she learns about the natural history of seeds, the seed supply chain, and the efforts of activists to regain and maintain connections to heirloom seeds.

Tuesday, February 20, 2024

Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth’s Extinct Worlds by Thomas Halliday

Called by Bill McKibben “as close to time travel as you are likely to get”, paleobiologist Thomas Halliday brings sixteen fossil sites to life in Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth’s Extinct Worlds. Each chapter focuses on a different epoch or era, using novelistic prose and descriptive language to bring the landscape and relationships of the specific place and time to life. Halliday begins with our most recent past and moves backwards through 550 million years, taking us into increasingly unfamiliar worlds and giving readers a new way to appreciate the resilience and fragility of life on Earth.

Tuesday, March 19, 2024

The Island of the Missing Trees

In this magical novel set in Cyprus and London, author Elif Shafak explores the themes of belonging, identity, love, and trauma by following a family across two generations as they struggle with the costs of war and displacement. At the heart of the novel and narration is a fig tree, a figure in their lives that spans the generations and witnesses their losses and hopes. Moving and beautifully written, Shafak speaks to how our ancestors’ lives affect our own and how our roots and branches are connected.