I want to thank The Garden Club of America for the honor they gave me in May, 2019 at their national convention in Boston. Each year the 201 GCA clubs (and their 18,000 members) from across the country are invited to nominate individuals who have contributed in a significant way to American gardening. (I was nominated by the Monadnock Garden Club centered around Peterborough, New Hampshire and seconded by the Dublin, NH Garden Club.) An awards committee then choses four honorees from those nominated to become honorary lifetime members of the GCA.
I was one of those honored in 2019. The others were William Cullina, President and CEO Emeritus of the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens; Eric Haskell, Professor Emeritus in French studies at Scripps College in California and lecturer on historic French gardens nationwide; and Richard Olsen, Director of the US National Arboretum in Washington, DC.
This award recognized my thirty-five years of writing eleven books on garden design (two of which won national awards) along with nearly 100 magazine articles on gardening and design and over 400 lectures I presented to garden clubs, botanic gardens and symposia in 38 states. It also recognized our garden here in Vermont which is documented in the searchable Smithsonian Archives of American Gardens.