The Garden in Art: A Bouquet of Stories (In-Person)

This program is now full for the In-Person option.

However, there are slots still available for the Virtual option. Click here to register for the Virtual program.

Registration Required Below

This program is co-sponsored by the Redding Garden Club and New Pond Farm

Gardening in the afterlife, an emperor with an all-consuming gardening hobby, monkeys trading in tulips, virtual reality in the 19th Century?  Laura Conley, a long-time Metropolitan Museum gallery guide who is also an enthusiastic gardener, will take us on a trip spanning 4,000 years to look at art that depicts gardens.

Laura will tease out what these images tell us about the beliefs and lifestyles of the people who created the gardens and their images; in short: their stories.

This is a hybrid program and will take place both in-person, at the Library and virtually, over Zoom.

To attend this lecture in-person, scroll down to register. If you’d like to attend virtually, please click here to register. For the optimal experience, we recommend attending the event at the Library.

About Our Presenter

Laura Conley grew up in the Netherlands where she studied law as well as art history. After retiring from a 20-year career with a scholarly publishing company in New York City, she became a docent at the Metropolitan Museum where she gives tours of the American Wing, European paintings and other galleries. Laura is a favorite lecturer at MTL and this will be her third talk at the Library. In 2008, she gave a talk about her father, the historian Johan Huizinga, and in 2022, Laura delivered a lecture entitled “A Walk Through Dutch 17th Century Art.” Laura and her husband Henry moved to Redding in 1997 and this is where Laura’s passion for gardening developed.  The couple spends nearly every weekend and most of the summer immersed in their garden.