From Marta McDowell’s website:
Marta McDowell lives, writes and gardens in Chatham, New Jersey. She shares her garden with her husband, Kirke Bent, their crested cockatiel, Sydney, and assorted wildlife. Her garden writing has appeared in popular publications such as Woman’s Day, Country Gardening and The New York Times. Scholars and specialists have read her essays on American authors and their horticultural interests in the journals Hortus and Arnoldia.
Marta’s latest book, The World of Laura Ingalls Wilder, tells the tale of the plants and places of the beloved author of the Little House series. Timber Press published All the Presidents’ Gardens, a book that relates the history of American gardening as seen through the White House grounds. It made The New York Times bestseller list and won an American Horticultural Society book award in 2017. Following the relationship between the pen and the trowel led Marta to children’s author/illustrator Beatrix Potter and poet Emily Dickinson. Timber Press published Marta’s book, Beatrix Potter’s Gardening Life, in 2013. It won the Gold Award from the Garden Writers Association in August 2014 and is in its sixth printing. With artist Yolanda Fundora, Marta wrote A Garden Alphabetized (for your viewing pleasure) in 2008. Emily Dickinson’s Gardens was published by McGraw-Hill in 2005, and Marta is in the process of revising it for a full color edition from Timber Press due out in 2019.
If you visit the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, Massachusetts, you can stroll the grounds with a landscape audio tour that Marta scripted. She was an advisor for the New York Botanical Garden’s 2010 show, “Emily Dickinson’s Gardens: The Poetry of Flowers” and worked with Chicago Botanic Garden’s Lenhardt Library on a Beatrix Potter exhibit in 2016. In 2018, Marta will be the Gardener-in-Residence at the Emily Dickinson Museum.
Marta teaches landscape history and horticulture at the New York Botanical Garden where she has been twice awarded “Instructor of the Year.” A popular lecturer, she has been a featured speaker at locations ranging from the Chicago Botanic Garden to the Smithsonian Institution to the Beatrix Potter Society’s Linder Lecture at the Sloane Club in London.
Marta interned at Wave Hill, Frelinghuysen Arboretum, the Royal Horticultural Society’s Rosemoor in Devon, England and at the Chelsea Physic Garden. She worked as a horticulturist for five years at Reeves-Reed Arboretum. Marta is on the Board of the NJ Historical Garden Foundation at the Cross Estate in Bernardsville, NJ. She received the 2016 Annual Award from the Friends of Frelinghuysen Arboretum. Her garden is included in the Smithsonian’s Archive of American Gardens.