Cost of Admission: Members FREE; $10 for non-members. Books will be for sale and refreshments will be available immediately following the lecture.

REGISTRATION IS REQUIRED.

Winner of the 2021 John Burroughs Medal for Distinguished Natural History Writing

"This deeply nourishing book invites us to reclaim reciprocity with the living world." Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass

Join arborist William Bryant Logan for a special talk about his award-winning book, Sprout Lands: Tending the Endless Gift of Trees. 

Once, farmers knew how to make a living hedge and fed their flocks on tree-branch hay. Rural people knew how to prune hazel to foster abundance: both of edible nuts, and of straight, strong, flexible rods for bridges, walls, and baskets. Townspeople cut their beeches to make charcoal to fuel ironworks. Shipwrights shaped oaks to make hulls. No place could prosper without its inhabitants knowing how to cut their trees so they would sprout again.

Pruning the trees didn’t destroy them. Rather, it created the healthiest, most sustainable and most diverse woodlands that we have ever known. In this journey from the English fens to Spain, Japan, and California, William Bryant Logan rediscovers what was once an everyday ecology. He offers us both practical knowledge about how to live with trees to mutual benefit and hope that humans may again learn what the persistence and generosity of trees can teach.

William Bryant Logan is the author of Sprout Lands, Oak, Air and Dirt, the last of which was made into an award-winning documentary. He is on the faculty of the New York Botanical Garden. He has spent the last three decades working in trees. He is a certified arborist, and founder and president of Urban Arborists, Inc., a Brooklyn-based tree company. Logan has won numerous Quill and Trowel Awards from the Garden Writers of America, and was a contributing editor to House Beautiful, House and Garden, and Garden Design magazines, as well as a regular garden writer for the New York Times. He won a 2012 Senior Scholar Award from the New York State chapter of the International Society of Arboriculture (ISA), as well as a True Professional of Arboriculture award from the international ISA. He also won an NEH grant to translate Calderón de la Barca and has published many translations from the Spanish, including the work of García Lorca, Ramón del Valle Inclán, and Calderón.