Thursday, July 18
7 pm
At Thoreau Farm
$10/ person to attend in person. Registration Required.
Join us for a lively interview and conversation around the amazing beauty and power of seed, seed people, and hope for our shared future with Jennifer Jewell, host of the award winning national, public radio program and podcast Cultivating Place and Tim Johnson, Executive Director, Native Plant Trust.
Growing on from the publication of his paradigm and genre shifting work in Walden: Life in the Woods, Henry David Thoreau went on to spend the next (and the last) 10 years of his life immersed in the study, research, beauty, and wonder of the natural world of his home in Concord, Massachusetts specifically focused on the development and dispersal of the seeds of the plants of his place. Among Thoreau’s final writings, The Dispersal of Seeds, was published posthumously in 1993 and describes the ecological succession of plant species through seed dispersal.
In What We Sow, On the Personal, Ecological, and Cultural Significance of Seeds (Timber Press, 2023), author and national, public radio host Jennifer Jewell shares an intimate and intense look at the seeds of the plants of her place in Northern California and journeys from there to an overview of the general state of seeds in our world and what this says about us as humans collectively. Reflecting Thoreau’s own statement, “Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders,” Jewell ultimately ends on the side of hope and the power of both seeds and seed people to grow creative and caring solutions for so many of the world’s great challenges.
The Native Plant Trust is the US’s first plant conservation organization, and the only one focused solely on New England’s Native Plants. The Native Plant Trust’s conservation team manages a seed bank of rare plants of New England and are leadership members of the newly formed Northeast Native Seed Network for the support of conservation and restoration work across the region.
We are delighted to also offer this program streaming via zoom. Please register on zoom to join us virtually.