Becoming a Gardener: What Reading and Digging Taught Me About Living

This time of year is the perfect moment to reflect on a past season of gardening.  Darien Library, along with Barrett Bookstore, welcome author Catie Marron to discuss her new book, Becoming a Gardener: What Reading and Digging Taught Me About Living.

To make her new house in Connecticut truly feel like home, Catie Marron decided to create a garden. But while she was familiar with landscape design, she had never grown anything. A dedicated reader with a lifelong passion for literature, Marron turned to the library of gardening books she’d collected to glean advice from a variety of writers on gardening and horticultural topics both grand and small. 

There is a mix of opinion, personal reflection and practical advice, as the book explores a myriad of subjects from the composition of dirt, the agricultural wisdom of avid kitchen gardeners George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, the healing power of digging in the soil, and the beauty of finding solitude in nature.  Marron will discuss her process and how her thinking evolved from learning the basics about mulch or which plants work best in the shade to identifying the core qualities and characteristics that make a person a gardener and an understanding of what a garden could mean to her as it had to multitudes of other gardeners over the centuries.

For anyone who enjoys the gardening process, this is will be a special event.

About the Author

Catie Marron’s career has encompassed investment banking, magazine journalism, public service, and book publishing. She is currently a trustee and Chair Emeritus of The New York Public Library, where she was Chairman of the Board from 2004 to 2011. Marron is also a trustee of Friends of the High Line, where she was also Board Chair and a trustee of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.

Marron began her first career in investment banking at Morgan Stanley and then at Lehman Brothers. She then became Senior Features Editor at Vogue, where she has been a contributing editor for twenty years. While writing her books, Marron launched Good Companies, a curated, online guide to companies that strive to do good while also making a profit. This venture was shaped in part by the success of Treasure & Bond, a pop-up store that she co-founded with Nordstrom and Anna Wintour in 2011. All of the store’s profits went to charities benefiting NYC children.

In addition to her most recent book, she is also the creator and editor of two anthologies published by HarperCollins which explore the value and significance of urban public spaces: City Squares, Eighteen Writers on the Spirit and Significance of Squares Around the World (2016), and City Parks: Public Places, Private Thoughts.