ANDREA WULF

Andrea Wulf, a British historian, and this year's speaker at the Columbus Botanical Garden Gala on October 14th, has written six award-winning books, including the ‘Founding Gardeners’ and the ‘Invention of Nature.’ She has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, the LA Times, Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and many more. Living in Germany has shaped her interest in nature, leading her to pursue a career in learning about the history of gardening.

Award-winning author, Andrea Wulf, has compelled audiences around the world through her books using her passion and discovery of nature as a tool to capture the reader’s attention. She will be the guest speaker at this year’s Columbus Botanical Garden Gala on October 24th, 2020. SVM spoke to Andrea about the topic of her upcoming lecture, when did her passion for nature begin, and how she find stories and lives that become the subjects of her books.

You are the featured guest speaker at this year's Botanical Garden Gala. What will the topic of your lecture be? The topic of the lecture will be my book, which is called "The Invention of Nature." It is about a German scientist who turned out to be the most famous scientist of his age. He was an explorer, a visionary thinker, and he’s actually the one who talked about nature as a web of life as an interconnected whole.

You are a design historian and how does that affect your writing style? Well, it actually doesn’t affect my writing style. Design history is this very strange hybrid kind of degree, which I did a long time ago. It’s basically the history of material culture. So I looked at a lot of it, architecture and furniture. Then I became really interested in the landscapes around the houses. Not so much the houses itself, because I was always focused on the 18th century. Gardening was such an important way to express, for example, your political beliefs, something we kind of forget when we walk through the landscape garden. I began to look at gardens as a window into culture, science, literature, and politics, and that’s how I began to write about landscapes in nature.

How did the founding fathers use regard to X like in a specific example to express their political beliefs? America just declared independence and George Washington was in New York. He’s the commander in chief and is preparing for the battle of New York. You have two thousand British troops safe at the Hudson, and your commander in chief is sitting down on the eve of the Battle of New York. He writes a letter to his estate manager in Mount Vernon asking him to pull out the materials to plant a new garden. The extraordinary thing about this, not just the timing, which is pretty extraordinary, but is that he wants to get rid of all the English plants. He says to only plant Native American species, which at that time Native American species, were seen as weeds. They wanted to recreate the English garden. So he’s using Native American species as a horticultural declaration of independence.

Because of your work you traveled to some amazing places. You wrote about Alexander von Humboldt, who had this very active life of discovery and adventure himself. What do you want your readers to take away from your work? I like to spin a good kind of adventure story. So, to me, I hate these super dry academic books. That’s not something you read in the evening for pleasure. I try to write books that reach an academic standard, so everything is based on primary sources. But I like to write it in a way that it is tangible. I want to take my readers up the Andes and down the Orinoco. Humboldt is almost forgotten today. He is a reminder of where we are today and why we are here.

Do you want each book to stand on its own, or are you trying to build a body of work with connections between each book? I would say that all stand on their own, because I write them at different times of my life with different subjects. But all of them are about the relationship between humankind and nature, and I use the past to understand the present in all of my books. So this is not just some dusty old, modern story, which I think is maybe a little bit interesting. I do actually think that Lomborg, for example, is someone who saw nature as a living organism and as an interconnected whole.

Columbus has a rich history of beautiful gardens, what are you looking forward to learning about our city? I’ve spent so much time in America and I love the South. I actually had the chance to visit Columbus before and I love it. I absolutely love Southern hospitality. I love your vegetation and the gardens. Right now, I’m looking forward to hopefully getting on a plane to visit again!. SVM