Lecture Series: Plants Go to War

Join us as we welcome author Judith Sumner as she shares her knowledge about plants usage during World War II.

Cost:

$5 for members

$10 for non-member

Purchase tickets in person on online here: https://fareharbor.com/embeds/book/battleshipcove/items/582010/calendar/2025/03/

Timeline:

Doors open at 5:15 pm

Lecture starts at 5:30 pm

Lecture will be about an hour long.

Judith Sumner specializes in ethnobotany, flowering plants, plant adaptations and garden history. She is a graduate of Vassar College and completed her doctorate in botany at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst). She has been a visiting researcher at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and at the British Museum, and did extensive field work in the Pacific region on the genus Pittosporum. In addition to writing, her projects include field studies in the Great Smoky Mountains and work with the United Nations developing petroleum-rich plants in the Caribbean. Judith has taught for many years at the college level and at botanical gardens, including the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University. She served as a visiting scientist for several summers in the Harvard LEAP (Learning about Plants) program for Boston school teachers and has volunteered as a National Public Radio Science mentor. She has spent summers working with teachers at the Museum Institute for Teaching Science program and conducting professional workshops on science writing.

Sought after as a speaker, Judith Sumner has been the scientist-in-residence at the Star Island Natural History Conference and a guest on the “Martha Stewart Living” TV show, the PBS program “Cultivating Life,” and various other PBS and educational programs. She lectures widely at botanical gardens, universities, and various symposia, including the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Her column “The Gardener’s Kitchen” (under the pseudonym Laura Craig) appeared in Horticulture magazine and is currently being republished in The Herbarium by the Herbal Academy of New England. In 2007 she was awarded the Gertrude B. Foster Award for Excellence in Herbal Literature by the Herb Society of America, primarily in recognition for The Natural History of Medicinal Plants (Timber Press); American Household Botany (Timber Press) earned the American Horticultural Society Book Award in 2005. Judith’s book, Plants Go to War: A Botanical History of World War II, was published by McFarland in 2019. It is the first plant-centered history of the war, aimed at understanding the essential roles played by plants on the home front and in the military—in victory gardens, agriculture, drugs, timber, paper, coal, fibers, resins, camouflage, survival, internment, botanical collections, and the landscape of war. Plants in the Civil War: A Botanical History, a companion volume, was published by McFarland as the end of 2022; it has been shortlisted for the Council of Botanical and Horticultural Libraries annual award.

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