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The Museum’s annual Garden Luncheon is one of our most joyful and beloved events as we welcome spring with flowers, food, and fancy hats! Gather your friends and join us Friday, June 9, 2023 for a day of garden-centered delights – including a delectable lunch under the tent, a raffle to please every green thumb, and a dynamic speaker!

We’ll hear from historian Victoria Johnson whose book, American Eden: David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic, was a 2018 finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Ms. Johnson will share the intriguing backstory of the doctor who tended to both Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton after their infamous duel and then went on to found the new nation’s first public botanical garden and New York’s first museum of fine art.

A resident of Old Lyme and a professor of New York City history at Hunter College of the City University of New York, Ms. Johnson is a captivating speaker and scholar who will invite us into the world of an important but shadowy figure of American history to reveal how his passions for nature and art impacted the early Republic.

Before and after the luncheon, you’re welcome to tour the gardens and riverfront and take in the new blockbuster exhibition, Object Lessons in American Art: Selections from the Princeton University Art Museum, as well as Blooms with a View – our annual installation of floral arrangements inspired by works in the galleries and the historic Griswold House. With your ticket to the Garden Luncheon, you can make of whole day of it at the Museum—all while helping us raise much-needed funds to care for this historic landscape!

Author photo by Ivo M. Vermeulen

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