SPECIAL COMMUNITY EVENT WITH GUEST SPEAKER  ANDREA WULF

Join the Garden Club of Santa Barbara for a special community event featuring guest speaker Andrea Wulf

About the Event

Andrea Wulf will elaborate on “Liberty Takes Root: Explore how America’s Founding Gardeners turned to nature and the native landscape to help define the identity of a new nation.”

Tuesday, February 2, 2027

Doors  Open: 3:30 pm

Lecture: 4:00 - 5:00 pm

Location

Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History 

Fleishmann Auditorium

2559 Puesta Del Sol, Santa Barbara 93105

Program

Lecturing on her acclaimed and deeply researched in book, Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation, Andrea explores how the founders of our nation, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and James Madison, saw native plants and landscape as fundamental to the new nation’s identity. Their passion for America’s nature led to the birth of the environmental movement. 

About the Speaker

Andrea Wulf is an award-winning author of seven acclaimed books, including the Founding Gardeners and The Invention of Nature which were both on the New York Times Best Seller List. Her books have been translated into 27 languages. The Invention of Nature has won 15 international awards, including the Royal Society Science Book Award 2016, Costa Biography Award 2015 and the LA Times Book Prize 2016, as well as awards in Germany, China, France and Italy. It was selected by the New York Times as “10 Best Books of 2015” and has sold more than 800,000 copies worldwide. Magnificent Rebels. The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self was published to great acclaim in 2022 (and will be published in 15 countries). Her new book, The Traveller, about the explorer and revolutionary George Forster, was published in 2026 and has been long listed for the Baillie Gifford Prize.

Her journalism has appeared in the New York Times, Atlantic, LA Times, Financial Times and Guardian among many other publications. Andrea lectures across the world – from the Royal Geographical Society and Royal Society in London to the New York Public Library and the American Philosophical Society in the US, as well as literary festivals across the world. She is also a regular on radio, podcasts and TV in the US, the UK and in Germany. In 2019, she was part of the delegation that accompanied Germany’s President Frank-Walter Steinmeier on his trip to Ecuador and Colombian … following Humboldt’s footsteps.

She is a Miller Scholar at the Santa Fe Institute, a three-time fellow of the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello and the Eccles British Library Writer in Residence 2013. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a member of PEN American Center and a judge of the Baillie Gifford Prize 2023.

Reservations

Registration will begin on November 1, 2026.

The lecture is free of charge, but reservations are required with Name, Email and Phone Contact.

Please note  that capacity for this event will be limited, so be sure to reserve your seat as soon as possible.

Registration deadline is Tuesday, January 26, 2027.