“The Adventures of a Narrative Gardener: Creating a Landscape of Memory”

Welcome to Museum Reads, the Newport Art Museum’s Art-Themed book group for adults. We meet monthly, at the Museum and virtually, for discussion, and frequently are joined by the author.

This 2021 New England Society Book Award winner brings Newporter Ron Fleming’s gardens to life. 

The Adventures of a Narrative Gardener is an entirely new kind of garden book, rather than a homage to contemporary gardens, a survey of historic gardens or a “how-to” manual. Through a careful mix of rich visual imagery and memoir, author Ronald Lee Fleming brings to life the garden he has created at Bellevue House, Newport, and explains his many sources, many of which hold deeply personal memories.

Museum Reads Notes:
Be sure to register to receive email updates and Zoom links.
For last minute registrations, please call the front desk for the Zoom link at 401-848-8200.

We are thrilled to announce that the author will be joining us in person for discussion! 

Ronald Lee Fleming, F.A.I.C.P., is the founder and president of The Townscape Institute, a not-for-profit public interest planning organization founded in the United States in 1979. He is a fellow of the American Institute of Certified Planners. He attended Pomona College and the Harvard Graduate School of Design. In 2006, he received the William H. Whyte Lifetime Achievement Award from Partners for Livable Communities in Washington, D.C.. He also won several awards for his 1998 Radnor Gateways Enhancement Strategy in Radnor, Pennsylvania. 

He has written several books on the urban landscape covering preservation, corporate visual responsibility and placemaking, most recently The Art of Placemaking: Interpreting Community Through Public Art and Urban Design. He was instrumental in the early Main Street Revitalization movement of the 1970s. He resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Newport, Rhode Island, at Bellevue House.

Top image by Mick Hales.