New Canaan Library is pleased to present one of its most popular annual lectures, the Susan McDaniel Memorial Lecture. Guest speaker this year will be Vincent Simeone, speaking about the vastly different, but equally fascinating, gardens and landscapes across the world in his lecture entitled “Great Gardens of the World.” The event takes place on Tuesday, June 27 at 6:30 p.m., preceded by a light reception at 6 p.m. Please register for the lecture online at newcanaanlibrary.org.
Simeone will take the audience on a global journey through the Canadian Rockies, the wild bush of New Zealand, a 15th century English abbey, and beyond. Among the topics he will address are the wide variety of unusual and exotic species of plants that define natural and cultivated gardens throughout the world, and new techniques and approaches to gardening. Simeone’s vast experience provides new perspective on what makes the garden an enduring feature of the human landscape across cultures.
Vincent Simeone is the Director of Planting Fields Arboretum State Historic Park in New York and teaches horticulture classes at New York Botanical Garden. Over the last fifteen years,
Vincent has also assisted Allan Armitage with garden tours through Southern England, Northern France, Southern Germany, Canada, Ireland, Australia, Japan, New Zealand, South Africa and Sweden. He appeared on several garden shows including Martha Stewart Living and HGTV, wrote and contributed to various gardening articles, and published six books: Grow More With Less: Sustainable Garden Methods, Great Flowering Landscape Shrubs, Great Flowering Landscape Trees, Great Landscape Evergreens and The Wonders of the Winter Landscape and Getting Started Garden Guide to New York & New Jersey.

The Susan McDaniel Memorial Lecture
The Susan McDaniel Lecture series is presented in memory of Susan McDaniel, a New Canaan resident, landscape architect and lifelong gardener who passed away in 2000. Her family and friends established a memorial fund at New Canaan Library to develop a collection of books and other materials on the subject of landscape architecture and garden design. The collection has grown to more than 300 titles, all of which are available for loan at the Library. The McDaniel Fund also sponsors the annual Susan McDaniel Garden Design Lecture Series. Past speakers include Marta McDowell, Gordon Hayward, Nancy Berner, and Susan Lowry.