Consultation

  • Value add heirloom food development, strategic facilitation and planning.
  • Varieties for heirloom garden and historic gardens, Native American gardens

Writing

Heirloom foods

Botanical origins, coverage of variety diversity, history, gardening, farming, culinary history and use, historic and current recipes.

Contemporary regional varieties, their uses, culinary practices, and value add products, farm production, seed saving.

 

Wild plants

Conservation of  American food and medicinal plants, foraging.

Ramps (wild leeks)

Talks

  • Heirloom vegetables, gardening, seed saving

  • Biblical Herbs and Spices

  • Spices: Orgins and uses of the familiar and exotic

  • Spring Wildflowers: Indian and Colonial Ethnobotany

 

Upcoming Public Talks

Comstock Ferre 200th Aniversary Celebration, Sunday June 5, Wethersfield, CT

The National Heirloom Exposition September 13-15, Santa Rosa, CA

 

Bio:

Lawrence is an ethnobotanist, writer, and President of Botanicalposters.com.  He is author of Tomato  A Fresh from the vine Cookbook and writes for a number of blogs and magazines including Grit magazine. Currently he is working on a campaign to protect ramps (wild leeks) from over harvesting and consults about heirloom foods.

Lawrence was founder and director of the Eastern Native Seed Conservancy, an organization dedicated to growing, preserving and eating heirloom varieties. For 13 years the Conservancy grew thousands of varieties.  He launched numerous heirloom food events such as the Epicurean Tomato Fete, Autumn Table,  and Garlic Banquet bringing rare foods, chefs and the public together. For many years he sampled hundreds of heirloom varieties from tomatoes to garlic to beans and incorporated them in his cooking.

At  the Conservancy Lawrence organized youth and Native American gardens, tested value added products, consulted with regional farmers, chefs,  and historic gardens. He worked directly with Native Americans on preserving and growing their plant heritage.

He trained as a botanist and ecologist at Connecticut College and conducted vegetation inventories for the Nature Conservancy. Lawrence  got his Master's degree at Harvard University, where he studied ethnobotany with Richard Evans Schultes, one of the world's foremost ethnobotanists, and ultimately focused on medicinal plants of the Northeastern United States. He was  Director of Horticulture at the Berkshire Botanic Garden and a landscape designer.

His garden experience began in his suburban Long Island backyard when he was thirteen and morphed  to organic farming in the 1970’s before there was a well developed market.

 

Always having an affinity for  food and growing  “I got my Betty Crocker bake set when I was eight and began cooking out of the Art of French Cooking when I was fourteen. After a while I decided the recipes were  too complicated and figured out how to make things taste good without that much fuss.”

 

 

 

 

 

Contact: 413.229.8316