About Nancy Ross Hugo

Nancy Ross Hugo an outdoor writer and lecturer, is known to many Virginians as the author of “Earth Works,” a weekly column on gardening and natural history that appeared in the Richmond Times-Dispatch. In those columns, in her “Habitat” columns for Virginia Wildlife, and in her features for national magazines including Horticulture and American Forests, Nancy explored natural history topics ranging from the life cycle of chiggers to the proper care of legacy trees. In 1997, University of Virginia Press published a collection of Nancy’s essays entitled Earth Works, Readings for Backyard Gardeners. Most recently, Nancy served as Education Manager at the Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden where she supervised educational programs for adults and children. Nancy left the Garden in the fall of 2004 to return to writing, lecturing, conducting workshops at Flower Camp, an outdoor education center in Buckingham County. In 2004, Nancy also launched the Remarkable Trees of Virginia Project, an initiative to locate and celebrate Virginia’s oldest, most historic, largest, and most interesting trees. With co-author Dr. Jeffrey Kirwan and fine art photographer Robert Llewellyn, she visited over 100 of Virginia’s most remarkable trees and described them in Remarkable Trees of Virginia, a large-format book illustrated with Llewellyn’s photographs. Remarkable Trees of Virginia, now in its third printing, has been called “not just a remarkable but a spectacular book of Virginia’s natural and cultural tree heritage.”

In the summer of 2011, Timber Press published Nancy’s third book, Seeing Trees: Discover the Extraordinary Secret Lives of Everyday Trees.  In Seeing Trees, Nancy describes how to view trees in ways that reveal secrets about how they have evolved and why they are engineered the way they are. She argues that looking carefully at seeds, catkins, flowers, resting buds, emerging leaves, and other small tree phenomena not only provides insight into tree biology but also uncovers a whole new universe of tree beauty. From the pollination droplets of the ginkgo to the sticky surfaces of female walnut flowers, striking tree features can be found not just in forests but in backyard and roadside trees within easy reach of anyone willing to look for them. Illustrated by fine art photographer Robert Llewellyn, whose photos resemble botanical illustrations, Seeing Trees proves how much tree beauty is usually outside our awareness and provides strategies for both seeing more and deepening our appreciation of trees. For more about Nancy see http://nancyhugo.home.comcast.net/~nancyhugo/