Happy Birthday, Cornelia!
Renowned landscape architect Cornelia Oberlander is celebrating her 90th birthday this week, and is finally admitting to her true age. (Not quite true. She’s been far too busy this month for anything as trivial as a birthday, so the big party will not be held until August.)
There can’t be many nonagenarians practising their professions with as much passion and energy as she is. Love Every Leaf: the life of landscape architect Cornelia Hahn Oberlander does a great job of describing her career and what drives her to keep on working to bring nature into cities in Canada, the States, and abroad, but last month there was another wonderful tribute paid to her.
At the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver (a fine example of her work), a new film about Cornelia’s amazing career was premiered. It’s part of the Washington-based Cultural Landscape Foundation Oral History Project, which has documented six important “Pioneers of Landscape Design in North America”.
Whether you have read Love Every Leaf or haven’t yet managed to get around to it, you’ll want to see and hear Cornelia speak for herself about her background, early career, and environmentally responsible designs in her segment of the CLF’s Oral History Project.
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Kathy Stinson is the author of the classic Red Is Best and the award-winning The Man with the Violin. Her wide range of titles includes picture books, non-fiction, young adult fiction, historical fiction, horror, biography, series books, and short stories. She has met with her readers in every province and territory of Canada, in the United States, Britain, Liberia, and Korea. She lives in a small town in Ontario.
