Marta teaches landscape history and horticulture at the New York Botanical Garden where she has been twice awarded 'Instructor of the Year.' A popular lecturer, she has been a featured speaker online and at locations ranging from the Chicago Botanic Garden, the Smithsonian Institution, the Beatrix Potter Society's Linder Lecture at the Sloane Club in London. She was an advisor for the New York Botanical Garden's 2010 show, 'Emily Dickinson's Gardens: The Poetry of Flowers.' Marta was the 2018 Gardener-in-Residence at the Emily Dickinson Museum. If you visit the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, Massachusetts, you can stroll the grounds with a landscape audio tour that Marta scripted. She is also is editing a facsimile edition of Elizabeth Blackwell's 18th century work, A Curious Herbal, for Abbeville Press. For Monacelli Press, she is working on text for a book of photography about five gardens of the du Pont family, now public gardens in the Brandywine Valley. Marta's next book is about gardening themes in crime fiction, with the working title Gardening Can Be Murder.

Her books have been translated into Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Beatrix Potter's Gardening Life won the Gold Award from the Garden Writers Association and is now in its eighth printing. All the Presidents' Gardens made The New York Times bestseller list and won an American Horticultural Society book award in 2017. Timber Press also published Emily Dickinson's Gardening Life, The World of Laura Ingalls Wilder, All the Presidents' Gardens, and Beatrix Potter's Gardening Life. Her latest book, Unearthing The Secret Garden explores the plants and places that inspired Frances Hodgson Burnett to write the classic children's book. Marta's work typically follows the relationship between the pen and the trowel, that is authors and their gardens. She is a regular contributor to the British journal Hortus. Her garden writing has appeared in popular publications such as Woman’s Day, Country Gardening, The New York Times. She shares her garden with her husband, Kirke Bent, their crested cockatiel, Sydney, and assorted wildlife.

Marta McDowell lives, writes and gardens in Chatham, New Jersey.

Unearthing the secret garden