Kathryn Aalto is an American landscape historian, garden designer, university lecturer, and best-selling author living in England.  For the past twenty-five years, her focus has been on places where nature and culture intersect: teaching the literature of nature and place, designing artful and sustainable gardens, and writing about the natural world.  She speaks widely as a keynote speaker throughout the United States and Britain.

Kathryn is the author of three books including The New York Times bestseller, The Natural World of Winnie-the-Pooh: A Walk Through the Forest that Inspired the Hundred Acre Wood (2015) and Nature and Human Intervention (2011). Her third book is Writing Wild: Women Poets, Ramblers, and Mavericks Women Who Shape How We See the Natural World (Timber Press, April 14, 2020).  Her work has appeared in Smithsonian Magazine, Outside, Sierra, and more.

She is co-founder of The Rural Writing Institute with James Rebanks in the Lake District. She is also a member of Association for Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) and the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) and is a dedicated mentor to emerging writers of narrative nonfiction and lectures in garden media communications. She has an M.A. in Garden History and a M.A. in Creative Nonfiction.  She also has a diploma in Garden Design from the London College of Garden Design and a B.A. in English from Berkeley.

“In writing and design,” Kathryn says, “There are opportunities to create narratives — one with words, the other with plants.”

Her work has been reviewed on National Public Radio and in People Magazine, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Huffington Post, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune and in a Chanel 4 television special with presenter Alan Titchmarsh.

You are invited to visit her book page and to learn more here and here.  The Press Kit for her Hundred Acre Wood book is here. She is represented as a corporate speaker by Chartwell Speakers.  For new projects, she is represented by Peter McGuigan at Foundry Literary and Media in New York City.

Please contact gardens@kathrynaalto.com for enquiries related to mentoring, designing, and speaking at libraries, universities, museums, garden clubs, book festivals, and bookstores.