 Diana Beresford-Kroeger is a scientist, gardener, writer and broadcaster who combines medical training with a love of botany. Raised in Ireland, she now lives with her husband on a 160-acre farm and forest in Merrickville, Ontario.
When her parents died when she was 11, she was taken under the care of a Brehon wardship in the South of Ireland, after which she was raised by an uncle who taught her everything from physics to Buddhism and Gaelic poetry. She was one of only two women among over 100 men to graduate in science from University College Cork in 1963, where she had taken on a “crushing load of studies in classical botany, molecular biology, mathematics, and medical biochemistry”. She has worked as a research scientist at the Canadian Department of Agriculture and the University of Ottawa School of Medicine, and her scientific publications have appeared in The American and The Canadian Heart Journal and The Journal of Microscopy, among others. She has lectured at University College Cork and at Carleton University and received a fellowship at the University of Connecticut. She has also been a regular contributor to CTV Television in Canada, and to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's radio service and to National Public Radio in the USA. In 2005, the CBC's flagship radio program, Ideas, aired The Ideas of Diana Beresford-Kroeger, and a documentary film on her life and her garden was completed in 2007. A warmly lyrical and engaging writer, she is the author of several books, and she has also been a regular columnist for such Canadian magazines as Nature Canada and The Canadian Organic Grower as well as her local community newspaper, The Merrickville Phoenix. In 2005, her book Arboreteum America won the American National Arbour Day Foundation Media Award for an exemplary educational work on trees and forests. Diana Beresford-Kroeger has been building the garden at her Merrickville home for more than 30 years, and she has used it for many purposes, from general enjoyment to medical and botanical research and breeding. She has planted and observed more than 6000 species and varieties of flowers, shrubs and trees, including varieties she has bred specifically to survive in a changing northern climate. She is passionate about the preservation of rare and near-extinct plants and the medicines they provide. She has collected such plants from all over the world, and she also collects the seeds of rare trees and plants, protecting them for future use through distribution to research institutions as well as to members of the public. She strongly advocates the use of “bioplans,” aimed at re-foresting cities and rural areas with trees that provide medicinal, environmental and nutritional “ecofunctions.” Basswood, for example, can be planted in hedgerows to feed beneficial insects. Roadside plantings of black walnut and honey locust will absorb pollutants. "The bioplan," she writes, is “the blueprint for all connectivity of life in nature. It is the fragile web which keeps each creature in balance with its neighbour. It is predation and prey. It is the victor and victim in a vast cycle of elemental life which is almost beyond our comprehension….It is the mantle of man, in his life and in his death, a divine contract, to all who share this planet.”
Books by Diana Beresford-Kroeger
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