Artist Linda Hoffman saved an orchard and reshaped her life at Old Frog Pond Farm in Harvard, Massachusetts. When she moved to the farm she didn't know anything about apple-growing. More than twenty years later, the farm is one of the few organic pick-your-own orchards in New England, as well as a hub for a thriving community of visual artists, writers, and spiritual seekers. Hoffman, the mother of three children, a Zen practitioner, and a breast cancer survivor, has now written about her extraordinary journey in The Artist and the Orchard: A Memoir.

What writers are saying about this book:

The Artist and the Orchard is a story about the gifts and demands of re-invigorating an apple orchard in central Massachusetts, but it is also much more than that. Linda Hoffman has written a meditation on change and continuity, a spiritual inquiry, and a celebration of both independence and community. Above all, The Artist and the Orchard is a plea for place, and an argument for just how essential a sense of it is to the human spirit. This is a clear, complex, and beautiful book.

—Jane Brox, author of Silence: A Social History of One of the Least Understood Elements of Our Lives.

A beautiful book about finding one's way in the world, The Artist and the Orchard is saturated with love for children and partners, creatures and trees—indeed for the very earth itself—but in particular for one old apple orchard lovingly brought back to life.

—Christina Thompson, editor, Harvard Review and author of Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia.

The Artist defies formula. Linda Hoffman relies on intuition, creativity, and ultimately courage to accomplish a perspective that is as profound as it is original. In her memoir, The Artist and the Orchard, she introduces us to a world where the human soul is intertwined with the landscape, placed like sculptures among the trees. Such a grand vision can only be seen incrementally, but as I followed Hoffman I began to arrive at its magnificence: We are found in Nature! And I can’t think of a better message for our times.

—Andy Brennan, author of Uncultivated: Wild Apples, Real Cider, and the Complicated Art of Making a Living.

Linda Hoffman’s memoir is a sensorial feast. We emerge from her orchard somehow more alive, more curious, more connected—and inexorably more appreciative of the apples we took for granted. —Miranda Hersey, author of Life By Design.

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Author Information

An honors graduate of Bryn Mawr College with a degree in Fine Arts, Linda Hoffman studied at the Sorbonne and at the École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris. Awarded a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship after graduating from college, she trained for two years in the Noh Theater in Kyoto, Japan.

A lifelong passion for poetry converged in 1981 with her work as a graphic artist in the form of her first sculpture, a poem in cloth, launching an extensive exploration of narrative sculpture incorporating language, natural fibers, wood, stone, and found objects. In 1997, she began using old agricultural tools to create lyrical and poignant sculptures decrying New England’s vanishing agricultural landscape. Represented in museums and private collections, Hoffman has public sculptures installed in towns and cities across the region.

A contributor to WBUR’s Cognoscenti, Hoffman was a founding editor of Wild Apples, a journal of nature, art, and inquiry. She is the author of three chapbooks of art and poetry, and the letterpress art book, Winter Air, created in memory of her mother, Dr. Annette Weiner.

In 2006, five years after Hoffman and her three children moved into an old farmhouse with an abandoned orchard, Old Frog Pond Farm in Harvard, Massachusetts became the first organic pick-your-own orchard in Massachusetts. Now, with more than fifteen years of experience growing organic apples, Hoffman contributes to a holistic apple growers’ forum, teaches workshops, and is respected by an influential holistic apple growing community.

She lives with her partner, Blase, his parrot, Orco, and friends who move in for a few days, weeks, or a season who are part of the farm’s growing creative and spiritual community. A Zen Buddhist, Hoffman's dharma name Shinji means Truth in the Soil. The Artist and the Orchard: A Memoir is her first book.