Mac Keith Griswold, journalist and garden historian, took her B.A. at McGill University, attended the Radcliffe Seminars in Landscape Design and studied horticulture at New York Botanical Gardens. She has taught landscape history at Sarah Lawrence College, where she was a recipient of the Noble Chair in Art and Cultural History, and has lectured widely in America and Europe. The author of three previous books of garden history, she is currently the Director of Archival Research at the Sylvester Manor Project, Shelter Island, New York, where the papers and the site date to the earliest European colonization of America. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt will publish her history of Sylvester Manor, Slaves in the Attic: the Extraordinary Story of a Northern Plantation in October 2011. She has written frequently for magazines and journals, and for The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Times Literary Supplement. She is a co-chair of the Sag Harbor Tree Fund, which plants trees in Sag Harbor, Long Island, New York.