Rebecca Trafton

Rebecca Trafton, Washington, DC
www.gardenstory.org

Rebecca Trafton is the co-founder and president of the Dumbarton Oaks Park Conservancy, a partner of Rock Creek Park and the National Park Service dedicated to restoring Beatrix Farrand’s 27-acre naturalistic garden given to the Park Service in 1940 by MIldred and Robert Bliss. 

Rebecca is also the Executive Producer and host of GardenStory, Inspiring Spaces, Healing Places, an innovative new 10-episode series about how gardens have the power to foster change. The series, which focuses on the relationship between garden and gardener in a refreshing variety of settings, presents stories of how gardens transform our lives and our communities. It premiered nationally in April 2008 on PBS.

A graduate of Princeton University, Rebecca has been designing gardens professionally for 30 years in Virginia and West Virginia, Kentucky, Maine and Massachusetts. She is co-author, along with Reuben M. Rainey, of the award winning The Garden of Anne Spencer, a History and Guide. The book describes the garden of Anne Spencer, a poet of the Harlem Renaissance, and explores the relationship between Spencer’s poetry and her creative garden design, which served as her inspiration and sanctuary. Rebecca lectures frequently about gardens, is an avid hiker and naturalist, and divides her time between the million-acre Monongahela National Forest in West Virginia and Washington, D.C.