Author, Gardener and Designer
Terry S. (Tripp-Brown) Silber, author of "A Small Farm in Maine" and former Art Director for the Atlantic Monthly, died July 6, 2003 (Sunday), at Hedgehog Hill Farm in Sumner, Maine after a long struggle with cancer. She was born and grew up in Lewiston, Maine, later attending the University of New Hampshire, where she graduated Magna Cum Laude in French and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. After traveling throughout the United States and living for a period in France, she moved to the Boston area, where she launched a successful career in publishing. She worked for such publications as Harvard Magazine and Working Papers, and became Art Director at Atlantic Monthly in 1971.She and her husband, Mark, increasingly divided their time between professional lives in the city and a growing love of country life and working the land, at their weekend home in Maine. In 1978 they decided to move there full time, and to start Hedgehog Hill Farm. The farm grew and prospered, developing from vegetable production into a diverse business, with seedlings that were started in the late winter, workshops covering several topics in horticulture and design throughout the summer and fall, and an herbal and everlasting design shop filled with products made of harvests from the garden, products Terry developed using her extensive talents as a designer.
Coaxed into documenting her experience by a close friend in publishing, Richard Todd, she authored "A Small Farm in Maine" (1988 Houghton Mifflin, 1992 Doubleday), described as "required reading" for new homesteaders by the Washington Post, and by the Chicago Tribune, "With words as with plants, Silber has a green thumb." She and Mark co-authored two other books. "The Complete Book of Everlastings" (Knopf 1988, 1992) became a seminal book on growing and designing with dry flowers. "Growing Herbs and Vegetables," (Knopf, 1999) was their latest work.
Her joy for life, her ebullience, her indelible optimism, her love of horticulture, her kindness and her generosity were infectious. Her friend, Judith Castle wrote "Terry was always smiling, a radiant sun in one's life." And Laurie Kennedy a friend and a musician said "I won't start to recount all the things I admired about her, but I have to mention her compassion. I felt so good being around Terry because I felt cared for, nurtured, understood, as I'm sure every person, plant or animal felt in her presence."
She touched many in her constant efforts to enrich the lives of others with the aesthetic of the natural world. She leaves in addition to her husband, a son, Jacob, of Boston.
Donations in her memory may be made to:
Bicentennial Scholarship Fund
Town of Sumner
633 Main Street
Sumner, ME 04292.
Link to Boston Globe article