Garden writer and designer Page Dickey will be the fall keynote speaker in the Rocky Hills Lecture Series. Her free talk, “Bringing Meadows into the Garden,” will be held at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 4 at the Chappaqua Library.

A North Salem resident, Dickey has written several gardening books, including “Gardens in the Spirit of Place” (Stewart, Tabori and Chang, 2005) and “Breaking Ground: Portraits of 10 Garden Designers” (Artisan, 2003).

She is currently at work on a book about her own 3-acre garden for Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The working title is “Embroidered Ground: A Garden Revisited,” and she hopes to finish the manuscript this winter. In her own yard, Dickey has been striving to convert a large patch of lawn into a meadow with mostly native grasses and wildflowers.

Here’s Page with her two dogs, by our Steve Schmitt.

“I really believe that doing less mowing and blowing is a wonderful idea,” Dickey says. “Even in a small piece of property we can have high grasses. That contrast of lawn and the grass that’s higher can be so wonderful, that play of texture and pattern.”

“Even in the smallest of patches you can fit high grasses into your garden scheme, maybe even with a path running through it,” she says.

Dickey regularly lectures around the country on various gardening topics and she is a contributor to such magazines as Horticulture and House Beautiful. Along with Bedford’s Pepe Maynard, Dickey is co-founder of the Garden Conservancy’s Open Days Program, which allows visitors to see some of the best private gardens in the country for a $5 fee.

Rocky Hills is the name of Henriette Suhr’s charming 8-acre garden in Chappaqua, which Suhr has agreed to turn over to Westchester County as a park and horticultural center. The Garden Conservancy has accepted a conservation easement as a first step in its preservation.

The goal of the Rocky Hills Lecture Series is to explore the interplay of horticulture, garden design and the environment in the Lower Hudson Valley. Previous speakers have included John Mickel, the nationally recognized fern expert who gardens in Briarcliff Manor, and Marco Polo Stefano, the former director of horticulture at Wave Hill in Riverdale.

The Chappaqua Library is at 195 S. Greeley Ave. For more information, call the Garden Conservancy at 845-265-2029 or the library at 914-238-4779, or visit chappaqualibrary.org.