Theodore Roosevelt Sanctuary and Audubon Center held their Women in Nature luncheon at Seawanhaka Corinthian Yacht Club, Centre Island, on Friday, July 22. The featured speaker was Irene Virag, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and Newsday Home and Garden Editor. All proceeds of the event benefit Theodore Roosevelt Sanctuary and Audubon Center's research and education programs.

Irene Virag is Newsday's Home & Garden Editor. She is widely known for her garden column, which focuses on people as well as plants. Additionally, she writes a home column centered on the way we live. She has won the Pulitzer Prize for local reporting and is an 8-time winner of Newswomen's Club of New York awards for column and feature writing. She won several awards for a series on her struggle with breast cancer. As she fought what she called "the bad seed," she drew inspiration from Long Island's natural beauty. In 2003, she was a lead writer for Newsday's 13-month-long series, Long Island: Our Natural World. She found the Theodore Roosevelt Sanctuary and Audubon Center a living resource and said that she is forever grateful to its director, Trish Pelkowski, for her advice and guidance.

The author of two books, We're All in This Together - Families Facing Breast Cancer and Gardening on Long Island with Irene Virag, she holds a bachelor's degree in journalism from Boston University and a master's from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. She studied at the University of London and was a Nieman fellow at Harvard University. She and her husband, author Harvey Aronson, nurture their flowers and vegetables on the North Shore of Long Island.

Oyster Bay's Andrew Pascoe, renowned florist known for commissioned work at New York Botanical Gardens and featured in Architectural Digest and Town and Country, provided the flower decorations for the luncheon.

For more than a century, women have played a pivotal role in Audubon's history of conservation - from the founding of the first Audubon chapter in 1896, to Rachel Carson's 1962 Watershed Book, Silent Spring, which sparked the modern environmental movement. That leadership continues today, as Carol M. Browner, formerly the longest serving administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, leads Audubon as the first woman to Chair its Board of TRS Directors.

The Women in Nature luncheon is the Theodore Roosevelt Sanctuary's biggest fund-raising event of the summer. The event is key in continuing to develop outreach programs to the diverse communities of Long Island and New York City through the message of conservation. Today, the Sanctuary reaches over 125,000 people annually and continues to grow its environmental education and wildlife management programs.

Theodore Roosevelt Sanctuary and Audubon Center was donated to the National Audubon Society in 1923 in honor of Theodore Roosevelt, the "conservation" president. As the first Audubon Sanctuary in the nation it is committed to building a culture of conservation through providing stewardship to the land, research on Long Island's bird populations and habitat and for the past three decades has been a leader in natural science education.

For further information please contact Patricia I. Pelkowski, director, Theodore Roosevelt Sanctuary and Audubon Center at 922-3200 ext. 29 or Aaron Virgin, Audubon New York Major Gifts Officer at (212) 979-3121.