The Polly Hill Arboretum and the Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center are pleased to host landscape historian Kenneth Helphand on Sunday, July 13, at 7:30 p.m. at the arboretum.

In this lecture Mr. Helphand will discuss his award-winning and deeply moving book Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens in Wartime, which states: “Gardens promise beauty where there is none, hope over despair, optimism over pessimism, and finally life in the face of death.”

An interactive exhibit featuring five Island artists — Sandy Bernat, Eva Gallant, Jennifer McCurdy, Julia Mitchell and Heather Sussman — opens at Featherstone Center for the Arts on Sunday, July 13, with reception from 4 to 6 p.m.

All may come to observe how these five women create their art through lectures, exhibits, workshops, demonstrations and open studios featuring weaving, papermaking, clay sculpting, carving and throwing. The four-week exhibition includes a video by Richard Skidmore.

Comics About You

Children’s author and illustrator Katie Davis will be visiting two of the Island libraries in the week ahead, leading a free program in which kids will be encouraged to work on journal entries in the comic book format which the author calls “autobiogra-strips.”

In Ms. Davis’s novel for middle-grade readers, The Curse of Addy McMahon, the title character keeps her diary in comic-strip format.

In this serialized novel set on the Vineyard in real time, a native Islander (“Call me Becca”) returns home after many years in Manhattan to help her eccentric Uncle Abe keep his landscaping business, Pequot, afloat. Abe has an intense loathing of Richard Moby, the CEO of Broadway, an off-Island landscaping business. He is irrationally convinced that Moby wants to destroy Abe personally, as well as all Island-based landscaping/nursery businesses in general. Abe is now obsessed with “taking down” Moby before Moby can hurt him.

Lola’s Adds Lunch

After 15 years in business on Beach Road in Oak Bluffs, Lola’s restaurant has decided to add lunch. The meal will be served on the patio courtyard or in the air-conditioned dining room from noon until 3 p.m.

Lola’s also has starting delivering a choice of five sandwiches with chips and a soda to the Inkwell or first and second bridge along State Beach by an eco-friendly bicycle delivery boy.

More information is available by calling 508-693-5007.

The Friends of the Chilmark Public Library presents a slide show and artist talk featuring the new work of Carol Brown Goldberg on Wednesday, July 16, at 5:30 p.m. at the Chilmark Public Library.

Ms. Goldberg, a Chilmark summer resident since 1984, has been exhibiting in Washington, D.C., for more than 35 years. She is represented by Osuna Art in Bethesda, Md., and Adamar Gallery in Miami, Fla.