Julia Hayes was a teacher, writer, gardener, and cook. Her life moved easily between science, the kitchen, and the page. After many years teaching high school science, she turned more fully to writing, gardening, and poetry. She worked with discipline, but also with curiosity and quiet humor. She led her life on her own terms, guided by a clear, independent mind.
Beginning in the mid-1970s, she tended an acre-wide organic garden at her home in Coventry, Connecticut. It was not just a garden, but a place she shaped over time. There were vegetables, herbs, wildflowers, and long-tended roses. Everything reflected her patience and her close attention. She understood that nature does not always cooperate, and she met that fact with a dry, understated wit. Those who knew her will remember how precise and quietly funny her observations could be.
Her cookbook, French Cooking for People Who Can’t (Atheneum, 1979), reflects that same clarity. It grew out of the seven years she lived near Paris at La Croix de Berny. There, she and her husband, the sculptor David Hayes, raised their four young children. She learned to cook not from formal training, but from daily life. She shopped in local markets, cooked at home, and learned from friends. Later, she taught French cooking at the University of Connecticut and wrote for the Willimantic Chronicle. Her work was recognized in a half-page feature in The New York Times, which she treated without fuss.
She was also a steady presence in her husband’s artistic life. As a long-time muse to David Hayes, she offered both insight and balance. Her role was quiet but essential. She helped shape the environment in which the work was made.
In her later years, poetry became central. Her work appeared in the anthology Women’s Voices of the 21st Century. Her chapbook, What to Say of Garlic Mustard (2010), reflects her close attention to the natural world. Her writing was direct, observant, and often quietly funny.
She held degrees from Albertus Magnus College and Connecticut College. But her education did not end there. She was deeply curious and widely read. She paid attention to language, to plants, and to people. Her life was grounded in careful work and close observation. She believed that both gardens and people reveal themselves over time.