Wild About Wildlife Gardens

Here at Smithsonian Gardens, we’re WILD about wildlife—the birds, bees, insects, and helpful critters that contribute to our garden, community, and planet health. That’s why we’re so excited to announce our first Community of Gardens Community Collaborators, the National Wildlife Federation Garden for Wildlife program.

Preserving Our Garden Heritage One Pixel at a Time

What better way to celebrate National Garden Month in April than to spend some time enjoying historic garden images from the J. Horace McFarland Company Collection!  Thanks to a Smithsonian preservation grant, thousands of images from this collection at the Archives of American Gardens (AAG) were digitized recently and are now available online through the Smithsonian’s Research Information System (SIRIS).  These images–produced by McFarland’s publishing firm which specialized in printing horticultural publications–are just some of the treasures found in AAG which is administered by Smithsonian Gardens and tasked with collecting historic and contemporary garden documentation as a means of preserving our garden heritage.

Very much a renaissance man, J. Horace McFarland (1859-1948) of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania,was a publisher, author, lecturer, horticulturist and authority on roses.  As the first President of the American Civic Association—a position he held for 20 years—McFarland also advocated for effective civic planning and improvements throughout the U.S. during the Progressive Era (1890-1920) when living and community conditions called out for significant reforms.

A newly digitized photograph from the J. Horace McFarland Collection showing McFarland looking over the gardens at his home, Breeze Hill, in Harrisburg, Penn. 1942. (PA083039)

McFarland’s printing company, Mount Pleasant Press, published many of the seed and nursery trade catalogs in the U.S. during the first half of the 20th century.  The J. Horace McFarland Company Collection at AAG includes over 3,000 of the firm’s images, many of which were published in books, catalogs, newspapers, and journals.

The images document an extensive variety of gardens across the U.S. dating from the 1900s to the 1960s, everything from popular parks to small flower patches planted behind crowded urban row houses.  Thanks to the broad range of private and public gardens photographed by the firm, the J. Horace McFarland Company Collection provides glimpses into historic trends and events of the times including World War II’s victory gardens and post-war neighborhood development.  Images that show people working in or enjoying these gardens are especially captivating.  In many cases the photographs are the only evidence left of certain gardens and public spaces.

A World War II-era victory garden at Breeze Hill in 1944. The gardens at Breeze Hill were often employed to stage photographs used by McFarland’s firm, Mount Pleasant Press. (PA083362)

This digitization project was timely since the photographs—which had been pasted onto brittle cardboard mounts –are fragile and subject to continued deterioration.  Rather than scanning the thousands of photographs on a flatbed scanner—both a time-consuming and potentially damaging procedure—each was photographed with a Phase One digital camera under controlled lighting conditions.  High resolution digital images are now readily available for research use and the need to handle the originals has been significantly reduced.  We hope you get a chance to search the McFarland Company Collection online and enjoy the garden history that it documents.

– Joyce Connolly, Museum Specialist, Archives of American Gardens

The Great American Lawn

March is a month of green: St. Patrick’s Day decorations, green buds appearing on the trees, and a new hint of green reappearing on our lawns. Patios, Pools, & the Invention of the American Backyard opens March 18th at the Elmhurst History Museum in Illinois. Let’s take a look back at American lawns through the years and our changing attitudes towards the green beneath our feet.

A long line of American lawns stretching from east to west. Elm Avenue, Hershey, Pennsylvania, 1946. J. Horace McFarland Collection, Archives of American Gardens.

 

In his 1989 article “Why Mow?” Michael Pollan describes the American landscape as a carpet of green stretching in an unbroken line from the East Coast to the deserts of New Mexico to the most arid regions of Southern California. “Like the interstate highway system, like fast-food chains, like television,” he writes, “the lawn has served to unify the American landscape; it is what makes the suburbs of Cleveland and Tucson, the streets of Eugene and Tampa, look more alike than not.” Lawns are arguably the most prevalent garden feature in the United States.

The popularity of lawns in the United States is an influence from the English school of landscape design. Andrew Jackson Downing, one of the first landscape designers in America, expounded on the virtues of the lawn in his 1841 book A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening. According to Downing, “the close proximity of fences to the house gives the whole place a confined and mean character . . . A wide spread lawn, on the contrary, where no boundaries are conspicuous, conveys an impression of ample extent and space for enjoyment.”

An unidentified English estate lawn, ca. 1930s. Garden Club of America Collection, Archives of American Gardens.

 Lawns were expensive to maintain in the nineteenth century. Before lawn mowers only the wealthiest landowners could afford to hire a full-time gardener to trim the lawns by scythe and pull weeds. A verdant lawn was a symbol of wealth and stature, but the development of the cylindrical lawn mower in the 1880s put a tidy lawn within the reach of the middle class. The forty-hour work week and the increase in home ownership in the mid-twentieth century turned lawn care into the hobby (or curse, depending on who you ask) that it is today.

Companies advertised various lawn products that purported to be time savers for homeowners. Here, a man kicks up his feet and enjoys his yard. In actuality many homeowners bemoaned the amount of time–and money–they had to spend on their yard to keep it trim and green. Undated commercial illustration from the 1950s or 1960s, W. Atlee Burpee & Company Collection, Archives of American Gardens.

 In certain parts of the country, lawns that were covered in a dusting of snow a month ago will soon be in need of a good mowing. Many homeowners in the 1950s would have rejoiced to have a healthy lawn in the middle of winter. A plethora of products and chemicals to combat pests and keep lawns healthy year-round flooded the market after the second World War. Much of technology was a direct result of wartime scientific advancement. Advertisements such as those by W. Atlee Burpee & Company peddled every product under the sun to the postwar consumer, from grass seed to DDT to sprayers and lawn mowers.

Illustrations for Burpee grass seed advertisements, circa 1950-1960. W. Atlee Burpee & Company Collection, Archives of American Gardens.

 Garden magazines published a backlash of editorials in the 1950s and 1960s bemoaning the “keeping up with the Joneses” race to have the perfect suburban lawn. There are even reports of some homeowners being so fed up with lawn maintenance they ripped out their grass and replaced it with green cement. (Of course, the introduction of AstroTurf in the mid 1960s would give irate gardeners another option.)

The Archives of American Gardens includes a photographic examples of almost every type of American lawn imaginable—from bowling greens to sweeping estate lawns to small suburban lots—including a retired lawn!

-Kate Fox, Patios, Pools, & the Invention of the American Backyard curator. A version of this post was originally published on the Smithsonian Collections blog. 

A Summer with the Archives of American Gardens at Smithsonian Gardens

Within Smithsonian Gardens is the Archives of American Gardens, a repository dedicated to collecting documentation on historic and contemporary American gardens. AAG was founded in 1987, the same year the Garden Club of America (GCA) donated its extensive slide collection documenting American gardens throughout history to the Smithsonian Institution.

Thanks to a GCA scholarship, I was able to join AAG for a 10-week Garden History and Design Internship this summer.  Prior to this internship, I knew little about this archive or its collections. Nevertheless I was eager to learn more about AAG and Smithsonian Gardens plus excited to have an internship with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. My name is Kathryn Schroeder and this past May I received a Master of Library and Information Science and Graduate Certificate in Archival Administration from Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan.

Right away, I was happy to see that my internship would be a diverse experience working on a variety projects exposing me to much of what AAG does. One of the main projects I worked on was processing the Mary Riley Smith Collection. Smith, a Manhattan-based landscape designer, laid out scores of private and public gardens including design work and supervising installation of planting beds at the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum in New York City for 20 years. I went through the collection folder by folder, noting the client or garden name, location, and folder contents in an inventory. In addition, I re-housed the materials and photocopied certain items for preservation purposes. Utilizing the knowledge I acquired of the collection during this process, I wrote a scope and contents note describing the collection as well as a biographical note about Mary Riley Smith. These notes will be incorporated into a comprehensive finding aid for the collection so interested individuals can learn more about it.

Kathryn processing the Mary Riley Smith Collection at the Archives of American Gardens

Having specialized in digital content management during my graduate program, digitization is something that greatly interests me. I was able to apply this interest during my internship by digitizing letters from the W. Atlee Burpee & Company Records. The letters I digitized were from a 1925 contest where customers shared their success stories using Burpee’s seeds. These digitized letters will be uploaded to the Smithsonian Transcription Center where they will be available for transcribing by virtual volunteers whose efforts will enable them to be readily searchable online.

This letter from the 1925 Burpee seed contest was one of hundreds digitized by Kathryn during her internship.

I also had the opportunity to catalog digital images documenting gardens submitted to AAG by volunteers from the Garden Club of America. Using a database designed for cataloging, I created records describing the garden as a whole as well as specific sections of it. The records I created are now available to the public on SIRIS, an online catalog containing millions of records describing holdings in the Smithsonian collections. Another exciting aspect of my internship was researching the history behind a number of garden features and writing ‘One Minute Reports’ to be distributed to GCA chapters across America, blogs, and social media posts. This enabled me to become more familiar with gardening, a subject I did not know much about prior to my internship. I particularly enjoyed researching and writing about the history of swimming pools.

The various projects I worked on throughout my internship allowed me to acquire skills and knowledge that will be valuable tools as I advance in my career. I am grateful that I had the opportunity to spend 10 weeks with the Archives of American Gardens and Smithsonian Gardens, and thoroughly enjoyed my time in Washington, D.C.

–Kathryn Schroeder, Summer 2015 GCA Garden History and Design Intern, Archives of American Gardens

Pollinator Houses

Gardens are not only places for flowers, trees, and vegetation to grow. Insects such as ladybugs, bees, and butterflies, have an important role in our garden as well. These pollinators propagate flowers and vegetables to keep our gardens flourishing. They are so important to the survival of plants that gardeners have been known to create “homes” for these critters. Bees and wasps use insect houses to keep prey for eggs that have been deposited, while butterflies and ladybugs use them as a place to hibernate.

Grosse Pointe Lighthouse Wildflower Trail Park, Evanston, Illinois, 2007. Mary Ann Grumman, photog. Archives of American Gardens.

The Archives of American Gardens includes terrific images of insect homes. The style and size of insect houses vary just like the houses in which we live. The design of a house depends on the type of bug a gardener may want in his or her garden. For example, the size of the nesting holes drilled into the walls of an insect house influence the type of bug likely to dwell inside. The butterfly houses shown here were constructed in an elongated shape with vertical slits running up and down the sides. Butterflies must fold up their delicate delicate wings in order to fit into these narrow openings. Once inside the insect house provides the butterflies with excellent protection from wind, weather, and predators.

Aspen Farms Community Garden, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1996. Ira Beckoff, photog. Archives of American Gardens.

It is immediately apparent how the holes in this bee house vary greatly from those used by butterflies. Round holes provide bees easy entrance to the house. Unlike bee hives, bee houses are meant to attract solitary bees, such as the Mason Bee (Osmia rufa). This explains why there are multiple holes created in the house rather than one large opening like a bee hive would have.

Giltinan Garden in Charleston, West Virginia, 1997. Jean Allsopp, photog. Archives of American Gardens.

To learn more about pollinators, attend the upcoming Pollination Party at the Smithsonian Gardens Butterfly Habitat Garden on Tuesday, June 16. The Pollinator Party will highlight the Pollinator Partnership’s mission to promote the health of pollinators–which are critical to food and ecosystems–through conservation, education, and research. Click here for more information about Smithsonian Gardens’ Pollinator Party.

– Melinda Allen, Archives of American Gardens intern

The Bride’s First Garden

June holds the promise of good weather and beautiful blooms, making it a popular month for weddings. This month on #ThrowbackThursday we’re mad for all things matrimonial and mid-century modern in celebration of our newest traveling exhibit, Patios, Pools, & the Invention of the American Backyard. Stay tuned on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and our blog as we celebrate everything from backyard weddings to DIY bouquets to a plan for a 1950’s bride on a budget and her new backyard.

Drawing of the “Bride’s First Garden,” 1953. Perry Wheeler, landscape architect. Smithsonian Institution, Archives of American Gardens, Perry Wheeler Collection.

“All young couples who move into new houses on bare, treeless lots share two things in common: the urge to give their house a setting that will distinguish it from others in the neighborhood, and a desire to plant a garden without delay. Both of these enthusiasms may eventually produce a dream garden, and the good outdoor life that goes along with it, but not without a sound plan.” —Excerpt from “The Bride’s First Garden,” House & Garden, 1953.

June is historically one of the most popular months for weddings, when summer gardens are still in full bloom. In 1953, an article in House & Garden entreated young brides-to-be to begin planning an important aspect of their new future home: a garden. The magazine enlisted landscape architect Perry Wheeler to design a garden for newlyweds that could be developed over a five-year period; or, in Wheeler’s words, “on the installment plan.” His resulting plan emphasizes easy-to-maintain plants, seasonal color, individuality, and outdoor privacy for the growing, young post-war family.

A Georgia native, Wheeler practiced landscape architecture in the Washington, D.C. area from 1948 to 1979. He is best known for his work on numerous private Georgetown gardens and redesigning the White House Rose Garden alongside Bunny Mellon during the Kennedy administration. His designs were practical, often incorporating terraces for backyard entertaining and room for a jungle gym, but also lighthearted and whimsical.

Plan of the “Bride’s First Garden,” 1953. Perry Wheeler, landscape architect. Smithsonian Institution, Archives of American Gardens, Perry Wheeler Collection.

Wheeler’s design for “The Bride’s First Garden: A Five Year Plan” catered to a young couple on a budget living in a typical, suburban home with modern architecture in a new community development. Almost two decades earlier, the Federal Housing Act of 1934 put home ownership within reach of middle-class families, and suburbs such as Levittown in Long Island were built in response to the post-war housing crisis. House and Garden was one of many magazines, along with Popular Mechanics and Better Homes & Gardens, which ran how-to articles on home improvement. Rather than utilizing the driveway as the approach to the front door, Wheeler recommended individualizing the house (which looked identical to the other houses on the street) by giving the front entrance a “welcoming aspect” with large trees and a stone walkway. The backyard terrace, pictured here in a preliminary drawing done by an assistant, is a “major must” for the second year, along with planting beds for the terrace edging and select trees for brilliant fall colors.

The plan emphasizes spaces for informal socializing and relaxation over formal elements. In his notes for the design, he suggested investing in a few pieces of antique garden furniture to go with more modern pieces, rather than purchasing a matching suite. He even incorporated a charcoal grill into the terrace design—newly introduced by Weber in 1952. The fifth year of the plan imagines that there is already a growing family in the works, and the design accordingly leaves room for a playhouse and spaces for the family to spend time together outdoors.

The Perry Wheeler Collection at the Archives of American Gardens, includes photographs, plans, business records, and newspaper and magazine clippings pertaining to Wheeler’s landscape architecture practice. More detailed information about Wheeler is available in the Archives of American Gardens’ Guide to the Collections.

-Kate Fox, curator of Patios, Pools, & the Invention of the American Backyard

A version of this blog post was originally published on the Smithsonian Collections blog.

A DAMS Good Internship at Smithsonian Gardens

Jessica scanning in the Archives of American Gardens reference room at the Smithsonian Gardens offices.

Did you know Smithsonian Gardens does a lot more than just plant and maintain all the beautiful gardens around the Smithsonian properties? I know I didn’t!  That is until I became an Archives of American Gardens intern at Smithsonian Gardens. My name is Jessica Brode, and I am a graduate student at George Washington University beginning my final year in the Masters in Museum Studies program.

Before coming to Smithsonian Gardens, I interned with various institutions across the country and abroad. After moving to D.C. I began to specialize in collections management work within museums, mainly assisting in digitization efforts with museums like the Smithsonian’s American History and Natural History Museums. I applied to Smithsonian Gardens after a chance encounter demonstrated that there were opportunities to use my skills there.

Coming in as an Archives of American Gardens intern, I was able to really put my skills to use for Smithsonian Gardens while learning new skills along the way. The Archives of American Gardens (AAG) currently documents over 8,500 gardens throughout the United States, with images ranging from the 1870s to the present.  AAG maintains records on historic and contemporary gardens and gardening trends and contains over 150,000 images.

The Hershey Rose Gardens is just one of the garden history topics Jessica explored during her internship. (Hershey Rose Gardens in Hershey, Pennsylvania, c. 1936. Archives of American Gardens, J. Horace McFarland Collection.)

I learned the Horizon cataloging system utilized by the AAG and cataloged often throughout my internship.  I was given the opportunity to research and write several exciting blog posts about gardening topics I would have never even thought of, including the Hershey Rose Garden, World Fairs’ gardens, and floral clocks.

The best part of my internship was the ability to take a project further than I ever thought I could.  Smithsonian Gardens uses a system called a Digital Asset Management System (or DAMS) in order to track digital images of its gardens and events.  I was given the opportunity to rename and reorganize the Smithsonian Gardens folder structure so that images could be filed by garden and year, making it more intuitive for a user to search numerous images.  The new re-organization of images will enable staff to easily create slideshows of the best garden images for each of its gardens to make them readily available to the public through the Collections Search Center and SIRIS.  It was really exciting to see how my skills could be used to help share garden history with the public!

I am really excited that I had the opportunity to spend the summer with Smithsonian Gardens, and even more excited to see what else is ahead.  My internship has been extended so that I can continue my work at the Archives of American Gardens this coming fall and spring, and I am really looking forward to continuing some of the work I began, and starting new projects as well.

-Jessica Brode, Archives of American Gardens intern

The Archives of American Gardens Welcomes a New Collection

One of thousands of garden images from the Ken Druse Garden Photography Collection at the Archives of American Gardens.

Smithsonian Gardens is pleased to announce the recent acquisition of the Ken Druse Garden Photography Collection.  Druse, a prolific garden writer and photographer, donated his extensive photographic collection of garden and plant images to the Archives of American Gardens.  The collection includes several thousand transparencies and slides documenting over 300 gardens across the United States.  Druse took the images to illustrate many of his books as well as newspaper and magazine articles for publications like House & Garden and The New York Times and postings published on his own blog, Ken Druse Real Dirt.  Among his books are go-to references like Making More Plants: The Science, Art, and Joy of Propagation; The Collector’s Garden; and The Natural Shade Garden.

Given its huge scale and exceptional quality, the Ken Druse Garden Photography Collection is a wonderful and important addition to the Archives of American Gardens.  A multi-year project to make the collection available for research use will involve steps such as rehousing and cataloging the images as well as digitizing select images for inclusion on the Smithsonian’s online catalog at www.siris.si.edu.  Please join Smithsonian Gardens and the Archives of American Gardens in celebrating this fantastic acquisition!

-Joyce Connolly, Museum Specialist

Fairy Gardens: Adding Some Imagination to Nature

Garden trends seem to be forever changing. Some develop because even gardeners who stick with a roster of proven reliable plants like a change now and then. There are, however, numerous trends that last. For example, Penjing, or the art of depicting landscapes in miniature, is an ancient pastime that developed in China and is still seen by the use today of bonsai plants. One interesting trend currently emerging out of these gardens in miniature is what’s known as a “fairy garden.”

Lemon Hill’s fairy garden is composed of young plants, diminutive trees and bonsai that are in scale with its miniature castle and houses, fountain, stone walls, gates and furniture, and fairy figurines. The Fairy Garden takes its name from the Meyer lemon trees grown in the vicinity.  Its design was inspired by miniature gardens found in Ireland and in books.  It is visited often by school and scout groups.

Though gardens can reflect many things, such as taste and style, they can also reflect function, such as creating a special place for children and grandchildren.  Just look at the Fairy Garden on Lemon Hill. Lemon Hill was a special project for the owner and her grandchildren.  Her own daughter helped her build the garden and she implemented suggestions from her other three daughters as well as her 13 granddaughters.  She created the garden with all her girls in mind.

Building a fairy garden can be a project that you enjoy with your children or grandchildren that can get them excited and participating in the art and act of gardening. They can be found in any number of small spaces, such as bird baths, pots, or large plant saucers.

Images from the Garden Club of America Collection at the Archives of American Gardens.

By Jessica Short
Archives of American Gardens Intern
October  2012

Take Ten Minutes to Tag for the Archives of American Gardens

As part of the American Archives Month celebration, the Archives of American Gardens is encouraging the public to ‘tag’ their online records in the Smithsonian’s Collections Search Center.  A little over a year ago, the Smithsonian’s Collections Search Center quietly turned on the tagging feature for records of participating Smithsonian archives, libraries and museums and now the Archives of American Gardens is hoping to use American Archives Month to promote this feature. The Archives is reaching out to Facebook followers of Smithsonian Gardens, universities with library and information science programs as well as horticulture programs to to contribute descriptive terms, keywords, or short phrases, to an item’s record to enhance searching on its records.  If a user describes an item in the same way that they would search for it, the presumption is that these new terms will help with the retrievability of the records.  For each tag that is added, that item has another access point – another way for other users to discover that item.

Although public tagging is not perfect and many questions remain about how folksonomy might function in the museum, a summary in a 2009 report by the Steve Project finds that, “Tags offer another layer that supplements and complements the documentation provided by professional museum cataloguers.” So while tagging is not meant to be a replacement for established cataloging methods, it may complement the catalog with a helpful element of user engagement and interaction.

Get Tagging! Visit the Archives of American Gardens Virtual Volunteer page to get started on tagging images.

Jessica Short, Intern
Archives of American Gardens
Smithsonian Gardens

Blogs across the Smithsonian will give an inside look at the Institution’s archival collections and practices during a month long blogathon in celebration of October’s American Archives Month. See additional posts from our other participating blogs, as well as related events and resources, on the Smithsonian’s Archives Month website.