He came early in the morning on Saint Patrick’s Day 2015 and knocked over my hive boxes in search of his favorite foods—honey and bees. The 400-600 pound male bear had been making the rounds through the town of Poolesville and surrounding farms, finding fodder in bird feeders and tasty dogfood in open garages, until […]
Nuccio’s Nurseries roots are firmly established in their Italian American family. The nursery began when Joe and Julius Nuccio began to grow camellias and azaleas in their parent’s backyard in Alhambra, California in the 1930s. The two brothers began to propagate camellias and azaleas which led them to grow seedlings, hoping to produce new cultivars. […]
Greenhouse 17 (GH17) is a forty-acre domestic violence emergency shelter and farm that has become a healing oasis to thousands of women and families since 2004. Greenhouse 17 is a Grow Appalachia success story for its innovative therapeutic farm stipend program for survivors. The farm, a multi-acre community garden with six high tunnels, was started […]
The story of the Alost family nurseries begins not in New Orleans, where the family’s greenhouses existed for years, but across the ocean in Europe. Antoine Alost was born in Brussels, Belgium, where he was in charge of the palace gardens of King Leopold II, and was decorated by the king. While employed under the […]
The Archives of American Gardens includes the business records of a number of nurseries and seed companies that operated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries including W. Atlee Burpee & Company. The collection consists of approximately 12,715 items, including account books, diaries, seed trial records, office correspondence, contest letters, seed catalogs, and other items […]
The mission of the Well Fed Community Garden is listed on the Irregardless Café website: “To provide an opportunity for community members to learn how to grow their own food, to reinforce the community’s ties to the environment; and to increase food access and food security within our community.” Some of the community benefits include […]
For the past three years, Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum has been leading a collaborative Smithsonian project on Urban Waterways. The project comes out of a desire to explore the various issues facing urban communities and document the diverse responses to such challenges. Rivers, typically imagined in the context of a wild, natural landscape, are often “forgotten” […]
Founded in 1876, W. Atlee Burpee & Company grew to be the largest seed company in the world by the early twentieth century. In 1924 the company advertised a contest in its Seed Annual asking customers to write in about “What Burpee’s Seeds Have Done for Me,” with prizes for the best stories ranging from […]
Founded in 1876, W. Atlee Burpee & Company grew to be the largest seed company in the world by the early twentieth century. In 1924 the company advertised a contest in its Seed Annual asking customers to write in about “What Burpee’s Seeds Have Done for Me,” with prizes for the best stories ranging from […]