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 […]
In 1937 Gustav George Gerbing transformed about seven acres of family property along the Amelia River into a public garden, Gerbing’s Azalea Gardens, with plans for massive plantings of azaleas and camellias for viewing and for sale. The entire fifteen-acre holding became Gerbing Gardens, with groves of native trees including cedars, magnolias, bay, pines, live […]
In January 2014 Michelle interviewed her neighbor Kelly, a first-time beekeeper in Watertown, Massachusetts. The transcript of their conversation follows. Michelle: Tell me a little bit about your garden? Kelly: We have a pretty small urban garden. It is actually mostly flowers because I just love growing flowers. But, we also have a small (maybe […]
Chewonki is a non-profit environmental education center in Wiscasset, Maine, with a semester school for high school juniors, an Outdoor Classroom program for visiting school groups, and a summer camp for boys on its 400-acre saltwater peninsula, Chewonki Neck. Chewonki also leads a variety of wilderness programs for boys and girls elsewhere across the state […]
Hard to believe that my mother has been gone thirty-four years now, she was born in 1911 and seemed as though she could grow anything. She would be 103 years old this October. I was born her youngest child when she was forty-five years of age. She loved all of her children individually as if […]
I’ve been thinking about my mother, as Mother’s Day has just passed. And I’ve been thinking about the Smithsonian Gardens’ new project Community of Gardens. And now the two are intersecting, as things often do in unexpected ways. My mother loved working in her yard. She was an adventurous gardener and did not stick to […]
Brothers Tom and Louis have gardening in their blood. How did it get there? They have fond memories of growing up with gardens. During their childhood, it seemed that everyone in the family grew a vegetable garden and many home gardens had perennials that had wonderful smells and fond memories. Starts of these perennials were […]
Ever since I was a child, I dreamed of the time when I could garden as my grandfather did, coaxing flowers from seeds and propagating roses under pickle-jar cloches. I had to wait until I completed graduate school to have a bit of ground I could call my own and get on with the job. […]
I grew up listening to stories of my grandmother’s prize-winning roses. She loved to garden and I have photos of her in various gardens she visited around the world. The two photos I have submitted are her house garden in Fort Payne, Alabama. One is from 1975 with my sister in the roses and the […]
It came to the attention of the Fairbanks Garden Club that our city was in danger of losing a type of rose that was brought here over sixty years ago. The ‘Pier Bugnet’ rose has proven to be a very hardy one for our harsh environment. It thrives in fifty below zero temperatures in winter […]
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 […]
Gardens are the one universal and infinite language of man and nature. The pure joy that walking through a garden brings is hard to put into words. Each garden has its own music and palette. As a child in the garden of my grandparents, both native and indigenous gardeners, I marveled at the intricate beauty […]
In the 1860s, an 83-acre property on what was then Smith Road, now South 51st Street, in Franklin, Wisconsin was bought by our great grandfather, Johann (John) Barg and his wife Maria (nee Tietgen). The Barg homestead’s main barn was erected in 1877. Later, his son, our grandfather, Edward J. Barg and his wife Annette […]
This garden, located in Ladue, Missouri, reflects the vision, planning, implementation and maintenance of a master gardener. The genius loci of the garden underscores the owner’s innate sense of scale, proportion, light and shadow, textural variety of materials and the relationship between the house and the garden. Over a sixty-year period, she has transformed a […]
The catalpa tree in the front yard of our family farm is still living today. As far as we know our parents planted the tree. There are six of us. Pa and Ma referred to us children as “first and second crop hay” as they had two girls and a boy (like first cutting of […]