“The Hill” is a steep, woodland slope at the corner of Nelson Street and College Parkway in Rockville, Maryland. The Garden Club of College Gardens (GCCG) has landscaped and maintained a garden there since the 1970s. The Club is part of the National Capital Area Garden Clubs, Inc. and draws its approximately fifty-three members from […]
Gardening was an important part of my grandparents’ life on their farmstead in western Iowa where my father grew up and also where I grew up. Originally the area around the house was bare of plants but with time Grandpa Henry and Grandma Olga planted numerous trees, bushes, flowers and a lawn around the home. […]
My garden is very simple, and it is an heirloom garden because it contains iris bulbs from three generations of my maternal family—my great-grandmother, grandmother and my mother. Some are bearded iris and some are what you might call “ditch iris” as they are very old and actually grew in the country ditch of my […]
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 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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]