A river runs through my city. There is a bike/walking trail next to it. It is natures garden with berry bushes, acorns, and all manner of wildlife. I go there when my soul is weary. My bike flies along the trail and the trees, water, bushes and sky pull the sadness from me. It is […]
Gardening, and living out-of-doors, come naturally to me thanks to my family. I myself moved so often as an adult that only now, after twenty years in Tennessee, have I been rooted long enough to see a flourishing garden emerge. It is named after a famous Comanche warrior, Quanah Parker, and we called our Parker, […]
The Poquoson Learning Garden is located at the Poquoson Museum, the former sixteen acre William Freeman Dryden farm in the City of Poquoson, Virginia. The museum campus contains a circa 1900 farm house, agricultural out buildings, frontage along the marshes of Topping Creek and a country store known as ‘Miss Becky’s Store’ that served local […]
On an early Monday autumn morning, with leaves changing colors and dropping across the city of New Haven, I found myself driving through The Hill neighborhood in the Urban Resources Initiative (URI) delivery truck, the bed full of 300-pound trees ready to be planted by the Greenskills/EMERGE planting crew. I pulled over to the side […]
It started because of a shared problem: the drug activity and prostitution in the abandoned double lot on Saltonstall and Lloyd. Adeli D. lived next door at the time, and remembers having to yell at the dealers who wandered through her driveway past her playing toddler to the empty house beside hers. Eventually, the young […]
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 […]
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 […]
This story was created by teachers who participated in the Smithsonian Gardens & National Postal Museum professional development workshop “Telling Garden Stories in the Digital Age,” July 2014. The teachers were challeneged to explore green spaces near the National Postal Museum, create a persuasive garden story, and design a semi-postal stamp to encapsulate their cause. Every fifteen […]
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 […]