African-American garden clubs continue to grow in popularity with the founding of the Delphinium Garden Club of Indianapolis, Indiana. Its mission: to educate and “beautify yards and gardens in many parts of the city, especially among school children, by donating seeds and plants.” The club had a special tie to the segregated Crispus Attucks High […]
Ethel Earley Clark is the only woman among the original founders of the Negro Garden Club of Virginia. The club promotes four main values: home improvement, community improvement, improving race relations, and recreation and creative self-expression.
Alice G.B. Lockwood publishes Gardens of Colony and State, an influential overview of early American gardens. Lockwood’s work helped define the emerging field of garden history.
The Garden Club of America partners with Save the Redwoods League, raising $92,000 to purchase and preserve a 2,552-acre grove of redwood trees in Humboldt County, California.
Housewife Elizabeth Lawton forms the predecessor of the National Roadside Council. Women’s clubs are persistent advocates for protecting natural scenery from the visual “blight” of billboard advertising through the 1960s.
Director Harriot Stanton Blatch mobilizes women to harvest crops and produce food during World War I as men leave to fight overseas. She later leverages their role in the war to win voting rights for women.
The National Park Service is established thanks to the efforts of many, including prominent conservationist Mary Belle King Sherman, who lobbied for its creation.
The Smith-Lever Act funds home demonstration agents – mostly women – to teach up-to-date agricultural, gardening, and food preservation techniques to families of all races living in rural areas. One of the goals of the project is to “develop leadership abilities in rural women and girls.”
Reformer Frances Griscom Parsons establishes the DeWitt Clinton Farm School in New York City, one of the first gardening programs for children in America.
One of the first landscape design schools to admit women is the all-female Lowthorpe School in Massachusetts. Similar schools follow, including the Cambridge School of Architectural and Landscape Design for Women, established under the auspices of Harvard University in 1915.
Beatrix Farrand is the only woman among eleven landscape design professionals who found the American Society of Landscape Architects. Later, more women join the ranks, including Elizabeth Bullard, Marian Cruger Coffin, Ellen Shipman, Annette Hoyt Flanders, Marjorie Sewell Cautley, and Martha Brookes Hutchenson.
Art critic Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer publishes Art Out-of-Doors, presenting landscape design as an art form on par with architecture. The book is required reading in many male-only landscape architecture courses.
The grounds and gardens of George Washington’s home at Mount Vernon are saved from disrepair by the Mount Vernon Ladies Association. Women play a major role in starting the movement to preserve historic homes and landscapes.