Smithsonian Gardens (SG) and the Archives of American Gardens (AAG) have a lot to celebrate in 2022. This year marks a series of institutional milestones, including the 50th anniversary of the establishment of Smithsonian Gardens in 1972, the 35th anniversary of the formation of the Archives of American Gardens in 1987, and the 30th anniversary of the donation of The Garden Club of America Collection to the Smithsonian in 1992. Through a sequence of three blog posts, you are invited to celebrate with Smithsonian Gardens as we retrace our origins and accomplishments over the past five decades. This final post explores the donation of The Garden Club of America Collection to the Archives of American Gardens and the archive’s early efforts to digitize the collection.

The origin of the Archives of American Gardens (AAG) parallels another important project that would go on to form the basis of a longstanding collaboration between Smithsonian Gardens and The Garden Club of America (GCA) to preserve a record of America’s gardens. Beginning in the mid-1980s, a national committee organized to honor The Garden Club of America’s 75th anniversary led an effort to reassemble thousands of glass lantern slides acquired in the 1920s and 1930s by the GCA to document garden history and design in America. Over time, the slides had been widely dispersed to dozens of GCA clubs nationwide for educational lectures. This collection, along with thousands of images of contemporary gardens newly documented by the GCA, was subsequently donated to the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Gardens in 1992. This donation also coincided with the publication of a related work, The Golden Age of American Gardens: Proud Owners, Private Estates, 1890-1940 by Mac Griswold and Eleanor Weller, that featured hundreds of gardens and images from The Garden Club of America Collection at AAG.

Reception commemorating the transfer of The Garden Club of America’s Slide Library to the Smithsonian, 1987. From left to right: James Buckler, Director of the Office of Horticulture, Kay Donahue, GCA President, Eleanor Weller, GCA Committee Chair, and Robert McCormick Adams, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution.

Early donations to AAG included fragile glass lantern slides and negatives from The Garden Club of America’s Slide Library (circa 1987).

Fortunately, the GCA’s donation of slides to AAG could not have happened at a better time. Preservation and access to these slides coincided with one of the earliest image digitization projects at the Smithsonian Institution. AAG used a digital capture software program to photograph and catalog the slides. Accessing a laser disc that stored the digitized images, a researcher could search and view the low-resolution images without having to handle the fragile glass slides. This was an outstanding accomplishment in the early 1990s, especially for a small archive, occurring well before most archives began digitizing their collections and describing their image collections at an item level. Access to AAG images was limited to onsite researchers until the Smithsonian Institution Research Information System’s (SIRIS) online catalog became available in February 1997. The GCA Collection was one of the first digitized collections migrated to this platform which enabled the images to be accessed by online users. In 2011, AAG received a Smithsonian Collections Care and Preservation Fund grant to re-digitize the GCA lantern slides as high-resolution images. Improvements to access, retrieval, and preservation occurred in 2013 and 2015 when the collection was migrated to an enterprise system using digital asset and archival management applications.

Today, the digitized GCA Collection and dozens of other AAG collections are available online through Smithsonian collection portals including SOVA (Smithsonian Online Virtual Archives) as well as shared nationally through OCLC’s Archives Grid. Each year the collection grows thanks to the help of GCA volunteers from across the U.S. who continue to photograph and document dozens of gardens annually to add to the GCA Collection at AAG. Digitization has not only supported research and scholarship in garden history and design but has enabled AAG staff and interns to create virtual projects that connect and enhance content within AAG’s collections, such as these recreated historic GCA slide lectures on Northern Gardens and Southern Gardens by garden historian Alice G. B. Lockwood. After 30 years as keeper of The Garden Club of America Collection and as a close collaborator with The Garden Club of America, the Archives continues to preserve, collect, and make available a wide array of material evidence of American gardens for the researchers of today and tomorrow.