Women's History in Gardening - Smithsonian Gardens

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8 Women to Know in Horticulture HERstory

Learn about a few famous names – and some lesser-known garden heroes.

Timeline of Women’s History in the Garden

Selected moments and movements when women have used gardens and landscapes for power, advocacy, and change.

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Garden design was a man’s world in the early 1900s. But a few women landscape architects determined to practice in their chosen career slowly made their way into the field.

Before the right to vote came to all women, social groups like garden clubs were one of the few ways women could indirectly influence politics.

Gardens could be a source of money – and thus, independence – for women one hundred years ago.

See stunning images of lush historic gardens photographed by three pioneering women garden photographers: Frances Benjamin Johnston, Mattie Edwards Hewitt, and Molly (Maida) Adams.

Learning Labs

Vintage postcard with a building and a flower on it

Focus in on topics in women’s garden history through online collections from the Smithsonian Archives of American Gardens and other Smithsonian collections.

StoryMaps

Explore author Alice Gardner Burnell Lockwood’s recreated 1935 lectures Northern Gardens and Southern Gardens. The content of this lecture was sourced from Lockwood’s research as editor and contributor of The Garden Club of America’s seminal 2-volume publication, Gardens of Colony and State in 1931 and 1934 which carefully documented extant gardens and landscapes in the United States.