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Category: Natural and Physical Sciences

Bringing Beautiful Gardens Indoors — Landscape Garden, Design, and History Collections at the Libraries

While the Smithsonian Institution Libraries (SIL) comprises 20 branch libraries, some branch collections naturally overlap when meeting the needs of their library users. That’s the situation with one of our art libraries, the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum Library located in New York City, and one of our science libraries, the Botany and Horticulture Library located in Washington D.C. It may surprise you to learn both collect books and journals on landscape design and history and the decorative arts.

From Hanzaki to Hellbender

Like Wade, following the names and descriptions associated with the Japanese Giant Salamander (Hynobius nebulosus, Andrias japonicus, Cryptobranchidae, just to name a few) finally led me to the Smithsonian Channel’s Nick Baker, and his adventures with the Hellbender, North America’s own Giant Salamander Nick Baker’s Weird Creatures. Yes, I knew I was back in the States when reading out the aliases of the Hellbender–“snot otter,” “mud-devil,” “grampus.”