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Tag: horticulture

Cultivating America’s Gardens Coming to a Close – Come Visit Before It Ends!

Abigail Espiritu
June 26, 2018
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Cultivating America’s Gardens Coming to a Close – Come Visit Before It Ends!

Come visit the Cultivating America’s Gardens exhibition in the National Museum of American History before it closes this August!

The exhibition officially opened in May 2017 and will be saying goodbye at the end of this summer. The exhibition highlights the establishment of botanical gardens and the history of gardening in America. On show are a collection of books and other objects from the Smithsonian Libraries and Smithsonian Gardens collections. Here you will be able to see a variety of beautiful, vintage illustrations, rare books and artifacts related to the history of American gardening. Many of the books on display have been digitized and are available online. They will stay available through the Smithsonian Libraries Digital Library collection even after the exhibition’s closing.

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John Lewis Childs: A Profile of an American Seedsman.

Erin Rushing
May 12, 2017
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Cultivating America’s Gardens, our newest exhibition produced with Smithsonian Gardens is now open in the National Museum of American History and features many colorful seed catalogs from our collection. This post, highlighting seedsman John Lewis Childs,  was written by social media intern Trudi J. Antoine.

Portrait of John Lewis Childs, from his profile in The Condor, September 1907.Via the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

While some children played games and chased the pavement, John Lewis Childs pursued a dream of playing in the dirt. Starting from the ground up, horticulturist and businessman, John Lewis Childs made his way as a young lad to East Hinsdale, a town bordering Queens, New York, with only a glimmer of where his path would take him. He was only seventeen.

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Seeking the Ferns of Southern Mexico: on Oliver Sacks neurologist, bestselling author, and botanist

Robin Everly
September 21, 2015
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This post was written by Robin Everly, librarian in the Botany and Horticulture Library, with Spencer Goyette, contractor in the National Museum of Natural History’s Department of Botany.

Working in the Botany and Horticulture library, I’m still surprised by the books I come across that I haven’t heard about. So when I came across Oaxaca Journal what caught my eye was the author’s name on the book’s spine- Oliver Sacks. Immediately, I wondered if it was the same Oliver Sacks, neurologist and bestselling author of books such as Awakenings, The Island of the Colorblind, and The Man who Mistook his wife for a Hat. Dr. Sacks, who died on August 30, 2015, of metastatic cancer, had the ability to communicate complex scientific concepts to the general public by providing well written prose as well as insightful and strange stories about the human mind. And yes, he, the same Dr. Sacks, wrote Oaxaca Journal, which is the personal journal he kept during a fern collecting trip to southern Mexico with the American Fern Society 15 years ago.

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Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries Awards Biodiversity Heritage Library

Liz O'Brien
June 18, 2013
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BHLlogo_WPThe Biodiversity Heritage Library received the Charles Robert Long Award of Extraordinary Merit from the Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries (CBHL) on May 9. It is the highest honor bestowed by CBHL and was founded to honor outstanding contribution and meritorious service to the CBHL or in the field of botanical and horticultural libraries or literature.

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

Abigail Espiritu
June 15, 2011
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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.

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