Smithsonian Gardens
Archives of American Gardens
Quarterly Report for October – December, 2013
For the Garden Club of America’s Garden History and Design Committee
Smithsonian Institution Staff
● Barbara Faust, Director, Smithsonian Gardens, (SG), Office of Facilities
Management and Reliability (OFMR)
● Cindy Brown, Manager, Horticulture Collections Management and Education branch
(HCME)
● Paula Healy
}
● Joyce Connolly } Museum Specialists, SG, AAG
● Kelly Crawford }
Mission Statement
The Archives of American Gardens (AAG) both collects and preserves a visual record of
representative American gardens and their features as well as the work of select
landscape practitioners, and documents the activities and collections of the Smithsonian
Gardens.
AAG’s mission is to collect and make available for research use unique, high-quality
images of and documentation relating to a wide variety of cultivated gardens throughout
the United States that are not documented elsewhere since historic, designed, and
cultural landscapes are subject to change, loss, and destruction. In this way, AAG strives
to preserve and highlight a meaningful compendium of significant aspects of gardening
in the United States for the benefit of researchers and the public today and in the future.
Government Shutdown
As a unit within the Smithsonian, AAG was closed during the government shutdown that
ran from October 1 – 16. A handful of Smithsonian Gardens staffers were designated as
essential employees so that the gardens could be maintained during this time.
Outreach Tools for the GHD Committee
Please take full advantage of the many AAG PowerPoint presentations that have been
distributed to each of you including presentations on documenting gardens for AAG, the
Smithsonian American Garden Legacy exhibitions, etc., as well as the monthly GHD
‘One Minute Reports’ that AAG sends you. We rely on you to alert your GHD club Reps
to these resources and hope they will have an opportunity to present one or more of these
programs to their clubs in order to highlight the critical importance of the GCA
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Collection. Some of the presentations are very helpful for garden documentation
workshops as well.
The Procedures Manual Appendix includes instructions on how to copy the master CD
you received from AAG if you want to send duplicates out to your clubs.
Mystery Gardens
We continue to solicit help with AAG’s ongoing Mystery Gardens project. Mystery
Gardens are those gardens in the AAG that are either unidentified or lack the necessary
Owner Releases that enable them to be made available for research use. Please urge your
clubs to visit AAG’s Mystery Gardens webpage at
www.gardens.si.edu/collections-research/mystery-gardens-initiative.html if they haven’t
already. Scores of images have been identified by GCA members and non-GCA parties
alike; these identifications add critical informational value to these formerly unidentified
images. Smithsonian Gardens’ Facebook page
(https://www.facebook.com/SmithsonianGardens) has a weekly ‘Mystery Monday’ post;
we’ve received several identifications through this outlet.
Please let us know if you have clubs in your zone that may be interested in following up on
any identified gardens in their area that lack basic descriptive information—it is especially
critical to address these gardens since many were part of the GCA’s original deposit
with the Smithsonian in 1987. ANY information that can be provided about any of these
gardens (many of which date from the 1960s to the 1980s) will help to rescue their story
before they sink into anonymity. We especially need help with numerous gardens in New
Jersey, New York, and Connecticut! Please note that many of the ‘Mystery Gardens’ are
not cataloged in SIRIS. AAG is happy to supply a list of relevant identified-but-lackinginformation Mystery Gardens to interested clubs to get the process started.
Very special thanks to Zone IV Rep Lynn Filipski for all her recent help in enlisting Zone
IV clubs to follow up on a number of Mystery Gardens. Club members have provided
exceptionally helpful information to AAG for a number of gardens that had little or no
descriptive information in the garden file at AAG. Without this information, the story that
each of these gardens has to tell would eventually be lost forever.
Smithsonian Institution Research Information System (SIRIS)
On average, it takes between three to six months after a garden is accessioned into the
GCA Collection for it to be cataloged into SIRIS.
Please remind your clubs that thousands of images from the GCA Collection are
available for searching on SIRIS at www.siris.si.edu! This web site features over 1.8
million catalog records for library and archival holdings throughout the Smithsonian.
Although AAG accounts for less than 2% of that total (just over 32,000 catalog records),
there were over 375,000 SIRIS hits on AAG images in 2013! As time allows, our
challenge is to revisit early GCA Collection catalog records on SIRIS that are not linked
to images in order to address any unresolved copyright and use issues.
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Don’t hesitate to contact any one of us at AAG if you need help with navigating the
SIRIS search screens, whether it be for the first time or for pointers on how to create
specialized searches with multiple parameters (e.g. trellises in Texas). We are here to
help in any way that we can. Also, please contact us if you find errors in any of AAG’s
catalog records in SIRIS. We welcome your assistance in improving the quality of the
information AAG has in its SIRIS records.
Smithsonian Collections Blog
AAG is one of several Smithsonian archives that regularly contribute to the Smithsonian
Collections Blog: http://si-siris.blogspot.com/. The blog features brief, intriguing
snippets that highlight a wide variety of archival holdings at the Smithsonian. You’ll be
amazed at some of the things you will learn by browsing through this resource. To see
just the AAG blogs, scroll down the page until you reach the Labels section in the right
hand column, then click on Gardens.
Research
AAG received a total of 51 requests for information from October 1 – December 31.
Twenty of the requests involved holdings in the GCA Collection. Of particular note are
queries we received from The Garden Conservancy; a blogger requesting historic images
of porches; The Trustees of Reservations seeking images of a garden in New Bedford,
Mass. that it has recently acquired; a researcher putting together an application for the
Connecticut State Register of Historic Places; an author seeking images for a book to be
published by Rizzoli; The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts requesting images for
an upcoming exhibition and accompanying catalog; and a GCA member working on a
history of her garden club.
In addition, AAG staff handled a number of inquiries from GCA members and GHD
Reps, many of them asking questions about the garden documentation process and the
AAG Digital Submission Policy. Other requests came from GCA members writing
articles for the GCA Bulletin or their club newsletters; putting together presentations,
reports, award nominations or exhibits for their clubs or GCA Headquarters; compiling
histories of their clubs; asking about select gardens in the GCA Collection; following up
on Mystery Gardens; needing help with searching SIRIS; making sure that a public space
is eligible for inclusion in the AAG; or requesting AAG brochures for workshops or lists
of gardens in their area that are included in AAG.
Don’t ever hesitate to contact us with any questions (including whether a particular
garden might be a good candidate for documentation) or requests for brochures or
geographic lists of gardens in the AAG, etc.--we are always happy to help out whenever
we can.
This past quarter, AAG and/or GHD-related citations were made in the following articles:
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The Rosita Trinca Garden in Greenwich, Conn. (AAG Garden #CT703) is cited
on the website of the garden’s designer, Oehme Van Sweden:
http://ovsla.com/_trinca_smithsonian/
Sun House in New Canaan, Conn. (AAG Garden #CT081) (formerly owned by
Richardson Wright, editor of House and Garden Magazine in the 1930s and 40s)
was featured in the Nov. 18 edition of New Canaan News Online as being
documented for the GCA Collection at AAG:
http://www.newcanaannewsonline.com/default/article/New-Canaan-gardendocumented-for-posterity-4990822.php
We will be sure to alert you to any other publications or online mentions (that we are
aware of) that refer to or use images from the GCA Collection. Thank you for letting us
know of any you come across as well—it is a huge help as we don’t always know
(despite our best efforts) where GCA Collection images will appear. Please remind your
clubs to let us know if they wish to use any AAG images in lectures, newsletters,
exhibits, etc. This enables us to track how the collection is being used and by whom
which helps to justify our operation to Smithsonian management.
Outreach
Kelly was a presenter at the “Tech Tools for Archives” session at the Mid-Atlantic
Regional Archives Conference (MARAC) meeting in Philadelphia in November. Her
presentation focused on AAG’s use of social media to enlist the public’s help with
‘tagging’ garden images and identifying Mystery Gardens.
Smithsonian Gardens hosted an activity for a Smithsonian Associates program in
September highlighting “Jazz in the Garden.” Over 500 people attended! Participants made
glow in the dark “lanterns” (mason jars) to highlight the addition of light in gardens during
this era. Another part of the program focused on glass lantern slides from the Gatsby era.
Cindy joined Dr. Thomas Mickey
in a presentation he gave for The
Smithsonian Associates in
November on his newly released
book, America’s Romance with the
English Garden. Dr. Mickey was a
former Enid A. Haupt Fellow in
Horticulture at Smithsonian
Gardens and conducted some of his
research at AAG.
Members of the Tuckahoe (VA) GC visited AAG on October 23 for a tour of the archives
and a presentation on the operations here.
GCA Garden Submission Statistics for October – December 2013
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Thank you for the garden submissions that you send to us throughout the year for the
GCA Collection. Remember, you don’t have to wait for a GHD meeting to submit
documentation to AAG, but you should hang onto a submission if you want to present it
at a GHD meeting. We’re grateful to each and every GCA volunteer for the time, effort,
and dedication that goes into documenting the gardens that are submitted to the AAG.
Each submission adds to the GCA Collection and captures today’s garden history for
future generations.
This past quarter, AAG received a bumper crop of submissions! The following
submissions came from these GCA Zones:
Zone I: 2 gardens
Zone II: -Zone III: 3 gardens
Zone IV: 2 gardens; 8 Mystery Gardens solved
Zone V: 4 gardens
Zone VI: -Zone VII: 2 gardens
Zone VIII: 1 garden
Zone IX: -Zone X: 3 gardens
Zone XI: 1 garden
Zone XII: 1 garden
A special thank you to those clubs that documented gardens for the GCA Collection this
past quarter…
Zone I: Cambridge Plant & GC; Chestnut Hill GC
Zone III: Fort Orange GC; Millbrook GC; North Country GC of Long Island
Zone IV: Short Hills GC; GC of Trenton;
Mystery Gardens: GC of the Oranges; Short Hills GC
Zone V: Carrie T. Watson GC; GC of Philadelphia
Zone VII: French Broad River GC
Zone VIII: GC of Palm Beach
Zone X: Akron GC; Bay City GC; Indianapolis GC
Zone XI: Cedar Rapids GC
Zone XII: GC of Honolulu
Looking ahead to the next quarter, January – March 2014
1. Kelly and Joyce will participate in a panel presentation and discussion on ‘lesser known’
collections at the Smithsonian for the Smithsonian Leadership Development Program,
an initiative developed to cultivate the next generation of leaders at the Smithsonian.
2. AAG will host a Master of Library Science student from the University of Maryland for
a 120-hour field study in archival processing and cataloging.
3. A new Enid A. Haupt Fellow in Horticulture will be joining Smithsonian Gardens.
4. AAG staff continues to work with researchers, address reference requests, and process
incoming reproduction orders and publication requests.
5. Kelly continues to catalog GCA Collection submissions into SIRIS.
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