Early American Gardens: American Seed Catalogs from Smithsonian Institution Libraries

How this blog works

President John Adams declared, “History is not the Province of the Ladies.” Oh well, I'll give it a try. This blog offers both Garden History & Garden Inspiration. Garden History focuses mostly on the history of American gardens from the 1600s through the 1800s. Garden Inspiration illustrates how people have carried historical garden design & components into today. It is here to give readers some ideas for their own gardens. I do not offer complete image credit lines or footnotes, as my goal is to entice blog visitors to begin researching for themselves. I do try to indicate where a photographic image originated. (Graded enough papers as a TA to know that some undergrads are tempted to borrow.)

About this blog --

This blog will focus on gardens in America's colonial Atlantic coast & early republic. I will try to explore what primary sources reveal was actually in these gardens; when various garden components were noted; & what people were doing in these gardens & why.

How people chose to shape & use the land around them is complex. The process becomes symbolic as well as practical, as they integrate their memories, history, legends, & religious beliefs into a personal landscape. That symbolic landscape must also meet immediate sustenance, income, social, political, & religious needs. How a landowner envisions, designs, & maintains his property differs from individual to individual.

While I am interested in most anecdotal descriptions of famous gardens, I am less than impressed when one or two garden accounts get translated into a general description of all gardens during the period.

History, especially garden history, is certainly not a science. Garden history is about a tug of war between man & nature. When man gets to the point that he can produce enough to sustain his family off the land, he begins to convert some of his land into art -- a garden.

History is not the absolute truth. It is constantly changing as new evidence & new interpretations flash into view. As those looking at history peel away the tired, old suppositions, they add new (but soon to grow old) assumptions of their own.

History reflects not just the prejudices of the period under study, but also the biases of those studying it. Since each person who focuses on a particular period of garden history brings a different goal & perspective to the task, historians often interpret the same period of garden history in vastly different ways.

History before 1800 is often skewed; because only the few, the powerful, and the wealthy kept written records of their plans and the events taking place in their gardens. And yet, gardens change & take on different purposes & designs, because of the everyday actions of the nameless many who toil to give them the form & energy to evolve.

My Obsession with Primary Sources

This blog will use as much original evidence as possible to allow the reader to draw conclusions.
Primary sources are documents & artifacts created during the time being studied or shortly after by a participant as a memoir.

Primary sources can give us a sense of the real differences between the past and the present; a context for the way ideas came about at a certain place in time; a realization that there are few neat linear narratives; a recognition of how our concept of the past has been shaped by people who have written about it.

Primary sources are infused with the fleeting spirit of the time in which they were created. First-hand accounts bring a human voice to history, but they surely do not speak for themselves, they must be interpreted.

Primary sources force us to ask what those who created these surviving records must have believed or desired or deemed valuable in order to understand their ideas & actions.

Primary sources urge us to question the historical conclusions of others.

For a study of early America gardens, surviving manuscripts & books, letters, maps, diaries, & journals; ship logs; court, church & land records; & artifacts such as paintings, portraits & archaelogical finds, are the original evidence needed to compile good garden history.

Good garden history results from the examination of countless primary sources to reach a general conclusion about a time period or event. Good garden history is not determining a conclusion in advance & then picking only those sources which support that foregone interpretation.

The "least-best" theory of collecting the least amount of the best evidence to construct a convincing argument about an issue may be expedient in mathematics, but it does not work well in any serious study of garden history. Without gathering a hefty quantity of primary source evidence, how can the garden historian determine which is the best evidence?

Good garden history is not based on one or two anecdotal incidents or descriptions manipulated into a generalized conclusion about the whole.
In this blog we will be looking at snippets of garden history. Exploring anecdotal incidents & individual gardens may be fun; but they are not good history, until they are woven into the whole.

The purpose of sharing art in the context of history on this blog is to promote knowledge of & interest in art. All a blog can do is present images. An image simply cannot replace seeing an art object in person, in context. The 3rd dimension is missing in an image, as is the emotional experience of confronting a work just as its creator did. If you can see a work in person, do. The difference between an image & a painting can take your breath away.

Just my opinion on museums, libraries, & historic sites

For years before I had to rely on my computer to read text or travel from place to place, I longed for a way to see images of paintings from various artists side by side to compare & contrast their works, as they changed over time & with the works of other artists. Those old back-lit slide boxes just didn't do it for me.

Using the jpegs allowed me to do this on my large-screen computer with ease. I could group the slides in any way I wanted to study, compare, & contrast them. Those computer images became my uber museum, nothing like seeing gardens & paintings in person, but infinitely better than not seeing them at all.

And, of course, now I realize more than ever before, that there are many people who cannot and do not go to museums, historic sites, & libraries for any number of reasons. They might be handicapped, intimidated, confined to their homes, or simply working hard to maintain their families without enough extra money to travel.

For many, a computer at home or at a local library is their only access to art & history.

Most historic sites, historical societies, museums, & libraries are incorporated as non-profit organizations which exist to collect, preserve, and study America's history & to share it with others.

They do not exist to make a profit by limiting access only to those who can afford to pay or to those who have the luxury of being able to travel & to walk.

Most do charge admissions, fees, & sell items to make money in order to research & to maintain their property & expand their collections in order to present education programs & websites.

Saturday, July 2, 2011

American Seed Catalogs from Smithsonian Institution Libraries