It’s gardening season!
These catalogs from the W. Atlee Burpee & Co., 1893 Special Advertisement of Burpee’s Seeds (1893), are examples of the “silent salesman” as the company referred to its catalog.
W. Atlee Burpee (1858–1915) brought the seed catalog into the modern age, even while staunchly resisting inventions such as the automobile, electric light, and telephone. By 1901, Burpee was using a fully mechanized photoengraving process for his catalogs. When the firm switched to photography, hand-drawn illustrations disappeared from seed catalogs in just a few years.
Learn more about gardening in our current exhibit, Cultivating America’s Gardens. The exhibit runs through August 2018, and our last rotation of items just went in this week!
A beautiful example of a copperplate initial letter from Denis Dodart’s Memoires pour servir a l’histoire des plantes, 1676, just digitized! Unusually for an initial letter, it’s signed by its creator Sebastien Le Clerc. He was appointed “graveur du roi” to Louis XIV and was forbidden from working for others. In this small initial is featured a crowned botanist discussing the properties of plants with a philosopher in the royal garden. Learn more about the book here https://s.si.edu/2IDv0R3 and check it out for yourself on the Internet Archive! https://archive.org/details/meymoirespourse00doda
What’s in a name? If you work in a library, for sure you know the answer to this is sometimes a whole lot of confusion. Read one cataloger’s discoveries about naturalist Mrs. Jane C. Loudon (nee Webb), author of several recently digitized books on gardening from our stacks (and other BHL members). This includes The ladies’ flower-garden of ornamental annuals (1840) available in @biodivlibrary and source for these lovely botanical illustrations.
Frigid arctic blast got you down?
Visit our Image Gallery’s collection of Seed and Nursery Catalogs and get lost in lovingly illustrated catalogs promising spring is just around the corner!
Visit our exhibit, Cultivating America’s Gardens for more about the role catalogs played in the history of gardening in America.
Turkey may be the center of most Thanksgiving tables, but we think vegetables really make the meal—especially if they are homegrown!
These are some varieties featured in Home vegetable gardening from A to Z (1918) by Adolph Kruhm. It was written to guide the millions of new gardeners brought about by the patriotic call to create Victory Gardens shortly after the United States’ entry into World War I.
Learn more about Victory Gardens and their role within the history of
gardening in America with Cultivating America’s Gardens, our
exhibit in the @amhistorymuseum and on our website, library.si.edu
Happy Thanksgiving!
7 days, 7 themes, 7 hashtags! Today kicks off Museum Week, and since we’re arguably the largest museum library in the world, we’re playing along.
The first theme is Food, which is a perfect entrée (ahem) into one chapter of our current exhibition with Smithsonian Gardens, Cultivating America’s Gardens. Namely, Gardening for the Common Good–our section all about Victory Gardens and the encouragement of Americans to plant vegetable gardens for better food security during the First, and later Second, World War. The images above are from a publication by the National War Garden Commission, The war garden victorious by Charles Lathrop Pack (1919) that we digitized for the exhibition. Pack was the organizer of the War Garden Commission.
pictorial.jezebel.com
Please Appreciate This Magnificent Turn of the Century Seed Catalog Art
The Smithsonian Libraries and Smithsonian Gardens are currently hosting an exhibition, “Cultivating America’s Gardens,” which traces the cultural history of this practice as business, means of keeping body and soul together, and pleasurable hobby. It is a wonderful opportunity to appreciate the stunningly lavish art of pre-photographic seed catalogs.
Lovely coverage of our current exhibition with Smithsonian Gardens, Cultivating America’s Gardens from Jezebel! Go check it out!
Our exhibition with the Smithsonian Gardens, Cultivating America’s Gardens is now open in the @amhistorymuseum
The exhibit features objects from Smithsonian Libraries and Smithsonian Gardens, including seed catalogs like these.
We are also hosting a Garden Party on June 9th. See here for more details.
We might associate Victory Gardens with World War II, but it was actually coined in the First World War by Charles Lathrop Pack, head of the National War Garden Commission as the Great War was nearing its end. These image comes from The War Garden Victorious by Pack (1919) before the term “victory garden” came into heavy usage.
While the battles of #WWI were fought overseas, millions of American did their part to help the war effort by turning front yards, backyards, schoolyards, and vacant lots into vegetable gardens.
Victory gardens are one of the many aspects of gardening that will be featured in our upcoming exhibit, Cultivating America’s Gardens, opening next month!
Today is #WorldWar1 social media day, so do look around for some great content from museums, archives, and libraries regarding the centennial of America’s entry into World War I.
Let’s hear it for the sides!
Some delicious veggies from Home vegetable gardening from A to Z by Adolph Kruhm (1918).
All I need this weekend…
From Home vegetable gardening from A to Z by Adolph Kruhm, in the Biodiversity Heritage Library.
While National Rose Month is celebrated every June, you don’t need that as an excuse to browse roses in our seed & nursery catalog cover collection. The Biodiversity Heritage Library has a collection of cover-to-cover scanned catalogs, too. Sure, you can’t smell them here, but you can still stop and appreciate their beauty.
This cover is from Floral Treasures from The Good & Reese Co. form 1898, out of Springfield, OH.
Some of the most common flowering plants in cultivation today were once considered exotic novelties. Pictured here are geranium, zinnia, and camellia, which were all relatively new to the gardeners and botanists reached by the journal The Botanist’s Repository. at the time of publication (or at least these varieties of them were).
Its full title said it all (literally): “The botanist’s repository, for new and rare plants: containing coloured figures of such plants, as have not hitherto appeared in any similar publication; with all their essential characters, botanically arranged, after the sexual system of the celebrated Linnaeus; in English and Latin; to each description is added, a short history of the plant, as to its time of flowering, culture, native place of growth, when introduced, and by whom.”
These images are from v. 3-4 (1797) of The Botanist’s Repository, which you can find digitally in the Biodiversity Heritage Library.