Archives of American Gardens
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Archives of American Gardens Annual Report for 2010 for the Garden Club of America’s Garden History and Design Committee Smithsonian Institution Staff ● Barbara Faust, Associate Director, Smithsonian Gardens (SG), Office of Facilities Management and Reliability (OFMR) ● Cindy Brown, Manager, Horticulture Collections Management and Education branch (HCME) ● Paula Healy } Museum Specialist, Horticulture Collections Management and ● Joyce Connolly } Education branch (HCME) ● 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 Horticulture Services Division of the Smithsonian Institution. 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. Notable Highlights • Smithsonian Gardens (SG) hired Cindy Brown as its new Horticulture Collections Management and Education Manager! In addition to overseeing AAG’s operations, Cindy is establishing a comprehensive educational program for SG that will provide learning opportunities that highlight Smithsonian Gardens as well as AAG holdings. • Our Smithsonian unit is now called Smithsonian Gardens; this name replaces our former title, Horticulture Services Division. This name is much more easily recognizable to the public as well as to the Smithsonian community and will help us ‘brand’ our operational and programming activities. • It has been two years since AAG’s Digital Submission Policy was launched. Of the 41 submissions we received during in 2010, 17 (or approximately 40%) have included digital images. We certainly expect to see more digital images and fewer 35mm slides as time goes on. 1 GCA Collection Submission Statistics for 2010 • 41 gardens were accessioned into the GCA Collection in 2010. The list of gardens is appended at the end of this report. • Thank you for the garden submissions that you send to us throughout the year for the GCA Collection. 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 overall collection and captures today’s history of a garden for future generations. Before and after shots of Middlegate Japanese Gardens in Pass Christian, Mississippi. Middlegate was an extensive 2010 submission documenting the history of a garden that was completely destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Cataloging Statistics • 28 of the 41 gardens accessioned in 2010 have been cataloged. Representative images of each garden are available online in the SIRIS database at www.siris.si.edu. • See the “Recent Acquisitions” web pages at http://www.gardens.si.edu/horticulture/res_ed/AAG/recentacquisitions201 0.htm for a list of all the submissions to the GCA Collection added in 2010. As soon as a garden is cataloged into SIRIS, its entry on the Recent Acquisitions page goes live and links directly to corresponding catalog entries and images in SIRIS. Please be sure to check it out and alert your clubs to this helpful resource! 2 GHD Committee Meetings GHD Committee Spring Meeting in Jacksonville, FL, March 22-23 Haskell Gardens, just one of many gardens visited during the Spring Meeting. This garden is included in the GCA Collection at AAG. • Very special thanks to Joan Haskell for the extensive local arrangements she made for the Spring Meeting. The roster of garden tours she arranged for us was fantastic as were the garden descriptions she assembled beforehand! The tour of her home’s sculpture garden and art collection given by her husband Preston was a memorable highlight as was the wonderful boat ride up the St. Johns River. The tours given by garden designers Judy Drake and Gerry Crouch of gardens they had designed as well as tours of the Jacksonville Zoo and Cummer Museum were a rare treat as well. • Discussion topics at the meeting included the AAG Digital Submission Policy, the AAG/GHD Internship, types of gardens to document for the GCA Collection, and the possible goal of having every GCA club document a garden in honor of GCA’s upcoming centennial. GHD Committee Meeting at GCA Headquarters, NYC, June 7-8 • This had to be the most bittersweet meeting ever! GHD Committee members and Smithsonian staff offered a heartfelt thank you to outgoing Chair Marilyn Brumder for her many years of service on the GHD Committee. It has been a pleasure working with Marilyn--her guidance and encouragement have contributed so much to the GCA Collection. We are fortunate to be in excellent hands with her successor, Barbara Kehoe. • Special thanks to Zone XII Rep, Carolyn Bennett, for all her work in arranging a number of garden tours including the High Line in lower Manhattan. • A highlight of the meeting included an evening lecture by Charles Birnbaum of The Cultural Landscape Foundation on the factors that go into making a landscape significant. 3 GHD Committee Fall Meeting in Washington, DC , September 29-October 1 GHD Committee members and Smithsonian staff on the terrace of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. The U.S. Capitol appears in the background. • The meeting started off with a PowerPoint presentation by AAG staff that went over the contents of the Procedures Manual and Procedures Manual Appendix. • This meeting featured AAG’s first hands-on workshop to ‘document’ a garden. Committee members were split into three teams and each was assigned a nearby garden to document. Each GHD Rep had a workbook that featured a number of exercises that broke the garden documentation process into its component parts and posed good/better/best options. • The opportunity for all the Reps to ask questions during the exercise and offer suggestions about their experiences with regard to documenting gardens resulted in an invaluable exercise. • Very special thanks to Zone VI Rep Corbin Harwood for arranging tours of so many handsome gardens in D.C. and Chevy Chase for the meeting attendees and for compiling exceedingly helpful descriptions of the gardens ahead of time. Interns, Fellow and Volunteers AAG/GCA Garden History and Design Interns • AAG was most fortunate to have two interns funded by the GCA’s Garden History and Design Internship in 2010! The GCA scholarship supplements a stipend that is awarded by Smithsonian Gardens; both help to attract strong candidates. 4 • Carolyn Chesarino (NC State & UNC at Chapel Hill--Public History program) and Kate Fox (Bard Graduate Center—Decorative Arts and Design History program), each joined AAG in late May for a ten-week internship. Both Carolyn and Kate worked to make portions of the GCA Collection readily accessible for research use. Among the projects they worked on, they digitized hundreds of glass lantern slides from the GCA Collection (which will supplant the lower resolution scans currently on SIRIS) and wrote a number of blogs based on the AAG collections. They accomplished an incredible AAG/GHD Intern Kate Fox retrieving amount of work during their images from the GCA Collection in the tenure with us! cool storage vault. • Special thanks go to the GCA Scholarship Committee and GHD Reps who made a careful review of the applicants and for all of their support. Field Study Intern • Caitlin DeMarco, a graduate student in the Library Science Program at the University of Maryland, completed a 120-hour practicum in the Archives of class credit. She inventoried the entire W. Atlee Burpee & Company Collection (over 350 boxes), rehoused portions of the collection, and updated the existing finding aid. Enid A. Haupt Fellowship in Horticulture • SG’s 2010 Haupt Fellow, Veronica Conkling, finished a 12-month fellowship in December. She studied SG’s extensive collection of antique bouquet holders that were donated by Frances Jones Poetker in 1987. Veronica’s Master of Arts degree in the History of Decorative Arts and Design from the joint Parson’s School of Design/ Smithsonian Associates program was invaluable when it came to identifying the material components of the holders and interpreting their design significance. Bouquet holder from FJP Collection • Information about the Haupt Fellowship can be found at www.gardens.si.edu/horticulture/res_ed/intern/fellow.htm . 5 AAG Volunteers • AAG’s premier volunteer, Nancy Sahli, celebrated her 11th anniversary with us in May. Over the years, she has cataloged thousands of images into SIRIS. • Marca Woodhams, AAG’s volunteer of five years, is the former librarian of the Smithsonian’s Horticulture Library and instituted the earliest collections management policies for the AAG which have successfully guided its operations for more than twenty years. Her knowledge of all things Smithsonian (especially the AAG and the Smithsonian gardens) is vast; she is the go-to person when AAG staff have a question about what took place in the AAG in the past. • Judith Lesser is an owner of a CSA farm in Maryland and an antique business. She assists with the cataloging of new garden submissions. • Lynn Benich is a home gardener on Capitol Hill and a former librarian who also assists with the cataloging of new garden submissions. AAG Contractor • Anna Barker, a former AAG intern, has been contracting with AAG on a part- time basis to assist with AAG’s Digital Asset Management System (DAMS), digitizing, cataloging and other archival tasks. Anna’s excellent work has enabled AAG to map out an effective work flow for ingesting its digital images into the Smithsonian’s Digital Asset Management System (DAMS).