Do you love history, horticulture, design, and architecture? Garden history is a combination of all these subjects and more! Transcribe Alice Lockwood’s 1930s garden history lecture titled ‘Northern Gardens’ and discover historic gardens in New England, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan. Funding for the digitization of Lockwood's lecture, & its inclusion into the Transcription Center, was provided by the Smithsonian Women's Committee.
Author and garden historian Alice Lockwood compiled and edited, “Gardens of Colony and State: Gardens and Gardeners of the American Colonies and of the Republic before 1840,” a seminal publication on the history of gardens and gardening in the United States. This encyclopedic and scholarly study of early American gardens was based on photographs and other documentary materials collected by amateurs and professionals including many Garden Club of America members, landscape architect Arthur Asahel Shurcliff, architect Fiske Kimball, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Many of the gardens disappeared or seriously declined after documentation, so this historical record provides an important record of these historic sites.
Lockwood prepared lectures based on book used to educate Garden Club members including a lecture on a lecture of historic gardens in New England, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan. Such garden lectures, largely written by women, helped shape national policies for the stewardship of America’s cultural and natural resources.