The Garden Club of America Collection - Alice Lockwood's Lecture American Gardens of the Southern States

What do the gardens of Mount Vernon, Middleton Place, and the University of Virginia have in common? They are all featured in Alice Lockwood’s 1935 lecture titled “Southern Gardens” which describes historic gardens of Maryland, Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and Louisiana in detail. Each garden mentioned corresponds to a hand-painted glass lantern slide in The Garden Club of America Collection at the Archives of American Gardens. Help us reconstruct this traveling garden history lecture! Lockwood based the “Southern Gardens” lecture on her work as author and editor of a seminal two-volume publication (1931 and 1934), “Gardens of Colony and State: Gardens and Gardeners of the American Colonies and of the Republic before 1840.” Lockwood paired this traveling lecture with -painted glass lantern slides to educate other members of The Garden Club of America across the country about historic gardens of America. Such garden club lectures, largely written by women, helped shape national policies for the stewardship of America’s cultural and natural resources.