Project Showcase: Community of Gardens

29 June 2015 – editors

Images from the Community of Gardens project. Photo credit: Smithsonian Gardens

Gardens are personal. To some they are a way to grow food, to others a space of serene retreat, and to others still a background for celebrating culture and friendship. For many, they encompass a host of meanings and uses. How do we collect these ephemeral stories? How do we celebrate garden diversity?

Community of Gardens is Smithsonian Gardens’ answer to the call to preserve our vernacular garden heritage. The Horticulture Collections Management & Education department has embarked on a new initiative to crowdsource garden histories. With help from an internal Smithsonian grant, we collaborated with Curatescape to customize its Omeka-based web platform for “curating the landscape” with location-based content. Visitors to the website can contribute stories of gardens and green spaces in their own communities and explore other stories from around the country. Our goal is to create a participatory archive that enriches and adds diversity to the Archives of American Gardens collection and encourages engagement with gardens on a local, community level. In the coming months, we will introduce online exhibits and educational materials for teachers. The website uses a multimedia platform that supports images, text, audio, and video, and we welcome stories from the general public, museums, schools, universities, and public gardens. It is our hope that the project will encourage our audience to get their hands dirty and go out and unearth the everyday, untold stories in our own backyards.

~ Kate Fox is Smithsonian Gardens educator.