About Community of Gardens
Growing garden history through your images, stories, & exhibits
Welcome to Community of Gardens, a digital archive hosted by Smithsonian Gardens in partnership with our Archives of American Gardens and created by YOU. By contributing images, videos, and stories to this website, your participation will help others to better understand the meaning and value of gardens to American life – today and in the future. Community of Gardens is the Smithsonian’s digital home for sharing and preserving the stories of gardens and the gardeners who make them grow.
Random Gardens
Breeze Hill
Situated on two and a half acres, the Breeze Hill estate in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania was home to J. Horace McFarland (1859-1948), an avid gardener, leading proponent of the City Beautiful Movement,…
Miss Bloomers Butterfly Garden
I started gardening about thirty-five years ago when my boys were very young. I was a stay-at-home mom and we had bought a new tract home with no landscaping in the backyard. Gardening became a great…
An Unusual Leadership Style
On an early Monday autumn morning, with leaves changing colors and dropping across the city of New Haven, I found myself driving through The Hill neighborhood in the Urban Resources Initiative (URI)…
Featured Garden
Portland Japanese Garden
We prepared for rain when we visited Portland, Oregon because the average annual rainfall is 36 inches. Therefore we were not deterred from visiting the Portland Japanese Garden in February. We were…