Garden Library

Lauxan, delineator; Bessin, engraver. Cupressus Disticha/Cyprès de la Louisiane.
Plate 1, from M. de Cubières, Simon-Louis Pierre de Cubières. Mémoire sur le cyprès de la Louisiane.
Versailles, 1809.
 

The Garden Library of the New Orleans Town Gardeners was established at Tulane University’s Southeastern Architectural Archive in 1986.  Dedicated to the study of landscape architecture, gardens and horticulture of the southeastern Gulf Region, the Garden Library has grown to a collection numbering over 1000 individual titles, with books dating from the seventeenth century to the contemporary.  

The Garden Library has an especially rich collection of published materials associated with women’s garden culture.  Its earliest imprint, Nicolas de Bonnefons’ Le Jardinier François (1664), a small duodecimo dedicated “Aux Dames” was published in Lyon by the widow-printer Catherine Housset (d. circa 1681).  The Library also retains a proto-first edition of Mary Catherine Rion’s Ladies’ Southern Florist (1860), considered the first gardening book published in the United States to be devoted to southern floriculture. The Garden Library’s copy includes Rion’s handwritten annotations and an inscription to her daughter Margaret.   Grace Matt Thompson’s A Garden Book of Old New Orleans (1947) is a personalized account of local garden practices and recommended plant lists, populated by monthly observations of her Toca Plantation garden and informed by the author’s career as proprietor of the Cottage Flower Shop.

Genevieve Munson Trimble’s recent donation of her Afton Villa gardening journals has been especially noteworthy, expanding the Garden Library’s collection into the realm of historic landscape preservation.  Her journals and supplementary reports prepared by Dr. Neil Odenwald document nearly forty years of planning and labor devoted to the restoration of Afton Villa’s extensive plantation gardens.  Trimble, considered the “First Lady of Louisiana’s Gardens,” has created a significant resource for those embarking on landscape preservation projects, as well as for those historians whose work focuses on southern landscape design and horticulture.  

The Garden Library at Tulane University’s  Southeastern Architectural Archive is open to the public Mondays-Fridays from 9-12, 1-5.  Published resources (books, pamphlets, and serials) are cataloged in Tulane University’s online catalog.

The New Orleans Town Gardeners, a local organization affiliated with the Garden Club of America, was founded in the 1950s.