Cherokee Garden Library at Atlanta History Center boasts a wealth of botanical knowledge of Georgia and her native plants. The collection comprises over 32,000 books, photographs, manuscripts, seed catalogs, and landscape drawings covering subjects including gardening, landscape design, garden history, horticulture, floral design, botanical art, cultural landscapes, natural landscapes, and plant ecology. These rare and valuable resources tell the story of horticultural and botanical history in the Southeastern United States and areas of influence throughout America, Europe, and Asia.
You’ll find all of the books below—and more!—the next time you visit our campus.
Cleaveland’s Green-wood Cemetery: A History of the Institution 1838-1864
New York: Anderson & Archer, 1866
Call No.: F129 .B7 G76 1866 Cherokee Garden Library – Historic Collection
Founded in 1838 as a rural cemetery in a time of rapid urbanization when churchyards were becoming overcrowded in cities, Green-Wood Cemetery is considered Brooklyn’s first public park. Containing 600,000 graves and over 7,000 trees within its 478 acres, Green-Wood Cemetery’s architecture, rolling hills and dales, ponds, and expansive landscape still draws visitors today.
Patrick Barry’s Barry’s Fruit Garden
New York: Orange Judd Co., 1883
Call No.: SB355 .B27 1883 Cherokee Garden Library – Historic Collection
Patrick Barry (1816–1890) was a horticulturist, author, and co-founder of Mount Hope Garden and Nurseries in Rochester, New York. Mount Hope Garden and Nurseries was a vibrant business that grew to be the largest nursery in the country in the later decades of the nineteenth century. From 1844 to 1852, Barry edited The Genessee Farmer (later The Cultivator and Country Gentleman), reaching a wide audience. He also took over Andrew Jackson Downing’s highly regarded The Gardening Magazine following Downing’s untimely death. Barry published the Treatise on the Fruit Garden in 1851, which was revised and reissued as Barry’s Fruit Garden in 1872, which went into several editions, and assisted Americans interested in the cultivation of fruit for profit or for home use.
Charles R. Baker’s Practical and Scientific Fruit Culture
Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1866
Call No.: SB355 .B3 1866 Cherokee Garden Library – Historic Collection
Charles R. Baker’s Practical and Scientific Fruit Culture is a nineteenth-century guide to the cultivation of fruit in America that includes discussions about soil amendment, fertilization, grafting, pruning, and diseases of fruit-bearing plants.
Joseph Harris’s Gardening for Young and Old: The Cultivation of Garden Vegetables in the Farm Garden
New York: Orange Judd Company, 1883
Call No.: SB321 .H3 1883 Cherokee Garden Library – Historic Collection
In 1879, Joseph Harris, a farmer in upstate New York, opened Harris Seed Co. on his 141-acre Morton Farm and issued his first seed catalog—a 44-page catalog free of charge that was distributed to 30,000 households. By the close of the 1890s, it was one of the largest seed farms in America. Harris published articles and books to share his horticultural knowledge and to expand his business. Among them is his book, Gardening for the Young and Old: The Cultivation of Garden Vegetables in the Farm Garden from 1883.
W. J. Bean’s Trees and Shrubs Hardy in the British Isles
7th Edition. Vol. 2. London: Murray, 1950-1951
Call No.: QK488 .B4 1950-1951 Cherokee Garden Library – Lawrence Collection
First published in 1914, W. J. Bean’s Trees and Shrubs Hardy in the British Isles has been the leading reference to hardy, woody plants in Britain and Ireland for the past century. William Jackson Bean (1863–1947) spent his working life at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, during a time when Western gardens were greatly enhanced by the discoveries of plant explorers working around the world. He had first-hand experience with most of the plants he wrote about through his work at Kew. Later editions of his expansive work were brought up to date by contemporary experts.
Alice Morse Earle’s Sun-Dials and Roses of Yesterday
New York: The Macmillan Company, 1902
Call No.: SB455 .E2 1903 Cherokee Garden Library – Lawrence Collection
Alice Morse Earle (1851–1911) was a prolific American author, collector, and historian who primarily wrote about customs and everyday life in colonial America. Later in life, she turned her attention to creating gardening books including Sun-Dials and Roses of Yesterday (1902).
Helena Rutherford Ely’s The Practical Flower Garden
New York; London: Macmillan Co., 1911
Call No.: SB453 .E5 1911 Cherokee Garden Library – Lawrence Collection
Helena Rutherford Ely (1868–1920) was an American author, gardener, and founding member of the Garden Club of America. Her three books, including A Woman’s Hardy Garden (1901), Another Hardy Garden Book (1905), and The Practical Flower Garden (1911), influenced American and British gardeners, encouraging them to forego Victorian formal gardens and embrace a more informal style focused around hardy perennial plants.
Donald Grant Mitchell’s Rural Studies, With Hints for Country Places
New York: C. Scribner & Co., 1867
Call No.: S521 .M662 1867 Cherokee Garden Library – Historic Collection
Donald Mitchell Grant (1822–1908) was an American essayist and novelist who frequently wrote under the pen name, Ik Marvel. One of his well-known works is Reveries of a Bachelor, or a Book of the Heart (1850), a group of sentimental essays, which was a favorite of Emily Dickinson’s. Throughout his life, he had a keen interest in agriculture and landscape gardening, which led him to produce other works, including Rural Studies, With Hints for Country Places in 1867.
Anne Pratt’s The Flowering Plants, Grasses, Sedges, and Ferns of Great Britain and Their Allies the Club Mosses, Pepperworts, and Horsetails. Vol. IV
London; New York: Frederick Warne & Co., 1889
Call No.: QK306 .P73 1889 Cherokee Garden Library – Historic Collection
Anne Pratt (1806–1893) was a well-known English botanical and ornithological illustrator and author during the Victorian age. Prolific during her lifetime, she composed more than twenty books, which she illustrated with chromolithographs (a unique method for making multi-color prints). Her greatest work is The Flowering Plants, Grasses, Sedges, and Ferns of Great Britain. . .a six-volume opus including over 1,500 species and 300 illustrations.
Richard Jefferies’s The Life of the Fields
London: Lutterworth Press, 1947
Call No.: QH81 .J444 1947 Cherokee Garden Library – Historic Collection
Richard Jefferies (1848–1887) was a prolific writer on natural history, agriculture, and rural life in late Victorian England. Among his many books is The Life of the Fields. Some of his work in the years after 1880 was in the form of essays published in journals and magazines. A number of these were collected and re-printed in books, including The Life of the Fields, first published in 1884 and reprinted subsequently.
Edith Tunis Sale and James River Garden Club’s Historic Gardens of Virginia
Richmond, VA: William Byrd Press, 1923
Call No.: F227 .J29 1923 Cherokee Garden Library – Historic Collection
Southern garden clubs, including those in Georgia, have played a key role in documenting their state’s garden histories. Historic Gardens of Virginia, published by the James River Garden Club in 1923, was the first of a landmark series of books produced by American garden clubs in the 1920s and 1930s that profiled aspects of the country’s garden history.