EXHIBITION AVAILABLE FOR RENTAL
The World in a Garden is a new traveling exhibition produced by
the Botanic Garden of Smith College.
This exhibit explores ways botanic gardens since the early Renaissance
have endeavored to represent our increasing awareness of the plant life
of other continents and climatic regions. Stunning images from the rich
collection of botanical works in the Smith College Mortimer Rare Book
Room and the National Geographic image collection showcase how
botanists and botanical artists have sought to describe and illustrate the
diversity of the known plant world in an age of constant exploration and
discovery.
See the exhibit online at
www.smith.edu/garden/exhibits/worldinagarden
In the summer of 1947, when future Smith College Professor of Biology John
Burk was eleven years old, he read an article in National Geographic Magazine,
entitled “The World in Your Garden,” featuring paintings of familiar garden plants
growing in their native regions around the world. At this time the United Nations
was in its infancy, and this article illustrated that, despite the recent carnage or
World War II, plants had been living together peacefully in our gardens all along.
“The World in Your Garden” became a part of Professor Burk’s botanical
subconscious, and he recalled it at once when he saw his first bulb show in the
Lyman Plant House at Smith College in the spring of 1962. Here in a single
greenhouse were crocuses, snowdrops, and fritillaries from Alpine meadows,
hyacinths from the shores of the Mediterranean, and tulips from Turkey. The
sight of all these plants originating from distant regions, assembled and thriving
together at winter’s end, seemed extraordinary to him then, as it still does today.
The beautifully illustrated old botanical texts found in Smith College’s Mortimer
Rare Book Room provided further inspiration for this exhibition. An essential
resource for teaching, particularly in discussions of the