The Archives of The New York Botanical Garden
With over one mile of original manuscript material, artifacts and images in its care, the Archives houses not only the operating records of the Garden but also the papers of prominent botanists, horticulturists such as Nathaniel Lord Britton, Charles Darwin, John Strong Newberry, Norman Taylor, Thomas Everett, John Torrey and Bassett Maguire as well as those of famous landscape designers such as Rosemary Verey, the Catalog of American Landscape Records in the United States, and the business records and architectural plans of the Lord and Burnham Company, premier builders of glasshouses in nineteenth and twentieth century America.
Additionally, the Archives holds the organizational records of several botanical and horticultural groups of note such as the Mycological Society of America, the North American Rock Garden Society, the Torrey Botanical Club, the Wildflower Preservation Society and the Council of Botanical and Horticultural Libraries.
Current Projects
Field Collector Notebooks Digitization
With funding for a pilot project from IMLS National Leadership Grant Program we are currently collaborating with several other major natural history institutions to digitize a selection of collectors field notebooks. The Gardens contribution to this project will focus primarily on the John Torrey archival collections as they relate to the exploration of the American West.
Torrey received the botanical specimens for identification and description of one of the earliest government sponsored scientific explorations of the west (the 1819 Long expedition). He was the first American botanist to publish plant descriptions based on the Natural System of classification, which was already widely used in Europe.
The collection holds important correspondence between Torrey and expedition leaders as well as the botanical illustrations done by the Arthur Schott, the well know American artist for the Emory Expedition of the Mexican Boundary Survey, 1849-1857 and the illustrations Torrey did for the 1853-1854 Pacific Railroad Survey.
Cuban Photographs Digitization
Recently, the Mertz Library’s Director, Susan Fraser, and Archivist, Stephen Sinon, came across a large unlabelled box in the Garden’s Archives. Inside the box was a slip of paper with the typewritten words: “Cuban, S. American, Central American and West Indian snapshots and negatives of scenery, trees, flowers.” Along with this note in the box were several dozen small envelopes filled with prints and negatives, and on the outside of the envelopes was hand-written in pencil place names in Spanish. But beyond that, there was nothing to indicate that these images had ever been cataloged or even looked at since they were boxed up at some unknown date. Garden scientist, Dr. Brian Boom, had done some research on historical images from the Archives in connection with the Garden’s 2010 exhibition The Orchid Show: Cuba in Flower, and was asked to examine the newly discovered collection. Dr. Boom determined that all the places were within Cuba. He further noted that on the reverse side of most of the prints were words hand-written in faint pencil that indicated a more specific location and/or the name of the plant or something else about the image, such as the vegetation-type or the name of the buildings or landscape being depicted. He was astonished with the number and diversity of the images from all over the island of Cuba taken at a clearly early 20th century date. These photographs are being inventoried and digitized.