We had a nice visit last week with Fionuala McGlinchey-Monsted, the newly elected chair of the library committee of the New Orleans Town Gardeners. Fionuala replaces long-serving chair, Ruthie Frierson. Thank you Ruthie for all your help in strengthening the library's holdings.
The Garden Library of the New Orleans Town Gardeners, a collection of the Southeastern Architectural Archive, has extensive holdings of published works dealing with gardens, gardening, and related subjects. The library contains well over 1,000 volumes representing approximately 800 titles. Founded in 1983, and given to Tulane in 1986, the library is a project of the New Orleans Town Gardeners, a New Orleans garden club affiliated with the Garden Club of America. The library has its own dedicated space within the archive's reading room.
The Garden Library is open to the public by appointment during normal SEAA hours, and is a great resource for general information on gardening and plants, but is also useful for more in-depth scholarly research. Areas of special interest include gardening of the southern United States, garden design and landscaping, and books by and about women in gardening. Of note are the handwritten gardening journals of Genevieve Munson Trimble, documenting her Afton Villa gardens in St. Francisville, Louisiana.
Please see our webpage for the library, which includes a search box to help locate items specifically in the Garden Library's holdings. You might also want to use the search tools on the Howard-Tilton Memorial Library's homepage, which will give you items in the Garden Library, as well as books, journals, and other materials on gardening and botanical subjects in other Tulane collections. The Louisiana Research Collection is the main source for published material on Louisiana gardens and gardening at Tulane.
