I am the librarian at Lewis Ginter and like to talk and read about plants. I also enjoying researching Lewis Ginter and our founder Grace Arents. Visit me in the library and we'll talk about plants, or history, or some other fun topic.
Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden’s collection of 4,000 herbarium specimens is now registered in the Index Herbariorum, a major international registry of herbarium plant collections. This means that our collection is now among over 3,000 registered herbaria around the world, where over 350 million plant records are cataloged, available for research and a crucial record of […]
Read MoreAs you walk around our garden enjoying the beautiful plants, you might not realize that they have complicated personal lives. All those beautiful colors and structures have a purpose. Often the purpose has to do with eating and reproducing, and nothing to do with your enjoyment. According to the PBS video Plant Behaving Badly, scientists […]
Read MoreThe Botanical Book club at Lewis Ginter decided it needed a new name, a broader descriptor of our eclectic reading tastes. We are now the Nature Study Reading Society. Looking back at the titles we’ve read since 2001 (PDF), it’s obvious we have wide-ranging tastes covering plants and gardening, botany, birds, hiking, observational powers, history, […]
Read MoreHere is our third and final post in honor of American Archives Month. We’re celebrating by sharing treasures from our collection with you. One of my personal favorite items from our archives is Lewis Ginter’s passport. We do not have any personal papers or other belongings of Lewis Ginter’s, so having his 1888 passport is very special to […]
Read MoreOctober is American Archives Month and to celebrate, I’ve poked around in the Garden’s Archives to find interesting things for you. On April 16, 1987, the Garden celebrated its first Arbor Day by planting a Darlington oak (Quercus hemisphaerica ‘Darlington’). Jeannie Baliles was the honorary chairman of the celebration. Here’s a photo of her doing […]
Read MoreOctober is American Archives Month and we are sharing our treasures all month long. Sometimes you have to search for historic items, and sometimes they just fall into your hands. One day a visitor came into the Robins Visitor Center and presented us with this map and then disappeared. He didn’t leave his name or want a […]
Read MoreOn this day in 1895 On January 2, 1895, the Richmond Dispatch reported that Richmond citizens enjoyed ice skating on the first day of 1895 and were fortunate to have three locations for skating: Forest Hill lake, the city reservoir, and right here in Lakeside at Clarke’s Pond. The pond is now known as Lakeside […]
Read MoreDollhouses Return Just in Time for Dominion Energy GardenFest of Lights! There’s great joy across the land at the return of our biennial dollhouse exhibit in the Lora Robins Library at Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden. People are crazy about miniatures. Tiny chairs, tiny sinks, tiny dogs and cats and cars. What is so appealing about […]
Read MoreNewton Ancarrow had a passion for his hometown river, the James. He’d always loved boating, and took up boat-building as an adult. With two 300-horsepower Cadillac engines and fins to match, his luxury crafts were designed for the world’s richest speed boating enthusiasts. Customers included King Paul of Greece, the sheik of Qatar, the […]
Read MoreHighgrove Florilegium Comes to Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden The Prince of Wales is an organic gardener. He practices organic, sustainable methods at his comfortable country home, Highgrove House, Gloucestershire, UK. Charles made the property his home in 1980 and has created a “centre of excellence for organic farming and gardening, as well as an acknowledged […]
Read MoreThey say the Internet and e-readers will kill printed books — and libraries — but it turns out neither is true. The Garden has a thriving book group centered in the library. Every two months, a group of book lovers get together in the reading room of the Lora Robins Library and discuss the latest title on […]
Read Moreby Janet Woody, Librarian, Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden The Pocahontas Chapter of the Virginia Native Plant Society, a mission-related group that meet here at Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden, recently gave the Lora Robins Library funding to purchase books about native plants and related topics. We were able to acquire five new titles you might be interested in. […]
Read Moreby Janet Woody, Librarian, Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden Thousands of visitors enjoyed Dominion GardenFest of Lights this year, and many of those visitors stepped into the library and back to 1895 as they viewed our exhibit on the Lakeside Wheel Club. However, it is likely that only one visitor had a unique connection to the […]
Read MoreBy Janet Woody, Librarian, Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden Lewis Ginter died in 1897, at age 73, from complications of diabetes. The local newspapers of the day, The Times and The Dispatch, were filled with detailed obituaries covering his entire career and stories of his many acts of kindness and benevolence. His entire will was printed […]
Read Moreby Janet Woody, Garden Librarian, Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden Continuing from last week, here is the conclusion of Grace Arent’s biography of her Uncle Lewis Ginter published in the Appleton’s Cyclopedia of American Biography. She wrote this in 1919. The story picks up after the Panic of 1873, when Lewis Ginter’s banking enterprise failed and he […]
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