Georgia, Susan Hitchcock, National Park Service discussed on The Garden Question
Automatic TRANSCRIPT
I'm very proud of it. It all started back with this program called the Georgia historic landscape initiative. That's a formal, isn't it? Anyway, that gosh, almost 20 years ago, 'cause we're coming up on 2022. I don't even know how that's possible. Back 2002. Under the direction of my mentor and a landscape architect, James our catharine, sadly, he's now deceased, and Susan Hitchcock of the National Park Service. Under their direction, a collaboration came together, the historic preservation division of the state office in Georgia, the garden called the Georgia, which is great group of women, and the National Park Service and the Cherokee garden library of the Atlanta history center. And we started this initiative, what we wanted to do was document doing inventory of all of Georgia's historic gardens. That was the plan, which is a kind of a big goal. I don't know what we were thinking, but we're all low crises. So we thought, oh, let's take this on. We were trying to figure out, how do we get started? Because Georgia has what a 159 counties is that right, Craig? That's correct. We are a big, long, wide, complicated state. We're like, how do we even begin on this? We thought for phase one, we'd use this old book called garden history of Georgia, 1733 to 1933. This work was published in 1933, but documents aren't all the way back to your forebears down the Savannah river area in 1733. To 1933, a group of students and volunteers mostly guarding club of Georgia volunteers spent years working on finding out what happened to these gardens that were listed in this book. So when we finished phase one, my co author, Marianne Edie, who worked for the historic preservation division, and she was actually a Professor of mine in grad school at Georgia state university. We both really felt strongly that we wanted to make this project the initiative better known by doing a book. We got together with our friend James Lockhart, who's an amazing photographer worked also for the state office for many years, doing all those National Register nomination photographs..