The Arboretum Through Time
Historical Landscape Images
About the image collection
The Arboretum's Visual Resources
Begun in the 1880s as an adjunct to the Arboretum's living, library, and herbarium collections, today our visual resources include 50,000 items. The library curates the 35,000 images that make up the photographic archives. Black-and-white and color prints, 35mm slides, and their predecessors, lantern slides, document individual specimens growing on our grounds as well as these same taxa growing in their native habitats. The plant collectors and their expeditions are also well represented along with the people, events, and customs of these exotic landscapes. Historical photographs of other plant collections, private gardens, and parks located throughout the world rounds out the collection.
Views of Our Grounds: Images of the Arboretum's Landscape
The pre-2000 images shown on the Arboretum's Landscape webpages are part of a collection of 1,463 historic photographs. Rather than recording specimen trees, these images reflect the overall look of the Arboretum: its hilltops, valleys, distant vistas, and distinct plant groupings such as the oak, lilac, rhododendron, and conifer collections. Also included are studies of our buildings, stonewalls, ornamental iron gates, and roads and paths.
All of the archival images may be seen by accessing Harvard's Visual Resources Catalog on the Harvard Library website and clicking on VIA, found under Other Catalogs.
Search Tips
To capture the largest number of our landscape views and their records on VIA's search screen, use the keywords Living Collections with the term Anywhere, and in the limit-to-holdings-of box select Arnold Arboretum/Horticulture Library (Jamaica Plain).
Entering additional keywords can narrow the number of results. Some possibilities are:
- The names of specific collections, such as cherry, rhododendron, or willow
- Generic terms for landscape features, such as brook, gate, hill, or road
- Broad terms, such as conifers, shrubs, trees, or vines
- Botanical names of genera, such as Abies, Betula, Rhododendron, or of species, Abies alba, Betula ermanii, Rhododendron viscosum
- The common names of specific plants, such as serviceberry, dawn redwood, pinkshell azalea
- The name of a photographer, such as Thomas E. Marr, Donald Wyman, Herbert Wendell Gleason, or Pamela Bruns
Photographers
View a list of the photographers represented in this collection.