Resources for Garden and Landscape Scholars

Dumbarton Oaks has supported garden archaeology since 1979 through scholarly activities, publications, and project grants.

This web-based research tool offers selected catalogues, glossaries, and bibliographies on Umayyad, Abbasid, Andalusian, Ottoman, Mughal, North African, and Safavid gardens from the eighth century to the present.

Access full digital facsimiles of select titles in the Rare Book Collection, relating to Byzantine, Garden and Landscape, and Pre-Columbian Studies, through this searchable resource.

Explore holdings from the Image Collections and Fieldwork Archives and the Dumbarton Oaks Archives.

A digital atlas of waterways big and small in Washington, D.C., from the eighteenth century to the present. The online atlas provides a clear sense of the relationship in scale between a city block and the course of an entire river, and facilitates visualizing changes over time in layers or phases.

The Ephemera Collection consists of a variety of materials related to the Byzantine and Pre-Columbian cultures and to worldwide gardens and landscapes that provide an alternative, popular cultural perspective on the academic research fields at Dumbarton Oaks.

Since the mid-1990s, Dumbarton Oaks has developed research on East Asian landscape cultures through library collections, public lectures, scholarly meetings, and publications as part of its commitment to situate garden and landscape studies in a broader domain of cultural and visual studies

In 2011, the Garden and Landscape Studies program at Dumbarton Oaks conducted a survey of its former fellows and grant recipients. The aim of this initiative was to evaluate the impact of this program on their careers and academic development in order to assess its broader role in shaping the field of garden and landscape studies over the first forty years of this program’s history.

The Garden Archives makes publicly available over six thousand individual pieces of correspondence, drawings, and photographs. These original materials have been supplemented by histories of the garden areas, biographies of individuals and firms, and sections on contemporary art installations.