Dumbarton Oaks: A Guide to the Gardens is a historically significant document, as it is one of four texts that trace the history of the gardens through the twentieth century. The guide was originally published in 1968, one year before the death of Mildred Bliss. Bliss had continued to alter the gardens after designer Beatrix Farrand’s retirement in the 1940s. With Bliss’s death in 1969, the gardens were effectively “finished” (even though time will continue to transform them indefinitely). The guide is, thus, the text most representative of the gardens at the close of nearly a half-century of creative activity.