General files contains materials pertaining to the origins and activities of the Sarah P. Duke Gardens including planting plans, calendars, correspondence, feasibility studies, annual reports, a planting card catalog, and publicity. Also in the collection is a VHS videocassette from 1996 "A Capital Campaign for the Center for the Duke Gardens," featuring Ted Koppel, and a DVD from 2004, "Crown Jewel of Duke University." The William Louis Culberson papers series contains administrative records pertaining to his directorship of the Sarah P. Duke Gardens from 1978-1998. Culberson was also Hugo L. Blomquist Professor of Botany and Chairman of the Department of Botany at Duke University. Also included are the records of Richard Fillmore, Assistant Director of the Gardens and "Horticulturalist in Charge." A further series of Garden Director Larry T. Daniels' papers is also part of the collection. These materials range in date from 1926-2012 and include correspondence, reports, donor material, personnel files, newspaper and magazine clippings, plans and drawings, and material relating to the creation of the Doris Duke Center.
taken from the Sarah P. Duke Garden website http://www.hr.duke.edu/dukegardens/history.htm
Much of the Gardens is located in a valley that the planners of Duke University in the early 1920s hoped to turn into a lake, but funds were short. For once, that problem was a blessing! Consequently, the idea of a lake with elegant fountains was abandoned and the first plants at this site were made in the early 1930s, a result of the vision and enthusiasm of Dr. Frederic M. Hanes, an early member of the original faculty of the Duke Medical School.
Dr. Hanes possessed a special love for gardening and was determined to convert the debris-filled ravine, by which he walked daily, into a garden of his favorite flower, the iris. He persuaded his friend, Sarah P. Duke, widow of one of the University's founders, Benjamin N. Duke, to give $20,000 to finance a garden that would bear her name.
In 1935, more than 100 flower beds (in the area which would become today's South Lawn) were in glorious bloom with 40,000 irises, 25,000 daffodils, 10,000 small bulbs, and assorted annuals, all of which were washed away in heavy summer rains and the flooding stream. By the time of Sarah P. Duke's death in 1936, the original gardens were destroyed. Dr. Hanes convinced her daughter, Mary Duke Biddle, to construct a new garden on higher ground, as a fitting memorial to her mother. Ellen Shipman (1869-1950), a pioneer in American landscape design, was selected to the plans for both the construction and the plantings for the new gardens.
Duke Gardens is considered Shipman's greatest work and a national architectural treasure, most of the some 650 other gardens she designed having long since disappeared.
The Sarah P. Duke Gardens today consists of four major parts: the original Terraces and their immediate surroundings, the H.L. Blomquist Garden of Native Plants (a representation of the flora of the southeastern United States), and the Culberson Asiatic Arboretum (devoted to plants of eastern Asia). There are five miles of allées, walks, and pathways throughout the Doris Duke Center and surrounding gardens.
Administratively, the Gardens are currently (2000) part of Facilities Management.
Processed by Sherrie Bowser, November 2006; Updated by Joshua Larkin Rowley, October 2008; Updated by Matthew Schaefer, October 2013
Encoded by Sherrie Bowser, January 2007
Updated by Sherrie Bowser, June 2007
Updated by Joshua Larkin Rowley, October 2008
Updated by Matthew Schaefer, October 2013
Accessions 76-182, A91-99, A97-67, A99-1, A99-18, UA2006-0056, UA2013-0032 were merged into one collection, described in this finding aid.
