All posts by Grace Costantino

Recent reports indicate that the number of women-owned businesses have increased by 54% in the last fifteen years. But while we may be seeing a rise in the number and cultural acceptance of women-owned businesses today, this was not always the case.

Today, commercial agriculture is a multi-trillion dollar global industry, while the global gardening industry, which has maintained an annual market growth of 3% since 2007, is predicted to be worth $220 billion globally by 2016.

In celebration of our Garden Stories event, we’ve released some of our seed catalogs for transcription as part of our Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)-funded Purposeful Gaming project. Seed catalogs are notoriously difficult subjects for Optical Character Recognition software (OCR) to parse (which produces searchable text files of digitized images), so searching the text of online vintage seed catalogs is often problematic.

Friday, March 20, 2015, we celebrated the March equinox (and, incidentally, a total solar eclipse!), when the sun appears to cross the celestial equator heading northward. In the northern hemisphere, this is also known as the vernal equinox. For those in the southern hemisphere, it means that autumn is upon them, and cold days are ahead. But for those of us in the northern hemisphere, it means that Spring is officially here! The coming of spring is therapeutic for many – a time for new life, a break from the grayness of winter, and a signal to get the trowels, shovels, and gardening gloves out.

All this week we’re celebrating the art, history, and science of gardening with our Garden Stories event, highlighting over 14,000 seed and nursery catalogs in BHL, featuring over 2,500 art images from seed catalogs, and providing great gardening tips and resources on our blog, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr,

Our Garden Stories campaign is just under a week away! We’re excited to share fantastic gardening information, history, art, and tips with you March 23-27, 2015. And don’t forget our TwitterChat this Friday, March 20, from 1-2pm EST! If you have gardening questions, send them our way with the hashtag #BHLinbloom. Don’t miss out!

We thought we’d give you a taste of the fascinating history and stories you can expect next week by featuring a post on one of the individuals that helped shape the gardening industry in America: Bernard M’Mahon.

It’s no surprise that the natural history books and archives available in the BHL collection are of vital importance to scientists and modern scientific research.