NCSU Libraries Focus Online

Volume 26 number 2 - Winter 2006

The Beauty of Vegetables

By Anna Dahlstein, External Relations

The NCSU Libraries has been providing quality programming on historical and cultural topics of great interest to the wider public. An upcoming traveling exhibition from the Smithsonian will be of particular interest to avocational gardeners as well as students and faculty in the university’s Department of Horticultural Science.

Feast Your Eyes: The Unexpected Beauty of Vegetable Gardens traces the visual appeal of vegetable gardens across centuries, continents, and cultures, from the floating gardens of the Aztecs and the highly manicured potagers of Louis XIV’s Versailles to the emergence of World War II victory gardens in America. The exhibition will be at the D. H. Hill Library from February 4 through April 2, 2006, and then continue on a national tour through 2007. As always, it will be free and open to the public.

Centuries ago, vegetable gardens were designed to be both productive and pleasing to the eye. In the ensuing years, vegetable gardens were perceived as so unappealing that they had to be banished from the formal landscape. Today, vegetable gardens are making a startling comeback, seen as a source of not only food but also beauty. Feast Your Eyes brings together images from the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Gardens (AAG), as well as images and documents from other museums and repositories, to chart the history of the vegetables’ exclusion from ornamental gardens to their surprising comeback during the past twenty years.