Elizabeth Barlow Rogers and the Foundation for Landscape Studies (FLS) have donated her cultural landscapes reference library and slide collection to the Center for Cultural Landscapes. Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, also known as 'Betsy,' is an environmentalist, landscape preservationist, author of numerous books and essays, and a former park administrator. Her most notable achievement was her role in the revitalization of New York City's Central Park in the 1980s and 1990s.

UVA's Department of Landscape Architecture has a long-standing relationship with Rogers, including:

• Rogers as the School of Architecture's Benjamin Howland Memorial Lecturer

• Rogers as advisor to the Center for Cultural Landscapes on a digital humanities project, the Landscape Studies Initiative

• Guest lectures and Speaking engagements at UVA

• Participating in a four-day field trip to Central Park with UVA MLA students

In addition to her reference library, Betsy also gifted the Center her extensive slide collection. Rogers Fellow and MLA student Ari Bell, who has spent the past semester cataloging the slides, offers this insight:

Working through the slide collection generously donated by Elizabeth Barlow Rogers has been a delight. Rogers’ collection of tens of thousands of slides contains imagery spanning from the smallest details of historic gardens to the street life of large cities. One part of the collection that stood out to me was a set of 93 slides from Gritille, Turkey. Strangely, when I tried to research the site, no such place showed up on Google Maps; all that I could find were archaeological papers from the 1980’s. I soon learned that Gritille was submerged following the construction of the Atatürk Dam, making Rogers’ 1984 visit to the site one of the last before its destruction.

While Rogers’ images of the archaeological site offer immense value on their own, I was most compelled by her photographs of the surrounding town, people, farms, and landscapes, providing a window into Gritille’s cultural landscape context that is absent from the other published research I found. These images offer a window into the lives and livelihoods that were displaced by the dam, painting a more complex and human portrait of the site than a strictly archaeological perspective allows. Throughout her travels, Rogers balanced her love of recording spaces, forms, materials, and plants with a clear affinity for the everyday moments that make such places come alive, making this collection a real treasure for the sites and stories it documents.  

We are extremely grateful to Betsy and the FLS for these generous gifts, which will be used by generations of landscape architects to come!

— Ari Bell and Laura Whitaker, Rogers Fellows; Jennifer Saunders, CCL Research Specialist