Explore the lives of three modern Philadelphia women — Cora Cassard Toogood, Mary Febiger Fife, and Hilda Emery Davis — and the private urban gardens they created.

October 5, 2026-February 26, 2027
McLean Library and Archives. Pennsylvania Horticultural Society
100 N. 20th Street, Philadelphia 19103
Free
Virtual
Link to the virtual exhibit: https://phsmcleanlibrary.omeka.net/exhibits/show/the-private-gardens-of-philade/the-private-gardens-of-philade

The Society of Little Gardens launched “City Garden Day” in 1933, an annual May event that opened private Philadelphia backyard gardens to the public and raised money for civic projects, including the 1938 restoration of the Old Swedes Church garden and 1939 improvements at Workman Place and the Bedford Center settlement house. Admission was 25 cents, with another quarter buying a garden luncheon at the Women’s City Club, and by its first decade the event had grown to include roughly 40 gardens spanning private homes, churches, clubs, institutions, and businesses. In 1943 the Society shifted its focus to wartime Victory Gardens, pausing the event until it resumed in 1949.

Celebrating the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s 200th anniversary, this virtual exhibit focuses on three private Philadelphia urban gardens — and the women who created them. Cora Cassard Toogood, Mary Febiger Fife, and Hilda Emery Davis were strikingly modern city women whose rich artistic and activist lives resonate today.