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Grounds for Knowledge
A Guide to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory's Landscapes and Buildings
Introducing the Bungtown Botanical Garden


Subject Area(s):  General Interest TitlesCold Spring Harbor Laboratory History

By Elizabeth L. Watson; Landscape Photography by Peter Stahl

© 2008 • 208 pp., illus., maps, appendices, bibliography, index
Hardcover •
ISBN  978-087969799-0

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Description

Grounds for Knowledge is an engaging and knowledgeable guide to CSH Laboratory's buildings both historic and new, and to the 150 species of trees that surround them. The superb color photography and detailed maps invite exploration of the newly designated Bungtown Botanical Garden. Buildings and landscapes of nearby Lab campuses in Woodbury, Lloyd Harbor, and Cold Spring Harbor are covered as well.

About the author: Elizabeth Lewis Watson, a native of Providence, Rhode Island, graduated from Radcliffe College and has earned two master's degrees – in Historic Preservation, from the Columbia University School of Architecture and Planning (1983); and in Library and Information Science, from the Palmer School of Long Island University (1997). She also holds honorary doctorates from the College of Charleston and Illinois Wesleyan University, where she has lectured on the preservation of historic landscapes.

Author of Houses for Science (a centennial history of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, 1991), she also drafted the nomination papers that led to placement of the Laboratory's main campus (along Bungtown Road) on the National Register of Historic Places, 1994. In addition, she authored A Limner's View (a sailor's view of world architecture, with "limner" Faith H. McCurdy, 1993) and contributed to The Mansions of Long Island, 1860-1940 (1997).

Occupying various homes at "Bungtown" for nearly four decades, together with her husband James Dewey Watson and two now grown sons, Liz has always taken a delight in the grounds of the Laboratory – a pleasure heightened only recently by a course of study on the campus of the State University of New York at Farmingdale, in their program on Ornamental Horticulture. Long a trustee, plus a past president, of the Planting Fields Foundation of the Planting Fields Arboretum State Historic Park in nearby Oyster Bay, Long Island, she was instrumental in the Laboratory's joining the American Association of Botanic Gardens and Arboreta (now the American Public Gardens Association) as the Bungtown Botanical Garden in 2006.

A devoted trustee of the Society for the Preservation of Long Island Antiquities (SPLIA), Liz Watson has also served on the boards of the Cold Spring Harbor Whaling Museum and the Heckscher Museum of Art and as a member of the Huntington Historic Preservation Commission. She was appointed in 2001 to the New York State Board for Historic Preservation and currently serves also on the boards of the New York Landmarks Preservation Foundation and the Archives of American Art.

Besides having become a manic "leaf peeper" (and aspiring to "bird watcher") in her free time, Liz is an avid photographer, enthusiastic traveler, and happy hostess to those from near and far.

Contents

ILLUSTRATIONS AND MAPS
FOREWORD – Vincent A. Simeone
PREFACE – James D. Watson
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INTRODUCTION

PROLOGUE: A BRIEF GREEN HISTORY
Before Bungtown, There Was a Harbor

1. BUNGTOWN ROAD ENTRANCE
What the Laboratory Is Today: A Research University of DNA

2. LOWER BUNGTOWN ROAD
Cold Spring Harbor's Earliest Laboratory Structures

3. CENTRAL BUNGTOWN ROAD
The Good Works of LIBA: Homes and Laboratories

4. MIDDLE CAMPUS AT BUNGTOWN
Emblematic Science: Understanding Cancer and the Brain

5. NORTH BUNGTOWN ROAD AND DE FOREST DRIVE
Maintaining the Lab and Housing Its Staff — and Their Infants

6. BANBURY CONFERENCE CENTER IN LLOYD HARBOR
The Laboratory's “Think Tank”

7. EDUCATIONAL OUTREACH ACROSS THE HARBOR
Classrooms — and Living Rooms — For Tomorrow’s Scientists

8. FURTHER AFIELD AT THE WOODBURY CENTER
Translational Genome Research and Scientific Publishing

EPILOGUE – THE HILLSIDE AND UPPER CAMPUSES
En Route to the New Watson School Campus

APPENDICES
A. Checklist of CSHL Buildings
B. Bird Checklist – Bungtown Botanical Garden
C. Seasonal Interest – at Bungtown...and Beyond
D. Timely Strolls – Bungtown Botanical Garden

PHOTOGRAPHERS AND ARTISTS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX TO BUILDINGS AND TREES
ABOUT THE AUTHOR