In Bloom at Wylie House: Louisa’s Garden

Louisa’s Garden was developed by several students and museum staff over about 18 months. In addition to a garden, physical items and digital presentations are used to explore ways the eldest daughter of IU professor Theophilus Wylie was “brave, complex, and still cherished today.”  

“I would like people to have a different take on historic figures and how we think of them and to see them as actual people,” said Melania Majowicz, Wylie House Museum generalist and outdoor interpreter since 2021. 

Majowicz and her collaborators read through Louisa’s letters and essays to better know her as a person. Louisa loved plants, flowers, and gardening. She was among the first female graduates of IU Bloomington, earning a bachelor’s degree in mathematics in 1871. Her uncommon legacy lives on in Wylie House Museum, where she resided many years. 

As a relative of IU’s first president Andrew Wylie, Louisa left her own unique mark. Museum visitors will glimpse her life experiences by walking through a garden with plants she was known to have grown, reading her essays and letters, and examining artifacts depicting her as a student, mother, teacher and horticulturist.   

“We established three themes based upon elements of Louisa's personal life story, ” explained Kacie Alaga, Sarah L Luckay Fellow. Those elements are “her bravery in pursuing higher education and professional opportunities in horticulture, the complexities she navigated as a wife and mother in the 19th century, while being expected to adhere to certain societal roles, and the way her legacy is still cherished today just as she cherished the plants and flowers she wrote about so often.”

 “She was a very interesting character. When you think of women in history, often they are represented as oppressed, married, and not having a voice,” said Majowicz, adding that Louisa’s life differed from historical stereotypes.  Additionally, she points out, “We’re highlighting some people whose stories sometimes get overshadowed by IU’s first president and house namesake.” 

Louisa was known as a devoted mother of a daughter and son, a gardener who exchanged plants, an Indiana Horticultural Society member, and the first female horticulture judge appointed for the Chicago World’s Fair. She wrote extensively on gardening and horticulture and had published essays. She briefly taught at the University of Missouri. 

Majowicz said the exhibit started with interns combing through letters Louisa wrote to and received from her husband Hermann Boisen, her son Anton, and many others. With assistance from students in IU's "Folklore Archives in the Digital Age" class, they then cataloged references inside those letters to flowers and plants (and their meanings to her).

Alaga, an IU doctoral candidate in virtual heritage informatics and art history, developed the exhibit’s narrative structure, organized relevant quotations from Louisa’s letters and writings, wrote the online exhibit content, curated physical exhibit elements, and worked to design the physical garden. 

“I found it especially interesting how this shared love of gardening seems to have helped strengthen and sustain her marriage, even during periods that appear to have been personally difficult or emotionally trying,” she said.  “The garden creates a direct physical connection between Louisa’s writings, her personal experiences, and the historic space where so much of her life took place.”  

IU Libraries Wylie House Museum gratefully acknowledges additional IU Bloomington partners who contributed to the exhibitions, including the IU Herbarium, and the Geography Department.