AS A STUDENT OF BOTANY AT SMITH COLLEGE,

Elizabeth K. Roys toured Asia with her mother in 1926-27, exploring gardens in China, Japan, Korea, Siam, and India. She kept detailed records and compiled her observations in a collection of five notebooks. Created as part of her academic work, the notebooks document the gardens she visited with nearly eighty pages of text, over three hundred photographs, hand-drawn maps, and meticulous plant lists. She described temple, palace, private, working-class, and ruined gardens in all five countries and analyzed the differing conceptions of the garden in each culture.

The notebooks of Elizabeth K. Roys constitute a unique historical chronicle, providing an irreplaceable firsthand account of Asian gardens in the early twentieth century.