From the Great Exhibition of 1851 in Victorian England, with its famous Crystal Palace, world’s fairs were the premiere showcase for both industry and nation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, also known as the Chicago World's Fair, new ideas and technologies were displayed and debated before crowds numbering in the thousands each day. For the first time, Congress authorized a Board of Lady Managers to oversee the development of a women’s building, led by Chicagoan Bertha Honoré Palmer.

The Congress of Representative Women took place over a week at the World's Congress Auxiliary Building, bringing together hundreds of women from around the world to debate the great issues of the day in front of an audience of thousands. One of the ideas proposed was that each U.S. state and territory select a flower to represent their state in the “National Garland of Flowers.” Long after the gates to the world’s fair closed, women’s clubs around the country undertook the task of choosing and advocating for a floral emblem representative of their state’s history, culture, and environment. Women played an instrumental part in introducing bills at the state level to declare an official flower for their state, often involving schoolchildren in the selection process. In some states it took many decades to officially declare a state flower. Today, all U.S. states and many territories have an official flower symbol representing their natural and cultural heritage. 

Present-day artist Helen Hornberger revived the techniques of French tole to create these naturalistic representations of the state flowers. The artist used thin copper sheets painted with oil paint. 

#HorticultureHERstory is a project to create digital stories that amplify the contributions of American women to the history of landscape, garden design, and horticulture using Smithsonian Gardens and Smithsonian Institution collections.   This project received support from the Smithsonian American Women's History Initiative. #BecauseOfHerStory