America’s Romance with the English Garden
Thomas J. Mickey
Ohio University Press
Athens
Preface
In 1908, Chicago landscape designer Wilhelm Miller wrote a book called What England Can Teach Us about Gardening. He opened with these words: “The purpose of this book is to inspire people to make more and better gardens.”1 He then presented several chapters that reflected the gardening trends in nineteenth-century England, covering topics such as landscape gardening, formal gardens, borders, water gardens, wild gardens, rock gardens, and rose gardens. How had we come to look to England as inspiration for our gardens?
Martha Stewart once wrote an article about hydrangeas for her magazine. As the story goes, within days nurseries around the country sold out of hydrangeas. Gardeners everywhere wanted the hydrangea because Martha had recommended it in her publication.
Both stories illustrate the power of mass media such as books and magazines, coupled with advertising, to sell just about anything.
Nineteenth-century American gardeners were the first ever to experience the mass marketing of the garden. New communication technologies and the emergence of modern advertising created for the first time a mass-media-marketed garden; in this case, one modeled after the English garden that appeared regularly in such media forms as the seed and nursery catalogs. The image of the garden in the catalog appealed to a national audience, especially women, defined through advertising as shoppers.
For the first time, the advent of mass production of seeds and plants, reliably produced and distributed like any other product for the home, increased their demand across the country. Modern advertising sold the seeds and plants using the image of an ideal garden that would motivate a consumer. This idealized image was that of the contemporary English garden, often featuring a woman planting or gathering flowers.
For many years I have been interested in the study of the cultural values within public relations, advertising, and marketing materials. A product or service by itself is not what is being sold and promoted, but rather an image of a better life, a happier home, or a more fashionable garden. I believe that you can understand a culture better if you look at the way advertisers and public relations professionals promote products and services.
The goal of this book is to lead readers to an understanding of how the advertising and marketing of seeds and plants in nineteenth-century America encouraged a particular view of the garden. Styles of gardening such as the Italian, Dutch, Spanish, and French fashions were familiar but were not the image that company owners fostered in their thousands of catalogs and countless advertisements. That image was, instead, the English garden style.
This book had its start when I spent a year at the Smithsonian, reading dozens of American seed and nursery catalogs from the nineteenth century. I was looking for a link between marketing and the American garden in that period. From the first time I picked up a catalog, I was struck by the friendly words of the company owner, both in the introduction and in the articles. The catalog’s illustrations only reinforced the words. After a while, what I found was that the catalogs sold a particular image of the garden.
I could see early on that the wealthy as well as the middle class in the nineteenth century had to garden in a particular way. Advertising material such as seed and nursery catalogs presented a view on how to use the seeds and plants so they would have meaning for the reader as a gardener who sought what was in fashion. It was no surprise to me that the same kind of English garden appeared from coast to coast, both in the catalog and on the ground.
In the nineteenth century, being modern—and the middle class valued modernity—meant you had an English-style garden, and especially a lawn. Perhaps that’s why garden historian and landscape designer Wade Graham wrote that despite all the powerful environmental critiques of the lawn, the American garden cannot escape from turf.2
This is the story of American gardening as told through the words and images of the seed and nursery catalogs of the nineteenth century. Michael Pollan said that garden design remains the one corner of our culture in which our dependence on England has never been completely broken.3Perhaps because the nineteenth-century seed and nursery catalogs played no small role in creating that dependence, the publisher for Miller’s book on the English garden knew there was an American audience, eager for its message.
Acknowledgments
In my year at the Smithsonian, made possible by the Enid A. Haupt Fellowship from the Smithsonian’s Horticultural Services Division, I read many catalogs from nineteenth-century American seed companies and nurseries at the National Museum of American History, the National Museum of Natural History, and the library of the Department of Agriculture, located in Beltsville, Maryland. This book is the result of that research.
Later, the following institutions proved essential for supporting material, including more garden catalogs: the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, the Boston Athenaeum, the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, the Arnold Arboretum Library, Winterthur Library, Hagley Museum Library, the Bartram Garden in Philadelphia, the Marblehead Museum and Historical Society, the Dedham Historical Society, the Ethel Z. Bailey Horticultural Catalogue Collection at Cornell University, the library at Tower Hill Botanic Garden, and the Newton Historical Society.
Many people helped me as I wrote this book. At the Smithsonian I am indebted to Lauranne Nash from Horticulture Collections Management and Education, who believed in this work from the beginning. At Bridge-water State University I have to thank Howard London, Jabbar Al-Obaidi, Frances Jeffries, and my research assistant, Kelley Walsh. The Center for Advancement of Research and Teaching (CART) at BSU provided several grants for this book. Steve Hatch, former journalist and editor at the Boston Globe, suggested the preface. New Hampshire photographer Ralph Morang supplied the images of the plants from my garden for the Featured Plant sections. Special thanks for their advice to Jim Nau, Stephen Scanniello, and Cathy Neal.
Thanks to Elizabeth Eustis, Karen Madsen, and John Furlong from the Landscape Institute, now located at the Boston Architectural College. They encouraged me to ask the garden history research question that started me on this book’s journey.
Finally, I am happy that Ohio University Press opened the door when I came knocking in search of a home for this book. Editorial director Gillian Berchowitz helped me with her endless patience.
Introduction
Let us encourage our writers—and that can be any of us—to write garden stories.
kenneth helphand
Today in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, outside of Philadelphia, you can visit Fordhook Farm, bought by the seedsman W. Atlee Burpee in 1888. There Burpee spent his summers, on what he called his trial farm, to test seeds for his catalog. The two-story eighteenth-century farmhouse still stands, and in the first-floor study lined in mahogany panels near the fireplace you see the desk at which Burpee wrote his seed catalog.
At the corner of the room a door opens to steps that lead up to the bedroom on the second floor. If, in the middle of the night, Burpee got an idea for his catalog, he would descend the steps to his desk below and record his thought. He did not want to lose any inspiration, because seedsmen such as Burpee were serious about their business: helping the gardener grow the best lawn, flowers, fruits, and vegetables.
Burpee was only one of dozens of nineteenth-century seed merchants and nurserymen who were passionate about the garden and eager to spread the word about the importance of a garden for every home.
This book tells the story of how mass-marketed seed and nursery catalogs in the late nineteenth century told us what seeds to use, plants to choose, and landscape design ideas to employ. It is the story of how we became English gardeners in America because the seed companies and nurseries sold us the English garden.
They did their job well. To this day we love the English garden. Why is it that so many people stress over the perfect lawn? In the face of mounting