One particular bit of travel, to visit John Custis in Williamsburg (encouraged by Collinson, who corresponded with Bartram and received plants from him), proved a gardener’s delight for Bartram. He had been instructed by Collinson, who, because he wanted Bartram to impress Custis, made suggestions regarding what to wear and how to act. Custis received him with much hospitality, and Bartram, who would never forget that visit, spent two days and one night. Bartram found the garden to be one of the best he had ever seen. Later Collinson wrote to Custis, “Your Intended Kindness to J. Bartram on my accountt [sic] is an Act of Real Fr’ship.”76
Prince Nursery, the second early American commercial source of plants that must be mentioned, was operated from 1737 to 1850 by successive generations of the Prince family. The company issued its first catalog of fruit trees and shrubs in 1771. Because imported stock was essential in the early nursery and seed trade, the firm sold imported fruit trees, ornamental woody plants, and bulbs.77 The Prince Nursery supplied seeds and plants to cities and towns along the East Coast and also shipped them to Europe. Notables such as Thomas Jefferson made selections from Prince’s extensive catalog. Among the items sold were fruit trees—including plum, apricot, nectarine, peach, pear, mulberry, and apple—some of which were propagated by Prince.
A few smaller seed and nursery companies at that time also made important contributions to American gardens. By 1790, the gardeners of Williamsburg had a local commercial nursery, Bellett’s, where Jefferson bought plants. Bellett specialized in ornamental gardening, importing most of his plant varieties from London.78
While the rich of Williamsburg may have had plants shipped to them from England, the cottager, or working-class gardener, depended mainly on seeds. However, the American commercial seed business spread by the mid-nineteenth century, when printing, increased transportation, improved postal service, and the Shakers’ invention of the seed packet enabled gardeners to order their seeds through a free catalog. The general availability of plants increased as more American seed companies and nurseries opened in the nineteenth century. By 1870, there were dozens of companies scattered along the East Coast, in cities such as Philadelphia, Rochester, and Boston, as well as new businesses on the West Coast, in cities such as San Francisco.
Garden Books
During America’s eighteenth-century colonial period there were few garden books, except titles from English writers who discussed gardening in the soil and growing conditions of England, not America. Few American seed companies or nurseries yet printed catalogs; no American newspapers or magazines published garden articles.
A popular information source for gardeners was a friend, as with Custis and his correspondence with Collinson, or a family member with whom a person might trade plants or seeds. Any reading by the more educated was based on an occasional book written by an English author. Personal memories of gardening in England also provided inspiration to the colonists.
The landscape architect and Williamsburg scholar Ian Robertson compiled a list of important English garden books on which the American colonial gardener depended in the eighteenth century.79 The books include The Compleat English Gardner, published in 1670 (with many subsequent editions), by Leonard Meager (1624–70). Meager referred to himself as a practitioner of the art of gardening for thirty years. He wrote for “young planters and gardeners” and covered fruiting plants, trees, shrubs, and the kitchen garden, as well as the flower garden, which he called the “garden of pleasure.”80
Philip Miller was another popular garden author in England. His book, Gardeners Dictionary, was printed in London in 1731 and was reprinted several times, with later editions including double the number of plants mentioned in earlier versions. Many considered it the most important garden book in eighteenth-century England; that it was also popular with American colonists is not surprising.81 Miller covered many garden questions but also wrote about using American plants in the English garden. These included trees, because they were “useful and beautiful” when “added to our wildernesses and other plantations.”82 In 1768, the eighth edition, he mentioned the black-eyed Susan, or Rudbeckia hirta, which he wrote “grows naturally in Virginia, and several other parts of North America.”83
Among the many who read the work of Englishman Thomas Whatley, author of Observations on Modern Gardening, published in 1770, was Thomas Jefferson. Whatley discussed the importance of the popular naturalistic view of landscape, which Jefferson later employed in designing Monticello. This same style would later become the primary English landscape design promoted in the American seed and nursery catalogs of the nineteenth century.
The English poet Alexander Pope (1688–1744) also inspired Williamsburg’s gardeners. English views of the natural landscape were aligned with the arts of poetry and painting, and the English at that time particularly relished the horticultural and agricultural ideas of the classical Latin authors. In a 1713 article in the Guardian, Pope praised the Roman poet Homer’s enclosed garden of four acres, mentioning the trees, the fruits that never failed, the vineyard, and, at the extremity of the enclosed area, the kitchen garden. Pope noted, “How contrary to this simplicity is the modern practice of gardening.”84
For Pope the “modern” form of gardening included topiaries: the heavily pruned and unusual shapes of shrubs and trees. Using his own garden as an example, he indicated his preference for a natural look to the landscape. He wrote, “Persons of genius and those who are most capable of art, are always most fond of Nature.”85 Pope inspired English landscape writers and designers with his preference for the picturesque view. That view later became important in nineteenth-century American landscape design through the writings of Andrew Jackson Downing.86
English garden writers Robert Bradley, John Abercrombie, William Marshall, and Charles Marshall were also popular in the colonies.87 The first edition of John Abercrombie and Thomas Mawe’s Every Man His Own Gardener was issued in 1767. Mawe was “gardener to his Grace the Duke of Leeds” and Abercrombie a “gardener” in Newington, Surry.
The English books presupposed farms of large acreage with existing well-cultivated grounds and the services of at least one well-trained gardener. Many of the plants discussed, however, were not available; procedures advised were not appropriate for the soils and climates of North America; and many topics were simply of no value to settlers engaged in the struggles of colonizing.
For these and other reasons, the need for American works on gardening became more apparent during the late eighteenth century.88 After 1820, farm journal publications began to appear in many states. Such journals were written for the dirt farmer and gentleman farmer alike, both of whom were facing a climate different from that of England. But a handful of American books that preceded those journals established the foundation for American farming and gardening literature.
The first American treatise on agriculture was written by Jared Eliot, a minister, physician, and farmer from Killingworth, Connecticut.89 His book, Essays upon Field Husbandry, appeared between 1747 and 1759. He wrote in the preface, “There are many sundry books on husbandry wrote in England. Having read all on that subject I could obtain, yet such is the difference of climate and method of management between them and us, arising from causes that make them always differ, so that those books are not useful to us.”90
A few decades after Eliot’s book, circa 1788, John Randolph, a lawyer and resident of Williamsburg, wrote the first American book on kitchen or vegetable gardening, Treatise on Gardening, which became popular among Williamsburg colonists. Before he wrote the book, he practiced Miller’s garden instructions for several years to adapt English methods to the Virginian conditions. The book is mostly a list of plants, primarily vegetables but also herbs such as mugwort and artemisia. At the end of his book, he included a calendar with garden duties for each month.
Samuel Deane, vice president of Bowdoin