In nineteenth-century America, the seed and nursery merchants worked hard to publish catalogs that would both tell their story and sell their products. They considered it their duty to endorse a particular style of garden, an English design, and so they wrote about and illustrated garden and landscape ideals they thought would motivate their customers. They were just doing their job.
Seedsman and Civil War veteran Roland H. Shumway, in his catalog of 1887, discussed how he would like to be remembered: “Good Seeds Cheap! is my motto; and has been ever since I left the tented field as a soldier, and staked the few remaining years of my busy life, in an earnest endeavor, to place good seeds within reach of [the] poorest planters. I will further inform you how we strive to do you good, and not disappoint you. From the beginning of the new year, until after spring planting, my industrious employees work 16 hours, and myself and family 18 or more hours a day. Are we not surely knights at labor? How can we do more? Do we not deserve the patronage of every planter in America?”
Seed merchants such as Burpee and Shumway worked long hours to create a successful business, but they and their nurserymen brethren offered more than seeds and plants. This book tells the story of how the nineteenth-century seed and nursery industry sold the American gardener the En-glish garden.
Featured Plant
Each chapter concludes with a section called “Featured Plant,” discussing a plant that I grow in my own garden. The image is also from my garden.
The plant choice is based on the discussion of that chapter, so it is usually an early plant variety, either native or exotic, though in some cases a newer variety is presented. These plants are still available to the gardener, thus linking the garden of the nineteenth century to today’s home landscape. I give a history of the plant and instructions on how to care for it as well.
1: The British Connection
At the age of fifteen, Charles Mason Hovey gardened in the backyard of his house in Cambridge, outside of Boston. In gardening he had seized on his passion. For the rest of his life he made a career in the nursery business and helped others find pleasure in gardening. He wrote in his garden magazine, “With respect to ourselves, Gardening is a pursuit to which we have ever been zealously devoted, and in which we have ever felt a deep interest.”7
In 1831, Hovey went to Philadelphia to visit the Landreth Company, the first seed firm in America, probably to see how the seed business worked. The next spring, at the age of twenty-two, he began a nursery business in Cambridge and opened a seed store in the center of Boston, in partnership with his brother, Phineas Brown Hovey. He was on his way, but it was just the first step on a long journey: Hovey’s lifework would ultimately lead him down a path that reflected his preference for the gardening style of England, and his influence on American gardeners would go far beyond selling them seeds and plants.
Perhaps the most visible manifestation of this influence is his publication Magazine of Horticulture, which became the longest-running nineteenth-century garden magazine in America. Hovey began the magazine in 1835, after reading the English publication Gardener’s Magazine (first issued in 1826), which was edited by horticulturalist John Claudius Loudon. Hovey designed the layout and chose the editorial content for his magazine to resemble Loudon’s. In addition, he often incorporated articles from English garden magazines such as Gardener’s Magazine, so his readers became familiar with English plants as well as English landscape style.
The magazine, however, was only one way in which Hovey brought an English garden influence to America. Like many other seedsmen and nurserymen of nineteenth-century America, Hovey found the English garden a source of inspiration for learning about plants and cultivating them, but he did not limit his efforts to business ventures. For example, Hovey joined the new Massachusetts Horticultural Society, modeled after the English version. Moreover, he encouraged the development of public parks and rural cemeteries, supported early on by the English.
Though Hovey and other seedsmen and nurserymen encouraged all things English in horticulture, the English garden style was only one among several in early America. Different forms of gardening emerged, whether brought first by explorers and colonists or by later immigrants. Each of these groups would form a landscape and garden in a style familiar to them from their homeland.
Early American Gardening
Before 1900, America witnessed several gardening styles, each contributing to the garden palette of the country. During the 1700s, missions in Florida and California favored Spanish gardens. These were often geometric in layout, with water elements such as fountains serving as an important feature of the design.
In early eighteenth-century America, the French formal garden design dominated through the presence of vista gardens. This grand style appealed to colonial governors, who had the clout, as well as to southern planters and northern merchants, who had the money.8
In colonial New England, dooryard gardens predominated in the form of a fenced-in area that contained beds of herbs and flowers serving both the cooking and the medicinal needs of the family. An example of this English style can be seen in the restored colonial housewife’s garden at the Whipple House, in Ipswich, Massachusetts. In this style, rows of plants were placed along straight paths running parallel to one another. Contemporary En-glish garden writers, who proposed this symmetrical style of garden, were important to the early settlers in the New World.9
The Dutch settled New York in the early seventeenth century. At first, their gardens were small and geometric in design. The Dutch, whether rich or poor, always provided an array of flowers in their gardens.
By the time of the Revolution, the majority of the country homes of New York’s wealthy citizens were situated on Manhattan Island, bordering the East and Hudson Rivers, though a few had also been established on Long Island.10 In this environment, the naturalistic English garden style became popular, and by the end of the century it had come to be featured on several regional estates.11 By then the middle-class landscape with its garden area would also reflect that same English picturesque view.
To the south, in the settlements of Maryland and Virginia, and along the James and other rivers, the geometric English style prevailed. Wealthier people chose to design elaborate gardens with more formal lines, rather than draw on the natural style. More money, as well as the help of slaves, enabled towns such as Williamsburg to showcase the geometric English garden style, with its trees, shrubs, straight walkways, parterres, and boxwood edging. This ancient English landscape garden style inspired such gardens in all the colonies during the second half of the eighteenth century but was especially favored on the southern plantations.12
At Middleton Place, in Charleston, South Carolina, an even more elaborate style of gardening emerged, with a lawn and an extensive collection of ornamental trees and shrubs. The garden was laid out in 1755; today it remains as an example of a combination of both the formal and the picturesque. The English garden style was at one time formal and geometric, and later naturalistic and picturesque.
Farther north, the William Paca house, built in Annapolis in the mid-1770s, likewise showcases a formal garden design, with parterres, walks, and a fountain. John Penn’s estate in Philadelphia, another design of the same period (laid out during the 1780s), demonstrated a taste for the contemporary English fashion of naturalistic landscape gardening, which included the ha-ha to keep animals from the house, irregular flower gardens, and a vista south of the house. The design reflects the work of Capability Brown and his vision of the ideal English landscape garden of the period.13 Other important estate gardens appeared in and around Philadelphia during the last decades of the eighteenth century.
Designed landscapes in America were not a priority in the colonial period, and certainly for decades after the revolution most people had to attend to the demands of farming just to survive. Few Americans were then familiar with the English picturesque style that had emerged in seventeenth-century England as the “modern” style. An English traveler who wrote about his visit in the first quarter of the nineteenth