Figure 1.3. The cemetery as it should be, with trees and shrubs in the English style of cemetery landscape.
Plant Collecting and Greenhouses
As noted earlier, the English had been avid plant collectors since the 1700s, when English horticultural societies and botanic gardens hired plant collectors to search the world for plants. To a large extent, the work of plant collectors was what made fashionable horticulture possible, as they sent thousands of intriguing new species to the gardens and herbaria of Europe.45 Plant collectors from England were representatives of the horticultural societies, of botanical gardens such as Kew, and even of British plant merchants such as Veitch Nurseries, which were always on the lookout for new plant varieties.
In America, the century began with the Lewis and Clark expedition to the northwest, which included a hunt for plants. Later, Asa Gray, the Harvard botanist, would provide a scientific listing of American plants. By the end of the century, botanic gardens such as Boston’s Arnold Arboretum would sponsor their own plant collectors, who traveled to Asia to bring back plants suitable for the American garden.
Historian Philip J. Pauly has written that nineteenth-century nurserymen were deeply involved in the work of selection, hybridization, and improvement of plants.46 For example, by the end of the century the Reasoner Nursery in Florida had made significant contributions to botany and agriculture by introducing plant varieties that are still grown in the mild climates of America.47
Hovey stands as a particularly good example of plant improvement, for throughout his life he sought better plant varieties. As he wrote in his nursery catalog of 1849, “From the best sources in Europe, all the new and choice varieties have been procured.” Philadelphia nurseryman Thomas Meehan agreed, saying, “Numbers of the best new plants and fruits were first introduced to the public from [Hovey’s] nurseries and seed house in Boston.”48 Hovey’s own fruit, the ‘Hovey’ strawberry, held a prominent place in the market for thirty years. Some claim that it was the start of the commercial sale of strawberries in this country.
Owners of commercial nurseries were not the only source of plant selection and improvement, however. At the historic English garden Chatsworth, the Duke of Devonshire collected orchids, which were housed in a glass house built by Paxton in 1834. Several orchids were named after Paxton and the duke. The glass house still stands on the original site.
The glass house is the most characteristic garden structure of the nineteenth century.49 Plants such as orchids and camellias became popular for greenhouse cultivation for the wealthy, but by midcentury the cheap price of glass had come to allow even the middle class to overwinter plants in a glass house. At the end of the century, Cornell horticulturalist L. H. Bailey wrote, “Even the humblest gardener, if he is thrifty, can afford a green-house.”50
By 1848 Hovey had built four greenhouses on his nursery grounds. One visitor wrote, “He erected one of the largest span-roofed houses in the country, being ninety-six feet long and thirty feet wide, chiefly for the growth of specimen plants.”51 His camellia collection had its own conservatory, called the Camellia House, which was eighty-four feet long and twenty-two feet wide.
Garden Publications
The English published several popular garden magazines in the nineteenth century. As Meehan wrote in his Gardener’s Monthly of 1878, “The Horticultural, or as they are justly more proud of saying, the Gardening press of England, is a great power. On the tables of the most intelligent, although you might not anticipate any gardening proclivities, you may not be surprised to see the Gardener’s Chronicle.”52 In 1844, The Gardener’s Chronicle was proposed as a new English garden journal by John Lindley, a garden writer and botanist who headed Chelsea Physic Garden in London. Lindley offered this editorial evaluation of his market: “Gardening is admitted to be better understood in Great Britain than in any other country, and the number of works on the subject prove the patronage it receives, and the desire there is to extend the knowledge of its various branches.”53
Lustig considers Loudon, Lindley, and Paxton the three great horticultural writers of mid-nineteenth-century England.54 Although England created a stream of publications for the middle-class gardener, Loudon’s was the first and most famous. It was for the businessman who gardened on the weekend, when he, too, could enjoy the pleasures of botany and horticulture, once solely the domain of the wealthy aristocrat.
The English gardening press maintained its influence but not its exclusivity, however: garden publications in England were soon imitated in America, with American seedsmen and nurserymen providing the lead. Hovey’s publication, with the original name The American Gardener’s Magazine, was America’s first magazine devoted solely to horticulture. It remained in publication for thirty years. Though America published its own garden magazines, the country still relished the garden instruction from England. American nurseries and seed houses looked to England for garden inspiration and then passed that experience on to their customers in the catalogs, articles, and books they wrote.
Botanic Gardens
The Worshipful Society of Apothecaries founded London’s Chelsea Physic Garden in 1673. Today its research continues to promote the study of the properties and origins of over five thousand plant species and encourages their conservation. In the eighteenth century, Phillip Miller was the garden’s director; in the nineteenth century, Lindley and plant collector Robert Fortune took that role. The garden’s purpose was, from the time of its origin, more scientific, that is, to study a plant’s possible medicinal uses. Nonetheless, it set the stage for what botanic gardens would eventually become: gardens to educate the public in horticulture and botany.
Another notable example of a public botanic garden is Kew. Princess Augusta and the Earl of Bute, in the late 1700s, began Kew, the royal garden in London, to house plants that had been collected around the world and then labeled in a scientific manner. It became a public garden in 1841. By 1848 Kew had built its Palm House, which demonstrated to the public the use of glass to cultivate exotic palms throughout the year.
From the beginning, America, too, had its botanic gardens. In the eighteenth century, the Bartram Botanic Garden, located in Philadelphia, and the Linnaean Botanic Garden, founded by William Prince on Long Island, illustrated the importance of collecting plants and using their scientific names to identify them. Nurseryman Dr. David Hosack saw the importance of gardening for the public good. In 1801 he began the Elgin Botanic Garden in New York, located where Rockefeller Center now stands. Hovey’s nursery sat on Cambridge Street not far from Harvard College, where a botanic garden was set up in 1805 and then replaced in 1872 by the Arnold Arboretum.
Though there were several garden styles in early American gardening, the English style would dominate in the nineteenth century in the sale of garden products and in the ideas expressed in garden publications. The seed and plant peddlers, such as Hovey, would provide the voice for that garden fashion in their catalogs, magazines, and books.
Hovey remained at the forefront of the gardening movement in this country for half a century. Over that time, his magazine and his catalogs reflected the evolution of American gardening. In the December 1886 issue of his magazine Gardener’s Monthly, Philadelphia nurseryman Thomas Meehan said of Hovey, “Horticulture on this continent is probably more indebted to him than to any living man.”55 By then Hovey’s camellia ‘C. M. Hovey’—of which the English journal Garden said, “It has no peer, whether we take into consideration its size, growth, floriferousness, or the size, form, and color of the flowers”56—was growing in the Camellia House at the Royal Exotic Nursery in Chelsea. A year later, Hovey died and was buried near his home in Cambridge, in Mount Auburn, the parklike cemetery.
featured plant
Podophyllum peltatum / Mayapple