An Abundance of Flowers. Judith M. Taylor

magazine that “few plants afford more gratification than a good collection of chrysanthemums.” Soon after, the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society held a show in 1846 promoting it as “the coming flower.” Within the next twenty years, the flower consolidated its hold on gardeners’ imaginations. By about 1865, chrysanthemum shows were springing up in many towns and growers competed for prizes and medals just as in the old country. The venerable Pennsylvania and Massachusetts Horticultural Societies were in the forefront of this movement.

      As this ferment continued, the introduction of the exquisite white Japanese variety, ‘Mrs. Alpheus Hardy’, took the Western world by storm. A Japanese student at Harvard wanted to please his mentor, Professor Hardy, and arranged for a specimen of this flower to be sent to the professor in 1891, naming it after the teacher’s wife. It was a precursor of the “spider” type, with exquisitely curved and fluffy petals.

      As Morton observed in his 1891 book,

      The chrysanthemum has been exhibited at the shows of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society in Boston since 1830. The list of varieties exhibited at that time was as follows: ‘Quilled Flame’, ‘Curled Lilac’, ‘Tasseled White’, ‘Golden Lotus’, ‘Large Lilac’, ‘Changeable Buff’, ‘Paper White’, ‘Crimson’, ‘Pink’, ‘Lilac’, ‘White’, ‘Semi-quilled White’, ‘Parks’, ‘Small Yellow’, ‘Golden Yellow’, ‘Quilled Lilac’, and ‘Quilled White’, these being exhibited by Robt. L. Emmons of Boston, then recording Secretary of the Society, and Nathaniel Davenport. The plants were spoken of as grown in the open ground and evidence is given that that the number of varieties at this period was very small. They were exhibited on the 20th of November, and reported in the New England Farmer of November 26th, 1830.

      ‘Mrs. Alpheus Hardy’ chrysanthemum

      From Garden and Forest, February 29, 1888

       MAJOR FIGURES

       John Lewis Childs (1856–1921)