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Nurserymen in the Garden

BESIDES being businesspersons, some nurserymen have gone beyond their occupational responsibility of offering catalogue lists of their botanical offerings and ventured into the realm of garden writing. Particularly in the nineteenth century—a time that saw an explosion of new plant varieties coming into cultivation and the consequent development of a thriving nursery industry—a rising middle class, as yet unsure of how to lay out and ornament the grounds of newly acquired properties, formed a readership eager for instruction in the design and planting of gardens. It is not surprising to find the occasional nurseryman enlarging his traditional role and joining the ranks of the Loudons and other authors of encyclopedic garden books as a purveyor of botanical information, tasteful design advice, and practical horticultural knowledge.

Andrew Jackson Downing

The son of a nurseryman in Newburgh, New York, Andrew Jackson Downing (1815–1852) acquired a thorough knowledge of botany and the principles of landscape gardening before setting forth on a self-proclaimed mission to instruct new rural property owners on how to build their homes and landscape their villa grounds with taste—that genteel decorative sensibility that spelled social refinement.

In 1841, while still running the family nursery business, Downing published his first book, A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, Adapted to North America. Its critical and commercial success as the first book of its kind in America gained him widespread recognition as a horticultural and landscape-design authority. Cottage Residences (1842), Fruits and Fruit Trees of America (1845), and The Architecture of Country Houses (1850) followed.

Beginning in 1846 Downing’s magazine, The Horticulturist, gave him a literary platform from which to dispense horticultural information and promote his landscape-design theories. In a stream of regular articles he discussed the best methods of transplanting trees, enriching soil, fertilizing orchards, growing vegetables, producing wine, constructing ice houses and greenhouses, designing rural villas, and landscaping their grounds. In 1853, a year after his untimely death, Downing’s best articles in The Horticulturist were collected in a single volume published as Rural Essays (1853). This book provides an important perspective on the degree of attention nineteenth-century Americans gave to landscape design as a core component of urban and regional planning, a sphere that encompassed the country’s first suburbs, parks, parkways, and rural cemeteries, all of which were social responses to the rapidly industrializing new metropolis. The essays also provide revealing glimpses of mid-nineteenth-century American cultural mores and social attitudes.

In the essay titled “On Feminine Taste in Rural Affairs,” Downing takes up the theme of women in the garden. “What is the reason American ladies don’t love to work in their gardens?” he asks. The answer is:

They may love to ‘potter’ a little. Three or four times in the spring they take a fancy to examine the color of the soil a few inches below the surface; they sow some China Asters, and plant a few Dahlias, and it is all over. Love flowers, with all their hearts, they certainly do. Few things are more enchanting to them than a fine garden; and bouquets on their centre tables are positive necessities, with every lady, from Maine to the Rio Grande.