Читать книгу America’s Romance with the English Garden - Thomas J. Mickey - Страница 1

America’s Romance with the English Garden

Thomas J. Mickey

Ohio University Press

Athens

Preface

In 1908, Chicago landscape designer Wilhelm Miller wrote a book called What England Can Teach Us about Gardening. He opened with these words: “The purpose of this book is to inspire people to make more and better gardens.”1 He then presented several chapters that reflected the gardening trends in nineteenth-century England, covering topics such as landscape gardening, formal gardens, borders, water gardens, wild gardens, rock gardens, and rose gardens. How had we come to look to England as inspiration for our gardens?

Martha Stewart once wrote an article about hydrangeas for her magazine. As the story goes, within days nurseries around the country sold out of hydrangeas. Gardeners everywhere wanted the hydrangea because Martha had recommended it in her publication.

Both stories illustrate the power of mass media such as books and magazines, coupled with advertising, to sell just about anything.

Nineteenth-century American gardeners were the first ever to experience the mass marketing of the garden. New communication technologies and the emergence of modern advertising created for the first time a mass-media-marketed garden; in this case, one modeled after the English garden that appeared regularly in such media forms as the seed and nursery catalogs. The image of the garden in the catalog appealed to a national audience, especially women, defined through advertising as shoppers.

For the first time, the advent of mass production of seeds and plants, reliably produced and distributed like any other product for the home, increased their demand across the country. Modern advertising sold the seeds and plants using the image of an ideal garden that would motivate a consumer. This idealized image was that of the contemporary English garden, often featuring a woman planting or gathering flowers.

For many years I have been interested in the study of the cultural values within public relations, advertising, and marketing materials. A product or service by itself is not what is being sold and promoted, but rather an image of a better life, a happier home, or a more fashionable garden. I believe that you can understand a culture better if you look at the way advertisers and public relations professionals promote products and services.

The goal of this book is to lead readers to an understanding of how the advertising and marketing of seeds and plants in nineteenth-century America encouraged a particular view of the garden. Styles of gardening such as the Italian, Dutch, Spanish, and French fashions were familiar but were not the image that company owners fostered in their thousands of catalogs and countless advertisements. That image was, instead, the English garden style.

This book had its start when I spent a year at the Smithsonian, reading dozens of American seed and nursery catalogs from the nineteenth century. I was looking for a link between marketing and the American garden in that period. From the first time I picked up a catalog, I was struck by the friendly words of the company owner, both in the introduction and in the articles. The catalog’s illustrations only reinforced the words. After a while, what I found was that the catalogs sold a particular image of the garden.

I could see early on that the wealthy as well as the middle class in the nineteenth century had to garden in a particular way. Advertising material such as seed and nursery catalogs presented a view on how to use the seeds and plants so they would have meaning for the reader as a gardener who sought what was in fashion. It was no surprise to me that the same kind of English garden appeared from coast to coast, both in the catalog and on the ground.

In the nineteenth century, being modern—and the middle class valued modernity—meant you had an English-style garden, and especially a lawn. Perhaps that’s why garden historian and landscape designer Wade Graham wrote that despite all the powerful environmental critiques of the lawn, the American garden cannot escape from turf.2

This is the story of American gardening as told through the words and images of the seed and nursery catalogs of the nineteenth century. Michael Pollan said that garden design remains the one corner of our culture in which our dependence on England has never been completely broken.3Perhaps because the nineteenth-century seed and nursery catalogs played no small role in creating that dependence, the publisher for Miller’s book on the English garden knew there was an American audience, eager for its message.

Acknowledgments

In my year at the Smithsonian, made possible by the Enid A. Haupt Fellowship from the Smithsonian’s Horticultural Services Division, I read many catalogs from nineteenth-century American seed companies and nurseries at the National Museum of American History, the National Museum of Natural History, and the library of the Department of Agriculture, located in Beltsville, Maryland. This book is the result of that research.

Later, the following institutions proved essential for supporting material, including more garden catalogs: the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, the Boston Athenaeum, the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, the Arnold Arboretum Library, Winterthur Library, Hagley Museum Library, the Bartram Garden in Philadelphia, the Marblehead Museum and Historical Society, the Dedham Historical Society, the Ethel Z. Bailey Horticultural Catalogue Collection at Cornell University, the library at Tower Hill Botanic Garden, and the Newton Historical Society.

Many people helped me as I wrote this book. At the Smithsonian I am indebted to Lauranne Nash from Horticulture Collections Management and Education, who believed in this work from the beginning. At Bridge-water State University I have to thank Howard London, Jabbar Al-Obaidi, Frances Jeffries, and my research assistant, Kelley Walsh. The Center for Advancement of Research and Teaching (CART) at BSU provided several grants for this book. Steve Hatch, former journalist and editor at the Boston Globe, suggested the preface. New Hampshire photographer Ralph Morang supplied the images of the plants from my garden for the Featured Plant sections. Special thanks for their advice to Jim Nau, Stephen Scanniello, and Cathy Neal.

Thanks to Elizabeth Eustis, Karen Madsen, and John Furlong from the Landscape Institute, now located at the Boston Architectural College. They encouraged me to ask the garden history research question that started me on this book’s journey.

Finally, I am happy that Ohio University Press opened the door when I came knocking in search of a home for this book. Editorial director Gillian Berchowitz helped me with her endless patience.

Introduction

Let us encourage our writers—and that can be any of us—to write garden stories.

kenneth helphand

Today in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, outside of Philadelphia, you can visit Fordhook Farm, bought by the seedsman W. Atlee Burpee in 1888. There Burpee spent his summers, on what he called his trial farm, to test seeds for his catalog. The two-story eighteenth-century farmhouse still stands, and in the first-floor study lined in mahogany panels near the fireplace you see the desk at which Burpee wrote his seed catalog.

At the corner of the room a door opens to steps that lead up to the bedroom on the second floor. If, in the middle of the night, Burpee got an idea for his catalog, he would descend the steps to his desk below and record his thought. He did not want to lose any inspiration, because seedsmen such as Burpee were serious about their business: helping the gardener grow the best lawn, flowers, fruits, and vegetables.

Burpee was only one of dozens of nineteenth-century seed merchants and nurserymen who were passionate about the garden and eager to spread the word about the importance of a garden for every home.

This book tells the story of how mass-marketed seed and nursery catalogs in the late nineteenth century told us what seeds to use, plants to choose, and landscape design ideas to employ. It is the story of how we became English gardeners in America because the seed companies and nurseries sold us the English garden.

They did their job well. To this day we love the English garden. Why is it that so many people stress over the perfect lawn? In the face of mounting questions about the sustainability of English-style gardens and their lawns —water shortages, chemical damage, and the use of demanding, exotic plants—we cling to the ideals sold by these merchants.

Here, the meaning of the phrase “English garden” dates to the nineteenth century. Its landscape includes a lawn, carefully sited trees and shrubs, individual garden beds with native and exotic plants, and perhaps, out back, a vegetable or kitchen garden. The lawn and the use of exotic plants are relics of the English garden style we have loved for the past two hundred years.

The English style of garden began in its modern form after the reign of King Henry VIII, in the sixteenth century. Garden then meant a symmetrical layout, often with a well-trimmed knot garden, which you can still see at London’s Hampton Court. By the early eighteenth century, the formal look was disappearing, replaced by a picturesque or more naturalistic view, with its signature feature, the long, sweeping green space devoted to lawn. By the early nineteenth century the garden had come to mean a gardenesque view—still a natural look but also with the careful grouping of exotic plants. Victorian gardens after 1850 meant carpet beds of annuals that the English usually first imported from a tropical climate and then cultivated in their conservatories over the winter. By the end of the century, the English garden included the wild garden, colorful perennial borders, and a return to a formal garden design.

The first section of the book (chapters 1–3) deals with early British influence on American gardening. Beginning in the colonial period, British garden authors provided the books for American gardeners. Professional gardeners emigrated from Great Britain, and Americans hired them, or they came to own large American seed and plant companies in such cities as Boston, New York, and Philadelphia.

Like the English, horticultural societies appeared in major American cities, first along the East Coast. America followed the English format as well as content of garden journals, so it is no surprise that C. M. Hovey’s The American Gardener’s Magazine mirrored J. C. Loudon’s Gardener’s Magazine. The rural cemetery movement in major American cities corresponded with the British example of that time. If American businessmen with money to spend on their hobbies loved gardening, they collected plants, many exotic, and built their greenhouses, just as the English aristocracy had done before them.

We look at eighteenth-century Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, where, as in the other British colonies, the Elizabethan-era English garden style became the model of what a garden should look like. The plant choices were limited, as were sources for those plants. It is worth noting that at a time when few seed and nursery catalogs appeared in America, the colonists engaged in a vigorous exchange of seeds and plants across the ocean.

Next follows a story of a mid-nineteenth-century country gentleman’s landscape, dependent on the ideas of the English picturesque landscape garden. The country estate of Joseph Shipley, in Wilmington, Delaware, established in the 1850s, provides the example. Shipley could afford the leisure of gardening for pleasure, designing a landscape with the parklike style of the English design. Most Americans were farmers, and so more concerned with survival.

The second part of the book (chapters 4 to 7) develops the persuasive hold of the American seed companies and nurseries. The mass-produced catalog proved an important business decision because it was a way to connect with customers across the country. Seed companies, along with nurseries, had published catalogs of one sort or another for decades, but never had they produced the thousands of inexpensive copies that the new technologies of print and illustration made possible after 1870. Cheap newspapers, low printing costs, easy mail delivery, the railroad, and chromolithography, combined with an emerging middle class in the suburbs, contributed to the growth of the business.

The history of the seed and nursery industries of the nineteenth century comes through in the words of the company owners in the introduction section of their catalogs. The essays captured an owner’s thoughts and hopes for readers. Here he (most owners were men, though not all) spoke in a friendly, colloquial way about the industry, about new seeds and plants, about how difficult the catalog was to put together, about how important the reputation of the company was, and about how gardening formed an important part of American life. As the Maule Seed Company from Philadelphia put it in its 1892 catalog, “Nothing represents the growth of this business so well as this book [catalog] itself.”

The authors of horticultural literature in nineteenth-century America were often the owners of the seed companies and nurseries. They knew not only what the gardener had to plant but also how to plant it. The company owners followed with their own books, magazines, and articles. The catalog covered such topics as soil preparation, watering, bulbs, container planting, and landscaping. The company owner considered himself an educator, not just a purveyor of seeds and plants.

In the catalogs the companies frequently told their own stories of how they used the latest technological developments for printing and illustrating the catalog and also of the newest means of shipping their products. Major themes included the availability of novelty plants; the impressive size of company buildings, extensive trial gardens, and greenhouses; and the use of railroads for shipping. Addressing these themes both in words and in images, a company constructed its relevance to society. The reader could see that the company was progressive and thus surely deserved a customer’s business.

This change in our garden story came with an increase in the numbers of newspapers and national magazines dependent on advertising, especially after 1870. The nineteenth-century seed companies and nurseries used the new mass media to sell a standardized garden—their version of the English garden of contemporary fashion—which their customers could easily recognize in articles, illustrations, and ads. For the first time, a mass-media-driven garden became part of the culture.

The third part of the book (chapters 8 and 9) examines the importance of a garden as part of the home landscape for the emerging middle class—but a garden reflecting the English garden style. The middle class, who were defined more and more as consumers by modern advertisers, wanted a standardized product. The gardener that catalogs sought to attract was the woman of the house, who made most of the purchases for the home, while the husband spent the day at work outside the home. Most women wanted a garden like the one that appeared in the catalogs. They would buy the seeds and plants as well as the books and magazines about gardening that came from the seed houses and nurseries, holding on to an ideal of a garden that one day might be theirs.

Philadelphia nurseryman Thomas Meehan wrote in his magazine, Gardener’s Monthly, “The garden is the mirror of the mind, as truly as the character of a nation is the reflex of the individuals composing it.”4He wrote what we still in some sense believe today: show me a garden, and I will tell you what class of people inhabits the home. The garden became a cultural symbol for the middle class. Today, lawns and yards may exist to fulfill some innate human love and need for beauty, but it is more likely that they announce the dignity and responsibility (or perhaps, in some cases, lack thereof) of their owners.5

When, as if in one voice, the catalogs recommended a plant, they exerted an influence unlike any in earlier times, because the production and mass circulation of the catalog made the company’s message available across the country. In the mid-1890s, the catalogs trumpeted a novelty plant called the ‘Crimson Rambler’ rose, introduced from England. By the end of the century, most major catalogs listed this plant and included chromolithographs of its bright red color. The ‘Crimson Rambler’ soon became an important addition to the American garden and maintained its popularity for over thirty years.

The final section of the book (chapter 10) concludes with the home landscape, the embodiment of an enduring English garden style. The catalogs taught the middle-class reader how to landscape the home grounds. The landscape discussed in the catalogs included the lawn, curved walks, groupings of shrubs, trees to line the property, flowerbeds of annuals, and, later, borders of perennials.

The English style of landscape appeared around the country. Horticulturalist Denise Wiles Adams, in her research into heirloom plants from the nineteenth century, wrote, “As I studied the gardening practices of different areas of the United States, it became increasingly clear that landscaping and garden styles remained fairly consistent and homogenous across the continent.”6

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 century said, “Ornamental gardening is an art at present totally unknown or at least unpracticed, in the United States.”14 Evidently, he had not visited Woodlands: William Hamilton (1749–1813) designed Woodlands, his property in Philadelphia, in the modern English style of the picturesque. Indeed, Woodlands was so well done that Thomas Jefferson visited the estate to gain ideas for his own landscape in Virginia. Woodlands, reflecting the English obsession with plant collecting, included ten thousand exotic plants, many of which had to be grown in the greenhouse.

Henry Pratt’s Lemon Hill, likewise in Philadelphia, was another important estate garden. Three thousand plants, including the first gardenia in America, were in Pratt’s collection. Pratt had an even more concrete connection with the English garden: not only did he send his gardener to En-gland to bring back exceptional plant varieties, but also nurseryman Robert Buist, who later became an influential figure in English-style landscape gardening in America, worked at Lemon Hill when he first emigrated from Scotland. Though Buist worked for only a year or two at Lemon Hill, considered one of the finest gardens in America at that time, he probably felt at home since the garden reflected a style that Buist knew from Great Britain.

However, not all gardeners had the funds or the space for estate gardens, and the Colonial gardening style remained strong until 1840. Gardens until that time were often developed by Europeans who had immigrated to the United States, and these gardens reflected the style of gardening back in the immigrants’ home countries, with their focus primarily on vegetables and herbs. By the second half of the nineteenth century, though, colonial gardens had started to diverge from that model, edging toward a New World sensibility.

The gardens of German settlers in mid- to late nineteenth-century Wisconsin are a good example of this trend, showing the distinct influence of mainstream America in relegating the kitchen garden to the side yard and having plantings in neat rows (rather than the traditional rectangular beds). Row planting allowing for mechanical cultivation, with the tools suggested by the garden catalogs.15 Indeed, the gardens took on the look presented in the catalog.

Middle-class gardens, too, reflected a more standardized form of gardening, which had swept the country largely in response to the advertising in seed and nursery catalogs. Along with popular garden magazines, books such as seedsman Peter Henderson’s Gardening for Pleasure encouraged the same kind of garden, featuring flowerbeds and an extensive lawn.

Members of the growing middle class did not limit themselves to standardization and practicality, however. After 1870, the period of the Gilded Age encouraged large estates in which the landscape and gardening became a way to show off one’s wealth. The middle-class Victorian garden included a lawn with flowerbeds and exotic plants, evoking the gardenesque view first introduced by Loudon. Boston nurseryman Marshall Wilder, president of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, said in 1879 that the introduction of subtropical plants such as palms, agaves, musas, dracaenas, caladiums, and the many other ornamental foliage plants was the most characteristic feature of that era in horticulture.16

By the final third of the nineteenth century, the Victorian garden of exotic tropical annuals, popular in England and America, had come to require a greenhouse in which to start the plants and also to overwinter them. Rejecting beds of annuals for the landscape because they demanded too much time in maintenance, the English horticulturalist and writer William Robinson’s new book The Wild Garden promoted the use of perennials in borders. Perennial borders were likewise a feature in the “cottage garden” look favored by English garden designer and artist Gertrude Jekyll, who in-fluenced American gardening through her insistence on perennial borders in carefully orchestrated chords of a certain color that would bloom with season-long interest.

Still other influences came to bear in America. One of these, the Arts and Crafts movement, which developed at the turn of the century, focused on native plants such as grasses for the landscape. In midwestern states such as Illinois and Wisconsin, a new interest emerged in using prairie plants in the garden rather than exotics. Around the same time, an interest in Italian garden styles (inspired even by novelist Edith Wharton) became part of the American garden scene in the 1890s. More preference for the formal garden soon followed, promoted through the work of American landscape architects such as Charles Platt.

Because of all these influences, and more, the preferred garden style of the decades before 1900 fluctuated between formal design and a more natural and less geometric composition. The extent of variety in gardens of the period was readily apparent to the likes of Daniel Denison Slade (1823–96), a Boston physician and member of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, who described the garden styles in his book on the evolution of New England horticulture: “Between the lawns, walks, and shrubbery of the Gardenesque, so often deemed ‘artistic’ and the only possibility for beautiful grounds—the wildness of the Picturesque, requiring little or no interference with nature,—the Geometrical style, so intimately connected with Architecture,—between these types, there are numerous modifications that are appropriate and will be adopted by those of refined taste.”17

Despite all this variety, most of the American gardens of the time shared a common element: the influence of the English-style garden. As nineteenth-century Americans read English garden books and designed their landscapes in that style, the English garden became the fashion. England’s reputation for having a developed sense of horticulture certainly played a role in making English design more prominent. Travel, too, to view English gardens firsthand helped make the English garden the preferred style among some Americans, including Thomas Jefferson. While Americans recognized the importance of English gardening practices and sought them out, the English were eager to spread their knowledge of horticulture on our shore as well.

Hovey wrote in Gardener’s Monthly of 1876 of the influence of one En-glish garden writer: “Loudon’s books have molded and formed the present English taste for landscape art, as they have also influenced to a great degree the taste in our own country.”18 But Loudon was not the only writer to find an audience across the Atlantic. In the early nineteenth century, William Cobbett, a seedsman from Kensington, England,19 visited America in search of new plants. In 1821, Cobbett published a book in America titled The American Gardener, an account of his trip along with some recommendations for the American gardener. He began by highlighting the English garden tradition: “The labourers of England are distinguished from those of other countries by several striking peculiarities; but, by none are they so strongly distinguished as by their fondness of their gardens, and by the diligence, care, and taste, which they show in the management of them.”20 That care of the garden was something he sought to instill in an American readership.

In the book Cobbett thanked his American hostess, Mrs. John Tredwell, of Salisbury Place, Long Island, for her hospitality and dedicated the volume to her. The purpose of the book, as he saw it, was to instruct American gardeners on the principles of gardening that he had learned in England. He, like nineteenth-century American seedsmen and nursery owners in their catalogs, set out to teach Americans how to garden in the English style.

And Americans were eager to learn. In the early 1800s, significant horticultural movements taking place in Great Britain appeared in American versions in cities such as Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. Hovey stood at the forefront, encouraging American gardeners to take up the English model of gardening as both an art and a science.

England’s Garden Tradition

The training and support of professional gardeners shows the importance a nation places on its gardens. England’s garden history illustrates the role of professional gardeners as well as an evolution of the meaning of the word garden.

Although in England gardening was an important occupation between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries at royal castles and manors,21 monasteries were the centers of botany and horticulture. Behind the walls of their monastic enclosures, the monks cultivated herbs, vegetables, and fruits. That all changed when Henry VIII (1491–1547) confiscated the monasteries and gave or sold them to his lords; after that, the gardens of the monasteries became the property of the aristocracy and the landed gentry. Interest in gardens and landscapes spread among this wealthy and powerful group, expressed in the land they owned or confiscated, which sometimes became deer parks. Today at Hampton Court, for example, the park where the monarch and invited guests once hunted for deer still forms part of the landscape.

Thus, despite England’s modern horticultural reputation for expertise, English gardening as an art and the aesthetic appreciation of flowers scarcely existed until the fifteenth or early sixteenth century.22 (Not until the nineteenth century, especially in the gardenesque style of the Victorian period, would masses of flowers assume an important role.) Back in the seventeenth century, fruits were abundant and orchards grew throughout the country. Kitchen gardens were maintained for the table as well. Hired gardeners began to take over the daily tasks of caring for the crops of fruits and vegetables. Apprentice gardeners worked under a head gardener, who would teach the skills of horticulture while he bought, sold, and planted for the needs of the garden.23

English garden style evolved over a period of centuries. The English in the 1600s copied the elaborate symmetrical landscape designs of the French, particularly as expressed in the formal style of Versailles. Elaborate topiary, a garden style of the Dutch, followed, with clipped shrubs and trees in the landscape. The English also combined the French landscape style, with its more formal appearance, with the fountains and statuary of the Italians.

The definition of the garden changed again in the 1700s, when landscape designers, or “landscape gardeners” as they were called, proposed a view of landscape that required a more natural use of trees, shrubs, and extensive lawns. This design approach, called “picturesque,” resulted in a landscape characterized by variation and irregularity.

By the mid-eighteenth century, England had begun to promote that more natural landscape, which included a lawn, winding paths, and the use of carefully placed trees and shrubs in groups similar to those one would, supposedly, find in nature. Flowers and flowerbeds were minimal or shunned entirely. This new approach was a reaction to the more formal landscape design that had dominated the English garden for over two hundred years. Advocates of the new garden design included landscape designers William Kent, Capability Brown, and Humphry Repton, each associated ever since with this naturalistic landscape. That view came to define the English garden by 1800. Today, the grand English landscapes like Rousham, Stowe, and Stourhead still embody that picturesque design.

By then the garden had ceased to be limited to an enclosure and instead approached the image of a park in the country.24 The estates of the aristocracy included an extensive lawn to create that parklike setting. For over two centuries the lawn, the central feature of the park view, has probably been the most constant factor in English gardening.25 Not that the lawn was limited to England. In 1864, Hovey, then serving as president of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, praised the lawn in its picturesque style, as found on the Lyman property located in Waltham, outside of Boston, and he called it a fine example of the art of landscape gardening in America: “Who does not remember the once and yet elegant demesne at Waltham, where, years gone by, the beautiful deer might be seen bounding o’er the lawn, or gently reposing beneath some graceful elm?”26

By the end of the eighteenth century, landscape gardening in the natural design had become the recognized style of England and was reproduced on properties in Europe and America as well. Indeed, English gardens became the fashion. Old gardens were even destroyed to give place to the new style,27 and books were written abroad extolling English taste and inviting other nations to copy it. One continental example of the new English naturalistic style of the time was Germany’s Englischer Garten, in Munich.

Even today the grand estate gardens of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England, such as Stowe, Stourhead, Rousham, and Chatsworth, serve as primary illustrations of the country’s history of gardening. Thus, it is no surprise that the English garden, until Loudon attempted to appeal to an emerging middle class in his writing during the early 1800s, was restricted to the landscape of the wealthy aristocrat. Usually a team of gardeners took care of the property and looked at gardening as a profession, one in which they could advance to become head gardener one day, like the famous Joseph Paxton at Chatsworth.

Gardeners often came from families of professional gardeners, which instilled the importance of this work in their sons; of the young men who were accepted as apprentices in the school of the garden of the Horticultural Society of London in the 1820s, about half were the sons of gardeners.28 By the mid-nineteenth century, England had long fostered a tradition of professional gardeners, who knew gardening both in theory and in practice. William Cresswell, one such English gardener, left a diary of his duties as a nineteenth-century gardener. His book provides insight into the levels of apprentice, journeyman, and finally professional gardener. Cresswell’s goal was to make horticulture his life’s career, as had his father before him.29

British Gardeners Journey to America

In the nineteenth century, some British gardeners, like many other Europeans, left to come to America to seek a new life. A few established their own seed or nursery businesses. They would, of course, also educate the American gardener about the English garden. The immigration of European-trained gardeners was an important factor in the early development of American horticulture.30

Some of this reliance on European-trained gardeners was born of necessity, because of the relative lack of professional gardeners in America. When John Bartram Jr., son of the founder of the Bartram garden and nursery in Philadelphia, died in 1812, his daughter, Ann, and her husband, Colonel Robert Carr, took over the business. In Loudon’s Gardener’s Magazine of 1831, Carr wrote an article in which he complained how difficult it was to find American gardeners: “We are very far behind you [England] in gardening, and willing to learn all we can from such as come here.”31

However, not everyone who came from England and called himself a gardener was qualified. Cobbett wrote, “Every man, who can dig and hoe and rake, calls himself a Gardener as soon as he lands here from England. This description of persons are generally handy men, and, having been used to spadework, they, from habit, do things well and neatly. But as to the art of gardening, they generally know nothing of it.”32

In addition, British and European gardeners did not necessarily have a lifelong passion for the craft. Englishman William Wynne visited Bartram’s Garden in Philadelphia in the early 1830s. When he returned to England, he wrote, “Before I left London, several young gardeners begged of me to let them know what encouragement there is for such persons in this country. Colonel Carr told me (with regret) that most of the European gardeners turned farmers soon after they came here. This speaks volumes. There are no American gardeners except amateurs.”33 So the owners of large estates with extensive gardens in America were left to fend for themselves, since there were no professional gardeners as there were in Great Britain. Decades later, the situation in America would not be much better. Meehan suggested in an 1874 edition of his Gardener’s Monthly that the lack “of horticultural colleges is one of the principal reasons why there are few educated and really competent gardeners.”

Although the meaning of gardener has a long history in English gardening, American professional gardeners before 1870 were to be found only on the estates of the wealthy, tending to the fruit trees, lawns, and greenhouses. In contrast to the British with their system for training gardeners, the free-spirited Americans most often sought work in factories in the city or working the fields on a farm. Until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, indeed the profession of horticulture did not attract many native-born Americans.34 This disadvantage did not go unnoticed. As Andrew Jackson Downing wrote in his magazine The Horticulturist, in an article that compared American and British horticulture, “Rapid as the progress of horticulture is at the present time in the United States, there can be no doubt that it is immensely retarded by this disadvantage, that all our gardeners have been educated in the school of British horticulture.”35

The need to train professional gardeners shows how important gardening and gardeners were to the British; they took their gardens seriously. Eventually, so would American garden lovers, who did not necessarily enlist professional gardeners but nevertheless came to view the garden as something worthwhile, especially for an emerging middle class with suburban homes. Though seed and nursery businesses such as Hovey’s contributed to the growing importance of American gardening, the homeowner did not fear to take on the role of gardener.

Over a three-hundred-year period, England had evolved a definable garden style. It makes sense, therefore, that American seedsmen and nurserymen, eager to find an image to convey the message of the importance of the garden in their marketing, would rely on that tradition to teach their customers how to garden and to promote the sale of seeds and plants.

America Reflects English Horticulture

Garden historian Abigail Lustig has written that horticulture, as a new mode of gardening and botany, was an English invention, but it did not remain confined to Great Britain.36 Nineteenth-century botany and horticulture in Great Britain would also have an impact on America, but not without the involvement of American seed and nursery industries.

Many horticultural developments in Great Britain were reflected on the American continent in the nineteenth century. To pursue his dream of educating others in horticulture, Hovey, seedsman and nurseryman, among others, took part in garden-related practices that reflected what the English had already introduced to the world of gardening.

Horticultural Societies

In 1804, English plant enthusiasts began the Horticultural Society of London, later to become the Royal Horticultural Society. The organization focused on plant science and exploration, and the members encouraged the development of gardens using the newest plants, whether imported from the Americas or from Asia. Members were primarily wealthy businessmen and aristocrats who had an interest in building greenhouses and cultivating exotic plants in the landscape. Exotic plantings were displayed in a range of specialized garden areas such as the American garden, which featured native American plants, and the pinetum, a collection of evergreens. Eventually, the horticultural societies appealed to the middle-class gardener, particularly in their yearly exhibitions of plants, which would attract hundreds of visitors.

The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society (1827), the Massachusetts Horticultural Society (1829), and the New York Horticultural Society (1855) came along shortly thereafter and modeled themselves after the Royal Horticultural Society. Like the English society, which was made up of the British landed gentry, at the start wealthy American merchants who were also avid gentleman farmers formed the membership of the horticultural societies.37 Prominent American seedsmen and nurserymen were often officers of these societies, if not founding members, for nineteenth-century nurserymen and seedsmen founded horticultural and pomological socie-ties wherever they had their businesses.38 In Boston, for example, Hovey served as president of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society from 1863 to 1866. Boston nurseryman Marshall Wilder and seedsman Joseph Breck also served as president. Local nurserymen William Kenrick and Jacob W. Manning, along with seedsman James J. H. Gregory, were involved as well. Fruit grower Robert Manning, from Salem, was both secretary and editor of the history of the society.

At the laying of the cornerstone for the Massachusetts Horticultural Society’s new building in 1864, Hovey, in his role as society president, said, “We erect this Temple to foster and extend a taste for the pleasant, useful, and refined art of gardening.”39 Thus, Hovey extended his passion for gardening by presiding over the premier horticultural society in the city as well as erecting a building for future lovers of gardening. Indeed, it was through Hovey’s skills in fund-raising that the new building in Boston, at the corner of Tremont and Montgomery, saw the light of day.

Horticultural societies enabled middle-class gardeners to enjoy gardening in a way only the wealthy could before, particularly in the ability to collect plants and build greenhouses. Although a few people were collecting plants before 1800, the era of serious plant collecting, with an emerging botany as well, did not begin until 1805, with the Horticultural Society of London. Such horticultural societies had as their goal, as Hovey recognized, fostering a passion for gardening, which included bringing unfamiliar plants to a wide audience. As evidence of this broad interest, thousands attended the yearly exhibitions of fruits, flowers, and vegetables sponsored by societies, such as the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, which held its first public exhibition (the precursor of the current annual Philadelphia Flower Show) in 1829.

Exhibitions were good for business not only in expanding the market but also in achieving higher visibility. Seed companies and nurseries collected, grew, and sold seeds and plants, especially novelties, to satisfy customer interest. Hovey, for example, grew hundreds of pears, apples, and plums, as well as camellias and chrysanthemums, after he expanded his nursery in 1840.

Parks

Loudon, in an 1833 issue of his garden magazine, defended the importance of parks for the health of all classes of people. He wrote, “The time is just commencing for the embellishments of public parks, and gardens adjoining towns, in which the beau ideal of this description of scenery will be realized, at the expense of all, and for the enjoyment of all.”40 The majority of the population, not just the monarchy and the wealthy, needed outdoor green space. Because Loudon’s ideas on landscape inspired Downing, who in turn was an important influence for Frederick Law Olmsted, America’s foremost park builder, it is no surprise that Central Park demonstrates the influence of the English view of the picturesque landscape.

Loudon considered the garden to be an agent of social change. He wanted green space or parks, especially in the cities, where people could enjoy fresh air. Many of his readers agreed. In London, Hyde Park and St. James Park were initially intended for wealthy aristocrats. In 1835, Regent’s Park became the first important city park designed for public use. Regent’s Park had a lasting and beneficial influence on park designers through the rest of the century and beyond.41 In 1843, Joseph Paxton built Birkenhead Park, the first publicly owned park in Britain.

The American seedsman James Vick, in 1881, included in his monthly magazine an illustration of St. James Park in London (fig. 1.1). He wrote, “The view here given in St. James Park, London, is of a very different kind, and no admirer of nature would hesitate to ascribe to it far greater merit as a pleasing work of art. What is meant as the natural style of landscape gardening is here made evident much more forcibly than is possible by words.”

Fig. 1.1 A view of St. James Par in London.

America would also build parks. Central Park, serving as a model in its use as public green space, was eventually reflected in similar designs around the country, often with the Olmsted firm hired as the designer. In 1888, the Mount Hope Nurseries, the premier nursery in the country owned by Ellwanger and Barry, in Rochester, New York, gave the city twenty acres not far from the nursery. That gift later became Mount Hope Park, which Olmsted also designed.

Rural Cemeteries

In Paris in 1804, Père Lachaise Cemetery had become an international model of the rural cemetery, inspiring the creation of garden cemeteries abroad.42 Across the channel, in London, cemeteries had become a problem as the city’s population increased dramatically in the nineteenth century. The amount of space available for burying the dead was diminishing in large cities, both in America and in England, creating the threat of health problems, including the fear of miasmas, for the urban residents. But more than fear of disease prompted calls for a new type of cemetery; aesthetic appreciation also played a role. Loudon, for example, proposed in his magazine a parklike cemetery with trees and shrubs in an extensive landscape that would ensure a natural, picturesque view of nature and also give city dwellers a chance to enjoy a Sunday stroll along the cemetery’s winding paths and grassy hills, dotted with stately trees. England’s first suburban, parklike cemetery in London was Kensal Green Cemetery, laid out in 1832.

At about the same time, Boston joined the movement toward the rural cemetery, a newly emerging style of burial ground. In 1831, with the support of the leadership of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, Mount Auburn Cemetery was built in Cambridge in the manner of the rural cemetery of Europe. Hovey referred to Mount Auburn as “the sacred garden of the dead.”43 Later, in 1848, Boston’s Forest Hills Cemetery was also built, as an expression of the best style of landscape or picturesque gardening.

Vick encouraged the rural cemetery, with its lawn, trees, and shrubs. Figures 1.2 and 1.3 show illustrations from his magazine. He wrote in 1878, “Although the laying out and general treatment [of a rural cemetery] should be as for a gentleman’s ground or park, still the Cemetery may and must have a character of its own, not forced or artificial, or severe, but natural and graceful. This character can be expressed in no way so well as by judicious planting.”44 He thus encouraged the use of lawn, trees, and shrubs in a cemetery, much in the tradition of the English as represented in the writings of Loudon.

Figure 1.2. The cemetery as it existed in many areas

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

Because my property includes many trees, I am always on the hunt for shade-loving plants. The mayapple fits that description well. I grow it along the back of the house, which the nearby trees shade most of the day.

English garden writer William Robinson included this plant in his nineteenth-century classic The Wild Garden in a list of plants for naturalizing beneath trees. Robinson attacked the Victorian style of carpet bedding, which demanded high maintenance from the gardener. He preferred a garden style with perennials like the mayapple. American nurserymen soon adopted Robinson’s ideas as well.

Liberty Hyde Bailey refers to the native American plant Podophyllum peltatum, or mayapple, as a most desirable plant for the wild garden when planted in a colony.57The plant is an herb common in woods throughout the eastern United States.

The mayapple is a perennial that blooms starting midspring and continuing to late spring. The mayapple requires part shade to full shade, a medium amount of water, and little maintenance. It will reach a height between six and eighteen inches.

The leaf arrangement is opposite with only one to two leaves. Each plant has a single stalk topped with one or two broad, deeply divided leaves that vaguely resemble umbrellas. The fruit of the mayapple, hidden under the large leaves, is a berry that resembles a lime in shape. It is edible when ripened, but all other parts of the mayapple are toxic.

Since 1820 the mayapple has been recognized for its medicinal value. Native Americans used the root of the plant as a laxative to treat worms and other diseases. It was also used as an insecticide on crops. Today the root of the mayapple is used in certain cancer medications.

A Furor for Plants from England

In his Magazine of Horticulture, in 1868, Hovey wrote about the new hybrid coleus:

Since the introduction of Coleus Vershaffeltii, with its rich deep colored foliage, it has formed a prominent object for bedding purposes, especially in England, where the style of ribbon borders had extensively prevailed. The introduction of another kind, called C. Veitchii, increased the taste of rich foliaged plants, and by the skill of the hybridizer, a great number of new sorts have been raised between these two, which seem to have attracted unusual attention, amounting almost to a furor for these plants. The successful grower of these hybrids was M. Bause, of the Chiswick garden, who has raised twelve of these seedlings. . . . All of these, or a portion of them, will no doubt find their way into American collections.58

2: The English Garden Influence at Williamsburg

Frustrated with his family problems and his business, tobacco grower and member of the Governor’s Council John Custis (1678–1749), of Williamsburg, Virginia, took up gardening as his escape. He said, “I have a pretty little garden in which I take more satisfaction than in anything in this world.”59 Custis looked to England for plants for his garden. In the process he would develop a twenty-year friendship with Englishman Peter Collinson.

Like many other eighteenth-century English gardeners, Peter Collinson and his friend Lord Petre, who cultivated one of the largest collections of plants from around the world, sought to add more American plants to their gardens. Collinson corresponded with John Custis, and the two men exchanged plants for twelve years, from 1734 through 1746. Collinson shared the seeds and plants with Petre and his other “Brothers of the Spade,” a name he used to refer to his fellow gardeners.

Williamsburg provides an early example of the English garden influence in America: English gardeners inspired the landscape design for the town and wrote the garden literature the town’s citizens read. Additionally, gardeners in colonies such as Williamsburg came to depend on seeds and plants from England.

Collinson, for example, shipped the latest in English garden fashion, though often the seeds would not germinate or the ship captain killed the plants by overwatering. Custis’s letters tell us that sometimes problems ranging from high temperature to winds to Williamsburg’s proximity to the sea prevented the seeds from germinating. Indeed, the double tulips, the lily of the valley, and the crown imperials sent by Collinson failed to come up for Custis in the spring of 1738.

Despite such failures, Custis managed to cultivate a four-acre garden on Francis Street, where he grew the newest varieties of plants in an English garden style that was more formal than naturalistic. His gift plants from England included Chinese aster and globe thistle. Letters from Collinson often mention the seeds and plants shipped to Custis’s garden, including a box of “Horse Chestnuts, and peach stones of the Double Blossoms.”60

Custis wanted to keep his garden full of the newest plant varieties. For that he looked to England. In turn, he sent Collinson plants from Virginia such as the dogwood and laurel. And so Custis and Collinson, too, became “Brothers of the Spade.”

The Landscape and Garden of the Colonies

Williamsburg exemplifies colonial gardening before the focal period of this book, the 1800s. The colonies along the East Coast shared a common heritage in their gardens, and so there were striking similarities.61 Williamsburg illustrates for us the prevailing early colonial landscape design, the sources for seeds and plants for the garden, and the garden literature important for that time. Though seeds and plants in nineteenth-century industrialized America would come from commercial houses, whose owners would write garden books and publish garden magazines, the decades before the start of the nineteenth century showcase a garden style that was already dependent on English plants and English garden writers.

English colonists first arrived in Virginia in 1607, at Jamestown. By the eighteenth century Williamsburg had become an important political and cultural center as well as a center of gardening activity.62 Although in the mid-eighteenth century the landscape design of England was changing to a more natural, picturesque style, the gardens of Williamsburg retained the older seventeenth-century English landscape style, which featured a more formal and geometric look.

Lieutenant Governor Francis Nicholson’s plan for the original Williamsburg in the early eighteenth century is still largely intact. The town boasts a series of broad, straight streets with impressive public buildings, including the Governor’s Palace and the Capitol. This material has been used to superb effect in the restoration of Colonial Williamsburg. This privately managed living museum today covers more than three hundred acres and includes about one hundred gardens. The gardens provide a key to understanding how later styles of nineteenth-century English picturesque American gardening contrast with the older formal English style of Williamsburg.

In the 1930s, Boston landscape architect Arthur Shurcliff, who pre-viously had worked with American landscape pioneer Frederick Law Olmsted, re-created the landscape of the Governor’s Palace. Its geometric garden runs along a central north–south axis. Today its restored landscape (fig. 2.1) includes rows of boxwood shrubs and other evergreens, perfectly pruned, reflecting the English formal style. Behind each of the houses that lined the streets is a series of gardens. The garden style is mainly one of linear symmetry.

Figure 2.1. The formal landscape of the Governor’s Palace at Colonial Williamsburg illustrates England’s early eighteenth-century landscape design.

The settlers did not choose the more open, naturalistic garden made popular through the influence of landscape designers such as Capability Brown, whose ideas dominated from the 1750s to the 1780s.63 Brown’s preferences replaced the more formal, geometric design the English had enjoyed for decades. John Custis, who took pride in his carefully trimmed shrubbery, admitted that his landscape taste was not the modern, or more natural, design.

A Williamsburg garden took on a more formal design, and like older English gardens, it had to be enclosed within a wall, fence, or hedge. In fact, colonial law eventually required that fences be built around each lot. While the garden plots throughout the town were limited in space because of the unpredictable and often threatening environment, an enclosed garden provided safety and gave the colonists more control over what they were growing.

Plants

The colonial gardener displayed his wealth through the number of English plants represented in the garden. The garden also demonstrated the gardener’s identification with England, where the colonists felt the most important plants could be found. Donald Wyman, horticulturist at Boston’s Arnold Arboretum from 1935 to 1970, wrote that before 1752 English plants such as the horse chestnut, European birch, cedar of Lebanon, English beech, English holly, Scotch pine, European linden, and English elm were thriving in Williamsburg.64

In the American colonies, the seventeenth-century gardens had been almost totally what garden historian Ann Leighton once called “relevant”:65 they existed to feed, clothe, clean, cure, and comfort the settlers. The primary way people engaged with plants was as a source of food and medicine. Farming and growing crops of various vegetables served the basic need for food. Until the late eighteenth century, the colonists seldom had time for more than utilitarian gardens with simple flower and herb beds.66

When the colonists arrived and settled in Williamsburg, they, of course, wanted to garden. The vegetation they encountered there, however, was unlike anything they had known in England. English gardens depended on the mild, damp climate of the British Isles,67 and the look and style of these Old World gardens were rooted in a particular ecology. Although the climate of Virginia differed drastically from England’s, that did not deter the colonists, for the English had long believed that their gardens were the best in the world.

The colonists wanted their plants from home—so they brought plants with them, such as the English ivy (though they also used the native plants found in the region). The dandelion, for example, came from Europe and was used as a green for cooking. Today’s popular ground cover for shade, vinca, or creeping myrtle, was brought here as well.

The majority of fruit trees came to Virginia from the Old World, where they had been grown in English gardens for hundreds of years.68The fruits introduced from England included the apple, plum, pear, peach, cherry, apricot, nectarine, and quince. The quince, for example, was brought to Virginia from England in 1648. For a century it was a more popular fruit than apples or pears, which had been introduced by the French missionaries and then adopted by the Indians. Cultivating fruit would become the major form of horticulture for American gardeners in the early to mid-nineteenth century when C. M. Hovey’s magazine provided an important resource for fruit growers, covering cultivation, insect issues, and the countless new varieties.

Europeans introduced peas, cabbage, carrots, beets, and most leaf vegetables. The potato, a South American native plant, is believed to have been introduced to North America from England in 1565, when John Hawkins brought it to Virginia. It eventually became popular in Europe when, in Germany in 1710, it became an important food crop. The story is the same with rhubarb and the strawberry, which were brought to North America from Europe. The tomato came to Virginia in the late 1700s from Jamaica. By the nineteenth century it had become a staple for the table. There were also marigolds, both the African and the French varieties, first brought to England from Mexico, and later to the colonies.

Conversely, Native Americans introduced many plants to the English colonists. Among these was tobacco, a native plant that by 1650 had become the major crop in Virginia; tobacco was harvested, dried, and sent to En-gland. Native Americans also introduced the colonists to peppers, maize, beans, pumpkins, and squash.

Williamsburg today has over five hundred kinds of cultivated plants, either indigenous to Virginia or introduced from abroad during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries.69 Cultivated native trees included the catalpa and the black locust. Plants within Williamsburg sometimes came from nearby plantations, for there was a strong relationship between the horticultural practices on the plantations and the gardens of Williamsburg. Thomas Jefferson, for example, received swamp mallow from marshes near the town and a fine apple tree from the garden of George Wythe’s house in Williamsburg.70 The fruit of that tree, he wrote, “was the most juicy apple I have ever known . . . very refreshing as an eating apple.”

The plants of colonial-era Williamsburg were thus a collection of both imported and native plants, reflecting the influences of English, French, and Spanish colonists as well as Native Americans. The gardens of Williamsburg were so distinctive that people even traveled to the town to see them.71

The Gardens of Williamsburg

In Williamsburg, raised beds were the preferred way of planting herbs and flowers because this was also the old method of gardening in En-gland. In addition, the wealthy had extensive parterres, topiary, and terraces, as reflected in the garden design at the Governor’s Palace. The lots at Williamsburg were half an acre, one acre, or two acres in size, with the landscape design extending in straight lines from the centrally located building. The straight lines catered to the practical needs of the gardener, especially in simplifying the maintenance of fruiting plants, vegetables, and herbs.

The influence of the English garden style held strong well into the nineteenth century, when Americans began to develop their own way of gardening while remaining dependent on the English style. Garden historian and landscape architect Rudy Favretti maintains that the formal geometric style of Colonial garden design can be dated from 1620 until 1840 because design did not change significantly during that period.72

After Richmond became Virginia’s capital in 1780, Williamsburg, Virginia’s previous capital, was forgotten until the early part of the twentieth century, when it assumed its role as an important site of America’s history. In the 1920s, Williamsburg was, in a sense, rediscovered when the creation of Colonial Williamsburg was begun with the restoration of the buildings and the gardens. In the process, landscape architects researched what colonial gardens looked like. Their resources included letters and deeds but also incorporated garden designs from other cities of that period. The garden design of Colonial Williamsburg, though reconstructed in the twentieth century, displays distinct English characteristics from the earlier period.

Today a visitor to Colonial Williamsburg can see what colonial gardening was like for both the commoner and the wealthy class.73 The style in the gardens, as well as the buildings, is called Colonial Revivalism, a reconstruction of the eighteenth-century design of the home and garden. Though the style was produced in the previous century, some have, perhaps rightly, criticized it as a twentieth-century interpretation.

Some of the colonial plants were native, but most were imported, primarily from England. There were no American seed companies or nurseries offering catalogs yet. If a seed company—such as the David Landreth Seed Company, which emerged in Philadelphia in 1794—printed anything for marketing its seeds, the document was usually a small circular or a handbill. The residents of Williamsburg might have purchased plants through the Prince or Bartram nurseries, two of the earliest eighteenth-century American gardening enterprises, but they had no involvement with the American seed companies and nurseries that would become national businesses in the nineteenth century. Any commercial seeds they planted, except for those few that they saved from the previous harvest, came mainly from English seed companies that exported to America.74

Commercial Sources for Seeds and Plants

America’s additions to the gardens of England during the colonial period were mainly trees, flowering shrubs, and vines. The English perennial garden is also indebted to America for many of its plants, such as the black-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia hirta), bee balm (Monarda didyma), coreopsis, goldenrod, garden phlox (Phlox paniculata), and the cardinal flower, which Robert Beverley praised in his book on the history of Virginia. Eventually, these plants would return to become part of American perennial beds, but only after American seedsmen and nurserymen began to sell them. Early among these American commercial garden enterprises of the eighteenth century are Bartram’s botanical garden at Kingsessing, near Philadelphia, and the Prince Nursery on Long Island.

Having been encouraged to collect native American plants, John Bartram in 1725 started a business selling his plants. The name “Bartram” was synonymous with botany and horticulture in the fledgling United States, and the Bartram garden became known around the world as a source for American plants.75 Though most of Bartram’s plant sales went to Europe, he insisted on the importance of his plants for American gardens as well, his belief serving as an early plea to American gardeners to use native plants. When the senior Bartram died in 1777, his sons continued the work to the end of the century, traveling the country to find plants and also carrying on their father’s tradition of practical gardening. In 1783, the Bartrams produced a broadside, or catalog, of plants and seeds available for sale from their garden. The garden, referred to as “America’s oldest botanical garden,” can still be seen, along with the Bartram house.

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 College, presented a dictionary of farming terms in The New England Farmer, published in 1797. He wrote, “Americans speak the English language, yet the diction peculiar to different farmers on the east and west of the Atlantick, and the manner of their communicating their ideas on husbandry are so little alike, as to render it highly expedient that we should be instructed by our own countrymen, rather than by strangers.”91 It seemed to him that English writers had instructed American gardeners for far too long. Deane focused his book on farming in North America, specifically in New England, to address the lack of such information. He wrote not for the wealthy landowner but for farmworkers, so they could understand the importance of applying certain agricultural techniques.

One of the most popular early nineteenth-century books on gardening published in America was John Gardiner and David Hepburn’s American Gardener (1804). Hepburn gardened for twenty years in England and for the next twenty years in America. He partnered with Gardiner, who was skilled enough in horticulture to write this practical manual, which gave great detail about the kitchen garden and also discussed the importance of flowers for the home landscape. The book appealed to the American gardener who had a small home lot.

Not specifically a gardening book but showing the importance of gardening was The History and Present State of Virginia, in Four Parts, written by Robert Beverley, the son of a Virginia planter. His purpose in writing this book was to lure English citizens to the new land. In it he discussed the plants that were native to the area and their value, which included nuts, berries, flowering trees such as the tuliptree, muskmelons and watermelons, corn, and potatoes—all well known to the residents of Williamsburg. Beverley said, “A kitchen garden don’t thrive better or faster in any part of the Universe than here.”92The garden included herbs and vegetables from England, but he argued that they grew better in Virginia. These gardens also contained native Virginia fruits and herbs.

Although books to instruct the gardener in colonies such as Williamsburg were primarily the work of English authors, the nineteenth century opened the door for American gardening writers such as Charles Mason Hovey and Andrew Jackson Downing, who, like so many other garden writers of that time, were also the owners of seed houses or nurseries.

Because of his wealth and connections in England, where he had attended school, John Custis was able to receive the latest seeds and plants for his garden, which many claimed was the best garden in all of Williamsburg. Though many of his imports failed to grow, he never gave up asking Collinson for the newest variety of plant. He imported more European plants into the Tidewater region of Virginia than anyone else.

Through several growing seasons, Custis learned the lesson important to every gardener: persistence and patience mark the journey. Custis enjoyed his garden, which, according to some, was graced with the best collection of lilacs in America. Custis wrote to Collinson, “I am att [sic] a loss what Returns or acknowledgements to Make you for your Many Favours.” The plants Custis sent and the splendid garden he tended in Williamsburg were thanks enough to Collinson.

George Washington, who married John Custis’s daughter-in-law, Martha, after her husband died, years later spent a night at the Custis home. By then John Custis was gone, but Washington, a gardener himself, likely enjoyed the plants, both native and from England, in a garden that many once considered the best in Williamsburg.

featured plant

Rudbeckia hirta / Black-Eyed Susan

As I walk around my garden in late summer, I see the yellow flowers of Rudbeckia hirta, or black-eyed Susan, popping out of crevices in the rocks that form a wall near the lamppost. How they get there I do not know, but every year they appear.

From the seventeenth century on, the English perennial garden included plants from America. This plant is native to eastern North America and was first sent to England in 1714. It appeared in the Bartram listing of native American plants in 1783, which was during the period when colonial Williamsburg’s gardens attained their prominence. In the nineteenth century, Rudbeckia hirta returned to become part of American gardens when American seedsmen and nurserymen offered it in their catalogs. Philadelphia’s Robert Buist sold it in his 1845 catalog for twenty-five cents.

Linnaeus, the Swedish naturalist, named the flower Rudbeckia after Olav Rudbeck and his son, who were both professors at the University of Uppsala. In 1918 the black-eyed Susan became Maryland’s official flower when it was designated the “Floral Emblem” of Maryland by the General Assembly. The story is told that its common name, black-eyed Susan, may refer to a Susan in England searching for her long-lost love, William.

The word hirta, the designation of the largest group from the twenty-five species of Rudbeckias, means “hairy” and refers to the short, stiff hairs on the stem. The black-eyed Susan is very easy to care for and has no special needs. However, it does best—growing two feet in height—when it is in well-drained soil and full sun. Its leaves are diamond-shaped, have three prominent veins, and reach four to seven inches in length. The yellow flower with the dark center blooms from June through August, and it can be annual, perennial, or biennial. It is often confused with the sunflower. This plant is usually found in dry fields, roadsides, prairies, and open woods.

3: Early Wealthy Americans and Their English Landscapes

Banker Joseph Shipley felt the pain from gout run through his body. When confined in his chair near the window, he enjoyed looking out at the extensive lawn and trees in the picturesque landscape outside his Liverpool home. Though his English landscape gave him some consolation, his illness often made him think about returning to his native America.

Shipley wrote to his nephew, requesting that he purchase on Shipley’s behalf the Weldin property in his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware. To his English friends it was no surprise, therefore, that in 1851, at the age of fifty-six, Shipley set sail for America, where he would retire and build the estate he called Rockwood.

After he arrived in America, Shipley could have read Cambridge nurseryman C. M. Hovey’s 1850 seed catalog, for on the inside front cover Hovey recommended the English picturesque landscape style: “The cultivation of ornamental trees and shrubs is rapidly increasing, and with the increasing taste, a desire to possess a greater variety than has usually been enumerated in catalogues in this country. The publication of that magnificent work, the Arboretum Britannicum, by the late Mr. Loudon, has made known a vast number of trees and shrubs, which, through the exertions of foreign collectors, have been introduced into Great Britain and the Continent and have already added so much to the embellishment of their gardens and grounds. A great portion of these being perfectly hardy, their introduction into our grounds is an object of great importance.” Hovey encouraged his readers to use exotic, imported plants in the home landscape to replicate the style of the English garden.

Shipley built his Delaware landscape in that English fashion. He provides an example of the early period of American gardening, when wealthy businessmen, with English garden books to guide them, chose to design their home landscape in the English manner. They would, however, buy their seeds and plants from an American company.

There had been no seed or plant catalogs in colonial Williamsburg, and inspiration for gardening came from English writers. That began to change during the nineteenth century, especially after 1870, when a large commercial trade in seeds and plants emerged, centered on the East Coast. While most Americans would continue to regard gardens primarily as a source of food and medical supplies, the wealthy could enjoy a landscape designed and planted as an art form. However, even though the words and images of the new catalogs opened up a world of possibilities to American gardeners, the inspiration remained the same: the tradition of the English garden.

The English Picturesque Design Comes to America

Eighteenth-century English garden designers such as William Kent, Capability Brown, and Humphry Repton promoted landscape designs that rejected the earlier formal geometric plan. Their encouragement of the naturalistic, or picturesque, garden design was widely accepted in England. The word picturesque refers to a painter’s view of the landscape, and such a landscape was intended to resemble what a landscape painter would put on the canvas: a glimpse of untouched nature. These landscape designers’ rejection of earlier garden fashions went beyond the figurative; in an act that angered some clients who had spent considerable money on a formal garden design, Brown often leveled a garden to make the land conform to this more naturalistic view—for example, adding grading for terraces and an expansive lawn.

James Kornwolf divides the picturesque landscape into three phases, which appeared one after another in eighteenth-century England. The first phase emphasized formal features and a variety of garden buildings in numerous styles, such as temples and grottos (for example, Alexander Pope at Twickenham, William Kent at Rousham Park); the second phase featured clumps of trees, artificial knolls, and serpentine ponds or lakes, often with islands (Capability Brown at Blenheim); the third phase generally stressed very natural settings and sweeps of turf with a minimum of “artificial” features.93

The picturesque style did not remain in England, however; wealthy Americans such as Joseph Shipley used its design principles to inspire their own gardens, designed and built in the manner of an English country home, with a lawn, trees, and shrubs. Such an estate sometimes served as a second home for a wealthy merchant who lived most of the year in the city.

The French immigrant Andre Parmentier, both a nurseryman and a landscape designer, was particularly notable in introducing the English style of landscape on the East Coast during the first part of the nineteenth century. Parmentier chose that design for his clients with properties along the lower Hudson River, outside New York City. He said that in America the landscape for the home needed to be more natural, not focused on an undue regard for symmetry: “Our ancestors gave to every part of a garden all the exactness of geometric forms. They seem to have known of no other way to plant trees, except in straight lines, a system totally ruinous to the beauty of the prospect. We now see how ridiculous it was.”94 His was an early voice for the naturalistic English picturesque style of landscape and garden on American soil.

The Gardenesque Style

English plantsman, designer, and writer John Claudius Loudon first used the term gardenesque in 1832, in his garden journal Gardener’s Magazine. After traveling to France and Italy, he realized the importance of plant collections and wanted to accommodate such plants in the landscape. He proposed a style of gardening that would show off a collection of plants and also allow for a bit of formality.

Though Loudon originated the term gardenesque to describe his modern view of landscape, English landscape designer Edward Kemp also used it in his own book, written in 1850. Loudon wrote that there were three kinds of landscaping: formal, gardenesque, and picturesque.95 For the rest of the nineteenth century, several American seed companies and nurseries used the same threefold division in their annual catalogs to instruct readers in how to landscape around the home.

In the gardenesque style, trees, shrubs, and flowers—often nonnative —would be planted carefully, so that one plant did not touch another. The idea was to create informal gardens that were, however, as obviously manmade as were formal gardens, so that the landscape would appear as a work of art. The landscape became an artistic display for a collection of plants that were often assembled from around the world.

Joseph Shipley of Delaware

Shipley, a member of one of the leading Quaker families of Wilmington, sailed to England in 1823 to run the Liverpool office of a banking firm called James Welch (the name would later change to Shipley, Welch, and Co.) that financed the shipment of cotton to England. Shipley remained in England for over twenty-five years, at a job that created enough wealth to purchase the land in Delaware and to design and build the house and landscape of his dreams. His home and landscape at Wyncote, whose design featured the parklike, more naturalistic use of trees and shrubs, clearly show that Shipley had firsthand experience of the modern English garden.

The British architect George Williams designed Shipley’s house. Williams had earlier worked with the horticulturalist and landscaper Joseph Paxton on Liverpool’s Prince’s Park, designed by Paxton in 1842. Additionally, he had worked with both Paxton and Kemp on Birkenhead Park. He too was familiar with the current fashion of landscape gardening.

Shipley purchased the Levi Weldin farm in Wilmington, a property with distinctive cliffs, trees, and a view of the Delaware River. He also bought adjoining parcels, creating an estate of 382 acres. He named his new estate Rockwood. The house, built between 1851 and 1857, was both a re-creation of his English home and an expression of the Rural Gothic style, popular in the United States after 1841 (fig. 3.1).96 That style, associated also with the picturesque view of nature, had been important in England earlier, when the Gothic Revival formed an expression of the Romantic age. The house featured a conservatory, a gate lodge, an extensive lawn, a kitchen garden, a carriage house, an orchard, a gardener’s cottage, and acres of farm and woodland.

Figure 3.1. Rockwood was built in the Gothic style, popular in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Shipley’s Garden Books

Shipley’s garden books included works by landscape designers Edward Kemp and Andrew Jackson Downing. While the wealthy in Europe were educated about landscape through reading and travel (including visiting gardens), wealthy Americans, too, traveled to Europe with the same intention. They also read English garden books.

Kemp’s landscape ideas inspired the design of Rockwood. Kemp became superintendent of Birkenhead Park, which impressed Frederick Law Olmsted on his travels to England well before his Central Park picturesque design took shape. Borrowing ideas from Kemp’s book How to Lay Out Home Gardens, Shipley transformed Rockwood into an English country estate in an English garden setting.

Kemp would continue to be an important voice influencing landscape in America for decades. In 1877, Meehan wrote in his magazine Gardener’s Monthly, “We would particularly recommend at this season of the year a consultation of works on taste in landscape gardening with a view to improvement in this respect. Of these there are Downing, Kemp, and Scott, within the reach of every one.”97

Born to a small community, early on Kemp showed interest in designing gardens. When he was old enough to work, he started training under Paxton. In 1858, Kemp judged the New York Central Park Competition, selecting the now-famous Olmsted and Calvert Vaux design. With his book, Kemp made Paxton’s ideas available to the masses. Paxton, first a rival and then a friend of Loudon’s, published the magazine Garden, which was read by American seed and nursery owners, who would sometimes refer to it in their catalog.

Downing also inspired Shipley, who owned two copies of Downing’s book A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening. Downing devoted a section of the book to the Gothic style of home building, which he admired as beautiful and picturesque.

Downing distinguished between landscape design for a cottage and for a villa, representing different social classes: one for the middle class and the other for the wealthy. Though he sought to provide inspiration for the emerging middle class, his appeal throughout the century would be to the wealthier estate owner. The rural architect Lewis Allen wrote, “Mr. Downing’s Designs and Plans are too expensive for general use among this class [the mechanic and farming community] of persons; they will do for what are termed gentlemen farmers, and mechanics, who work, if at all, in gloves.”98 The wealthy could afford their own landscape designers, such as William Webster of Rochester, New York; Jacob Weidenmann from Hartford; Olmsted and Vaux; and, later in the century, Charles A. Platt.

Shipley was familiar with the landscape design principles of Loudon’s Encyclopedia of Gardening.99 Loudon made collecting plants for the landscape an important part of gardenesque design. Rockwood’s historian Lawrence Elliott Lee referred to the estate’s style of gardening as a gardenesque landscape.100

Sources for Rockwood’s Plants

Even while in England, Shipley had known the value of American trees for the landscape, and he had planted several of them in his Wyncote landscape. He later purchased trees and shrubs for his Rockwood landscape from several East Coast nurseries. The orders, placed in 1857, included plants from the Robert Buist Company of Philadelphia. More were ordered in 1852 from the Mount Hope Nurseries, owned by Henry Ellwanger and Patrick Barry of Rochester, New York. The majority of the plants for the Rockwood gardens were obtained from American sources.101

Nursery receipts show that Shipley ordered his plants in two stages. First, he chose the plants for the landscape away from the house. Later, after the house was built, he ordered plants for the area around the house. By 1861 the gardens were well established.

The nurseries Shipley used featured both native and exotic plants from around the world. Because the companies offered such plants and encouraged patrons to use them, they encouraged the English gardenesque design, which featured collections of plants.