American Gardening

Today plant hunters still travel the world looking for plants that will find a home in American gardens. The American grower Proven Winners tests plants from sixty breeders around the world.  The company trials them and if they are worthwhile, the new plants become part of the palate for the American gardener. The company introduces [...]

Today we take the sales catalog for granted. In our house several arrive in the mail each month, selling everything from flour to clothes. In the nineteenth century the American seed and nursery industries pioneered the use of the mail order catalog to reach customers across the country.  It became their major form of advertising. [...]

Gardening resembles clothing as a cultural symbol.  It represents what is in fashion at the moment. In nineteenth century England plant collecting made varieties of plants from Africa, Asia, and the Americas available to gardeners who had never seen them before. People gardened to show off their collections. The garden moved from the eighteenth century picturesque [...]

In the spring time one of my favorite public gardens to visit is Blithewold in Bristol, Rhode Island. In the bosquet area, near the house,  thousands of spring bulbs will bloom for the next several weeks. American gardeners owe the encouragement of  such naturalizing of spring bulbs to the popular Irish plantsman and writer William [...]

The question of advertising the garden continues to haunt me. How is it that we covet the plants and garden products that become heavily advertised? In some way advertising gives legitimacy to a product. If it’s advertised, it must be good. But more than that. The more advertising is connected to the product, the better [...]

Any business owes its success to a multitude of causes. One of them has to be integrating the latest communication technology. Today that might mean social media. In nineteenth century America that meant chomolithography to illustrate the company’s products.  The seed and nursery industries were at the forefront of employing chromolithography for their advertising. Lithograph [...]

Every year I look forward to the nursery trade show in the Northeast called New England Grows. The show attracts thousands.  It was held last week, only Wednesday and Thursday, cut short a day because of the snow storm. What I like about New England Grows besides the lectures which always bring me new ideas, [...]

This past week I attended a lecture on the chromolithography exhibit currently showing at the Boston Athenaeum. I knew that chromos played a key role in advertising in the nineteenth century and wanted to learn a bit more about them. A chromo is a colored illustration in which the artist used a flat limestone for [...]

I always wondered when seed companies first  started to send seeds across the country in the U. S. mail. The Philadelphia nurseryman Thomas Meehan in the 1873 issue of his magazine Gardener’s Monthly included an article entitled “The Father of the Postal Seed Business” written by fruit-grower, landscape gardener, and writer Franklin Reuben Elliott. Elliott wrote: [...]

By the end of the nineteenth century seed company and nursery catalogs would offer for sale many varieties of one plant. That was possible because of the new system of mass production of seeds and plants.  Like any business, the garden industry sought ways to incease its inventory and market share. The growing conditions of [...]