American Gardening

After six years, my book America’s Romance with the English Garden (Ohio University Press) is now officially published. Today is what the book industry calls the ‘pub date’. My friend, publicist Lissa Warren in her book The Savvy Author’s Guide to Book Publicity says, “The pub date is the date your book makes its entry into the [...]

A common theme in the marketing of the garden from the nineteenth century seed and nursery industries is that gardening in Europe, but particularly in England, surpassed  American gardening. New York seedsman Peter Henderson (1822-1890) often wrote about that difference. Henderson admitted that American garden ingenuity outpaced that of England in some areas. He once [...]

In the 1890s advertising took off in a new direction. No longer did the company simply provide information about a product or service in an ad. Ads appeared everywhere, including the streetcar. The goal of course was to persuade the viewer to buy a product or service. Nineteenth century Philadelphia seedsman W. Atlee Burpee believed [...]

One of the research activities I enjoy is scouring library archives for their treasures. Recently I spent an afternoon in the Special Collections at Harvard’s Loeb Design School.  There I came across the book The Gardens of England (1857) by artist E. Adveno Brooke. The book was filled with page-length drawings of prominent English gardens from [...]

Advertising in nineteenth century America moved from simply product information to creating icons for the culture. At least that’s want Mary Cross writes in her book A Century of American Icons. Products became recognizable as brands, linked to a visual symbol that eventually became an American icon. For example, the Quaker Oats figure sold oatmeal, [...]

When John Claudius Loudon (1783-1843) began his garden publication Gardener’s Magazine in England of 1826, his goal was to educate gardeners but especially cottagers, the working class, or peasant population, to learn more about gardening. He made that goal clear in the first issue of the magazine. Early on in the magazine he also wrote that [...]

A couple of summers ago we visited England’s Stourhead where the garden illustrates the eighteenth century view of the landscape. I arrived at 9 a. m. and found that I was the only visitor on the property for at least an hour. I enjoyed that aloneness. I first made a stop at the Information Center [...]

I remember the high doors of the old men’s clothier Louis of Boston on Berkeley Street, at the corner of Boylston, an exclusive store in a building dating to 1863. Now the building has become the new home for RH, the current name of Restoration Hardware.  RH used to have a home on Newbury Street. [...]

This week the Boston Flower and Garden Show opens in the exhibition center along Boston’s harbor called Seaport World Trade Center. Though it has a smaller role in this Show, for years the Massachusetts Horticultural Society sponsored the New England Flower Show that drew thousands of visitors during its week-long run in the spring. The [...]

For the first time mass media became an important form of advertising products in the late nineteenth century, especially through magazines and newspapers. The fruit grower J. T. Lovett from Little Silver, New Jersey introduced the ‘Manchester’ strawberry  in 1881.  It proved to be a popular variety in the media. Garden magazines and articles in [...]