The advent of the lawn would seem all to the point. And
lawns there were, in plenty, English civil society at long last stable enough
(or so it seemed) for the nobility to live outside of walled castles on
extensive plots of ground.
Prior to Henry, most gardens were within the walls of
castles or monasteries. There were medicinal gardens, kitchen gardens and
pleasure gardens. The pleasure gardens were the forerunners of the flower beds
around our homes, or would have been if non-medicinal flowers had played more
than a tiny role. They were more turfed orchards, actually, almost certainly
featuring a central fountain or statue. Shrubs along the walls were generally
used to soften the effect of being within an enclosure.
Some 70 or 80 years later, Shakespeare would have his
characters discuss the overthrow of Richard II in gardening terms that bear on
these matters:
Gardener. Go, bind thou up yon dangling
apricocks,
Which, like unruly children, make their
sire
Stoop with oppression of their prodigal
weight:
Give some supportance to the bending
twigs.
Go thou, and like an executioner,
Cut off the heads of too fast growing
sprays,
That look too lofty in our
commonwealth:
All must be even in our government.
You thus employ'd, I will go root away
The noisome weeds, which without profit
suck
The soil's fertility from wholesome
flowers.
Servant. Why should we in the compass
of a pale
Keep law and form and due proportion,
Showing, as in a model, our firm
estate,
When our sea-walled garden, the whole
land,
Is full of weeds, her fairest flowers
choked up,
Her fruit-trees all upturned, her
hedges ruin'd,
Her knots disorder'd and her wholesome
herbs
Swarming with caterpillars?
There were no apricots in England in Richard's time (or in
Henry's, for that matter) and many fewer flowers than Shakespeare's more
expansive age allowed. The details of the playwright's garden—as all of his
historical detail—belong to the world in which he himself moved. But, even
then, most gardens remained in "pales," or enclosures, turfed, having
only room for spreading allegory, little for lawn. The growing freeman class
had only kitchen gardens, meant for neither pleasure nor protection, and such
gardens have been "modern" since ancient times.
Once England built an insuperable navy, and was the
preeminent commercial power in the world, late in the 17th century, the minor
nobility and growing middle-class came out from behind the pale. Lawns became a
necessity. They and the trees and flowers that ornamented them were adapted, as
signs of wealth, from the old models of the grand nobility which could maintain
estates on the outskirts of London, along the Thames, yes, but they were
generally much smaller and surrounded houses rather than castles. Lawns and
gardens began to be what they are today.
Sir William Temple, son of a prominent Irish barrister and
special envoy for Charles II, was such an early English bourgeoisie. Advocate
for a constitutional monarchy, for which history was not quite yet ready, he
retired early from public life to tend his garden and his library, his two
loves in life. Among the results was his book The Gardens of Epicurus,
in which he provides the following description of the average garden of the
late 17th century:
...our gardens are made of smaller compass, seldom exceeding
four, six, or eight acres: enclosed with walls, and laid out in a manner wholly
for advantage of fruits, flowers, and the product of kitchen gardens, in all
sorts of herbs, salads, plants and legumes, for the common use of tables.
Minus the vestigial walls, these are the "English
gardens" that the American colonists copied once they were possessed of
the leisure time and the wealth. As American wealth and leisure extended to a
larger portion of its population so did the number of its English gardens.
But this is not the history Mickey focuses on in his
America's Romance with the English Garden. His brief introduction is meant to
get the reader to the 19th century as quickly as possible—to cut to the chase.
Prior to that, America was most notably a botanical Eden. The English
contracted with the likes of John Bartram to catalogue the exotic flora of the
New World, for them, and to send samples for their botanical gardens. There
they were adapted to the English climate and dispersed to English gentlemen for
their cherished gardens. The Americans were busy enough clearing the land of
its flora and planting crops. It was in English gardens that American flowers
were first cherished.
Among the first of many "featured plant" histories
in Mickey's lushly illustrated America's Romance with the English Garden are
the American mayapple and black-eyed susan, both wild native plants, he informs
the reader, that were domesticated in England before finding their way back to
America gardens during the 19th century.
Bartam set up near Philadelphia, America's most cultured
city, and gathered his American plants there, as well. As Mickey quotes, from a
late 19th century seed catalogue:
"The noise of the guns of the Revolution had hardly died
away, when in 1784 the first seed establishment in America was founded at
Philadelphia by David Landreth"
Philadelphia was the arboretum of the new Eden. Isolated
efforts were made elsewhere in the colonies.
Early in the 19th century, America begins to pay more
attention to its gardening. At least on its coast, where wealth could be made
and packages of plants and seeds could be received. Journals could also be
received and enterprising types realized early on that English journals did not
precisely fit American gardening needs. Even tiny distances inland, however,
were beyond inexpensive postage and shipping; livings inland were little more
than subsistence.
America's Romance with the English Garden actually blooms in
earnest in about 1832. It was in that year that the first steam powered train
engine was successfully tested. In ten years, the express company began to
appear, shipping mail and goods inland at thitherto unimaginable speed and
affordable prices.
After seeing twenty years of growth in rail service,
nurseryman C. M. Hovey said in his catalog in the 1850s, "Plants are now
disseminated as rapidly over half the Union as they were in former years in the
immediate vicinity of our large cities."
In the wake of inexpensive shipping, advances in light
weight newsprint and color lithography led to an explosion of newspapers,
magazines and catalogs. All served to make life in the expanding American
hinterland more attractive. Catalog sales would fill the prairies with
everything from Levy's jeans, balloon-frame house kits to flowers for the
flower-bed once the kit was assembled. To pay for them, crops and cattle
traveled back to the East.
Mickey's romance of the seed catalog is one small aspect of
that explosion of markets and wealth. His numerous reproductions of their color
covers and black and white interior prints illustrate the unfolding history of
American gardening even more effectively than his informative text.
As America's Romance with the English Garden informs us,
gardening magazines and seed catalogues began to proliferate after the Civil
War. It was then that the railroads and the likes of the American Express
Company reached Chicago and St. Louis. The light seed-packets that the Shakers
had invented cost minute sums to ship from the growing number of seed
companies.
In about 1870, the U. S. Postal service began to institute
mobile post offices in customized railroad cars in order to further speed its
service in a bid to take over the express business. Speeds increased still
further as far as there were rail spurs. Postage became still less expensive.
Still more inexpensive printed matter, advertising every imaginable product,
seeds among them, went out to distant customers.
Being located along the earliest east-west transportation
routes, along the Mohawk Valley, Rochester, New York, became the center of the
American horticulture industry.
Lithographic businesses such as the Stecher Lithographic
Company,... were kept busy most of the year with catalogs, advertising, and
seed packets. By the late nineteenth century, more than two hundred Rochester
printers, employed in eight printing and lithographic firms, devoted their time
almost exclusively to horticulture.
With the passage of President Grover Cleveland's Civil
Service Act, postal clerks were no longer appointed by local political
machines. Instead they were hired based on their score on a civil service exam
and advanced in their profession based upon their professional competence. As
the result, the mail was even less expensive and delivery even faster.
The expansion of the postal service was helping to change
the country in enormous ways. By 1890, the Ladies' Home Journal was the most
popular advertising venue in the country. There, between ads for cook books,
children's clothing, stave-less corsets, indoor water-closets, refrigerators
and pianos, and popular female columnists who advised the housewife about them
all, were a profusion of ads for seeds. The husband away from the house,
participating in a rapidly expanding economy, the wife was now the modern
manager of the modern home. It was she who made the purchasing decisions and
her budget was also growing. The seed companies were very aware that their
customers were almost entirely those managers, almost entirely women.
By the 1890s the American garden—though founded upon the
English—had its own culture. Influences were traveling both ways across the
Atlantic. Various regions had their own distinctive styles. The American
gardener was now eagerly seeking out latest exotic varieties available from her
or his annual catalog. As Mickey's featured plant histories inform us, the
clematis made its way from Central Europe to become a common flower along American
fence lines. The Crimson Rambler rose, imported into seed-men's test-gardens
from Japan, was all the rage for decades, well into the 20th century.
Like Sir William Temple, Thomas J. Mickey clearly loves his
garden and his library. Unlike Temple, the history of America's Romance with
the English Garden is the history of the seed catalog and it is accompanied by
a gratifying number of color illustrations and reproductions of 19th century
black and white etchings from those catalogs. Those seed catalogs imply a great
deal. More and more people had the time and money to garden. While the scale of
the individual garden was much smaller, lawns and gardens were everywhere in
the landscape. An expanding country and the technologies it demanded had
created the American garden.
Also from the Library of Babel:
- Blank Verse Now and Then. January 1, 2019. “Surrey was as erratic as most young noblemen during early English history, and far more brilliant, and was imprisoned several times for temper and intemperance. In the end, he became rather impatient for the gouty, porcine, syphilis-riddled Henry VIII to die, and for the Howard faction to rule as regents to the young, fragile, son conceived of the syphilitic, Edward.”
- The Elegy and the Internet. July 1, 2005. ‘Drummond, we may remember, was the William Drummond, of Hawthornden, who Ben Jonson visited during a trip to Scotland, in 1619. The Scot took the time to jot a memorandum of Jonson's conversation, in which we learn inter alia that "he cursed Petrarch for redacting Verses to Sonnets, which he said were like the Tirrant's bed, wher some who were too short were racked, others too long cut short,"7 and "That Shakspear wanted Arte."’
- Be sure to check out the Browser's Guide to the Library of Babel.
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