Writing the Garden. Elizabeth Barlow Rogers
soulless beauty, Frau Karl Druschki, to the contrary notwithstanding.
The curse of scentlessness is sometimes removed when the modern hybrid roses are crossed with old roses. Wilder’s language then rivals that of the wine connoisseur when she describes certain hybrids of intricate and complex old-rose ancestry. In one instance she invites us to smell and detect “the odours of spice and musk and of honey, even that of Violets . . . and a whole gamut of fruity odours.”
Like Jekyll, Earle, and other garden writers who grew up playing in a garden, Wilder’s happy recollections of her youthful associations with nature and place reinforce one of the themes running throughout these pages: if there is such a thing as a horticultural gene, it is powerfully nurtured by the privilege of having been born into a gardening family and having lived in a home with a beautiful garden. In citing a repertoire of fragrant roses, Wilder says:
In the Maryland garden of my youth we grew only Teas and Noisettes and I remember that splendid Rose of the latter class, Maréchal Niel, that wound a vigorous wreath about the library windows, was called the Strawberry Rose, because its pointed golden buds so realistically suggested the pungent odour of ripe Strawberries, and that the Tea Rose, Safrano, my mother’s favourite, had distinctly the spicy breath of the Scotch Pinks that edged the bed. . . . The Box bushes grew tall in my grandfather’s garden in Massachusetts, which has been little changed in outline for more than a hundred years. Their sharp scent seemed to bring about a special atmosphere of apartness and mystery, and when mingled with the simpler scents of herbs and the old time Roses, after a shower or an early frost, the odours of this lovely old garden would be raised to such a pitch of oriental richness that one felt transported straight out of green and white New England to the glamorous East. And to a small person creeping through the white gate to play, the usual game of young matron tidily keeping house beneath the Grape vine and competently managing a large family of dolls, seemed no longer fitting. Instead a distraught lady out of the Arabian Nights glided with lissome grace up and down the straight paths, a fantastic head dress of Hollyhocks masking pigtails, a Lily scepter in her hand.
Thus are the imprinted memories of childhood the future gardener’s lucky inheritance.
Nurserymen in the Garden
BESIDES being businesspersons, some nurserymen have gone beyond their occupational responsibility of offering catalogue lists of their botanical offerings and ventured into the realm of garden writing. Particularly in the nineteenth century—a time that saw an explosion of new plant varieties coming into cultivation and the consequent development of a thriving nursery industry—a rising middle class, as yet unsure of how to lay out and ornament the grounds of newly acquired properties, formed a readership eager for instruction in the design and planting of gardens. It is not surprising to find the occasional nurseryman enlarging his traditional role and joining the ranks of the Loudons and other authors of encyclopedic garden books as a purveyor of botanical information, tasteful design advice, and practical horticultural knowledge.
Andrew Jackson Downing
The son of a nurseryman in Newburgh, New York, Andrew Jackson Downing (1815–1852) acquired a thorough knowledge of botany and the principles of landscape gardening before setting forth on a self-proclaimed mission to instruct new rural property owners on how to build their homes and landscape their villa grounds with taste—that genteel decorative sensibility that spelled social refinement.
In 1841, while still running the family nursery business, Downing published his first book, A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, Adapted to North America. Its critical and commercial success as the first book of its kind in America gained him widespread recognition as a horticultural and landscape-design authority. Cottage Residences (1842), Fruits and Fruit Trees of America (1845), and The Architecture of Country Houses (1850) followed.
Beginning in 1846 Downing’s magazine, The Horticulturist, gave him a literary platform from which to dispense horticultural information and promote his landscape-design theories. In a stream of regular articles he discussed the best methods of transplanting trees, enriching soil, fertilizing orchards, growing vegetables, producing wine, constructing ice houses and greenhouses, designing rural villas, and landscaping their grounds. In 1853, a year after his untimely death, Downing’s best articles in The Horticulturist were collected in a single volume published as Rural Essays (1853). This book provides an important perspective on the degree of attention nineteenth-century Americans gave to landscape design as a core component of urban and regional planning, a sphere that encompassed the country’s first suburbs, parks, parkways, and rural cemeteries, all of which were social responses to the rapidly industrializing new metropolis. The essays also provide revealing glimpses of mid-nineteenth-century American cultural mores and social attitudes.
In the essay titled “On Feminine Taste in Rural Affairs,” Downing takes up the theme of women in the garden. “What is the reason American ladies don’t love to work in their gardens?” he asks. The answer is:
They may love to ‘potter’ a little. Three or four times in the spring they take a fancy to examine the color of the soil a few inches below the surface; they sow some China Asters, and plant a few Dahlias, and it is all over. Love flowers, with all their hearts, they certainly do. Few things are more enchanting to them than a fine garden; and bouquets on their centre tables are positive necessities, with every lady, from Maine to the Rio Grande.
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