An Abundance of Flowers. Judith M. Taylor

      Introduction

      ALL OF US, gardeners and nongardeners alike, are extraordinarily spoiled in being able to satisfy almost any floral whim with a huge abundance of choices. Did you ever wonder about the amazing variety of potted and cut flowers found even in the local supermarket, why you have roses which start to bloom in the early spring and continue late into the year, or why there are chrysanthemums in almost every color of the rainbow, including green? How about that prosaic garden center or “big box store” down the street and its vast inventory? Did you ever ask yourself how they could offer such varied flowers and who might have created them?

      It is hard to imagine a time when florists’ carnations were new and exotic, but that was the case toward the end of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century, when the humble pink became a great star. Begonias are another example. The new flowers came in waves and created great excitement. Many began as rich men’s playthings, like orchids, but rapidly came down in price and spread to the general population.

      There is hardly a flower or shrub in general use that has not been crossbred and hybridized since its original discovery. In Visions of Loveliness: Great Flower Breeders of the Past, I touched on the fascinating stories behind eighteen well-known flowering plants, but no work of that sort is ever complete: One simply draws a mental line at a particular point and stops. As soon as the manuscript has been sent to the publisher, new material appears, and the task stretches out asymptotically.

      With that in mind, I decided to pick up where I had stopped and cover another series of handsome plants with equally fascinating stories. In this book, I look into several more herbaceous flowers and one vine.

      In a few instances, figures familiar from the first book make another appearance. Victor Lemoine (1823–1911) is one of them. Lemoine was the son and grandson of well-established estate gardeners in Alsace-Lorraine. The family worked for a wealthy nobleman. It was a sign of their prosperity and social position that Victor Lemoine’s parents could afford to send him to a good school and allow him to stay there until he was seventeen. Usually, gardeners’ children were lucky to go to school at all. It was clear Victor Lemoine knew exactly what he wanted to do, because he apprenticed himself to three of the most influential horticulturists of his day. Within a year of opening his own nursery in 1844 in Nancy, a rapidly growing industrial city in eastern France, he issued the first of his intentional hybrids, a new purslane. Shortly after that, more of his hybrids drew attention and he was the subject of an article in a French horticultural journal.

      During his self-directed apprenticeship, Lemoine spent about a year in Ghent with Louis Van Houtte, a now-legendary figure who expanded the radical new business of breeding flowers. Van Houtte had a very powerful