is native to eastern North America and was first sent to England in 1714. It appeared in the Bartram listing of native American plants in 1783, which was during the period when colonial Williamsburg’s gardens attained their prominence. In the nineteenth century, Rudbeckia hirta returned to become part of American gardens when American seedsmen and nurserymen offered it in their catalogs. Philadelphia’s Robert Buist sold it in his 1845 catalog for twenty-five cents.
Linnaeus, the Swedish naturalist, named the flower Rudbeckia after Olav Rudbeck and his son, who were both professors at the University of Uppsala. In 1918 the black-eyed Susan became Maryland’s official flower when it was designated the “Floral Emblem” of Maryland by the General Assembly. The story is told that its common name, black-eyed Susan, may refer to a Susan in England searching for her long-lost love, William.
The word hirta, the designation of the largest group from the twenty-five species of Rudbeckias, means “hairy” and refers to the short, stiff hairs on the stem. The black-eyed Susan is very easy to care for and has no special needs. However, it does best—growing two feet in height—when it is in well-drained soil and full sun. Its leaves are diamond-shaped, have three prominent veins, and reach four to seven inches in length. The yellow flower with the dark center blooms from June through August, and it can be annual, perennial, or biennial. It is often confused with the sunflower. This plant is usually found in dry fields, roadsides, prairies, and open woods.
3: Early Wealthy Americans and Their English Landscapes
Banker Joseph Shipley felt the pain from gout run through his body. When confined in his chair near the window, he enjoyed looking out at the extensive lawn and trees in the picturesque landscape outside his Liverpool home. Though his English landscape gave him some consolation, his illness often made him think about returning to his native America.
Shipley wrote to his nephew, requesting that he purchase on Shipley’s behalf the Weldin property in his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware. To his English friends it was no surprise, therefore, that in 1851, at the age of fifty-six, Shipley set sail for America, where he would retire and build the estate he called Rockwood.
After he arrived in America, Shipley could have read Cambridge nurseryman C. M. Hovey’s 1850 seed catalog, for on the inside front cover Hovey recommended the English picturesque landscape style: “The cultivation of ornamental trees and shrubs is rapidly increasing, and with the increasing taste, a desire to possess a greater variety than has usually been enumerated in catalogues in this country. The publication of that magnificent work, the Arboretum Britannicum, by the late Mr. Loudon, has made known a vast number of trees and shrubs, which, through the exertions of foreign collectors, have been introduced into Great Britain and the Continent and have already added so much to the embellishment of their gardens and grounds. A great portion of these being perfectly hardy, their introduction into our grounds is an object of great importance.” Hovey encouraged his readers to use exotic, imported plants in the home landscape to replicate the style of the English garden.
Shipley built his Delaware landscape in that English fashion. He provides an example of the early period of American gardening, when wealthy businessmen, with English garden books to guide them, chose to design their home landscape in the English manner. They would, however, buy their seeds and plants from an American company.
There had been no seed or plant catalogs in colonial Williamsburg, and inspiration for gardening came from English writers. That began to change during the nineteenth century, especially after 1870, when a large commercial trade in seeds and plants emerged, centered on the East Coast. While most Americans would continue to regard gardens primarily as a source of food and medical supplies, the wealthy could enjoy a landscape designed and planted as an art form. However, even though the words and images of the new catalogs opened up a world of possibilities to American gardeners, the inspiration remained the same: the tradition of the English garden.
The English Picturesque Design Comes to America
Eighteenth-century English garden designers such as William Kent, Capability Brown, and Humphry Repton promoted landscape designs that rejected the earlier formal geometric plan. Their encouragement of the naturalistic, or picturesque, garden design was widely accepted in England. The word picturesque refers to a painter’s view of the landscape, and such a landscape was intended to resemble what a landscape painter would put on the canvas: a glimpse of untouched nature. These landscape designers’ rejection of earlier garden fashions went beyond the figurative; in an act that angered some clients who had spent considerable money on a formal garden design, Brown often leveled a garden to make the land conform to this more naturalistic view—for example, adding grading for terraces and an expansive lawn.
James Kornwolf divides the picturesque landscape into three phases, which appeared one after another in eighteenth-century England. The first phase emphasized formal features and a variety of garden buildings in numerous styles, such as temples and grottos (for example, Alexander Pope at Twickenham, William Kent at Rousham Park); the second phase featured clumps of trees, artificial knolls, and serpentine ponds or lakes, often with islands (Capability Brown at Blenheim); the third phase generally stressed very natural settings and sweeps of turf with a minimum of “artificial” features.93
The picturesque style did not remain in England, however; wealthy Americans such as Joseph Shipley used its design principles to inspire their own gardens, designed and built in the manner of an English country home, with a lawn, trees, and shrubs. Such an estate sometimes served as a second home for a wealthy merchant who lived most of the year in the city.
The French immigrant Andre Parmentier, both a nurseryman and a landscape designer, was particularly notable in introducing the English style of landscape on the East Coast during the first part of the nineteenth century. Parmentier chose that design for his clients with properties along the lower Hudson River, outside New York City. He said that in America the landscape for the home needed to be more natural, not focused on an undue regard for symmetry: “Our ancestors gave to every part of a garden all the exactness of geometric forms. They seem to have known of no other way to plant trees, except in straight lines, a system totally ruinous to the beauty of the prospect. We now see how ridiculous it was.”94 His was an early voice for the naturalistic English picturesque style of landscape and garden on American soil.
The Gardenesque Style
English plantsman, designer, and writer John Claudius Loudon first used the term gardenesque in 1832, in his garden journal Gardener’s Magazine. After traveling to France and Italy, he realized the importance of plant collections and wanted to accommodate such plants in the landscape. He proposed a style of gardening that would show off a collection of plants and also allow for a bit of formality.
Though Loudon originated the term gardenesque to describe his modern view of landscape, English landscape designer Edward Kemp also used it in his own book, written in 1850. Loudon wrote that there were three kinds of landscaping: formal, gardenesque, and picturesque.95 For the rest of the nineteenth century, several American seed companies and nurseries used the same threefold division in their annual catalogs to instruct readers in how to landscape around the home.
In the gardenesque style, trees, shrubs, and flowers—often nonnative —would be planted carefully, so that one plant did not touch another. The idea was to create informal gardens that were, however, as obviously manmade as were formal gardens, so that the landscape would appear as a work of art. The landscape became an artistic display for a collection of plants that were often assembled from around the world.
Joseph Shipley of Delaware
Shipley, a member of one of the leading Quaker families of Wilmington, sailed to England in 1823 to run the Liverpool office of a banking firm called James Welch (the name would later change to Shipley, Welch, and Co.) that financed the shipment of cotton to England. Shipley remained in England for over
