century, Phillip Miller was the garden’s director; in the nineteenth century, Lindley and plant collector Robert Fortune took that role. The garden’s purpose was, from the time of its origin, more scientific, that is, to study a plant’s possible medicinal uses. Nonetheless, it set the stage for what botanic gardens would eventually become: gardens to educate the public in horticulture and botany.
Another notable example of a public botanic garden is Kew. Princess Augusta and the Earl of Bute, in the late 1700s, began Kew, the royal garden in London, to house plants that had been collected around the world and then labeled in a scientific manner. It became a public garden in 1841. By 1848 Kew had built its Palm House, which demonstrated to the public the use of glass to cultivate exotic palms throughout the year.
From the beginning, America, too, had its botanic gardens. In the eighteenth century, the Bartram Botanic Garden, located in Philadelphia, and the Linnaean Botanic Garden, founded by William Prince on Long Island, illustrated the importance of collecting plants and using their scientific names to identify them. Nurseryman Dr. David Hosack saw the importance of gardening for the public good. In 1801 he began the Elgin Botanic Garden in New York, located where Rockefeller Center now stands. Hovey’s nursery sat on Cambridge Street not far from Harvard College, where a botanic garden was set up in 1805 and then replaced in 1872 by the Arnold Arboretum.
Though there were several garden styles in early American gardening, the English style would dominate in the nineteenth century in the sale of garden products and in the ideas expressed in garden publications. The seed and plant peddlers, such as Hovey, would provide the voice for that garden fashion in their catalogs, magazines, and books.
Hovey remained at the forefront of the gardening movement in this country for half a century. Over that time, his magazine and his catalogs reflected the evolution of American gardening. In the December 1886 issue of his magazine Gardener’s Monthly, Philadelphia nurseryman Thomas Meehan said of Hovey, “Horticulture on this continent is probably more indebted to him than to any living man.”55 By then Hovey’s camellia ‘C. M. Hovey’—of which the English journal Garden said, “It has no peer, whether we take into consideration its size, growth, floriferousness, or the size, form, and color of the flowers”56—was growing in the Camellia House at the Royal Exotic Nursery in Chelsea. A year later, Hovey died and was buried near his home in Cambridge, in Mount Auburn, the parklike cemetery.
featured plant
Podophyllum peltatum / Mayapple
Because my property includes many trees, I am always on the hunt for shade-loving plants. The mayapple fits that description well. I grow it along the back of the house, which the nearby trees shade most of the day.
English garden writer William Robinson included this plant in his nineteenth-century classic The Wild Garden in a list of plants for naturalizing beneath trees. Robinson attacked the Victorian style of carpet bedding, which demanded high maintenance from the gardener. He preferred a garden style with perennials like the mayapple. American nurserymen soon adopted Robinson’s ideas as well.
Liberty Hyde Bailey refers to the native American plant Podophyllum peltatum, or mayapple, as a most desirable plant for the wild garden when planted in a colony.57The plant is an herb common in woods throughout the eastern United States.
The mayapple is a perennial that blooms starting midspring and continuing to late spring. The mayapple requires part shade to full shade, a medium amount of water, and little maintenance. It will reach a height between six and eighteen inches.
The leaf arrangement is opposite with only one to two leaves. Each plant has a single stalk topped with one or two broad, deeply divided leaves that vaguely resemble umbrellas. The fruit of the mayapple, hidden under the large leaves, is a berry that resembles a lime in shape. It is edible when ripened, but all other parts of the mayapple are toxic.
Since 1820 the mayapple has been recognized for its medicinal value. Native Americans used the root of the plant as a laxative to treat worms and other diseases. It was also used as an insecticide on crops. Today the root of the mayapple is used in certain cancer medications.
A Furor for Plants from England
In his Magazine of Horticulture, in 1868, Hovey wrote about the new hybrid coleus:
Since the introduction of Coleus Vershaffeltii, with its rich deep colored foliage, it has formed a prominent object for bedding purposes, especially in England, where the style of ribbon borders had extensively prevailed. The introduction of another kind, called C. Veitchii, increased the taste of rich foliaged plants, and by the skill of the hybridizer, a great number of new sorts have been raised between these two, which seem to have attracted unusual attention, amounting almost to a furor for these plants. The successful grower of these hybrids was M. Bause, of the Chiswick garden, who has raised twelve of these seedlings. . . . All of these, or a portion of them, will no doubt find their way into American collections.58
2: The English Garden Influence at Williamsburg
Frustrated with his family problems and his business, tobacco grower and member of the Governor’s Council John Custis (1678–1749), of Williamsburg, Virginia, took up gardening as his escape. He said, “I have a pretty little garden in which I take more satisfaction than in anything in this world.”59 Custis looked to England for plants for his garden. In the process he would develop a twenty-year friendship with Englishman Peter Collinson.
Like many other eighteenth-century English gardeners, Peter Collinson and his friend Lord Petre, who cultivated one of the largest collections of plants from around the world, sought to add more American plants to their gardens. Collinson corresponded with John Custis, and the two men exchanged plants for twelve years, from 1734 through 1746. Collinson shared the seeds and plants with Petre and his other “Brothers of the Spade,” a name he used to refer to his fellow gardeners.
Williamsburg provides an early example of the English garden influence in America: English gardeners inspired the landscape design for the town and wrote the garden literature the town’s citizens read. Additionally, gardeners in colonies such as Williamsburg came to depend on seeds and plants from England.
Collinson, for example, shipped the latest in English garden fashion, though often the seeds would not germinate or the ship captain killed the plants by overwatering. Custis’s letters tell us that sometimes problems ranging from high temperature to winds to Williamsburg’s proximity to the sea prevented the seeds from germinating. Indeed, the double tulips, the lily of the valley, and the crown imperials sent by Collinson failed to come up for Custis in the spring of 1738.
Despite such failures, Custis managed to cultivate a four-acre garden on Francis Street, where he grew the newest varieties of plants in an English garden style that was more formal than naturalistic. His gift plants from England included Chinese aster and globe thistle. Letters from Collinson often mention the seeds and plants shipped to Custis’s garden, including a box of “Horse Chestnuts, and peach stones of the Double Blossoms.”60
Custis wanted to keep his garden full of the newest plant varieties. For that he looked to England. In turn, he sent Collinson plants from Virginia such as the dogwood and laurel. And so Custis and Collinson, too, became “Brothers of the Spade.”
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