American Gardening

Gamble House’s Pollinator Garden

July 15, 2019 by admin Leave a Comment

Gamble House’s pollinator garden

Today there is much interest in including a pollinator garden in every landscape.

Scientists tell us there is a shortage of bees and other insects to pollinate. Much of our food crop depends on such pollinators.

The USDA Forest Service encourages gardeners everywhere to include a pollinator garden.

A national program emerged recently called the Million Pollinator Garden Challenge. Its lofty goal is to spread pollinator gardens across the country.

Gamble Garden

A wonderful California garden I recently visited now includes a pollinator garden.

In Palo Alto, California the grand Elizabeth F. Gamble Historic Home built in 1902 still stands. The house and garden are now open to the public.

The Edwardian revival Gamble House was built by Edwin Gamble, son of Proctor & Gamble founder James Gamble.

A sign that welcomes you to the property in a residential neighborhood.

I walked around quite a bit and found many beautiful, smaller garden areas, including this walkway edged in the short boxwood shrubs. [below]

Walkway at the Elizabeth F. Gamble Garden

The Palo Alto Garden Club offered a grant to install a new pollinator garden at the Gamble garden.

Here is the sign that greets the visitor to the new pollinator garden.

New Pollinator Garden at the Gamble House

The Elizabeth F. Gamble garden now serves as an example of the importance of encouraging pollinator gardens everywhere.

Filed Under: Garden fashion, Native plants, Nature, Victorian

Victorian Garden Advice Works

July 8, 2019 by admin Leave a Comment

Victorian garden advice works –

Garden writers of the Victorian period can offer advice useful for today’s garden as well.

American gardener, writer, and poet Eben E. Rexford (1848-1916) wrote several books about gardening.

In 1890 Rexford first published his book Four Seasons in the Garden.

Several editions followed later in the early 1900s.

Rexford included a chapter called “The Garden in Summer.” In it he addressed several topics familiar to any gardener.

His list of annuals, for example, seems like the summer plants you’d still find at any nursery or big box store. They included Dahlia, Gladiolus, Sweet Pea, Pansies, Asters, and Petunias.

He advised the gardener to make sure to keep up with watering as needed.

Then he wrote about the importance of weeding. He said, “While most of the work of pulling weeks ends with June, it will be necessary to continue the warfare against them, to a greater or lesser extent, throughout the season.”

How well we gardeners know that.

Then I was surprised to read his list of summer plants with showy leaves, a must for any garden.

Rexford said, “Beds of ornamental foliage, like the Coleus, Alternanthera, Achyranthes, Pyrethrum, and Centaurea, will require constant and careful attention if you would have them afford entire satisfaction.”

He endosed the mass planting of such ornamental foliage.

He wrote, “If planted in rows or patterns, they must be clipped two or three times a week to prevent the several colors used from reaching out beyond the limits assigned them and blending with other colors, thus destroying that distinctness of outline upon which much of the beauty of a bed of foliage plants depends.”

Boston Athenaeum

Recently I found Rexford’s book at the downtown Boston Athenaeum.

Still in the pocket of the book was a return slip with the date of July 11, 1907 stamped on the slim but well-used card.

Over a hundred years ago someone checked out this book at about this time in the summer, perhaps for some ideas on the summer garden.

Rexford speaks to today’s gardener as much as he did to the Victorian gardener of his day.

Filed Under: Annuals, Bulbs, Flowers, Garden fashion, Garden history

Any Old-Fashioned Dahlias?

July 1, 2019 by admin 2 Comments

Any old-fashioned dahlias?

The problem with the expression ‘old-fashioned’ is that it lacks a specific time.

The reader can simply fill in a time frame.

When it comes to old-fashioned dahlias, it might be appropriate to say the nineteenth century. It was at that time that they began to appear in American gardens.

By the end of the nineteenth century dahlias had become a garden favorite.

Here is the cover of the 1888 seed catalog from the Childs Company in Long Island, New York. [below] In the image colorful dahlias fill the blue and gold vase.

[**Thanks to the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass.**]

A blog called Gardenista from Meadowburn Farm in New Jersey included an article about old dahlias. The title of the article says it all: “Dahlia Detectives: 7 Mysterious Heirlooms from an Earlier Century”

The article takes the definition of ‘old-fashioned’ to mean the early 1900s when the book by Helena Rutherford Ely appeared, A Woman’s Hardy Garden.

Today Meadowburn Farm, just ninety miles from New York, continues the tradition of Ely as an historic garden and working farm. Lots of dahlias appear in the garden each summer.

Dahlia ‘Bishop of Llandaff’

Bill McClaren wrote about the dahlia ‘Bishop of Llandaff’ (1927) in his great book Encyclopedia of Dahlias.

McClaren said that the ‘Bishop of Llandaff’ dahlia was “one of the oldest dahlias still being grown and shown and often the jewel of the garden.” This dahlia seems to have it all: old-fashioned and still popular today.

A problem with dahlias is that hundreds of varieties have appeared since the mid nineteenth century. Most of them are long gone, replaced by ever newer varieties.

Maybe one of the reasons we love dahlias is because there are so many newer varieties always available on the market.

Filed Under: Annuals, Garden fashion, Garden history, Victorian

Filoli Hosts Art Exhibit

June 24, 2019 by admin Leave a Comment

Filoli hosts art exhibit –

A few days ago I visited the wonderful historic garden Filoli, near San Francisco. The garden, surrounding a red brick mansion, dates to the turn of the twentieth century.

Right now artist and landscape designer W. Gary Smith has created an environmental art exhibit called “Nests: Patterns from Nature.”

The exhibit continues through November 10.

Smith has designed and built around the garden a series of nests with materials gathered from the Filoli Estate including its trees, shrubs, and grasses.

Nests appear in various forms and are made of different materials.

When you visit, you will see twelve expressions of ‘nest’ scattered around the property.

Here is one of the designs, a series of brown nests hanging from trees. [below]

A nest exhibit now on display at Filoli.

Filoli’s garden spans sixteen acres and was installed between 1917 and 1929.

The magnificent formal garden and grounds reflect the seventeenth and eighteenth century English garden with its sweeping lawn and many views to enchant any visitor.

Filoli represents a long history of landscape, gardening, and art. That’s why it is one of my favorite gardens to visit.

Filed Under: English garden design, English Style, Garden fashion, Garden history, Lawn, Nature

Victorian Flower Fashion

June 17, 2019 by admin Leave a Comment

Victorian Flower Fashion –

American gardeners fell in love with annuals after 1850 during the Victorian period.

The use of perennials in the garden re-emerged by the end of the century. They became stylish through the encouragement of English garden authorities like William Robinson and Gertrude Jekyll.

A T. W. Wood and Sons catalog cover [below] from the late 1880s shows a bed of annuals. The round bed sits in a well trimmed lawn.

Philadelphia seedsman Thomas Meehan wrote in his magazine Gardener’s Monthly in 1872: “The evil which accompanied [flower beds, ribbon beds, and carpet beds] was nearly banishing from cultivation the beautiful and interesting tribe known as hardy herbaceous plants. From early spring til late in the fall some of them were in bloom.”

In 1882 Warren H. Manning, New England plantsman, wrote: “The use of tender plants and annuals for bedding purposes in summer decoration has been in vogue for about a quarter of a century, and they have almost entirely superseded hardy herbaceous plants for general cultivation.”

When the English garden style emphasized perennials rather than annuals, we discovered the English had been enjoying many of America’s native perennial plants for decades. By the end of the century native American perennials became a part of our home landscape as well.

As we had for the whole century, America followed the style of English garden design.

The nineteenth century seed and nursery catalogs provided the gardener with inspiration. They also pointed out the latest garden fashion.

Annuals were popular from 1850 until the late 1870s when perennials once again took center stage.

What do you think is the garden fashion today?

Filed Under: Annuals, Garden fashion, Garden history, Garden style, History of English garden style, Victorian

New Hydrangea Book

June 10, 2019 by admin Leave a Comment

New hydrangea book –

Late nineteenth century seed company owner James Vick (1818-1882) wrote about the hydrangea in his magazine Vick’s Illustrated Monthly.

In 1879 he said, “The hydrangea is an old garden favorite that we are all familiar with.”

Vick was right that the hydrangea has been around for a long time and we all know a lot about it.

However with newer varieties or cultivars appearing each spring, it might be worthwhile to learn more about this famous and important shrub. Vick wrote in his magazine, “This hardy Hydrangea [ H. Paniculata] is the most useful plant that has been introduced for years.”

Now there is a new book to teach us even more about the hydrangea.

Garden writer and lecturer Lorraine Ballato has written a new book called Success with Hydrangeas: A Gardener’s Guide.

Lorraine spells out the varieties or cultivars of the hydrangea along with their different demands of sun, water, fertilizer, and pruning.

The photos in the book are worth its price. They clearly capture the beauty of this popular shurb in so many shapes and forms, planted both in containers and in beds.

I enjoyed the glossary of terms at the end of the book as well as a list of gardens to visit where you can see hydrangeas in bloom.

Vick often wrote about Hydrangea paniculata. He said, “It is superb, with its score of creamy panicles of flowers, some ten inches in length. I introduced this fine shrub here three years, and its greatly admired by every one.”

Lorraine Ballado’s new book provides updated and useful information about today’s hydrangea.

I particulary liked that she focuses on the five most common species: H. macrophylla, H. quercifolia, H. petiolaris, H. arborescens, and, of course, the popular H. paniculata. This helps the reader with more direct examples and illustrations.

Filed Under: gardening

American Gardening Has Long Imitated English Style

June 3, 2019 by admin Leave a Comment

American gardening has long imitated the English style –

At breakfast this morning I glanced at the label on the marmalade jar.

I read the words ‘An English Classic.’ Who knew my marmalade belonged to a long line of English jams and jellies?

Here I have often written about America’s dependence on English gardening fashion.

Recently I came across a reference to that relationship.

Historian Robert H. Wiebe wrote the book The Search for Order 1877-1920. ”

Wiebe says, “For more than a century… Americans’ freedom and their democracy, their heritage and their culture, all acquired meaning through a comparison, explicit or implicit, with the British model.”

In the early 1900s Chicago horticulturist and landscape designer Wilhelm Miller spelled out that relationship as it concerned gardening in his book What England Can Teach Us about Gardening. (below)

Miller made the point that since the English have been gardening for so long, we needed to look to them as a guide for what we ought to do here in America.

To a certain extent his argument was true.

How often did garden writers in the nineteenth century compare an emerging American style of gardening to that of the traditional English garden?

Dahlias

Boston nurseryman Charles Mason Hovey wrote in his Magazine of Horticulture in 1838 about the English love for dahlias.

He said,“The dahlia has done more, in England, than all other plants together, toward the dissemination of a taste for gardening.”

Then he wrote how our dahlia gardens here in America might soon resemble the quality of the English.

Hovey said “I believe the time is at hand when our gardens will produce dahlias equaling the English.”

Today we Americans subscribe to the magazine The English Garden. Each spring Americans flock to visit the Chelsea Flower Show. English garden tours remain popular in this country.

American gardening, like so much here, has long imitated the English.

Filed Under: English garden design, English Style, Gardens of England, History of English garden style, Victorian

Too Many Trees Spoil the View

May 27, 2019 by admin Leave a Comment

Too many trees spoil the view in a landscape –

When planning a home landscape, it is a good idea to choose the number of trees you plant carefully. You want not too many, and not too few.

Though he was discussing trees in a park, Samuel Parsons in his book Landscape Gardening (1891) offered advice usefull also to the home owner.

He wrote, “We must be careful always to keep open considerable stretches of turf, endeavoring rather to flank than to cross with plants the direct line of vision through to the background.”

He wanted an unobstructed view of lawn.

In 1978 landscape historian from Dumbarton Oaks David Schuyler wrote the book called Victorian Landscape Gardening .

The book was actually a facsimile of landscape architect Jacob Weidenmanns’ book Beautifying Country Homes written in 1871. This image appeared in the book. [below]

A drawing from *Victorian Landscape Gardening*

Notice that the drawing illustrated in the long dotted line the unobstructed view between the two properties.

The advice seems to make sense.

Whether you have one acre or a hundred acres, create the opportunity for a visitor to see the lawn in a long view because too many trees spoil the view.

Filed Under: Garden fashion, Garden history, Lawn, Uncategorized, Victorian

Victorian NY Landscaper Advocated for Parks

May 20, 2019 by admin Leave a Comment

Victorian NY landscaper advocated for parks –

To Frederick Law Olmsted we all owe a great deal of debt because he advocated for public green spaces.

The restrictions of city life call for the opportunity for a citizen to walk among trees and observe nature in plants, insects, and animals in a public space like a park.

Landscape architect Samuel Parsons (1844-1923) served as Superintendent of New York parks at the end of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century.

In his book Landscape Gardening (1891) Parsons outlined the importance of parks, much in the spirit of Olmsted.

He wrote, “The chief and most important office of Central Park is not to furnish agreeable driving territory for the ‘beau monde’, the millionaires, and the lovers of horseflesh.

“It is not a scheme to please and attract the fashionable, but it is playground for the young people, a pleasant open-air breathing space for the mothers and fathers who desire to go into the country and cannot get there.”

Thus Parsons follows in the tradition of America’s early environmentalist Olmsted.

Parsons clearly spells out in his writing that his work as director of parks in New York included overseeing the grand design of Olmsted, Central Park.

Central Park came to be for city residents who had little or no recourse to escaping the city for the country.

Children and Nature

Today there is much discussion with signs of activity as well on the topic of children and gardening.

Kids have little experience with nature, for many reasons.

So when children maintain a garden at school, at home, or a plot in a community garden, they can see nature at work.

An organization called Kids Gardening encourages children to garden and offers many suggestions.

Rochester, New York seed company owner James Vick (1818-1882) wrote in the late nineteenth century that children who garden learn to appreciate nature.

Parsons contributed to that same tradition in his insistence that kids from the city have an opportunity to experience nature in city parks.

Filed Under: Garden history, Garden style, gardening, Lawn

Beware the Coleus and Geranium

May 13, 2019 by admin Leave a Comment

Beware the coleus and geranium –

Who doesn’t love the two popular annuals coleus and geranium?

It turns out that New York’s Superintendent of Parks Samuel Parsons (1844-1923) showed little regard for these two annuals.

He wrote the book Landscape Gardening in 1891. In it he discussed these two plants.

He said, “Farm door-yards and Newport lawns alike distort themselves in the gay but unfortunately often garish colors of the coleus and geranium. No need to advocate their use. They have achieved a foothold that is not likely to be soon shaken.”

He disliked their colors, but he was most unhappy that they were assuming an important role in flower gardens.

Parsons gave his reasons for not liking these two plants.

He wrote, “As we find them presented on many grass plots, their appearance is vulgar, inharmonious, and barbaric.”

That is pretty heavy criticism for two simple plants.

Today

Well, today the coleus and the geranium have certainly found a home in our flower gardens.

Here’s a coleus called ‘Neptune’s Net‘ that I planted in a container on my lawn.

With its shades of lime and burgundy this coleus looks splendid in a gray cement container. It stayed there the whole summer.

Though Mr. Parsons failed to find any value in the coleus and geranium, today they have become an integral part of many summer gardens, whether in a container or in a bed.