American Gardening Has Long Imitated English Style

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.