I remember the day as if it were yesterday. In downtown Philadelphia the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society office includes a library of a substantial size, filled with books, periodicals, and other assorted material. Since the Society has been around since 1827, the…
The seed and nursery catalog by the end of the nineteenth century had become a small book, not only because of the number of color illustrations that appeared within its pages, but also because the garden catalog had so many…
This past summer Emily Morry wrote an article in Rochester 's Democrat and Chronicle called "From flour to flowers" which details the up-state New York city's transformation in the nineteenth century into a seed company and nursery powerhouse with customers across the nation. The…
The consumer culture began in this country about 1880, when products became standardized, emerging from factories in mass numbers. Bartering no longer worked for services and goods because the exchange of money provided whatever people needed. The garden industry also…
In my photos from the California trip I made a few weeks ago, I found an image of the vine called Virginia creeper, climbing up the wall near a window at Francis Ford Coppola's Inglenook Winery in Rutherford. The leaves…