Flower Gardens Followed Farming

Flower gardens followed farming.

It is spring and my thoughts turn to working in the garden.

My garden includes beds of perennials, colorful shrubs, many trees, vines, and soon several annuals that I simply must have.

It may seem that flower gardens have always been important.  That is not the case. What has always been important is survival.

In most cultures gardens filled with flowers only appeared after a long stretch of time devoted to farming that made available the food needed for the family table.

Stephen Buchmann writes in his fabulous book The Reason for Flowers: Their History, Culture, Biology, and How They Change Our Lives, “No cultures with agriculture develop pleasure gardens unless the collective belly is full.”

If you think about the beginning of our own country, a similar situation occurred.

Thomas Jefferson thought the whole country was to be built on the role of the farmer who worked the soil to provide for a family.

Throughout the late eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century, there was little time for pleasure gardens, or gardens of flowers.

Most people were simply trying to survive.

Thus any working with the soil centered on agriculture.

Most early American garden magazines emphasized the progress of farming.

Certainly we know during this time gardeners grew some flowers, but that was not the focus for a home garden.

It was not until after 1850 that we saw the growth of flower gardens with the emergence of seed companies who had flower seeds to sell. Thus their customers could add a touch of beauty to the home landscape.

Rochester, New York seed company owner James Vick (1818-1882) wrote in 1878, “To any who can look back a quarter of a century, the increase of a love of flowers and their cultivation within that time seems almost marvelous.

“Twenty-five years ago a ‘laylock’ or two, a red ‘piney’ on either side of the front door, a few straggling, untrimmed rose bushes, and, perhaps, half-a-dozen bunches of the old-fashioned yellow Day Lily, constituted the floral adornments of even the most pretentious country homes.

“But, now, a day’s ride through almost any of our rural districts will reveal a succession of bright pictures upon which memory loves to linger.”

In the nineteenth century Rochester developed a thriving garden industry and the city became known as the ‘Flower City.’

Vick congratulated the seed industry for its help in bringing flowers into the home garden. He wrote, “There is no question that those same packages which, in the beginning of the year 1852, went out from ‘the flower city’ of the Empire State on their beneficent mission to all parts of the land, have had no small share in producing this happy change.”

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