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Ireland Trip Illustrates Similar Plant Palette
Ireland trip illustrates similar plant palette.
My recent trip to Ireland taught me a lesson about marketing the garden.
While near Dublin, I visited the classic Victorian garden and estate called Powerscourt in the town of Enniskerry, County Wicklow.
There at the gift shop and greenhouse, near the visitor’s parking lot, I saw trays of pansies for sale. [below]
The pansy has long been a gardener’s favorite. Since the nineteenth century pansies have played a central role in providing color for garden beds here in America.
When I saw the Powerscourt pansies, it was as if I was at home. We sell the same pansies here in the States.
What that means to me is that the power of marketing communication today makes a plant variety easily recognizable, perhaps even around the world, and that becomes the plant that people want to grow.
Mass marketing of the garden only began in the later part of the nineteenth century when communication innovations like the typewriter and increased speed in printing along with increased advertising became common.
A customer from Iowa wrote a letter to Rochester, New York seedsman James Vick (1818-1882) about pansies. Vick included these words from the letter in his magazine Vick’s Illustrated Monthly in 1878, “We never had such flowers before; you ought to have seen our Pansies. We have every color you can think of, and lots of them that you cannot think of. We have one or two roots of them that have not had anything but double Pansies, and they were very beautiful.”
Vick, of course, encouraged the growing of pansies. That advice has continued to this day.
So in one sense it is no surprise to see the same annuals for sale in Ireland even though the growers may be local.
Since the late nineteenth century American gardening has been intimately connected with the mass marketing of plants and garden products.
The effect is that our palette of plants has become quite similar from region to region around the country, and even from country to country.
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