Last week on my trip to the Midwest I had an opportunity to visit the Chicago Botanic Garden. The size of the garden takes your breath away. In addition, the many separate areas of plants in the garden amid extensive…
Plant collecting has always been a passion for gardeners. The nineteenth century American seed and nusery catalogs often wrote about new plant varieties called 'novelties' in hopes that the customer would buy. Must have worked because the catalogs made that…
Reading garden history has helped me to understand gardening today. In his new book American Eden Wade Graham reaffirms what I have often written about here. Nineteenth century American landscape designer Andrew Jackson Downing (1815-1852) became a voice for the ideas…
Recently I received in the mail a subscription offer to a magazine called The English Garden. That such a magazine would seek an American audience is certainly no surprise to me. These words that appear in the flyer describe the magazine's…
Now that I am cutting the lawn more because of days of rain, my thoughts seem to drift to how we inherited the lawn in the first place. Philadelphia nurseryman Thomas Meehan wrote in his magazine Gardener's Monthly in December…