This Weigela rosea [left] bursts with spring color in my New England garden. The shrub variety came to America in 1848 from England where three years earlier plant hunter Robert Fortune had brought it from China. Walter Elder, a Philadelphia…
Joseph Paxton (1803-1865) head gardener at Chatsworth, writer, and garden designer. The history of English landscape design owes much to Joseph Paxton, the simple gardener who became the head gardener at the Duke of Devonshire’s estate Chatsworth, and one of…
In 1865 Boston financier and horticulturalist Horatio H. Hunnewell (1810 -1902) gave $2000 to the Massachusetts Horticulture Society to encourage the art of landscape gardening. [left: The Hunnewell Pinetum, a collection of evergreens, still stands today as a symbol of early…
[left:A child appears in the garden in this 1891 catalog from the B.A. Elliott Seed Company.] I have come to the end of Morris Brownell’s book on poet Alexander Pope Alexander Pope and the Arts of Georgian England. What struck me…
[left: The Shell Temple in Pope's Garden at Twickenham. By William Kent c. 1725-30] Landscape designer Ian Robertson once gave a talk at the annual spring seminar that Colonial Williamsburg sponsors. His theme was the English influence on gardens in America. One…