Category — History of gardening

In my last post, I discussed Peter Henderson’s 1875 greenhouse/hothouse plans for the wealthy. But Henderson deserves credit: he didn’t just write for the rich, he wanted people of every income to have a chance to grow a plentitude of houseplants and exotics.

After he’s exhausted himself on the subject of the Ideal Greenhouse, his Gardening for Pleasure continues with ideas for attached greenhouses and greenhouse-pits that need no artificial heating to hold the plants you would keep in a cool greenhouse. It’s advice that modern half-hardy and tender plant growers might use, since rising fuel prices make heating a greenhouse an increasingly expensive proposition.

The attached-greenhouse method only works in areas with relatively mild winters; Henderson wrote from Jersey City Heights, where it freezes and snows, but not inordinately. (New Jersey, whose car licenses still read “Garden State”, was at that time a huge market-garden area that served the massive population of New York City.) A small greenhouse attached to a heated building, properly constructed, says Henderson, will keep plants going in places where the temperature doesn’t fall below 25 degrees F (-4 C). It needs to be tightly glazed, and shielded from the north and north-west (if you’re below the equator, change the directions accordingly).

The pit greenhouse (which seems to be a kind of glorified sunken cold frame) is even better, Henderson says. “This is formed by excavating the soil to the depth of from 18 inches (45.7 cm) to 36 inches (91.4 cm), according to the size of the plants it is intended to contain. A convenient width is 6 feet (1.83 meters)…and of such length as may be desired.” He cautions that the ground must be dry enough that water won’t seep into the pit, and advises walling the sides of the pit  4  (10.2 cm) to 8 inches (20.3 cam) high with brick or planks.

“The back wall should be raised about eighteen inches (45.7 cm), and the front six inches (15.2 cm) above the surface, in order to give the nursery slope to receive the sun’s rays and to shed the water.” If glass is laid on top, and light shutters or half-inch boards  laid on top of the glass every evening, “it may be used to keep all the hardier class of greenhouse plants, even in localities where the thermometer falls to zero (-18 C). ”

While plants in such cool greenhouses won’t thrive lustily, they will be ready to go at the first sign of warm weather. That way, you wouldn’t have to grow out tender or half-hardy plants from small slips every year, or buy them new.  If I bestirred myself to make such a pit-greenhouse, I could  have the large collection of scented and flowering geraniums I’ve fantasized about, or keep beautiful brugmansias over winter reliably, and flower them before frost. I wouldn’t have to beg friends to babysit my houseplants when I go away in winter, either. (I don’t have central heating, so if temperatures fall below freezing, my houseplants turn to mush.)

Older technology has a lot to teach us. While we may not have the stay-at-home lifestyles or cheap help of past eras, many of these antique ideas make better sense than energy-eating options we are offered today.

When Robert Buist mentioned radiant hot water floor heat for hothouses, it was an innovation; the first records of such a system in U.S. hothouses is in 1839. By 1847,  Charles M’Intosh’s The New and Improved Practical Gardener, and Practical Horticulturalist boasts an appendix on the new and improved tank system for bottom heat.

The boiler/radiant floor systems must have caught on, because by 1875, when Peter Henderson wrote Gardening for Pleasure,  hot water heating systems for hothouses seem to have been an industry standard. “Although we describe flues as a means of heating greeenhouses or graperies, they should be used only on the score of economy; whenever one can afford to have the heating done in the best manner, by all means let it be done by hot water.”

Henderson points out that the hot water system takes less attention, and is easier to manage. (You get the feeling that the hothouse owner is probably not the person who has to manage these systems.) And he mentions the same dangers of smoke and gas that Buist alluded to. By now, commercial boilers are available, ready-made for the purpose; he recommends Hitchings & Co. in New York as purveyors of the best.

Henderson, a very popular garden writer, wrote widely, on every subject that had to do with plants. He was known for his agricultural treatises as well as his ornamental gardening works, and he must have had some wealthy clients, since he uses two pages of diagrams and description to outline a combined hothouse and greenhouse, totalling 20 x 100 feet (about 7 meters x 30.5 meters), and costing about $3,000 USD to construct in 1875.

When I looked up this figure on Measuring Worth  to see what that meant in modern terms, I got involved in a whole other adventure. The relative worth of something can be measured in a number of ways. The Consumer Price Index measures relative cost by taking the price of normal household items and adjusting for inflation. In those terms, the 2007 price for Henderson’s greenhouse would have been $58, 461.09.  But using the Unskilled Wage Rate, which determines the cost of something in terms of the amount of work it would take to produce, the same greenhouse/hothouse would cost $392,400. There are six indicators in all, and the highest price comes from relative share of the Gross Domestic Product. I admit, I didn’t get exactly how that indicator works, but I did understand the price: a mere $5,076,124.62 for this greenhouse/hothouse combination.

However you look at it, such a project was for the wealthy to the insanely rich. And insanely rich was what James Lick, resident of San Francisco, appears to have been. He left behind 12,000 square feet (3657.6 square meters) of greenhouse fashioned from wood and glass when he died in 1876, and a group of businessmen bought it and donated it to the San Francisco Park Commission. When I visited that renovated Flower Conservatory in Golden Gate Park last year (2007), I was struck by the design of the steel walkways in the floor, so I took pictures of them (an example of what I saw is in the photo at the top of this page). Now I realize that what I was looking at was a much-upgraded example of Buist’s “pathway...which…may be a casting of iron, or wooden slats, fancifully put together, at least six inches above the flue.”

One of life’s little satisfactions: discovering more of the story behind something.

It’s the time of year when I visit old haunts, figuratively and literally. One of the oldest (literally speaking) is the Providence Atheneum, a library that’s been around so long that all the reading desks and chairs are antiques, and gardening books from the 1800s are still on the shelves, waiting to have their depths plumbed by people like me.

Plumbing, it turns out, is the mot juste. On this year’s expedition, I was surprised to discover that radiant floor heating was the heating system of choice for hothouses in 1841.

But as I started writing this post about it, I remembered a long-ago visit to the Alhambra, where I found radiant floor heating systems much older than that. Eight hundred years ago, the architect had caused a bath area to be built, and I remember the guide saying that the hot water was piped under the floors above, as heating. (Why is it that I can remember this comment from over thirty years ago, but I can’t recall the name of someone who introduced themselves five minutes earlier? Memory is indeed like a sieve, as a friend of mine used to say.) Since the entire palace is out of stone, the heating was probably welcome in the winter.

I am not sure if radiant floor heating was invented by the Arabs, but it seems likely. They were leaders in water engineering, likely due to their development of mathematics. I still remember the water in the gardens of the Alhambra, because they amazed me: though the place was neglected and crumbling around the edges (it was the very end of the Franco regime), all the fountains and pools and watercourses still worked: they had been designed to run on gravity alone, no pumps needed. On one staircase, where railings would normally have been, there were channels in the tops of the sidewalls, cascading water down to yet another pool and fountain. The flumes in my goldrush area sent timber from the mountains to port cities on the same principle, but they didn’t last nearly as long as the watercourses of the Alhambra gardens.

If anyone knows the history of radiant floor heating, or cares to speculate, I’d be interested to read your comments. But for now I will jump ahead to 1841, and Robert Buist’s The American Flower Garden Directory.

Garden writers of the mid-eighteen hundreds usually ran nurseries. They also bred plants, traveled long distances to see what other breeders were doing and to find new stock to introduce into their lists and breeding programs. Any aspect of gardening was their purview; there was much less specialization than there is today.

That’s because in 1840s U.S., gardening and plants were undergoing a huge boom. For the first time, the newly monied middle class could afford the ornamental plants and gardens that had been a rich person’s privilege in the century before.  Farmers wanted to know what the latest crops and plant techniques were. Literacy had become common, so there was a large readership for the books nursery owners began putting out, books that covered everything from the poetic values of tilling the soil to how to deal with the Rose slug, one of the catastrophic insect invasions of the 1800s.

Hothouse building was definitely on the agenda, and in The American Flower Garden Directory,  Buist tackles the construction of hothouses and greenhouses. He describes the siting of the hothouse: “…set the front directly to the south. Any deviation from that point should incline to the east.” And he gives a detailed description of the heating system.  “As workmen are not generally conversant on the subject, nor yet understand the effect or distribution of heat in these departments, we will give minute details on their construction.”

Coal- or wood-fired furnaces were the basis of the heating system  (wood-fired furnaces had to be built twice as big as the coal ones). The cheaper way was to run flues from the furnace through the greenhouse.

“Where capital, taste, and practical science can be united, a more elegant disposition of heating conveniences can be adopted: an excavation should be made for the flue to pass along under the pathway, which pathway may be a casting of iron, or wooden slats, fancifully put together, and at least six inches above the flue.”

But the flue system created problems with smoke and coal gas–dangerous to humans as well as plants. By adding a small boiler to the furnace (he recommend a size about 2 feet (about 61 cm) by 2 feet, and 4 inches (10.2 cm) wide), hothouse owners could have fumeless heating that was better for them and the plants.The boiler was built of cast iron or copper, with a zinc or copper lid. Two pipes were attached to the boiler, one to run hot water through the flues, the other to take the cold water back to the boiler for reheating–a simpler version of the way a boiler works in a steam-heated apartment building.

Clearly, it was the day of different manufacturing methods and abundant cheap skilled labor. Buist expected the incipient hothouse owner to easily find workmen who could build not only the boiler and the plumbing system, but the many wooden frames needed for the 6 by 6 inch (15.2 cm) panes of glass he thought were ideal. But a handy person today could easily rig a similar system for a hothouse, using modern materials.

Next post: How to Heat Your Hothouse: 1841 and Later

References: 

Robert Buist, The American Flower Garden Directory, Philadelphia, Carey and Hart, 1841

Great Buildings website

Sometimes it’s easy to forget how exuberantly beautiful a vegetable can be. This fading but vital red chard arrested me as I was passing through a friend’s garden, just at the moment when the sun backlit it.

In the past twenty years or so, there’s been a movement to get vegetables back into the ornamental landscape (or maybe it’s the other way around). Pioneers such as Rosalind Creasy an Robert Kourik proved that edible plants can be ornamental, and that landscaping can provide food.

This seems like a new idea (it’s still controversial for some zoning boards and neighbors), but it’s actually a very old one. Food plants didn’t get split up from other plants until the age of European colonialism.

Colonialism opened up new vistas of plants, and for the first time, it wasn’t just curators of botanical gardens who were plant collectors. Wealthy people became aware that they could show off their status by using exotic plants in their gardens. Though slow transportation and primitive shipping methods meant many foreign plants arrived dead, avid collectors were willing to pay the price. Wanting to be the first on your block to have something is not a modern phenomenon.

Neither is showing off  to your neighbors.  Wealthy Western Europeans started to display their substance to the world by planting only ornamentals in the visible parts of their gardens and landscapes; the vegetables and fruits were relegated to areas visited only by the servants.  To show only ornamentals was to announce that you were too wealthy to farm; someone else could do that work for you.

This trend only applied to the wealthy, of course.  Workers and farmers kept on doing what gardeners have done for millenia: they grew what they needed as near to the door as they could get it. Plants that provided medicine or dye or food or were just the gardener’s beautiful pets or breeding project were all grown in one place: the original definition of a cottage garden. For many people, the idea of edibles as ornamentals has never passed away.

But as time went on, Western Europeans (including the ones who emigrated to the what became the U.S.) adopted the styles of those who were wealthier than they were. This trickle-down or social climbing in styles is a very pervasive feature of Western European cultures. The styles don’t necessarily have to make sense for us to adopt them. The reason why Spaniards lisp, for instance, is because one of the royals a few hundred years ago had a lisp. In order to save him embarrassment, the courtiers-the wealthiest class-followed suit. Since the courtiers were wealthy and prominent (the equivalent of movie or rock stars today), people copied what they did. The lisp spread until now standard Spanish Spanish means lisping,  and not only on the “s” sound.

Our culture is full of stories like these. Many of our fashions are not only the sign of deep changes; they are part of creating them. On a larger scale, the separation of food and ornamental plants-something you see in most of the gardens of the modern-day U.S.-reflects the economics of colonialism. A garden that shows that you don’t have to work the land yourself, that unseen others do the dirty work for you, is the basis of colonialism, where far-off workers make cheap goods for our sometimes uneasy consumption. It’s  a knotty issue we’re still struggling with. Maybe we can begin to unravel that knot by appreciating the beauty of red chard.

I know only the tiniest bit about bonsai. But when I see trees growing out of rock, wind- and weather-shaped, I can’t help wondering if the inspiration came from high mountain trees like this. (Well, that and the ever-enticing concept of having a small world which you can shape and enter into entirely.) This tree, though huge by bonsai standards (a few feet tall), has a form and surroundings that bring to mind less-shaggy bonsai.

If I’m remembering rightly, Japanese culture has a spiritual and aesthetic reverence for things mountainous.

Including rocks. One my one visit to Japan, I visited one Shinto shrine which had a rock that was famous for curing respiratory diseases. (If you’re interested, I was exposed to a respiratory flu in Japan that lasted for six violent weeks when I got home. After it was over, my susceptibility to bronchitis did seem to taper off.) Buddhist and Shinto shrines always featured rock and plants, in one way or another.

Shinto is the indigenous spiritual practice of Japan; like most indigenous spirituality the world over, it concentrates on the cycles of nature. It was inspiring to me to be in a country where this type of worship had been respected, instead of systematically killed off as much as possible, as it was in Europe and the United States. Shinto seems to thrive along with the different sects of Buddhism, Christianity, and the other religions of Japan. People don’t seem to consider it exceptional to visit more than one kind of worship place; the religions aren’t in competition with each other.

While many Buddhist shrines had beautiful gardens,  I was most fascinated by the tiny plots of ritualized country that formed the Shinto shrines. There were so many of them in Tokyo, in amongst the skyscrapers and traffic noise.  At least one for every neighborhood, it seemed. With the help of an English-language guidebook, I walked to different ones each day and spent time sitting in them, listening to the sound of water from the bamboo fountain, watching suited businessmen come in for a quick prayer before going on with their day.

In my culture, religion is formally separated from nature (although a lot of gardeners heal that rift), a legacy of a time when nature, and those who understood its voices, were enemies of the church/state. In Japan, the connection between nature and spirituality seems to be a given. I can’t help feeling that anyone who has experienced time in nature knows that for truth.

I remember walking by a very small local shrine, a low fence enclosing a small triang

le of bare ground maybe ten square feet on a narrow city corner. I don’t know what kind of shrine it was, and since I had about ten words of Japanese, I couldn’t ask. My book didn’t  say.

I saw many dark rocks, smoothed by time, any carving or elaboration long since worn away. It gave me shivers. Ancient things do that for me. I feel somewhat the same way looking at Sierra granite, still holding on to the polishing glaciers gave it millenia ago.