Category — History of gardening

Dahlia atropurpurea in its more purple guise.

Dahlias have been on my mind lately. This fall, I had a noticeable gap in fall color. My young blueberry bushes had a spectacular range of leaf-colors, better than I’d hoped, ranging from dull matte wine-red to yellow and red with bits of flame in it.

But deer had pruned my “Emperor of China” chrysanthemums to the ground, and my late-blooming sweet peas were about the only other fall color I got. When my Old House Gardens catalogue arrived, I fell victim to the beautiful shapes and colors of their heirloom dahlias, and ordered six.

Naturally, when I got to my favorite historical library, where garden books from the eighteen hundreds are on the open shelves for all to peruse, I turned to books and sections on books about dahlias.

I love historical garden books. The first one I picked up, Joseph Breck’s** Flower Garden, published in 1851, starts each plant section with a quotation of poetry, if one is available. Attributions aren’t given; you get the feeling that these are poets you’re just supposed to know, the way we know quotes from Beatles songs and TV shows.

The poetic heading for Breck’s dahlia section is:

“In queenly elegance the Dahlia stands,
And waves her coronet.”

But the laudatory poetry ends at the first sentence of prose:

“The Dahlia is a native of Mexico, found on the table lands of that country, and I have sometimes wished it had been let alone there, ‘to waste its sweets on the desert air.’ It is so capricious in its flowering, so subject to the ravages of insects, so much influenced by too much heat, or too much dryess, or too much wet; and then, just as it begins to give promise of abundant bloom, having escaped all the casualties of the season, is cut down by the frost, and becomes a blackened, hideous object in the garden;, that, after many disappointed hopes, I have been sometimes disposed to say, I would not try it again.”

Which of us has not been jilted by a plant, and retained the mixed feeling of a teenager who can’t help being attracted to someone who used to be close, but now doesn’t even deign to notice our existence?

Will disappointment be the story of my dahlias? I have tried them before, one put up a few leaves; the others disappeared.

But at this point, I’m still hopeful: not inclined to take Breck’s dim view of things:

“True it is, that, after paying extravagant prices for new sorts, I have frequently been disappointed in not having a single bloom; and what is worse, the roots may not get strength enough to stand through the winter, even with the greatest care.”

In my own garden experience, I can’t really blame the dahlias for their poor showing. I ordered them on sale, late; planted them two months later, and proceeded to abandon them completely for months. This was due to my health, which didn’t run to taking care of all the plants I greedily acquired.

But I did successfully grow one dahlia last year: the august ancestor of many, Dahlia atropurpurea, whose picture you see above. I can’t agree with Breck’s dismissal of what I assume to be the same plant (nomenclature is a chancy thing when you’re reading historical garden books; Latin names were thrown around like confetti, and not infrequently the same plant had several of them, none of which may be the one that’s used now, or even in recent times).

“It was first introduced into England in the year 1789, was but little noticed, and soon lost. It was reintroduced in 1804, then a single purple flower of not much interest.”

I loved the mahogany-purple of this dahlia, which changes with the changing light, and obliged me with more flowers than I really deserved, for I threw it in a pot with some hard-clotted compost and left it to its own devices. Since I didn’t prune it back, it grew a single slender stalk of a few feet in part sun, and while it gave me only a couple of flowers at a time, they were magnificent, and more than I could have expected.

But, like sweethearts, the same plant may be a joy to one and a disappointment to another. I can’t help feeling that Breck is prejudiced. Cultivation was my main interest in this entry, because I wanted to repeat whatever it was I did that allowed the Dahlia atropurpurea to do as well as it did.

While Breck is more straightforward in the sections about growing dahlias, notes of chagrin keep creeping in. The dahlia cultivation section of The Flower Garden leads off like this:

“Too much has been said and written about the cultivation of the Dahlia.”

About the disposal of dahlias in the garden, Breck says:

“Dahlias look best in groups, as they hide each other’s ugliness…”

Even the propagation section sounds a soft note of scorn. Breck discusses storing the roots in a cellar over the winter:

“There is no danger from rats or mice or any other creature. I never knew an animal to touch them. You could not catch an old rat even to smell of them the second time.”

When I perused the cultivation section more thoroughly, I found a useful hint which I had not seen elsewhere – and perhaps the deep-buried root of Breck’s disappointment:

“While I resided in Lancaster [Massachusetts], my garden was situated on the banks of a branch of the Nashua River. In hot weather, a damp or mist rose from the river every night, and gave my Dahlia plants a good wetting. I did not have any difficulty then with the Dahlia; it flowered in great profusion, having had nearly one hundred blooms on a plant at one time.”

I am more fortunate than Joseph Breck; when hot weather comes, I have the technology to take his tip and mist my dahlias. Whether or not this will lead to a flourishing relationship, only time will tell.

Next post: Dahlia lovers (and more confused nomenclature)

* For those of you who are wondering, why the lengthy title, my title is a pale copy of the effulgently prolix titles of the 1800s. They cover entire pages, in a show of fonts and layout that I wish I could find online today. For a full view of the glory of Breck’s title page, check out this Google books link, where you will find a photocopy.

** Yes, this is the Breck of Breck’s catalogue. While he was clearly very interested in bulbs – he has much fuller writeups on them than some of his contemporaries – he also covered the full range of plants. In those days, U.S. horticulture was in its infancy, and there was less specialization. I’m not sure how the current Breck’s catalogue came to be bulb-centric.

Surely Breck enjoyed the fan-play of hyacinth foliage…

They don’t write books like they used to.

  ”Let us learn another lesson from the lily of the field. How small a portion of its exquisite beauty is within the reach of our vision. Look with a true heart and a loving spirit, study its wondrous mechanism, its faultless form, seek for the secret of its ‘tender grace,’ and when you have read all that eye can see, and have felt all that heart can receive, remember that you know but in part, that you see the beauty of this flower only through a glass darkly. It has a wealth of beauty that to you is entirely imperceptible.” 

…and the first violets poking through snow and leaves 

 That’s from Breck’s New Book of Flowers, written in 1866, when Joseph Breck was 70.  Not only does he take some pages to discuss the spiritual value of flowers, he takes even more to describe how every child will benefit from growing flowers, and how, for a person in declining years, gardening is the perfect exercise.

He goes on to paint a portrait of his dead mother:  how she grew, gathered, and had flowers around the house. ”With tender emotions do I remember the old white rose-bush, trained up to the top of the house by the hand of a dear mother, the abundant and fragrant flowers of which gave delight to all the household as well as to the neighbors, who received them as expresions of neighborly friendship and good-will.” (If you’d like to read the full text, you can find it at google books.) 

As the founder of one of our most famous U.S. bulb catalogues, Breck must have enjoyed the unfurling of a tulip bud as much as I (although the bud, and the tulip, would have been smaller than this one)

While no one would write in such a florid style now, many gardening books and articles include childhood garden inspirations, and descriptions of the generous spirit plants often seem to nurture in gardeners. (I can’t help wondering what that fragrant white rose would have been, though. Perhaps a white damask of some type? Or maybe it was an alba, which would be appropriate.)

 What interests me is that, these days, the memoir and the paeon to the joys of plants would probably not be in a book of practical instruction. Or at least it wouldn’t take the first few chapters, and be interlarded with the practical instruction that followed. I’m not sure this means we’ve gone forward in the world of garden writing; I think it’s more a case of pressing forward in the world of book marketing.

The incredibly fragrant ‘Painted Lady’ sweet pea was known in England in the late 1700s, so Breck would have been familiar with it 

  And, speaking of marketing, by the time Breck was writing, he was living in the same breathless pace of plant fashion we know today. “Time makes great changes in all the pursuits of life, and in none more than it has in Floriculture in the last 15 years..” he says, giving the reason why he’s writing the new edition, and not even bothering to amend his old flower book. Which is to say a lot of new plants had come into style, and a lot of old ones had been relegated to the back of the catalogue, or been cut out of it entirely. 

“There is a fashion among amateurs of the floral kingdom…thus, when  new flower of fancied merit is introduced, it becomes all the rage, for the time being,” Breck writes knowingly. 

Species nicotiana were popular Victorian flowers. The species names were different, though. The Nicotiana longiflora in Breck’s book is probably N. sylvestris. The flower above is N. alata. 

Ignorance is another gardening trait which hasn’t changed over the years. In the section where he discusses seed vitality, Breck tells a story about a Maine farmer who sent him a potato which, he insisted, had grown on the roots of a Gilly-Flower (carnation, or pink; it’s a corruption of “July-flower”). Breck feels called upon to tell this story because, despite all Breck’s careful explanations, the farmer was firmly convinced that a potato could be bred with a Gilly-flower, and he wouldn’t budge from his story.  (Of course these days that farmer could breed a potato with a fish, if he were talented at genetics.)

  Are there still people out there who believe a potato could grow from carnation roots? Well, judging by the ads for Giant Tomato Trees and Giant Bluberries, which I’ve been seeing for the last 20 years, credulity still seems to be a part of horticultural life.

  And judging by location-establishing shots that have roses blooming all year round in Washington, D.C.  (a popular TV show which shall remain nameless), we are probably no better educated than Breck’s farmer audiences. Possibly less: most of us don’t have the daily experience of nature and its vagaries firshand. 

 ”What’s a Wardian case?” my sister asked, when I told her in an email that I’d just acquired one.

As well she might. These days, most people call them terrariums, or mini-greenhouses, or cuter names which I’ll refrain from using.

But if you grow imported plants – and almost everyone does – Wardian cases are an invisible but important part of your garden. Back in the days before air freight, or even steam shipping and railroads, plant explorers were often frustrated by the amount of plants that arrived dead. Sailing ships might take many months to go from, say, South America or India or China to Europe. There was no temperature control, and fresh water was at a premium. I imagine sailors looking askance at the plant collector who wanted to use valuable drinking and cooking water for a bunch of dead-looking roots.

Plant collectors who shipped their acquisitions with other people had even more problems. Years ago, I wrote a book review on Anne Leighton’s history of U.S.  horticulture. (It’s really a history of white anglo upper-class U.S. horticulture, so it’s incomplete, but fascinating.) In one of her books, she quotes a rather crabby letter to a sea captain who was entrusted with bringing plants from a collector here to a plant enthusiast in England.

The sea captain, it appears, had not been too anxious to spend water or time on the plants, so they sat in unfortunate places on the journey, and more than half of them died. The other ones weren’t in great shape, either.

The English plant collector’s frustration was more than we might experience by ordering from a catalogue that ships us puny, half-dead plants. Plant importers of the time were rabid plant nuts, somewhat like old rose enthusiasts now: they looked for the unusual, the long-hidden, the thing that everybody else didn’t have. The plants they imported were expensive and unique. It might take years to replace them. Or they might never be available again.

Plant collectors were also commercial. In the 1700s, wealthy people began to show off their money and culture by growing imported plants on their estates. Imported plants were rare, pricey, and something your neighbor could envy. They were an ideal way to genteelly show your wealth.

The working class, meanwhile, was importing plants in the old-fashioned way: gardeners have been taking seeds and cuttings from wealthy employers for a long time. Once in the cottage gardens, the exotic plants spread from hand to hand.

By the mid-1800s, middle-class homeowners had adopted the exotic-plant craze, – on a smaller scale, of course. Imported plants had become big business, and smart horticultural entrepreneurs were springing up everywhere.

New technology made this possible. New technology in the form of a Wardian case.

In 1829, Dr. Nathaniel BagshawWard discovered that plants could survive for very long times under glass without care.  He was actually tying to create an entomology exhibit, a case holding a moth pupa in a “natural environment”.

 As time went by, he noticed that the ferns he’d put in as part of the environment were surviving well – better than the ones in his garden, in fact, which were overrun by smog (they called it “pea-soupers” back then, but it was still smog).

The tightly sealed environment allowed plants to survive where before they died miserably. The Hookers, a father and son plant exploring team, knew Ward, and they were quick to see its use. On their Antarctic expedition, they shipped back plants in Wardian cases. Successfully.

Ward became interested in the commercial uses of his case, and experimented by shipping English ferns and grasses to Sydney, Australia – then a six-month journey by sea. The plants arrived in perfect shape, and the native Australian plants he brought back to England on an 8-month trip (they hit a lot of storms) did well, too.

After that, they were quickly adopted, not only by plant hunters but by plant growers who enjoyed having their own little worlds to construct and put on a parlor table. Terrariums are the modern descendants of Wardian cases, and they are still pleasing for the same reasons.

Those of you who are interested only in the history of Wardian cases can stop reading now. Those of you who are toying with the notion of your own Wardian case, or just wonder what kinds of shapes and sizes they come in, can keep reading.  Because my own connection with Wardian cases is also something of a commercial venture.

Daffodil Planter, who edits and blogs at H. Potter, as well as her own blog  and the enticing morsels of Dirt du Jour, told me that, if I was one of the first 25 people to sign on as an H. Potter affiliate, I would get a Wardian case.

A Wardian case is a long-held garden fantasy of mine. Not one I tell to a lot of people, since I hate to be thought of as a “cute” gardener. But, well, there is an appeal in having a tiny world you can design to your taste. Much of the world is out of our control, so it’s nice to think that this shoebox-sized patch is  mine, all mine.

Since I know H. Potter containers are well-made, I feel fine about advertising them. And since I got my own Wardian case, I’ve been admiring it from different angles. At last I have a greenhouse. Even if it’s tiny.

I love the little cross-shaped openings that act as vents, just like a real greenhouse

And the completely unnecessary but very appealing spiral metal edging.

If you want to indulge your own fantasy and look at more Wardian cases, click that nice discreet terrarium ad on my right sidebar.

If you want ideas about how to plant a Wardian case, check out English Creek Gardens,  or read Tovah Martin’s post on terrariums for children at the H. Potter blog.  (Tovah Martin is a member of the family at Logee’s, a nursery that’s been growing greenhouse plants since Victorian days.)

If you’re an orchid grower, this post  by Susan Taylor can give you ideas for making a tiny greenhouse full of orchids. And if you want to get even more exotic, you can have a case full of carnivorous plants .

I’m not sure yet what I’ll plant in my Wardian case. I’m still dealing with fall planting, so I have all winter to fantasize. I could go for the original Wardian-type fern planting. But then again, a Wardian case allows me to grow tropical plants I couldn’t otherwise manage.

I’ll have a lot of fun deciding.

History may be recreating itself in a small pot on my porch. I mean that  part of history where a tulip grower, in a muddy patch somewhere in 17^th century Netherlands, noticed that one of the tulips had come up funny. Had come up beautifully weird, in fact.

When my own tulip came up beautifully weird, I thought at first it was a sport. A sport is the botanical equivalent of a whim; the plant suddenly decides it wants to be, or look like, something else. Some plants have a family (or at least a genus) tradition of sporting; tulips are one of those.

But now I’ve had a few days to look at these tulips, I’m leaning toward the theory that some of the soil I’ve grown my few, precious broken tulips in got in this pot and infected ‘Annie Schilder’ with the virus that makes broken tulips into the intricate, variable gorgeous things that they are.

I’ve had several tulip sports in my garden. I’ve even had another Annie Schilder sport.

As you can see, the sport patterns are beautifully flamboyant, but they don’t have the refinement of the tulips in this pot, with their fine-brush patterns dividing the colors, spreading their way across the tepals, lacing into a new pattern each day.

(yeah, that’s a dog behind the tulip. Honi soit qui mal y pense.)

There aren’t a lot of true broken tulips on the market anymore, so people tend to confuse them with what are called Rembrandt tulips, tulips that also have streaked patterns. I like Rembrandt tulips, but their markings are nothing like true broken tulips. Once you’ve seen the two, you’ll understand what I mean.

‘Zurel’ tulip, a purple-and-white modern Rembrandt

‘Insulinde‘, a true broken tulip

It’s lucky for me that not all of my tulips turned into exotic beauties, so I can be sure of the identity of the original. In 17^th century Netherlands, my remaining ‘plain’ Annie Schilder (Annie Schilder has some beautiful, subtle flushes of coloring, plus fragrance, so I wouldn’t really call it plain) – my plain Annie Schilder would have been called a breeder tulip. Breeder tulips were the solid-colored tulips whose coloring was so beautifully broken up when all went well.

In order to make that happen, the early broken tulip growers used strange concoctions of crushed bugs and other arcane ingredients, or cut tulips in half, bound the different halves together, or did all sorts of  mysterious garden rituals to make their tulips break into the patterns that could make them prestigious millionaires.

It wasn’t until the 1920s that it became evident that the very ingredient that made the tulips so beautiful might also be the ingredient that made the tulips so likely to be sickly and die off.  Broken tulips are created by a virus.

Their sickliness is the reason that they fell out of favor with commercial breeders. Broken tulips are chancy, delicate things, the Elizabeth Barrett Brownings of the tulip world. Once commercial growers knew that broken tulips carried a virus, a virus that could make their tulips spindly and weakly and unreliable, they phased them out. Gardeners were warned (and still are, though few of them now understand what the warnings are about) to plant broken tulips away from all others, lest they be infected.

But I – well, I never practiced garden hygiene. I’m a dirty gardener. In garden scicnce, I take Fleming for my model: his discovery of penicillin was based on an accidental contamination of a petrie dish.  While I’ve planted my broken tulips in pots so that I can identify them and give them special attention, I’ve sometimes used the soil from those pots for other tulips, or even put a surreptitious pinch into a pot, just to see what would happen. Once I had grown my first true broken tulip, I was quite willing to sacrifice some of my plainer ones to this beauiful, inspiring virus.

 It’s unfortunate that my record-keeping habits are also dirty, because I honestly can’t say that this pot of tulips is the fruit (or flowering) of my experiment. But I hope it is, and I look forward to further developments.

I was researching for another article when I came across an amazing find.

Amazing to me, anyway. Some of you may have known about this for years. Googlebooks has a collection of old garden books which have been scanned in, so you can see the original layout, font, and often very beautiful illustrations.

(We often believe that color photography is the apex of illustration – and sometimes it is. But a skilled artist can show us more about the textures and colors and personality of a plant than a photographer, who must work at least partly in the realm of the literal.)

More importantly, for historial garden book addicts such as myself, you can read all of anything that no longer has a copyright.

For instance, you can check out Robert Hogg’s 1879  Florist and pomologist (which looks like either a bound magazine or an encyclopedia of sorts) and read how to have new potatoes at Christmas, primula culture, the preservative qualities of seawater, and a number of other things about the fruits and flowers that were popular in 1879. (In those days, a florist was a person who grew flowers, not a person who sold them.) In the case of potatoes, “pomology” is used poetically, since a potato is a tuberous rhizome. The rhizome, in turn, is a modified stem (the eyes on a potato are the same type of bud you would see on a branch of a tree).

Or you can move up a generation or so, and read The School Garden Book,  which has the most thorough, clear instructions on forcing bulbs I’ve found in many a day – and which encourages you to tell the story of your plant as you saw it grow. It’s long been my habit to read a children’s book if I want clear, non-jargony instruction. This one may be from 1911, but the writing is clear and easy to follow. I also like all the little science suggestions, such as cutting the bulb in half and drawing a picture of the proto-flower inside (someday it’s my aim to cannibalize a bulb to such purpose. So far I haven’t been able to make myself do it).

The section  for August includes an essay on “Useful Flower Jars” :

“In few things could the average American home be so greatly benefited by a little careful attention as in the choice of receptacles for displaying cut flowers,” it starts, and goes on to lay out some very simple, cheap arrangements very suited to modern gardeners who don’t want to spend a lot of money and time.

My old friend Peter Henderson  is back with his classic 1904 Handbook of plants and general horticulture (they didn’t necessarily capitalize every important word in a title, then; initial caps were more of an art). Since Henderson started writing in the mid 1800s, this would have been a summing-up of his considerable output and knowledge. Henderson was one of the first serious U.S. garden and farm writers, and he did phenomenal amounts of research. Liberty Hyde Bailey’s 1906 Cyclopedia of American horticulture is also available. Bailey wrote the first Hortus, whose later editions are still standard references, so the information in this compendium is bound to be thorough. Bailey, who started the Cornell School of Agriculture and wrote some of his classic works there, retired to spend his time campaigning for the environment, natural studies classes in schools, and to travel the world researching plants, becoming an expert in both carex and palms. He also kept writing books into his hardy old age.

Googlebooks also has garden books from other countries and in other languages. Even a cursory review shows that this is a meaty collection you can find a lot of good stuff in.

Online books aren’t substitutes for books on paper: I love the smell of old books, the indented letterpress print, the way they open out (the art of bookbinding was well understood in those days); I love the idea that I’m holding something some gardener held in 1841 or 1880 or 1904. But while it’s more informative, in many ways, to travel to a library where you can have access to historical books (for one thing, you learn a lot from the books next to the ones you think you want), not all of us can do that. Googlebooks opens the attic door to treasure chests of old garden lore. A great spot for a gardener to spend a winter day.