May 19, 2021 • 41 mins
Gardening is a living history that connects us all to people and places through time. This episode covers precolonial North America, Europeans bringing their own gardening ideas to the colonies, and how gardening has developed and shifted since then.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy Vie Wilson. So, Tracy,
I'm very lucky because one of my awesome friends brought
me a bunch of garden plants recently. Yeah. Um, who's
(00:23):
a person you also know. And I love this because
she participates in a community garden, so she gets all
kinds of good stuff through like seedling swaps and whatnot.
So I got a nice variety. I got some peppers
and tomatoes and squash and some basil from her. And
I had already started a bunch of mint in my
house so that I can always have ready Mohito's on um.
(00:44):
And all of this kind of needed to be moved
into planters, and so I finally started doing that. And
as I was, you know, doing this, I had one
of those very simple but profound moments where I found
myself thinking about all of the places and efforts and
plants that have contrued be did over time to me
on my back deck digging soil out of my compost
(01:04):
bins to make new homes for all these plants. Might
sound a little self important, but really it was more
like I'm part of a bigger picture and it I
don't know, it just hit me in that moment. Sure
just got me thinking about gardening and how it is really. Gardening,
more than almost any other sort of obvious thing, is
a living history that connects us to all places and
people through time. Because right like, people five thousand years
(01:27):
ago did not have a local home improvement store or
a big box store where they could go get fertilizer
and weed management in abundance from an entire aisle of
shelves of these kinds of things. Yet lots of plants
that are useful or delightful to humans have survived and
even thrived four thousands of years so that we can
continue to plant their descendants today in our home gardens.
(01:49):
This is where my head's at. So we have talked
about various specific gardening topics before, right like, we've talked
about roses, and we've talked about historical gardens at the
History Center some others, and some of those will come
up here. But I wanted to take a look at
how gardening developed in North America to contextualize some of
those other topics. Um but of course that also does
(02:11):
involve things that happened around the globe prior to colonization.
So to level set, this is definitely one it's more
North American than anything else. It's definitely more focused on
the idea of a garden than landscaping or growing crops,
though there's some overlap because some of those learnings UH
kind of contribute to gardening. So we won't, for example,
(02:33):
be talking like about when various cereal grains were grown
in various historical cultures. And we also won't have a
whole lot of discussion of East Asian gardening. That is
a really amazing history all its own that I would
love to tackle one day, but it was way outside
the scope of this. We do talk about some influences
on Western gardening from East Asia, though, But first we're
gonna talk about North America before colonists, and then some
(02:56):
of the history that led up to Europeans bringing their
own gardening ideas to North America, and then how gardening
developed and shifted once the colonies were established, and beyond
leading up more or less to present day. This is,
as you might imagine, a lot, so it is by
no means comprehensive. We're really just trying to hit a
few of the highlights that connect gardening traditions of today
(03:18):
to history. So all gardening starts in the same place.
Humans didn't invents plants out of thin air, and the
earliest precursors to gardening started historically with somebody nurturing and
useful plant species in that plant's natural habitat and then
starting to plant them more deliberately closer to where they
(03:39):
lived or traveled so that they would have easier and
faster access to these plants. So, of course, long before
Europeans ever showed up on the North American continent, there
were people here cultivating plants, and most of this might
fall more closely under crops than gardening. We're talking about
things like gourds and potatoes and maize that were being grown,
according to records in what's modern day Mexico as far
(04:02):
back as in some cases, and for a lot of
cultures that were living in the America's there was already
this deep understanding of how cultivated growing impacted the land.
So a lot of the early practices here were focused
on sustainability. That is not a new concept, and these
techniques were then later picked up by gardeners who moved
(04:22):
to North America from Europe. So, for example, companion planting
was practiced by the Wapanog people as well as others,
and that has come to be known as the three
sisters technique. And that is when three different crops were
grown together that all supported each other in the soil.
So one configuration is growing corn or maize along with
(04:43):
pole beans and squash all together in the same tract.
The corn offers climbing space for the beans, the beans
enriched the soil with nitrogen that they pulled from the air,
and the squash provides a soil protective ground cover and
a pesta turrent that helps to if the smaller plants healthy. Um.
I actually saw an article about a similar idea in
(05:06):
gardens today that was combining sunflowers with other plants to
grow them together in a way that naturally supported each other. Yeah,
and there are even some people who have taken kind
of this three sisters technique. It still gets used today
and they add in a flower component. So there are
a lot of ways that this has been developed, but
(05:27):
it really is um kind of a wonderfully balanced idea.
And another technique that was well established by indigenous populations
in North America was what we would now call no
till gardening. So in this case, instead of digging up
the soil to plant seeds, the soil is undisturbed. In
the seating phase, seeds are laid down and then a
fresh layer of compost is added on top of them,
(05:50):
and as a consequence, the healthy soil that's been developed
remains intact and it actually prolongs its viability for future planting.
Other techniques were also part of indigenous gardening practices for
centuries before they were adopted by colonists who arrived on
the continent. So terrorists gardening to manage erosion and inconsistent
(06:11):
rain cycles, irrigating using catchments and water runoff reservoirs, directing
the water flow with dugout canals or indentations in the earth,
seed saving naturally, fertilizing with things like fish or remnant vegetation,
among others. These these kinds of things come up a
lot on our Unearthed episodes. We're always finding new evidence
(06:35):
of new things that people were doing to cultivate plants. Yeah,
I also love how a lot of these things get
discussed when you're talking about modern gardening, and it's like,
this isn't a new idea. People have been doing it
this whole time. This is not new in the least. Uh.
And in addition to the indigenous gardening practices that colonists
(06:56):
encountered and learned when they arrived in North America, Europeans
also brought with them gardening knowledge that had roots all
the way back in Mesopotamia. So that includes Babylon and
Persia as well as ancient Egypt. So we know that
there were a variety of gardens styles throughout Mesopotamia. The
hanging gardens of Babylon are one of the Seven Wonders
(07:17):
of the Ancient World after all, although their date usually
puts them at around six hundred b C as an
origin point. And obviously there was plant cultivation in the
area way before that. Yeah, Orchard gardens were cultivated as
well as temple gardens designed to honor deities, and there
were also gardens that were cultivated in courtyards within palaces.
(07:38):
And we know all this based on archaeological findings over
the years, but we really don't have a lot of
specifics on how most of these gardens were designed. We
just have sort of snippets of information, like seeing the
use of trees and straight lines right next to walls.
Gardens were created in Egypt as far back as ten
thousand BC and included the three types of gardens that
(08:00):
we just mentioned. In Egyptian gardens, sycamores, date palms, and
fir trees were used to form grand gardens that were
pretty architectural in their design. They were highly ordered and
precise in the placement of the flora. Both Mesopotamian and
Egyptian gardens were often intended to offer an escape from
the heat and the dryness of the desert, so kind
(08:23):
of a respite of shade and beauty. Yeah, it's like
I would like to build a small oasis within the
walls of my compound. That sounds great to me. By
six thousand BC, gardens had started to appear in Greece,
and in addition to those three types of gardens that
were used in prior locations that we mentioned, the common
architecture of Greece may have given rise to small personal gardens.
(08:46):
So most families lived in these sort of small homes,
but they had courtyards, and while there isn't certain evidence
in the matter, it has been theorized that one of
the functions of those courtyards was as a place for
small gardening projects, in addition to common other uses like
as a common living area and as a place to cook.
Ancient Rome is where we start seeing more recorded information
(09:08):
about gardens and their uses. The atriums found in the
town homes of Rome's wealthy inhabitants would have multiple garden areas.
Peristyle court often contained a family shrine and the gardens
surrounding that would have been ornamental. The hortest courtyard was
used for cultivating fresh fruits and vegetables, and the atrium
(09:30):
courtyard would have been where rainwater was collected in cisterns
and may have also included some ornamental plants and villas.
Outside of the heavily populated areas, courtyard gardens were also popular,
and also a lot grander in scale. As Roman military
efforts moved into Europe over time, so did their gardening aesthetics.
(09:50):
So when Roman officials, for example, would conquer a place
and then move into that conquered territory, they would then
have homes built that included all of the comforts of
home as they knew it, including gardens Another carrier of
the garden tradition from Western Asia into Europe was the
spread of Islam that started in the eighth century when
(10:10):
Islamic forces attacked the Iberian Peninsula. Just as was the
case with Roman officials, the conquering Muslim leaders set up
new homes in Spain, and they also had gardens planted.
By the Middle Ages, gardens were spread throughout Europe in castles, monasteries,
manor houses, and private homes of the upper middle class,
as well as smaller subsistence gardens for the lower classes.
(10:34):
One of the common features of castles during this time
is something I absolutely love. It's an herbor. That's a
small private pleasure garden used almost as an outdoor room.
There were also food gardens associated with most castles. Often
those were outside of the castle walls to include things
like fruit orchards and large scale vegetable gardens. Monastery gardens
(10:56):
were filled with produced plants as well as medicinal herbs,
and this eies into our recent episode when we talked
about barber surgeons and the ways that monks had at
one point functioned in a more medical caregiver role. In
just a moment, we're going to talk about the first
known English language text on gardening, and it is pretty delightful.
But before we get to that, we will take a
(11:17):
quick sponsor break. Somewhere in the early to mid fourteen hundred's,
the earliest English language gardening book was written. Actual estimated
dates for it are kind of all over the place,
but regardless of the exact origin date, the Feet of Gardening,
(11:39):
attributed to author John Gardner, offers a massive amount of
information for horticulturists to draw from. Trinity College, Cambridge has
the only known copy. It is eight eight pages, although
the last dozen of those pages are very damaged. We
don't know who John Gardner was, although there has been
plenty of speculation. Interestingly, a good bit of this gardening
(12:03):
manual was written in verse and in a commentary on
the book written in eight three by an honorable Alicia M.
Tisson Amherst. John Gardner's writing and gardening is critiqued as
follows quote. John Gardner must certainly have been a practical gardener,
as the poem is a series of most sensible and
(12:24):
reasonable instructions for growing fruits, herbs, and flowers, and his
work is singularly free from the superstitious beliefs in astrology,
and the extravagant fancies and experiments and grafting and rearing plants,
especially fruit trees, so prevalent in the writings of this
period that he was not skilled in making verses can
(12:46):
be seen by his poem. The lines frequently failed to scan,
and many of the rhymes are very imperfect. I love
that criticism. So to give you a taste, Gardener's Verse
begins with and this is kind of amended from its
its original language to be a little easier to understand.
But for the most part it's all there. How so
(13:08):
well a gardener b here, he may both here and
see every time of the year and of the month,
and how the craft shall be done, in what manner
he shall delve and set, both in drought and in wet,
How he shall his seeds. So of every month he
must know both of warts and of leek, onions, and
of garlic parsonally cleary, and also sage and all other herbage.
(13:32):
I want to say garlic as garlik. From now know
me too. So here's part of the section on grafting.
Thou must graft apple and pear from the month of
September to April. With a saw, thou shout the tree cut,
and with a knife smooth, make it clean between the
(13:53):
stock of the tree, wherein that thy graft shall be
Make the cutting of that graft between the new and
the old staff, so that it be made to life
as the bake. And the edge of a knife a wedge,
thou set in the midst of the tree, that every
side from other fleet, till it be opened wide, wherein
(14:16):
the graft shall be laid. I find this whole thing
incredibly charting. The oldest known botanical garden is the Botanical
Garden of Pizza that was established at the University of
Pisa to How's Luca Guinea of Imola's Herberarium close on
its heels. Another botanical garden was founded in five at
(14:37):
Padua University. The Orto Botanica was established to give the
medical school at Padua ready access to medicinal plants. The
Botanical Garden Padus still exists today as a teaching garden.
It has an estimated six thousand plants in its collection,
and it's also a UNESCO World Heritage Site and it's
open to the public. You know, sometimes see the had
(15:00):
you a garden list as the oldest. This is because
the piece of botanical garden has moved twice and in
relocating it forfeited that oldest title. Yeah, both sometimes get
get called the oldest. Uh, nobody seems too spun up
about it. During the early Renaissance in Europe, gardens expanded
(15:21):
in size as the next step to the grandeur of
expansive formal gardens. So during the High Renaissance was when
gardens really started to become more highly formalized, with those
intentions of creating huge visual spectacles that highlighted the grand
homes of families that could afford extravagant landscaping. So these
geometric designs were a display of both wealth and taste.
(15:44):
While we're not talking about Asia's gardening history so much
in this episode, we do need to note that it
was certainly influencing the Western world's gardening aesthetics. Essay written
by Sir William Temple really extolled virtues of the East
Asian gardening style, which was more in tune with nature
(16:05):
and not about forcing rigidity onto it. At the same
time that Andre Lenotro was lauded for his manicured masterpieces
at Versailles temples writing espoused the wisdom of a softer
design for gardens, and then over time some designers did
try to incorporate what they thought East Asian gardens might
(16:25):
look like in their own plots. Over time, English gardens
in particular adopted touches that referenced Chinese and Japanese gardens,
although again they were really usually referencing their imagined versions
of those cultures. Yeah, it was one of those instances
where these people had never seen gardens in China or Japan,
(16:48):
but they were like, I know, a pagoda, so they
would just drop it in their garden. Um kind of
a messy, messy way to do it. And this is
where we're actually going to transition back to North America.
So when Spanish ships landed at St. Augustine, Florida, starting
in fifteen sixty five, they brought with them both plants
that were native to Spain and others that they had
(17:11):
collected on their journey, which they then cultivated in this
new place. And this was the first of many integrations
of non native plant life with plants that naturally grew
in the area. The gardens and crops of the early
pilgrims in North America were widely known to have been
successful thanks to knowledge they got from the wampanag and
(17:32):
the difference between the soil of New England and the
soil of England is really significant, and while many of
these people had plenty of gardening and farming knowledge from
back into England, it really did not transfer across the
Atlantic in a way that could have sustained them. We
mentioned the three sisters method earlier, and this is where
that technique started to be incorporated by European colonists. Incidentally,
(17:56):
the success of these crops not only fed the early
arrivals the colonies, but it also enabled them to ferment
their own alcohol, something that was culturally important to English
and other European colonists from the very beginning. As the
colonies continued to expand, of course, so did their horticulture.
In the Jamestown Colony of Virginia, seeds were used to
(18:17):
start gardens that would mirror some of the items that
colonists had been accustomed to in their own home gardens
back in England, and they also integrated plants in their
gardens based on their learnings from the Native American population.
So that included large scale growings of things like tobacco
and corn, as well as growing squash and native being varieties.
(18:38):
One of the earliest laws in the colonies that involved
plants was passed in sixteen thirty nine in the Jamestown
Settlement and that required anyone who had a certain acreage
to plant an orchard and also to have a fenced garden.
A popular garden for North American colonists was the so
called dooryard garden that means like a small hatch of
(19:00):
plants right outside the homes front doorway, and that offered
vegetables and herbs for the household. This idea continued well
beyond this into the eighteen hundreds. As people started to
migrate west, dooryard gardens gave way to what are called
kitchen gardens. Those are the same basic idea, but sometimes
they tended to be a bit larger than a dooryard
garden to include more food plants, because as we got
(19:23):
further and further away from established places, there were, of
course fewer options to procure produce elsewhere you kind of
had to do it all yourself. Fruit trees were sometimes
included in these gardens along with the vegetables and herbs.
By the eighteen hundreds, as these settlements turned into towns,
residents were less immediately dependent on growing their own food,
(19:43):
and so some of the gardens shifted their makeup to
included things that were planted just because they were pretty.
And this also marks the rise in the US of
an entire industry of plant breeders who could specialize in
growing and reproducing hardy plants with disease and pest resistance,
and and they could ship seeds or plants to growers
around the expanding country. If you recall our episode on
(20:05):
Jewel Roberts point Set, this was around the time that
he was sending samples of what would come to be
known points Set, as as well as other plants from
Mexico to the US, and after that point, point cet
Is exploded in popularity. At this point, it wasn't just
wealthy people like points Set who were interested in plants
as a hobby. Leisure gardening became popular in the US
(20:26):
as people all across the socioeconomic spectrum started growing plants
for ornamental use, and flowers started to be cultivated by
home gardeners even more than fruits or vegetables. Coming up,
we will talk about the rise of botanical gardens and
seed companies in North America, and we'll dive into that
after a pause for a word from some of the
(20:47):
sponsors that keep stuff you missed in history class going.
The Colonies got their first botanic garden in seventeen twenty
eight in Philadelphia. Its founder was quaker John Bartram, a
friend of Benjamin Franklin, and Bartram used his contacts in
(21:08):
London to trade seeds back and forth, so North American
plants were being exported to Europe at the same time
European plants were being sent to the Colonies. Bartram is
credited with sending dozens of plants species to Europe for
the first time and was granted the title of Royal
Botanist by King George the Third. Bartram's Garden still exists
(21:29):
and it is open to the public. Flushing, New York,
was home to the first commercial nursery in the Colonies
that was opened by Robert Prince in seventeen thirty seven.
That nursery, like Bartram's business, imported and exported plants and
seeds both with Europe and with Australia, and also offered
ornamentals and grafted fruit trees for sale. Prince's expansive cherry
(21:53):
orchard was the source of ten thousand trees worth of
barrel making wood. During the Revolutionary War, Princess nur story
was seen is so valuable during this conflict between the
Colonies and England that British General Lord how commanded that
it be protected. The Prince Nursery operated for a hundred
and thirty years. As we know, throughout colonization in early
(22:14):
US history, there have been enslaved people going all the
way back to the sixteen hundreds, and gardening was part
of the enslaved population's life. This has come up on
the show before a couple of times, and I wanted
to make sure we touched on it again. For example,
when we had journalist and cookbook author and burn On
to talk about her historical baking books, particularly the one
on cookies American Cookie, she mentioned benny seeds that traveled
(22:38):
to North America in the pockets of enslaved people. And
in Holly's interview with Sarah Roberts of the Atlanta History Center,
she talked about the enslaved people's garden that's part of
Smith Farm at the History Center and how it recreates
the subsistence gardening that was often a necessity for enslaved
people to ensure that their food supply was supplemented with
(23:00):
fresh produce and herbs. To reiterate what Sarah told us
in that interview, allowing the enslaved workforce to maintain their
own small crops was not a magnanimous move on the
part of enslavers. This was a means to ensure that
the enslaved people retained a connection to place and minimize
the likelihood that they would try to escape. Additionally, these
gardens not only yielded food for the enslaved community, but
(23:23):
in cases of particularly successful yields, it sometimes created a
means to earn a little bit of money by selling
off the surplus. This is one of those things that
that can come across. As you just noted as as
being magnanimous, but it was also putting some of the
onus on enslaved people to provide their own food for themselves.
(23:44):
It's like players, yeah, and also knowing like, hey, your
beans are going to be ready in two months, so
you're probably going to be I don't have to worry
about you trying to get away in the next two months.
You know, this is important. Throughout the history of gardening
in North America. Enslaved labor was used for most of
the grand landscapes and many of the less grand that
(24:07):
were created by colonists and early Americans. This came up
in our White House to partner, but it really applies
to most of the historical homes that we think of
when we think of the founders and very wealthy European colonists.
In the late seventeen hundreds, dedicated seed stores began to
open around the United States. The d land Ruth Seed
Company opened in Philadelphia in seventeen eighty four and eventually
(24:30):
had George Washington and Thomas Jefferson as customers. Jefferson also
patronized another Philadelphia seed company that was run by Bernard McMahon.
That one opened in seventeen The first seed pamphlet was
created by G. Thornburn and Son's Seed and flooris Shop
that operated in New York City starting in eighteen o two.
(24:51):
As plants and seeds marketed to individual gardeners continued to
grow in popularity in the US, so did large scale
gardens and landscapes. In eighteen twenty the US Botanic Garden
was founded in Washington, d c. By an Act of Congress.
At the same time, gardens cemeteries started to be popular,
(25:12):
and large parks in the formal European style like Central
Park and Prospect Parks in Manhattan and Brooklyn, all of
those started to develop. Yeah, you see how, just like
the idea of gardens started to gain more and more
value as a culturally important part of uh US identity
and for the home gardener, there were also just more possibilities.
(25:34):
For one, people started moving out of the most dense
areas of cities and to less crowded areas where they
had more of their own green space to cultivate. It
also became quite popular in the mid eighteen hundreds for
wealthy families that lived in the city to purchase country home,
so even though they were city dwellers, they had a
place to garden, or in many cases have their enslaved
(25:55):
workforce or their staff do the gardening for them. In
eighteen sixty, natural pesticides made from things like dried and
powdered chrysanthemums started to be offered to home growers to
control insects in the garden. Chrysanthemums contain a naturally occurring
chemical compound known as pyrethrine, and that impacts the insect
(26:16):
nervous system, causing paralysis and then death. So small scale
gardeners had more success at raising plants, and that bolstered
interest in gardening even more. In the eighteen seventies, two
things happened that gave the home gardener in the US
both more information and more to work with when planning
their plots of flowers and produce. First, the Philadelphia Sentennial
(26:39):
Exposition of eighteen seventy six featured a massive horticultural hall
that was inspired by Paxton's Crystal Palace from the eighteen
fifty one London Exposition. That hall contained exhibit after exhibit
of plants and tools, and demonstrations and gardening that were
meant to appeal both to professional gardeners and to home amateurs.
(26:59):
In the wake of the U S Civil War, people
were really eager for the escape of the expo. It's
estimated that one thousand people attended the opening speech that
was given by President Ulysses S. Grant, and that ten
million visitors attended the expo over the course of its
six month run. The other development of the late eighteen
seventies was another seed business, and this one has a
(27:21):
name that folks will probably be familiar with, even if
you only have the most casual knowledge of gardening, and
its founder had attended the expo and was just beyond inspired.
W at Lee Burpy was only eighteen when he went
to this expo and was expected to continue on with
the family poultry and livestock business. He was so deeply
(27:44):
interested in gardening and particularly breeding plants. He had studied
plant genetics alongside animal genetics as he prepared for his career.
He had probably read Gregor Mendel's experiments with plant hybrids
and had done some experimenting on his own. So in
eighteen seventy eight he founded the w at Lee Burpee Company,
(28:05):
but at the time it focused at first on poultry
and then other livestock. But within just a few years
Burpie had added seeds to his offerings, and soon he
was shipping seeds and plants throughout the Northeast and the
Plain States, and he had to hustle to keep up
with demand. Burpie also made a trip to Europe every
year to tour the continent and meet with other horticulturalists,
(28:26):
and he would use his notes from these trips, along
with the stock that he acquired along the way, to
write each Burpee catalog. Of course, Burbie seeds are still
easy to find today. You can find them at home
and garden centers, big box stores. You can buy them online.
They're kind of like the I would guess the most
common name in seeds. As all these seed companies were
(28:46):
established and demand for seeds group, people started to see
a need for a trade organization for seedsmen uh and
the result was the formation of the American Seed Trade
Association in eighteen eighties three that still exists. It's one
of the oldest trade organizations in the country that was
founded to address issues like tariffs and established guidelines for
(29:09):
claims against seed performance. Today, the a s t A
states its mission is quote to be an effective voice
of action in all matters concerning the development, marketing, and
movement of seed associated products and services throughout the world.
A s t A promotes the development of better seed
to produce better crops for a better quality of life.
(29:30):
The first women's garden club in the US formed in
eight one not far from me, that's in Athens. Georgia,
and soon garden clubs like it had popped up throughout
the country, and in nineteen thirteen, several of those garden
clubs joined together in Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania to form the
Garden Club of America. Gardeners Elizabeth Martin and Ernestine Goodman
(29:52):
had founded the Garden Club of Philadelphia in the early
nineteen hundreds, but their move to form this larger coalition
enabled deeper in gagement on issues beyond merely cultivating one's
own personal garden, and the group's ideals have remained more
or less the same. To stimulate the knowledge and love
of gardening among amateurs, to share the advantages of association
(30:13):
through conference and correspondence in this country and abroad, to
aid in the protection of native plants and birds, and
to encourage civic planting. Today, the g c A offers
merit based scholarships in a variety of horticulturally related fields,
promotes conservation, and traces the history of gardens throughout the US,
among other efforts. As the nineteenth century came to a close,
(30:36):
the placement of the home garden shifted. Up to this point,
outside the front door had continued to be the usual
place that a person would probably find a home garden.
But a new concept came into favor that replaced the
dooryard garden, and that was the lawn. The lawn fell
in line with a Victorian trend of formality and aesthetic
(30:57):
that quickly traveled across the Atlantic to the US, and
while there were still ornamentals grown in the front yard
at this time, the structured nature of lawn landscaping for
homes meant that a lot of urban vegetable gardening, as
well as some flower gardening, just kind of shifted around
to the back of the side of the house. In
nineteen o two, a school garden initiative was started by
(31:18):
Fanny Griscom Parsons. Initially launched on a plot in Manhattan's
Hell's Kitchen neighborhood, the project aside small garden plots to
the students. Each student was given a four by eight
plot to grow an assortment of vegetables. The idea was
that the hundreds of city dwelling students who participated would
learn to work together and become connected to nature, while
(31:41):
also beautifying a portion of the city. This program expanded
and moved to a space in DeWitt Park and Parsons
started lecturing on school gardens to teachers. She actually became
director of the Bureau of School Farms in nineteen ten,
and that was a program that lasted until the early
nineteen thirties. During World War One, many of these school
(32:02):
gardens were dedicated exclusively to growing vegetables to help the
war effort. Promotional posters read joined the United States School
Garden Army. Beyond schools, Americans were encouraged to grow gardens
to supplement their rationed allotment of food. At the beginning
of the twentieth century, a trend which has recently cycled
(32:22):
back into favor began in the form of more natural gardens.
The structure and formality that had really dominated the late
eighteen hundred started to fall out of favor, and they
were replaced with efforts to grow more native plants and
pleasing arrangements, and a desire to soften the hard lines
to match the natural form of the surrounding landscape. In
(32:43):
n two, the American Horticultural Society was started. Similar to
how the Garden Club of America formed, This nonprofit group
came together to combine the existing American Horticultural Society. The
National Horticultural Society and the American Horticultural Council. The a
h S continues today with a mission to quote share
(33:03):
with all Americans the critical role of plants, gardens, and
green spaces in creating healthy, livable communities and a sustainable planet.
During World War Two, Americans were once again encouraged to
grow vitamins at your kitchen door by planting victory gardens.
The White House had its own victory garden, and the
idea became symbolic of the American spirit. And as we've
(33:27):
mentioned on the show before, many Japanese Americans who were
incarcerated in internment camps by the US as part of
Executive Order ninety grew their own gardens at the camps.
The post war suburb boom saw another surge in personal gardens.
The yard space that a lot of people had for
the first time was used largely for ornamental purposes. It
(33:48):
was connected to this growing idea of leisure living. But
then in the second half of the twentieth century, activism
around conservation led to new initiatives and trends in gardening.
As the focus, a lot of plant enthusiasts turned away
from just cultivating private gardens and toward projects that enriched
their communities and reclaimed green spaces in densely populated areas.
(34:11):
This is also an arrow when gardening television shows, which
have existed from just about the beginning of broadcast TV,
really took off in a big way. If you watch HDTV,
you can thank earlier shows like The Victory Garden, which
started running on PBS in the mid nineties seventies and
was definitely part of my childhood mine too, and they
(34:33):
I haven't watched it, but I believe they have relaunched
a new version of it, so I'm curious about it. Today,
gardening seems to be more popular and more varied than ever.
Part of this, of course, is because everyone was stuck
at home for the last year and suddenly was like,
I could grow some stuff. And while some people tend
to specialize plants in their greenhouses, others helped manage wild
(34:56):
growth gardens, and yet others create their own topiaries in
their yards. One of our neighbors has gotten vary into
topiaries during the pandemic. Uh Some people grow squash and
raised beds, or grow small container gardens, or there are
plenty of people that just have a lamp system to
grow fresh herbs in their kitchen. There is a way
for almost anyone who wants to garden to engage with
it at whatever level they're comfortable with. UH. And all
(35:19):
of these possibilities are really part of this long history.
A lot of the produced varieties that we grow today
have been grown in some form or another for centuries
or even millennia. As just one example, onions have been
grown for at least five thousand years, although whether they
originated in the area that's modern day Pakistan or in
(35:41):
Central Asia, that's a matter of debate. Onions were buried
with the pharaohs of Egypt. They appear in medical texts
in India going back to the sixth century. And as
we talked about at length in our episode on roses,
if you're growing ornamental flowers, you're benefiting from centuries of
work to create hart pretty beautiful plants. So when you're
(36:02):
working on your own garden or your community garden or whatever,
you are a link in this ongoing historical chain of
people growing stuff. Yes, I love it. That's why I
love gardening so much. UM, and please please let my
tomatoes work this year, Oh dear, I have a really
I need to get an expert involved because I have
(36:23):
a history of um having some very near missrs and
plant failures. We can talk about it during the behind
the scenes on Friday, but that is our our very brief.
I mean, there's so much detail you could dive into
on any one of these, and some of the people
we mentioned could certainly be episodes of their own. But
I hope if anybody is out there gardening that they
think about how they're part of this bigger picture of
(36:45):
gardening and how it's a one of the few things
that connects humans across all cultures in a really obvious
intangible way in our day to day lives. Okay, I
have listener mail. This is a two fur because it
covers both our recent episode on the Tacoma Naro's Bridge
and our older episode on Canary Row. Uh. This is
(37:06):
from our listener Chelsea, who writes, Dear Tracy and Holly,
Evidently I got distracted part way through telling you my
life story after your Canary Row episodes, so I'll just
add on my Tacoma Naro's Bridge commentary here and actually
send it this time. My husband was stationed at Naval
Base kits Up in eighteen and I got really involved
(37:27):
volunteering at the Kids Up Humane Society. I walked and
fostered dogs, I did dishes and laundry, and drove for
the transfer team. We transferred in animals from overcrowded shelters
all over Hawaii, Texas, Guam, California, and even Israel ones
and found them homes in the area. I was always
amused by the looks on the faces of the Kauai
dogs that jumped out of the van to find a
(37:49):
few inches of snow. This meant that about once a
week for more than two years, I drove across Dirty Dirty.
That podcast was the first time I heard that nickname.
To pick animals up from Sea Tech Airport in the
middle of the night, I can confirm that the winds
through the Narrows are still intense. I don't think I
ever felt the bridge move, but there were definitely times
it took effort to stay in my lane. Feeling the
(38:10):
broadside of the behemoth of a cargo van getting smacked
by wind will certainly help keep you awake. I figured
you guys could use to Cooma Narrow's dog stories that
ended better than poor tubbies. I miss getting to work
with all the dogs since we moved in the local
shelter can't have volunteers because of the pandemic, but I
make up for it by loving our foster fail pit mix.
Molina Picks attached that dog is painfully cute. She also
(38:33):
had included her original message, which was about canary row. Uh,
and I'll i'll pick up part of that. She said.
I grew up in Monterey, exactly a mile up the
hill from the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Here are a series
of anecdotes and fun facts from my hometown. Local lore said.
The streets I walked to get to the elementary school
bus was named for women who had worked in Flora Woods, Bordello, Alice, Grace,
(38:54):
et cetera. I have no idea if this is true,
and Google was no help in confirming. Uh. My brother
was in second grade. His classman on a field trip
to the aquarium and ate lunch in the outdoor classroom.
A seagull grabbed his sandwich out of his hand and
then immediately dropped it into the ocean. He cried and
his teacher had to share her lunch with him. I
have had the seagull theft situation and it's scary that
(39:18):
they will. Um. I mean I I've said before that
I grew up on the Florida Gulf Coast when I
was little, and I remember I had a bag of
Doritos once and a flock of seagulls literally came and
we're just like that, that bag is ours, ma'am um,
And then I was terrified. It was a lot of
birds anyway. Chelsea also mentioned that there was a Nickelodeon
game show on in the nineties that frequently gave a
(39:39):
trip to the aquarium as its big prize, and I
spent way too much time worrying that if I went
on the show and one it would not be a
very good prize for me, given that it wouldn't be
a vacation and we already had year passes to get in.
Did the show runners base the prizes off of the
hometowns of the contestants. I never even tried to get
on the show, but the logistics of prise selection worried me.
Kids are weird. Uh, that is a very cute. There
(40:01):
are other stories that she includes, but I wanted to
uh include those, They're so sweet. She also mentions that
if you do visit Monterey, bring a jacket. A major
driver of summer sweatshirt sales at the Canary Row Shops
is tourists who come expecting California summer weather and get
stuck in the June gloom. Right, it gets very cold
(40:21):
at times. But thank you so much, Chelsea. Also, I
really do love those pictures of your dog. That is
a cute, cute baby, and I understand why that was
a foster fail. If you would like to write to us,
you can do so at History Podcast at i heeart
radio dot com. You can also find us on social
media as Missed in History, and you can subscribe to
the show on the I heart Radio app, at Apple
(40:42):
podcast or wherever it is you listen. Stuff you Missed
in History Class is a production of I Heart Radio.
For more podcasts from i heeart Radio, visit the i
heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy Vie Wilson. So, Tracy,
I'm very lucky because one of my awesome friends brought
me a bunch of garden plants recently. Yeah. Um, who's
(00:23):
a person you also know. And I love this because
she participates in a community garden, so she gets all
kinds of good stuff through like seedling swaps and whatnot.
So I got a nice variety. I got some peppers
and tomatoes and squash and some basil from her. And
I had already started a bunch of mint in my
house so that I can always have ready Mohito's on um.
(00:44):
And all of this kind of needed to be moved
into planters, and so I finally started doing that. And
as I was, you know, doing this, I had one
of those very simple but profound moments where I found
myself thinking about all of the places and efforts and
plants that have contrued be did over time to me
on my back deck digging soil out of my compost
(01:04):
bins to make new homes for all these plants. Might
sound a little self important, but really it was more
like I'm part of a bigger picture and it I
don't know, it just hit me in that moment. Sure
just got me thinking about gardening and how it is really. Gardening,
more than almost any other sort of obvious thing, is
a living history that connects us to all places and
people through time. Because right like, people five thousand years
(01:27):
ago did not have a local home improvement store or
a big box store where they could go get fertilizer
and weed management in abundance from an entire aisle of
shelves of these kinds of things. Yet lots of plants
that are useful or delightful to humans have survived and
even thrived four thousands of years so that we can
continue to plant their descendants today in our home gardens.
(01:49):
This is where my head's at. So we have talked
about various specific gardening topics before, right like, we've talked
about roses, and we've talked about historical gardens at the
History Center some others, and some of those will come
up here. But I wanted to take a look at
how gardening developed in North America to contextualize some of
those other topics. Um but of course that also does
(02:11):
involve things that happened around the globe prior to colonization.
So to level set, this is definitely one it's more
North American than anything else. It's definitely more focused on
the idea of a garden than landscaping or growing crops,
though there's some overlap because some of those learnings UH
kind of contribute to gardening. So we won't, for example,
(02:33):
be talking like about when various cereal grains were grown
in various historical cultures. And we also won't have a
whole lot of discussion of East Asian gardening. That is
a really amazing history all its own that I would
love to tackle one day, but it was way outside
the scope of this. We do talk about some influences
on Western gardening from East Asia, though, But first we're
gonna talk about North America before colonists, and then some
(02:56):
of the history that led up to Europeans bringing their
own gardening ideas to North America, and then how gardening
developed and shifted once the colonies were established, and beyond
leading up more or less to present day. This is,
as you might imagine, a lot, so it is by
no means comprehensive. We're really just trying to hit a
few of the highlights that connect gardening traditions of today
(03:18):
to history. So all gardening starts in the same place.
Humans didn't invents plants out of thin air, and the
earliest precursors to gardening started historically with somebody nurturing and
useful plant species in that plant's natural habitat and then
starting to plant them more deliberately closer to where they
(03:39):
lived or traveled so that they would have easier and
faster access to these plants. So, of course, long before
Europeans ever showed up on the North American continent, there
were people here cultivating plants, and most of this might
fall more closely under crops than gardening. We're talking about
things like gourds and potatoes and maize that were being grown,
according to records in what's modern day Mexico as far
(04:02):
back as in some cases, and for a lot of
cultures that were living in the America's there was already
this deep understanding of how cultivated growing impacted the land.
So a lot of the early practices here were focused
on sustainability. That is not a new concept, and these
techniques were then later picked up by gardeners who moved
(04:22):
to North America from Europe. So, for example, companion planting
was practiced by the Wapanog people as well as others,
and that has come to be known as the three
sisters technique. And that is when three different crops were
grown together that all supported each other in the soil.
So one configuration is growing corn or maize along with
(04:43):
pole beans and squash all together in the same tract.
The corn offers climbing space for the beans, the beans
enriched the soil with nitrogen that they pulled from the air,
and the squash provides a soil protective ground cover and
a pesta turrent that helps to if the smaller plants healthy. Um.
I actually saw an article about a similar idea in
(05:06):
gardens today that was combining sunflowers with other plants to
grow them together in a way that naturally supported each other. Yeah,
and there are even some people who have taken kind
of this three sisters technique. It still gets used today
and they add in a flower component. So there are
a lot of ways that this has been developed, but
(05:27):
it really is um kind of a wonderfully balanced idea.
And another technique that was well established by indigenous populations
in North America was what we would now call no
till gardening. So in this case, instead of digging up
the soil to plant seeds, the soil is undisturbed. In
the seating phase, seeds are laid down and then a
fresh layer of compost is added on top of them,
(05:50):
and as a consequence, the healthy soil that's been developed
remains intact and it actually prolongs its viability for future planting.
Other techniques were also part of indigenous gardening practices for
centuries before they were adopted by colonists who arrived on
the continent. So terrorists gardening to manage erosion and inconsistent
(06:11):
rain cycles, irrigating using catchments and water runoff reservoirs, directing
the water flow with dugout canals or indentations in the earth,
seed saving naturally, fertilizing with things like fish or remnant vegetation,
among others. These these kinds of things come up a
lot on our Unearthed episodes. We're always finding new evidence
(06:35):
of new things that people were doing to cultivate plants. Yeah,
I also love how a lot of these things get
discussed when you're talking about modern gardening, and it's like,
this isn't a new idea. People have been doing it
this whole time. This is not new in the least. Uh.
And in addition to the indigenous gardening practices that colonists
(06:56):
encountered and learned when they arrived in North America, Europeans
also brought with them gardening knowledge that had roots all
the way back in Mesopotamia. So that includes Babylon and
Persia as well as ancient Egypt. So we know that
there were a variety of gardens styles throughout Mesopotamia. The
hanging gardens of Babylon are one of the Seven Wonders
(07:17):
of the Ancient World after all, although their date usually
puts them at around six hundred b C as an
origin point. And obviously there was plant cultivation in the
area way before that. Yeah, Orchard gardens were cultivated as
well as temple gardens designed to honor deities, and there
were also gardens that were cultivated in courtyards within palaces.
(07:38):
And we know all this based on archaeological findings over
the years, but we really don't have a lot of
specifics on how most of these gardens were designed. We
just have sort of snippets of information, like seeing the
use of trees and straight lines right next to walls.
Gardens were created in Egypt as far back as ten
thousand BC and included the three types of gardens that
(08:00):
we just mentioned. In Egyptian gardens, sycamores, date palms, and
fir trees were used to form grand gardens that were
pretty architectural in their design. They were highly ordered and
precise in the placement of the flora. Both Mesopotamian and
Egyptian gardens were often intended to offer an escape from
the heat and the dryness of the desert, so kind
(08:23):
of a respite of shade and beauty. Yeah, it's like
I would like to build a small oasis within the
walls of my compound. That sounds great to me. By
six thousand BC, gardens had started to appear in Greece,
and in addition to those three types of gardens that
were used in prior locations that we mentioned, the common
architecture of Greece may have given rise to small personal gardens.
(08:46):
So most families lived in these sort of small homes,
but they had courtyards, and while there isn't certain evidence
in the matter, it has been theorized that one of
the functions of those courtyards was as a place for
small gardening projects, in addition to common other uses like
as a common living area and as a place to cook.
Ancient Rome is where we start seeing more recorded information
(09:08):
about gardens and their uses. The atriums found in the
town homes of Rome's wealthy inhabitants would have multiple garden areas.
Peristyle court often contained a family shrine and the gardens
surrounding that would have been ornamental. The hortest courtyard was
used for cultivating fresh fruits and vegetables, and the atrium
(09:30):
courtyard would have been where rainwater was collected in cisterns
and may have also included some ornamental plants and villas.
Outside of the heavily populated areas, courtyard gardens were also popular,
and also a lot grander in scale. As Roman military
efforts moved into Europe over time, so did their gardening aesthetics.
(09:50):
So when Roman officials, for example, would conquer a place
and then move into that conquered territory, they would then
have homes built that included all of the comforts of
home as they knew it, including gardens Another carrier of
the garden tradition from Western Asia into Europe was the
spread of Islam that started in the eighth century when
(10:10):
Islamic forces attacked the Iberian Peninsula. Just as was the
case with Roman officials, the conquering Muslim leaders set up
new homes in Spain, and they also had gardens planted.
By the Middle Ages, gardens were spread throughout Europe in castles, monasteries,
manor houses, and private homes of the upper middle class,
as well as smaller subsistence gardens for the lower classes.
(10:34):
One of the common features of castles during this time
is something I absolutely love. It's an herbor. That's a
small private pleasure garden used almost as an outdoor room.
There were also food gardens associated with most castles. Often
those were outside of the castle walls to include things
like fruit orchards and large scale vegetable gardens. Monastery gardens
(10:56):
were filled with produced plants as well as medicinal herbs,
and this eies into our recent episode when we talked
about barber surgeons and the ways that monks had at
one point functioned in a more medical caregiver role. In
just a moment, we're going to talk about the first
known English language text on gardening, and it is pretty delightful.
But before we get to that, we will take a
(11:17):
quick sponsor break. Somewhere in the early to mid fourteen hundred's,
the earliest English language gardening book was written. Actual estimated
dates for it are kind of all over the place,
but regardless of the exact origin date, the Feet of Gardening,
(11:39):
attributed to author John Gardner, offers a massive amount of
information for horticulturists to draw from. Trinity College, Cambridge has
the only known copy. It is eight eight pages, although
the last dozen of those pages are very damaged. We
don't know who John Gardner was, although there has been
plenty of speculation. Interestingly, a good bit of this gardening
(12:03):
manual was written in verse and in a commentary on
the book written in eight three by an honorable Alicia M.
Tisson Amherst. John Gardner's writing and gardening is critiqued as
follows quote. John Gardner must certainly have been a practical gardener,
as the poem is a series of most sensible and
(12:24):
reasonable instructions for growing fruits, herbs, and flowers, and his
work is singularly free from the superstitious beliefs in astrology,
and the extravagant fancies and experiments and grafting and rearing plants,
especially fruit trees, so prevalent in the writings of this
period that he was not skilled in making verses can
(12:46):
be seen by his poem. The lines frequently failed to scan,
and many of the rhymes are very imperfect. I love
that criticism. So to give you a taste, Gardener's Verse
begins with and this is kind of amended from its
its original language to be a little easier to understand.
But for the most part it's all there. How so
(13:08):
well a gardener b here, he may both here and
see every time of the year and of the month,
and how the craft shall be done, in what manner
he shall delve and set, both in drought and in wet,
How he shall his seeds. So of every month he
must know both of warts and of leek, onions, and
of garlic parsonally cleary, and also sage and all other herbage.
(13:32):
I want to say garlic as garlik. From now know
me too. So here's part of the section on grafting.
Thou must graft apple and pear from the month of
September to April. With a saw, thou shout the tree cut,
and with a knife smooth, make it clean between the
(13:53):
stock of the tree, wherein that thy graft shall be
Make the cutting of that graft between the new and
the old staff, so that it be made to life
as the bake. And the edge of a knife a wedge,
thou set in the midst of the tree, that every
side from other fleet, till it be opened wide, wherein
(14:16):
the graft shall be laid. I find this whole thing
incredibly charting. The oldest known botanical garden is the Botanical
Garden of Pizza that was established at the University of
Pisa to How's Luca Guinea of Imola's Herberarium close on
its heels. Another botanical garden was founded in five at
(14:37):
Padua University. The Orto Botanica was established to give the
medical school at Padua ready access to medicinal plants. The
Botanical Garden Padus still exists today as a teaching garden.
It has an estimated six thousand plants in its collection,
and it's also a UNESCO World Heritage Site and it's
open to the public. You know, sometimes see the had
(15:00):
you a garden list as the oldest. This is because
the piece of botanical garden has moved twice and in
relocating it forfeited that oldest title. Yeah, both sometimes get
get called the oldest. Uh, nobody seems too spun up
about it. During the early Renaissance in Europe, gardens expanded
(15:21):
in size as the next step to the grandeur of
expansive formal gardens. So during the High Renaissance was when
gardens really started to become more highly formalized, with those
intentions of creating huge visual spectacles that highlighted the grand
homes of families that could afford extravagant landscaping. So these
geometric designs were a display of both wealth and taste.
(15:44):
While we're not talking about Asia's gardening history so much
in this episode, we do need to note that it
was certainly influencing the Western world's gardening aesthetics. Essay written
by Sir William Temple really extolled virtues of the East
Asian gardening style, which was more in tune with nature
(16:05):
and not about forcing rigidity onto it. At the same
time that Andre Lenotro was lauded for his manicured masterpieces
at Versailles temples writing espoused the wisdom of a softer
design for gardens, and then over time some designers did
try to incorporate what they thought East Asian gardens might
(16:25):
look like in their own plots. Over time, English gardens
in particular adopted touches that referenced Chinese and Japanese gardens,
although again they were really usually referencing their imagined versions
of those cultures. Yeah, it was one of those instances
where these people had never seen gardens in China or Japan,
(16:48):
but they were like, I know, a pagoda, so they
would just drop it in their garden. Um kind of
a messy, messy way to do it. And this is
where we're actually going to transition back to North America.
So when Spanish ships landed at St. Augustine, Florida, starting
in fifteen sixty five, they brought with them both plants
that were native to Spain and others that they had
(17:11):
collected on their journey, which they then cultivated in this
new place. And this was the first of many integrations
of non native plant life with plants that naturally grew
in the area. The gardens and crops of the early
pilgrims in North America were widely known to have been
successful thanks to knowledge they got from the wampanag and
(17:32):
the difference between the soil of New England and the
soil of England is really significant, and while many of
these people had plenty of gardening and farming knowledge from
back into England, it really did not transfer across the
Atlantic in a way that could have sustained them. We
mentioned the three sisters method earlier, and this is where
that technique started to be incorporated by European colonists. Incidentally,
(17:56):
the success of these crops not only fed the early
arrivals the colonies, but it also enabled them to ferment
their own alcohol, something that was culturally important to English
and other European colonists from the very beginning. As the
colonies continued to expand, of course, so did their horticulture.
In the Jamestown Colony of Virginia, seeds were used to
(18:17):
start gardens that would mirror some of the items that
colonists had been accustomed to in their own home gardens
back in England, and they also integrated plants in their
gardens based on their learnings from the Native American population.
So that included large scale growings of things like tobacco
and corn, as well as growing squash and native being varieties.
(18:38):
One of the earliest laws in the colonies that involved
plants was passed in sixteen thirty nine in the Jamestown
Settlement and that required anyone who had a certain acreage
to plant an orchard and also to have a fenced garden.
A popular garden for North American colonists was the so
called dooryard garden that means like a small hatch of
(19:00):
plants right outside the homes front doorway, and that offered
vegetables and herbs for the household. This idea continued well
beyond this into the eighteen hundreds. As people started to
migrate west, dooryard gardens gave way to what are called
kitchen gardens. Those are the same basic idea, but sometimes
they tended to be a bit larger than a dooryard
garden to include more food plants, because as we got
(19:23):
further and further away from established places, there were, of
course fewer options to procure produce elsewhere you kind of
had to do it all yourself. Fruit trees were sometimes
included in these gardens along with the vegetables and herbs.
By the eighteen hundreds, as these settlements turned into towns,
residents were less immediately dependent on growing their own food,
(19:43):
and so some of the gardens shifted their makeup to
included things that were planted just because they were pretty.
And this also marks the rise in the US of
an entire industry of plant breeders who could specialize in
growing and reproducing hardy plants with disease and pest resistance,
and and they could ship seeds or plants to growers
around the expanding country. If you recall our episode on
(20:05):
Jewel Roberts point Set, this was around the time that
he was sending samples of what would come to be
known points Set, as as well as other plants from
Mexico to the US, and after that point, point cet
Is exploded in popularity. At this point, it wasn't just
wealthy people like points Set who were interested in plants
as a hobby. Leisure gardening became popular in the US
(20:26):
as people all across the socioeconomic spectrum started growing plants
for ornamental use, and flowers started to be cultivated by
home gardeners even more than fruits or vegetables. Coming up,
we will talk about the rise of botanical gardens and
seed companies in North America, and we'll dive into that
after a pause for a word from some of the
(20:47):
sponsors that keep stuff you missed in history class going.
The Colonies got their first botanic garden in seventeen twenty
eight in Philadelphia. Its founder was quaker John Bartram, a
friend of Benjamin Franklin, and Bartram used his contacts in
(21:08):
London to trade seeds back and forth, so North American
plants were being exported to Europe at the same time
European plants were being sent to the Colonies. Bartram is
credited with sending dozens of plants species to Europe for
the first time and was granted the title of Royal
Botanist by King George the Third. Bartram's Garden still exists
(21:29):
and it is open to the public. Flushing, New York,
was home to the first commercial nursery in the Colonies
that was opened by Robert Prince in seventeen thirty seven.
That nursery, like Bartram's business, imported and exported plants and
seeds both with Europe and with Australia, and also offered
ornamentals and grafted fruit trees for sale. Prince's expansive cherry
(21:53):
orchard was the source of ten thousand trees worth of
barrel making wood. During the Revolutionary War, Princess nur story
was seen is so valuable during this conflict between the
Colonies and England that British General Lord how commanded that
it be protected. The Prince Nursery operated for a hundred
and thirty years. As we know, throughout colonization in early
(22:14):
US history, there have been enslaved people going all the
way back to the sixteen hundreds, and gardening was part
of the enslaved population's life. This has come up on
the show before a couple of times, and I wanted
to make sure we touched on it again. For example,
when we had journalist and cookbook author and burn On
to talk about her historical baking books, particularly the one
on cookies American Cookie, she mentioned benny seeds that traveled
(22:38):
to North America in the pockets of enslaved people. And
in Holly's interview with Sarah Roberts of the Atlanta History Center,
she talked about the enslaved people's garden that's part of
Smith Farm at the History Center and how it recreates
the subsistence gardening that was often a necessity for enslaved
people to ensure that their food supply was supplemented with
(23:00):
fresh produce and herbs. To reiterate what Sarah told us
in that interview, allowing the enslaved workforce to maintain their
own small crops was not a magnanimous move on the
part of enslavers. This was a means to ensure that
the enslaved people retained a connection to place and minimize
the likelihood that they would try to escape. Additionally, these
gardens not only yielded food for the enslaved community, but
(23:23):
in cases of particularly successful yields, it sometimes created a
means to earn a little bit of money by selling
off the surplus. This is one of those things that
that can come across. As you just noted as as
being magnanimous, but it was also putting some of the
onus on enslaved people to provide their own food for themselves.
(23:44):
It's like players, yeah, and also knowing like, hey, your
beans are going to be ready in two months, so
you're probably going to be I don't have to worry
about you trying to get away in the next two months.
You know, this is important. Throughout the history of gardening
in North America. Enslaved labor was used for most of
the grand landscapes and many of the less grand that
(24:07):
were created by colonists and early Americans. This came up
in our White House to partner, but it really applies
to most of the historical homes that we think of
when we think of the founders and very wealthy European colonists.
In the late seventeen hundreds, dedicated seed stores began to
open around the United States. The d land Ruth Seed
Company opened in Philadelphia in seventeen eighty four and eventually
(24:30):
had George Washington and Thomas Jefferson as customers. Jefferson also
patronized another Philadelphia seed company that was run by Bernard McMahon.
That one opened in seventeen The first seed pamphlet was
created by G. Thornburn and Son's Seed and flooris Shop
that operated in New York City starting in eighteen o two.
(24:51):
As plants and seeds marketed to individual gardeners continued to
grow in popularity in the US, so did large scale
gardens and landscapes. In eighteen twenty the US Botanic Garden
was founded in Washington, d c. By an Act of Congress.
At the same time, gardens cemeteries started to be popular,
(25:12):
and large parks in the formal European style like Central
Park and Prospect Parks in Manhattan and Brooklyn, all of
those started to develop. Yeah, you see how, just like
the idea of gardens started to gain more and more
value as a culturally important part of uh US identity
and for the home gardener, there were also just more possibilities.
(25:34):
For one, people started moving out of the most dense
areas of cities and to less crowded areas where they
had more of their own green space to cultivate. It
also became quite popular in the mid eighteen hundreds for
wealthy families that lived in the city to purchase country home,
so even though they were city dwellers, they had a
place to garden, or in many cases have their enslaved
(25:55):
workforce or their staff do the gardening for them. In
eighteen sixty, natural pesticides made from things like dried and
powdered chrysanthemums started to be offered to home growers to
control insects in the garden. Chrysanthemums contain a naturally occurring
chemical compound known as pyrethrine, and that impacts the insect
(26:16):
nervous system, causing paralysis and then death. So small scale
gardeners had more success at raising plants, and that bolstered
interest in gardening even more. In the eighteen seventies, two
things happened that gave the home gardener in the US
both more information and more to work with when planning
their plots of flowers and produce. First, the Philadelphia Sentennial
(26:39):
Exposition of eighteen seventy six featured a massive horticultural hall
that was inspired by Paxton's Crystal Palace from the eighteen
fifty one London Exposition. That hall contained exhibit after exhibit
of plants and tools, and demonstrations and gardening that were
meant to appeal both to professional gardeners and to home amateurs.
(26:59):
In the wake of the U S Civil War, people
were really eager for the escape of the expo. It's
estimated that one thousand people attended the opening speech that
was given by President Ulysses S. Grant, and that ten
million visitors attended the expo over the course of its
six month run. The other development of the late eighteen
seventies was another seed business, and this one has a
(27:21):
name that folks will probably be familiar with, even if
you only have the most casual knowledge of gardening, and
its founder had attended the expo and was just beyond inspired.
W at Lee Burpy was only eighteen when he went
to this expo and was expected to continue on with
the family poultry and livestock business. He was so deeply
(27:44):
interested in gardening and particularly breeding plants. He had studied
plant genetics alongside animal genetics as he prepared for his career.
He had probably read Gregor Mendel's experiments with plant hybrids
and had done some experimenting on his own. So in
eighteen seventy eight he founded the w at Lee Burpee Company,
(28:05):
but at the time it focused at first on poultry
and then other livestock. But within just a few years
Burpie had added seeds to his offerings, and soon he
was shipping seeds and plants throughout the Northeast and the
Plain States, and he had to hustle to keep up
with demand. Burpie also made a trip to Europe every
year to tour the continent and meet with other horticulturalists,
(28:26):
and he would use his notes from these trips, along
with the stock that he acquired along the way, to
write each Burpee catalog. Of course, Burbie seeds are still
easy to find today. You can find them at home
and garden centers, big box stores. You can buy them online.
They're kind of like the I would guess the most
common name in seeds. As all these seed companies were
(28:46):
established and demand for seeds group, people started to see
a need for a trade organization for seedsmen uh and
the result was the formation of the American Seed Trade
Association in eighteen eighties three that still exists. It's one
of the oldest trade organizations in the country that was
founded to address issues like tariffs and established guidelines for
(29:09):
claims against seed performance. Today, the a s t A
states its mission is quote to be an effective voice
of action in all matters concerning the development, marketing, and
movement of seed associated products and services throughout the world.
A s t A promotes the development of better seed
to produce better crops for a better quality of life.
(29:30):
The first women's garden club in the US formed in
eight one not far from me, that's in Athens. Georgia,
and soon garden clubs like it had popped up throughout
the country, and in nineteen thirteen, several of those garden
clubs joined together in Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania to form the
Garden Club of America. Gardeners Elizabeth Martin and Ernestine Goodman
(29:52):
had founded the Garden Club of Philadelphia in the early
nineteen hundreds, but their move to form this larger coalition
enabled deeper in gagement on issues beyond merely cultivating one's
own personal garden, and the group's ideals have remained more
or less the same. To stimulate the knowledge and love
of gardening among amateurs, to share the advantages of association
(30:13):
through conference and correspondence in this country and abroad, to
aid in the protection of native plants and birds, and
to encourage civic planting. Today, the g c A offers
merit based scholarships in a variety of horticulturally related fields,
promotes conservation, and traces the history of gardens throughout the US,
among other efforts. As the nineteenth century came to a close,
(30:36):
the placement of the home garden shifted. Up to this point,
outside the front door had continued to be the usual
place that a person would probably find a home garden.
But a new concept came into favor that replaced the
dooryard garden, and that was the lawn. The lawn fell
in line with a Victorian trend of formality and aesthetic
(30:57):
that quickly traveled across the Atlantic to the US, and
while there were still ornamentals grown in the front yard
at this time, the structured nature of lawn landscaping for
homes meant that a lot of urban vegetable gardening, as
well as some flower gardening, just kind of shifted around
to the back of the side of the house. In
nineteen o two, a school garden initiative was started by
(31:18):
Fanny Griscom Parsons. Initially launched on a plot in Manhattan's
Hell's Kitchen neighborhood, the project aside small garden plots to
the students. Each student was given a four by eight
plot to grow an assortment of vegetables. The idea was
that the hundreds of city dwelling students who participated would
learn to work together and become connected to nature, while
(31:41):
also beautifying a portion of the city. This program expanded
and moved to a space in DeWitt Park and Parsons
started lecturing on school gardens to teachers. She actually became
director of the Bureau of School Farms in nineteen ten,
and that was a program that lasted until the early
nineteen thirties. During World War One, many of these school
(32:02):
gardens were dedicated exclusively to growing vegetables to help the
war effort. Promotional posters read joined the United States School
Garden Army. Beyond schools, Americans were encouraged to grow gardens
to supplement their rationed allotment of food. At the beginning
of the twentieth century, a trend which has recently cycled
(32:22):
back into favor began in the form of more natural gardens.
The structure and formality that had really dominated the late
eighteen hundred started to fall out of favor, and they
were replaced with efforts to grow more native plants and
pleasing arrangements, and a desire to soften the hard lines
to match the natural form of the surrounding landscape. In
(32:43):
n two, the American Horticultural Society was started. Similar to
how the Garden Club of America formed, This nonprofit group
came together to combine the existing American Horticultural Society. The
National Horticultural Society and the American Horticultural Council. The a
h S continues today with a mission to quote share
(33:03):
with all Americans the critical role of plants, gardens, and
green spaces in creating healthy, livable communities and a sustainable planet.
During World War Two, Americans were once again encouraged to
grow vitamins at your kitchen door by planting victory gardens.
The White House had its own victory garden, and the
idea became symbolic of the American spirit. And as we've
(33:27):
mentioned on the show before, many Japanese Americans who were
incarcerated in internment camps by the US as part of
Executive Order ninety grew their own gardens at the camps.
The post war suburb boom saw another surge in personal gardens.
The yard space that a lot of people had for
the first time was used largely for ornamental purposes. It
(33:48):
was connected to this growing idea of leisure living. But
then in the second half of the twentieth century, activism
around conservation led to new initiatives and trends in gardening.
As the focus, a lot of plant enthusiasts turned away
from just cultivating private gardens and toward projects that enriched
their communities and reclaimed green spaces in densely populated areas.
(34:11):
This is also an arrow when gardening television shows, which
have existed from just about the beginning of broadcast TV,
really took off in a big way. If you watch HDTV,
you can thank earlier shows like The Victory Garden, which
started running on PBS in the mid nineties seventies and
was definitely part of my childhood mine too, and they
(34:33):
I haven't watched it, but I believe they have relaunched
a new version of it, so I'm curious about it. Today,
gardening seems to be more popular and more varied than ever.
Part of this, of course, is because everyone was stuck
at home for the last year and suddenly was like,
I could grow some stuff. And while some people tend
to specialize plants in their greenhouses, others helped manage wild
(34:56):
growth gardens, and yet others create their own topiaries in
their yards. One of our neighbors has gotten vary into
topiaries during the pandemic. Uh Some people grow squash and
raised beds, or grow small container gardens, or there are
plenty of people that just have a lamp system to
grow fresh herbs in their kitchen. There is a way
for almost anyone who wants to garden to engage with
it at whatever level they're comfortable with. UH. And all
(35:19):
of these possibilities are really part of this long history.
A lot of the produced varieties that we grow today
have been grown in some form or another for centuries
or even millennia. As just one example, onions have been
grown for at least five thousand years, although whether they
originated in the area that's modern day Pakistan or in
(35:41):
Central Asia, that's a matter of debate. Onions were buried
with the pharaohs of Egypt. They appear in medical texts
in India going back to the sixth century. And as
we talked about at length in our episode on roses,
if you're growing ornamental flowers, you're benefiting from centuries of
work to create hart pretty beautiful plants. So when you're
(36:02):
working on your own garden or your community garden or whatever,
you are a link in this ongoing historical chain of
people growing stuff. Yes, I love it. That's why I
love gardening so much. UM, and please please let my
tomatoes work this year, Oh dear, I have a really
I need to get an expert involved because I have
(36:23):
a history of um having some very near missrs and
plant failures. We can talk about it during the behind
the scenes on Friday, but that is our our very brief.
I mean, there's so much detail you could dive into
on any one of these, and some of the people
we mentioned could certainly be episodes of their own. But
I hope if anybody is out there gardening that they
think about how they're part of this bigger picture of
(36:45):
gardening and how it's a one of the few things
that connects humans across all cultures in a really obvious
intangible way in our day to day lives. Okay, I
have listener mail. This is a two fur because it
covers both our recent episode on the Tacoma Naro's Bridge
and our older episode on Canary Row. Uh. This is
(37:06):
from our listener Chelsea, who writes, Dear Tracy and Holly,
Evidently I got distracted part way through telling you my
life story after your Canary Row episodes, so I'll just
add on my Tacoma Naro's Bridge commentary here and actually
send it this time. My husband was stationed at Naval
Base kits Up in eighteen and I got really involved
(37:27):
volunteering at the Kids Up Humane Society. I walked and
fostered dogs, I did dishes and laundry, and drove for
the transfer team. We transferred in animals from overcrowded shelters
all over Hawaii, Texas, Guam, California, and even Israel ones
and found them homes in the area. I was always
amused by the looks on the faces of the Kauai
dogs that jumped out of the van to find a
(37:49):
few inches of snow. This meant that about once a
week for more than two years, I drove across Dirty Dirty.
That podcast was the first time I heard that nickname.
To pick animals up from Sea Tech Airport in the
middle of the night, I can confirm that the winds
through the Narrows are still intense. I don't think I
ever felt the bridge move, but there were definitely times
it took effort to stay in my lane. Feeling the
(38:10):
broadside of the behemoth of a cargo van getting smacked
by wind will certainly help keep you awake. I figured
you guys could use to Cooma Narrow's dog stories that
ended better than poor tubbies. I miss getting to work
with all the dogs since we moved in the local
shelter can't have volunteers because of the pandemic, but I
make up for it by loving our foster fail pit mix.
Molina Picks attached that dog is painfully cute. She also
(38:33):
had included her original message, which was about canary row. Uh,
and I'll i'll pick up part of that. She said.
I grew up in Monterey, exactly a mile up the
hill from the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Here are a series
of anecdotes and fun facts from my hometown. Local lore said.
The streets I walked to get to the elementary school
bus was named for women who had worked in Flora Woods, Bordello, Alice, Grace,
(38:54):
et cetera. I have no idea if this is true,
and Google was no help in confirming. Uh. My brother
was in second grade. His classman on a field trip
to the aquarium and ate lunch in the outdoor classroom.
A seagull grabbed his sandwich out of his hand and
then immediately dropped it into the ocean. He cried and
his teacher had to share her lunch with him. I
have had the seagull theft situation and it's scary that
(39:18):
they will. Um. I mean I I've said before that
I grew up on the Florida Gulf Coast when I
was little, and I remember I had a bag of
Doritos once and a flock of seagulls literally came and
we're just like that, that bag is ours, ma'am um,
And then I was terrified. It was a lot of
birds anyway. Chelsea also mentioned that there was a Nickelodeon
game show on in the nineties that frequently gave a
(39:39):
trip to the aquarium as its big prize, and I
spent way too much time worrying that if I went
on the show and one it would not be a
very good prize for me, given that it wouldn't be
a vacation and we already had year passes to get in.
Did the show runners base the prizes off of the
hometowns of the contestants. I never even tried to get
on the show, but the logistics of prise selection worried me.
Kids are weird. Uh, that is a very cute. There
(40:01):
are other stories that she includes, but I wanted to
uh include those, They're so sweet. She also mentions that
if you do visit Monterey, bring a jacket. A major
driver of summer sweatshirt sales at the Canary Row Shops
is tourists who come expecting California summer weather and get
stuck in the June gloom. Right, it gets very cold
(40:21):
at times. But thank you so much, Chelsea. Also, I
really do love those pictures of your dog. That is
a cute, cute baby, and I understand why that was
a foster fail. If you would like to write to us,
you can do so at History Podcast at i heeart
radio dot com. You can also find us on social
media as Missed in History, and you can subscribe to
the show on the I heart Radio app, at Apple
(40:42):
podcast or wherever it is you listen. Stuff you Missed
in History Class is a production of I Heart Radio.
For more podcasts from i heeart Radio, visit the i
heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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