The Newest Endangered Heirlooms: Hybrid Tea Roses

        The most popular roses of the 20th century – lush hybrid teas such as ‘Peace’, ‘Chrysler Imperial’, and ‘Tropicana’ that helped define American gardening for decades – are now at risk of disappearing forever. Although some gardeners may say “good riddance,” those of us who value history and diversity – and who remember when many of today’s most popular plants were scorned for one reason or another – can’t help but feel concerned. Learn more in the recent Los Angeles Times’ article, “Bloom Comes Off the Rose Industry.” (April 2012)

Revolutionary Manure: The Founding Fathers and Political Bullpucky

        As the BS piles up deeper and deeper this election year, we thought you’d enjoy this refreshingly different perspective on politicians and manure from Andrea Wulf’s Founding Gardeners:
        “[In 1796, John] Adams stood in a pile of compost that was rising in his yard – seemingly one of his most favorite spots, because no other subject was mentioned so frequently in his diary that summer. In fact, the only correspondence that Adams thought worth noting at all was a letter about a ‘report on manures’ from Britain, which Jefferson, Madison and Washington also had received. Mundane as it seems, manure was of the greatest concern to all four of them, for one of the reasons why yields in the United States of America were declining so drastically was the lack of manuring.
        “Over the years Adams had experimented extensively with dung . . . . One of the most charming images from Adams’s life . . . was his close investigation of a manure heap just outside London. Teasing apart the straw and dung, the American minister to the court at St. James’s Palace ‘carefully examined’ the stinking pile and clearly didn’t mind the muck on his hands. He noted the exact contents and ingredients, before announcing with glee that it was ‘not equal to mine.’
        “While Adams had his arms up to the elbow in the dung, the studious Madison used pen, paper, and numbers to tackle the problem. In spring 1796, in the midst of the Jay Treaty controversy, he had managed to find time to calculate precisely how many wagonloads of manure were needed to produce a healthy harvest of potatoes and dispatched instructions to Montpelier to cover the fields with dung.
        “Somewhat ironically, these steaming piles of dung became icons of the founding fathers’ agricultural vision. While other farmers let their cattle and hogs drop the nutritious dung far away from the plantations, Washington was the first American to build a stercorary – a covered dung depository where manure could be stored, aged, and mixed. ‘Nothing is more wanting in this country,’ Washington wrote to Jefferson, asking him to share all knowledge on manures with his friends. Jefferson thought a British pamphlet on the subject so delectable that he declared it a ‘charming treatise.’ In the summer of 1796 they all received a pamphlet on manure from John Sinclair, the president of the British Board of Agriculture, who knew that they were not only the most powerful political figures in the United States of America but also the most innovative farmers. All agreed with Washington that ‘the profit of every farm is greater or less in proportion to the quantity of manure which is made thereon.’” (April 2012)

‘Atom’ to Help Celebrate Monet’s Gladioli and National Public Gardens Day

        Inside/Out is a terrific program of the Detroit Institute of the Arts that brings reproductions of masterpieces from the DIA to the streets and parks of metro Detroit. Among the 80 works scattered about this year is one of our favorites, Monet’s Gladioli, which shows Monet’s wife in their home garden admiring a big bed of one of his favorite flowers. It’s on display at the Taylor Conservatory and Botanical Gardens where, to celebrate National Public Gardens Day, they’ll be giving away hundreds of our best-selling glad, ‘Atom’ – which looks a lot like Monet’s glads – at their spring Plant Sale on May 12. We’re proud to be partnering with the DIA and the Taylor Conservatory to celebrate heirloom art with heirloom flowers! Learn more here. (April 2012)

NYBG’s “Monet’s Garden” to Feature Our Dahlias . . .

        A blockbuster exhibition this summer at the New York Botanical Garden will showcase Monet’s garden at Giverny – and our heirloom dahlias! The multi-faceted event runs from May 19 through October 21 and will include paintings, photographs, films, concerts, lectures, poetry readings, a special app, and spectacular plantings.
        “We are recreating Monet’s garden at Giverny,” the NYBG’s Marc Hachadourian emailed us, “and the exhibition director thought that it would be great to have a large heirloom dahlia element as a part of the show’s continual display this summer. Naturally I am turning to you to see if you could help supply us with the dahlias from your extensive and wonderful list of plant material.” We were thrilled to help, and five tubers each of 25 of our oldest dahlias will soon be on their way to the NYBG.
        Monet loved dahlias almost as much as he loved waterlilies, and several of our heirlooms are old enough that he actually could have grown them at Giverny, including ‘Nellie Broomhead’ and ‘Stolz von Berlin’. Learn more about Monet and dahlias here and more about the NYBG exhibition here. (March 2012)

. . . And So Will Belgium’s Bokrijk Museum!

        “We are open air museum in Belgium and we like to plant this year some historical cultivars of dahlia.” So began the email from Jef Van Meulder, Curator of Living Plants at the Bokrijk Open-Air Museum in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking northern part of Belgium. Much like Old Sturbridge Village or Greenfield Village, Bokrijk features over 100 restored buildings with authentic furnishings and costumed interpreters – and, this summer, nine of our authentic historic dahlias ranging from ‘Tommy Keith’ of 1892 to ‘Tsuki Yori no Shisha’ of 1957. (March 2012)

How Can ‘Mrs. Langtry’ Be Older than Mrs. Langtry?

        The lovely ‘Mrs. Langtry’ – aka ‘Lily Langtry’ – is one of the most popular Victorian daffodils, but its name is a bit of a puzzle, as our good customer Sarah Weinberg of Falls Church, Virginia, notes:
        “Your daffodil ‘Mrs. Langtry’ is either not actually from 1869, or was named after a different Mrs. Langtry than Lily [the enormously popular singer and actress], or else was renamed somewhat after it was bred. Lily Langtry was born in 1853, making her 16 at the time the daffodil was introduced, and she didn’t meet future King Edward until 1877.”
        Although we wish we knew more, here’s what we can tell you: There’s a group of important nineteenth-century daffodils (including ‘Conspicuus’, ‘Empress’, and ‘Stella’) whose official date of introduction is 1869, so probably some 1869 book or catalog mentioned them, or maybe the breeder or a later book or reference said that they were developed then.
        ‘Mrs. Langtry’ is listed in an 1884 publication by the legendary daffodil breeder Peter Barr with the pseudo-historic title of Ye Narcissus or Daffodyl Flowre and hys Roots. In the text, Barr explains that the RHS Daffodil Conference of 1884 adopted a resolution directing the standardization of daffodil names and “a committee was appointed to revise the names of new daffodils, which resulted in the substitution of popular names for the Latin ones Mr. Barr had in use.” So it seems that ‘Mrs. Langtry’ was bred in 1869 but at first had a different, Latinized name that was then changed by this RHS committee in 1884 to ‘Mrs. Langtry’. If you know more, please let us know. We’re always eager to learn! (March 2012)

International Plan for Biodiversity Recognizes the Importance of Heirloom Bulbs

        Well, not specifically, but the importance of preserving cultivated plants has been officially recognized at the international level for the first time. The United Nation’s Strategic Plan for Biodiversity is “a ten-year framework for action by all countries and stakeholders to safeguard biodiversity and the benefits it provides to people.” The plan includes five goals and twenty “targets,” one of which reads, “By 2020, the genetic diversity of cultivated plants . . . including . . . culturally valuable species, is maintained, and strategies have been developed and implemented for minimizing genetic erosion and safeguarding their genetic diversity.” As with world peace, we can’t expect to see 100% success anytime soon, but the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity is an important step forward in any case – and not just for heirloom bulbs. Learn more here. (March 2012)

1927 Advice: Companion Plants for “Loveliest” Iris

        Louise Beebe Wilder was a popular garden writer in the early 1900s who’s been called “America’s Gertrude Jekyll.” Here’s some advice from her 1927 My Garden about one of our favorite iris:
        “‘Florentina’ . . . is one of the loveliest of irises, and its French-gray crepe flowers are invaluable to us in creating May pictures. It is fine with Dicentras [bleeding hearts] and tall pink tulips of the Cottage and Darwin types; with the yellow Doronicums [leopard’s bane] and the pretty lavender-flowered Phlox divaricata; and is splendid in spreading groups near pink-flowered crabapple trees.” (March 2012)

Back Soon or Lost Forever?

        Whatever happened to ‘Prinses Beatrix’ dahlia? And why aren’t we offering ‘Inglescombe’ daffodil anymore? Though preservation is our mission, every year bulbs drop out of our catalog for a variety of reasons. Some return in a year or two, or they’re widely offered elsewhere, but others may have slipped through our fingers into oblivion.
        Now you can find photos and information about many of these bulbs – including over a dozen dahlias, glads, and hyacinths, 38 daffodils, and 41 tulips – at our Back Soon or Lost Forever pages. To get there, find our green navigation-bar button labeled “Favorites, Rarest, New, Etc.” and click the “Back Soon or Lost Forever” link that appears in its drop-down menu. The good news is that we’re often able to return these bulbs to our catalog, and whenever we do we’ll announce it right here in our email newsletter – as we’re doing today for long-lost ‘Dauntless’ gladiolus. (Feb. 2012)

Renoir and the “Magnificent Red Dahlias”

        A “large panel with magnificent red dahlias amidst a jumble of grass and creepers” – that’s how a reviewer in 1877 described Renoir’s five-foot-tall The Garden in the rue Cortot which hangs today in the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.
        According to Renoir Landscapes: 1865-1883, “This exuberant depiction of an overgrown garden is linked to the creation” of one of his most famous paintings. “In spring 1876 he was seeking a studio in Montmartre which would put him in proximity to the outdoor cafe where he planned to paint his large, multi-figure composition, The Ball at the Moulin de la Galette. . . . There he would store the canvas overnight, enlisting the aid of friends to carry it the short distance to the Moulin to begin work each day. His friend Georges Riviere described how he and Renoir . . . found such a studio . . . [and] were delighted to discover that it came with a large, secluded garden, ‘which resembled a beautiful abandoned park . . . . We were amazed.’” Renoir completed several important paintings in the garden and applied what he learned there “as he painted his friends at the Moulin enjoying themselves under the acacia trees on a sunny afternoon. . . . Secluded and tranquil but within hailing distance of central Paris, the garden in the rue Cortot was . . . an oasis for Renoir and, in its lush splendor, a spur to his creativity at a vital moment of artistic development.”
        Dahlias also figure prominently in Renoir’s Claude Monet Painting in His Garden at Argenteuil of 1873, and art historian Clare Willsdon has “wondered if Monet perhaps might not have given Renoir some of his own dahlia tubers to plant in the rue Cortot garden.” Since dahlias were one of the most popular flowers of the era, Renoir could have gotten his tubers anywhere, but as gardeners we’re happy to believe that Monet – an avid, life-long gardener – passed them along to his friend. (Feb. 2012)

Book of the Month: Restoring the Garden of a Harlem Renaissance Poet

        One of the most interesting historic gardens I’ve ever visited is that of Anne Spencer, a little-known African-American poet who lived in Lynchburg, Virginia. Starting in 1905, Anne and her husband Edward transformed their narrow backyard into a highly personal garden with an aqua-blue pergola, a small pool filled by a cast-iron African head spouting water (a gift from W.E.B. DuBois), and beds overflowing with roses, iris, larkspur, poppies, and other flowers. After Anne’s death in 1975, the garden that she’d called “half my world” was all but lost – but, remarkably, it wasn’t, and the story of its unlikely rescue is told in a fascinating new book, Lessons Learned from a Poet’s Garden by Jane Baber White.
        “Lessons Learned” are the key words in that title, because as Jane told me in a recent email, the book isn’t just “the 28-year story of a garden restoration by a group of garden club ladies. The names could be changed and it could be anywhere. Indeed, that is sort of the point. I hope the book will be helpful to anyone, anywhere, who might be planning a garden restoration. These are the steps we took that might be helpful to them.” It’s not a dry how-to manual, though. It’s a richly illustrated book laid out something like a scrapbook with all sorts of bits and pieces clipped together and overlapping one another – old family photos taken in the garden, notes Anne scribbled on seed catalogs, receipts, newspaper clippings, snapshots of the restoration, and evocative photos of the restored garden today. Although I could argue with some of the things Jane and the garden club ladies did – I don’t think any restoration, for example, should start with a bulldozer – the bottom-line is that this compelling garden was in dire need and they saved it. For that, all I can say is bravo, and thanks!
        To buy a copy of Lessons Learned, visit the newly-upgraded website of the Anne Spencer House and Garden Museum which is full of excellent photos and information. And since proceeds from the book will help fund the ongoing care of the garden, and the “lessons” it offers are so valuable, please consider asking your local library, garden club, or historical society to buy a copy, too. (Jan. 2012)

Save the Peonies! Rescuing the Treasures of a Century-Old Nursery

        When I first started collecting heirloom plants in the 1970s, I was elated to discover a small, family-owned nursery in Iowa with an enormous list of peonies. Founded in 1887, Sherman Nursery was especially rich in peonies from the nineteenth century, many of which were no longer available anywhere else. Unfortunately they were wholesale-only and wouldn’t sell to me then, but soon after mailing my first catalog in 1993 I started thinking about someday offering their rare heirlooms.
        It took a while, but in 2008 we added peonies to our catalog, and since then all but two of the 18 we’ve offered have come from the Sherman collection. (See them all here and here.) Unfortunately, like many nurseries Sherman’s was hard hit by the economic downturn, and in 2009 it was sold to a much larger Midwestern grower. When I heard the news I was worried about their peonies, because wholesalers typically make their money by selling large volumes of relatively few varieties, but I was busy and . . . before I knew it, instead of the 111 peonies that Sherman’s was growing in 2001, only 56 were still available – and last month we learned that 17 more will be dropped next year.
        Although there’s no way Old House Gardens can save all of those peonies, we’re doing what we can. We alerted our friends at the University of Michigan’s historic Peony Garden and they spread the word to some of the country’s leading peony specialists. We also joined forces with the Iowa farmer we get ‘Festiva Maxima’ from, buying the last available roots of several rare peonies from the Sherman ark and turning them over to him to preserve and multiply for us. If all goes well, we’ll see the first fruits of this partnership as early as next year when we hope to offer the fragrant Midwestern classic, ‘Frances Willard’. With your support, there will be more good news. Stay tuned. (Dec. 2011)

Book of the Month: Founding Gardeners

        Our first four presidents weren’t just fiery revolutionaries, authors of the Constitution, and saviors of the new nation, they were also avid gardeners. In Founding Gardeners, British author Andrea Wulf explores the intertwining political and agricultural/horticultural lives of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and James Madison. All four were farmers who believed that citizens who worked their own land were the foundation of democracy. All four had a deep love of the American wilderness, and they found comfort and inspiration in cultivating their own home grounds.
        Even readers who are familiar with the garden-lives of Jefferson and Washington will find a lot of new information in Wulf’s book. When the Constitutional Convention was on the verge of breaking down, for example, James Madison and several other delegates took a break to visit Bartram’s Garden, the nursery of the famous colonial botanists. There they saw native plants from all of the colonies growing happily together, with trees from big Southern states like Virginia sheltering woodland shrubs from small Northern states like Connecticut. Returning to the Convention with a fresh perspective and renewed commitment, they brokered a compromise that established the Senate and House as we know them today, with representation that protects both large states and small.
        Although Founding Gardeners disappointed me in some ways – the narrative bogs down at times in too much political detail, Wulf makes several misstatements about plants (tuberoses are from Mexico, not Europe), and almost 40% the book’s 350 pages are end-notes – I finished it with a better understanding of a fascinating era in American history and of four great men who, like me (and you?) loved to putter around in their yards. (Dec. 2011)

Book of the Month: One Writer’s Garden

        Here’s a book to put at the top of your gift list – for you and anyone who loves gardening, history, American literature, independent women, or the South. Eudora Welty is one of the most revered American writers of the 20th century, and her home in Jackson, Mississippi is now a historical museum visited by pilgrims from all over the world. But when Welty first gave the property to the state in the 1980s, the garden which she had helped her mother plant and tend since the 1920s, and which offered her comfort and literary inspiration for decades, had all but disappeared from neglect.
        This book is the story of the rediscovery and restoration of that garden, guided by author Susan Haltom and based mostly on family photographs, old letters, and Welty’s memory. What makes the book truly outstanding, though, is the way Haltom and co-author Jane Roy Brown integrate the story of the Welty garden into the broader social history of gardening and America – street-car suburbs, garden clubs, civic beautification, Progressivism, the conservation movement, and so on – and illuminate the many connections between Welty’s gardening and her writing. It’s also an especially attractive book, with big, full-color shots of the restored garden interspersed with a wide array of old photographs and historic images from books, magazines, and seed catalogs. We’re proud that many of our historic bulbs grow today in the Welty garden (Susan even thanks us in her acknowledgements), but even if they didn’t I’d be telling you this is a book you don’t want to miss! (Nov. 2011)

Protecting Historic Landscapes: “The Landscape I Love” Calendar

        All across the country, historic gardens, parks, cemeteries, battlefields, farmland, and other important landscapes are at risk. Now you can help protect them – and learn more about them – by simply hanging the 2012 “The Landscape I Love” calendar on your wall. It’s a striking calendar, with photos by award-winning photographers of twelve at-risk landscapes and the inspiring people who are working to protect them. The landscapes range from a grand plantation-house garden in Louisiana and Olmsted-designed parks in Newark and Washington, DC, to Michigan’s Saugatuck Dunes and the entire Sonoran Desert. See all 12 here. Produced by The Cultural Landscape Foundation, America’s leading non-profit devoted to preserving our landscape heritage, the calendar is just $14.94 and shipping is free. Order it here. (Oct. 2011)

Happy Iris Stories

        We doubled our iris offerings for the coming year, thanks in part to the generosity of some of our Old West Side neighbors who shared their heirloom iris with us. Many of them passed along stories with their rhizomes, too. Jean Henry, for example, told us that her ‘Pallida Dalmatica’ came from her Iowa grandmother who got them from the woman who babysat for Jean’s father and later Jean herself. It was “the standard iris” in that area, but Violet Kieffer – pronounced “Wiolet,” Jean explained – was “very proud of them” and “she’d be thrilled to know they made it into your catalog.”
        ‘Flavescens’ is another very old iris that will grow just about anywhere. For example, a few years ago my wife Jane and I were walking along the wooded, hillside path that circles a small lake in the Brighton State Recreation Area. At one point the hillside was so steep that the ground to our left was almost at eye level, and there in the crowded, densely shaded undergrowth I was shocked to see a few scrawny bearded iris. They must have been survivors from a long-forgotten home that once stood where now wilderness ruled. I was so impressed that I collected one small rhizome and brought it home to a sunny spot in my own garden. This spring it finally bloomed for the first time, and – you guessed it – it was the indomitable ‘Flavescens’. (Aug. 2011)

‘Luxury Lace’ and Edna Spalding’s Kitchen Knife

        Great garden plants come from all sorts of people, including this Louisiana housewife who John Peat and Ted Petit profile in The Daily: A Guide for Gardeners (2004):
        “Edna Spalding of Iowa, Louisiana, was an early breeder of daylilies (including ‘Luxury Lace’) who made formidable contributions..... Daylilies shared space in the vegetable garden of this housekeeper..... She had the strong, silent, self-assured appearance of an early pioneer woman in her cloth bonnet..... She had a magnificent eye for quality and beauty as well as a great intuitive breeding sense. Her standards were the highest. She always carried a large kitchen knife as she walked in the garden, and if a new seedling displeased her, out it would go, cut below the crown, never more to plague her with its short-comings.” (2010-11 catalog)

Monet the Dahlia Lover

        Though you may not be able to have a Monet on your wall, you can enjoy one of his favorite flowers in your garden – dahlias. As Vivian Russell writes in her excellent Monet’s Garden: Through the Seasons at Giverny (1995):
        “If water lilies were Monet’s last love, then dahlias were certainly his first. He grew and painted them in all his gardens. Together with the earlier-flowering gladiolus which Monet also grew and painted, dahlias are the autumn staples of every French jardin rustique. If they grow nothing else, French country-dwellers often have a token clump of dahlias, however straggly, somewhere in the front yard or by the roadside. . . . Dahlias were prized and coveted by Monet, Caillebotte, and Mirbeau, and this trio regularly and readily exchanged varieties and sought particular cultivars most assiduously.” (2010-11 catalog)

Book of the Month: Bill and Greg’s New Heirloom Gardening in the South

        North, south, east, west – no matter where you garden, if you like heirloom flowers, you’ll want this book. Our friends Bill Welch and Greg Grant have been growing and championing heirloom plants for decades. Their 1995 The Southern Heirloom Garden became an instant classic, and although this new book is based on that landmark publication, it’s different enough to warrant the new title. Chapters on the garden influences of various ethnic groups – Native Americans, Africans, Germans, etc. – have been completely rewritten, and many new chapters have been added, including ones on naturalizing bulbs, traditional ways to multiply plants, heirloom fruits, and “Natives, Invasives, Cemeteries, and Rustling.”
        It’s a hefty book at 537 pages, and nearly 350 of those are devoted to an encyclopedia of heirloom plants for the South. Some entries – such as the one for snowflakes – are pretty much identical to what originally appeared in The Southern Heirloom Garden, but others – such as the five pages on lilies – are completely new. Following the final entry (Zizyphus jujuba, with a recipe for jujube butter) comes one of the book’s best parts, “How Our Gardens Grew,” in which Bill and Greg tell the very personal stories of their own gardens. Don’t miss it.
        The book is list-priced at $29.95, but Amazon is offering it for just $19.77 – less than I paid last weekend for two flats of annuals that will be dead by Thanksgiving. No matter how you do the math, this extraordinary book belongs on your bookshelf. (May 2011)

Site of the Month: “Wild Lakota” Iris and Other Legacy Bulbs

        “My favorite old homestead flower is a bearded iris that I’ve nicknamed ‘Wild Lakota’. It has a lovely lemony scent.” So wrote Dennis Kramb of southwest Ohio in the Pacific Bulb Society’s email discussion group. “The roadside places where I’ve found it are nowhere near any existing home,” he continued, “so I can’t imagine how many decades they’ve been able to persist there, untended. I collected a few pieces years ago and now have a big patch of it in my front garden.” That sounded like an iris we ought to offer, but when we looked at Dennis’s photo of it, we discovered we already do. It’s 200-year-old, primrose-yellow ‘Flavescens’.
        From roses to daffodils to asparagus, some garden plants are so tough that they can persist in the wild without care for many, many years. Some are so commonly found there that they’ve made it into wildflower guide books where they’re typically marked as “alien” or “garden escape.” Although the Pacific Bulb Society focuses on truly wild bulbs, they’ve included a long list of “Legacy Bulbs” – “bulbs that outlast their owners” – in the Wiki section of their excellent website. You’ll find ‘Flavescens’ and ‘Crimson King’ iris there, along with descriptions and photos of bulbs from almost every genus we sell, from Allium to Zephyranthes. It’s fun to explore, it may help you identify bulbs you’ve found in the wild, and it’s convincing testimony to the staying power of heirlooms. (April 2011)

Tuberoses in Williamsburg, from 1736 to 2011

        Wesley Greene, Williamsburg’s lead-interpreter for heirloom plants, wrote us a while ago in praise of one of our most popular heirlooms, tuberoses:
        “What is amazing to me is how well known the tuberose is in the 18th century, and how little known in the 21st. It is mentioned frequently in the correspondence between John Custis of Williamsburg and Peter Collinson of London. A 1736 letter from Collinson reads: ‘It gives Mee great pleasure that the Tuberoses proved a new Acquisition to your Garden. I [am surprised] you had them not, when they are on both sides of you in south Carolina & Pensilvania. My friend [colonial botanist John Bartram] from Last place writt Mee he had last yeare 149 flowers on one single Flower Stalk which is very Extriordinary, but I have heard the Like from Carolina where they Stand in the Ground and Increase amazeingly.’”
        Wesley went on to say, “I did not realize at first how much more fragrant they were in the evening, because I am home by then. One of our visitors from Mexico told me, so one night when I had to stay late I walked back to the garden about 7:30 and the fragrance was nearly over-powering!” To enjoy that lush fragrance yourself, order a few to plant this spring. (April 2011)

Rare Snowdrop Sells for $567

        The British rage for snowdrops hit new heights last week when a single bulb of the rare Galanthus plicatus ‘E.A. Bowles’ sold on Ebay for $567. The variety was discovered in 2002 at Myddelton House, the former home of legendary bulb connoisseur, E.A. Bowles (whom you’ll find quoted throughout our catalog). With an $800,000 grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, Bowles’ gardens are currently being restored to their early-20th century splendor. Learn more at the blog of our friend, snowdrop expert John Grimshaw. (As for the sale’s effect on our prices, you have nothing to fear!) (Feb. 2011)

Garden Design Heralds “The New Victorian Age”

        “Rare plants, smart design, and a passion for the natural world: the 19th century looks new again.” So says uber-stylish Garden Design magazine on the cover of its Jan.-Feb. 2011 issue. Inside, an article titled “The New Victorians” spotlights five US gardeners who’ve “found ways to revive the spirit of the Victorian era,” while another explores how “the Victorian naturalist is back” in contemporary design. There’s also a short “Victorian Garden Travel Guide,” an “Ode on a Victorian Urn,” a reading list, and dramatic photo-spreads of ferns (which the Victorians loved) and “black” plants (which, though mostly modern, exemplify the Victorians’ fascination with Nature’s oddities). All in all it’s a terrific issue, and when a fashion-forward magazine like Garden Design sees a future for the past – well, that has to make heirloom-lovers everywhere feel pretty darn good. (Jan. 2011)

The No Longer Secret History of ‘Sellwood Glory’

        Because it’s gorgeous, old, and no one else was offering it, we re-introduced ‘Sellwood Glory’ dahlia to American gardeners in 2008. But one of the great pleasures of heirlooms is their stories, and at first we knew nothing about this old dahlia except its date of introduction, 1951. Then our friend Linda Beutler of Portland emailed to say she’d been seeking ‘Sellwood Glory’ for years because it was named for her neighborhood by a man whose nursery once stood a few blocks from her house. Even better, she sent us an article that tells the dahlia’s story – a tale of chance (fate?), vision, persistence, and the power of one person to make the world a more beautiful place. Read it here. (Dec. 2010)

Book of the Month: Monet’s Garden: Through the Seasons at Giverny

        Though it looked like just a coffee-table picture book, it only cost a few bucks at a local used-book shop, so I took it home – and not only enjoyed it but learned a lot from it. Writing in an engagingly readable style, author Vivian Russell tells the story of Monet’s life, art, and gardening with a focus on his horticultural masterpiece, the gardens at his home in Giverny. Through the text, Monet emerges as a gardener much like the rest of us – digging plants to share with friends, worrying about mixing up the labels on his dahlias, inspired by accidental combinations in the garden, and always looking ahead. The book is richly illustrated with period photographs, color plans, and plenty of lush, coffee-table photographs. If you’re interested in Monet, garden history, or even just gardening, period, I think you’ll like it. For an excerpt, see below. (Nov. 2010)

Dutch Bulb Fields Changed Monet’s Gardening and Art

        An 1886 trip to Holland had a profound impact on Monet’s painting and gardening, as explained by Vivian Russell in Monet’s Garden: Through the Seasons at Giverny.
        “The Dutch tulip fields stretched before him in sheets and blocks of color that formed a bold, brilliant mosaic that no painter, Dutch or otherwise, had ever attempted to capture on canvas before. In a letter, Monet spoke of these ‘enormous fields in full bloom; it’s admirable, but enough to drive a poor painter crazy – impossible to render with our poor colors.’ Not one to let a challenge pass, he took up his brushes and in twelve days produced five canvases. Infused with sunlight, blue sky, and white clouds, his red and yellow tulip fields shone luminously.
        “The bulb growers’ technique of strengthening the bulbs by picking off the flower heads just at their peak also impressed him. There were piles of these blooms on the banks of the canals. What struck Monet was that ‘on these little canals we see spots of yellow, like colored rafts in the blue reflection of the sky.’ The image of flowers floating on a mirror of water would obsess him for the rest of his life.
        “Using the tulip fields as a point of departure, he began recreating the effect of these concentrated splashes of color [in his gardens at Giverny] by making long rectangular beds planted with one variety of flower giving a solid block of color. Occasionally he would mix flowers to give various color harmonies. This became the theme and variations of the flower garden, with new plants and color schemes being added all the time – blocks of yellow marigolds, for instance; long, wide lines of blue irises; gladioli in one color or a mixture of two; Japanese anemones in whites and pinks; mauve and orange snapdragons together.
        “To allow him to expand and experiment with an even greater variety of colors and plants all at once, he created smaller versions of these long beds, his famous ‘paintbox beds,’ thirty-eight in all, laid out in pairs from the top of the garden to the bottom. The gardeners [today] always refer to them affectionately as les tombes because they are the same size and shape as a grave, but it is not known whether that was Monet’s nickname for them, too. Each one was planted seasonally with different annuals or biennials in specifically chosen colors, laid side by side, like daubs of color on a palette or on one of his canvases.” (Nov. 2010)

Made in Michigan: Historic Pewabic Pottery

        This is the third in our ongoing series introducing you to some of our favorite Michigan businesses. We hope you’ll love their products, tell your friends, and help give our home state’s battered economy a boost. (Though Michigan’s unemployment rate is still the country’s second worst at 13.1%, since May it’s dropped .1% – hooray!)
        One of the iconic potteries of the Arts and Crafts era, Detroit’s Pewabic Pottery was founded in 1903 by a young artist named Mary Chase Stratton. It soon gained acclaim for its simple designs and earthy, often iridescent glazes. Today, skilled artisans are still turning clay into small, affordable works of art in Pewabic’s 1907 studio, now a National Historic Landmark. Among our favorites are the graceful daffodil tile in Pewabic blue, the replica of Stratton’s 1903 Snowdrop Vase, and the irresistible little frog paperweight for just $19.95 – but there are many, many more to choose from. We hope you’ll be inspired to add one to your Christmas list! (Oct. 2010)

In the Beginning: Double Hyacinths Go from Rejects to Super-Stars

       As Heidi Klum says on Project Runway, “In fashion, one day you’re in, and the next day you’re out.” But fashion cuts both ways, and what’s scorned or overlooked one day can become the coolest of cool. That’s what happened with double hyacinths which emerged from the compost pile to become, for much of the 18th and 19th centuries, the world’s most popular bulb. The story of their origins is told in an 1897 article in The Gardeners Chronicle based the Marquis de Saint Simon’s exhaustive Des Jacintes, de leur Anatomie, Reproduction, et Culture of 1768:
        “The first double variety was a seedling which appeared in the gardens of Peter Voorhelm . . . at Haarlem. At that time, the exact date is not certain but it was probably towards the latter part of the seventeenth century, all the bulb growers waged incessant warfare against all hyacinths raised from seeds or offshoots bearing flowers which in any way did not conform to the conventional notions of a perfect flower. The idea of a double variety does not appear to have entered even into the dreams of the Dutch [flower lovers].
        “But (and the story reads almost like a page out of Dumas) Peter Voorhelm was taken ill, and could give no attention to his plants, and was unable to examine them until the hyacinths were beginning to die off. A flower of unusual form arrested his attention, and examination proved it to be a double hyacinth. It was very small, but he cultivated and multiplied it, and was soon able to place it on the market, whilst numerous amateur growers were found willing to pay high prices for the new bulb.
        “The . . . first double hyacinth had a comparatively short life, for it was lost long before 1768. The two double varieties discovered subsequently were named, respectively, ‘Marie’ [not the single ‘Marie’ that we offer now] and the ‘Roi de la Grande Bretagne’. . . . The latter was raised about 1698, and was infinitely the finest of the first three varieties and over a thousand florins was paid for a single bulb.” (Sept. 2010)

Eat and Learn at Monticello’s Heritage Harvest Festival

        Thomas Jefferson was a life-long gardener, and every September Monticello celebrates his garden legacy with a Heritage Harvest Festival. This fun, family-oriented event promotes gardening, sustainability, local food, and heirloom plants. Co-hosted with Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, this year’s offers 40 tastings, workshops, hands-on demonstrations, garden tours, and exhibits on Saturday, Sept. 11. Learn more at HeritageHarvestFestival.com. (Aug. 2010)

ADS Offers Rare 1930s Daffodil Yearbooks on CD

       Fans of historic daffodils will be happy to hear that four rare volumes of The American Daffodil Year Book from 1935-1938 are now available on CD. The 300-plus pages of text include a wide variety of articles such as “In Praise of Old Daffodils,” “Daffodils in Texas,” “Naturalizing Narcissi,” and – our personal favorite – “A Daffodil Parade in Michigan.” Even better, the full 325 pages are completely searchable. That means if you want to find references to, say, ‘Argent’; or fragrance or daffodils for the South, just type those words into the search box and voila!
       A collaborative effort by the American Horticultural Society and the American Daffodil Society, the four-volume CD is available from the ADS website for just $10 – and worth every penny. (Aug. 2010)

Tiger Lilies and Dahlias in The Gardens of Frank Lloyd Wright

        Beyond his iconic Fallingwater, few of us know anything about the gardens and landscapes that were always an important part of Frank Lloyd Wright’s vision. Now Derek Fell, the renowned garden photographer, sets out to change all that in The Gardens of Frank Lloyd Wright (2009). It’s a beautiful and informative book, and any gardener with a taste for art, history, or nature will find plenty to like in it.
        Be sure to check out the photos of our 'Bishop of Llandaff' dahlias and Wright's favorite flower, tiger lilies, at Taliesin, Wright’s home and studio in rural Wisconsin. Tiger lilies, which are native to Japan and have been pictured in the country’s art for centuries, may have reminded Wright of the months he lived there during the construction of his landmark Imperial Hotel.
        Dahlias figured in one of the saddest episodes of Wright’s life. While he was away from Taliesin, his live-in companion, Mamah Cheney, and her two young children were murdered in a fire set by an employee gone berserk. The next morning as Wright walked among the smoldering ruins with a Chicago Tribune reporter, “a crushed dahlia flower attracted his attention and seemed to raise his spirits. He picked up the flower and stirred the earth around its roots to give the plant a new lease on life.” Later, Wright “gathered all the flowers he could salvage from the garden and made piles of dinner-plate dahlias, summer phlox, long-stemmed zinnias, and armloads of peppery-scented nasturtiums” to fill Mrs. Cheney’s casket. (June 2010)

Finding Heirloom Plants: New Tips, Groups, and Sources

        “Start with what you have -- including what seem to be weeds. Every site has historic plants waiting to be rediscovered and re-appreciated.” That's the first of “Scott’s Tips for Finding Real Heirloom Plants” which we recently added to our Groups and Sources page. We also expanded our list of favorite mail-order sources for everything from heirloom tomatoes to antique waterlilies and our list of helpful groups such as Plant Heritage and the American Dahlia Society. Most of these groups have websites that are rich in photos, expert advice, and links, so even if you’re not ready to join (which we highly recommend!) you can still learn a lot from them.
        And if your favorite group or source is missing from our lists, give us a holler. We love learning from our friends. (June 2010)

Peonies in 1901: “A Well-Gloved Girl Who Can Swim and Ride”

        While the magnificence of peony season is still fresh in our mind’s eye, here’s some praise of that enduringly popular flower from Alice Morse Earle’s classic Old Time Gardens, Newly Set Forth. Published in 1901, Earle’s book became enormously popular – a reminder today that we’re not the first gardeners to appreciate heirloom plants.
        “The glory of the front yard was the old-fashioned early red ‘piny’, cultivated since the days of Pliny. I hear people speaking of it with contempt as a vulgar flower – ‘flaunting’ is the conventional derogatory adjective – but I glory in its flaunting. The modern varieties, of every tint from white through flesh color, coral, pink, ruby color, salmon, and even yellow, to deep red, are as beautiful as roses. Some are sweet-scented; and they have no thorns, and their foliage is ever perfect, so I am sure the rose is jealous. . . .
        “Not the least of the peony’s charms is its exceeding trimness and cleanliness. The plants always look like a well-dressed, well-shod, well-gloved girl of birth, breeding, and of equal good taste and good health; a girl who can swim, and skate, and ride, and play golf. Every inch has a well-set, neat, cared for look which the shape and growth of the plant keeps from seeming artificial or finicky. . . .
        “No flower can be set in our garden of more distinct antiquity than the peony; the Greeks believed it to be of divine origin. A green arbor of the fourteenth century in England is described as set around with gillyflower, tansy, gromwell, and ‘pyonys powdered ay betwene’ – just as I like to see peonies set to this day, ‘powdered’ everywhere between all the other flowers of the border.” (June 2010)

Scott’s “Tulips with a Past” Now Online

        Way back in February 2002, Horticulture magazine featured on its cover a sumptuous close-up of ‘Black Parrot’ along with an invitation to “Touch the Past with Antique Tulips.” Inside was Scott’s six-page article, “Tulips with a Past.” For those who missed it, we recently posted it at our website. Enjoy! (May 2010)

Heirloom Coleus for Every Garden

        All the rage in Victorian times, coleus fell out of fashion for most of a century, but now they’re cool again. That’s garden history. If you’re a fan, you’ll want to read Coleus: Rainbow Foliage for Containers and Gardens by our good customer Ray Rogers. In his book Ray focuses on modern forms, but when we asked him to recommend a few heirlooms, he gladly obliged:
        “As with daffodils [which Ray also collects] and many other plants, heirloom coleus – some dating back to the 1850s when coleus first took the Victorian gardening world by storm – have an enduring appeal. Many perform just as well as or even better than newer beauties. A few of my favorite heirlooms include ‘Pineapple Queen’ (almost certainly one of the oldest selections) in gold with dark purple leaf bases and stems; ‘Beckwith’s Gem’, clad in changeable yellow, green, and red; ‘Glory of Luxembourg’, whose red leaves can be edged in gold or green; ‘Violet Tricolor’, decked out in green, dark purple, and vivid magenta; and icy-cool, lace-edged ‘Crystata’, with a white ‘tree’ marking the center of each leaf.” (May 2010)

Mount Vernon to Host Southern Garden History Conference

        The Southern Garden History Society returns to Mount Vernon for its 28th annual meeting, April 30-May 2. Speakers include Andrea Wulf, author of The Brother Gardeners, along with experts from the Smithsonian, National Gallery, National Herbarium, and Mount Vernon. There will also be tours of Washington’s gristmill and distillery and an after-hours reception on the piazza “to enjoy the view that visitors have admired since the 18th century” with carriage rides around the bowling green and tethered hot air balloon ascents. Learn more at southerngardenhistory.org/annualmeeting.html, and while you’re there check out the Society’s excellent calendar of events at southerngardenhistory.org/calendar.html. (March 2010)

Book of the Month: The Wild Garden of 1870 Updated for 2010

        “One of the finest books of the year was first published in 1870.” So begins Saxon Holt’s recent review of The Wild Garden, William Robinson’s ground-breaking work which has just been reissued in an “expanded edition” by one of the most inspired wild gardeners of our time, Rick Darke. Robinson’s wild garden wasn’t a natives-only preserve but rather a breaking free from traditional garden beds to plant wild and nearly wild plants in areas where they could naturalize with little care. Darke brings Robinson’s ideas into the age of sustainability with 70 pages of new text and 125 photos that are both spectacular and convincing. (March 2010)

Saving Local Heirlooms at the Pickle Barrel Iris Garden

        Some of the most exciting heirloom flowers aren’t found in catalogs or gardens. They’re just out there, in the wild, the last reminders of houses and gardeners that are long gone. In a small town on the shores of Lake Superior, our friend Nancy McDonald decided to collect some of these relics and display them in a living museum of local garden history. Her charming, photo-filled account of the Pickle Barrel House Historic Iris Garden – home now to “Linnamaki Purple,” “Baker Grade” (from the site of a railroad switchman’s cabin), and other “noids” – is an inspiring story that may get you saying, “I could do that!” (March 2010)

Massachusetts Farmland Listed as Endangered World Monument

        Historic farmlands all across America are threatened by development. In a move that’s sure to raise the profile of these endangered landscapes, the World Monuments Fund has included the Great Meadow of Hadley, MA, on its 2010 Watch List. We first read the news in the excellent newsletter of the Library of American Landscape History (subscribe at lalh.org/new.html):
        “How could a 350-acre plot of farmland in rural western Massachusetts wind up on the same list of endangered heritage sites as Peru’s ancient Macchu Pichu and a medieval village in Spain? The World Monuments Fund – which placed the farmland, Hadley’s Great Meadow, on its Watch List for 2010 – says the tract represents a rare, large-scale example of ‘open-field’ agriculture. This practice, in which individual landowners farm adjacent parcels laid out in long, unfenced strips, dates back to medieval Europe. The Great Meadow borders the Connecticut River and has been farmed continuously since the 1650s, when English Puritans settled Hadley. Local land trusts and historic preservation groups have been on the case for years, helping farmers preserve pieces of the Great Meadow. Now, says the WMF’s Amy Freitag, the message is going global.” (Feb. 2010)

Save the Clematis! RCC Granted “National Collection” Status

        If you care about conserving historic garden plants, here’s some exciting news: The world-class Rogerson Clematis Collection has been granted National Collection status by the North American Plant Collections Consortium. Located in Lake Oswego, Oregon, the Rogerson Collection includes over 650 clematis species and cultivars, including a recent gift from Poland of rare varieties bred by the late Brother Stefan Franczak.
        What may be even more exciting is that, according to our friend Linda Beutler, curator of the Rogerson Collection, the North American Plant Collections Consortium is “broadening their focus from conservation of species to preservation of important/historic cultivars.” In fact, she says, “part of the attraction of our collection for the NAPCC was the number of cultivars we have that are ‘museum quality’, including cultivars that are commercially extinct.” Only a handful of other NAPCC Collections focus on garden cultivars and/or herbaceous plants instead of wild species of trees and shrubs – including hostas at the Toledo Botanic Garden (43 species, 357 cultivars), hardy geraniums at the Chicago Botanic Garden (17 species, 85 cultivars), and peonies here in Ann Arbor at Matthaei Botanical Gardens and Nichols Arboretum (292 cultivars) – but we’re encouraged to see this small group expanding. (Jan. 2010)

Join Scott at Williamsburg’s “Timeless Lessons from Historic Gardens”

        Williamsburg in April is a paradise for any garden lover (and we’re not just saying that because Williamsburg now gets all of their bulbs from us!). Add two days of talks and informal garden sessions focused on “Timeless Lessons from Historic Gardens” and you’ve got the extraordinary 64th annual Williamsburg Garden Symposium. Our own Scott Kunst will be a featured speaker along with garden superstar Ken Druse (Planthropology, etc.), rose rustler Mike Shoup of the Antique Rose Emporium, John Forti of Strawbery Banke Museum, Jennifer Bartley of American Potager, and landscape designer Gordon Hayward (Intimate Gardens, etc.). For full details, see history.org/History/institute/Images/Web_GardenSym10.pdf. (Jan. 2010)

Site of the Month: For Those Who Love Hyacinth Vases

        Julie Berk has fallen in love with forcing vases, and she’s sharing her enthusiasm in a brand-new website, hyacinthvases.org.uk. There you’ll find colorful photos of all sorts of vases, images from antique books and catalogs (don’t miss the Etruscan Revival vases), reports on her latest bulb-shopping forays, and a “Collectors Community” for email discussions with fellow enthusiasts. Though far from slick, the site is well worth exploring, and Julie has big plans for developing it as an educational resource. Give it a look! (Nov. 2009)

Book of the Month: Bringing an Old Cemetery Back to Life

        Once Upon a Time . . . A Cemetery Story is so full of beauty and energy and people having fun that you may find yourself forgetting it’s about a cemetery – which, in a way, is what it’s really about.
        Cemeteries today are no longer a central part of most of our lives, and many are moldering into ruin. As our friend Jane White will tell you, the key to reviving them is to get people visiting them for something other than graveside services. For nearly 30 years Jane spearheaded efforts to restore, replant, and revitalize the Old City Cemetery in Lynchburg, Virginia, turning it into America’s liveliest “gravegarden” with bird walks, concerts, workshops, parties in period dress, heirloom daffodils, a cookbook, four mini-museums and archives, twelve self-guiding brochures, a chapel that’s popular for weddings, a composting education center (how fitting!), and hundreds of volunteers.
        As attractive as any coffee-table book and full of charm, Once Upon a Time is an unconventional how-to manual for anyone who wants to bring new life to a neglected historic place. Do yourself and your community a favor and ask your local public library to purchase a copy. It’s an extraordinary, yes-we-can success story that, with a little help, could inspire similar efforts all across the country. Save the Cemeteries! (Nov. 2009)

Heirloom Tulips Hit Prime-Time TV

        Amid football games and desperate housewives, heirloom tulips made a prime-time appearance recently in a PBS special based on Michael Pollan’s best-selling The Botany of Desire. If you missed it, no problem. Check for rebroadcasts or watch full streaming video of it (along with multiple extras) at pbs.org/thebotanyofdesire/.
        In the show, Pollan explores four plants that humans have loved and manipulated for centuries – apples, tulips, potatoes, and marijuana – and argues that we’re essentially over-sized bees, lured by the plants to help spread their progeny far and wide. In the half-hour devoted to tulips, you’ll catch glimpses of T. acuminata, ‘Estella Rijnveld’, the Hortus Bulborum, Aalsmeer’s billion-dollar flower auction, and even Amy Stewart. At one point a bulb-industry scientist claims that broken tulips are so debilitated by virus that “in a few years you will not have a tulip left” but – since dozens of broken varieties from the past 400 years survive today – we figure he meant “if you want to produce millions of bulbs as inexpensively as possible for the mass-market, broken tulips aren’t a great choice.” But let’s not quibble. All in all this is a fascinating, thought-provoking show. Bravo, PBS! (Nov. 2009)

Bulls-Eyes and Stars: Planting a Victorian Pattern Bed

        With antique images and advice from historic catalogs, our new web-page “Bulbs per Square Feet: For Pattern-Beds or Anywhere” will show you how to plant bulbs in true Victorian style. It’s easy and fun – and not just for Keukenhof or the lawns of Victorian mansions. Take a peek! (Oct. 2009)

A Glimpse from 1810: Bulbs in South Carolina

        In the Rare Books Library of the Missouri Botanical Garden, our friend Sara Van Beck tracked down a fascinating booklet titled Catalogue of Plants in the Botanick Garden of South-Carolina. Published in Charleston in 1810, it lists 494 plants, including these 25 ornamental bulbous ones (along with garlic and leeks). Though we wouldn’t recommend all of them for Southern gardeners today, the list offers a rare glimpse into the past.
        Arum, esculent; Indian kale, Arum esculentum [probably Colocasia esculenta]
        Asphodel lily, Crinum americanum
        Atamasco lily, Amaryllis atamasco [= Zephyranthes atamasco]
        Corn-flag, common, Gladiolus communis [most likely G. byzantinus]
        Crocus, Crocus sativus [also listed as Saffron]
        Crown imperial, Fritillaria imperialis
        Daffodil, Narcissus poeticus [see also Jonquil and Polyanthes]
        Day-lily, Hemerocallis flava
        Flag, German, Iris germanica [= all bearded iris]
        Flag, Virginian, Iris virginica
        Four-o’clock flower, Marvel of Peru, Mirabilis jalapa
        Hyacinth, garden, Hyacinthus orientalis [= all hyacinths]
        Jonquil, Narcissus jonquilla [see also Daffodil and Polyanthes]
        Indian kale, three-leaved, Arum triphyllum [= Arisaema triphyllum, jack-in-the-pulpit]
        Indian reed, Canna indica
        Lily, Canadian, Lilium canadense
        Lily, Guernsey, Amaryllis sarniensis [= Nerine sarniensis]
        Lily, Jacob’s, Amaryllis formosissima [= Sprekelia formosissima]
        Lily, white, Lilium candidum
        Paeony, Paeonia tenuifolia [= fern-leaf peony]
        Polyanthes, Narcissus tazetta [see also Daffodil and Jonquil]
        Squill, officinal, Scilla maritima [= Urginea maritime]
        Tuberose, Polyanthes tuberose
        Tulip, common garden, Tulipa gesneriana [= all standard garden tulips]
        Wake-robin, Arum maculatum [= lords-and-ladies, cuckoo-pint]
        (Sept. 2009)

Conserving the Topiary Wonderland of Pearl Fryar

        Topiary has a long, glorious history dating back to Rome and before, but today it’s hard to find shrubs clipped into anything other than spirals or meatballs. Which makes the garden of Pearl Fryar all the more remarkable. In his modest backyard in a small town in South Carolina, Fryar has created an exuberant topiary garden that’s so inspired it’s become a preservation project of the Garden Conservancy. Starting this fall, the project will gain the able help of one of our favorite former employees, Lindsey Kerr. “I’ll be doing an oral history with Mr. Fryar,” Lindsey wrote us recently, “as well as documenting the grounds and planning for public use.”
        You can take a quick tour of Fryar’s garden with Raleigh garden writer Helen Yoest and get the full story at pearlfryar.com/index.asp. For a fascinating glimpse of the roots of American topiary, see Barbara Sarudy’s blog on topiary in the 18th century. (June 2009)

Blog of the Month: Early American Gardens

        “A museum in a blog,” that’s how Barbara Sarudy describes her entertaining blog devoted to American gardens of the 1700s and early 1800s. Much as I love her landmark book, Gardens and Gardening in the Chesapeake, 1700-1805, Sarudy’s blog is more fun to read because it’s so personal and meandering, filled with, as she says, “snippets of garden history and images that fascinate me.” Though she’s clearly enjoying herself, Sarudy is a serious and expert historian. As in a museum, she presents us with authentic artifacts, both written and visual, giving us the opportunity to enjoy and draw our own conclusions from them.
        A few of my favorite entries are the ones about arbors, bee-hives, and slave gardens. Be sure to check out the “boring assumptions, introductions, and housekeeping rules” in the left-hand column, too. This is some of Sarudy’s most interesting writing, and spot-on. (June 2009)

Garden Design and Heirloom Bulbs at Bartram’s Garden

        The current April issue of Garden Design magazine gives a shout-out to the colonial-era Bartram’s Garden in Philadelphia – and our bulbs:
        “Drive some 15 minutes south of Center City to stroll the riverfront grounds of Bartram’s Garden, home of early botanists John Bartram and his son William, and often called America’s first botanical garden. Heirloom daffs and rare “broken” tulips, scattered among silverbell trees, horse chestnuts, and bottle-brush buckeyes, bloom in profusion this month . . . .”
        Horticulturist Nancy Wygant has been planting our bulbs at Bartram’s Garden for years, and some of our rarest tulips have multiplied so well for her that they’ve sold them in their gift shop! (Apr. 2009)

Echoes from the Great Depression: High Praise for ‘Jane Cowl’

        In 1934, as America struggled through the Great Depression, George W. Park of Greenwood, SC, kicked off his Spring Flower Book with a big photo and lavish praise for a new dahlia that we’re still keen on today:
        “The greatest of them all is Jane Cowl, greatest in size . . . , greatest in form and color, and destined to become the greatest in popularity. It is undoubtedly the greatest dahlia in the world and deserves the highest place in every garden collection. The originators say, ‘Jane Cowl has won more prizes than any other dahlia since it was introduced. Just imagine the ideal dahlia bush, fairly tall, with vigorous, dark green . . . foliage. Give it stems that are straight and strong, yet not clumsy, then add monster blooms of bronzy buff . . . , blooms that will stop you every time you near them, and you have a mental picture of our own Jane Cowl. The flowers on long, strong stems look at you and up, some squarely on top, like an umbrella. They are immense, of the full-petaled decorative type, with just enough twist to the broad petals to add the touch of refinement. The many medals won prove it to be one of the greatest dahlias. If it has a fault we have yet to find it.’”
        Park offered “tubers at 25 cts. each, or five for $1.00,” and though we can’t match those prices today we do agree with him that smart gardeners will “Order promptly.” (Apr. 2009)

Sharing Plants Then and Now: “A Friendly Society”

        In the 1730s and ‘40s, John Custis of Williamsburg exchanged letters and plants with fellow plant-lover Peter Collinson of London. Happily for us, many of their letters survived and were eventually published in a book called Brothers of the Spade. Here’s a bit from one that Collinson wrote in 1735. Though the writing is archaic, the sentiments will be familiar to anyone who has ever shared plants with a fellow gardener – or who values heirloom flowers.
        “Tho’ I have Enough already myself, yett I think there is no Greater pleasure then to be Communicative & oblige others. . . . I seldome fail of Returns, for Wee Brothers of the Spade find it very necessary to share amongst us the seeds that come annually from Abroad. It not only preserves a Friendly Society but secures our Collections, for if one douse not raise a seed perhaps another does & if one Looses a plant another can Supply him. By this Means our Gardens are wonderfully Improved In Variety to what they was Twenty Years agon.” (Apr. 2009)

Summer Camp with Thomas Jefferson

        For two weeks this summer, you could explore historic gardens and plants with Thomas Jefferson at your elbow. From June 14-26, Monticello’s Historic Landscape Institute will offer students an introduction to landscape history, garden restoration, and historic horticulture by using Jefferson’s landscapes at Monticello and the University of Virginia as case studies and outdoor classrooms. Friends of ours who’ve participated in previous Institutes have given it rave reviews, and students quoted online call it “a thorough look at all of the issues with insights from real experts” and “a lifetime experience.” For more information, visit monticello.org/education/gardeninstitute.html. (Mar. 2009)

Book of the Month: A Rose by Any Name

        If you’ve ever heard Stephen Scanniello speak, you know how interesting and entertaining he can be. It’s not enough for him to simply grow great old roses, he wants to know their personal histories, too. And many of them are fascinating! Now with the help of Douglas Brenner, former editor of Martha Stewart Living, Stephen has collected hundreds of these stories into A Rose by Any Name. It’s a charming little book, beautifully illustrated with antique images, and written for a broad audience rather than history geeks. Whether your taste runs to wild roses such as our native Cherokee, medieval roses such as ‘York and Lancaster’, Victorian roses such as ‘Gloire de Dijon’ (“the caviar of roses”), or 20th-century classics such as ‘Chrysler Imperial’, any heirloom gardener will find a lot to like here. And when you sit down this spring with sore muscles from a day of gardening, it would be a great book to relax with. (Mar. 2009)

Century-Old ‘Little Beeswings’ Stars at National Dahlia Show . . .

        Congratulations to the Snohomish County Dahlia Society of Washington on its 100th anniversary! To celebrate, they’re hosting the ADS National Show August 22-23 and – since our jazzy little pompon dahlia ‘Little Beeswings’ also turns 100 this year – they’ve devoted a special category in the show to it. Another category is devoted to ‘Kidd’s Climax’ which they’re calling the “Most Successful Foreign Dahlia of the Last 100 Years.” Plant both and join the celebration! (Mar. 2009)

1820s Philadelphia: Dahlias in the Cellar, Cannas in the Hall

        Wyck is a grand, colonial-era home in Philadelphia, a National Historic Landmark, and a remarkable museum. Recently Wyck’s horticulturist, Nicole Juday, ordered a few of our Canna indica and shared excerpts from a couple of fascinating letters. Read them and see if you don’t think they could have been written last fall rather than almost 200 years ago.
        On Nov. 6, 1822, Jane Bowne Haines, mistress of Wyck, wrote to her husband: “Our plants in the hall are in a beautiful state. Robert could not rest till he patched up a tub for that huge Canna Indica, which he calls the king of them all.” And then on Nov. 29, 1835, Jane’s cousin wrote to her reassuringly while she was away from home: “At present the thermometer is 19. We think it will be 10 by morning. The dahlia roots are in the cellar, and I believe all housed that ought to be.” (Mar. 2009)

March 1, Wear a Daffodil (or Leek!) for St. David of Wales

        While researching daffodil history, we stumbled upon this interesting bit at Wikipedia.com:
        “Saint David’s Day . . . is the feast day of Saint David, the patron saint of Wales, and falls on March 1 each year. The date . . . was chosen in remembrance of the death of Saint David on that day in 589, and has been celebrated . . . since then. The date was declared a national day of celebration . . . in the 18th century.
        “On this day many Welsh people wear one or both of the national emblems of Wales on their lapel to celebrate: the daffodil (a generic Welsh symbol . . .) or the leek (Saint David’s personal symbol). The association between leeks and daffodils is strengthened by the fact that they have similar names in Welsh, cenin (leek) and cenin Bedr (daffodil, literally “Peter’s leek”).
        “In south Wales males usually wear leeks while young girls wear daffodils; in the north the daffodil predominates.” (Feb. 2009)

        In this excerpt from Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Kingsolver describes what is most likely Narcissus pseudonarcissus, the early yellow trumpet daffodil of the South – and reveals herself as a kindred spirit to heirloom-flower lovers everywhere:
        “The greatest rewards of living in an old farmhouse are the stories and the gardens, if they’re still intact in any form. We are lucky enough to have both. The banks all around us are crowded with flowering shrubs and hummocks of perennial bulbs that never fail to please and startle us, like old friends leaping from behind the furniture to yell, ‘Surprise!’ These flowers are gifts from a previous century, a previous dweller here – a tale, told in flowers, of one farm wife’s fondness for beauty and this place.
        “In a few more months we’d be drunk on the scent of Lizzie Webb’s mock oranges and lilacs, but the show begins modestly in April with her tiny Lenten roses, white-petaled snowdrops, and the wildish little daffodils called jonquils that have naturalized all over the grassy slopes. As Lily and I walked single file up the path to the greenhouse, I noticed these were up, poking their snub, yellow-tipped noses through a fringe of leaves.
        “‘Oh, Mama,’ Lily cried, ‘look what’s about to bloom – the tranquils.’ There went the last of the needles of ice around my heart, and I understood I’d be doomed to calling the jonquils tranquils for the rest of my days. Lily is my youngest. Maybe you know how these things go. In our family, those pink birds with the long necks are called flingmos because of how their real name was cutely jumbled by my brother’s youngest child – and that was, yikes, twenty years ago.” (Jan. 2009)

No Need to Buy a Monet, Just Garden Like Him!

        For the last twenty years of his life, Monet painted only one subject: his gardens in Giverny. Many bulbs played a leading role in those gardens, and it seems his taste for bulbs was shaped, at least in part, by financial difficulties in his early years.
        In Monet: The Gardener (2002), Sidney Eddison writes: “Today, water lilies continue to float on the pond at Giverny. In May, irises in every imaginable shade of blue and violet bloom in their long, narrow beds; in June, roses smother the metal arches along the front walk. By midsummer, gladioli stand tall among the nasturtiums, which have begun their headlong rush toward the middle of the path. And in the fall, dahlias lavish their rich colors on the beds. The gardens, now open to the public, are the property of the Academie des Beaux-Arts. But Claude Monet still owns them.”
        In the same book, Robert Gordon writes of Monet’s early career: “Given his precarious finances and the temporary nature of his abodes, many of the plants he chose were annuals . . . or corms, such as gladiolus, which can be dug up in the fall and saved from year to year. At Argenteuil, Monet planted gladiolus corms by the hundreds. In a painting simply titled Gladioli of 1876, . . . [Monet’s wife] Camille . . . gazes wistfully at cheerful ranks of pink, red, and bicolor flowers. . . . Two years later, in a work depicting Monet’s new garden at Vetheuil, gladioli appear again, but this time growing in decorative blue-and-white ceramic containers – a reminder of the impermanent nature of these early gardens. The same containers ultimately found a home at Giverny.” (Jan. 2009)

Tuberoses at Versailles and Around the Globe

        Our good friend Wesley Greene is a garden historian and the lead interpreter at Williamsburg’s Colonial Garden. He writes:
        “The single tuberoses that I got from you have been magnificent. One of the joys of working at Colonial Williamsburg is that I get to meet gardeners from all over the world. I’ve met people from Mexico who tell me, “Oh yes, tuberoses grow all around our village,” and the other day I met a couple girls from Iran who tell me it is a very popular plant where they live, commonly used at weddings and funerals.
        “Then I ran across this bit of information from 17th century France: Saint Simon, a critic of much that went on in the court of Louis XIV, observed that when the tuberoses were in bloom at the Grand Trianon at Versailles, the fragrance was so overpowering the entire court was obliged to retreat indoors. That must have been quite some show!” (Dec. 2008)

Book of the Month: Ken Druse’s Planthropology

        If you haven’t already added this brand-new book to your holiday wish list, do! The cover features a dazzling close-up photo of a red-and-white poppy framed by deep green, and you’ll find many other “oh wow” images throughout the book. In fact the first time I sat down with it I simply turned the pages savoring the photographs. If nothing else, Planthropology should cement Ken Druse’s reputation as one of the most gifted garden photographers of our time.
        But it’s a not-to-be-missed read as well. “Planthropology” is Ken’s inventive term for “the study of plants and their particular histories,” yet this is no conventional history book. Subtitled The Myths, Mysteries, and Miracles of my Garden Favorites, it’s more like a walk in the garden with your favorite uncle, a brilliant, passionate, talkative guy who paints, collects rare flowers, has advanced degrees in botany, literature, and world history, and still manages to be down-to-earth. Follow Ken’s lead and you’ll be entertained, charmed, and enlightened – and I think you’ll never look at your own garden in quite the same way again. (Nov. 2008)

Book of the Month: Flowers and Herbs of Early America

        Curator of plants at Colonial Williamsburg, Larry Griffith is also an enthusiastic home gardener, and you’ll see both sides of him in this terrific new book. Covering 56 seed-grown flowers and herbs, Larry presents both scholarly history and tips for using these long-loved plants in modern gardens. The book’s many illustrations show us past and present, too, with antique images set alongside lush photographs by Barbara Temple Lombardi. Though many of the plants are well-known, others such as devil’s claw and scarlet pentapetes will be new discoveries for most gardeners.
        You can leaf through the book right now at Amazon.com. Click “search inside this book,” noodle around a bit, maybe read the chapter on cannas, and I bet you’ll agree: this is a book that every heirloom gardener will want to add to their holiday wish list. (late Oct. 2008)

That Was Then: Picking Daffodils for a Nickel

        In a fascinating article titled “Daffodils, Pears, Melons, and More” in the spring 2007 issue of The Illinois Steward, Judith Joy writes:
        98-year-old Mary Winks Weeks “still remembers the old days when the fields around Alma [Illinois] were covered with golden daffodils. When the flowers were in bloom, school was delayed so that the children could harvest the daffodils at the peak of freshness. The children were paid according to their size. ‘I was small for my age, so I got put in the nickel bunch,’ Mrs. Weeks recalled. Asked if she got a nickel for each bunch of flowers, she answered that the nickel was for the morning’s work.
        “After the children went off to school, the women in the packing shed sorted the daffodils and packed them – 13 to a bunch – in cardboard cartons for shipment to the Water Street Market in Chicago. By planting a number of different varieties, growers extended the season from the first King Alfreds to the later blooming Narcissus type [probably N. poeticus recurvus]. The early bloomers were called Easter Flowers, the name still used by many local people, and the later ones were known as Mother’s Day Flowers.”
        Mrs. Weeks’ grandfather was the first daffodil farmer in the area, starting with the classic ‘Emperor’ sometime around World War I. “At one time, 65 to 75 acres in Alma were devoted to daffodils, and . . . in addition to the 40 to 50 children who picked daffodils each morning, 100 women sorted and packed the flowers for shipment. . . .
        “One of Alma’s last daffodil growers was Mrs. Weeks’ brother, Eugene Winks. When interviewed in 1979 he said the business declined because ‘high school kids today are too lazy to pick, . . . the Railway Express Company went out of business, and . . . there are no more street peddlers.’ For many years, Winks operated a small roadside market in Alma, and when he died in 1995, it was the end of an era.” (Sept. 2008)

‘Kaiser Wilhelm’: Now Even Older

        German researchers have determined that ‘Kaiser Wilhelm’, one of the world’s oldest surviving dahlias and our 2007 Spring-Planted Heirloom Bulb of the Year, was introduced by Christian Deegen, the father of German dahlias, in 1881, twelve years earlier than was previously believed. Sehr gut! (Sept. 2008)

Book of the Month: The Unknown Gertrude Jekyll

        Inspired by the traditional cottage gardens of England, Gertrude Jekyll in the early twentieth century became an enormously popular garden designer. Though her books have all been reprinted, most of her magazine and newspaper articles languished in obscurity – until editor Martin Wood collected the best of them in this fine book.
        Though you may have heard that Jekyll’s borders were filled exclusively with perennials and pastels, here’s an excerpt to help correct that misconception (and maybe inspire your planting!). Note that she includes dahlias, cannas, and gladiolus in this border, too, as she often did.
        “The pale yellows in the border are followed by the deeper yellow of coreopsis, helenium and some . . . perennial sunflowers. Soon we come to the splendid deep orange of African marigolds and the rich mahogany browns of the French marigolds both tall and dwarf. Then come deep orange dahlias backing fiery clumps of kniphofia, passing on to the pure scarlet of dahlias and cannas, salvias, gladioli and bedding geraniums. The use of these grand summer plants is one reason why the border had better not be called hardy or herbaceous, for there are no hardy plants that will answer the same purpose. . . . Moreover it is certainly more important that the border shall be beautiful than that it should be either strictly hardy or herbaceous.
        “At the back of the mass of rich red is a group of towering hollyhocks, blood-red, with a few of a rich, dark claret color. The whole of the red region has also an interplanting of the red-leaved Atriplex hortensis, and, nearer the front, of a French form of annual amaranthus with dull red flowers of a pleasant quality and red-tinted leaves; a much better plant than the commoner form with magenta flowers.” (Sept. 2008)

What Do You Plant at an Icon of Mid-Century Modernism?

        In a recent article in Preservation magazine celebrating Richard Neutra’s Kaufmann House, a sleek, glass-walled icon of Modernism set in the desert near Palm Springs, California, my eyes were drawn to the minimalist planting outside one of the famous floor-to-ceiling glass panels. Looking more closely at the tufts of low, grassy foliage arrayed in geometric precision, I could see a few small, white, crocus-like flowers. You guessed it, white rain lilies. (Aug. 2008)

Monticello Symposium to Focus on Historic Edibles

        Prominent early American gardeners and the edible plants they grew will be celebrated at this fall’s Historic Plants Symposium at Monticello’s Center for Historic Plants. Speakers include the irreverent Felder Rushing, author of Passalong Plants; Arthur Smith, food historian and author of The Tomato in America; cider-maker and heirloom fruit lover, Ben Watson; herb authority and heirloom-plant collector, Art Tucker; Colonial Williamsburg’s garden historian, Wesley Greene; and Monticello’s own Peter Hatch. The symposium is conveniently scheduled for Friday, Sept. 5, the day before the Heritage Harvest Festival at Monticello’s Tufton Farm. For more information on both, contact our good friend Peggy Cornett at pcornett@monticello.org or (434) 984-9816. (June 2008)

Hyacinth History Now Online

        Once the world’s most popular bulb, hyacinths have been cherished in gardens since the days of Greece and Rome. Very few people know anything of their history, though, so we recently posted a terrific short history of hyacinths at our website. We bet you’ll find it fascinating! (April 2008)

Historic Plant Labels: What Did George Do?

        Before the days of aluminum, plastic, and Dymo, how did gardeners label their plants? Here are two 18th-century methods reported to us by our good friend Wesley Greene of Colonial Williamsburg:
        “I have come across an interesting reference to plant labels in instructions from George Washington to William Pierce, his manager at Mount Vernon, written on Feb. 26, 1794. These instructions were meant to be relayed to the gardener.
        “‘Let him number the papers which contain these seeds, and drive stakes with corrisponding [sic] numbers by each kind, when sown, that he may be at no loss to know them: Putting the papers as is usual, in a split stick by them, is apt to be lost; or so defaced by the weather as to become, after a while, unintelligible; and then the name will be forgotten. By the method I have proposed this cannot happen. On the papers too may be noted the places where they are sown.’”
        “In a second letter, written on May 18, 1794, he gives this advice concerning seeds recently received from Europe: ‘He should set boards by them, with inscriptions thereon, similar to those which are written on the papers, containing the respective seeds.’” (March 2008)

“Little Pots on the Front Porch” – Rain Lilies in the Early 1900s

        The revered Elizabeth Lawrence in her classic A Southern Garden of 1942 writes with enthusiasm about pink rain lily, Zephyranthes grandiflora:
        “It is one of the hardiest species and is said to winter safely in Philadelphia. As a child I thought of the little rose-colored lilies as the sign and seal of summer. My grandmother in Georgia grew them in her garden, and my grandmother in West Virginia grew them in little pots on the front porch.
        “Those in my garden [in Raleigh] came from Georgia. They have been with me so long and have increased so much that their bloom makes a sea of pink. The season is in June, but there is scattered bloom in the late summer and even to the end of September. The flowers are large, to over three inches long, on ten-inch stems. They open out flat at midday and close in the afternoon; this is a characteristic of the genus. The shimmering leaves are grass green.” (March 2008)

Link of the Month: America’s Liveliest Old Cemetery

        Cemeteries don’t often show up on lists of favorite vacation spots, but if more cemeteries were like the Old City Cemetery in Lynchburg, Virginia, that could change. I spent last weekend there – speaking at a sold-out garden symposium – and loved it!
        Laid out in 1806, the cemetery has been revived as a multi-faceted community resource by an eager and ever-growing group of volunteers. There are guided tours year-round on everything from historic daffodils to “Lynchburg’s Early Bawdy Ladies.” There’s a chapel that’s popular for weddings as well as funerals, and four small, reconstructed buildings that house archives and museum displays. Larger-scale artifacts rescued from local sites ornament the grounds, including antique fencing, marble columns, and a huge iron pitcher that once poured water into the Lynchburg reservoir. Perhaps more surprising, there are bee-hives (with honey sold as “Died and Gone to Heaven”), goats (helping to clear invasive plants from a steep ravine), a composting education center, and an award-winning cookbook. To learn more and get inspired, visit gravegarden.org . (March 2008)

Fragrance Fit for a President: Thomas Jefferson and Tuberoses

        If you still haven’t tried our fabulous, spring-planted tuberose bulbs, maybe Thomas Jefferson can sway you. Allen Lacy, in his 1998 book The Inviting Garden, writes:
        “Jefferson evidently loved Mexican tuberoses, recording in his garden notebook on April 18, 1806, that he had planted twenty-four double ones from M’Mahon [a famous Philadelphia nurseryman]. They started flowering on August 12, and the following January Jefferson placed a larger order with M’Mahon, who wrote back on February 25 that the shipment would be delayed: ‘When the weather becomes more mild I will send you some double Tuberose roots, but as they are extremely impatient of frost, it would be hazardous to send them at present.’” (Nov. 2007)

“The Time-Capsule Garden”

        “My husband and I are the curators of a little bulb museum, on our very typical 60-by-120-foot lot in an older neighborhood in Kansas City.” So begins a charming essay by Marty Ross in the September Horticulture that’s a must-read for every old-bulb lover. “We live on McGee Street, and we call our museum the Hortus Bulborum McGeeinsis,” she continues. Enjoy it all online (where it’s been re-titled “Building a Bulb Collection”) at http://www.hortmag.com/gardening_articles/bulbs.asp. (Aug. 2007)

Link of the Month: Preserving Historic Landscapes

        Wow! The website of the Cultural Landscape Foundation — the country’s leading non-profit dedicated to preserving all sorts of historic landscapes — has recently been upgraded and it’s a gem. Rich with information, resources, and beautiful images, it features major sections on Landscapes at Risk, Pioneers of Landscape Design, Outreach & Education, Stewardship Stories, and In the News. You’ll also find a definition of cultural landscapes, a term that’s still unfamiliar to many people but which embraces “public parks, historic sites, gardens, scenic highways, college campuses, farmland, cemeteries,” and other historic landscapes that both express our shared culture and enrich our daily lives. (Aug. 2007)

Link of the Month: Vintage Garden Books

        Reading old garden books is one of our favorite ways to learn about plants and gardens of the past. While shopping recently at AbeBooks.com, a terrific internet source for used and rare books, we stumbled upon “In the Garden: Let Your Collection Bloom.” This brief essay on collecting old garden books includes links to an assortment of classics ranging from a paperback edition of A Southern Garden for $3 to a hand-colored 1794 copy of Repton’s Landscape Gardening for $25,000. (June 2007)

Cannas in Colonial Williamsburg

        Though cannas may seem flamboyantly modern, these New World natives were pictured in John Gerard’s Herbal of 1597, and in 1735 Peter Collinson of London wrote to his friend and fellow plant-collector John Custis of colonial Williamsburg:
        “The seed you Call Indian frill Wee call Cana Indica or Wild Plaintain or Bonana from some Resemblance in the Leafe. With us it is perannuall by secureing the Roots from the Frost & Comes up Ev’ry Spring.” (March 2007)

That’s Not a Weed, It’s a Historic Daffodil!

        Last weekend our friend Russell Studebaker led his annual tour of historic daffodils that survive at old cemeteries and other relic sites in rural Oklahoma. He writes:
        “I thought you might be interested in a comment from Saturday’s tour. We had stopped at the site where there are so many ‘Butter and Eggs’, and a lady who had taken last year’s tour with her father told me that after he saw those last year and learned their name and heritage, he stopped digging them up and throwing them away from his garden!” (March 2007)

Bulbs in Art and History at the NYBG

        If you like bulbs, art, and history, here’s a December treat you won’t want to miss. Thanks to our friends Deirdre Larkin and Bevan Davies for the tip. Bevan writes:
        “I have to tell you about this exhibit I saw yesterday: ‘Buried Treasures: The Art and Nature of Bulbs.’ Like so many good things in New York, it’s hidden in an out-of-the-way place, the Mertz Library at the New York Botanical Garden. It consists of dozens of stunning images of tulips, lilies, gladiolus, and other bulbs selected from three centuries of the library’s rare books and artwork. My favorite print depicted ‘broken’ tulips of an unimaginable beauty, and I came home inspired to grow some of your true broken tulips in my own garden.” (Dec. 2006)

Colonial Inventories Offer Glimpses of Gardening

       Here’s an interesting tidbit from our good friend Wesley Greene of Colonial Williamsburg:
        “We have been looking at probate inventories in an effort to determine how common the urban garden was in 18th-century Virginia. These are very accurate inventories that list the possessions of the household right down to the last spoon.
        “We have made the assumption that to keep a garden you must have garden tools, and it has been interesting to discover that less than half of urban households list garden tools. It appears that 18th-century urban households, like 21st-century urban households, relied on the local market for their produce. (The prevalence of vegetables in the diet is a whole other area of investigation, but it appears to hover around 15% of the diet.)
        “One striking discovery thus far is that taverns are far more likely to list garden tools than are private households. Another surprise has been the number of households that list garden shears as their only garden tool. Maybe the colonial revivalists [who have been criticized for over-emphasizing the use of boxwood in colonial gardens] were right after all!” (Dec. 2006)

WW II Catalog Urges “Plant Flowers and Banish Barbarism!”

        Here’s some inspirational reading we found in the Conard and Jones catalog of 1919 under the title “What About Your Home?”
        “Ugliness is Barbarism and should be banished. But that’s easy – simply induce beauty. It may take a little of your time (really a delightful pastime), it may require work (which really is a wholesome recreation) and skill you either have or can acquire.
        “When you beautify the outside of your home with plants, you buy but the beginning of things; that’s why it costs so comparatively little. Your investment in Beauty grows; it will usually double many times over, and you will have planted not only plants but love for home that will strengthen as the roots of your plants go deeper and that will be a blessing as the flowers bloom.
        “The satisfaction from beauty about your home is threefold: First, to those in the home; second, to neighbors; third, to those who merely pass by. It marks the character of those within. Every good reason calls upon you to join the crusade and, about your home at least, ‘HELP TO MAKE AMERICA MORE BEAUTIFUL!’” (Oct. 2006)

Heirloom Plants at Historic Sites: Two Model Approaches

        Landscapes at historic sites often get short shrift, but here are two pioneering efforts to include truly historic plants in authentic ways that also attract and educate visitors.
        Herbs are deeply historic, but by the 1800s they were much less common in home gardens than most of us today believe. So how can a historic site serve modern, herb-loving visitors without misrepresenting the past? At Massachusetts’ Old Sturbridge Village, right outside the visitors’ center and before you enter the historic part of the Village there’s a huge, carefully labeled herb garden. There people can enjoy and learn about a vast array of herbs, which means there’s no need to over-plant herbs in the historic areas. A garden like this outside the historic core of any site (by the parking lot, for example) could be devoted to all sorts of heirloom flowers displayed as if in museum cases, allowing the landscape in the historic core to be kept as authentic as possible.
        Williamsburg does something similar with its Colonial Garden which is essentially an intensively planted teaching garden in the colonial style right on the main street of the village. Under the expert leadership of our good friend Wesley Greene, costumed interpreters who know a heck of a lot about colonial gardening explain things to visitors all day long and engage children in historic garden tasks. Here Williamsburg grows some of our rare tulips that are too expensive for them to plant in large quantities in their other gardens. Wesley digs and stores these tulip bulbs when they go dormant which both gives him more to replant in the future and helps to preserve these highly endangered living relics. We wish every historic site would do that! (July 2006)

Take a Peek at the 171st Annual Wakefield Tulip Show

        What do beer bottles and exquisitely beautiful tulips have in common? Every spring since 1836, tulip lovers in Yorkshire have exhibited their best Feathers, Flames, and Breeders at the Annual Show of the Wakefield and North of England Tulip Society. For snapshots and a brief report on this year’s particularly good show, visit http://www.oldhousegardens.com/tulipshow.asp. (June 2006)

Sissinghurst’s Vita Sackville-West Loved Clusiana

        In her 1937 book Some Flowers, Vita Sackville-West – the famous author and creator of Sissinghurst gardens – described 25 of her favorite flowers, including Tulipa clusiana:
        “The lady tulip [T. clusiana] . . . reminds one most of a regiment of little red and white soldiers. Seen growing wild on Mediterranean . . . slopes, you can imagine a Lilliputian army deployed at its spring maneuvers. I suppose her alleged femininity is due to her elegance and neatness, with her little white shirt so simply tucked into her striped jacket, but she is really more like a slender boy, a slim little officer dressed in a parti-colored uniform of the Renaissance.” (2006-07 catalog)

Classic Tulip Combos from 1918

       In her 1918 classic Color in the Garden, Louise Beebe Wilder suggests:
       late yellow tulips (try ‘Golden Harvest’) “interspersed with patches of soft lavender and deep purple aubretia,” candytuft (Iberis), sandwort (Arenaria montana), and early purple iris;
       late red and white tulips (‘Alabaster’ and ‘Lincolnshire’) backed by wisteria;
       late, light to dark purple tulips (see our Tulips Comparison Chart) with “silvery” creeping phlox, woodland phlox, pink thrift (Armeria), white and lavender horned violets (Viola cornuta), lambs-ear, snow-in-summer, white flax, and Nepeta mussini under redbuds or dogwoods. (2006-07 catalog)

Posh British Magazine Spotlights Heirloom Daffodils and Our Friend Josephine

        The headline on the cover of the current Gardens Illustrated, the upscale British monthly, definitely caught our eye: “Heirloom Daffodils – Rescuing Forgotten Bulbs.” Inside, six pages are devoted to our good friend Josephine Dekker and her centuries-old farm in North Holland where she is collecting and propagating exactly the sort of daffodils we love.
        In fact, we’re proud to be the only US source for Josephine’s treasures. (And we got a kick out of Gardens Illustrated calling us THE Old House Gardens. It sounds much more distinguished, don’t you think?) You can pick up the April issue at many US bookstores and newsstands right now. (March 2006)

Link of the Month: Historic Garden Photos

        Now you can view hundreds of great old photos of American yards and gardens at memory.loc.gov/ammem/award97/mhsdhtml/aladhome.html. They’re part of a collection of nearly 3000 historic lantern slides from 1850-1920 recently digitized for the Library of Congress’s “American Memories” project. There are views of cities, buildings, parks, estates, and gardens, and you can easily search the collection by terms such as arbors, carpet beds, and even “plants-bulbs.”
        I especially liked an image that I happened upon of an urban working family’s backyard from 1902 with nothing but a fence, clothes lines, a wooden walk, and a little kid standing on the flat bare dirt. But there are plenty of lavish gardens pictured, too, and simply browsing through the collection is both educational and inspiring. (March 2006)

Farewell to Flora Ann Bynum

        Many of us who love historic gardens were broken-hearted when we learned of the death on March 17 of Flora Ann Bynum. One of the warmest, most genuine people you could ever hope to meet, Flora Ann was devoted to her family and a wide circle of friends in historic Old Salem, NC, as well as in the Southern Garden History Society and all across the country. She founded and worked tirelessly for decades leading the SGHS and landscape-preservation efforts in Old Salem. She had a special affection for Roman hyacinths, making herself the country’s leading expert on these all-but-lost Southern heirlooms, and her big, old-fashioned garden on Main Street became a local landmark. The garden history community has lost one of its brightest lights, the world has lost an amazing human being, and we have lost a good friend who we will miss forever. (March 2006)

Monet and Parrot Glads

        While thumbing through a book about Monet recently, I was excited to see what I’m convinced are parrot glads blooming in one of his best known paintings, “Garden at Sainte-Adresse.” Painted in 1867, it shows a sunny, waterside garden with tall, narrow, red and yellow glads that must be parrots. See if you agree: nga.gov.au/MonetJapan/Detail.cfm?WorkID=W95 (click on the painting to enlarge it).
        Monet also painted a large bed of glads in his own garden with Mme. Monet standing in back admiring them, a painting I have enjoyed at the Detroit Institute of Arts for years. (see dia.org/the_collection/overview/full.asp?objectID=54805&image=1). So there’s no need to plant a pond full of waterlilies to garden à la Monet. Just plant a few of our old glads and you’ll be all set! (Feb. 2006)

Link of the Month: Antique Hyacinth Vases

        American gardeners of the 1800s loved forcing hyacinths in special vases for winter bloom. The practice dates back to the mid-1700s when Madame Pompadour, influential mistress of Louis XV, had hundreds of hyacinths forced in vases at Versailles.
        Today, antique hyacinth glasses are collected worldwide. For a glimpse of the immense collection of Dutch enthusiast Wim Granneman, visit kennemerend.nl/bollenglazen. Among other treats, Wim’s homespun site offers a link to Querbeet, a German garden shop offering many forcing vases, including a reproduction from 1888, and the world’s only book about them, Hyazinthen Glaser.

‘Beauty of Bath’ Revealed – A Tulip Mystery Story

        With primrose petals flamed purple, the ‘Beauty of Bath’ tulip is stunning. But how did it get its name? One of our favorite garden writers, Betsy Ginsburg, put on her detective cap and journeyed back to Edwardian England to investigate. Her quest, which involves antique apples and a hit musical, makes for an evocative story that I bet you’ll love. But don’t stop there. Betsy’s site, GardenersApprentice.com, is full of other great garden articles, tips, book reviews, and more. I especially liked her piece titled “Rose of Sharon: Still Fashionable After All These Years,” but like a good book, Betsy’s whole site is hard to quit reading. Enjoy! (Nov. 2005)

Victorian Advice for Growing Hyacinths

        Garden advice tends to change slowly, but here are some surprising tips from the recently republished Ladies’ Southern Florist of 1860 by Mary Rion of Columbia, SC:
        “Hyacinths. In October prepare the ground by digging two feet deep, thoroughly mixing with the soil, as it is returned, equal parts of earth mould and well rotted manure and clean sand. A small quantity of poudrette [literally: fine powder], put in deep, is beneficial. Pulverize and mix in the earth thoroughly with the manure. Then cover four inches thick with sand, that the manure may not touch the bulbs.
        “[A month later,] plant the bulbs three inches deep in sand. The colors are believed to mix by planting the different colors together; therefore one should sacrifice beauty of display for the permanent beauty of the colors, by planting the different colors in separate groups . . . .
        “After blooming, the foliage dies or turns yellow, when (the spot having been previously marked by sticks with labels) the bulbs should be lifted and separated. The small offsets should be replanted at once, which is better for them than drying . . . .
        “Keep all the colors distinct, and carefully wrap each in a bit of newspaper, and bundle all in paper and mark them. Then put away in a room where a fire is never built. We have pursued the newspaper plan of preserving hyacinths for years, and never lost one.” (Oct. 2005)

Link of the Month: An 18th-Century Flower Album

        One of the greatest florilegiums of the 1700s, the Hortus Nitidissimus, is also one of the rarest. Featuring hand-colored prints of hundreds of garden flowers, it was published in parts over the course of 36 years and few complete copies survive. But now through the wonders of modern technology a virtually perfect copy is on reserve for you at rbgkew.org.uk/data/trew/home.do. In it you’ll find dozens of hyacinths (including some astonishing doubles) and tulips (with several parrots much like our Hortus Bulborum rarities) along with lilies, daffodils, ranunculus, and many other bulbs. Enjoy a glimpse of what spring looked like 250 years ago! (Sept. 2005)

An Ark for Herbs, and Daffodils, and Peonies, and . . .

        Efforts to preserve endangered wildflowers are well developed, but what about endangered garden plants? We’re hoping that a budding effort by the Herb Society of America may inspire a broader effort to preserve our flower heritage. As Tovah Martin explains in the May/June issue of Horticulture magazine, “Since 1996, the Herb Society has led a bold Plant Collections initiative, in which individual members and units curate different herb genera such as Lavandula. . . . Originally the brainchild of Dr. Arthur Tucker, a professor at Delaware State University,” it’s based on the British National Plant Collections Scheme (see www.nccpg.com) and now encompasses 50 collections. As Tovah says, we hope “other gardening groups will perk up, take notice, and follow suit.” (July 2005)

BBG Features Our Bulbs in Heirloom Garden Plan

        The Brooklyn Botanic Garden newsletter published a great plan for “An Heirloom Border” recently. It includes classic heirloom bulbs and other plants in a graceful early-spring to summer display – and we’re their featured source! Thanks to the BBG and author Joan McDonald who writes, “In this age of cloned pets and genetically altered food, there’s an ‘unmessed with’ quality about heirlooms that I find comforting and reassuring.” View Joan’s plan and read more at: bbg.org/gar2/topics/design/2005heirloom_border.html. (July 2005)

Heirloom Gardening in Pompeii

        Last week, USA Today reported:
        “For the next month, visitors to the ancient city of Pompeii, Italy, will be able to get a real taste of ancient life. In areas that housed the gardens of the prosperous city (before it was buried under volcanic ash from the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in AD 79), archaeologists have replanted the fruits and vegetables that were a part of the Roman diet: figs and olives, plums and grapes, as well as poppy, broom, bramble, and mallow. Kits with the ingredients will be sold to visitors with instructions on how to cook Roman specialties.”
        Now THAT’S heirloom gardening! (June 2005)

Seeing Ghosts: Ann Arbor’s Favorite Bulbs in 1839

        In 1839, Ann Arbor – now Old House Gardens’ hometown – was a rough-edged Midwestern village surrounded by wilderness. But its gardeners were buying plenty of flower bulbs! In an letter that year to a wholesale nursery in Buffalo, nurseryman S.B. Noble ordered (along with 700 fruit trees, 100 roses, and 60 scented geraniums) a surprisingly large number of bulbs for his customers: 100 hyacinths, 100 tulips, 50 dahlias, 25 crown imperials, 25 anemones, 25 ranunculus, 25 tiger lilies, “and other choice bulbs.”
        Noble’s selection of bulbs reflects his era. Hyacinths back then were as popular as tulips, while daffodils, today’s most popular bulb, didn’t even make his list. Dahlias and tiger lilies, introduced just 40 or 50 years earlier, were already enormously popular, and crown imperials, anemones, and ranunculus, favorites since the 1600s, were much more widely planted than they are today.
        Thanks to our friend and local historian Susan Cee Wineberg for sending us Noble’s letter and its fascinating glimpse of 166-year-old garden ghosts! (June 2005)

More on the Copeland Sisters and Their Daffodils

        More of you responded to the Copeland family history in our last newsletter (oldhousegardens.com/copeland.asp) than to anything else we’ve ever published here. We’re glad you liked it!
        Irene’s daughter wrote again this spring to say our bulbs were blooming beautifully for her family. She also told us that the RHS staged an exhibit of the Copeland doubles and their many descendants at the London Daffodil Show. As famed daffodil breeder Brian Duncan explained to us, it’s almost impossible to find a good modern double which does not have ‘Mary Copeland’ in its ancestry. Double daffodils rarely set seed, but one of two seeds found by chance in a single pod of ‘Mary Copeland’ in the 1940s grew into ‘Falaise’ which was fully fertile and opened the floodgates of double daffodil breeding. For a photo of the RHS exhibit and a couple of Brian’s great modern doubles descended from ‘Mary Copeland’, click here. (June 2005)

Who Were Irene and Mary Copeland? A Daughter Tells Their Story

        Two of the loveliest old double daffodils are ‘Irene Copeland’ and ‘Mary Copeland’. We knew they were named for the daughters of the man who bred them, but that’s about all we knew – till last spring when we got an email from Irene’s daughter. She was looking for bulbs of both daffodils to plant on Irene and Mary’s graves, but she couldn’t find true stock in England. Even though we don’t normally ship outside the US, for her we made an exception! In appreciation she sent us a short history of her mother and Auntie Mary along with a photo of them as teenagers. To enjoy both, click here. (May 2005)

Tour Spotlights Cherokee Daffodils in Oklahoma

        Our good friend Russell Studebaker, garden writer for the Tulsa World, led a pilgrimage two weeks ago to explore heirloom daffodils in rural Oklahoma that may date back to the earliest days of Cherokee settlement and the notorious Trail of Tears. For Russell’s inspiring report and a few photos, visit oldhousegardens.com/russellstudebaker.asp. And then consider leading a similar tour of rediscovery in your own neighborhood! (March 2005)

Get Inspired by a Real Victorian Pattern-Bed

        A hundred years ago and more, Victorian gardeners were enjoying many of the same, vibrant, spring-planted bulbs and annuals that are thrilling gardeners again today. So how about jazzing up your lawn this year with a Victorian-style island bed? For inspiration, take a look at a real 1880s pattern-bed at oldhousegardens.com/bedding-with-bulbs.asp. You could reproduce it in the middle of your own lawn with castor-beans in the center ringed by cannas (our heirlooms, of course!), then elephant ears, coleus, and finally dusty miller.
        Or experiment with other plants, old or new, of similar stature and flair, planting the tallest in the center and working outward in concentric circles until you finish with a low-growing annual for a colorful, clean edge. We’ve made some alternative plant suggestions online, but we’d love to hear yours, too. Or email us a photo of your results this summer! (March 2005)

Traveling Exhibit Showcases Historic American Flower Pots

        After drawing admiring crowds from Ontario to North Carolina, the first museum exhibit devoted to historic American flower pots is moving April 2 to the Civic Garden Center of Greater Cincinnati and then on to the US Botanic Garden, the Stonington (CT) Historical Society, and the Botanic Garden of Smith College. For a brief overview, for links to modern potteries, or to book the exhibit for your local museum or botanical gardens, visit aplacetotakeroot.com/dates.html. (March 2005)

The First Daffodils of Spring are Often . . . Easter Lilies?

        Yes, “Easter lilies” is the traditional name many old gardeners give to Narcissus pseudonarcissus, the very old, very early-blooming trumpet daffodil that thrives from Cape Cod to Georgia and points west. Even in areas such as Piedmont, North Carolina where our friend Douglas Ruhren of the Daniel Stow Botanical Gardens says they usually bloom by Valentine’s Day, the Easter lilies name seems to have been more common than the traditional English name which we use, Lent lilies.
        According to our good customer Beate Jensen of Belmont, the Gari Melchers estate in Fredericksburg, VA, the name is even more common in Norway. There all trumpet daffodils are called paskeliljer, which means Easter lilies, and all late-blooming pheasant’s eye daffodils are called pinseliljer or Ascension lilies. (Feb. 2005)

Garden History Exhibit Opens at Ohio Historical Center

        It takes a lot to get us Wolverine fans to want to visit Columbus, Ohio, home of our archrival, Ohio State. But hey, this will do it: opening April 1 at the Ohio Historical Center is an exciting new exhibit, “Ohio’s Garden Path: The Flowering of Our Landscape.” Curated by our friends Janet Oberliesen of OSU and Denise Adams, author of Restoring American Gardens, the exhibit will show how Ohio home landscapes have changed in the last two centuries reflecting changing lifestyles. With both serious scholarship and interactive fun for children, this promises to be a diverse, inspiring exhibit. For museum information, visit ohiohistory.org/places/ohc/#exhibits. (Feb. 2005)

Bulb Lunacy and Emily Dickinson

        In a May 1883 letter to her sister, Emily Dickinson confessed:
        “I have long been a Lunatic on Bulbs, though screened by my friends, as Lunacy on any theme is better undivulged.”
        You can read more about Dickinson and her love of flowers in the excellent Emily Dickinson’s Gardens by our good customer Marta McDowell of Chatham, NJ. (2004-05 catalog)

1890 Book Calls Gladiolus “Best of All”

       Glads were one of the most popular flowers of the late 1800s, as attested to by Eben Rexford of Wisconsin in his Home Floriculture of 1890:
       “The gladiolus is the best of all the summer-flowering bulbs, all things considered. . . . It is a flower anybody can grow, and it is lovely enough to satisfy the most exacting. . . .
       “Of late . . . the size of the flower has been increased, its colors intensified, and new markings and combinations of colors of wonderful beauty have rewarded the skillful hybridizer. It deserves a place in every collection. . . .
       “There is nothing coarse about the Gladiolus. It has all the delicacy of the Lily combined with the magnificence of color peculiar to the most brilliant and showy tropical plants. Nothing is finer for cutting for vases. . . .
        “The bulb increases rapidly. If you invest a dollar or two in bulbs this season you will have quite a stock of them in fall, when you come to dig them, and from these, planted next spring, you will obtain all you care to use, and very likely more. If so, it will afford you a great deal of pleasure, doubtless, to share them with your flower loving friends who may not be so fortunate as you are.” (2004-05 catalog)

Eudora Welty’s Garden Restored with Our Heirlooms

        Roman hyacinths, ‘Twin Sisters’, and other classic Southern bulbs are blooming again in the Jackson, Mississippi, garden of author Eudora Welty – and we helped! The garden opened to the public this past spring after a careful restoration led by landscape historian Susan Haltom who turned to us for authentic bulbs.
        Our customer and friend Jeannette Hardy writes in the Nov.-Dec. 2004 issue of Horticulture: “If you go to the garden on Pinehurst Street, brace yourself for a primer on the native and heirloom plants that dominate Mississippi’s landscape. There are camellias of every stripe, banana shrub and other fragrant plants, along with bulbs galore – daffodils, spider lilies, silver bells, and hundreds of other favorites that planted Welty’s writings into the tough soil of the Deep South.”
        To learn more, visit mdah.state.ms.us/welty/index.html. (Dec. 2004)

Diversity Diminishes As Big Growers Rely on Unskilled Labor

        Steve Vinisky of Cherry Creek Daffodils posted this message to Daffnet, the American Daffodil Society’s email discussion group:
        “One hundred years ago, over 400 named hyacinths existed. Today roughly 80 exist in the trade and of those, only 30 or so are available in tonnage. Crocus stocks, especially species, are being reduced severely as knowledgeable help to rogue the fields [weed out erroneous bulbs] is becoming a serious problem.
        “During a visit to Holland a couple of years ago, I asked my grower host friend why there were so many Russian Lada automobiles parked along many bulb fields. His embarrassed reply was that field help appears seasonally from all of the former Eastern Bloc countries as illegal farm labor which skirts the Dutch social welfare laws (and cost burden). Knowledgeable Dutch housewives were the traditional labor pool for hundreds of years. As in the USA, a farm wife in Holland today is probably employed outside of the home. Fewer cultivars makes it far easier for unskilled, casual laborers, to maintain plantings without being knowledgeable about what it is that is actually being grown.” (Nov. 2004)

New UK Source to Specialize in Heirloom Bulbs

        “How many techies does it take to save a bulb?” So starts a recent article in The Times of London. “Perhaps just one if an initiative by Alex Chisholm succeeds. Chisholm recently left his job as a software manager in Dublin to spearhead the Heritage Bulb Club, an organization aimed at rescuing endangered bulbs. . . . Chisholm was both amazed and appalled when he learned that of the 5,900 tulip varieties in the International Register, most of the production is now devoted to just 20. ‘I wanted to stand up for some of the other 5,880,’ he says. . . .”
        Though this “club” is actually a mail-order source, it’s another sign of the growing interest in heirloom bulbs. To find out more, visit www.heritagebulbs.com. (April 2004)

Book of the Month: Restoring American Gardens

        If you love antique flowers, you won’t want to miss this magnificent new book by our good friend Denise Adams. Restoring American Gardens: An Encyclopedia of Heirloom Ornamental Plants, 1640-1940, is the first comprehensive history of the PLANTS of American gardens: annuals, perennials, bulbs, vines, shrubs, and trees. Seven years in the making, it draws on a database of over 25,000 plants, and its 419 pages are sumptuously illustrated with modern and historic photos as well as antique engravings. Maybe best of all, it names hundreds of heirloom cultivars you can grow in your own garden TODAY! (Feb. 2004)
        [For many other books about garden history and heirlooms, see the Books section of our Newsletter Archives.]

Tender, Family Heirloom Rain Lilies Thrive for a Century in Zone-4 Wisconsin

        Although pink rain lilies, Zephyranthes grandiflora, aren’t hardy beyond zone 8, Julie Monroe and her family have been enjoying them in zone-4 Wisconsin for a century or so. Her bulbs came originally from her Great-Aunt Irene and before that from Irene’s mother. “They thrive on neglect,” Julie says. “The only thing I am careful about is to take the pots inside before the first freeze.” She stores them dry in pots in the basement all winter, brings them back outside in the spring, and they just get better every year. For the whole story and Julie’s tips, or to try a few rain lilies yourself, click here. (Jan. 2004)

“Heirloom Plants . . . Are More Than Just Old”

        In her superb article about our old bulbs in the September issue of Garden Showcase, The Northwest’s Garden Magazine, Elizabeth Petersen starts with a paragraph that says so much so well that we wanted to share it with you:
        “An antique jewelry box that belonged to my great-grandmother is one of my favorite possessions. Its long rich history connects me to times long ago. Call me sentimental, but I am not alone. Relics from the past, be they furniture, photos, or fruit, charm us as they suggest simpler, safer, and more honest times. Combine this nostalgia with the shocking rate at which plants are disappearing worldwide and you will understand current efforts to preserve horticultural heirlooms. Gardeners are saving seed and growing foods that were stalwarts in earlier times as a way to connect to their roots and as a way to rescue worthy selections from extinction. While no individual can reverse global problems or turn back the clock, each of us can offer a safe haven for unique antique plants in our home gardens. And why not? Heirloom plants are rich with history, but they are more than just old. Many are excellent garden plants: tough, carefree, exuberant in their production and elegant in their simplicity.”
        Thank you, Elizabeth! (Sept. 2003)

Good News – Louisiana’s Old Dickory is Saved!

        The centuries-old live oak that we told you a couple of months ago was threatened by a highway project has been saved, thanks to an outpouring of support sparked by our good customer Coleen Perriloux Landry. The great old tree and its surrounding land have been donated to the local government, and three projects that would have fatally damaged it have been redesigned to protect it. Click here and scroll down the page for a photo and more info, and be sure to read the editorial from the New Orleans Times-Picayune, too. Who says one person can’t make a difference?! Thanks, Coleen, for the inspiration, and for saving this VERY historic plant. (July 2003)

Canna History 101

        For our brief and entertaining history of cannas, click here. Read what gardeners from 1629 through the 1893 World’s Fair and beyond have had to say about these bold summer beauties. Get growing tips and links to other canna resources, too. Then you can say, “I’ve been to Canna College!” (June 2003)

Kind Words from Colonial Williamsburg

        Our good customer Wesley Greene of Colonial Williamsburg, VA, writes:
        “We are thrilled to be able to include your heirloom bulbs in the demonstration beds at the Colonial Garden. They were a great fascination to our visitors last year, and we frequently recommend your website to interested visitors. Your company is a wonderful resource.” (2003-04 catalog)

Emily Dickinson’s “Permanent Rainbow”

        In early 1884, poet and flower lover Emily Dickinson wrote to her sister:
        “I have made a permanent rainbow by filling a window with hyacinths, which Science will be glad to know. . . .” (2003-04 catalog)

OHG Customer Fights to Protect 800-Year-Old Oak

        When an 800-year-old live oak is threatened by a $6-million highway extension, what do you do? Well, if you’re Coleen Perilloux Landry of Metairie, LA, you call local officials and even the governor, alert the media, organize volunteer crews to clean up the woods surrounding it, and speak eloquently about the value of a living giant that was already old when La Salle claimed the Mississippi Valley for Louis XIV in 1682. Thanks to Coleen’s efforts, the DOT is now studying alternative plans for re-routing the project and saving “Old Dickory.” Yea, Coleen! For a 14-state registry of ancient live oaks, visit the Live Oak Society website at louisianagardenclubs.org. (March 2003)

Who Is Bishop of Llandaff and Why Is He Living in My Garden?

        Dark-leaved, flame-bright ‘Bishop of Llandaff’ is our best-selling dahlia – but who was the bishop? In the ancient cathedral city of Llandaff (now part of Cardiff) in Wales, third-generation nurseryman Fred Treseder spent 50 years growing and breeding dahlias. One fine day in 1924 Fred presented blooms from several of his best seedlings to his good friend, the Right Reverend Joshua Pritchard Hughes, Bishop of Llandaff, and asked him to pick his favorite. An avid supporter of the temperance movement and strict in observing the Sabbath, the Bishop apparently had little interest in gardening – but he knew a fantastic flower when he saw one. Four years later his namesake won an RHS Award of Merit and by 1936 it was one of the most popular dahlias in all of England. (March 2003)

Join Scott’s Internet Discussion Group

        HeirloomFlowers@yahoogroups.com is a free, world-wide discussion group for people with a passionate interest in historic ornamental plants. If that sounds like you, we’d love to have you join us! HeirloomFlowers is not a chat room or a forum. Members post email messages whenever it’s convenient to a common address and these are automatically sent to all members. HF was founded three years ago by our own Scott Kunst, and current members number almost 50 including Peggy Cornett of Monticello, Bill Finch of the Mobile Press-Register, Greg Grant of Flora Catalpa Arboretum, and Marlea Graham of the Heritage Roses Group. To learn more, click here. (March 2003)

Who Is Mrs. Backhouse and Why Is She in My Garden – Twice?

        Ever wonder about the people whose names grace our flowers? We’re going to be introducing you to some of them here in our Gazette. First in line is Sarah Elizabeth Backhouse (1857-1921), a gifted hybridizer of daffodils and other bulbs. She lived at Sutton Court, near Hereford, England, and with her husband worked for years trying to develop a daffodil with a red trumpet. Their efforts resulted in many award-winning varieties, but their greatest achievement was the luscious, pink-cupped ‘Mrs. R.O. Backhouse’ daffodil of 1921. It’s still so well loved that it’s one of our perennial best-sellers.
        But that’s not all! Mrs. B. also bred crocus, snowdrops, colchicums, hyacinths, and lilies, including a lovely, pink-and-amber martagon – named ‘Mrs. R.O. Backhouse’. (Feb. 2003)

“Ancient Tulips”: Reflections on Our T. schrenkii from The New York Times

        In the spring of 2001, hundreds of our oldest tulips bloomed in a small display set amid block after block of massed tulips on New York’s Park Avenue. Sponsored by the Daughters of Holland Dames and the Fund for Park Avenue, this tiny living history lesson inspired Verlyn Klinkenborg, editorial-page writer for The New York Times, to devote his “In the Country” column for April 11, 2001, to these musings:
        “I know a horse trainer who says that if you could just carry square one with you, you’d never have to go back to square one. I heard that at a county fairground in eastern Wyoming, but it came back to me on Park Avenue yesterday. I was standing in the median crosswalk north of 63rd Street and there, in a small raised plot, were the first two tulips I’ve seen blooming this spring. They are a species of tulips called Tulipa schrenkii [currently unavailable], discovered by Europeans in 1585 but native, as tulip historian Anna Pavord writes, to the steppes and low mountains of Crimea and Transcaucasia. Their presence this spring on Park Avenue indicates the growing importance of gardening with heirloom and antique plants – the botanical equivalent of carrying square one with you.
        “T. schrenkii is not a dominating tulip. It has none of the height, none of the stiffness or prominence of the hybrid tulips that surround it, and which are still only in leaf. But T. schrenkii may be one of the important progenitors of the familiar monochromatic tulips, that in another week or two will display a certain unanimity all over the city. By comparison, T. schrenkii seems almost to crouch, to withdraw. It lacks the foghorn colors of modern tulips. Its sharp-tipped petals, wine-dark but edged with yellow, resemble deep, subtle flames, and it looks as though it were meant to cover entire hillsides, not to compete with the overpowering effects of Park Avenue.
        “But back to square one. The variations that humans have wrought upon domesticated plants and animals are almost infinite. Inevitably, as time passes and fashions change, the origins that lie behind those variations grow dim and often forgotten, as do earlier variations themselves. Just as there is a necrology of long-gone buildings, so there is a necrology – a substantial one – of plant varieties and animal breeds that have been sacrificed as values and tastes have changed. With luck, the current fashion for heirloom and antique plants, embodied by T. schrenkii, will turn out not to be a fashion at all, but a continuing expression of the need for genetic conservation, for keeping the past alive in the most literal sense possible.”
        For more of Verlyn’s poetic and thought-provoking writing, click here. (2001-02 catalog)

Changing Fashions, “Conservative Instincts,” and Rediscovering Great Bulbs

        In the early 1900s, the past was all the rage. People built Colonial Revival houses and planted “grandmother’s gardens” filled with old-fashioned plants – including Darwin and Cottage tulips – rediscovered in old and often humble gardens. In his 1915 My Garden in Fall and Winter, E.A. Bowles writes:
        “We owe a vast debt of gratitude to the conservative instincts of our peasantry. Just think, for instance, how often it has happened that the weathercock of fashion has turned out the Chippendale chairs from the dining room of the Hall first to some stable loft, and then to the cottages [workers houses] on the estate to be discovered and bought back half a century later.
        “The same change of taste, or lapse and abeyance of good taste we might say, turned out the old roses and herbaceous plants to make way for showier bedding sorts. Again, Cottage Tulips, rescued from cottage gardens, are clearly the throw-outs of various tulip fanciers who discarded . . . those that would not behave just as they wished and their self-imposed rules decreed. Many a laborer in the gardens of such autocrats has [appreciated these rejected tulips and brought them home], . . . and perhaps fifty years later a Barr or a Hartland has spotted a clump of some glowing and graceful tulip, and gladly purchased the stock from the surprised tenant of the old cottage for what seemed to him untold wealth. . . .
        “Anyone with a keen eye for a good plant might do good work by keeping that eye open on cottage plots [or yards today in poorer areas both rural and urban!]. A really hardy, reliable plant of good habit is what the cottage gardener wants, and it is after all not a bad standard to set up for the larger garden, and a plant that has thriven and been found worth growing for fifty years in a cottage garden is certain to have many good qualities in it.” (2001-02 catalog)

Why Save Old Bulbs?

        In The Heirloom Gardener, her excellent 1984 book on heirloom edibles, Carolyn Jabs writes:
       “Each time we permit an old variety to become extinct, we sacrifice part of our heritage. Those who ask why we need more than a few varieties of beans or corn [or bulbs] might as well wonder why a library needs more than one book on a subject.” (2000-01 catalog)

Memories of Lost Flowers, 1907

        We bet this lament from the 1907 best-seller Aunt Jane of Kentucky by Eliza Calvert Hall will strike a chord with many heirloom plant lovers – including maybe you.
        “Did you ever hear o’ people disappearin’ from their homes and never bein’ found any more? Well, flowers can disappear the same way. The yar before I was married there was a big bed o’ pink chrysanthemums . . . at old Dr. Pendleton’s. It wasn’t a common magenta pink, it was as clear, pretty a pink as that La France rose. Well, I saw ’em that fall for the first time and the last. The next year there wasn’t any, and when I asked where they’d gone to, nobody could tell anything about ’em. And ever since then I’ve been searchin’ in every old gyarden in the county, but I’ve never found ’em, and I don’t reckon I ever will.
        “And there’s my roses! . . . Every color a rose could be, and pretty near every kind. Wouldn’t you think I’d be satisfied? But there’s a rose I lost sixty years ago, and the ricollection o’ that rose keeps me from bein’ satisfied with all I’ve got. It grew in Old Lady Elrod’s gyarden and nowhere else, and there ain’t a rose here except grandmother’s that I wouldn’t give up forever if I could jest find that rose again. . . . I’ve got all the shades of yeller in my garden, but nothin’ like the color o’ that rose. It got deeper and deeper towards the middle, and lookin’ at one of them roses half opened was like lookin’ down into a gold mine. . . .
        “I always intended to ask for a slip of it, but I waited too long. It got lost one winter, and when I asked Old Lady Elrod about it she said, ‘Mistress Parrish, I cannot tell you whence it came nor whither it went.’ . . . .
        “Well, honey, them two lost flowers jest haunt me. . . . No matter how many roses and chrysanthemums I have, I keep seein’ Old Lady Elrod’s yeller roses . . . and that bed o’ pink chrysanthemums under Dr. Pendleton’s dinin’-room windows.” (2000-01 catalog)

Timeless Advice on Ordering Bulbs

        We’d like to second this advice from the September 1892 edition of The Mayflower magazine:
        “Try ordering your bulbs early this year. No home can afford to be without the refining influence of flowers.” (2000-01 catalog)

Fragrance and Memory, Circa 1932

        In her 1932 classic, The Fragrant Path, Louise Beebe Wilder writes:
        “Fragrance, perhaps, speaks more clearly to age than to youth. With the young it may not pass much beyond the olfactory nerve, but with those who have started down the far side of the hill it reaches into the heart . . . .
        “The gardens of my youth were fragrant gardens and it is their sweetness rather than their pattern or their furnishings that I now most clearly recall.” (2000-01 catalog)

Parrot Tulip Poetry from Sissinghurst’s Vita Sackville-West

        In her book-length 1946 poem The Garden, Vita Sackville-West writes:
        . . . the Parrot, better called the Dragon,
        Ah, that’s a pranking feat of fantasy,
        Swirling as crazy plumes of the macaw,
        Green flounced with pink, and fringed, and topple-heavy,
        A tipsy flower, lurching with the fun
        Of its vagary. Has it strayed and fallen
        Out of the prodigal urn, the Dutchman’s canvas
        Crammed to absurdity? Or truly grown
        From a brown bulb in brown and sober soil?
        Did you catch the “fantasy” pun? Vita grew the pink and green parrot tulip ‘Clara Butt’ – in her world famous gardens at Sissinghurst. (2000-01 catalog)

Another Reason Why Modern Bulbs Often Disappoint Gardeners

        Don Egger writing in the 1998 Lily Yearbook of the North American Lily Society explains:
        “Before tissue culture . . . of lilies was common, new varieties had to be carefully propagated by scaling or . . . seed, [so] it took years to multiply commercial quantities . . . . During this time viruses and disease would take their toll . . . . Only the [toughest] of new varieties lasted long enough to be offered to the trade.
        “Tissue culture technology has changed that. New clones can be micro-propagated with such speed that clones are on the market before they can succumb to virus . . . . While providing us with a vast assortment of new varieties to grow, it has made it all too easy to produce vast numbers of lilies that are not well suited for the home garden due to their virus sensitivity . . . .
        “It’s obvious why the best varieties have been around for such a long time: they are inexpensive to propagate, and easy to grow, and virus tolerant. These old-timers have proven that they will survive for many years in the garden without pampering.” (2000-01 catalog)

Reducing Bulb Diversity – and Garden Worthiness

        “Forcing tulips for the cut-flower trade is now a more lucrative business than providing bulbs,” writes Anna Pavord in her masterful The Tulip, “and half the bulb fields in the Netherlands are planted with the same twenty cultivars, all of which are used to provide forced cut flowers. In fact half the cut-flower market in tulips is dominated by just ten cultivars, a hideous reductio ad absurdum for a flower that nature equipped with more than a thousand tricks.”
       And we’ll add this: As greenhouse-forced tulips have become more lucrative, the bulbs of many of these same varieties are being sold to home gardeners. The problem is that though these bulbs are great for commercial production, many are mediocre for home gardens where our conditions, needs, and desires are quite different.
       It’s the supermarket tomatoes story all over again: when plants are bred for one priority – such as long-distance shipping or greenhouse forcing – other virtues such as taste or garden-worthiness are often lost. (1999-2000 catalog)

History’s Greatest Tulip Party?

        Tulips grow wild in Turkey, and during the early 1700s they became so prized that one modern Turkish historian has called this period “the Tulip Era.” Anna Pavord in her magnificent 1999 book The Tulip describes a party from that time I would have loved to have been invited to:
        “Under Sultan Ahmed III [who reigned 1703-1730], Turkey became a hotbed of floriculture. . . .
        “At tulip time, . . . one of the courtyards of the Grand Seraglio was turned into an open-air theatre; thousands of tulip flowers were mounted on pyramids and towers, with lanterns and cages of singing birds hung between them. Tulips filled the flower beds, each variety marked with a label of filigree silver. At the signal from a cannon, the doors of the harem were opened and the Sultan’s mistresses were led out into the garden by eunuchs carrying torches. Guests had to dress in clothes that matched the tulips (and avoid setting themselves on fire by brushing against candles carried on the backs of hundreds of tortoises that ambled around the grounds).
        “One of these tulip extravaganzas was described by . . . the French Ambassador . . . in the early 18th century. ‘The Grand Vizier. . . and others of the court have a great taste for flowers, and above all the Tulips,’ he wrote. . . ‘There are 500,000 bulbs in the Grand Vizier’s garden. When the Tulips are in flower and the Grand Vizier wants to show them off . . ., they take care to fill in any spaces with Tulips picked from other gardens and put in bottles. At every fourth flower, candles are set into the ground at the same height as the tulips, and the pathways are decorated with cages of all sorts of birds.
        “‘All the trellis-work is bordered with flowers in vases, and lit up by a vast number of crystal lamps of various colours. Greenery is brought in from the woods roundabout and used as a background behind the trellises. The colours and reflections of the lights in mirrors makes a marvelous effect. The illuminations are accompanied by noisy music and Turkish music lasts through all the nights that the tulips are in flower.’” (1999-2000 catalog)

Bone Shavings & Hartshorn: Victorian Tips on Forcing

        In his 1863 Flowers for the Parlor and Garden, popular Victorian garden writer E. S. Rand gave some unusual tips for forcing hyacinths:
       “If small bits of powdered charcoal be mixed with the earth, it imparts great depth and brilliancy of color to the flowers, and a dark, rich green to the foliage. Bone shavings or horn scrapings assist a full development of foliage and flower. If the plants are watered once a fort-night with a very weak solution of glue, or a few drops of hartshorn added to the water, the same effect will be produced.” (1999-2000 catalog)

Why Save Old Bulbs?

        In Vegetables and Fruits: A Guide to Heirloom Varieties (1998), Suzanne DeMuth offers some thoughtful reflections:
       “In the end, the question of whether old or new varieties are ‘better’ remains elusive, since the answer implies values and priorities. Better for whom, and for what purposes? . . . Growing old varieties allows people to express their individual preferences, and their . . . beliefs about what is worth sustaining. As Carolyn Jabs has put it: ‘In a world . . . changing so rapidly, one of the most meaningful things we can preserve . . . is a full range of possibilities.’
       “More than seventy-five years ago, Liberty Hyde Bailey asked . . . , ‘Why do we need so many kinds of apples?’ His answer: ‘Because there are so many folks.’ . . . Bailey anticipated the view of modern heirloom stewards when he stated that ‘. . . there is merit in variety itself. It provides more contact with life, and leads away from uniformity and monotony.’” (1999-2000 catalog)

Forcing Bulbs in Freezing Bedrooms: Canada, circa 1869

        If you’ve ever had any trouble forcing bulbs, this letter from 1869 New Brunswick will help put your problems in perspective and introduce you – across the centuries – to Juliana Ewing, a young woman with the enthusiasm and undaunted spirit of a true gardener.
       “I have been much more successful this year than last. 1st – Our little house will keep out the extreme frost & the other one we lived in last year would not. We used to carry the hyacinth pots up to bed with us – put them round the stove – and bury them in dressing gowns, &c., but the poor things were frozen and thawed – over & over again!!
       “2dly – Last year I bought my bulbs here, & they were not first-rate I think. This year . . . I got them from Carter & Sons at Home. They were not kept dry enough & when I got them mould had begun. I lost all the aconites – & anemones – & almost all the snowdrops & crocuses – but my hyacinths & narcissi & tulips were none the worse. . . .
       “I planted them in leaf mould & sand just as I used to do at home, kept them in my dress closet in my room for their dark month, & brought them out by degrees into my ‘forcing house’!!!! This is the tiny ‘landing’ at the top of the stairs. It has a window – & what is called a ‘dumb stove’ – i.e. a ‘drum’ or box of iron through which the pipe of the hall stove runs – & which thus warms the upper part of the house. The window is very near it, & on the window sill I force my bulbs! But every night I have to move them from the glass (though we have double windows) – as if a ‘snap’ of increased frost came, I might lose them one & all. Our house is very warm, & they would probably be safe 6 nights in 7 – but if one doesn’t do it always one is apt to forget on the cold nights – & I have lost one hyacinth – my only rose – & some other things already, besides by poor Calla Ethiopica which was just looking grand!!
       “. . . I only treated myself to 3 polyanthus [tazetta] narcissi – all Soleil d’Or – & put the 3 bulbs in one pot. They sent up 4 stems & I have counted 29 blossoms. I had one exquisite blush single hyacinth (name lost) which sent up a stem with 18 very large bells. The same bulb has now sent up a second stem with 9 bells quite as large as the others . . . . In the same pot was a single white faintly tinged with yellow (Rosseau) also very fine. The first stalk bore 18 bells & the 2d seems to have 30 – but I can hardly be certain yet – they are so closely packed. That makes 75 bells from the 2 bulbs in one pot. I only had 9 hyacinths – they have certainly fully repaid me. I never had such blooms as some of them, I think. I lost one – gave one away – & the other 7 have been a great enjoyment to me . . . .
       “I am proud of my bulbs.”
       Letter 76, Feb. 23, 1869, in Canada Home: Juliana Horatia Ewing’s Fredericton Letters, 1867-1869 (1999-2000 catalog)

Dear Mr. Jefferson: Letters from a Nantucket Gardener

        I love this book, and not just because we’re in it! It’s a collection of musing garden essays cast as letters to Jefferson, that soul-mate of all American gardeners. Though they focus on author Laura Simon’s ample kitchen garden, these lively, wide-ranging letters are really about the deep pleasures – and meaning – of all gardening. They’re full of American garden history, too, including our bulbs. Laura has been a “friend and partner” of OHG since our earliest days. (1998-99 catalog)

Garden Wisdom from E. A. Bowles

        One of the greatest bulb connoisseurs of the twentieth century, E. A. Bowles was also an insightful gardener. In his 1914 My Garden in Spring, he writes:
       “Right letting alone and right meddling are the beginning and the ending of good gardening, and . . . the simplest effects are just precisely those which defy money and ambition and effort and everything but tireless patience, attention, and knowledge bought at first hand with pain.” (1998-99 catalog)

Garden Wisdom from Gertrude Jekyll

        Gertrude Jekyll may have been the most influential gardener of the twentieth century. Here’s one of her simple planting techniques that I’ve found very helpful in my own gardening, as explained in Judith Tankard and Martin Wood’s fine Gertrude Jekyll at Munstead Wood:
        “One of the secrets of the border’s success [at Jekyll’s home] lay in the style of planting. All her borders were habitually planted in ‘long rather than block-shaped patches’ because, as she observed, ‘a thin long planting does not leave an unsightly empty space when the flowers are done’ [or the bulbs’ foliage is yellowing], especially if the borders were built up in layers, using long narrow-shaped drifts that interlocked and overlapped one another.” (1998-99 catalog)

Grandma Says: Those Aren’t Daffodils, They’re Jonquils!

        Our good customer Nancy Foster of Clemson, South Carolina, writes:
       “My grandmother (born 1884) called daffodils such as ‘Avalanche’ and ‘Laurens Koster’ ‘narcissus’ (as opposed to ‘paperwhites’) and all the yellow ones ‘jonquils.’ ‘Daffodils,’ on the other hand, were just something in a Wordsworth poem. Thanks for providing me with the ‘real’ narcissus and jonquils so precious to my childhood!” (1998-99 catalog)

Recollections of Bulbs in an Early-1800s Garden

        Recalling the gardens of her childhood home in Connecticut, Lydia Sigourney (born in 1791) published this description in her 1867 Letters of Life. Notice how many bulbs are included!
        “The southern [garden] stretched out in view of the windows of the parlor, where we usually sat. There were the flowers, transposed in an old-fashioned parterre, or knot – a diamond shaped bed in the center – with its chief glory, a rich crimson peony, surrounded by others in angles and parallelograms, whose dark mould [soil] was sprinkled with every tint and perfume, in their season.
        “There flourished the amaryllis family, white and orange-colored; the queenly damask-rose, the deep-red, the pale-cheeked, and the sweet briar; tulips in gorgeous and varied robes, the protean sweet-william, the aspiring lark-spur, the proud crown imperial, the snowdrop, the narcissus, and the hyacinth, so prompt to waken the Spring’s first call, side by side with the cheerful [pot] marigold, braving the frost-kiss; pinks in profusion, and a host of personified flowers, peeped out of their tufted homes like nested birds: the beauty by night, the ragged lady, the mourning window, and the mottled guinea hen [Fritillaria meleagris].
        “The dahlias had not then appeared with their countless varieties, but the asters instituted a secondary order of nobility; coxcombs and soldiers in green rejoiced in their gay uniform; the borders were enriched with shrubbery, tastefully disposed, at whose feet ran the happy blue-bell and the bright-eyed hearts-ease, intent with a few other lowly friends on turning every crevice to account, and making the waste places beautiful. . . .”
       Thanks to our colleague and customer Christie White of Old Sturbridge Village for sharing this fascinating document with us. (1998-99 catalog)

A Measure of What We’ve Lost

        In his 1930 Bulbs for American Gardens, John Wister laments a trend which, for the most part, has only gotten worse since then. He writes:
       “In 1874 the [Krelage] firm was growing the following number of varieties, a list which will appear astounding to modern gardeners: Tulips 2200, Gladiolus 2000, Hyacinths 1700, Iris 900, Peonies 900, Amaryllis 500, Crocus, Narcissus, Anemones, Ranunculus, Lilies, Dahlias, and Ixias, each 300; Cannas 200, Begonias 150, Hardy Orchids 100, Fritillarias 100, Scillas 80, Oxalis 60. What modern nursery can be found which is growing such great quantities of so many varieties of plants?” (1997 catalog)

A.H. Ladd’s Garden Book, 1888-1895

        Alexander Ladd of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, loved tulips and planted them by the thousands. In this fascinating garden diary Ladd recorded with affection the mundane details of seven years in his Victorian garden which survives today under the care of the Moffat-Ladd House Museum. Many of his entries deal with tulips – including our ‘Duc van Tols’ and ‘Prince of Austria’ – which he dug and stored for the summer in baskets in his basement. Supplementary essays and a complete plant list add to the value of this rare document published by the Moffatt-Ladd House Museum. (1997 catalog)

What was Joseph Annin Growing in Upstate NY in 1845?

        “Mr. Gage reached home yesterday and handed over your very liberal package of Jewelry, Pocket-Books, Knife, and more precious than all an assortment of Bulbs.”
        So begins an extraordinary letter from 1845 that survives today in the Big Springs Museum of Caledonia, New York. It was written by Joseph Annin of Le Roy, NY, to his brothers in Boston.
        “It was a rich treat for me to see the Bulbs,” it continues, “and Catherine, Charles and Sarah were almost carried away with delight upon opening their presents . . . .
        “. . . I send you a hasty Sketch. Notice that your Bulbs are in the front rank and in the most conspicuous place in the Garden . . . . If they do as well as my old bulbs I shall soon [have] a fine lot of them from the nine that you sent.”
        Annin’s “hasty Sketch” is a map of his garden which includes – all in small-town New York in 1845! – tulips (43 “bunches”), hyacinths, daffodils, jonquils, polyanthus (tazetta) narcissus, snowdrops, crocus, crown imperials, lily-of-the-valley, purple gladiolus, red gladiolus, (chances are one or both of these are Byzantine glads), and “Orange, Yellow, White, White Japan, Double Red, Tiger,” and L. superbum lilies.
        Thanks to Cynthia Howk for sharing this rare glimpse of the past with us! (1996 catalog)

No Need to Wait for a Tuberose Revival

        Regarding tuberoses and fashion, I couldn’t have said it better than F.F. Rockwell did in his 1927 Book of Bulbs:
        “It is hard to understand why this really excellent summer-flowering bulb, with its permeating fragrance . . . should have fallen off, as it has, in its popularity. Possibly some day it will meet with a ‘revival,’ as have so many of the other flowers of ‘Grandmother’s garden;’ but those who grow things for their intrinsic value, rather than because they may happen to be ‘in style,’ need not wait for that day.” (1996 catalog)

Sourcebook of Cultivar Names by Art Tucker and Scott Kunst

        It’s hard to discover when a plant was introduced or first grown in gardens. Books, nurseries, and the plants themselves rarely tell you. So Art Tucker of Delaware State University and I set out to track down “check lists” and other references that included this information. We found some 900 for over 300 genera, and all are cited in this special issue of Arnoldia, the journal of Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum, which can now be downloaded for free. Essentially a 64-page bibliography, it’s dry reading but a gold mine for anyone researching the history of plants. (1995 catalog)

Paradisi in Sole Paradisus Terrestris by John Parkinson

        Often called one of the great herbals, this landmark work from 1629 is actually the first illustrated book in English devoted mainly to ornamental plants. Nearly 1000 are described – including the “Great Nonesuch Daffodil” and the “Lesser Purple Flame Coloured Crocus” – and there are over 800 quaint but accurate woodblock illustrations. Republished by Dover Press under the title A Garden of Pleasant Flowers, it’s a feast for old-flower lovers! (1995 catalog)

In Praise and Defense of Early Tulips

        Louise Beebe Wilder was one of America’s most popular garden writers in the early twentieth century. In What Happens in My Garden, published in 1935, she writes in defense of Single Early tulips. (See our Tulip Comparison Chart to find some for your garden today!)
        “The Tulips known as ‘Early’ do not by any means receive the recognition that their special comeliness and usefulness merit. So many, so marvelous . . . are the Darwins, Breeders, and the Cottage varieties of the later season [which today are all lumped together as Single Lates] that too often the early-flowering kinds are quite overlooked. . . .
        “They suffer too . . . by association in our minds with pots and geometrical bedding, for which they are indeed ideally adapted. But these are not the only roles they are capable of filling with grace and distinction . . . There is a pleasant surprise awaiting those who cast precedent aside and allow this type of Tulip to play a more gracious and less formal part in the spring scene. . . .
        “I have found too, that several years of good service may be had of these early Tulips without lifting and with only a slight diminution of size, if the soil in which they are planted has not been too heavily and freshly manured. This slight falling off in size indeed seems to me no drawback, for just as I like Hyacinths best when a few years of border life have reduced their obese opulence, so I like Tulips (this is rank heresy, I know) when they have lost something of their self-conscious hugeness and take their places a bit more simply in the garden scene. . . .” (1995 catalog)

Bulb Rustling – with Sensitivity

        “Another tried-and-true way to obtain daffodils is to take a weekend trip through older communities.” writes Scott Ogden, author of Garden Bulbs for the South, in an article in the March 1998 edition of Gardens and More. “Many varieties can be located in bloom and gardeners often will sell or trade their plants. Occasionally, vacant lots will be found with numerous bulbs that can be moved to your garden, and residents in expanding cities and suburbs should always be on the watch to see what can be saved from the bulldozer.”
        I’d only add (as I know Scott would) that “bulb rustling” should always be done with permission and sensitivity. I believe historic plants are akin to endangered species and should be approached with comparable ethics and care. Let your enthusiasm be tempered by the recognition that a plant that seems terribly “at risk” has probably already survived right where it is for decades if not generations – which is more than most of us can guarantee in our own gardens. Always collect the smallest possible sample, and never jeopardize the continued existence of the original plant. (1995 catalog)

What Do You Have Against Hyacinths?

        Hyacinths are the most endangered of historic garden bulbs, in part because too many gardeners still stereotype them as “formal” and “stiff.” May I suggest looking at them as “quaint” instead? As John Wister, the great Philadelphia plantsman, wrote in his popular Bulbs for Home Gardens of 1930:
        “Few flowers have suffered more unjustly at the hands of the American gardening public – unjustly because they have been banned from countless gardens for no fault of their own, but on account of the revulsion of taste against the circles, half-moons, crescents, stars, and other atrocities that were cut in lawns in bygone days and filled with Hyacinths.
        “Big or little, white, pink, blue, or yellow, the Hyacinth is a lovely flower when used with discretion or restraint. To condemn it for the bad company it kept generations ago is . . . narrow-minded. . . .
        “Don’t be afraid of Hyacinths. Try them and see how many different garden positions suit them . . . . But don’t be without this early and delightfully fragrant flower.” (1995 catalog)

On Daffodils and Ecstasy, 1916

        Though some may say Louise Beebe Wilder gets a little carried away here in this excerpt from her 1916 classic, My Garden, many of you will know just how she feels. She writes:
        “When one comes to Daffodils, it is difficult to write with moderation or even to think connectedly – one wants to go into ecstasies and to run, in spirit, from one sunshiny group to another inhaling the ineffable wet-earth-and-sun perfume which is their birthright. . . .
        “It was Mahamet who said more than a thousand years ago, ‘He that hath two cakes of bread, let him sell one of them and buy Narcissus, for bread is food for the body but Narcissus is food for the soul.’ And verily it is true – food for the soul and delight for the eyes, these gleaming things lying like patches of light among the fallen Cherry Blossoms, glorifying the brown earth, and lifting the most sodden into a rarer atmosphere. Daffodil time is the very height of spring, the epitome of springing youth and hope.” (1995 catalog)

Day One: Scott’s Letter to the World on the Cover of Our Very First Catalog

        In 1993, with high hopes, Scott mailed 500 copies of his first catalog – three pages of brightly colored paper photocopied at Kinko’s. It offered a grand total of ten daffodils, eight hyacinths, and twelve tulips. Though Old House Gardens has changed a lot since then, his vision and our mission remain unwavering:
        “Welcome to Old House Gardens’ first-ever catalog of antique bulbs!
        “For ten years I have been working as a landscape historian, researching and helping preserve historic landscapes and plants.
        “During this time, hundreds of people have asked me, “What plants are right for our old house – or museum?” and “Where can we get them?” At the same time, unfortunately, many antiques varieties have been disappearing from commerce.
        “This catalog is an effort to help preserve historic bulbs by making them – and information about them – more widely available. (Of course, I also hope to have some fun and make a little profit.)
        “What if you don’t have an old garden? No problem. Besides being historic, these bulbs are wonderful. They have thrived and delighted gardeners for generations, sometimes centuries. To any garden, they can bring a more-than-modern diversity of colors, forms, and scents – and a touch of the past.
        “I welcome your support. (Please send money!)”

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