You are here:   Home > Home & Shopping > Garden

Nature Illustrated: Flowers, Plants, and Trees, 1550-1900

The New York Public Library has an extensive series of collections relating to nature, Nature Illustrated: Flowers, Plants, and Trees, 1550-1900: Thousands of art and scientific prints, illustrating medicinal plants, spectacular garden flowers, exotic tropical blooms, trees and ferns. Includes many different printmaking techniques, from woodcuts to stipple engravings to color-printed lithographs.

One of those collections is "A curious herbal, containing five hundred cuts of the most useful plants, which are now used in the practice of physick."

A collection of roses from nature.

Illustrations of Himalayan plants : chiefly selected from drawings made for the late J.F. Cathcart, Esq.re of the Bengal Civil Service / the descriptions and analyses by J.D. Hooker (1855)

Les liliacées / par P.J. Redouté.  (1805-1816)

The Orchidaceæ of Mexico & Guatemala / by Jas Bateman, esqre.  ([1837-43])

Vegetable materia medica of the United States; or, Medical botany: containing a botanical, general, and medical history of medicinal plants indigenous to the United States. Illustrated by coloured eng....  (1818-25)

Pomona Britannica ; or, A collection of the most esteemed fruits...with the blossoms and leaves...  (1812)

Talking Plants

Talking Plants is Ketzel Levine's blog about plants. She's studied horticulture and landscape design and has been known as NPR's 'Doyenne of Dirt' in the past.

Following that assignment, "In 2007, Levine began reporting on the world's flora for the NPR series, Climate Connections, a year-long assignment that will take her to places as varied as a dairy farm in Vermont to an ancient cave in Hawaii. She's also recently launched her own NPR blog, Talking Plants, where her trademark wit and irreverence — and her passion for plants — will have free reign."

Here's a bit from her blog about an elusive orchid on Kaua'i, Hawaii:

The Little Green Orchid That Could

It wasn't a very big plant, maybe 20 inches high. The chances of spotting it were absolutely nil. But Steve Perlman of the National Tropical Botanical Garden had seen this rare orchid years ago, before it was dwarfed by knee-high shrubs. So it wasn't entirely miraculous — but it was pretty damn impressive — when he found it growing the middle of a wind-swept, fogged-in swamp.

His timing was perfect; the orchid was ripe for picking. So he carefully removed a couple of pregnant pods for safekeeping, each filled with hundreds of dust-sized seeds.

Read the rest of the The Little Green Orchid that Could post at the Talking Plants blog.

Article

Ferida Wolff, Buddleia Isn’t Just for Butterflies: Instead of landing on the flower, it hovered, its wings quivering like a hummingbird. When we looked closer, we saw that it had antennae and a tongue that reached out and sucked up the nectar. What was this creature?

Excerpt

NPR has run an excerpt from Richard Preston's book, The Wild Trees; A Story of Passion and Daring published by Random House. Here's just a bit of that excerpt:

No one knows exactly when or where the redwood entered the history of life on earth, though it is an ancient kind of tree, and has come down to our world as an inheritance out of deep time. A redwood has furrowed, fibrous bark, and a tall, straight trunk. It has soft, flat needles that become short and spiky near the top of the tree. The tree produces seeds but does not bear flowers. The seeds of a redwood are released from cones that are about the size of olives. The heartwood of the tree is a dark, shimmery red in color, like old claret. The wood has a lemony scent, and is extremely resistant to rot.

Redwoods grow in valleys and on mountains along the coast of California, mostly within ten miles of the sea. They reach enormous sizes in the mild, rainy climate of the northern stretches of the coast. Parts of the North Coast of California are covered with temperate rain forest. A rain forest is usually considered to be a forest that gets at least eighty inches of rain a year, and parts of the North Coast get more than that. A temperate rain forest has a cool, moist, even climate, not too hot or cold. Redwoods flourish in fog, but they don't like salt air. They tend to appear in valleys that are just out of sight of the sea. In their relationship with the sea, redwoods are like cats that long to be stroked but are shy to the touch. The natural range of the coast redwoods begins at a creek in Big Sur that flows down a mountain called Mount Mars. From there, the redwoods run up the California coast in a broken ribbon, continuing to just inside Oregon. Fourteen miles up the Oregon coast, in the valley of the Chetco River, the redwoods stop.

Read the rest of the excerpt at NPR's site. On another page is the interview with Preston as he describes being up in a redwood canopy. He also says of the redwoods in his interview:

Layers of soil sitting on the limbs — layers that can be up to a meter deep, filled with organisms and then small trees growing on the branches of redwood trees. Trees of many different species — these are bonsai of the canopy.

These are trees growing out of the limbs of redwoods, so these trees have trees growing on them?

Yes. Thickets of huckleberry bushes, with ripe berries hanging in them if it happens to be in the fall. And you can stop and rest and eat the berries. Flowering Rhododendrons, Laurel trees, Hemlocks, Spruce trees, all growing in little places in nooks and crannies on the giant redwood. It's an ecosystem in the air.

NOVA's First Flower

PBS' NOVA "explores the incredible truth that lies behind the ravishing flowers we so love to behold: that humans could not have existed or evolved without them. First Flower probes the controversial discovery of Archaefructus, a Chinese fossil scientists believe is the earliest evidence of a flower yet found on Earth. Following the trail of clues to the fossil's origins, a vivid journey takes NOVA's cameras deep into the lush wilds of China, giving audiences a view into a spectacular living safety deposit box, where some of the world's most beloved flowers originated (see Mother of Gardens)."

Those of you who are aware of Dan Hinkley (and his nursery Heronswood) will be glad to see him return to the public eye searching for a rare lily found only in one small region of China.

There's also an interactive feature consisting of video clips, fossil images, and drawings of the Archaefructus. Another slide show displays the transplants from China that now populate many areas: rhododendrons, forsythias, magnolias, camellias, primroses, viburnums. Lastly, there's a matching game identifying pollinators with their plants.

Ms. Potter and the Linnean Society

From the website of the Linnean Society of London:

"Before she took up writing children’s books it is clear that Beatrix had the mind of a professional scientist and biologist.  She contributed a paper on mycology to the Linnean Society on 1 April 1897 entitled 'Germination of the Spores of the Agraricinae.'  She followed this up in correspondence with Charles McIntosh on the problems of fungal hybridization.  Other scientific fields in which she was clearly interested included palaeontology where she enjoyed collecting fossils.  She also collected and drew insects, but like her archaeological paintings this appears to have been a more recreational or artistic pursuit rather than a serious scientific study.  Finally it seems that she put this creativity into breeding Herdwick sheep on her Lake District Farm.

Professor Brian Gardiner

8th January 2007

"Beatrix Potter is probably best known to the world for her beautifully illustrated children’s books.  She is much less well-known for her scientific work, particularly on the study of fungi.

"The Linnean Society published an article entitled “Helen Beatrix Potter: 1. Her interest in fungi”, by Roy Watling (The Linnean, January, 2000). 

If you're interested, you can read some highlights from this paper at the site or the full paper.

In addition, you can see the movie about Beatrix Potter.

Chrysanthemums on the Eastern Hedge; Gardens and Plants in Chinese Art

The Huntington Library is a research and educational center set amidst 120 acres in San Marino, California founded in 1919 by railroad and real estate developer Henry Edwards Huntington and opened to the public in 1928.

In addition to the Library, the Botanical Gardens span nearly 150 acres with sweeping lawns and vistas interspersed with statuary, tempiettos, and benches. Approximately 15,000 kinds of plants from all over the world make up the botanical collections, many landscaped into a series of theme gardens.

An exhibit about flowers in Chinese Art may be viewed in a pdf form providing a guide in both English and Chinese about objects in the exhibit. An essay on the exhibit is also available:

The title of this exhibition, Chrysanthemums on the Eastern Hedge, is taken from a work by the famous Chinese poet Tao Yuanming (365-427). Protesting the inequities he witnessed while in government service, Tao retired to his garden. There, he planted his favorite flower, the unpretentious chrysanthemum. Tao’s simple garden has come to represent the perfect retreat of a man of principle.

The art of garden building in China has long been considered an artistic endeavor, encompassing the composition of scenic views, landscapes, floral colors, literary references, and much more. The artworks in this exhibition illuminate some of the hidden cultural meanings that are richly embedded in The Huntington’s garden and its cultivated plants.

In China, fine porcelain was made to satisfy the demanding tastes of the imperial family and wealthy clients. Floral designs were used not just for their beauty but for the meanings they had acquired. The delicate paintings of the blue fruit and flower sprays on the late 15th century yellow dish in the exhibition all are identifiable and selected for conveying auspicious messages. Pomegranates and lotus pods, with their plentiful seeds, signify an abundance of progeny. The lotus blossom, arising pristine from muddy water, stands for purity. And the peaches, long associated with the immortals, represent longevity. These symbols are part of a visual vocabulary for plants that had developed in China long ago.

Fruits and Flowers of Winter

Elements of the LuEsther T. Mertz Library from New York's Botanical Garden are featured this exhibit:

Fruits and Flowers of Winter features items drawn from the Mertz Library’s rare books, folios, archival materials, manuscripts, and original artwork, exploring the pageantry of winter’s beauty.

In 1712, Joseph Addison, an English essayist wrote in his a daily paper, The Spectator, an article introducing the concept of the all-green winter garden whose “trees only as never cast their leaves.” Addison contrived a winter garden saying, “there is something unspeakably cheerful in a spot of ground which is cover’d with trees that smile amidst all the rigour of winter, and give us a view of the most gay season . . .”

The exhibition features more than 60 splendid works of botanical illustration that brighten and illuminate the season. Seventeenth-century items illustrate advances in hothouse construction, enabling the growth of fruits and flowers indoors in winter. Exotic plants collected for local and foreign trade during this period of exploration enriched the collections of botanical gardens and private horticulturists. A rare post revolutionary era New York City plantsman’s account ledger provides a glimpse of the number of exotic ornamentals from Europe and Asia, recently brought into the trade, and being kept the winter for a fee.

Some examples from the online exhibit:

Corridor, a Humphry Repton hand-colored aquatint; Pinus Cembra, a T.A. Bischoff hand-colored engraving; Limon Cedrato, 1699, an engraving by Johann Christoph Volkamer

Garden Scrapbook & The American Garden Museum

An online exhibition features 15 black and white images from the scrapbook of Lois Travis Thornton, made up of magazine images she collected. The designs particularly represent what is characterized as New England garden designs and trends from 1920 to 1940.

The images have the kind of photographic quality seen in movies from that period as though they were the sets from Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House.

The site hosting Mrs. Thornton's scrapbook is the American Garden Museum, providing inspiring images of their own: pathways, gates, benches, fountains, ornaments.

The Museum asks for your garden stories as well as three photographic images you care to include:

"The American Garden Museum wants to hear your story: be it a cherished childhood memory, or something profound or amusing; perhaps the trials and tribulations of gardening in northern zones, or even a valuable garden tip. Consider honouring your neighbour or friend’s garden — it is not every day that an individual’s efforts get recognized in a museum!"

"The American Garden Museum is a working archive that celebrates American gardens and their gardeners. The Museum highlights gardens big and small, urban and rural, gentle and outrageous, wildly expensive and affordable. It does not, however, support competitions, or pass judgment on the aesthetic or technical merit of any garden. It simply collects and shares American garden stories and pictures."

Orchids & John Day Scrapbooks

The Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew outside London hold a stunning archive of orchid illustrations. For the online exhibition, 73 images are included in The Romance of Orchid Discovery; The John Day Scrapbooks. The exhibit is divided into four sections: Tropical America and Asia, Europe and Afro-Madagascar, John Day's Orchids.

The New York Botanical Garden describes the current book detailing Day's paintings thusly:

"John Day (1824-1888) was one of the richest and most famous orchid growers in Europe. No amateur of his time possessed a greater knowledge of orchids. Day illustrated over 2,300 orchids, bound together in 53 scrapbooks. These watercolor and ink illustrations now form one of the most important botanical archives in the world."

"The Day collection includes the earliest hybrid slipper orchids, odontoglossums and cattleyas plants that no longer survive but which were important ancestors of modern orchid hybrids."

Fortunately, the online exhibit can be enjoyed without cost. And, it's glorious. The Botanical Garden also presents a page section on Orchidaceae:

Orchids have been cultivated at Kew for more than two centuries and orchid research dates back to the time of Joseph Banks, who was studying them at the end of the 18th Century.

Today the orchid science group is a multi-disciplinary team, who work together to advance orchid knowledge, promote orchid conservation and improve access to the collections. In addition to the familiar living collection, there are herbarium and library collections, and also the Kew DNA Bank, which currently contains over 4000 orchid specimens.

Landscape Architecture

From the magazine's article,The Cornerstone Garden Festival brings Chaumont to northern California:

Designers for other garden festivals, such as those at Chaumont, Grand-Métis in Québec, or Westonbirt in Britain, are largely chosen by competition. At Cornerstone, by contrast, Hougie selected and invited the designers to participate under Walker’s guidance. Cornerstone is conceived more in the spirit of a museum, with its outdoor galleries holding a permanent collection along with some of the garden rooms functioning as rotating gallery exhibitions. As a design showcase, Cornerstone hearkens back to the classic garden shows at Hampton Court or the Chelsea Flower Show. Its location in California also suggests connections to Sunset magazine’s demonstration gardens. But these gardens are not intended to showcase the possibilities for residential design. The ambition is grander.

Hougie brought an outsider’s enthusiasm to the project. He did not offer any proscription to the chosen designers other than that they were free to do what they would like and a suggestion that they “invent something new.” If the results had a practical application, that was fine, but it was not the goal. The aspiration was to expand and explore the possibilities of garden design, to make visitors think but have a good time while doing so.

Fortunately, one can physically enter all of the gardens at Cornerstone, unlike many at Chaumont that prohibit entry and restrict visitors to a single viewpoint. The professional community has applauded the project, but the public has loved it, and it is gradually building an audience. For Hougie, what’s appealing is that “it’s alive,” people participate in it and walk through it, and “like a park, it’s really fun.”

Read the article at Landscape Architecture Magazine

A Curious Herbal

Turn the pages of Elizabeth Blackwell's A Curious Herbal at the British Library to reveal the marvelous illustrations and descriptions of herbals and their medicinal uses. The feature not only has the original text, it has a readable version and audio as well as a magnification tool

The introduction informs that Elizabeth Blackwell was born in Aberdeen, Scotland in about 1700, but moved to London after she married. She undertook this ambitious project to raise money to pay her husband's debts and release him from debtors' prison.

Blackwell's Herbal was an unprecedented enterprise for a woman of her time. She drew, engraved and coloured the illustrations herself, mostly using plant specimens from the Chelsea Physic Garden.

The Herbal was issued in weekly parts between 1737 and 1739, each part containing four illustrated plates and a page of text. It was highly praised by leading physicians and apothecaries (makers and sellers of medicines) and made enough money to secure her husband's freedom.

Lost Gardens

The British Library has put together a virtual tour of the online exhibit, Lost Gardens. From the Garden of Eden to more secular displays, the themed tour takes one on a historical garden adventure. We have taken text from the Library's well documented and written site.

Buttons embedded on the maps expand in great detail and references our knowledge about ancient gardens. One such 'button' is the Beatus Map of 1106:

This world map comes from a beautifully illuminated copy of Beatus of Liébana's ‘Commentary on the Apocalypse of St John’, a religious text from the 8th century held in high esteem by medieval Christians. This copy was made at the Spanish Monastery of San Domingo de Silos in 1106, a time when the monastery’s scriptorium was producing some of its finest work.

Throughout medieval times, and even beyond, many believed the lost Garden of Eden was located in the Middle East ... Most writers placed Eden beside the Euphrates and the River Tigris in modern-day Iraq.

Illuminations from medieval manuscripts illustrate two facets of the medieval pleasure garden — the sensual and the intellectual.

The secular counterpart of the hortus conclusus was the hortus deliciarum, the garden of pleasure. It too was enclosed, a space protected from the rigours of everyday life where the wealthy could enjoy cultural amusement and intellectual inspiration.

Both gardens usually had flowery meads, sometimes also called 'strews'. The grass was often raised to form turf seating. Trellises with grape vines and climbing roses were popular. Many pleasure gardens had decorative fountains and pools at their centre, for fish or bathing.

The branches of trees were trained to form shady arbours where ladies could enjoy the air without fear of compromising their complexions by exposure to the sun. A suntan was the sign of the labouring classes: wealthy women aspired to having skin as pale and translucent as alabaster.

An illustration of the Renaissance Garden comes from Giovanni Battista Falda's 1670 book of gardens in Rome: 'Li Giardini di Roma'. It shows the Pontifical Garden on the Quirinale, one of the seven hills of Rome.

The revived classical style was marked by orderliness, symmetry, and carefully observed proportions. These principles were reflected in garden design, which came to be seen as an extension of the architecture of the house. Gardens were compartmentalised into a series of 'rooms' with different uses or themes. Statues lined the pathways between as if they stood in hallways.

Illustrations of John Evelyn's gardening tools demonstrate how narrow the market has become for elaborate implements: gardening teeth, garden compasses made of wood, rammers and beaters of elm, as well as a taravelle fashioned like a crow are just some examples of the tools. The Global Garden section informs as to where what now we view as commonplace plants first originated: Cyclamen, Madonna Lily, Damask, Lobelia and that seasonal flower/leaf, Poinsettia.

How long have we been mowing lawns? Since the invention of the lawn mower by Edwin Budding in 1830. Until then, lawns were cut by scything, a labour-intensive method that often produced uneven results. Budding worked as a textile mill engineer. His lawn mower was inspired by the twin-bladed machine used to trim the nap off newly woven cloth to produce a smooth finish.

Take this marvelous online stroll through history's gardens.

Garden Explorers

'Gentle Reader,

Lo, here a Camera Obscura is presented to thy view,
in which are lights and shades dancing on a whited canvass,
and magnified into apparent life!
if thou art perfectly at leisure for such trivial amusement, walk in,
and view the wonders of my lnchanted Garden'

Erasmus Darwin

So currently begins the PlantExplorers.com site. The membership aspect of the site is explained:

Plant Explorers is a resource for those rare individuals who specialise in photographing or painting plants, and who are willing to travel to the ends of the earth to find the right subject. To help our members accomplish this, we have resource pages with information on equipment, clubs, botanical gardens and even seed sources.

The site contains articles with little known facts such as "The first plant hunting expedition recorded in history was on the orders of Queen Hatshepsut of Egypt, when she dispatched five ships to gather valuable plants, animals and precious goods from the Land of Punt."

Another is a article is on Carl Linnaeus and his plant classification system:

"Although designed to be simple, basing all flowering plant classification on the number of stamens in the bloom, and requiring the botanist to simply count them to determine which group the plant should be placed in, nothing is ever that simple. Through some translations, styles became wives, and stamens husbands, with their groupings being referred to as a marriage. This resulted in some very strange, and occasionally very funny, descriptions."

The resources page includes links for botanical gardens, clubs and associations, equipment and supplies and seeds.

The Tulip Bubble Revisited

We read that a new play on Broadway, How to Build a Better Tulip, is based on an 1850 Alexandre Dumas novel entitled The Black Tulip. Fortunately this novel, along with so many others, is online. Here's an excerpt:

Isaac knew the temperature of his frames to the twentieth part of a degree. He knew the strength of the current of air, and tempered it so as to adapt it to the wave of the stems of his flowers. His productions also began to meet with the favour of the public. They were beautiful, nay, distinguished. Several fanciers had come to see Boxtel's tulips. At last he had even started amongst all the Linnaeuses and Tourneforts a tulip which bore his name, and which, after having travelled all through France, had found its way into Spain, and penetrated as far as Portugal; and the King, Don Alfonso VI. - who, being expelled from Lisbon, had retired to the island of Terceira, where he amused himself, not, like the great Conde, with watering his carnations, but with growing tulips - had, on seeing the Boxtel tulip, exclaimed, "Not so bad, by any means!"

All at once, Cornelius van Baerle, who, after all his learned pursuits, had been seized with the tulipomania, made some changes in his house at Dort, which, as we have stated, was next door to that of Boxtel. He raised a certain building in his court-yard by a story, which shutting out the sun, took half a degree of warmth from Boxtel's garden, and, on the other hand, added half a degree of cold in winter; not to mention that it cut the wind, and disturbed all the horticultural calculations and arrangements of his neighbour.

After all, this mishap appeared to Boxtel of no great consequence. Van Baerle was but a painter, a sort of fool who tried to reproduce and disfigure on canvas the wonders of nature. The painter, he thought, had raised his studio by a story to get better light, and thus far he had only been in the right. Mynheer van Baerle was a painter, as Mynheer Boxtel was a tulip-grower; he wanted somewhat more sun for his paintings, and he took half a degree from his neighbour's tulips.

Landscape images from around the world

Just the words, "Tree Clogged Notch, Near the Southeastern Escarpment of the Fells" tends to excite the gardener in me. A photo of a parterre gardener, a view from a grotto, the gardens at Villandry, unforgettable images from a site, History of Landscape Architecture authored by Kenneth Helphand of the University of Oregon's landscape department.

Nevertheless, we were seduced by the departments: Egypt, Roman, Primitive, Medieval, Agriculture, Islamic, Moghul (think Taj Mahal) and irresistibly, Paradise Gardens. The illustrations are classic, colorful, historic, artistic and marvelous. It's only the beginning of a fading garden year but this will help to bridge the green gap and take you on a trip to gardens both imagined and visited.

Gardening Articles

Landscape Architect

A Website about garden designer Edna Walling consists mainly of material drawn from material from the Edna Walling "Collection, held by the State Library of Victoria, Australia: Walling was an instant success when she began writing for Australian Home Beautiful in the 1920s. Her passion for gardening and her intimate and charming style won her many fans."

Edna Walling's basic design principles were founded on a set of design ethics:

Work with existing landscapes and existing features, such as slopes, rocks and trees

Begin by 'sculpting' the surface of the land, preferably not levelling it

Create a unity between the house and the garden

Use architectural principles to structure the garden and soften with dense planting

Individually design for each house and garden and the needs of the clients

Keep garden maintenance to a minimum

A couple of quotes from Walling's writings will reveal a little her gardening philosophy:

"So much money is spent on the house and then it often is left without any connecting link with the land... The garden should be built first, forming the setting for the house which should then be linked up with it."

"First thoughts on a garden are best inspired by the ground with any feature at all, such as an undulation or a rocky outcrop, there is your inspiration."

The Website has quite a number of garden plans that can be viewed ranging from 1920 up through 1965. Use the magnification lenses on the page to take a closer look (25%, 50% and 100%). Perhaps the plan that will resonate most with SeniorWomen (and Men) is that of a water garden for the famed Australian opera star, Dame Nellie Melba.

Walling's design of houses and an English-style village in Australia is described in an interesting article describing the project of Bickleigh Vale in Mooroolbark and a house at Lorne, East Point.

Articles

"So gardens end with the bishop’s death and with the worms. They end in a hard frost and in a drought. They end where the neighbor’s property begins or at the limit of the drip-irrigation line, or where the woods close in. They end in a view, a wall, a border, a road, a tangle of weeds, a subdivision, or in political turmoil, a change of ownership, a reversal of fortune. They end where energy and money and ideas run out, or where the deer and woodchucks begin. They end in divorce and death. They end most happily by beginning all over again. "

From How Gardens End by Verlyn Klinenborg for Double Take Magazine.

Enlarging the Garden Through Design

"The more elements of interest a garden contains (provided they are harmonious), the more variety of satisfying experiences the garden visitor is provided, thus abolishing an apprehension of limits. It is, however, important that these elements all relate well to each other. Too much unrelated diversity strikes the eye as clutter — and is constricting; so is too much openness with no elements to which the visitor can relate. You can stand in a desert and feel very restricted, whereas well integrated, interesting elements stimulate, expand the experience, and enlarge the sense of space. You can stand in a small, well-made garden and feel it to be unending, so long as there is a rich tapestry of plants in appealing combination, rocks in pleasing groupings, a variety of planes the eye can traverse, or other elements which attract and please."

Read more of a Traditional Building article by Keith Davitt

Garden Edition

"The most frugal way to water a lawn is on an as-needed basis. To tell if Kentucky bluegrass, the most common type of turf, needs water, step on it. If it springs back, there is ample moisture. If it lies flat, it needs water. St. Augustine grass, which is what's used extensively in South Florida, tells you it's thirsty when the blades fold. If you're not sure how long it takes your sprinkler system to deliver one inch of water to your lawn, mark several cups one inch from the bottom of the cup. Set out the cups around your lawn and time how long your sprinklers take to deliver one inch of water to the cups. "

Linda Coyner's April Garden Edition: Water-smart lawns

Garden Edition: June 2002, Water-saving products for the garden, Part II: Superabsorbers

Garden Edition: May 2002, Water-saving products for the garden: soaker hoses

Articles

Certain memories from my childhood replay frequently in my mind like images on a strip of film. In one of these, I am eight years old, walking hand in hand with my father, showing him a small stream and waterfall in a patch of forest on the far edge of our farm. No doubt he had been to this place hundreds of times, but still he allowed me to show it to him as though it were my private secret. Quietly we picked fiddlehead ferns and watercress. My dad would have been in his fifties, and at home on that farm for almost 25 years; I grew up there. Unfortunately, it was part of the story of our lives that we would need to sell the farm just when I was learning of my need to stay.

On a fall day 20 years later, I was on my knees working the soil in a vacant lot in Providence, Rhode Island. The Trust for Public Land, the organization I worked for, had just bought this urban plot on behalf of a local land trust. For most of the morning I worked silently alongside a Laotian woman of about my age. We communicated mostly through laughs and nervous exclamations, as when a truck barreled too close to us through the narrow streets, or when we found a piece of glass or jagged metal buried in the soil. By afternoon, we had cleared almost a quarter acre and we were comfortable enough with one another for her to try her broken English on me. Suke was 28 and had arrived with her two daughters just four months before from a refugee camp on the Thai border; they were waiting for her husband to join her in Providence. While she waited, she gardened. Every day she would walk two miles through a city she didn’t know to a place that had become very important to her. At the end of our time together, Suke held my hand for a moment and told me that this urban garden had made her feel at home in America.

On Finding Home by Peter Forbes, Trust for Public Land

Domi habet hortum et condimenta ad omnis mores maleficos. — Plautus

I wasn't exactly born with a green thumb in my mouth, but I did have the rapacious and meddling tendencies of a gardener when I was a kid in Pennsylvania. We lived in a brick duplex that had an oddly fertile back yard This was most likely because my parents were greeted, on their first visit as proud new homeowners, by a broken sewer main in the basement. As the alleged French drain — just a hole through the concrete floor with no pipe or even gravel underneath — was giving the French a bad name, the resulting two feet of yuck had to be carted up the stairs in buckets and dumped on the lawn out back. This was followed by enough water to dilute the stink, a short quarantine, and that was that. Maybe the Fifties really were a more innocent time. Fortunately, no one got typhoid.

From Ron Sullivan's: A Child's Verse of Gardens

Links

Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University - Founded in 1872, the grounds were planned and designed by the Arboretum's first director, Charles Sprague Sargent, in collaboration with the landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmsted as part of Boston's Emerald Necklace park system. The collection to explore is made up of Larz Anderson Bonsai Collection, the Lilac Collection, the Eleanor Cabot Bradley Collection of Rosaceous Plants, and Chinese Path. There is a specialized collection of books and journals on the plants of the North Temperate Zone and a history of the Arboretum through the lives and contributions of its plant hunters, botanists, and horticulturists.

North American Fruit Explorers, Inc - From NAFEX's opening: "A network of individuals throughout the United States and Canada devoted to the discovery, cultivation and appreciation of superior varieties of fruits and nuts. Founded in 1967 by a small group of pomological hobbyists, NAFEX has grown to an organization of more than 3,000 members, and is chartered as a nonprofit organization in the state of Illinois. Although the ranks of our membership include professional pomologists, nurserymen, and commercial orchardists, NAFEX members are all amateurs in the truest sense of the word; they are motivated by their love of fine fruit. NAFEX members typically work together to help each other by sharing ideas, information, experiences, and propagating material."

Garden Guides - Well-organized menu with advice on planting, harvesting, a discussion group and articles on such topics as 'plant posture', recipes, and disease-proofing.

Heronswood Nursery, Ltd. - An encyclopedic site (buying a book for Latin names is recommended) by an authoritative nursery in Washington. "We search for plants because we love studying our planet. We grow the seeds we collect... We place them in our garden as it is still the driving purpose of my existence. And the surplus ­ our plants, our observations, our garden ­ we offer to you." What more could a gardener wish for? 

Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew - Besides the information available at Kew's home page, this page hosts an enormous number of links to both U.S. and U.K. gardening sites. 

National Gardening Assn Home Page - Weekly gardening tips for your region, a horticultural dictionary, a searchable database of mail-order catalogs and an online, fee-based, gardening course.

The Nature Conservancy - The mission of The Nature Conservancy is to preserve plants, animals and natural communities that represent diversity. Reportedly, they are world's leading private, International conservation group and preserve habitats and species. There is a magazine and a section on the education steps in this field. You can search for your state which allows you to view the projects in terms of location and consider becoming part of that project. 

New York Botanical Garden - A virtual tour of the rose gardens mixed with instructive text about various species and examples of modern and more traditional roses; digitized images of plant specimens, herb and perennial garden displays, information and links, tours to Costa Rica and Holland, Spring 2000. There's a marvelous link to worldwide botanical libraries

Sunshine Farm & Garden - This company describes itself as "a diverse collection of well over 10,000 different, hardy to zone 5 perennials, bulbs, trees and shrubs from every corner of the Earth on our 60-acre mountain top at 3000 feet in beautiful Greenbrier County WV" and as "Rare and Exceptional Plants for the Discriminating Gardener and Collector." The primary focus of plant breeding at SF & G is within the genus Helleborus. Taking the virtual tour of the garden leaves one wishing that your garden, too, resembled Barry Glick's beautifully composed Eden.

UrbanGarden - A Vancouver, British Columbia gardener has provided plants, hints and chores for the urban container gardener, zone 8, by the calendar month. Lovely, restful and to the point. 

ZenGardens - An updated version of the site "dedicated to the gardens of Japan, and more specifically to the historic gardens of Kyoto and its environs. Although many of these gardens are located within Zen monasteries, this site does not explore the influence of Zen Buddhism on Japanese garden design, an influence that is often conjectural at best. Instead, the site is designed to provide the visitor with an opportunity to visit each garden, to move through or around it, to experience it through the medium of high-quality color images, and to learn something of its history."

"The presentation of each garden will include a plan that will help the visitor locate the various positions from which photographs were taken, but one may also make the tour by simply clicking on the 'next' button on each page. Other buttons lead to a longer history of each garden, a general bibliography, a glossary, an overview of the history of early garden design, and a section on the basic elements of Japanese gardens."

The site has quite a bit of history so do peruse the page relating to Early Japanese Gardens: The Asuka, Nara, and Heian Periods. The bibliography page is also helpful for those further examining this form of gardening.

©1999-2007 Tam Martinides Gray for SeniorWomenWeb