America's Romance with the English Garden

by Thomas J. Mickey

Overview

Named one of “the year’s best gardening books” by The Spectator (UK, Nov. 2014)

The 1890s saw a revolution in advertising. Cheap paper, faster printing, rural mail delivery, railroad shipping, and chromolithography combined to pave the way for the first modern, mass-produced catalogs. The most prominent of these, reaching American households by the thousands, were seed and nursery catalogs with beautiful pictures of middle-class homes surrounded by sprawling lawns, exotic plants, and the latest garden accessories—in other words, the quintessential English-style garden.

America’s Romance with the English Garden is the story of tastemakers and homemakers, of savvy businessmen and a growing American middle class eager to buy their products. It’s also the story of the beginnings of the modern garden industry, which seduced the masses with its images and fixed the English garden in the mind of the American consumer. Seed and nursery catalogs delivered aspirational images to front doorsteps from California to Maine, and the English garden became the look of America.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780821420355
Publisher:	Ohio University Press
Publication date:	04/17/2013
Edition description:	1
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.60(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Thomas J. Mickey is Professor Emeritus of Communication Studies at Bridgewater State University, Bridgewater, Massachusetts. He is a graduate of the Boston Architectural College’s Landscape Institute, a Master Gardener, and a garden columnist. His other books include America’s Romance with the English Garden, from Ohio University Press, and Best Garden Plants for New England.

Editorial Reviews

Nursery catalogues sell more than seeds and plants; they also sell dreams and aspirations. In this examination of more than a hundred years of commercial garden catalogues, communications professor Mickey (Best Garden Plants for New England) describes how American gardeners were seduced by 19th-century English gardening aesthetics. The English influence was first felt during the Colonial period, when English and American enthusiasts exchanged plant material and landscaping treatises. In the 19th century, new technologies allowed American seed and plant merchants to mass produce and distribute illustrated sales catalogues. The English plant and design preferences that were pictured on these colorful pages quickly became the standard by which American gardeners planned their gardens. A quintessentially English garden, featuring a sweeping lawn, collections of flowering shrubs, and perennial borders, became the ideal that was widely sought after. This Anglophilia is still strongly felt in American horticulture and is reflected in the (nearly) homogenous suburban landscapes across the American continent. We can trace 21st-century lawns and annual beds in sunny California from the images in 19th-century advertisements. Mickey has thoughtfully woven together an American landscape design history with a critical examination of how commercial interests and mass media shape our preferences, even in our humble backyards. Color illus. throughout. (June)

Publishers Weekly

Nursery catalogues sell more than seeds and plants; they also sell dreams and aspirations…. Mickey has thoughtfully woven together an American landscape design history with a critical examination of how commercial interests and mass media shape our preferences, even in our humble backyards.”—Publishers Weekly


“This is an illuminating book packed with very readable results of dedicated and thoughtful research. It helps give a greater understanding of how and why English garden style has been admired in North America for such a long time.”—Gardens Illustrated


“Mickey convincingly demonstrates how catalog companies used advances in color printing, rural postal service, and railroad networks to reach a mass audience, uniformly promote the English ideal, and create demand for their own products. Thoroughly researched and footnoted, the book includes examples from powerful and enduring catalogs such as Burpee's but also from lesser-known and regional seed companies, including some from the burgeoning West.” —Library Journal


“In his wonderfully enlightening book, Thomas J. Mickey describes how the garden of this early period in this country became a cultural symbol for the American middle class. Also this period of our history was when our fascination with expanses of green lawn originated.If you read America’s Romance with the English Garden, you will be glad that you did. Better still, you could share it with a fellow gardening Anglophile.”—Focus on Flowers, Indiana Public Media


“America’s Romance with the English Garden is a must for gardening history collections, highly recommended.”—The Midwest Book Review


“A penetrating look at the standardized English garden’s grip on the American imagination.”—Ted Steinberg, author of American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn


“This is an illuminating book packed with very readable results of dedicated and thoughtful research. It helps give a greater understanding of how and why English garden style has been admired in North America for such a long time.” — Gardens Illustrated

From the Publisher