The Roots of Flower City: Horticulture, Empire, and the Remaking of Rochester, New York

by Camden Burd

Overview

In The Roots of Flower City, Camden Burd explores the economic and ecological significance of Rochester plant nurserymen over the course of the nineteenth century. As the first boomtown in the United States, Rochester was an embodiment of nineteenth—century market economies and social reform movements. Connected to the eastern seaboard by the Erie Canal, the city's unique economic, cultural, and environmental conditions fostered and sustained a vast and influential commercial plant nursery industry that attracted the nation's most prominent horticulturists and nurserymen.

Rochester—area nurserymen built parks and rural cemeteries, landscaped homes and schools, and promoted horticultural pursuits regionally and nationally. As their influence grew, many of these horticultural entrepreneurs developed into the city's elite and played a leading role in shaping Rochester's economic, social, and physical landscape. Most significantly, nurserymen enthusiastically participated in the American imperial project, selling and distributing fruit, shade, and ornamental trees, shrubs, and flowers across the continent, transforming landscapes and ecologies far beyond New York.

The Roots of Flower City tells the remarkable history of Rochester's outsized influence on the homes, estates, towns, and cities of nineteenth—century America as it weathered economic downturns and competition from other regions. One threat, however, proved to be too much to overcome. As Burd details, the spread of the destructive San Jose scale through the transcontinental plant trade prompted federal legislation that would lead to the decline of the Rochester plant nursery industry in the last decade of the nineteenth century, ending a sustained era of success and ecological impact.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501777929
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	10/15/2024
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Camden Burd is Assistant Professor of History at Clemson University. His research explores the interaction of nature, capitalism, and culture in nineteenth and twentieth—century America. Visit camdenburd.com for more information.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. Flour City: Financial Panic and Horticultural Reform in an American Boomtown
2. Nurserymen: Professionalization and Duty in Nineteenth—Century America
3. Business: Horticultural Empire and the Planting of North America
4. Flower City: Concentration, Influence, and the Remaking of Rochester
5. Bugs and Business: The Pests and Political Economy of the Continental Plant Trade
6. Ornament: City Beautification, Suburban Development, and the Decline of the Rochester Horticultural Industry
Conclusion
Epilogue

What People are Saying About This

David Stradling

Based on rich archival materials, The Roots of the Flower City addresses a novel and important topic. Camden Burd describes the rise and fall of Rochester's plant nursery business, how its nurserymen helped shape the nineteenth-century urban landscape, and the consequences of their ecological imperial project across North America.