Flower garden

History

The meaning of the term flower garden remained relatively unchanged between 1650 and 1850, and the placement of the flower garden within a designed landscape, as well as the plants and their arrangement contained therein, helped distinguish it from other garden features. Although flowers might appear in kitchen gardens, the kitchen garden carried connotations of utility while the flower garden signified ornament and pleasure. Moreover, the flower garden required specialized care and expertise, as implied by Charles Carroll (of Annapolis) in his 1775 query about the training of a potential gardener.

The siting of the flower garden distinguished it from the kitchen garden and orchard, which, as mainly utilitarian features, were often situated beyond the view of the main house. Flower gardens, in keeping with their ornamental function, were often placed in relative proximity to the most prestigious rooms of the house. In this location they could be viewed from the house and could act as adjuncts to reception and entertaining rooms. Some eighteenth-century British treatise writers stated that the flower garden should be situated at the “back-front” of the house, meaning the area adjacent to the rear of the house and often just below the terrace. Such a location also provided a degree of shelter conducive to nurturing plants.

Flower gardens also could be placed at some distance from the house. Batty Langley (1728), for example, advised situating the flower garden within a wilderness (see Wilderness). At the seat of John Penn, near Philadelphia, the flower garden was located in a wooded area away from the mansion [Fig. 1]. This placement of the flower garden distinguished it from the parterre, which, typically in the British and European context, was placed adjacent to the house (see Parterre). The eighteenth-century parterre used common plants, whereas the eighteenth-century flower garden was often devoted to exotic, unusual, or rare plants; hence Benjamin Henry Latrobe (1796) expressed disappointment in the flower garden at Mount Vernon because it contained “nothing very rare.” This “neat” layout arranged with precision met with Latrobe’s sarcasm as he described a parterre as “the expiring groans I hope of our Grandfather’s pedantry.” A sketch of John Bartram’s famous garden depicts the botanist’s care and interest in “new flowers,” which were separated from the “common flower garden” [Fig. 2].

In England, long narrow beds were associated with florists’ gardens, which were devoted to the cultivation of rare or “choice” flowers, also known as “florists’ flowers.” Bernard M’Mahon’s prescription in 1806 for a flower garden composed of narrow beds and planted with bulbous and tuberous rooted flowers, “each sort principally in separate beds,” suggests this English florist tradition.

By the eighteenth century in England, regular, geometric layout gave way to a new type of flower garden: island beds set into a lawn. Isaac Ware (1756) proposed planting flowers so as to resemble a nosegay emerging out of green lawn. The island (or kidney-shaped bed), composed of flowers arranged in concentric circles or in a grid, gradually became a popular mode of flower garden design in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English gardens. Such practices were adopted in America in the nineteenth century.

J. C. Loudon’s An Encyclopaedia of Gardening (1826) attempted to order and clarify the increasing profusion of flower garden types by establishing a typology. For small gardens, he recommended a “regular figure” enclosed by a hedge. For larger gardens, Loudon recommended what he called an “irregular,” or alternately, a “modern” style garden, characterized by small groups or “garden scenes” of flowers set in the lawn and interspersed with shrubs. Loudon, in describing the modern garden, addressed an issue that had emerged for treatise writers of his time. As shrubbery developed as a garden feature, and as flowering shrubs were increasingly included in flower gardens, the “lines of distinction between the Flower Garden, the Shrubbery, and the Pleasure Ground,” as John Abercrombie and James Mean observed in The Practical Gardener (1817), “can neither be positively marked, nor constantly observed” (see Shrubbery). Indeed, writer Basil Hall (1828) conflated flowering shrubs in shrubbery and those in the flower garden when describing a plantation in the South.

Loudon outlined four types or classes of flower gardens. The first was the “general” or “mingled” flower garden, one in which graduated rows of flowers and shrubs were planted in a loose quincunx pattern that allowed taller species to rise up behind shorter species. In An Encyclopaedia, Loudon included a plan for planting a flower garden with respect to alternating the colors and sizes of plants, as well as the time of the plants’ flowering. The second type, the “select” flower garden, included only “particular kinds of plants,” that were cultivated or hybridized flowers grown by nurseries or florists, which were often massed in irregular drifts. The “changeable” flower garden, the third type, plunged plants (presumably greenhouse- or hothouse-raised) in their pots to correspond with seasonal changes. The final type, the “botanic” flower garden, had plants “arranged with reference to botanical study.” A. J. Downing similarly attempted to systematize the flower garden in A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (1849), in which he discussed the “irregular” flower garden, the “English” flower garden, and the “old French” flower garden.

The nineteenth century witnessed another style of flower gardening: the “geometric” garden, as described in Downing’s 1847 article in the Horticulturist. The flower bed was divided into square or rectangular plots and subdivided into geometric figures. This manner of gardening had persisted since the eighteenth century and harkened back to such European Renaissance patterns as knots or cutwork parterres. The 1847 redesign of the Vassall-Craigie-Longfellow House flower garden in imitation of a Gothic stained-glass window was suggestive of this fashion [Fig. 3].

Greenhouses or conservatories were often located near or in flower gardens as they allowed for easy transport of plants. (See, for example, Hovey’s 1839 description of Charles Phelps’s residence in Stonington, Conn.) At Montgomery Place, on the Hudson in New York, Downing (1847) placed the flower garden in front of the conservatory, echoing the “Moorish” character of this building with a flower garden designed to resemble an oriental carpet.

In addition to design and plant material, objects placed within the garden—seats, statues, arbors, and other decorative structures—contributed to the style of flower gardens. “Figures of statuary work of every character and description” characterized the “French” style according to Robert Buist (1841), whereas Jane Loudon (1845) included statues as well as vases, seats, basins of water, rustic baskets, and rock-work in the “modern English” flower garden. Edward Sayers, in The American Flower Garden Companion (1838), proposed a native American flower garden to be accompanied by a rustic seat and rockery in addition to a pond, shrubbery, and walk.

Given the plethora of styles and types of flower gardens in the nineteenth century, treatise writers emphasized the need for homeowners to select a mode of flower garden design that suited the characteristics of their house’s site and architecture, as well as the associative readings desired by the owners. Downing’s explanation (1849) for why an “enthusiastic lover of the picturesque” whose residence was in the so-called “Rural Gothic” style would chose an “irregular” flower garden is an excellent example of this design logic.

Flower gardens often carried associations of status, wealth, and taste because of the expense of skilled gardening and of rare flower species. Thomas Hancock in 1736, for example, fretted over the cost when he ordered plants, instructing that he wanted “Particular, Curious Things not of a high price.” Hancock’s concern about the potential financial liability of flowers was warranted. In 1737, for an order shipped from England of a “Baskett of flowers” (which, in fact, had arrived dead), he paid £26—a sizable amount of money considering that such luxury goods as lace, muslin, and silk could be purchased for a few pennies a yard. While the cost of flowers declined with the growth of nurseries in America, prices remained relatively high compared to other goods and services. For example, in 1839, the Ellwanger and Barry Nursery in Rochester, N.Y., sold a China Rose for $2.50 at a time when the average wage for nursery labor was $1.50 per day. In 1850, Henry C. Bowen of Woodstock, Conn., a successful dry goods merchant, bought a tree peony for $1.00, the equivalent of the daily wage that he paid his laborers. Thus the flower garden proposed by treatise writer Joseph Breck in 1851 at the cost of $10.00 dollars was the equivalent to approximately ten days’ salary for a laborer. Breck’s recommendation of old-fashioned plants as opposed to new hybrids or florists’ flowers may have been, in part, an attempt to decrease the cost of a flower garden.

The high cost of flowers enhanced the cachet of flower gardens. Despite her protests that she had neither taste nor the time, Caroline Bell (1831) expended much energy to create a garden that she hoped would be “pleasing to the eye or comfortable.” Treatise writers echoed and encouraged such attention. Charles Marshall (1799) wrote that no trouble should be spared in cultivating the “choicest gifts of Flora”; Thomas Green Fessenden (1828) claimed that “flower gardens were ever held in high estimation by persons of taste”; and C. M. Hovey (1844) insisted that “the flower garden is an appendage to almost every residence” and therefore should be planted in “a judicious manner” in order to be “an object of importance.” Fessenden also capitalized upon the notion of the flower garden as an index of taste when he proposed that young ladies cultivate flower gardens to learn neatness and correct taste and ideas. Writer

M.A.W. (1840) commended flower gardening as a test of the gardener’s taste and skill. This didactic aspect of the flower garden resided in the link between gardening and moral behavior. Fessenden (1828) argued that by caring for plants young persons could learn that “every moral virtue must be protected, and every corrupt passion and propensity subdued.” Walter Elder (1849) implied that flower gardens could keep at bay the physical and moral corruption that he associated with the urban environment. Robert Squibb (1727, reprinted 1827), in keeping with his notion that flowers were an expression of divinity, believed that flowers could ennoble, “refine,” and comfort their beholders and caretakers. Consistent with these discourses, many nineteenth-century institutions responsible for the care of individuals (including orphanages and insane asylums) kept flower gardens.

The labor and exercise associated with flower gardens resulted in their promotion as a source of healthy activity. Fessenden argued that flower gardens crossed class lines and appealed to everyone, and he described tending gardens as particularly suitable exercise for older citizens. Elder, in touting gardening for city dwellers, stipulated that no other activity could “more plainly bespeak” the “health and happiness” of the family. Sayers (1838) also argued that flower gardens were particularly healthful for city dwellers, basing his argument upon the notion that gardening helped to dispel the noxious vapors that condensed and settled on the ground.

Such texts helped to imbue flower gardens with pastoral, anti-urban associations and encouraged the recognition of the feature as a sign of the transformation of the American “wilderness” into a cultivated, even utopian, landscape. As was written in the Magazine of Horticulture in 1844, flower gardens suggested to the traveler “the steady march of taste and refinement, and the progress, though slow, of that art that transforms the wildest forest into a very Eden.”

-- Anne L. Helmreich