Nursery

History

Nursery was a term used to describe either the part of a garden where young stock was raised until it could be transplanted to a permanent location or to a business or commercial establishment that sold live plant material. In the first sense, “nursery” was often used interchangeably with words that have a more specific meaning, such as “seminary” or “botanic garden” (see Botanic garden). The term “seminary,” which technically refers to a plot where seeds were started, was used to describe the section of a nursery from which plants started from seed were moved to the main part of the nursery. This term was found more often in European and American treatises than in American common usage. In general, the term “nursery” in America was used to describe a place where plants and seeds alike were cultivated to maturity. George Washington referred to his nursery as a botanic garden, suggesting that this place contained exotic and rare plants, as well as cuttings from mature trees grown elsewhere on his plantation.

General instructions for establishing a nursery included finding a site close to water, in a southeast (rather than full south) orientation, and most importantly, fencing it to keep out animals. Several accounts also emphasized that the soil composition be as close as possible to the plants’ ultimate destination. Nurseries supplied the rest of the garden and also other plantations with every type of plant, ranging from flowers to tall trees.

A nursery generally was laid out with dense plantings in a rectilinear plan that permitted, as John Parkinson said, “plenty of stock in a little space.” Since the nursery had a utilitarian purpose—supplying the garden and filling in vacant spaces—practical considerations, such as the movement of wheelbarrows, were important. According to J. C. Loudon (1826), nurseries in gardens united “the agreeable with the useful,” which was, for him, the object of gardening.

Private and public nurseries were found throughout the colonies from the earliest period and were of critical importance to the settlers. In a 1629 tract for the “unexperienced planter,” Capt. John Smith recommended building nurseries for fruit trees on islands in the Charles River, ensuring that they would be protected from cattle. It was essential at the founding of new settlements to establish as soon as possible those plants and seeds that the colonists brought from Europe. In the Trustees Garden founded in 1734 in Savannah, Ga., oranges, olives, figs, and mulberries—all imported from the Old World—were planted in a public nursery known also as a botanic garden, where planters could get cuttings and scions for free. Gradually, New World species, as well as imported plants, were collected in the nursery and by the nineteenth century native and exotics were propagated equally. The great private houses of the eighteenth century had extensive nurseries. At the Woodlands in Philadelphia, owner William Hamilton knew that a garden’s long-term greatness required a nursery first. Beyond the utility of the nursery, several writers, including Loudon and Charles Marshall, extolled the pleasures and satisfaction derived from witnessing the propagation of plants.

The term “nursery” also referred to commercial firms that sold plants, introduced new plants, and as a result, established a complex trade network.1 Scholars have attributed the growth of commercial nurseries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to a response to both increasing public demand and a wider range of available plants.2 The commercial nursery business began in America with the activities of importers and growers of domestic horticultural products who participated in the international trade of plants. Recent scholarship has documented a flourishing nursery profession in Boston as early as 1719.3 The Prince family opened one of the first commercial nurseries in the 1750s.4 The propagation and cultivation of stock for sale was undertaken quite early in American history. The first catalogues of plants for sale, however, were not published until 1771, when they became available for William Prince’s Linnaean Botanic Garden and Nurseries in Flushing, and then in 1783 for the second generation of the Bartram family, the brothers John and William, who hoped to boost sales at the Bartram Botanic Garden and Nursery, near Philadelphia.5 In 1792, two large collections of native plants were ordered from the Bartram Botanic Garden and Nursery for Mount Vernon. After 1800, the first American treatise writers were nurserymen who turned their attention to publishing as a means of promoting their businesses. The work of Bernard M’Mahon, Thomas Green Fessenden, André Parmentier, C. M. Hovey, Robert Buist [Fig. 1], Joseph Breck, Thomas Meehan, and A. J. Downing, to cite some of the most famous, provided the first generation of garden literature in this country. Several of them also used their nurseries as showcases for plants and the newly established profession of landscape design.

After the Revolution, promoters of economic independence for the United States insisted that more nurseries were essential to the new republic.6 Numerous attempts to establish public nurseries on the national Mall in Washington, D.C., document this effort. The 1808 Washington Exposition described a nursery on the national Mall where botanists, agriculturists, and chemists would come together to serve national interests. The White House also was the site of a nursery for trees planted by President John Quincy Adams, who was concerned with the conservation of native hardwoods [Fig. 2]. A speaker at the Massachusetts Horticultural Society in 1830 argued that the country should not be dependent on foreign nurseries. In addition to the nationalistic impulse underlying this talk, other writers knew that the vast range of different soils and climatic conditions available in the United States promised huge economic success. Finally, nurseries were considered important because they gave publicity to new and improved species and, according to George William Johnson (1847), “excite[d] a taste for their cultivation,” thereby stimulating burgeoning botanical, agricultural, and horticultural pursuits.

-- Therese O'Malley