Tag Archives: Garden History

Summer 2020 Reading List: What I Would Have Read

I’m a bit late with this summer reading list: it’s August! And this list is more intentional than actual, so I’m not going to be able to give informed commentary on most of these books. I planned to read all of them, but as soon as the end-of-semester responsibilities were over, intensive gardening began. And as soon as intensive spring gardening ceased, family trips were taken. And then I returned home and BOOM: big book contract! So the last month has been all about writing rather than reading. Yet I have heard from many of you that you like my book lists, so I thought I would offer up one: I did choose these carefully, and many of them are sitting by my bedside, but I usually pass out before I can pick one up! I didn’t even have time to go back and look at my previous book lists but I bet there is a trend of increasing interest in historical fiction over the years: I used to be pretty snobby about that genre, but after reading several titles which were researched meticulously and crafted beautifully—enabling one to really plunge into the world in question—I have changed my tune. I think there are a few of these on this list: you’ll have to forward your assessments, and after my own book is finished I will either return to these books—or I won’t!

So let’s start with fiction. I am dying to read James Meek’s To Calais, in Ordinary Time, which is set in England and France during the Hundred Years’ War and Black Death, and the publication date of Emma Donoghue’s 1918 book was moved up to Corona time. Talk about plunging into the past: I read Andrew Miller’s previous historical novel, Pure, last year and was definitely plunged into the world of an eighteenth-century engineer in Paris; Free is set in Scotland during the Napoleonic Wars, and I really want to go there. I always want to go to sixteenth-century England, even into the somber Shakespeare household following the death of Hamnet, from the plague, of course. Big jump in terms of both chronology and topics: I’ve been reading my way through Evelyn Waugh and his era over the years, and I loved these new covers so purchased them for my bedside stack (I purchased Martin Green’s Children of the Sun a few years ago for some context and insights into this era, but have read it only in snippets so far). And another favorite era in fiction and fact: the Daphne Du Maurier’s novel is from the 1940s, Nadine Akkerman’s scholarly book on female spies in the seventeenth century is much more recent.

Reading Pandemics

Reading Miller

Reading Hamnet

Reading Waugh collage

REading Untitled - 2020-08-03T132118.632

For the first time every, I think I have more fiction books than nonfiction—-probably because I’m all nonfiction all the time for by work: both writing and teaching. I don’t really have time to indulge my curiosity this year, but if I did, I would move Ivory Vikings by Nancy Marie Brown, about the medieval Lewis Chessmen, up to the top of my bedside stack: I’ve been curious about these guys forever. The other books are somewhat related to my book so I supposed I can categorize them as research: I’m writing about gardening and cooking right now, in my Chapter Three, so Floud’s and Dawson’s books are right by my side, offering some great insights and context supplementary to my primary sources. Newton is a little late for me, but I’ve got to read all about alchemy for my book as it creeps into several topics (medicine, beauty, even agriculture), so William R. Newman’s Newton the Alchemist will be illuminating, I’m sure.

Reading Chess

Reading Gardens

Reading Food

Reading Newton Collage


Celebrated Gardens of Salem

A while ago I scored the first volume of a classic text of early American gardens, Gardens of Colony and State, compiled and edited for the Garden Club of America by Alice G.B. Lockwood in 1931. I’ve seldom been without it since; I can’t say that “I can’t put it down” because it is a heavy tome, but I’ve been dipping into it whenever I have a free moment. It’s an absolutely amazing publication: scholarly, detailed, engaging, illustrated, comprehensive. I’ve planned all of my summer road trips around it, even though I suspect I might find myself on sites of former historic gardens more often than not.

Gardens 1

Gardens of Colony and State is nothing less than an illustrated history of American gardens and gardening to 1840: the first volume covers New England and the Midwest, while the second volume presents the South and West (and garden enclosures from across the nation). It is remarkably well-sourced, but also as accessible as you would imagine a garden club publication to be, and its illustrations are nothing short of invaluable. While Salem trades on its darkness now, in 1931 it was still quite well known for its horticultural heritage, and so it rates an entire chapter in the first volume: there is Boston, Salem and Newburyport, and everywhere else in Massachusetts. Lockwood starts off with the Reverend Francis Higginson’s observations on “the bounty of the soil of Salem” in 1629 and shows us the Endicott pear tree and sundial (purchased by the Reverend William Bentley–is this still in the Crowninshield-Bentley House or up in the storage bunker/Collection Center in Rowley?) and then it’s all about Elias Hasket Derby, who employed one of the nation’s first professional gardeners, an Alsatian emigré named George Heussler (whom contemporaries referred to as “Dutch”) for both his town and country gardens. We get to see charming drawings by Samuel McIntire of the former’s grounds—from the Essex Institute/Peabody Essex Museum, of course.

Garden Sundial

Garden Derby 1

Garden Derby 2

We then proceed through the nineteenth century, and visit Salem’s most famous gardens, most of which were laid out or maintained by “Scotch gardeners” (How many gardens are due to the Scotch gardeners! proclaims Lockwood). The botanist John Robinson’s garden at 18 Summer Street was long ago paved over for a parking lot while elsewhere grass and more carefree perennials have replaced the very intensively-cultivated gardens of the Victorian era. An interesting connection: the “Scotch gardener” of Captain Charles Hoffman’s garden at 26 Chestnut, Hugh Wilson, came over from the old country with Peter Henderson, the so-called “father of horticulture and ornamental gardening” in the United States who operated several commercial market gardens and a successful seed company, and they maintained a close connection throughout their lives. Doubtless Henderson made some contributions to the three greenhouses Hoffman and Wilson maintained in the vicinity of 26 Chestnut–one at the rear of his property and two additional ones along Hamilton Street.

Garden Robinson

Garden 26 Chestnut

Across Chestnut Street were the renown gardens of two maiden ladies: Miss Huntington’s garden at #35 and Miss Laight’s garden at #41 Both gardens were featured in several periodicals at the turn of the twentieth century and Lockwood includes older photographs of each—one wonders if they were simplified in the 1930s when the Great Depression reigned and there were probably no more Scotch gardeners on the street. We then read about the botanical experiments of John Fiske Allen at # 31 (more greenhouses!), and enterprises of Robert Manning, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s uncle, in the pastoral paradise of North Salem. By far the most poignant photographs in the Salem chapter of Gardens of Colony and State are those of the Peirce-Nichols House on Federal Street, another PEM property and McIntire creation, if only because of the stark contrast of past and present.

Garden 35

Garden 41

Peirce Nichols

Peirce Nichols Garden 4

Peirce Nichols Garden

Peirce Nichols Garden 2

Gardens page


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