America's romance with the English garden
By: Thomas J. Mickey
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 2013
Place of publication: Athens, Ohio
Language: eng
Number of pages: 271
ISBN-13: 9780821420355
Subjects: History; Seed industry and trade; English Gardens
Description: "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."--Publisher's website.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 233-253) and index.
Table of contents: title: The British connection --; title: The English garden influence at Williamsburg --; title: Early wealthy Americans and their English landscapes --; title: A short history of the nineteenth-century seed and nursery industries in America --; title: Garden writing from the seed companies and nurseries --; title: The impact of social changes on the seed and nursery industries --; title: Major themes in the catalogs --; title: Gardening and the middle class --; title: The grandest rose of the century --; title: Landscape design according to the catalogs.