gardening

For more information on gardening, visit Britannica.com.

By A.D. 1000, native peoples on the American continent had developed a system of planting corn, beans, and squash together. Beans enriched the soil with nitrogen, corn provided a trellis for the bean to climb, and squash vines grew to cover the ground and discourage weeds. The effectiveness of this method was not surpassed until state agricultural stations were established in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Indigenous peoples also sowed wild rice, and cultivated sun-flowers, roses, cotton, tobacco, and potatoes. The survival of many pioneering Europeans owed much to Native Americans who shared their harvests and their agricultural knowledge.

English settlers arriving in Virginia and Massachusetts in the early years of the seventeenth century brought wheat, barley, rye, oats, hay, and peas, grown as field crops. Kitchen gardens, close to the house, included vegetables, herbs, fruit trees, and berries. An integral element of the household, the garden supplied not only food, but also medicines, insect repellents, preservatives, air fresheners, dyes, and other necessities.

Such plots were laid out geometrically, with rectangles or square planting areas bordered by paths for walking between, a design familiar from Elizabethan times. Sensible housewives located sweet-smelling plants near open windows and kept those with objectionable odors, like onion or cabbage, more distant. Plants were grown in raised beds, the soil held by boards. House gardens were fenced to keep animals out.

As the colonies prospered, wealthy landowners built fine houses and fine gardens, patterned after those in Europe, based on classical ideals of symmetry and order. Pleasure gardens of the period were enclosed by a border of closely clipped hedges, often of boxwood. The interiors were laid out in elaborate geometrical patterns, sometimes tracing knots, or creating mazes against a background of colored gravel. Raised beds featured showy flowers and shrubs pruned to represent animals and other forms (topiary). Found most often in the South, this style remained popular for most of the eighteenth century. American versions of the formal garden were less fussy than their European counterparts.

The founding fathers, who so carefully planned for balance and order in the new nation, took similar care in designing their grounds and gardens. George Washington planned his Mansion House farm to include a deep border of woods, rolling meadows, serpentine walkways, groves of trees, a pleasure garden, and a utilitarian kitchen garden. Thomas Jefferson is America's most renowned gardener of the early nineteenth century. He built on European design and imbued it with American sensibility, combining beauty and utility. Jefferson made Monticello an experimental laboratory of plants from around the world. He cultivated 250 vegetable varieties in a garden terrace and 170 fruit varieties on another eight acres. Further, he designed romantic grottoes, garden temples, and ornamental groves.

Andrew Jackson Downing began a horticultural revolution with the 1841 publication of A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening. Downing's idea was to unify the classical standards of European style with the irregular, raw, and picturesque beauty of America. His vision included home design and had unprecedented popular appeal. Downing advocated a free-flowing style of planting and the scattering of parts of the garden about the grounds. Public parks, even cemeteries, reflected the new naturalistic trend.

Thirty years afterward, Frank J. Scott published The Art of Beautifying Suburban Home Grounds of Small Extent. In his work, Scott addressed the nation's growing middle class, whose estate might be as small as an eighth of an acre. It is he who suggested that front yards be open to the street and to adjoining neighbors' properties, the look that characterizes American suburbs today.

With this guidance, Victorian gardeners decorated the outdoors with the same enthusiasm for ostentation that they demonstrated in their home interiors. Artfully placed tree specimens, groups of shrubs, and exotic ornamentals delighted the eye from an inside window or gazebo. Flowerbeds of varied shapes were cut out of the lawn and bloomed with ribbons of annuals in vivid and jarring colors. Victorians used wrought iron furniture, urns, statuary, and other decorative elements to make the garden an extension of the home.

As the twentieth century dawned, a revival of classical styles in architecture reintroduced symmetry and geometry to garden design. Flowers in softer combinations, such as white and yellow or other pastels, became the fashion. Victorian-era color and exoticism were now considered gaudy and in poor taste.

Most Americans were now more likely to be workers in offices and industry than farmers and independent tradesmen. Wages purchased food and other household needs. Gardening had been transformed from an indispensable domestic art into an interest for those with leisure time. During World War I (1914–1918)and World War II (1939–1945), the government was compelled to initiate "victory garden" campaigns to urge citizens to grow as much as possible of their family's food supply.

After World War II, a severe housing shortage caused a boom in development across the country. In the rush to build, the relationship of the house to the land, so important to earlier generations, had been forgotten. Groups of houses of identical design appeared on lots bulldozed bare and strewn with grass seed. New homeowners added trees for shade, foundation plantings or flowerbeds on whim, with no guiding aesthetic. Feeding, watering, and maintaining a flawless green expanse of lawn became the new suburban ideal.

In the 1970s, environmental awareness sparked appreciation for the natural world in a new generation of Americans. Practices that followed in later decades, including "naturalizing" with bulbs and wildflowers, adding water features and plants to attract wildlife, and selecting plants requiring less water in arid areas (xeriscape), are heirs to this new consciousness. Organic methods of growing produce also gained loyal adherents. However, the desire of many homeowners to enhance their property value by achieving "perfect" lawns and grounds continues to generate sales of grass seed, chemical fertilizers, and pesticides.

Steadily growing numbers of Americans are taking up gardening, many no doubt inspired by the ageless human desire for intimacy with nature and quiet refuge from worldly demands. The books that have been valued gardening references in American homes since colonial times have been joined by radio shows, television programs, and Internet resources. In 2001, the National Gardening Association found that eight out of ten American households regularly tend lawns and gardens. Most gardeners are homeowners, aged 35 to 54. Men and women are equally represented. In 2001, Americans spent $37.7 billion on horticultural products. The Department of Agriculture has ranked the nursery and greenhouse industry as the fastest growing segment of United States agriculture and the second most important in economic output.

Bibliography

Darke, Rick. In Harmony with Nature: Lessons from the Arts and Crafts Garden. New York: Michael Friedman Publishing Group, 2000.

Downing, Andrew J. A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening: Adapted to North America. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Publishing Service, 1991. (Reprint)

Leighton, Ann. Early American Gardens: "For Meate or Medicine." Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1970.

———. American Gardens in the Eighteenth Century; "For Use or for Delight." Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986.

———. American Gardens of the Nineteenth Century: "For Comfort and Affluence." Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987.

Olmsted, Frederick L. Forty Years of Landscape Architecture: Central Park. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1973 (Reprint).

Weishan, Michael. The New Traditional Garden: A Practical Guide to Creating and Restoring Authentic American Gardens for Homes of All Ages. New York: The Ballantine Publishing Group, 1999.

—Christine M. Roane