Discover a US-UK special relationship that’s still very much alive, in this history of 400 years of transatlantic horticultural co-operation.
What better time and place to read this book than while flying across the Atlantic en route to teach at the extraordinary gardens of Chanticleer, Pennsylvania?
I was completely riveted from the very first page by the interwoven and complex horticultural history of the Anglo-American relationship.
Charting the fascinating course of horticultural history between these two countries, Bisgrove describes how plants, landscape and gardens were a ‘powerful barometer of social evolution’. From the voyages of Francis Drake to the plant collections of David Douglas (mysteriously losing his life in Hawaii). Including the detailed collaborations between nurserymen, such as William Lobb, who collected giant redwood seeds from Oregon for the famous Veitch Nursery and Conrad Loddiges of Hackney who corresponded with Philadelphia botanist John Bartram. Bartram, described by Linnaeus as ‘the greatest natural botanist in the world’, was a good friend of Benjamin Franklin, and in 1765 was appointed by George III to be the ‘Botaniser Royal in America, at a salary of £50 per year’.
The chapter on Women in the Garden, reveals one of the major differences between the USA and the UK in the early 20th century; this was the role of women in landscape design. In the UK it was a world still dominated by men but not so in the USA, where leading lights in the newly defined world of landscape architecture included Beatrix Farrand, Ellen Biddle Shipman and Rose Standish Nichols.
This is a fascinating read, whichever side of the Atlantic you happen to garden on, providing a thoroughly illuminating account of the garden ties that bind our nations together.