| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Fruits and Plains: The Horticultural Transformation of America. By Philip J. Pauly. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. xiv, 336 pp. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-674-02663-6.)

Philip J. Pauly moves the story of plant introduction, plant breeding, and pest control out of the history of horticultural science into the much broader and ideologically freighted framework of "culture"—in the eighteenth-century, not the twentieth-century, use of that word, he hastens to add. The ideas and activities of America's gentleman gardeners, professional nurserymen, landscape designers, scientists, and government bureaucrats were never just about plants. Inevitably, their work resonated with multiple meanings, reflecting and addressing the many ways Americans linked their physical environment to their nation's postcolonial identity. Did the American environment invariably lead to the degeneration of living things, or could it in time develop an advanced culture? Did indigenous varieties represent the highest potential and pride of the American environment? Could foreign varieties be naturalized into the American continent? Or was it best to keep out aliens altogether?

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