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Anniversary Forum
Is Environmental History a Subfield of Garden History?
Philip J. Pauly
| AS SOMEONE WHO was trained and has worked primarily in history of science rather than in environmental history, I am not in a good position to critique the latter field, or even to declare that a broad direction of work is "new." What I do see, primarily within the American context, is a combination of topics, sources, and perspectives that are important in themselves, understudied, and potentially valuable for improving our understanding of the history of relations between humans and other organisms. |
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The subject is horticulture. That term currently refers to more or less ornamental leisure activities. But as Abigail Lustig has emphasized, in the nineteenth century it was a scientifically, technologically, and socially fundamental and broad-ranging activity.1 Horticulture was not primarily about flowers, but rather about food plants, landscape design, and biogeographic transformation. In the North American context, horticulturists were particularly important, for better or worse, as agents of plant mobility. They imported species from other continents, and they also shuffled the distributions of North American plants. Some of these, such as sorghum and soybeans, were cultivars that transformed rural landscapes and the agricultural economy; others—notably grasses and forbs, but also such woody types as tamarisk, melaleuca, and black locust—spread on their own in different parts of the continent.2 |
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In 1872, the Nebraska nursery owner and future Secretary of Agriculture J. Sterling Morton named his proposed tree-planting holiday "Arbor Day" rather than "Sylvan Day" because his primary interest was in trees, not forests. We know much less about "tree" people such as Morton, Charles S. Sargent, or David Fairchild, than about "forest" figures like Gifford Pinchot. Extensive material is available for studying them and other horticulturists: Specialized magazines began with The New England Farmer and Horticultural Register in the 1820s; nearly every state published (sometimes with verbatim transcripts) the transactions of meetings of horticultural societies; federal, state, and local agencies generated reports and archives; there are scattered but detailed nursery catalogs and herbarium records. How, exactly, did plants move? How were horticultural exchanges structured? What were the relations between native landscape designers like F. L. Olmsted and immigrant plantsmen?3 How did (some) aspects of horticulture become feminized? What were the roles of professors? How conscious were horticulturists of the transformations they were effecting? What were the relations between intentions and results? These questions are all answerable, to a considerable degree, through research. |
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From the perspective I am outlining, the central figure in the development of thinking about people and landscapes in the early twentieth century was not John Muir, but Liberty Hyde Bailey. No one has studied Bailey in depth since the 1950s; Ben Minteer's work breaks new ground.4 Bailey's conviction that activities ranging from poetry and philosophizing to the production of reference works and herbaria all fit within the compass of a vitalized enterprise of horticulture should be taken seriously; the question then is to understand what happened to that identity as different elements were taken up and transformed by nature writers, nurserymen, breeders, and botanists. |
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The largest issue here—one that interfaces with central debates among environmental historians during the last decade—is the history of "culture." In the United States in the nineteenth century this was not primarily a noun referring either to literature or to group behavior, but rather a verb denoting the use of intelligence to foster living things. Cotton culture, strawberry culture, and mental culture were linked concepts; high culture was not sweetness and light, but manure, hand weeding, and controlled pollination. What then was culture is now biotechnology. |
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Fruitful conversations can occur between environmental historians and a number of other groups regarding the history of horticulture. Engagement with historians of science and technology, and with ecologists and botanists, is straightforward and ongoing. The real benefit could come from interaction with garden historians, the scholars who have attended most carefully to past vegetational design. The implication of work by Marcus Hall is that environmental history may potentially become a subfield of garden history.5 In 2002, when asked to organize an informal session at the ASEH annual meeting, I proposed that question for discussion. The idea was discouraged, and the discussion did not take place. It remains an issue worth both puckish and serious consideration. |
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Philip J. Pauly is professor of history at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Publications include Biologists and the Promise of American Life: From Meriwether Lewis to Alfred Kinsey (Princeton University Press, 2000); "Fighting the Hessian Fly: American and British Responses to Insect Invasion, 1776–1789," Environmental History 7 (July 2002): 377–400; and Fruits and Plains: Horticulture and the Meaning of America (forthcoming).
Notes
1. Abigail J. Lustig, "Cultivating Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century English Gardens," Science in Context 13 (2000): 155–81.
2. R. N. Mack and M. Erneberg, "The United States Naturalized Flora: Largely the Product of Deliberate Introductions," Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden 89 (2002): 176–89.
3. Franziska Kirchner, Der Central Park in New York, und der Einfluß der deutschen Gartentheorie und praxis auf seine Gestaltung (Worms: Wernersche Verlagsgesellschaft, 2002).
4. Ben A. Minteer, The Landscape of Reform (Cambridge: MIT Press, forthcoming).
5. Marcus Hatfield Hall, "American Nature, Italian Culture: Restoring the Land in Two Continents," (PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1999).
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