America's romance with the English garden / Thomas J. Mickey

Author: Mickey, Thomas J.
Published: Athens, Ohio : Ohio University Press, [2013]
Copyright Date: ©2013
Physical Description: xxi, 271 pages : illustrations (chiefly color) ; 22 cm

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Contents

The British connection -- The English garden influence at Williamsburg -- Early wealthy Americans and their English landscapes -- A short history of the nineteenth-century seed and nursery industries in America -- Garden writing from the seed companies and nurseries -- The impact of social changes on the seed and nursery industries -- Major themes in the catalogs -- Gardening and the middle class -- The grandest rose of the century -- Landscape design according to the catalogs.

Summary

"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.

Subject(s)

ISBN

9780821420355 (pb : alk. paper)
0821420356 (pb : alk. paper)
9780821444528 (electronic)
0821444522 (electronic)

Bibliography Note

Includes bibliographical references (pages 233-253) and index.

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