Planting a Seed: The Nineteenth-Century Horticultural Boom in America

Summary

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Between 1850 and 1880, enthusiasm for horticulture swept the nation, particularly the Upper Midwest. Nursery owners and seed traders welcomed the escalating demand for trees and flowers but soon faced consumer complaints about their questionable business practices. Customer dissatisfaction had many sources, ranging from unethical entrepreneurs to faltering industry infrastructure and underhanded dealing. The nurserymen and seed dealers worked diligently to overcome these criticisms, sharing information to improve industry methods and attempting to deflect responsibility for fraudulent practice onto disreputable competitors or inexperienced customers. The conflicts between commercial horticulturists and their broadening customer base reflected tensions within America's rapidly expanding consumer culture and suggested that traditional restraints on industry practice based on personal ties and shared values would no longer suffice when dealing with a newly diversified and seemingly intractable clientele.

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Planting a Seed: The Nineteenth-Century Horticultural Boom in America

In 1854, the Chicago-based Prairie Farmer published a commentary on problems besetting the American nursery industry. "The Nurseryman has his customer more fully at his mercy than any which involves interests of the same magnitude," the Farmer claimed. The nursery business, the Farmer continued, "demands an integrity and an amount of knowledge above other trades." Customers were vulnerable for many reasons, this well-respected agricultural newspaper maintained. While an Illinois farmer or small-town banker might know hogs and cattle, good farmland, or a profitable investment, he had little knowledge of trees and flowers and was dependent on the seller to provide healthy plants that matched their labels. Many customers placed horticultural orders with distant nurseries and seedsmen, leaving them little opportunity to apply even their modest knowledge to plant purchases. Finally, the Farmer pointed out, the consequences of an unsavory horticultural transaction were not always readily apparent when new plants arrived. "A fruit, untrue to name, makes no revelation of the fact, often for some years," the Farmer declared. Even when a plant left the nursery "without a breath of life in it," it passed through many hands, making the source of the problem difficult to pinpoint.1

For many readers, the Farmer's comments struck a sensitive chord. Between 1850 and 1880, demand for trees and flowers boomed, spurred on by worldwide plant exploration, the introduction of many new ornamental varieties, and a plethora of agricultural and horticultural publications that encouraged hands-on horticulture and delivered practical advice to would-be gardeners and orchardists. Domestic and agricultural reformers added their voices to the chorus promoting plant culture, often describing horticultural embellishments as critical components of desirable home environments. As they touted the benefits of beautiful, ordered home grounds, these proponents firmly linked horticulture with moral virtue, progressive tendencies, and even family intelligence. Finding the varied arguments hard to resist, Americans of all ranks and circumstances jumped on the horticultural bandwagon, and domestic landscapes across the nation blossomed with newly established lawns, orchards, shade trees, and fashionable flower gardens. Struggling to meet the seemingly insatiable call for trees and flowers, America's nursery and seed businesses proliferated. With competition on the rise, well-established firms, along with many new ventures, turned to innovative marketing strategies designed to spark even greater horticultural interest.2

Unfortunately, commercial horticulturists and their newly minted customers sometimes encountered bumps on the road to a thriving orchard, flourishing flower bed, or grounds dappled with shade. Venting their frustrations in horticultural journals, farm magazines, letters to nurserymen, and in conversations among friends and neighbors, customers cried foul and regularly accused the nursery and seed trades of false advertising, careless business practices, or even outright consumer fraud. Professional horticulturists were themselves occasionally burned by deceptive business practices. Frequently engaged in whole-sale exchange of plants or in ordering particular varieties from growers with specialized inventories, they were inconvenienced when plants received did not match those promised. More worrisome to established professionals were the potentially fraudulent practices by competitors new to the trade that threatened to undermine the horticultural boom.

Both the wave of horticultural enthusiasm and the problems it engendered took strong root in the upper Midwest.3 In the early decades of the century, settlers streamed into the Old Northwest, establishing the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin between 1803 and 1848. With the help of advancing transportation and communication facilities, residents quickly transformed newly settled regions into well-tended farms and bustling towns and villages. Their diligent efforts and demand for the region's agricultural products brought unprecedented prosperity, and as historians Andrew Cayton and Peter Onuf have pointed out, the region emerged at midcentury as "one of the most important centers of commercial agriculture in the world."4 When, at the same time, horticultur...

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