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Phila. Inquirer-My Backyard : The gift of garden variety

Rake4Leaves
18 years ago

The following article regarding the contribution of American plants during the 1700s in Europe may be of interest to some of you.

Source: Philadelphia Inquirer

http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/living/home/

Posted on Fri, Jun. 24, 2005

My Backyard : The gift of garden variety

By Denise Cowie

Inquirer Staff Writer

As a visitor was about to leave Bartram's Garden in Southwest Philadelphia a couple of years ago, Bill LeFevre reached up and pulled some seeds from an American wisteria growing on a nearby arbor.

"Here, take these with you," LeFevre, the garden's executive director, told Elaine Headlam, who was in town to discuss Bartram's role in an ambitious exhibition planned for Painshill Park, an 18th-century estate southwest of London.

The impromptu gift was an echo of the much larger horticultural exchange that took place between England and its colonies about 21/2 centuries ago, when American seeds sent to England changed European gardens forever.

The Painshill Park exhibition, "American Roots," will tell that story when it opens next month in Surrey. And those wisteria seeds, now sturdy seedlings, will play a featured role.

In the middle of the 18th century, a mania for exotic new plants gripped Britain's elite, including a young nobleman named Charles Hamilton, who was transforming Painshill, his 160-acre estate, into a series of romantic landscapes inspired by works of art.

Many of the plants the British craved were imported from across Europe and a few came from other countries, says Teige O'Brien, development director of the Painshill Park Trust. But a huge numver came from the colonies of North America.

Here, they were gathered in the wild by plantsmen like John Bartram, the colonial botanist and plant explorer from Philadelphia who had established a botanic garden on the banks of the Schuylkill.

The American plants provided a new palette of colors and shapes and sizes, says Joel T. Fry, curator at Bartram's Garden, who researched Bartram's plant collections for the "American Roots" exhibition.

"The plants that were commonly grown in European gardens were rather limited," Fry says. "The ice ages had reduced the diversity of plants in northern Europe, which includes England and France, and when these North American plants arrived, they probably more than doubled the numbers of trees and shrubs available for planting.

"They revolutionized the garden."

Among the newcomers were magnolias, mountain laurel, rhododendrons, and azaleas.

"Rhododendron is one of the most popular plants in Britain, and we have masses of them from India and the Himalayas," O'Brien says. "But the first rhododendrons to come to England came from the East Coast of America."

The colors of fall foliage were, perhaps, the most startling gift from America.

Until then, autumn in England had been a subdued affair, reflecting the muted shades of English oak, beech, and linden.

To imagine the impact of the American plants, think of the scene from The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy opens the door of her black-and-white world and is dazzled by the colors of Munchkinland.

Seeds sent from the colonies set the English landscape ablaze with the brilliant reds and yellows of sugar maples, black gums, sumacs, and viburnums.

"They wouldn't have known how they were going to come up, how big they were going to be - and then they had these colors," O'Brien says.

Mature specimens of those plants - including some that date to the 18th century - can be found throughout Painshill Park today, though the "American Roots" exhibit will be concentrated in a walled garden on the grounds.

Painshill likely received other shipments of American seeds in the 18th century, but the exhibit will focus largely on a "five-guinea box" of unlabeled seeds, collected by John Bartram and sent to his friend Peter Collinson in London, that Hamilton received in 1748.

(Collinson, a wealthy Quaker merchant and amateur botanist, never met Bartram, but the two corresponded for 38 years and Collinson distributed Bartram's boxes of seeds to nurserymen, botanists, and the wealthy owners of famous gardens. He also sent seeds and bulbs of English plants to Bartram, and it was largely through Collinson's efforts that Bartram was named royal botanist in America by King George III.)

Without much idea of what would come up, or whether the plants would grow to 6 feet or 60, Hamilton and his head gardener sowed the seeds. They were probably grown first in enclosed areas, like a botanic garden, because they were valuable plants, Fry says.

"We can't possibly know what was sent to Painshill, because there is just a mention of it in a letter," Fry says. But his research, which compared five lists of seeds attributed to Bartram over a period of about 30 years, suggests there was little overlap in the boxes of seeds he sent to Collinson.

"Every year, he was sending what was available, probably - sometimes you have a good year for maples, sometimes a good year for oaks," Fry says.

Bartram packed 100 to 105 species to a wooden box. The hard part for collectors was keeping the seeds viable during the sometimes months-long voyage to England - or getting them there at all. The precious cargo was vulnerable to rats, seawater, theft, and other hazards.

"They tended to split the seed among different ships, because you never knew whether a ship would sink or be taken by pirates," Fry says.

Happily, many made it and helped transform the vistas of their new land. Along a winding walk to the Chinese Bridge Peninsula at Painshill, O'Brien says, "is a magnificent red oak planted by Hamilton which almost certainly could have been in a Bartram box of seeds."

And the horticultural exchanges continue.

A Bartram's gardener who carried seeds to Painshill for the "American Roots" exhibition brought back to the garden on the Schuylkill some cuttings from a red cedar believed to have grown from a seed in Bartram's 1748 box.

Which means, Fry says, that "it would have gone from Bartram's to Painshill and back again."

My Backyard :

Tracking John Bartram's seed-collecting ways. E4.

Contact gardening writer Denise Cowie at 215-854-2719 or dcowie@phillynews.com. Read her recent work at http://go.philly.com/denisecowie.

(Caption for online photo)

Todd Greenberg, the head gardener, amid wisteria hanging above John Bartrams greenhouse in Southwest Philadelphia. In the 1700s, BritainÂs elite were obsessed with such exotic new plants, and gardeners like Bartram were happy to oblige.

R E L A T E D L I N K S Go to the link, to access

these online articles:

 Bartram's curator turned detective

 'American Roots': The Details

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