Gardener's Life Inspired Plantsmen, Passionate Collectors, and Singular Visions in the World of Gardening

1 Inspired Plantsmen "I am led to reflect how much more delightful to an undebauched mind is the task of making improvements on the earth, than all the vain glory which can be acquired from ravaging it." George Washington, Letter to an English farmer (1790) There are gardens of the heart, gardens of the mind, and gardens of the pocketbook, and most of us find something pleasing in all of them. Plantsmen and plantswomen bring those preoccupations together by virtue of their livelihoods. They need to grow that which is both sentimental and sensible in order to stay in business. In their delightful tribute Legends in the Garden (2001), Linda Copeland and Allan Armitage single out dozens of plantsmen, both professional and amateur, who discovered cultivars that have become gold-standard offerings in the American plant palette. The diversity of the gardeners who first recognized the special virtues of certain garden plants is matched by their acuity in observation. These men and women are on a first-name basis with all that grows in and out of their gardens. Like Elizabeth Lawrence, the beloved chronicler of the world of country gardeners who subscribed to southern market bulletins and who, in her own words, "garden for love," such gardeners have a compulsion to put a name on things, especially plants that seem to stand apart from others of their kind. Thus, Harriet Kirkpatrick, out for a horseback ride in the hills outside Anna, Illinois, in 1910, came upon a hydrangea with a bloom like a snowball, and thought so much of it that she transplanted it into her own garden. Many years later it was finally registered and propagated commercially as Hydrangea arborescens 'Annabelle'. Before Allen Lacy became a nationally recognized garden writer, he taught philosophy at a small college in Linwood, New Jersey. He saw an aster in his neighborhood that no one seemed to know anything about, one that grew to four feet tall and produced violet-blue flowers with bright yellow centers. He guessed correctly that it might be a new variety useful to gardeners and subsequently named it after his wife, thus creating Aster 'Hella Lacy'. Henry Ross, who singlehandedly created Gardenview Horticultural Park on sixteen acres in Strongsville, Ohio, has introduced dozens of cultivars through his work on the park over the years, from his white-leafed Ajuga 'Arctic Fox', to his mildew-resistant Monarda 'Gardenview Scarlet' (which he points out is actually a clone, not a cultivar, because it is vegetatively reproduced). This brings to mind the greatest plant-namer of all, 18th-century Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus, who subdivided the kingdom of plants according to the form and function of the reproductive parts of individual specimens. By this method, which changed the course of science's inquiry into Nature, he arrived at twenty-four classes and numerous orders, genera, and species for further differentiation. When a German botanist named Johann Siegesbeck attacked his sexual system as "loathsome harlotry," Linnaeus saw fit to name after his detractor a particularly obnoxious weed, still known to this day as Siegesbeckia. More typically, however, the plantsman displays an inherent generosity of spirit, and "passes along," as they say in the South, wonderful plants, not weeds, to fellow gardeners. As Elizabeth Lawrence of Charlotte, North Carolina, wrote The New Yorker editor Katharine S. White of Maine and Manhattan, early in their twenty-year-long correspondence about plants and people, "I wish you lived next door and I would fill your garden up." Plantsman's World "The most noteworthy thing about gardeners is that they are always optimistic, always enterprising, and never satisfied." Vita Sackville-West, Country Notes (1939) Like Picasso, legendary plantsSheehan, Larry is the author of 'Gardener's Life Inspired Plantsmen, Passionate Collectors, and Singular Visions in the World of Gardening', published 2004 under ISBN 9780609609392 and ISBN 0609609394.