ATHENS, Ohio, Nov. 5, 2014 /PRNewswire/ — Take a stroll down any residential block, and you might see tomatoes, squash, and other vegetables adorning front yards—a different story from even a few years ago, when it was a given that vegetables grew in backyards only. Why? The tradition stems from America's long-lasting embrace of the English garden, which is typically associated with the lawn, but also with the kitchen garden out back.
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America's Romance with the English Garden, an illustrated book from master gardener Thomas Mickey, now in its second printing from Ohio University Press, tells the story of how Americans fell in love with the English garden.
"We have planted vegetables in the back because the nineteenth-century garden industry sold us that kind of gardening," says Mickey, who researched the book at Washington's Smithsonian Institution. He suggests that Americans were seduced by the romantic English garden approach to landscaping (noted for planting vegetables out of view of visitors) thanks to the marketing efforts of nineteenth-century seed companies and nurseries to sell seeds and plants to the new suburbs spread across the country. "Though the company owners knew the French, Italian, Spanish, and Dutch gardens, the English garden became the brand to sell seeds and plants in the nineteenth century," Mickey says.
In their richly printed catalogs—which had become possible thanks to advances in printing, and with mass mailing—made possible by cheap paper and railroad transportation, these businesses sold not only plants and seeds, but an image, a landscape style that evoked a pastoral vista and country life.
Publisher's Weekly said, "Mickey has thoughtfully woven together an American landscape design history with a critical examination of how commercial interests and mass media shape our preferences, even in our humble backyards."
The paperback edition ($26.95) features more than 40 illustrations and is available through www.ohioswallow.com, Amazon, and elsewhere. Check out the Ohio University Press website about the book for images, reviews, interviews, and more at: http://www.ohioswallow.com/book/America's+Romance+with+the+English+Garden, and Mickey's blog "American Gardening, with a love for the English Garden" at: http://americangardening.net.
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