time — one of the many gifts of tlie New World to the 

 Old. 



By the middle of the 19th century, several innova- 

 tions, inventions, and improvements appeared that 

 would radically alter the tone of American horticul- 

 ture. Perhaps the greatest of these was the opening 

 up of the Far East to trade and the African continent 

 to exploration, flooding the horticultural 

 world with hundreds of new, garden- 

 worthy species quite unlike anything 

 ever seen before. Advances in the horti- 

 cultural sciences and the development 

 of facilities for raising plants on a huge 

 scale followed. Carried to the far cor- 

 ners of the globe by increasingly faster 

 and more efficient means of transporta- 

 tion, these new introductions stormed 

 the gardening world. Americans, who 

 perhaps felt, and rightfully so, a greater 

 sense of isolation from the world com- 

 munity at large, welcomed these new 

 varieties with open arms. Compared 

 with them, many of the old natives 

 seemed less colorful, less exotic. At about this same 

 era, advances in farm machinery made possible the 

 destruction of native habitats for agricultural pur- 

 poses on an unprecedented scale. Native plants were 

 not only disappearing from our gardens, but from 

 the wild as well. 



The invention that did more to reshape American 

 yards than perhaps any other was the mechanical 

 lawn mower. Invented in the 1830s, it was modeled 

 after a machine used to trim the nap from woolen 

 cloth. In the hands of Victorian society, with its pen- 

 chant for orderliness, the new invention allowed 

 people of even modest means to present to common 

 view a well manicured lawn. In many respects, the 

 front lawn of the era was the outdoor reflection of 

 that other great Victorian symbol of affluence: the 

 front parlor, with its carpet of green and shrubs and 

 borders tastefully arranged around the periphery like 

 fine furniture. By the end of the century, the 

 groomed lawn with exotic plantings had become so 

 common that it came to be viewed as the traditional 

 form of landscaping. 



In the ensuing decades, interest in native plants 

 continued to ebb, but never quite disappeared. In the 

 1820s, George Aiken, plantsman and future U.S. 

 senator from Vermont, was propagating and ship- 

 ping native plants around the world. So great was 

 the response and so many the questions he received, 

 that in the early 1930s, he published his landmark 

 book Pioneering with Wild/lowers. Aiken was a pioneer 

 in a very important respect: he demonstrated that 

 native plants, far from being shy, recalcitrant wild- 

 lings that often failed to settle into our gardens. 



were actually relatively easy to propagate and intro- 

 duce. Still, the interest in natives continued to re- 

 main on the fringes of horticulture for several more 

 decades. 



The turning-point came in the mid-sixties, when 

 society begin to question, then reject, the technology- 

 based industrial complex that had seemed to deceive 

 with false promises of a better life, pol- 

 lute natural resources almost beyond 

 reclamation, and bring humanity to the 

 brink of nuclear war. Worries in the 

 past few decades over the continued 

 despoiling of our soils, air and water 

 beyond nature's ability to cope have 

 galvanized concerned individuals into 

 organizations dedicated to countering 

 these threats. Indeed, benign "wild- 

 flower societies" have existed for de- 

 cades, but many of these new groups 

 are more vocal and more militant than 

 those of the past. 



Slowly government and the Green 

 Industry are responding. Ongoing re- 

 search, along with more stringent laws regulating the 

 use of chemicals in the landscape, has provided us 

 with cleaner, safer pesticides and improved practices 

 that make their use more a matter of choice than of 

 necessity. Specialty nurseries dealing exclusively 

 with natives have sprung up over the past two de- 

 cades, and while they are not yet the street-corner 

 fixtures that many more traditional garden centers 

 seem to be, their numbers, as well as the variety of 

 plant material they have to offer is on the rise. Gar- 

 dening magazines, formerly the bastions of the 

 "mow and spray" set, are devoting more and more 

 pages to naturalistic gardening and designing with 

 indigenous material. Even a few periodicals devoted 

 entirely to these subjects have appeared. 



Will native gardening ever supplant the traditional 

 forms we have been used to for all these years? 

 Probably not. There will always be the individual for 

 whom the perfect tea rose is the highest of horticul- 

 tural goals; there will always be the person for 

 whom the exotic Pachysandra terminalis is for some 

 reason horticulturally superior to the native P. 

 procumbens; and there will always be the wisest gar- 

 dener of all — the one who chooses his material not 

 by its provenance, but by its merits in the landscape. 

 But these individuals will have to get used to having 

 in their midst a new breed of gardener and, above 

 all, a new style of gardening — one that doesn't nec- 

 essarily play by established rules and doesn't al- 

 ways delight the eye, but is here to stay. 



Bruce Behan is a senior in the horticulture curriculum at 

 the Thompson School of Applied Science, UNH, Durham. 



OCTOBER. NOVEMBE 



