America's Romance with the English Garden
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- ISBN 9780821420355
- Dimensions: 152 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 17 Apr 2013
- Publisher: Ohio University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Named one of "the year's best gardening books" by The Spectator (UK, Nov. 2014)
The 1890s saw a revolution in advertising. Cheap paper, faster printing, rural mail delivery, railroad shipping, and chromolithography combined to pave the way for the first modern, mass-produced catalogs. The most prominent of these, reaching American households by the thousands, were seed and nursery catalogs with beautiful pictures of middle-class homes surrounded by sprawling lawns, exotic plants, and the latest garden accessories—in other words, the quintessential English-style garden.
America's Romance with the English Garden is the story of tastemakers and homemakers, of savvy businessmen and a growing American middle class eager to buy their products. It's also the story of the beginnings of the modern garden industry, which seduced the masses with its images and fixed the English garden in the mind of the American consumer. Seed and nursery catalogs delivered aspirational images to front doorsteps from California to Maine, and the English garden became the look of America.
Thomas J. Mickey is Professor Emeritus of Communication Studies at Bridgewater State University, Bridgewater, Massachusetts. He is a graduate of the Boston Architectural College's Landscape Institute, a Master Gardener, and a garden columnist. His other books include America's Romance with the English Garden, from Ohio University Press, and Best Garden Plants for New England.
