| This study traces and documents the commercial availability and landscape use of hardy herbaceous ornamental plants, perennial and biennial, in nineteenth-century gardens of the northeastern United States. Herbaceous plants are relatively ephemeral in the landscape, with some exceptions, for example, Paeonia and Hemerocallis, which have survived unchanged at many old homesteads. Documentation therefore must rely more on written records, utilizing period books, nursery catalogues, diaries, photographs, and business records and inventories. Nineteenth-century horticulture and garden design books, as well as 357 extant nursery and seed catalogues, representing 12 northeastern states and the District of Columbia, provided the data for this research. Additionally, period photographs and illustrations visually document some of the gardening practices.; Perennials were not plants of fashion in the early 1800s. As the century progressed, the literature demonstrates that hardy herbaceous plants slowly became both available and fashionable, due to the efforts of garden writers and designers and a developing nursery trade. In this study, plants were ranked in order of the most available to the least available, based on protocol established by Robert Harvey in 1989. The most available plant for the nineteenth-century northeastern United States was Dianthus barbatus, an old-fashioned favorite, which was also the subject of breeding innovations. Almost 2700 taxa of hardy herbaceous plants were available in the nineteenth-century nursery trade.; The state of Ohio provided a microcosm of the national trends. As the 1800s unfold, gardens were mainly practical in the developing state. Prominent citizens grew hardy herbaceous plants, but they were not often seen in the vernacular garden until the second half of the century. Ninety catalogues, representing the years 1835-1899, have demonstrated that Ohio's nurseries and seed houses made hardy herbaceous plants available to the citizens of the state. The garden literature and also horticultural and civic organizations contributed to public interest in this group of plants. |
