Mainland Nursery Inc history

He wrote The Genera of North American Plants with a Catalogue of the Species through 1817, “a landmark in American botany,” and “beyond above praise;” a botany textbook; Manual of Ornithology, Land Birds and Water Birds, reprinted several times; and an updated North American Sylva.

Breck founded Joseph Breck and Co. in 1818 and it exists today as Breck’s.

“Naturally the first wagon roads to the village,” he writes, followed “paths which the Indians had trod and were correspondingly crooked.” In 1835 the first right-angled streets were laid out and cleared but otherwise unimproved except for “little plank or log bridges across streams and mud holes.”

So begins an extraordinary letter from 1845 that survives today in the Big Springs Museum of Caledonia, New York.

The first mower to reach the US arrived in 1850, imported by a wealthy garden-lover for his Hudson River estate.

“The postal service was also helping the plant business. . . . In 1861, seeds and cuttings in packages under eight ounces were, for the first time, accepted by the United States mail.

In his 1863 Flowers for the Parlor and Garden, popular Victorian garden writer E. S. Rand gave some unusual tips for forcing hyacinths:

Born in 1866, Potter was a shy girl with a love of nature who grew up to chart her own path, self-publishing her first book, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, becoming a celebrated author and preservationist, marrying at 47, and gardening with enthusiasm.

“One of the finest books of the year was first published in 1870.” So begins Saxon Holt’s recent review of The Wild Garden, William Robinson’s ground-breaking work which has just been reissued in an “expanded edition” by one of the most inspired wild gardeners of our time, Rick Darke.

From 1875 Gertrude Jekyll joined Robinson in the war.

A “large panel with magnificent red dahlias amidst a jumble of grass and creepers” — that’s how a reviewer in 1877 described Renoir’s five-foot-tall The Garden in the rue Cortot which hangs today in the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.

Not compared to the perennial asters that are commonly grown today, but back in 1879 the most popular asters – by far – were the annual bedding plants known as China asters, Callistephus chinensis.

They founded the earliest continuously operated and one of the most important plant nurseries in Florida, dating back 1881.

Almost as old, the Glen Saint Mary Nursery in North Florida started in 1882.

“My grandmother (born 1884) called daffodils such as ‘Avalanche’ and ‘Laurens Koster’ ‘narcissus’ (as opposed to ‘paperwhites’) and all the yellow ones ‘jonquils.’ ‘Daffodils,’ on the other hand, were just something in a Wordsworth poem.

In 1885 his younger brother Egbert joined in, and the rest of the family followed soon.

Van Gogh painted it in 1886, shortly after moving to Paris and beginning to favor the brighter colors and bolder brushwork of the Impressionists.

In 1887 through the USDA Division of Pomology, he published their first Brochure which was a full-size book, entitled Report on the Condition of Tropical and Semi-Tropical Fruits.

Horace Darwin’ (1888) – Although “rather dwarf,” this white iris is “wonderfully free blooming.

One of the greatest daffodil breeders of all time, Engleheart introduced some 700 named varieties starting in 1889.

The techniques described below by Liberty Hyde Bailey in his 1896 Nursery Manual would have been familiar to bulb-growers a century earlier and are still standard practice in the Netherlands today.

Subtitled Great Works from the LuEsther T. Mertz Library of the New York Botanical Garden, it’s a collection of essays that explore the riches of the Library — which holds over a million books and eleven million other documents — and its development since 1899.

R.O. Backhouse’ daffodil of 1921.

Jones’s ‘Jersey’s Beauty’ that stole the show in 1926, local reports say the Herald’s cover-girl dahlia was raised at Fairacres, and an oil painting of that flower once hung in splendor there, perhaps alongside her Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington.

Before it sells out early this year (as it always does), here’s a bit of history about big, beautiful ‘Jane Cowl’. Sent to us by our good customer Jim O’Donnell of Philadelphia, it’s from the November 1927 edition of Garden and Home Builder:

In 1934, as America struggled through the Great Depression, George W. Park of Greenwood, SC, kicked off his Spring Flower Book with a big photo and lavish praise for a new dahlia that we’re still keen on today:

Within a decade, 30 growers were cultivating some 2500 acres of glads there. It all started in 1935 when two successive winter freezes in central Florida drove gladiolus growers further south to the Iona area just outside of Fort Myers.

By 1938 the Twin City Sentinel reported that “Winston-Salem’s iris attract visitors from all parts of the state.

There’s also a fascinating section of “People in Plant History” with short bios of 45 greats from the ancient Greek Dioscorides to Karl Foerster who in 1939 introduced what has become the world’s most popular ornamental grass.

Universities have programs in Historic Preservation, there’s the Historic Iris Preservation Society, the American Daffodil Society has a section in every show for Historic Pre-1940 Daffodils, etc.

Garden Design, by Sylvia Crowe, 1958 – “My first choice,” Hobhouse says.

Deike describes ‘Starface’ as a “dainty little beauty” whose “ornately patterned petals” have been “stopping gardeners in their tracks since 1960.” Other summer bulbs she praises include:

According to a 1963 LIFE magazine article titled “JFK’s New Garden,” the “once rundown” space outside the Oval Office was bulldozed and replanted as a “traditional 18th-century garden” with a lawn for presidential receptions.

‘Café au Lait’ dahlia – Like ‘Starface’, this 1967 beauty also rates a full-page photo in Deike’s article.

Howard went on to launch his own nursery in 1969 with £50 in the bank and a half-acre of rented land.

His sunflowers, of course, have become iconic, and his magnificent Irises sold in 1987 for a record-breaking $54 million.

In her fine A Passion for Daylilies (1992), Sydney Eddison tells of its breeder, a man who saw the possibilities for beauty in a form that everyone else at that time was scorning.

In 1993, with high hopes, Scott mailed 500 copies of his first catalog — three pages of brightly colored paper photocopied at Kinko’s.

As Vivian Russell writes in her excellent Monet’s Garden: Through the Seasons at Giverny (1995):

“Foods, Flavors, and Scents,” which includes an ancient Egyptian perfume recipe that starts with 2000 Madonna lily flowers,

Published in 2001, it was the first by Amy Stewart who went on to write best-sellers such as Flower Confidential and The Drunken Botanist and co-found the popular Garden Rant blog.

After taking early retirement in 2004, Sarah launched a quest to rediscover all of Morris’s iris, and today she’s nurturing some 25 of them as holder of Plant Heritage’s National Collection of Cedric Morris Iris.

late, light to dark purple tulips (see our Tulips Comparison Chart) with “silvery” creeping phlox, woodland phlox, pink thrift (Armeria), white and lavender horned violets (Viola cornuta), lambs-ear, snow-in-summer, white flax, and Nepeta mussini under redbuds or dogwoods. (2006-07 catalog)

Now Derek Fell, the renowned garden photographer, sets out to change all that in The Gardens of Frank Lloyd Wright (2009). It’s a beautiful and informative book, and any gardener with a taste for art, history, or nature will find plenty to like in it.

From roses to daffodils to asparagus, some garden plants are so tough that they can persist in the wild without care for many, many years. It’s fun to explore, it may help you identify bulbs you’ve found in the wild, and it’s convincing testimony to the staying power of heirlooms. (April 2011)

See Ed and his dahlias (‘Promise’, ‘White Fawn’, ‘Blue Danube’, and ‘Old Gold’) and learn more about the Topsfield Fair and its history. (July 2012)

Evelyn’s 300-year-old advice for winter storage isn’t much different from ours to store them pot and all in a dry, dark space: “September: Your Tuberoses will not endure the wet of this season, therefore set the pots into your conserve, and keep them very dry. It is best to take them out of the pots, about the beginning of this month, and either to preserve them in dry sand, or to wrap them up in papers, and so put them in a box near the chimney.” (March 2013)

Grow one of our easy heirloom dahlia samplers, Dreamy Dahlias or Endless Bouquets. (April 2015)

And if you’re one of the 1.5 million people who will visit Alcatraz this year, don’t miss the docent-led tours of the gardens! (April 2016)

To learn more or register, visit oldsalem.org/events/event/landscapeconference/. (July 2017)

Those clues led me to the former Lawn Mower Capital of America and helped me learn a lot more about my mower’s history – which I’ll share with you in our next newsletter. (December 2018)