Biodiversity Heritage Library - Program news and collection highlights from BHL
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Citizen Science Uses Art to Unlock Scientific Knowledge

Citizen Science in Science Gossip

Since the release of Science Gossip a little less than a month ago, 3,600 volunteers have enthusiastically completed 160,000 classifications of natural history illustrations from the pages of 19th century science periodicals! As a result, the periodicals Recreative Science and Midland Naturalist are now fully classified and both the Magazine of Natural History and Journal of Zoology, Botany, Mineralogy, Geology and Meteorology and the Intellectual Observer are nearly complete (approximately 80%).

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Volunteers have identified illustrations from a wide variety of topics, from Barnacles transforming into Geese to Egyptian Village Life to a plant called Vegetable Sheep, all of which demonstrate the diversity of domains covered in these 19th century science periodicals.

Some of the illustrations volunteers have discovered relate to other Zooniverse projects such as these gems:

 

Furthermore, within the first week, one of the volunteers managed to uncover the background image we use for the Science Gossip website!

Talk has been very active with questions about the best way to classify. Based on regularly recurring questions from users we have begun an FAQ, and this list will grow over time. If you have a question you think should be added to the FAQ, please post here.

We are in the process of uploading new content and are looking to reduce the number of blank and text only pages that volunteers have to weed through to get to pages with illustrations. Algorithms that can help automatically identify pages with text are being tested, although they are not 100% accurate. Stay tuned for progress and we look forward to seeing what other illustrative treasures our volunteers will unearth over the next month!

Citizen Science in Flickr

We’ve also been encouraging our user community to help us unlock knowledge in scientific illustrations through Flickr tagging. In January, we announced that, in addition to the nearly 100,000 images in our own Flickr collection, over a million BHL images are also being uploaded to Flickr Commons via the Internet Archive Flickr stream. As part of our Art of Life project, we asked you to help us enhance these images by tagging them with species names.

Since our request in January, over 1,700 images in the BHL Flickr collection have been tagged by our user community, translating to over 18,000 total images tagged. Those images with species name machine tags are automatically ingested into the Encyclopedia of Life and associated with the corresponding species page. To date, there are over 17,000 BHL images in EOL.

Our community has also been adding much more information than just species names. @SiobhanLeachman and @VLeachman shared a great guide from the British Library on additional machine tag formats, including artist name, dates, and VIAF information. As a result, knowledge such as the artists who created these amazing illustrations is also being captured.

Thanks to our interaction with taggers on social media, we’ve also discovered some really amazing things about these illustrations. For example, through transcription activities with the Smithsonian Transcription Center, @Bailiuchan discovered a great mention by Vernon Bailey of Cassin’s Kingbird (Tyrannus vociferans), which she shared on Twitter. We shared an illustration of the bird from BHL, and a suggestion of the possible artist from one of our image taggers led us to discover that this image, and the other plates from this work, were prepared by the same firm that did Audubon’s famous Birds of America!

We are so excited about the ways that citizen science is allowing us to learn new things about our collections and capture this knowledge in ways that allow others to more easily discover them. The ultimate goal for all of these activities is to ingest the tags and descriptions provided by users on Science Gossip and Flickr into BHL to enhance our own metadata and eventually support image search within the portal itself.

Thank you for helping us learn about our collection and improve access to it! We hope you will continue to explore and describe our illustrations on Science Gossip and Flickr. What will you discover?

March 31, 2015by ulib-libraryjobs
Blog Reel, Campaigns, Featured Books, Garden Stories

What’s Up with Seed Catalogs in BHL?

We’ve spent a fun-filled week exploring the history, art, and science of gardening with our Garden Stories event. Seed and nursery catalogs and lists played a starring role in our campaign, allowing us to explore the world of gardening through the instruments that informed, documented, shaped, and transformed the industry.

As our journey this week has demonstrated, seed and nursery catalogs and lists allow us to trace the development of the seed industry, agriculture, and the home garden, documenting the rise, decline, and development of new plant varieties and prices; changing agricultural and printing technologies; the individuals who shaped the industry; the evolution of garden fashion and landscape design; the introduction of chemical agents for insect and weed control; early methods of cleaning, preserving, and shipping seeds; and cultural and social dynamics such as the effects of and reactions to scientific advancement, global wars, and the shifting roles of women in society and business.

Because of their cultural, historic, and scientific importance, many BHL partners are engaged in a variety of projects to digitize and improve access to the seed and nursery catalogs and lists in their collections. As we wind things down in our Garden Stories event, we invite you to explore the exciting world of seed catalogs in the Biodiversity Heritage Library consortium.

Digitizing One of the Largest Seed Catalog Collections in America

Started in 1904 by USDA’s first economic botanist, Percy Leroy Ricker, the National Agricultural Library’s (NAL) Henry G. Gilbert Nursery and Seed Trade Catalog Collection consists of over 200,000 American and foreign catalogs. The earliest catalogs date from the late 1700s, but the collection is strongest from the 1890s to the present.

As one of NAL’s most frequently used collections with an appeal to a wide-ranging audience, the Nursery and Seed Trade Catalog Collection was a natural candidate for digitization. In 2013, NAL began digitizing the collection with Internet Archive which operates a scanning center at NAL. As of February 2015, NAL has cataloged all of its U.S seed catalogs through 1923 and digitized over 13,000 seed catalogs, including all of its U.S. catalogs through 1906 as well as its entire collection of catalogs from long-established firms such as Peter Henderson & Co., and woman-owned firms such as Miss Ella V. Baines. The Nursery and Seed Trade Catalog Collection will remain a focus of NAL’s digitization work with Internet Archive for the foreseeable future.

Soon after NAL’s catalogs became available in Internet Archive, BHL added them to its own Seed and Nursery Catalogs Collection. In 2014, NAL formally became a BHL affiliate and the two institutions began working on a standardized process for ingest of NAL seed catalogs (and other relevant digitized materials) into BHL.

Digitizing to Improve Access and Discoverability

In 2013, the Biodiversity Heritage Library engaged in an ambitious project to explore the applicability of purposeful gaming to tackle a significant challenge for digital libraries today: poor output from Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. OCR allows a computer to “read” the text on a digitized page and produce a searchable text file for each page image that allows users to more easily discover content relevant to their needs.

Led by the Missouri Botanical Garden’s Center for Biodiversity Informatics (CBI) and in partnership with Harvard University, Cornell University, and the New York Botanical Garden, the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)-funded project, Purposeful Gaming, will demonstrate whether or not digital games are a successful tool for analyzing and improving outputs from OCR and transcription activities because large numbers of users can be harnessed quickly and efficiently to focus on the review and correction of particularly problematic words by being presented the task as a game.

As part of Purposeful Gaming, project participants are digitizing seed and nursery catalogs and lists because these documents are great examples of materials that are notoriously difficult subjects for OCR to parse. The picturesque fonts and elaborate page layouts so endearingly characteristic of seed catalogs cause the resulting OCR output to be error prone and less than optimal. By identifying unique catalogs and lists in their collections and integrating them into the BHL Seed and Nursery Catalog Collection, transcription sites, and purposeful games, participating institutions are helping us enhance our OCR and improve access to not only these catalogs and lists but the entire BHL collection as well.

Seed catalogs and Index Semina – What’s the difference and why do we care?

As described, Purposeful Gaming involves digitization of historic seed catalogs and seed lists, or index semina. What is the difference? Beautifully illustrated seed catalogues were issued regularly by seed companies to list their current selection available for sale. The catalogues occasionally included plants that were not only new to the garden, but also new to science. Similarly, the far less colorful seed lists were issued and exchanged by botanical gardens to facilitate the free exchange of new seed acquisitions and also included plant species new to science.

The seed lists were published and circulated in limited numbers and were often considered ephemeral so they were not generally deposited in libraries. Today no library in the world has a complete set. BHL partners have joined forces to digitize their collections to form a virtual set that is nearly complete and are far more accessible to botanists and everyone around the world.

Nierembergia frutescens is just one example of a plant that was first named and described in a seed exchange list. This beautiful flowering herb is a member of the Solanaceae or Nightshade family. It was first named in 1866 by the French botanist Michel Charles Durieu de Maisonneue. He described the plant in great detail while advertising the availability of seeds of this new species to his colleagues in Catalogue des graines récoltées en. 1866, issued by Jardin-des-plantes de la ville de Bordeaux.

Identifying the Unique

 

With many Purposeful Gaming-affiliated institutions involved in digitizing seed and nursery catalogs, alongside the significant digitization underway at the National Agricultural Library (NAL), it can be difficult to ensure that the same catalog is not digitized by multiple libraries. Recognizing this challenge, Cornell University’s Mann Library developed a process to identify and digitize the unique seed catalogs in their collection.

The first step in this process was to collect metadata about the seed catalogs held by BHL institutions currently digitizing these works. This was done using Excel spreadsheets with matching columns. The merging of the metadata was complicated by differing cataloging processes among various institutions. For instance, NAL catalogs each seed catalog as a monograph whereas Cornell catalogs them as serials based on the firm name. To further complicate the situation, Cornell also cataloged the firms for which they have only a handful of catalogs in alphabetic ranges by firm name.

After the metadata for the seed catalogs in applicable institutions was merged into one large spreadsheet, it was necessary to try to match up the varying firm names. For example, one institution might have a firm cataloged as John W. Adams, whereas another institution may have JW Adams, Adams JW, or even John W Adams & Sons. Additionally many firms changed names over time.

Mann decided to use Google Refine in an attempt to standardize firm names. Using Google Refine’s Cluster option they were able to match up various firm names used for the same firm. (For more on clustering methods, please see https://github.com/OpenRefine/OpenRefine/wiki/Clustering-In-Depth). If requested, Google Refine will change the firm names in the spreadsheet to use a common firm name for each. This allowed the resulting spreadsheet to be sorted by firm so that all metadata for one firm appeared together in the spreadsheet. Mann Library then reviewed the spreadsheet manually to see what firms or seed catalog publication years are uniquely held by them, avoiding the scanning of material already digitized by other BHL institutions.

Gaming to Enhance Collections

So we’ve covered digitizing the catalog and list collections. How then will Purposeful Gaming use video games to decipher difficult-to-read texts–such as seed and nursery catalogs–that cannot easily be read by OCR software?

Here’s how it works: an original catalog is scanned, and the image uploaded to BHL. The image is then uploaded to a transcription portal, where volunteers type out the text that would be too difficult for a computer to read (thanks to all who have helped us transcribe seed catalogs this week!). Multiple transcriptions of the same text are then incorporated into the video game, which identifies discrepancies between them. The task of the player is to correctly transcribe the text in question through a creative video game interface. Eventually, games like this could help create searchable versions of seed and nursery catalogs, increasing their value to historians and horticulturalists alike.

Beta versions of the games are being tested right now, and we hope to release them this summer. Stay tuned to our blog and social media for more updates. In the meantime, you can help inform the game development by transcribing seed and nursery catalogs today! Learn more.

We’re so glad you joined us this week for Garden Stories. You can explore all our great posts by following #BHLinbloom on Twitter and Facebook and diving into our Garden Stories blog series. Be sure to check out the over 14,000 seed and nursery catalogs in BHL and enjoy over 2,500 seed catalog images in Flickr, with a selection also available in Pinterest. Find great online gardening resources, facts, and tips on the BHL Gardening Resources Page.

Happy gardening!

Contributions From:

Chris Cole
Manager, Business Development, National Agricultural Library
Doug Holland
Director, Missouri Botanical Garden Library
Holly Mistlebauer
Information Technology Project Manager, Cornell University’s Mann Library
Kay Derr
Contracts Librarian, National Agricultural Library
Patrick Randall
Marketing Intern, Ernst Mayr Library, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University
Judith A. Warnement
Librarian of Harvard University Botany Libraries

March 27, 2015by ulib-libraryjobs
Blog Reel, Campaigns, Featured Books, Garden Stories

“’Tis A Gift To Be Simple” But to Have a Splendid Garden Buy Shaker Seeds

The United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, a religious sect commonly referred to as the Shakers, was founded in 18th-century England from a branch of the Quakers. Along with other newly formed devotional groups, they soon immigrated to colonial America. There they established as their economic foundation a variety of cottage industries that thrived throughout the 19th and into the early 20th centuries. Now known mostly for wonderfully simple architecture, austere but beautifully designed furniture and such functional objects as nesting oval boxes and baskets, members of the Shaker communities also once had booming garden and seed businesses. Their labor-intensive methods of working inevitably came to be overwhelmed by competition from industrial manufacturing as well as the problem of ever-shrinking membership, celibacy being one of their central tenets.

The first fully organized Shaker community was New Lebanon in New York; by 1789, two years after its formation, the members cultivated seeds as a cash crop. This was the second earliest “company” to sell seeds in America. David Landreth & Son of Philadelphia was the first, in 1784, and that business traded back and forth with the Shakers. Another early dealer was Grant Thorburn in Philadelphia who wrote about the difficulty of obtaining seeds of good quality.
Other Shaker settlements, or “families,” soon followed in the seed-production business, including Watervvliet, New York; Hancock, Massachusetts; Enfield, Connecticut; Canterbury, New Hampshire; Alfred, Maine; and South Union, Kentucky, among several others. All were known for the excellence of their products and integrity of their business dealings. Devotion to God was expressed through their work ethic, hand labor and craftsmanship. The selling of goods was meant to raise funds only for needs the Shakers could not supply for themselves.

It is uncertain whether the Shakers were the first to put their seed products in small paper envelopes or packets, but they were the first to popularize their use. The Shaker Brothers printed millions of them on their presses, while the Sisters performed the labor of cutting, folding and pasting the papers. While believing in partnership in work and equality of the sexes, occupations tended to fall along traditional gender lines. The Brothers tilled the fields while the Sisters picked, sorted and packaged the seeds and herbs.

The Shakers were also early adopters of incorporating gardening manuals in their catalogs. Charles Crossman wrote ones in 1835 and 1836 for Mount Lebanon, Pittsfield and Watervilet, directing the wholesaler or the individual purchaser how best to plant the offered seeds. Instructions for storing and cooking bounties from the gardens were also sometimes given. Vegetables dominated the products but herbs and flowers as well as grass also appear in the lists. Crossman later left the Shakers and established his own company in Rochester, New York, which was just beginning to become the thriving horticultural center in the country.

As the Shaker seed business in the United States grew from 1840, printing firms outside of the communities were employed to keep up with demand. Correspondingly, advertisements and the design of the packets, begun first plain with simple chunky block type, were transformed to include the use of color papers and borders and eventually vivid chromolithography.

Following the Civil War, increased competition resulted in the Shakers’ using the word “genuine” in their advertising, as products from the communities were considered to be of the highest quality, their best selling point. They also used various and effective marketing techniques, including seed boxes meant to be displayed on the counters of country stores. The containers had compartments for assorted Shaker vegetable and flower seed packages, with a hinged lid to be propped open to display a broadside detailing the contents within, and a chromolithographic image of a bountiful harvest, promising the purchaser a similar reward.

Other surviving ephemera record the once-thriving industry of seed, herbal, food, and medicinal products from the Shakers. Along with seed catalogs and the packets, mailing tags and envelopes, broadsides, receipts, invoices, billheads, and labels, give testament to their industry. Product labels include currant, grape, wild cherry, and blackberry wines. Far from being abstinent (except in the matter of sex), the Shakers made at least fourteen varieties of wine as well as distilled spirits. The religious group in their various communities was also at the forefront of selling medicinal herbs in the United States.

The changing world and market forces caused the Shaker seed industry to gradually peter out at the beginning of the 20th century. Increasing industrialization, growth of urban centers with ease of shipping and mailing to formally isolated villages, and overwhelming production from big companies, particularly in Philadelphia and Rochester, eliminated the communities’ wagon and sleigh seed routes for trading. With their firm spiritual beliefs and practices, the Shakers were not very competitive against aggressive business tactics.

At their peak in the mid-19th century there were about 6,000 “Shaking Quakers” so named because of their ecstatic behavior during worship services. Today, Sabbathday Lake Shaker Community, founded in 1783 in Maine, is the sole active survivor of the religion. A tree farm, an apple orchard and vegetable gardens are maintained, and hand-set printing is still practiced. The library there holds ephemera such as account records, recipes, catalogs and 1,380 labels printed by Shakers for their own products. They are living testament to the Shakers’ influence on the American seed and nursery industry and their permanent place in horticultural history—the early development of the new business, innovative techniques in marketing and education as well as the propagation and introduction of new varieties. The Sabbathday Shakers still sell herbs, and their catalog is online.

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March 27, 2015by mckenzie.87
Blog Reel, Campaigns, Garden Stories

Revolutionizing the Garden Industry with Art: Part Two

J. Horace McFarland’s name is little known today. In the early twentieth century, however, he was a prominent figure in American horticulture and the nascent environmental movement. McFarland (1859-1948) was a master printer, horticulturist, and conservationist, whose Harrisburg, Pennsylvania printing company specialized in horticultural trade publications. He was particularly noted for his use of photographs and color photoengraving in nursery and seed trade catalogs.

As a boy, McFarland learned the nursery trade by working in his family’s business, Riverside Nurseries of Harrisburg. His father, who published a small weekly newspaper, gave Horace a printing press in 1878. He merged his skills in horticulture, printing, and business and formed his own printing company. McFarland sought clients among people he knew—the growers who provided seed and stock to Riverside Nurseries. He called his venture Mount Pleasant Press. (The company was incorporated in 1891 as the J. Horace McFarland Company and was known for many years under both names.)

McFarland initially printed eight-page seed lists for spring and fall planting seasons. Wanting to generate a steadier stream of year-round business, he pitched ideas to nurserymen throughout the country for producing informative publications and more frequent catalogs full of enticing illustrations. Eventually, through skillful marketing, he won large contracts for thousands of catalogs.

An innovative businessman with diverse interests, McFarland also mastered the art of horticultural photography. It’s not known when he started carrying bulky camera equipment with him to capture images of growers’ plant stock, fruit, and produce. He most likely began doing this well before 1896, when he was elected to the Photographic Society of Philadelphia.

McFarland sent his early photographs to one of the foremost woodcut illustrators of plants, Albert Blanc of Philadelphia. Blanc prepared woodcuts which McFarland printed in his plant lists to develop the look of his catalogs. By 1890, the first commercial use of photographs in magazines and newspapers began thanks to Frederic E. Ives’ invention of the halftone printing technique. McFarland is thought to be the first to use halftone images in horticultural publications (Morrison, p. 41).

As the use of photography in publishing increased, so did McFarland’s collection of plant and garden photographs. He found most of his photo subjects in gardens along the East Coast and in his own trial gardens. Mount Pleasant Press kept an extensive library of photographs mounted on cards and offered the images for sale to clients wishing to use the illustrations in publications. This was a method of expanding the company’s service. McFarland aimed to offer a full range of services to his customers in addition to printing, including publicity, editorial and design, and direct mailing.

William Kurtz, a New York photographer and founder of the Coloritype Company, instructed McFarland in a new photomechanical technique for mass printing color images known as three-color photoengraving. Kurtz, impressed with McFarland’s abilities, hired him to manage the company in 1893. With less than one year’s experience in this position, McFarland launched color photoengraving techniques at Mount Pleasant Press, and was soon using four-color process.

Despite the advances in color photoengraving, McFarland was not satisfied that the new color photographic methods of the early twentieth century measured up to his exacting standards. His solution was to hire artists, who went to work in the 2.5 acre trial gardens at his residence, Breeze Hill, in Harrisburg. These skilled artists painted plant images in watercolor in order to capture an accurate color record on paper. Sometimes they created several versions of the same plant variety in order to get a proper average of the colors found in nature. Eventually, these colors were transferred to plates that were run in the printing of nursery catalogs or other publications.

McFarland’s philosophy behind his painstaking efforts to produce realistic images was simple—good pictures sell products. In a booklet marking his company’s sixtieth year he writes, “Since the natural appearance of a flower or plant is an important selling factor in advertising, nearly all progressive horticultural tradesmen are anxious to use colored illustrations.” His passion for the inherent beauty in nature appealed to many growers and established McFarland’s legacy as a trailblazer in horticultural printing.

Some of the companies for which the J. Horace McFarland Company printed catalogs include:

J. Horace McFarland’s personal and business records are now housed at several institutions:

Post Sources

  • Morrison, Ernest. J. Horace McFarland: A Thorn for Beauty. Harrisburg, PA: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1995.
  • Sixty Years of Printing Service, second edition. Harrisburg, PA: J. Horace McFarland Company/Mount Pleasant Press, 1940.

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March 26, 2015by ulib-libraryjobs
Blog Reel, Campaigns, Featured Books, Garden Stories

Revolutionizing the Garden Industry with Art: Part One

The Seed Industry Blossoms in America

Seventeenth and eighteenth-century America had established nurseries—George Fenwick’s in Connecticut in the 1640s, John Bartram’s in Philadelphia (approximately 1729) and Robert Prince’s on Long Island (1737)—that traded plants to and from Europe. The owners were accomplished botanists and plant collectors. They and their successors played a great role in horticulture and floriculture introductions and trends during the colonial period and even during the War of Independence, choosing, making available and distributing specimens and seeds for cultivation.

George Washington ordered from Bartram’s 1784 catalog American Trees, Shrubs and Herbacious Plants for his gardens at Mount Vernon. Prince’s Nursery at Flushing Landing was spared by the British in the midst of battles of the Revolutionary War, and President Washington visited in 1790. The early nursery catalogs usually lacked illustrations and prices, indicating a knowledgeable clientele able to afford the wares.

During the nineteenth century in America gardens for pleasure, influenced by various botanical, industrial and cultural forces, became accessible to a wider audience, not just the wealthy. Gardening increasingly was not only a means for providing food and medicine but a way to enrich one’s life, to enjoy nature and contribute to the public good. Along with the creation of urban parks as the country became more industrialized, commercial nurseries also proliferated. There was a growing middle-class market for their goods of fruit-trees, shrubs, vegetables, flowers, and seeds. And where there were nursery stocks, there were illustrated advertisements to entice purchasers.

This was the time when Rochester, New York, became known as “The Flower City.” The temperate climate of Lake Ontario, the rich Genesee Valley (particularly for fruit trees) and the ease of transport, abetted with the creation of the Erie Canal in 1825 and the proliferation of railroads, all contributed to the region becoming an entrepreneurial center for horticulture. First, in 1830 William A. Reynolds and Michael Bateham, started their Rochester Seed Store. The nursery part of that business soon evolved into the Ellwanger and Barry Nursery Company. The two immigrants, George Ellwanger and Patrick Barry, issued the first catalog of the Mount Hope Botanic and Pomological Gardens in 1843. By 1871 they were the largest horticultural firm in the country with over 650 acres. Stock was shipped across the country and to Europe, Asia and Australia.

The nursery man Patrick Barry’s horticultural treatises and inclusion of information in his own gardening catalogs helped educate his middle-class clientele in how to design and plant their own home landscapes. Barry’s writings led to involvement with the serial publications, the Genesee Farmer from 1844 and, following the early death of the enormously influential Andrew Jackson Downing, The Horticulturist in 1853. Barry also published The Fruit Garden in 1851 and for the American Pomological Society, he wrote in 1862 A Catalogue of Fruits (1868 revised edition in BHL).

Art Transforms the Seed Industry

Concurrently, before mid-century, illustrations—lithographs, engravings, woodcuts—were beginning to be put to use in nursery and seed catalogs. These printing techniques could not fully meet the demand of the rapidly expanding business as coloring by hand was time-consuming and expensive.

Chromolithography, also known as color lithography, was patented in 1837 by Franco-German lithographer Gottfried Engelmann. The process involves planographic or flat-surface printing on stones where the image is drawn with greasy ink or crayon in several different colors (the idea being that oil and water do not mix). This provides for eye-catching, vibrant and imaginative images produced by the thousands. Earlier methods of color reproduction had proved inadequate. Thus chromolithography became dominant in the second half of the nineteenth century for inexpensive decorative prints and for ephemera, such as postcards, cigar boxes, posters, and calendars.

The printmaking technique of chromolithography for advertisements, particularly with the advances in steam-driven production, was quickly put to great effect in the nursery industry in Rochester, where the greater number of firms were located. As a result, “the Flower City” became the center of horticultural publishing along with the garden firms. The first company solely devoted to chromolithography in Rochester was established in 1871. Production was not just for the widely distributed catalogs but also for seed packets and labels for boxes and trade cards and, eventually, horticultural periodicals. In addition, unique sample books for salesmen, composed of varying images of fruits and flowers, could be assembled for the trade, advertising the inventory of a business. One leading firm was Dellon Dewey. An example of one of the surviving works for agents of the company is in the Smithsonian Libraries’ Cullman Library (SB361 .D519 1872). While not many of these pieces of ephemera in the nursery trade still exist, the University of Delaware Libraries has nearly one hundred.

Reimagining the Seed Catalog: James Vick

James Vick (1818-1882) is a figure that unites all these trends—Rochester as a horticultural center both for the selling of plants as well as printing and publishing, the use of beautiful and informative illustrations as to aid the gardening business, and landscape design education. He was another immigrant, from Portsmouth, England. After learning the printing trade in New York City, he settled in Rochester in 1837 to work for several newspapers. An intense interest in horticulture, excellent editorial skills and an innovative mind perfectly suited the Genesee Farmer and The Horticulturist (1853 to 1854). He then started his own business in 1860: the Vick Seed Company.

Andrew Jackson Downing’s English landscape aesthetic, laid out in the author’s A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (1841) and Cottage Residences (1842), particularly influenced the seedman’s essays for his several annual catalogs and magazine, Vick’s Illustrated Monthly (the title varies). Vick promoted Downing’s favored picturesque style of undulating expanses of lawn, groupings of trees and shrubs, and flower in borders and beds, along curving paths. He advertised widely seeds for all these components in other publications and newspapers while integrating his own printing shop and bindery and mailing operation, with this 100-acre nursery and retail store. His sons took over the business following Vick’s death but eventually sold it to the Burpee Seed Company.

As an added incentive, mail order customers of Vick’s company were sent free chromolithographic prints to display in their homes.The suitable-for-framing art and the covers of Vick’s catalogs were mostly devoted to floriculture with bold, colorful images to lure customers in the dead of winter to dream of planting and then order for planting in the spring and summer. Planning, particularly for something new and exotic, is at least half the fun.

Survivors of this ephemeral form of publication—seed and nursery trade catalogs—are valuable not only for their pictures (documenting different techniques of illustrating processes) but as research sources on introduction of plants into the trade as well as trends in horticultural fashion. Catalogs can also be used to trace the propagation history of specific plants, seed cleaning, packing and shipping methods, and prices. Or, rather than research, the illustrations can provide in this day inspiration or simple enjoyment of their aesthetic.

Stay Tuned for Part Two of our “Revolutionizing the Garden Industry with Art” blog post to see how photography influenced the seed catalog.

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For further reading: 

March 26, 2015by mckenzie.87
Blog Reel, Campaigns, Featured Books, Garden Stories

Leading Ladies in the World of Seeds: Part Two

A Garden Stories celebration for Women’s History Month

Seed Catalogs to Inform Botanical Research

Carrie H. Lippincott (featured in our previous post) exploited the potential that seed catalogs offer in a business setting. Ethel Z. Bailey recognized the potential of seed catalogs in an entirely different application: cultivated plant research.

Ethel Z. Bailey, daughter of Liberty Hyde Bailey (botanist, a foremost leader in American horticulture, and the first dean of Cornell University’s College of Agriculture) and Annette Smith Bailey, was born in Ithaca, New York on November 17, 1889. Born in a faculty house on the Cornell University campus, in the middle of what is now Phillips Hall, Ethel was surrounded at an early age by the students, professors, deans, and presidents of Cornell University, witnessing over her lifetime the evolution of the university from a three-building campus at her birth to one of America’s premier institutions.

In 1911, Ms. Bailey graduated with an A.B. in Zoology from Smith College in Northampton, MA. While her early scientific interests were zoological in nature (influenced in part by natural history excursions during her youth with Cornell herpetologist Albert Hazen Wright), her focus soon turned to botany and horticulture shortly after her graduation, when she became her father’s co-worker, editor of his many books and articles, and field assistant on collecting expeditions around the world. She also served as her father’s chauffeur, as she was the first woman in Ithaca to obtain a driver’s license.

Ms. Bailey was a particularly well-traveled individual. As a girl, she traveled with her parents and sister to Europe, and in 1914 she accompanied her parents on a trip to New Zealand (her father wrote his book The Holy Earth during this latter venture). Once joining her father in his work, Ethel traveled with him to Japan and China in 1917, Brazil in 1922-23, the west coast of the U.S. in 1926, as well as locales in Puerto Rico, Panama, Barbados, Trinidad, other West Indian Islands, and Venezuela, collecting plant specimens. These specimens were processed and cataloged (largely by Miss Bailey), and housed at the family home at Sage Place, about 10 blocks from the Cornell campus (the palms were housed in the carriage house and the remaining general herbarium in a wing off of the carriage house, where the work areas were situated).

During one particularly memorable collecting excursion, Miss Bailey, her father, and a few other botanists ventured into the wild jungle island of Barro Colorado in the Panama Canal Zone in search of a rare palm, which L.H. Bailey believed would be found in the Mohinja Swamp. Wading through hip-deep water amidst warnings of disease and boa constrictors, the group found the palm as predicted and photographed it in the middle of a downpour using a tripod nearly submerged in water. But the specimens, and the photographs, were successfully obtained!

Miss Bailey assisted and edited many of her father’s works during his lifetime, including Standard Cyclopedia of Horticulture (1914-17) and the Manual of Cultivated Plants (1924; 1949). She also served as editor of Gentes Herbarum through its first eight volumes and co-authored Hortus (1930) and Hortus Second (1941) with her father.

As part of her work, Miss Bailey also maintained a collection of seed and nursery catalogs from around the world, which she and her father used to gather and record information on cultivated plants (this collection greatly informed L.H. Bailey’s Manual of Cultivated Plants and L.H. and E.Z. Bailey’s Hortus Second). As each catalog was received, the plants listed were recorded on index cards, along with the name of the firm offering the plant, the year of offering, Latin names, and prices, resulting in an index providing a record of the species and variants available in the commercial trade. The file grew to become the most comprehensive index of available ornamental plants in the world.

In 1935, L.H. Bailey donated his Hortorium, which contained over 100,000 plant and seed catalogs, 125,000 plant specimens, and nearly 3,000 books, along with the family home buildings that housed the collections, to Cornell University, establishing the L.H. Bailey Hortorium. Interestingly, L.H. Bailey coined the term “hortorium” in 1935 as (in his words) “a repository for things of the garden. It is to be a place for the scientific study of the plants of the garden–their documentation, their classification, and their naming.”

Miss Bailey became the first Hortorium curator, managing the herbarium specimens (which since 1953 have been located in Cornell University’s Mann Library building), seed and nursery catalogs and book collections, and card file index system. She diligently processed herbarium specimens, grew the catalog collection, and built her cultivated plant index system until her “retirement” in 1957. She continued to volunteer her time at the Hortorium after her retirement, however, working five days a week, 9am-4pm, on her index and curating the catalog collection. She also glued pressed plants on sheets for the herbarium on Saturday afternoons at her home at Sage Place, while listening to the opera on local radio – Ethel had played the violin in the Ithaca High School orchestra.

After her death on July 15, 1983 at the age of 93, the seed and nursery catalog collection at the L.H. Bailey Hortorium (which today holds over 134,000 pieces) was named after Miss Bailey. It is now known as the Ethel Z. Bailey Horticultural Catalogue Collection in recognition of the 70+ years that Miss Bailey curated and cultivated the collection. Explore the catalogs in the Cornell University Library Mail Order Gardens exhibit and materials from the L.H.Bailey Hortorium in BHL.

Miss Bailey’s tireless efforts and research involving cultivated plants boldly illustrates the importance of seed and nursery catalogs in historical research. The catalogs and index are today used to trace the introduction of plant cultivars and species, support price-index studies and related economic investigations, and verify the existence of certain plant varieties. Miss Bailey’s contributions to horticultural science were well-recognized both during and after her lifetime. She was awarded the George Robert White Medal of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society in 1967 and the Smith College Medal in 1970.

Explore other remarkable Leading Ladies of the Seed Industry represented in BHL 

More Garden Stories Fun

With Significant Contributions From:
Robert Dirig
Curator, Cornell Plant Pathology Herbarium, Cornell University Department of Plant Pathology
Marty Schlabach
Food and Agricultural Librarian, Cornell University Library
March 25, 2015by michelle.underhill
Blog Reel, Campaigns, Featured Books, Garden Stories

Leading Ladies in the World of Seeds: Part One
A Garden Stories celebration for Women’s History Month

A Feminine Touch in the Gardening Industry

Recent reports indicate that the number of women-owned businesses have increased by 54% in the last fifteen years. But while we may be seeing a rise in the number and cultural acceptance of women-owned businesses today, this was not always the case. In fact, up through the nineteenth century, women-owned businesses were largely limited to taverns and alehouses, millinery and retail shops, and hotels and brothels, and were operated amidst the prevailing opinion that business was an unsuitable venture for the “gentle sex.”

By the late 1800s, however, women were beginning to make a decided mark on a growing American industry: gardening.

Unlike other businesses such as banking or manufacturing, the flower and seed industry, with a strong connection to the home, was considered a more suitable occupation for women in the nineteenth century. Miss Ella V. Baines, who started her floral business in Springfield, OH, in 1896 and offered roses, plants, bulbs, and seeds for sale via her catalogs, asserted:

“When I started in the floral business two years ago, I confess it was with fear and trembling. It was a new field in the commercial world for woman to enter. Every one said ” don’t; ” but I did, and I am happy to say that my business success has been assured from the very start. I reasoned in this way: that this business is one eminently suited to a woman in every respect, and of all occupations it is the most pleasant and refining. Wherever there is a home in which happiness reigns, flowers are grown…For this reason floriculture appeals to the hearts of women the world over.”

Furthermore, as Miss Baines’ remarks suggest, women were a predominant customer base for the amateur gardening industry, meaning that a feminine touch and advertising tailored by women, for women, offered a distinct business advantage.

Perhaps the best example of the woman-owned business advantage in the flower seed industry at the turn of the twentieth century was the self-proclaimed “Pioneer Seedswoman of America,” Carrie H. Lippincott, and the “Three Minneapolis Seedswomen.”

Three Minneapolis Seedswomen

Carrie H. Lippincott was born in Burlington, NJ, in September 1863. After the death of her father, Carrie, her sister and her sister’s husband, Henry B. Kent, and their widowed mother, moved to Minneapolis. In 1886, at the suggestion of her brother-in-law, Sam Y. Haines, and with a need to increase the family income, Carrie started a business offering a variety of flower seeds for sale. Initially run from the family home, success soon compelled Miss Lippincott to move the business into the two-story brick store next to their house. It was the first seed company in the U.S. to be founded and managed by a woman.

The business blossomed, and in 1891, the Lippincott Flower Seed House entered the mail order gardening world by producing its first catalog – an impressive 5×7 inch lithographed delight offering seeds for sale via post. By 1896, the business claimed to have received more than 150,000 orders, and the catalog for the year reportedly enjoyed a 200,000 print run and was offered, free of charge, to anyone interested. The 1896 catalog also made the bold claim that the Lippincott company was the largest exclusively flower seed house in the world. In 1898, a quarter of a million copies of the year’s catalog were shipped, translating to 1 in 60 households in the U.S. receiving a copy.

The Lippincott catalogs are a study in marketing genius. Revolutionary for their time, they reflected a “feminine touch” that appealed to women and directly contributed to Carrie’s success. Her catalog art featured colorful, idealized women and children amidst exotic or elaborate floral displays, resembling chromolithographed greeting cards of the day rather than the typical manilla paper, black-ink printed catalogs of many competitors. The catalog introductions were also personal and conversational, providing updates on the life events of the Lippincott family. Following this theme, Carrie branded her early catalogs as annual “Greetings.” Carrie knew her audience. As the reputed first seed seller to target women buyers, the Lippincott catalogs were artistically tailored to feminine tastes.

The Lippincott business was pioneering in other ways. It employed a staff of twenty-five female clerks and engaged housewives to grow seed stock on their farms and backyard gardens. In 1894, Carrie’s became the first business to list the number of seeds contained in each packet, allowing buyers to better plan their garden layouts each year. Her contemporaries took notice of her originality, with an 1896 article in Printer’s Ink asserting, “She is the original pioneer seedswoman – a real woman, arranging all the details of a large business herself.”

Miss Lippincott’s fans were not the only ones to take notice of her success; her Minneapolis competitors also took note of the advantages of marketing a seed company as a woman-owned business catering to other women, and followed suit.

In 1895, the catalog “Flower Seeds” appeared under the name of Jessie R. Prior, Seedswoman. Jessie’s husband was listed as the owner of the seed business for five years before a seed catalog featuring Jessie’s name appeared.

The next year, in 1896, the E. Nagel and Co. flower seed business in Minneapolis announced that it had transferred ownership to Miss Emma V. White, who became known as the “Northstar Seedswoman.” The company subsequently produced catalogs strikingly similar in format to that of the Lippincott phenomena. Miss White was a boarder at the home of Alanson W. Latham, Secretary of the Minnesota State Horticultural Society, whom she married in 1922.

The association of these women with prominent men in the seed industry led many to question whether the new women-owned companies were in fact only fronted by women but run by men. Carrie Lippincott believed this to be true, writing:

“…a number of seedsmen (shall I call them men ?) have assumed women’s names in order to sell seeds. It is a peculiar thing in this day and age, that a man should want to masquerade in woman’s clothing.”

Miss White responded to the accusation, proclaiming, “I am a real live woman and I give personal attention to my business.” In an 1896 catalog, Emma even asserted (as a jab at Miss Lippincott?):

“While it is true that the buyers of flower seeds are almost always women, yet I ask your patronage NOT BECAUSE I AM A WOMAN, but solely because by my methods I merit it.”

Miss Prior’s company remained silent on the gender accusations.

Were the White and Prior companies truly owned and operated by women, or were they, as Miss Lippincott believed, the brainchildren of men hoping to mimic Carrie’s success? Research suggests that the latter was more likely true with Miss Prior’s business than with Miss White’s, but whatever the truth, the fact that being a woman in the flower seed industry was recognized as an asset represents a remarkable shift in prevailing 19th century attitudes about women in business.

Explore other remarkable Leading Ladies of the Seed Industry represented in BHL 


Leading Ladies in the World of Seeds Resources

More Garden Stories Fun

March 25, 2015by michelle.underhill
Page 1 of 3123

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