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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

Antique Seed Catalogs and Heirloom Gardening

On Heirloom Plants

When you think of an “heirloom plant”, you may be imagining a plant that has changed little in over a hundred years—something our great- great-grandparents would have farmed and eaten.  However, the definition of an heirloom plant is a bit more fluid than that, and not only includes edibles but also plants such as flowers, herbs, bulbs, and shrubs.  In fact, there is no singular consensus on how many years a plant has to have remained unchanged to be considered an heirloom.  Some groups use cut-off dates—meaning dates after which the plant has not changed.  For instance, 1940 is the cut-off date used by the Southern Exposure Seed Exchange in Virigina.  The Heirloom Garden at the National Museum of American History uses a cut-off date of 1950.  Plants can be considered heirloom if they have not changed in 50, 75, and 100 years; there is not a single date used by a single, overriding authority.

Interestingly, the genetic make-up of an heirloom plant is also not necessarily unchanged over time, as one might assume.  While heirloom plants are plants that breed true to seed by open-pollinated, natural means, i.e., wind, water, insects, animals, etc., a certain amount of genetic crossing can take place naturally and the plant will still be considered an heirloom.  In technical terms, an open pollinated heirloom plant will seem extremely similar to its parent plant in looks and genetic composition, but will not necessarily have the exact same genetic make-up as the parent.  Sometimes flowering plants, mainly food crops, need to be isolated to prevent cross-breeding with neighboring plant species.  However, sometimes hybrid plants containing crossed characteristics from two different parent plants can be considered heirlooms if they are open pollinated and become stabilized over a long enough period of time (at least eighty years). Learn more about hybrids in our previous post.

Heirloom vegetables have been passed down over generations, often being 50, 75 or 100 years in cultivation.  Heirloom gardeners use seed saving techniques or buy seeds from heirloom seed companies.  You can explore various antique seed catalogs in the Biodiversity Heritage Library’s collection here to see the types of seeds our ancestors used, some of which are now heirloom varieties if they have been carefully preserved over time to maintain the same genetic traits (as explained above).  Aside from vegetables, people have also preserved flowers over time, creating heirloom varieties.  The Heirloom Garden at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History contains shrubs, perennials, annuals, bulbs and tropicals grown in American gardens prior to 1950.

Prior to, and during, WWII, many people grew their own vegetables in backyard gardens.  When many hybrid plants were produced after the War, creating plants with desirable traits and increased yields, a large number of people wanted to preserve their own seed because they missed old varieties of plants.  This led to the beginning of the heirloom gardening movement.  The first use of the term “heirloom” in relation to plants appears to be in describing edible crops, most likely bean seeds, in the 1940s: Professor J. R. Hepler at the University of New Hampshire told John Withee, prominent bean seed collector, about some beans given to him by friends and described them as “heirloom”.  Widespread use of the term was cemented in 1981 when Kent Whealy, co-founder of Seed Savers Exchange, gave a speech in Tucson using the term after obtaining permission to use it from John Withee.

Seed Catalogs and Heirloom Gardening

Many heirloom plants are available through seed catalogs.  A majority of these catalogs are currently held in different collections, and by looking at images and reading descriptions of plants in these catalogs, one can determine when certain heirloom varieties which still exist today were first introduced.  You can search the Biodiversity Heritage Library for heirloom plants by scientific name (the genus and specific epithet) and find old catalogs, magazines and publications containing that name. For instance, search for Nicotiana sylvestris in the Biodiversity Heritage Library catalog and you will find the beautifully-illustrated Maule’s Seed Catalogue from 1900.  Below is an image of the Maule’s page featuring Nicotiana sylvestris (click here to view that page in the catalog online).  Nicotiana sylvestris is a night scented tobacco plant, also called “Woodland Tobacco”, that grows up to five feet tall with three-to-four inch hanging trumpet-shaped white blossoms that open in the evening to release a sweet scent–and you can learn more and still purchase this heirloom plant today at places like Seed Saver’s Exchange!

Older seed catalogs are especially helpful to the modern heirloom gardener—peruse the catalogs to discover the plants you might like to have in your garden, and then search for heirloom seed varieties of those plants at modern companies such as Seed Savers Exchange and Southern Exposure Seed Exchange.  Check out the beautiful seed catalogs available at the Biodiversity Heritage Library here.

Happy seed catalog viewing and heirloom gardening!

Garden Stories: A Week Long Event for Garden Lovers

All this week, we’ll be exploring the fascinating world of gardening, including garden history topics such as the development of hybrids, heirloom gardening, women in the seed industry, revolutions in garden marketing through art, and the vital role the Shakers played in the American seed industry. We’ll also be sharing great gardening tips and plant factoids with help from our BHL members and affiliates. And we’ll be using the over 14,000 seed and nursery catalogs in BHL to help tell these stories. Join in all the gardening fun by:

Special thanks to Joseph Brunetti and Erin Clark at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History HeirloomGarden for their significant contributions.

References:

  • Adams, Denise Wiles.  Restoring American Gardens: An Encyclopedia of Heirloom Ornamental Plants, 1640-1940.  Portland, OR: Timber Press, 2004.
  • Weaver, William Woys.  Heirloom Vegetable Gardening: A Master Gardener’s Guide to Planting, Seed Saving, and Cultural History.  New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company, 1997.
March 24, 2015by micahv
Blog Reel, Campaigns, Featured Books, Garden Stories

Perfecting the Garden: From the Rise of Agriculture to Genetic Modification

Today, commercial agriculture is a multi-trillion dollar global industry, while the global gardening industry, which has maintained an annual market growth of 3% since 2007, is predicted to be worth $220 billion globally by 2016. From the corporate executive looking for ways to maximize profit, to the home gardener toiling to grow the best garden in the neighborhood, the quest to achieve the “perfect” garden or the idealized crop is a passionate, laborious, and indeed ancient pursuit.

But though it may be one of the biggest industries today, agriculture, and by extension gardening, has humble origins.

The Rise of Agriculture

Although theories about ancient agricultural practices are largely speculative due to lack of historical records, some researchers believe that Neolithic agriculture began with attempts by hunter-gatherers to manage nature for their benefit, stimulated perhaps by population pressures, reductions in wild food sources due to climate change, and/or over-exploitation of land by grazing animals. Whatever the catalyst, the first “agricultural” activities comprised land management strategies like burning woodland, draining wet ground and watering dry soil.

The real beginning of cultivation, however, was propagation, whereby ancient civilizations began distributing, dividing, and planting seeds and tubers. This is commonly known as the “Domestication Revolution.”

The earliest propagation probably involved vegiculture – propagation using tubers (modified plant structures that store food and enable asexual reproduction that result in cultivated clones). Australian Aboriginal hunter-gatherers were known to practice vegiculture with yams. Before long, however, humans were practicing seed-based agriculture – collecting, saving, and growing crops from seeds – which led to the domestication of plant species which eventually resulted in plants that were genetically distinct from wild relatives. The very first instance of saving seeds to produce the next year’s crop, which inevitably resulted in certain genes being propagated instead of others, was the start of plant breeding – “the art and science of changing the traits of plants in order to produce desired characteristics.” [1]

Early plant breeding not only involved unconsciously propagating certain genes through seed selection, but also early hybridization (breeding between two genetically-distinct individuals) that occurred as farmers traveled or migrated, bringing seeds with them which were planted in new areas and eventually mixed with local species. Furthermore, natural genetic mutations often resulted in new plant varieties that could be propagated over time.

Nascent plant hybridization and improvements were likely not intentional, but early tribal people did recognize the improvements and eventually selected for them. Plant breeding history reflects the three levels of the “selection process” outlined by Charles Darwin in The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication (1868). Land management and propagation reflect Darwin’s first two levels: Natural Selection and Unconscious Selection. Land management created conditions that spurred species to change by natural selection, and eventual awareness and cultivation of “improved” plants represented unconscious selection, whereby humans preserve the more desirable and destroy the less desirable specimens without intention of altering the breed.

It would take a revolution to bring about the third level of Darwin’s “selection process”  – Methodical Selection, whereby humans try to systematically modify a species to a predetermined standard.

The Agricultural Revolution

Fast forward several millennia from the Neolithic origins of agriculture to seventeenth century Europe, and a revolution was underway. Not a revolution of violence, but a revolution of the mind. The Enlightenment, and with it the Scientific Revolution, was reforming society, culture, and science. Within the scientific realm, emphasis was diverted from mysticism to experimentation and observation of the natural world. This emphasis was further facilitated through the increasing availability of the printed word, which allowed scientific observations to be more easily passed down, studied, and improved upon. From this movement spread a revolutionary new concept: that if nature could be understood, it could be managed (and even changed) for the benefit of humanity.

While commercial agriculture was practiced throughout China and the Roman Empire centuries earlier, it became increasingly prevalent in England and America in the seventeenth century onwards. Educated farmers began to publish their knowledge, resulting in a steady rise in agricultural literature. Agricultural societies began to form in the eighteenth century and botanic gardens began to shift their focus from herbal medicines to the needs of agriculture, facilitating the free international exchange of new seed acquisition among gardens through seed lists, or indices seminum. [3]  These lists cataloged the seeds housed at the garden available for exchange, and by the nineteenth century the index semina were important sources of taxonomic and nomenclatural information, often including diagnoses, descriptions, and notes either in footnotes or in appendices. Since they are sometimes the first publications to contain the Latin binomial of new species, the rules of botanical nomenclature dictate that these published names must continue to be recognized and used today.

The Enlightenment resulted in and was simultaneously fueled by a revolution in agriculture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The introduction of new crops, more complex and efficient rotation systems, and enclosure techniques allowed farmers to produce more food and cultivate more land, which in turn led to greater food security and laid the foundations for similar advances around the world.

The growth of the agricultural economy exerted greater pressure on quality, productivity, and variety to generate more profit. These pressures resulted in more trading of crops and plants from different areas, while imperial expansion opened up new trade routes, providing opportunities for even more varieties of seeds to be introduced. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw a growing trade in seeds, generally from Italy, southern France, Switzerland, northern Europe, Turkey, Syria and colonial America. The growing popularity of home gardens spurred the development of the seed trade, with more and more nurserymen and seedsmen entering the industry and selling increasing numbers and varieties of seeds (starting with vegetables and forage crops but encompassing flowers as well by the end of the nineteenth century), culminating in the mail order garden phenomenon.

As commercial gardening and agriculture grew, competition among seed sellers, productivity pressures, and consumer demands for more interesting and unusual plants turned curious minds in the direction of methodical selection.

Hybridization and the New Agricultural Era

The idea that species were not constant, but could be changed by human intervention, was a revolutionary and somewhat blasphemous concept even as late as the nineteenth century. The prevailing belief was that species were intransmutable. The methods of plant reproduction and genetic transfer, which, along with mutations, provide the mechanisms by which species change, were largely uncharted territories before the Enlightenment. There is evidence of limited knowledge of plant reproduction processes in ancient Assyria and Medieval Arabian documents record some artificial fertilization activities. In Europe and the Mediterranean region, however, knowledge of plant sex organs and seed origins was a concept slowly realized starting in the seventeenth century.

In 1694, Rudolph Jakob Camerer provided the first clear indication of plant gender and the necessity of pollen for reproduction. The realization that plants reproduce sexually was the first step towards creating deliberate hybrids – offspring resulting from the crossing of two genetically different plants – as it illustrated the process by which it could be induced. Several advances in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries paved the way for deliberate hybridization, including Joseph Gottlieb Kölreuter’s hybridization experiments to refute the constancy of species (which also demonstrated that hybridization was only possible between closely related species and that some characteristics were more likely to be passed on than others), Antoine Nicolas Duchesne’s hybridization of strawberries (which opened the door to deliberate crossing of different species), Linnaeus’ Tragopogon hybrids (which caused him to conclude that hybridization resulted in offspring with a combination of traits exhibited by parents), and Thomas Andrew Knight’s (the first person in Britain to conduct systematic hybridization) principles of heredity.

The first commercial offering of an artificial hybrid plant was “Fairchild’s Mule,” a hybrid pink presented by nurseryman Thomas Fairchild in the seventeenth century. It would be another century before more deliberate commercial hybridization was pursued, partly due to perceived moral and religious conflicts with altering species, and partly because the introduction of foreign varieties through trade was long sufficient to satisfy the consumers’ demand for new plants. However, a breakthrough occurred in the 1820s when G.C.L. Hempel published an article that suggested that, with more knowledge, it might be possible to customize hybridization to identify the characteristics desired and breed for them. Up until this point, breeders had simply crossed whatever species they could to see if they could produce a hybrid, rather than crossing species to deliberately produce certain outcomes. However, it would take an understanding of plant genetics to achieve Hempel’s vision.

The nineteenth century saw the true start of methodical breeding. Darwin’s exploration of self- and cross-fertilization in The Effects of Cross and Self Fertilization in the Vegetable Kingdom (1876) and breeding in The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (1868) laid the foundation for much of this systematic work. It was Gregor Mendel’s famous experiments with pea plants in the mid-1800s, however, that opened a window into the world of genetics, establishing many rules of heredity now known as Mendelian inheritance and enabling the development of systematic hybridization towards an end goal.

Hybrids and the Seed and Nursery Industry

Widespread understanding that plants could be improved and demands for increased productivity to feed a growing population at a profit, with plants adapted to new or human-created environments, alongside the rising popularity of the home garden, a growing capacity for discretionary spending on luxuries, and consumer demand for new, exotic, and flashy commodities, converged in the nineteenth century to create a prime market for hybrids. While farmers themselves drove much early plant selection, breeding, and hybridization work, by the late nineteenth century, seed and nursery companies were playing a dominant role in the production of hybrids for the market and home garden, offering them for sale through an ingenuity of the garden industry: the seed and nursery catalog.

Crossing species to create ever more glorious varieties improved for color, resilience, flowering time, abundance, or longevity, seedsmen and nurserymen began branding the hybrids, using them to promote their business. “An endless search for novelty” drove the hybridization of ornamental plants for home and public gardens, which became one of the most profitable offerings of the seed and bulb industry. Fueled by imports of “exotic” species by “plant hunters” in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, a plethora of hybrids, many now garden staples, ensued, including hybrids of rhododendrons, camellias, daffodils, gladioli, tulips, and roses. But until the late nineteenth century, there was little to no regulation on the seed trade. Untested hybrids sold to gardeners eager for the next great thing, old hybrids were rebranded as new novelties, and identical hybrids were offered by different companies under different names as distinct varieties.

One of the most successful seed companies (based largely on a realization of the importance of hybridization) was the Burpee Seed Company, responsible for such staple hybrids as Iceberg Lettuce, the Stringless Green Pod Bean, and “Burpee’s Golden Bantam” corn, the first yellow sweet corn. It was one of Burpee founder Atlee Burpee’s cousins, Luther Burbank, that popularly introduced the idea of plant breeding as a desirable activity to the American public. Though often criticized for his intuitive, rather than analytical, process of producing hybrids, Burbank created around 800 new hybrid varieties during his career.

Mendel and Genetics Take Center Stage

The widespread impact of Mendelian principles, when true methodical selection began to replace “chance” hybridization en mass, began in the twentieth century as heredity was more widely understood and accepted. William Bateson, the key figure in the introduction of Mendel in the plant sciences, articulated the opportunities that Mendelian principles offered to the plant breeder at the  2nd International Conference on Plant Breeding and Hybridization in New York in 1902:

“He will be able to do what he wants to do instead of merely what happens to turn up. The period of confusion is…passing away, and we have at length a basis from which to attack the mystery.”

The term “genetics” to describe plant heredity came into use in 1906, and from that point forward hybridization began to move from the fields of farmers and seedsmen to the labs of scientists.

Plant Breeding and hybridization resulted in more versatile, robust, hearty, and nutritious crops, essential to the survival of an ever-increasing population. Floral hybridization propagates ever-more exotic, diverse, and luxurious gardens. But recently, hybridization under the name of “genetic engineering” has fallen under severe scrutiny and criticism. The loss of crop biodiversity, use of traditional crops from developing countries to fuel industrialized commercial agriculture, increasing corporate control over breeding,  seed source, and food production, and corporate gene patents, have spurred interest in traditional farming, heirloom seeds, and a curb on genetic engineering. Many now argue that the quest is not to perfect the garden through human intervention, but to un-engineer it to a natural balance.

So we have to ask…Does the future of gardening (and agriculture) now reside in our past?

More Garden Stories Fun

References and More Information

[1] Poehlman, John M, and D A. Sleper. Breeding Field Crops. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1995. Print.
[2] (Reference consulted for blog post) Kingsbury, Noel. Hybrid. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. 20-23 pg. Print.
[3] More Seed List Resources:

With Contributions From:
Doug Holland
Director, Missouri Botanical Garden Library
Judith A. Warnement
Librarian of Harvard University Botany Libraries
March 24, 2015by michelle.underhill
BHL News, Blog Reel, Campaigns, Garden Stories

Help us Improve Access to Seed and Nursery Catalogs!
In celebration of our Garden Stories event, we’ve released some of our seed catalogs for transcription as part of our Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)-funded Purposeful Gaming project. Seed catalogs are notoriously difficult subjects for Optical Character Recognition software (OCR) to parse (which produces searchable text files of digitized images), so searching the text of online vintage seed catalogs is often problematic. 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…at least up to now.
You can help us improve access to these valuable gardening resources by transcribing seed and nursery catalogs. Here’s a helpful tutorial to get you started!
A selection of catalogs digitized by The New York Botanical Garden as part of the Purposeful Gaming project were chosen for inclusion in our transcription sites because they contain text over/interspersed with images, difficult formatting, and hard-to-read scientific names. Selections include:
  • Choice flower seeds 1908. Reason chosen: Numerous illustrations interspersed with text; OCR had difficulty rendering scientific names
  • Choice flower seeds 1914. Reason chosen: Some examples of text over illustrations, numerous illustrations interspersed with text

 

  • Floral gems (1922 Year Book). Reason chosen: Example of text over illustration; many scientific names
Help us improve access to these lovely seed and nursery catalogs by transcribing them. Share your discoveries with us by commenting on this post or posting on Twitter or Facebook with #BHLinbloom!

Happy Transcribing!

More Garden Stories Fun

March 23, 2015by ulib-libraryjobs
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