Vanished Gardens: Finding Nature in Philadelphia

13. Snapdragon

63 & 13. Snapdragon peter kalm visited john bartram in the fall of 1748 when Kalm was staying near Philadelphia. On the way from Philadelphia to Bartram’s farm on the Schuylkill he passed a flower“in astonishing quantities upon all uncultivated fields, glades, hills and the like.” He said the English called it “life everlasting, for its flowers, which consist chiefly of dry, shining silvery leaves . . . The English ladies are accustomed to gather great quantities of this life everlasting and to pick them with the stalks. For they put them into pots, with or without water, amongst other fine flowers which they gather in the gardens and in the fields, and place them as an ornament in the rooms.” Bartram told him that the plant was also used to “bathe pained or bruised parts of the body.”Did Ann, his wife, gather these flowers and decorate her rooms? Now in the little room off the Virgin Mary’s altar at St. Francis Xavier Church,I do everything wrong at first—I’m following Rose’s directions and I put the oasis upside down in the deep sink and just run the water over it, can’t find a stopper. I’m learning to decorate God’s house. I’m in the secret parts of the church behind the altar where I’ve never been before. I trod the blue and red oriental rugs and throw my vest on the back of a polished chair. I’m not robed in cream like the altar servers or wearing brocade like the priest. The cream robes hang in a row in one small wood-paneled room. In a closet off to the side, we pull out the basket with clippers and the plastic watering can. I fill the green buckets with water. The other women arrive slowly and throw their coats off, too, and 64 springettsbury roll up their sleeves to work. When Judy comes they all shrink back a bit—she’s the expert, a floral designer with a degree. She’s come in from the suburbs with her station wagon full of pots of flowers and long curly willow and armfuls of greens. We’re part of a long tradition of arranging flowers for the house. When the settlers answered Penn’s advertisement for a new colony they brought their traditions with them. One of the legacies was a love of flowers. Something very few of my ancestors shared. I think they were too poor in Ireland and too busy trying to grow food and raise pigs to think about the beauty of the newest discovery from Turkey or America. Some of my mother’s family came from Quebec with few possessions, although my Aunt Eva and her sister Laura must have inherited their love of beautiful things from somewhere. The designs we use in the church are the evolution of British flower arranging over several centuries.Seventeenth-century paintings show vases of flowers in public rooms that emphasize a crowning specimen, like a sunflower from the new world or an iris or tulip from Turkey. Flowers exotic to the landscape of Britain at this time and valued for their variegated petals or flower shape or color were displayed in their fluted pots. In the eighteenth century arrangements were full and lush with the abundance of flowers that had been introduced to the wealthy landowners who coveted the new arrivals. These flowers were more natural than the arrangements of the century before as gardening styles changed in England. Some of these flowers and trees and bushes were plants John Bartram collected in Pennsylvania or the Carolinas or Florida and sent to Peter Collinson, who then sold the plants to his clients. Collinson was thrilled with one of the early plants supplied by Bartram, Lilium superbum, a Turk’s-cap lily with brown-spotted crimson petals. He wrote to Bartram in July 1738: snapdragon 65 Dear Frd— I am obliged to thee for thine per Steadman, and have the pleasure to tell thee that Most of the plants in the Last Cargo thrive finely I never had such Luck Before that Stately Martagon thee sent found on a bank near Schuylkill—is now Near flowering it is 5 foot ½ high & will I believe have 15 flowers which is prodigious. In her book Flora Domestica, Mary Rose Blacker writes that John Bartram found Magnolia grandiflora in Bulls Bay in South...