The Native Landscape Reader

“The Neglected American Plants” (1851)

85 From The Horticulturist, May 1851, 201–3. aNdRew JacksoN dowNiNg the neglected american Plants (1851) It is an old and familiar saying that a prophet is not without honor except in his own country, and as we were making our way this spring through a dense forest in the State of New Jersey, we were tempted to apply this saying to things as well as people. How many grand and stately trees there are in our woodlands that are never heeded by the arboriculturist in planting his lawns and pleasure grounds; how many rich and beautiful shrubs that might embellish our walks and add variety to our shrubberies that are left to wave on the mountain crag or overhang the steep side of some forest valley; how many rare and curious flowers that bloom unseen amid the depths of silent woods or along the margin of wild water-courses! Yes, our hothouses are full of the heaths of New Holland and the Cape, our parterres are gay with the verbenas and fuchsias of South America, our pleasure grounds are studded with the trees of Europe and Northern Asia, while the rarest spectacle in an American country place is to see above three or four native trees, rarer still to find any but foreign shrubs, and rarest of all to find any of our native wild flowers. Nothing strikes foreign horticulturists and amateurs so much, as this apathy and indifference of Americans to the beautiful sylvan and floral products of their own country. An enthusiastic collector in Belgium first made us keenly sensible of this condition of our countrymen, last summer , in describing the difficulty he had in procuring from any of his correspondents here American seeds or plants, even of well known and tolerably abundant, species, by telling us that amateurs and nurserymen who annually import from him every new and rare exotic that the richest collections of Europe possessed, could scarcely be prevailed upon to make a search for native American plants, far more beautiful , which grow in the woods not ten miles from their own doors. Some of them were wholly ignorant of such plants except so far as a familiarity with their names in the books may be called an acquaintance. Oth- 86 ouR amERiCan floRa ers knew them but considered them “wild plants,” and therefore too little deserving of attention to be worth the trouble of collecting even for curious foreigners. “And so,” he continued, “in a country of azaleas, kalmias, rhododendrons, cypripediums , magnolias and nyssas, —the loveliest flowers, shrubs, and trees of temperate climates, —you never put them in your gardens, but send over the water every year for thousands of dollars worth of English larches and Dutch hyacinths. Voila le goût Republicain!” In truth, we felt that we quite deserved the sweeping sarcasm of our Belgian friend. We had always, indeed, excused ourselves for the well known neglect of the riches of our native flora by saying that what we can see any day in the woods is not the thing by which to make a garden distinguished, and that since all mankind have a passion for novelty, where, as in a fine foreign tree or shrub, both beauty and novelty are combined , so much the greater is the pleasure experienced. But, indeed, one has only to go to England, where “American plants” are the fashion (not undeservedly, too), to learn that he knows very little about the beauty of American plants. The difference between a grand oak or magnolia, or tuliptree , grown with all its graceful and majestic development of head, in a park where it has nothing to interfere with its expansion but sky and air, and the same tree shut up in a forest, a quarter of a mile high, with only a tall gigantic mast of a stem, and a tuft of foliage at the top, is the difference between the best bred and highly cultivated man of the day, and the best buffalo hunter of the Rocky Mountains, with his sinewy body tattooed and tanned till you scarcely know what is the natural color of the skin. A person accustomed to the wild Indian only, might think he knew perfectly well what a man is, and so indeed he does, if you mean a red man. But the “civilizee” is not more different from the aboriginal man of the forest than the cultivated and perfect garden tree or shrub (granting always that it takes to civilization, which...