The Native Landscape Reader

Part II: Our American Flora

83 PaRt ii ouR amERiCan floRa This section chronicles the discovery of the value of our native flora which evolved through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many of these authors advocate for increased use of native species in American horticulture. It seems appropriate to open the section with “The Neglected American Plants,” published in 1851, Andrew Jackson Downing’s observations on why native plants were so frequently overlooked in the early nineteenth century. A series of essays from Garden and Forest by Charles Sprague Sargent and William Augustus Stiles, Henry Nehrling, Charles H. Shinn, and E. J. Hill explores groups of native plants, ranging from trees to grasses and geographically from Florida to the midwestern prairie to the Sierra Nevada in California. Each of these articles expresses a growing fascination with the wide variety of plants available across North America which had at that time been little used in gardens. Nehrling had purchased forty acres of land in Orange County, Florida, where he created an experimental garden for testing native and ornamental plants for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He was highly instrumental in popularizing many plants indigenous to Florida and the southeastern United States within the nursery trade. In “The American Hawthorns,” Sargent and Stiles explore the value of these small trees, which had until then been largely neglected, as garden ornamentals. Sargent explains the often confusing genera of Crataegus and points out hawthorn species he considers of particular worth. The hawthorn would become a potent symbol for the so-called prairie style of landscape gardening practiced by O. C. Simonds and Jens Jensen and described in Wilhelm Miller’s essay in Part III. Jensen considered the hawthorn to be the icon of the great midwestern prairie and included a hawthorn motif in his professional letterhead (Grese, Jens Jensen, 156–58). Jensen’s article “I Like Our Prairie Landscape” records the special attraction the prairie expanses and woodlands held for him, which were the inspiration for so many of his parks and gardens. ...