Gardening books in eighteenth-century Maryland

Abstract

Abstract The eighteenth-century Maryland gardening gentry were bound to England for most planting materials and guidance. Pleasure gardeners ordered their horticultural instruction books as well as seeds, plants, tools, and often gardeners themselves from the mother country before the Revolution. Despite wide discrepancies in both soil and climate among the colonies themselves and certainly between these ‘new’ lands and mother England, gentlemen up and down the Atlantic depended on English gardening publications until well after the Revolution. The English garden books that dominated the American market until the early nineteenth century, however inadequate and misleading their planting instructions, remain as valuable tools for reconstructing not only plant materials recommended but also methods used in designing and laying out elements of eighteenth-century Chesapeake gardens.