Old Time Gardens

In this well-illustrated 1901 work, Alice Morse Earle describes the historic and modern gardens of the United States' north-eastern seaboard.

As Wisconsin’s population moved from farmsteads into villages, towns, and cities, the state saw a growing interest in gardening as a leisure activity and source of civic pride. In Vintage Wisconsin Gardens, Lee Somerville introduces readers to the region’s ornamental gardens of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, showcasing the “vernacular” gardens created by landscaping enthusiasts for their own use and pleasure. The Wisconsin State Horticultural Society, established during the mid-nineteenth century, was the primary source of advice for home gardeners. Through carefully selected excerpts from WSHS articles, Somerville shares the excitement of these gardeners as they traded cultivation and design knowledge and explored the possibilities of their avocation. Women were frequent presenters at the WSHS annual meetings, and their voices resonate. Their writings, and those of their male colleagues, are a remarkable legacy we can draw on today—learning how Wisconsinites past created and enjoyed their gardens helps us appreciate our own. Filled with period and contemporary images, recommended plant lists, and garden layouts, Vintage Wisconsin Gardens will interest those curious about the history of the state’s cultural landscape and inspire readers to restore or reconstruct period gardens.

A classic work on historic gardens is available again.

The American social historian and antiquarian Alice Morse Earle (1851-1911) published this work in 1901. She was a prolific writer of books and pamphlets on pre-revolutionary New England, and her writings were very popular with readers who took great interest in the social history and material culture of their country. In this work, which contains more than 200 illustrations, Earle describes the historic and modern gardens of the north-eastern seaboard, the gardening activities - for pleasure as well as for food - of early settlers, and the progress of plant-hunters and nursery-men such as John Bartram in discovering and categorising new specimens, as well as the introduction into the United States of cottage garden favourites from Europe and exotica from the Far East. Earle's Sundials and Roses of Yesterday (1902) is also reissued in this series.

Excerpt from Old Time Gardens, Newly Set Forth: A Book of the Sweet O' the Year Old Time Gardens, Newly Set Forth: A Book of the Sweet O' the Year was written by Alice Morse Earle in 1902. This is a 621 page book, containing 111119 words and 241 pictures. Search Inside is enabled for this title. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

The old-fashioned American garden, 1865-1915.