Urbane bouquets: a floricultural history of California, 1848 to 1915

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URBANE BOUQUETS:
A FLORICULTURAL HISTORY OF CALIFORNIA, 1848 TO 1915

by

Elizabeth A. Logan

__________________________________________________________

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF
THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(HISTORY)

AUGUST 2013

Copyright 2013 Elizabeth A. Logan
i

Acknowledgements

In Kate Greenaway’s 1902 version of The Language of Flowers, Canterbury bells
signify acknowledgment. Although some scholarly distance from the Victorian language
of flowers serves one well in the text of a dissertation, imaginary buckets filled with
small, white bell flowers of gratitude are more than appropriate here, particularly for my
advisor and dissertation committee, William Deverell, Richard Fox, Karen Halttunen, and
William Handley. While I am humbled by their collective body of work and their fierce
commitment to students, I am most grateful for their thoughtful guidance and the time
they spent helping me in the midst of hectic schedules.
Fennel to Jessica Kim, Julia Ornelas-Higdon, Kristen Geaman, Sarah Keyes, and
Raphaelle Steinzig for they are all worthy of praise for advice. And orange tree blossoms
for the generosity of Paul Lerner, Ariela Gross, Judith Bennett, Carole Shammas, and
Lori Rogers through exams and the earlier stages of imagining this project.
My research took me to libraries and gardens of true excellence. Camellia
japonica to those who assisted me at the California State Library, Stanford University
Library Special Collections, the Bancroft Library at the University of California at
Berkeley, the San Francisco Public Library, the Sutro Library, the Huntington Library
and Gardens, the University of Southern California, and the University of California at
Los Angeles and Santa Cruz. Cardinal flowers for distinction for helpfulness to Amy
Kasameyer at the Jepson Herbaria at the University of California at Berkeley, Eileen
Keremitsis and Alison Moore at the California Historical Society, John Skarstad at the
ii
University of California at Davis, and Brandy Kuhl at the Helen Crocker Russell Library
of Horticulture at the San Francisco Botanical Garden. Their generosity of spirit and
time and knowledge of their collections deserve my highest gratitude.
Oak-leafed geranium for the true friendship of Andy and Laura Miller, Matt and
Neeta Jain Metzger, Andrew and Ann Carney Nelson, Amanda Augustus, Summer Batte,
Erica and David Warter, the extended Boutin-Carroll-Vitela family, Sara Graves, and
Phuong Phillips, particularly in the year I lived in the Bay Area. To Edith Lee Hope,
Anna Sadusky, Karin Iwasaka Myhre, Meredith Mason, Beckie Kwak, Hilary Weber, and
Sharmeel Wasan blue periwinkle for early (and treasured) friendship and thanks for the
encouragement. Peppermint to convey warmth of feeling to Esther Kim, Pam Lopez,
Neal Robb, Melanie Ronen, and Sean Muntz, whose help cannot be measured.
Clematis and kennedia to celebrate mental beauty and sweet peas (simply because
I like them and because they remind me of the gift of being present for family and
friends) to Mari Ryono, Tami LaSance, and Molly Logan for their constant words of
wisdom and their precious time spent reading through my work.
For my extended family of Logans, Hugheses, and Youngs, angelica for the
inspiration and love you give to our family. And extra sprigs of agrimony for
thankfulness to Bob, Kathy, and Molly Logan for reading my chapters and offering me
equally helpful hugs and insightful comments.
Please accept these bouquets of my gratitude. To those of you I carry in my heart
but accidently omitted to name, you are invited to send me moonwort for my
forgetfulness.
iii

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements……...………………………………………………………….i

Abstract……………………………………………………………………………iv

Introduction………………………………………………………………………...1

Chapter 1: Concierges of Taste: California’s Early Floriculturists, 1850s
to 1870…………………………………………………………….21

Chapter 2: An Infinite Bouquet of Taste: New Voices in the Taste
Conversation, 1870s to 1915…………………………………...…51

Chapter 3: Seedling Promises: Refining Men, Women, Children, and
California Begins at Home……………………………………....102

Chapter 4: From Campers to Home-builders: Confidently Crafting Garden
Advice for California’s Ecology……………………...................142

Chapter 5: Sweet Pea Roguing and Beyond: Chinese and Japanese American
Floriculturists’ Creations of Social Infrastructure in an
Anti-Asian Climate……………………………...........................169

Chapter 6: Poppy Culture: Wild Botanizing and the Imagining of Golden
California………………………………………………………..206

Chapter 7: Dahlias on Display: Mapping Local, National and Imperial
Space with Flowers…………………………………………......250

Chapter 8: Encountering the Espiritu Sancto: Walking through
Woodward’s Gardens and Golden Gate Park Across
Three Decades…………………………………………………..300

Epilogue: Considering California’s Floricultural Past, Present, and Future….321

Bibliography…………………………………………………………………….330
iv

Abstract

The subject of this dissertation is Californians’ attempts to understand and define
themselves and their newly formed state from 1848 to 1915. The project examines the
subject through the lens of Californians’ intensive practice of floriculture during this
period by focusing on these floriculturists’ visions for the state and the connections they
made all across the state, the nation, and the world. By the Panama Pacific International
Exposition in San Francisco in 1915, the next generation of Californians displayed
flowers as an essential part of the Exposition to project an image of the state and the
people of California.
This project expands a narrower definition of floriculture as the commercial and
home garden tending of flowers to include the cultural power of flowers more broadly.
This broader definition captures dialogues regarding the transformative power of flowers
working within landscapes but also within families and individuals. The analysis extends
to five realms: 1) commercial nursery, seed, and floristry businesses and their
publications; 2) home gardens and the publications created by professional and amateur
gardeners to assist them in their endeavors; 3) wholesale flower markets; 4) floricultural
exhibits and displays; and 5) academic and amateur botanical experimentation and
scouting.
The history of California after 1848 includes narratives of chaotic (and frequently
corrupt) struggles for political and social power, environmentally destructive
v
competitions for resources, and violent conflicts amongst multi-ethnic populations, such
that the state faced being branded a notoriously uncivilized place. California
floriculturists undertook a project both to actively civilize California and Californians
(changing their nature), and to represent the state and its people as eminently civilized
(changing their public image to the nation and perhaps the world). From 1848 to 1915,
they transformed their spaces from what they originally saw as blank canvases into an
international garden of landscape and commerce and struggled with the questions about
the nature of their state and what made the state and its people cultivated. As they
transitioned from thinking about how they fit into California to how California fit into the
United States and the international community, they ultimately embraced a definition of
cultivated (in the context of landscape but not society) that embraced imports from
around the globe as well as the state’s native blooms.
This project reconsiders the roles of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
hallmarks of civilization within Californians’ attempts to define themselves and their
state. While they turned to creating homes, laws, schools, civic organizations, businesses
and churches, Californians encountered and employed flowers within each context. And
they used the fragile, dynamic existence of the blooms in their project of equal fragility
and dynamism. By examining floriculture in myriad contexts, this project reveals the
cultural pervasiveness of everyday objects like flowers within Californians’ striving
towards confidence about their civility and individual identities. Through varied
encounters with flowers, this process emerges as neither linear nor promising a uniform
meaning of cultured. Though floriculturists used “civility” or “civilized” as a term of art,
vi
the bundle of conditions and behaviors that constituted “civilized” drew together a range
of meanings for these Californians, from neighborliness to performance in conformity
with Anglo-American, religious, or specific class norms. Floriculturists wielded the
concept as a tool both to gain acceptance with the social and cultural powers in the
eastern portion of the country and to define what surrounded them and what they wanted
to create in their backyards. Some women and immigrants facing nativistic violence also
used the umbrella of civility flowers and gardens provided as protective cover as they
pushed against prevailing notions of refinement.
A broad range of sources provides the foundation for this project, from
newspapers, magazines, and gardening manuals to collections of individuals’ papers
including academic botanists’ field notes and letters. Nurseryman and florist collections
offer nursery catalogs, growing logs, photographs, and business ephemera. In addition,
association records and ephemera for the Mechanics’ Institutes Fairs, the California State
Floral Society, and floral missions provide information on institutional floral culture.
Collections of the California Midwinter Fair and the Panama Pacific International
Exposition include lists of specimen presented at the fairs, newspaper coverage,
landscape planning and reception, and general ephemera.
Flowers and floriculture invite reconsideration of the transformation of early
California from mining cabins to a state whose people greeted the world at the Panama
Pacific International Exposition in 1915 promising a land of sunshine and flowers.
Chapters 1 and 2 examine the actions and conversations of California’s early
floriculturists. Chapter 1 covers the time period from 1850 through the 1870s. Early
vii
northern California nurserymen constructed, debated, and promoted notions of floral taste
to champion goals of creating societal (and landscape) order and fostering
experimentation. Chapter 1 argues that the dialogues surrounding floral taste
demonstrate how floriculturists imagined flowers offered a civilizing influence and the
power to transform space from the chaos associated with the mass influx of men in search
of gold to an Edenic, civilized society. Chapter 2 continues the discussion of taste by
analyzing the taste battles at the turn of and the early twentieth century. During this later
time period, discussions of science and taste emerged as dominant themes and florists and
landscape architects joined the nurserymen in the taste conversation with a growing
confidence in the connections between environments and civilization. As nurserymen
and then a wider range of floriculturists imported, created, and calculated what they
imagined were the correct flowers and floral formulas for civilizing California, they
placed taste at the center of measuring progress and defining the space as part of, if not
leading, national culture. Taste was the rallying cry for a partially derivative, entirely
experimental, floricultural civilizing process.
Chapters 3 and 4 examine Californians’ ideas about and creations of flower
gardens at their homes. Floriculturists in California drew on national narratives of the
importance of home gardens and reworked the advice to suit their climates and
landscapes. Chapter 3 concludes that home gardens became the local, intimate laboratory
of the cultural refining power of flowers. Chapter 4 argues that California floriculturists
tested their homeland and concluded it supported flowers from across the globe, defining
viii
California as cultivated through the processes of experimentation and re-working of
advice from across the globe.
Chapters 5 and 6 focus on possibilities for expanding the largely Euro-American,
male rhetoric of the civilizing power of flowers and the professional and economic
benefits of floriculture. Chapter 5 examines the work of Chinese and Japanese American
seed growers, botanists, florists and commercial marketers. Flowers grown or sold at the
wholesale market by Chinese and Japanese Americans, deemed culturally or ethnically
inferior and inassimilable, maintained their purported power to civilize even as their
growers were excluded or faced nativistic attacks. Some Californians used flowers to
define their state as an Anglo-dominated sweet pea paradise – drawing on the wide
popularity of the sweet pea in Britain. Simultaneously, many Asian Americans used
floriculture to their benefit – in creating family businesses and commercial infrastructure
that grew the floricultural industry as a whole – illustrating the fragility of the vision of
civility as white.
Chapter 6 examines poppy culture from the efforts of those who lobbied for the
Golden Poppy as the state flower, to poppy poetry, to the work of amateur and academic
botanists. Poppy enthusiasts used the wildflower to capitalize on the state’s gold rush
past by connecting the flower to the metal by focusing on their shared color and as
evidence of California’s natural abundance. By picking the wildflower poppy as the state
flower, Californians expressed confidence in their civility and used the bloom to
articulate visions of a future California based on the richness of its natural resources.
Wildflower promotion and botanizing proved promising grounds particularly for
ix
California women in creating identities that comported with and challenged dominant
notions of civility and gender norms.
Chapters 7 and 8 examine floral displays and flowers featured at private and
public gardens from the 1850s through 1915. Chapter 7 focuses on local exhibits, the
1894 Midwinter Exposition, and the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition.
Floriculturists used floral displays as a key component in their quest to civilize and
present a cultivated image of California. From the early local shows to the international
fair in 1915, floriculturists exhibited many of the same flowers but with an expanding
message of the fecundity and international importance of California. Chapter 8
examines walks in Woodward’s Garden in the 1870s and through Golden Gate Park in
1915. These walks trespass on those struggling to define themselves and their
surrounding landscape as civilized and refined and listen to the lessons they ascribed to
the flowers as they walked towards fulfilling their goals.
Finally, the Epilogue ponders the dialogues of philosopher and historian Josiah
Royce and horticultural professor E.J. Wickson in connection with nature, floriculture,
and California. In conclusion, the Epilogue questions the role of the cultural power of
flowers in local or state regions in the face of global flower markets.

1

Introduction

In the early 1850s, James L. Lafayette Warren envisioned a floricultural
California. He imagined opening a horticultural museum and hall of science in Northern
California through which he would teach the science of floriculture and sell wax
specimen, instructional manuals, and seeds in the museum’s store.
1
When Warren
arrived in San Francisco in August of 1849 with his family of four daughters and a son,
he brought with him significant horticultural experience. For over two decades, he
operated the Nonatum Vale Nursery near Brighton, Massachusetts.
By 1852, he had established his first California nursery at 15 J Street in Sacramento.
2

Recognizing and seeking to capitalize on a desire for growing flowers, Warren imported
and offered an impressive range from honeysuckles and peonies to dahlias, roses, and
greenhouse flowers like camellias and fuchsias.
3
Warren and his few early
contemporaries laid the foundations of commercial floriculture in California. By 1853,

1
Warren & Sons, “A Descriptive Catalogue of Fruit and Ornamental Trees, Grape Vines,
Shrubs, and Herbaceous Plants, Roses, Dahlias, Green-house Plants Cultivated at Warren
& Son’s Garden and Nurseries,” 1853-1854, University of California at Davis, Nursery
and Seed Catalog Collection, Box 385, Folder 11782, back cover describing his plans.
2
H.M. Butterfield, “Some Pioneer Nurseries in California and Their Plants,” Journal of
the California Horticultural Society, Vol. 27, No. 3 (Jul., 1966), 70-71 & Vol. 27, No. 4
(Oct, 1966), 102-108 and Vol. 28, No. 1 (Jan., 1967), 132-139. See also Judith H. Taylor
and the late Harry Morton Butterfield, Tangible Memories: Californians and Their
Gardens, 1800-1950 (San Francisco, 2003), 29 & 40.
3
Warren & Sons, “A Descriptive Catalogue of Fruit and Ornamental Trees, Grape Vines,
Shrubs, and Herbaceous Plants, Roses, Dahlias, Green-house Plants Cultivated at Warren
& Son’s Garden and Nurseries.”
2
he produced what is credited as the first seed catalog published in the state. He exhibited
his blossoms and helped form a committee to create the state’s first agricultural society.
4

In 1854, he started California Farmer, which merged with Pacific Rural Press in 1870.
In a few short years, Warren strategically used his horticultural and business expertise to
transform the space around him. Gold Rush California constituted a foreign landscape to
the Massachusetts native, devoid of many of the blooms and marks of nineteenth-century
civility he was used to. He worked to transform this foreign California landscape into
something recognizable and even comfortable for his family and many immigrants and
migrants like him.
Less than 50 years after Warren’s arrival, mourners filed into place in the
Stanford University Quad in the summer of 1893 to celebrate the life of the late Senator
Leland Stanford. They found themselves in a temporary outdoor chancel framed entirely
in flowers. On one side, Timothy Hopkins – the relative of one of Stanford’s railroad
partners – had created a gigantic floral replica of the Central Pacific Railroad’s first
locomotive, the “Governor Stanford.” Mauve sweet peas comprised its boiler and
smokestack. The locomotive’s cab featured white peas bordered with the same variety of
yellow pansies that sparkled as the engine’s brilliant bell. Hopkins even included
Stanford’s initials on the “headlights” in heliotrope. The San Francisco Chronicle
meticulously detailed the mourners’ floral contributions for public curiosity. The
recitation read like a Who’s Who of California society from state Senator William Gwin
Jr.’s “pure white St. Charles lilies” to Phoebe Hearst’s artificial violets. Chinese

4
Taylor and Butterfield, Tangible Memories, 29 & 40.
3
gardeners from Palo Alto supplied a broken wheel of carnations, hollyhocks, violets,
white peas, and ferns. As the funeral procession made its somber way from the service in
the Quad toward the Mausoleum that served as Stanford’s final resting place, mourners
moved towards a massive shield of white roses, St. Joseph lilies, and smilax. Workers
from railroad shops in Sacramento constructed the 8-foot “marvel” of a shield and
scripted in violets – “The Laborers’ Tribute to the Laborers’ Friend.”
5

What was the relationship of floriculture to California? How were flowers part of
the imagining and self-fashioning of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
Californians? How did California floriculture develop so rapidly from Warren’s vision to
Stanford’s funeral?
The subject of this dissertation is Californians’ attempts to understand and define
themselves and their newly formed state from 1848 to 1915. The project examines the
subject through the lens of Californians’ intensive practice of floriculture during this
period. In 1848, at the conclusion of the United States-Mexico War and the beginnings
of the gold rush, many recent immigrants viewed California as a savage place devoid of
order, suffering from a landscape devoid of flowers. Starting in 1849 when William C.
Walker and Warren moved to California and opened nurseries, Californians began
importing and cultivating flowers in significant numbers. Until the early 1900s, northern
California floriculturists dominated the state’s floral rhetoric and significant activity.
This project focuses on these floriculturists’ visions for the state and the connections they

5
“His Final Rest: The Funeral of Senator Stanford,” San Francisco Chronicle, Jun. 25,
1893, 22.
4
made all across the state, the nation, and the world. By the Panama Pacific International
Exposition in San Francisco in 1915, the next generation of Californians displayed
flowers as an essential part of the Exposition to project an image of the state and the
people of California.
This project expands a narrower definition of floriculture as the commercial and
home garden tending of flowers to include the cultural power of flowers more broadly.
This broader definition captures dialogues regarding the transformative power of flowers
working within landscapes but also within families and individuals. The analysis extends
to five realms: 1) commercial nursery, seed, and floristry businesses and their
publications; 2) home gardens and the publications created by professional and amateur
gardeners to assist them in their endeavors; 3) wholesale flower markets; 4) floricultural
exhibits and displays; and 5) academic and amateur botanical experimentation and
scouting.
So many Californians – from nurserymen, botanists, and state promoters to
church groups and teachers – expended energy on growing, marketing, and thinking
about flowers. The central question of this project is: How and why did late nineteenth-
and early twentieth-century Californians use flowers to understand and define their own
identities and the nature of the landscape surrounding them?
The history of California after 1848 includes narratives of chaotic (and frequently
corrupt) struggles for political and social power, environmentally destructive
competitions for resources, and violent conflicts amongst multi-ethnic populations, such
5
that the state faced being branded a notoriously uncivilized place.
6
California
floriculturists undertook a project both to actively civilize California and Californians
(changing their nature), and to represent the state and its people as eminently civilized
(changing their public image to the nation and perhaps the world). From 1848 to 1915,
they transformed their spaces from what they originally saw as blank canvases into an
international garden of landscape and commerce and struggled with the questions about
the nature of their state and what made the state and its people cultivated. As they
transitioned from thinking about how they fit into California to how California fit into the
United States and the international community, they ultimately embraced a definition of
cultivated (in the context of landscape but not society) that embraced imports from
around the globe as well as the state’s native blooms.

6
See Barbara Berglund, Making San Francisco American: Cultural Frontiers in the
Urban West, 1846-1906 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007); Gray A. Brechin,
Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1999); Raymond H. Clary, The Making of Golden Gate Park, The Early Years:
1865-1906 (San Francisco: California Living Books, 1980); Michael P. Cohen, The
History of the Sierra Club, 1892-1970 (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988); Susan
Craddock, City of Plagues: Disease, Poverty, and Deviance in San Francisco
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); William Deverell, Whitewashed
Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of its Mexican Past (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2004); Philip L. Fradkin, The Great Earthquake and
Firestorms of 1906: How San Francisco Nearly Destroyed Itself (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2005); Lisbeth Haas, Conquest and Historical Identities in California,
1769-1936 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Philip J. Ethington, The
Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco, 1850-1900
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); William Issel and Robert W. Cherny,
San Francisco, 1865-1932: Politics, Power, and Urban Development (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1986); Phoebe S. Kropp, California Vieja: Culture and
Memory in a Modern American Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
6
This project reconsiders the roles of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
hallmarks of civilization within Californians’ attempts to define themselves and their
state. While they turned to creating homes, laws, schools, civic organizations, businesses
and churches, Californians encountered and employed flowers within each context. And
they used the fragile, dynamic existence of the blooms in their project of equal fragility
and dynamism. By examining floriculture in myriad contexts, this project reveals the
cultural pervasiveness of everyday objects like flowers within Californians’ striving
towards confidence about their civility and individual identities. Through varied
encounters with flowers, this process emerges as neither linear nor promising a uniform
meaning of cultured. Though floriculturists used “civility” or “civilized” as a term of art,
the bundle of conditions and behaviors that constituted “civilized” drew together a range
of meanings for these Californians, from neighborliness to performance in conformity
with Anglo-American, religious, or specific class norms. Floriculturists wielded the
concept as a tool both to gain acceptance with the social and cultural powers in the
eastern portion of the country and to define what surrounded them and what they wanted
to create in their backyards. Some women and immigrants facing nativistic violence also
used the umbrella of civility flowers and gardens provided as protective cover as they
pushed against prevailing notions of refinement.
Eight thematic chapters reveal the connections between the cultural power of
flowers and Californians’ attempts to understand, define, and market their potential and
the potential of the state. Before these thematic chapters, this introduction provides a
brief narrative chronology of the rise and transformation of California floriculture. Long
7
before Warren’s arrival in 1849, California had a rich history as a site for international
plant hunting as well as Native American, Spanish and Mexican floriculture. Throughout
the late 1840s and into the 1850s, immigrants, including those seeking the riches of the
California gold hills, journeyed from the Midwest, East, South, and every corner of the
globe. Some lacked familiarity with California’s native plants or this rich history. Others
lacked interest in the blooms. To the extent plants interested them at all, many brought or
imported their own; they saw the landscape as muddy, blank, and ready for planting.
The first recorded professional nurserymen set up shops in San Francisco in 1849,
with the Golden Gate Nursery; and throughout the 1850s, nurseries sprang up throughout
the city.
7
At the time of the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in 1848, approximately
1,000 people called San Francisco home. Four years later, in 1852, that number
increased to 36,000. Drawing emigrants from New York and Boston, Europe, China,
Central and South America, and Australia, San Francisco became an international place.
8

In 1850 and through 1860, half its residents were foreign born, in contrast to 10% in the
country as a whole.
9
Many nurserymen and those interested in starting nurseries
emigrated from Europe and the east coast of the United States. Before arriving in
California, quite a few apprenticed together both domestically and internationally. These

7
Michael R. Corbett, “Rearranging the Environment: The Making of a California
Landscape 1870s to 1990s,” eds. Steven A. Nash and Bill Berkson, Facing Eden: 100
Years of Landscape Art in the Bay Area (San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San
Francisco, 1995), 3-29. David C. Streatfield, California Gardens: Creating a New Eden
(New York: Abbeville Press, 1994), 37.
8
Ethington, The Public City, 1-2, 20, and 47.
9
Berglund, Making San Francisco American, 4. See also, Ethington, The Public City, 47-
50.
8
new Californians rejected the Spanish and Mexican Califorñios’ enclosed patio gardens
that created outdoor rooms.
10
The dominant narrative has been that these immigrants and
the nurserymen operating in California sought to recreate tasteful, eastern United States
gardens on the streets of San Francisco, both in design and in imported specimen. Much
of the planting of California landscapes in the late 1840s through the turn of the century
did involve transplanting explicitly British or European plants as part of fashioning
California to match familiar landscapes.
11
These nurserymen and amateur gardeners
inherited a wealth of instructional guides written for flower-lovers in the east coast and
Midwest. They imported, planted, and displayed their goods; the Mechanics’ Institute, in
connection with the California Horticultural Society, held one of the first significant
floral fairs in September 1857.
12

By the late 1860s through the 1880s, both the scale of floricultural projects and
businesses and the desire for California-specific gardening information had expanded
significantly. Population growth in the state’s largest city, San Francisco, also grew
exponentially: 57,000 in 1860; 149,500 in 1870; almost 250,000 in 1880. By the end of
the 1860s, one out of every three San Franciscans was born in Ireland, Germany, China
or Italy. By the 1870s, Chinese immigrants comprised 8% of the total population.

The
United States censuses from 1870, 1880 and 1890 reveal San Francisco housed a greater

10
Jere Stuart French, The California Garden and the Landscape Architects Who Shaped
It (Washington, DC: The Landscape Architecture Foundation, 1993), 21, 28, & 62.
11
Streatfield, California Gardens: Creating a New Eden, 10.
12
Report of the First Industrial Exhibition of the Mechanics’ Institute of the City of San
Francisco (San Francisco: 1858), xv, 5 & 20-22. See also, Mechanics’ Institute Fairs,
San Francisco Ephemera Collection at the California Historical Society.
9
proportion of foreign-born residents than New York, Boston, or Chicago.
13
As the state
and city struggled in the face of this diverse population expansion, waves of national
economic shifts, and the Civil War and Reconstruction, various sectors of the population
turned to different solutions to build infrastructure and institutions within which they and
their neighbors would prosper. The Central Pacific Railroad Company cut east across
the landscape to connect the continent and enrich its owners. Dennis Kearney’s
Workingmen’s Party organized in the 1870s seeking greater economic security by
protesting Chinese labor and immigration.
But a wider range of Californians simply lived through the day-to-day
ramifications of demographic shifts, war, and increased urbanization – and they did so
(consciously and unconsciously) in increasingly floral spaces. In the late 1860s, public
and private sectors developed community sites featuring flowers, ranging from the public
opening of Woodward’s Gardens in 1868 to the 1870s’ acquisition of land for Golden
Gate Park. As nurserymen gained momentum and economic power, they started trade
publications and created associations to track specimen and trends and to market
themselves, their businesses, and the state. In opening the Hall of the Bay District
Horticultural Society in 1872, speakers declared the work of nurserymen and florists
enlarged Nature’s boundaries and transformed the land of miners’ cabins and “barren
sand hills” into “substantial civilization.”
14
From 1870 to 1880, California

13
Ethington, The Public City, 2, 20 & 47; Berglund, Making San Francisco American, 4-
5.
14
“Opening of the Hall of the Bay District Horticultural Society,” California
Horticulturist and Floral Magazine, Vol. II, No. 9 (Aug., 1872), 297-301, 298.
10
Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine articulated flower growing tips, reports of visits to
specific places, and status reports on the state of California floriculture. In the 1870s,
California publications repeatedly reflected frustration at the lack of information specific
to California, delays in the pace of public excitement for flowers, and the lack of variety
of flowers Californians chose to grow. At the same time nurserymen stressed the
importance of local information, their publications also reprinted how-to articles from
foreign flower gardens in Australia, Japan, and England and a range of domestic locales
from Chicago to Rochester.
15

California floriculture extended beyond the work of nurserymen and captains of
industry. In 1879, San Francisco women created a floral mission to address crime,
poverty and the uplift of immigrants.
16
In the 1880s, peddlers, largely more recent
immigrants, sold blooms on San Francisco’s Kearny Street. Seed growing companies
dotted the landscape of the Santa Clara Valley. Chinese Americans, facing increasing
nativism, worked fields. Academic and experimental botanists like Luther Burbank,
explored possibilities for understanding and creating new flowers in the aftermath of
Charles Darwin’s evolutionary texts.
Interest in pre-statehood history and wildflowers grew in the 1880s. Helen Hunt
Jackson’s Ramona in 1884 drew gardeners to re-envision mission gardens through

15
California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol. II, No. 10 (Sep., 1872).
16
“Flowers for the City Children,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine,
Vol. IX, No. 3, (Mar., 1879), 86-87, 86. See also, “Give Flowers Away,” California
Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol. IX, No. 7 (Jul., 1879), 219. “The Ladies’
Floral Mission,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol. X, No. 3 (Mar.,
1880), 92-93.
11
romantic lenses.
17
Charles Fletcher Lummis’ Land of Sunshine magazine, the Landmarks
Club’s quest to “save” the missions, and the 1915 San Diego Exposition and work of
Bertram Goodhue in Spanish colonial architecture and design challenged floriculturists to
create (or imagine) exhibits and gardens of California’s floral pasts.
18
The popularity of
the poppy rose in the 1890s, as did the rhetoric explicitly connecting the poppy and the
state. Blanche Pratt of Fruitvale nominated the California poppy as a candidate for state
flower at the fall 1890 meeting of the California State Floral Society.
19
The selection of
the poppy at the level of the state floral society was only the first step and part of a rising
movement calling for the designation of state and federal flowers. At the 1893 Chicago
World’s Fair, a group in the Woman’s Building discussed the selection of national
flowers and created the National Floral Emblem Society towards those aims. The
National Society appointed Sarah Lemmon chair of the California State Committee to
select a state flower and push the official designation of that flower through state

17
Streatfield, California Gardens: Creating a New Eden, 31. David Streatfield, “Where
Pine and Palm Meet: The California Garden as a Regional Expression,” Landscape
Journal, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Fall, 1985), 61-73, 65. David C. Streatfield, “’Califorñio’ Culture
and Landscapes, 1894-1942: Entwining Myth and Romance with Preservation,” Design
with Culture: Claiming America’s Landscape Heritage, eds. Charles A. Birnbaum and
Mary V. Hughes (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005), 103-135, 103.
18
Nancy Goslee Power, The Gardens of California: Four Centuries of Design from
Mission to Modern (Santa Monica: Hennessey & Ingalls, 2001, 1995), 17. See also,
Richard J. Orsi, Sunset Limited: The Southern Pacific Railroad and the Development of
the American West, 1850-1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 159.
19
“State Floral Society: The California Poppy in the Lead for State Flower,” San
Francisco Chronicle, Nov. 15, 1890, 3. Emory Evans Smith, The Golden Poppy (San
Francisco: Murdock Press, 1902), 58.
12
legislation.
20
And on March 2, 1903, Governor George Pardee signed Senate Bill 251,
officially designating the Eschscholzia californica or California poppy the state flower.
At the signing, legislators wore colored-paper poppies in their lapels in celebratory
fashion.
21

From the legislature to the garden, flowers received increased attention on a
national level. Although florists had been operating in the United States for over a
hundred years, the industry achieved significance only after the Civil War and in 1890,
the United States census officially reported on the work of florists for the first time. Out
of the approximate 5,000 florists recorded in the 1890 census, three-fifths started their
businesses after 1870 and one third of those recorded opening after 1880. By 1890, every
state and territory except Idaho, Nevada, Indian Territory, and Oklahoma reported
floriculture businesses. They totaled 4,659 establishments, 312 of those owned by
women.
22
They organized and created the Society of American Florists. By 1888, the
Society functioned as a national trade organization with members from every state.
23
In

20
Richard G. Beidleman, California’s Frontier Naturalists (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2006), 426. Richard Schwartz, “The East Bay Woman Who Made the
Poppy the State Flower,” The Berkeley Daily Planet, Dec. 23, 2009, viewed in the
Lemmon Biographical Materials file at the Jepson Herbaria at the University of
California, Berkeley.
21
“Poppy Day in Capitol,” Los Angeles Times, Mar. 3, 1903.
22
J.H. Hale, Agriculture: Floriculture (United States Bureau of the Census, Census
Bulletin No. 59, April 29, 1891). See also, “Recent Publications,” Garden and Forest: A
Journal of Horticulture, Landscape Art, and Forestry (New York: The Garden and Forest
Publishing Company), Vol. IV, No. 167 (May 6, 1891), 215-216.
23
“The Society of American Florists,” Garden and Forest, Vol. I, No. 26 (Aug. 22,
1888), 301.
13
addition to the national society, by the 1890s, florists formed 965 state and local
societies, numerous clubs, and interacted with 358 horticultural societies.
24
Many
nurserymen in the Bay Area continued to function as both nurserymen and florists.
While some California florists grew their own blooms, others purchased flowers
from third-party growers. From the 1890s through the first decade of the twentieth
century, Japanese American floriculturists, including the influential Domoto family, held
an open-air flower market twice a week in the Bay Area.

Chinese American growers,
persevering and prospering in the face of legislated exclusion and popular nativism,
maintained a second market in Stevenson Alley.
25
After the 1906 earthquake and fire,
Japanese American florists organized their efforts in coordinating a wholesale market to
showcase their wares.
26
By 1906, 22 Japanese nurseries operated in the East Bay. In
May of 1906, the Domotos leased space accessible from the Lick Place alley between
Montgomery and Kearny Streets. The California Flower Growers Association opened
the indoor California Flower Market. As the enterprise expanded, the California Flower
Market expanded and changed locations. At times, the market shared space with
individual florists such as the Domoto Brothers and United Florist as well as the Japanese

24
“Recent Publications,” Garden and Forest, Vol. IV, No. 167 (May 6, 1891), 215-216,
drawing from the 1890 census.
25
Gary Kawaguchi, Living with Flowers: The California Flower Market History (San
Francisco: California Flower Market, Inc., 1993), 21-22.
26
Noritaka Yagasaki, “Ethnic Cooperatism and Immigrant Agriculture: A Study of
Japanese Floriculture and Truck Farming in California,” PhD Dissertation, University of
California at Berkeley, 1982, 48 & 435. See also, William F. Benedict, “Bringing the
Flowers to Market: An Army of Growers – Chinese, Japanese and Italian – Swarm Into
the City from Down the Peninsula or Across the Bay In the Early Hours of the Morning,”
San Francisco Chronicle, Jan. 4, 1914, 12.
14
Association of America and the Japanese Chamber of Commerce of San Francisco.
27

After 1906, Japanese growers expanded into San Mateo, Belmont, Redwood City, and
Mountain View and farther south, assisting in the creation of Los Angeles’ flower market
in 1912.
In the first decades of the twentieth century, California seed growers such as
C.C. Morse & Co. exported seeds across the globe. Luther Burbank created new flowers
and pondered connections between environment and breeding with eugenicists. The
University of California offered classes on landscape gardening. School gardens – both
with flowers and vegetables – received ever-increasing attention from Progressive
reformers and the Department of Agriculture. Citizens formed the Association for the
Improvement and Adornment of San Francisco in 1904, in connection with the national
City Beautiful Movement. As the Panama Canal neared completion, San Franciscans
prepared to greet the world at the Panama Pacific International Exposition by planting
blooms from across the globe.
By 1915, when the Panama Pacific International Exposition opened and
California promoted itself as the place where the lotus met the rose, floriculture in
California involved academics, businessmen, club women, fair promoters, home
gardeners, school children and a range of blooms that surely would have impressed
Warren when opened his nursery more than 60 years earlier.

27
Yagasaki, “Ethnic Cooperatism and Immigrant Agriculture: A Study of Japanese
Floriculture and Truck Farming in California,” 46, 49-50, 64, 66-67, 71-72, 84.
Kawaguchi, Living with Flowers, ix and 32.
15
California floriculturists imagined they could grow their way towards civilizing
their state and themselves. And they championed the blossoms they cultivated as
evidence for the rest of the nation that California and its people embodied civilization.
From 1848 to 1915, they gardened their spaces as they sought to understand and define
their state. As they transitioned from thinking about how they fit into California to how
California fit into the United States and the international community, they increasingly
welcomed a greater diversity of blooms from across the world alongside their native
treasures and some used the blooms to create more diverse understanding of civility.
A broad range of sources provides the foundation for this project. Newspapers
and magazines, both horticultural in nature and more general, such as California
Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, California Florist, Garden and Forest, San
Francisco Chronicle, Overland Monthly, Ladies Home Journal, and Sunset provide rich
insights into the breadth of discussions of floriculture, particularly within editorials,
advertisements, narratives of experiences visiting gardens, and reports of experimentation
in the garden. Collections of individuals’ papers offer more personal information;
academic botanists’ field notes and letters, such as those of Townshend Stith and
Katharine Layne Brandegee, capture the daily routines of wild botanizing. Nurseryman
and florist collections offer nursery catalogs, growing logs, photographs, and business
ephemera. In addition, association records and ephemera for the Mechanics’ Institutes
Fairs, the California State Floral Society, and floral missions provide information on
institutional floral culture. Collections of the California Midwinter Fair and the Panama
Pacific International Exposition include lists of specimen presented at the fairs,
16
newspaper coverage, landscape planning and reception, and general ephemera. Finally,
the project would not have been possible without the wealth of printed primary sources
on gardening and wildflower scouting books, both California-specific and national, as
well as those on the California Midwinter Fair and the Panama Pacific International
Exposition.
Flowers and floriculture invite reconsideration of the transformation of early
California from mining cabins to a state whose people greeted the world at the Panama
Pacific International Exposition in 1915 promising a land of sunshine and flowers.
Chapters 1 and 2 examine the actions and conversations of California’s early
floriculturists. Chapter 1 covers the time period from 1850 through the 1870s. Early
northern California nurserymen constructed, debated, and promoted notions of floral taste
to champion goals of creating societal (and landscape) order and fostering
experimentation. Chapter 1 argues that the dialogues surrounding floral taste
demonstrate how floriculturists imagined flowers offered a civilizing influence and the
power to transform space from the chaos associated with the mass influx of men in search
of gold to an Edenic, civilized society. Chapter 2 continues the discussion of taste by
analyzing the taste battles at the turn of and the early twentieth century. During this later
time period, discussions of science and taste emerged as dominant themes and florists and
landscape architects joined the nurserymen in the taste conversation with a growing
confidence in the connections between environments and civilization. As nurserymen
and then a wider range of floriculturists imported, created, and calculated what they
imagined were the correct flowers and floral formulas for civilizing California, they
17
placed taste at the center of measuring progress and defining the space as part of, if not
leading, national culture. Taste was the rallying cry for a partially derivative, entirely
experimental, floricultural civilizing process.
Chapters 3 and 4 examine Californians’ ideas about and creations of flower
gardens at their homes. Floriculturists in California drew on national narratives of the
importance of home gardens and reworked the advice to suit their climates and
landscapes. Chapter 3 concludes that home gardens became the local, intimate laboratory
of the cultural refining power of flowers. Chapter 4 argues that California floriculturists
tested their homeland and concluded it supported flowers from across the globe, defining
California as cultivated through the processes of experimentation and re-working of
advice from across the globe.
Chapters 5 and 6 focus on possibilities for expanding the largely Euro-American,
male rhetoric of the civilizing power of flowers and the professional and economic
benefits of floriculture. Chapter 5 examines the work of Chinese and Japanese American
seed growers, botanists, florists and commercial marketers. Flowers grown or sold at the
wholesale market by Chinese and Japanese Americans, deemed culturally or ethnically
inferior and inassimilable, maintained their purported power to civilize even as their
growers were excluded or faced nativistic attacks. Some Californians used flowers to
define their state as a Anglo-dominated sweet pea paradise – drawing on the wide
popularity of the sweet pea in Britain. Simultaneously, many Asian Americans used
floriculture to their benefit – in creating family businesses and commercial infrastructure
18
that grew the floricultural industry as a whole – illustrating the fragility of the vision of
civility as white.
Chapter 6 examines poppy culture from the efforts of those who lobbied for the
Golden Poppy as the state flower, to poppy poetry, to the work of amateur and academic
botanists. Poppy enthusiasts used the wildflower to capitalize on the state’s gold rush
past by connecting the flower to the metal by focusing on their shared color and as
evidence of California’s natural abundance. By picking the wildflower poppy as the state
flower, Californians expressed confidence in their civility and used the bloom to
articulate visions of a future California based on the richness of its natural resources.
Wildflower promotion and botanizing proved promising grounds particularly for
California women in creating identities that comported with and challenged dominant
notions of civility and gender norms.
Chapters 7 and 8 examine floral displays and flowers featured at private and
public gardens from the 1850s through 1915. Chapter 7 focuses on local exhibits, the
1894 Midwinter Exposition, and the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition.
Floriculturists used floral displays as a key component in their quest to civilize and
present a cultivated image of California. From the early local shows to the international
fair in 1915, floriculturists exhibited many of the same flowers but with an expanding
message of the fecundity and international importance of California. Chapter 8
examines walks in Woodward’s Garden in the 1870s and through Golden Gate Park in
1915. These walks trespass on those struggling to define themselves and their
19
surrounding landscape as civilized and refined and listen to the lessons they ascribed to
the flowers as they walked towards fulfilling their goals.
Finally, the Epilogue ponders the dialogues of philosopher and historian Josiah
Royce and horticultural professor E.J. Wickson in connection with nature, floriculture,
and California. In conclusion, the Epilogue questions the role of the cultural power of
flowers in local or state regions in the face of global flower markets.
_______________________
Louis J. Stellman gifted readers of Sunset in 1915 with a Christmas story of an
older man living in the Russian Hill neighborhood of San Francisco who invited in a
younger man he observed wandering the streets. The younger man appeared lonely. An
orchid graced a buttonhole on his coat. In gratitude for the invitation, the younger man
gave the orchid to the older, explaining, “I saw it in a florist’s window and took it away
with me.”
The older man questioned, “You are fond of flowers?”
And the younger man confessed: “I paid my last dollar for this.”
In the hopes of conveying to the older man that he was not a “spendthrift,” he
explained, “Usually I do not do that.” He continued, “It was for a memory I bought it. .
.That was whimsical, foolish – wasn’t it? A memory should be left alone – even a
beautiful memory. One should be brave, and go forward and not think about – what is
over. . .”
In the face of this confession and emotional confusion, the older man opined, “A
flower. . is often a symbol of Hope.”
20
The younger man’s narrative bubbled forth. He yearned for his girl, Gertrude,
who remained back at a home far from San Francisco. He worried he did not deserve
her, that he was not good enough to send for her and marry her.
28
Yet the flower still
served as a nostalgic reminder of his former home and hope for a future home.
This is a story that reveals the meanings encoded in flowers. The orchid was
important enough to the young man that it was worthy of his last dollar. The younger
gentlemen’s flower in his button-hole signaled to the older gentleman a commonality of
civility or taste. The orchid embodied a past and hope for a future. Even though flowers
blossomed all around and reflected the certainty that California could nurture exotics like
orchids, the singular bloom captured both that promise and anxiety. From those who read
this magazine story in 1915 to those who sold or purchased orchids that Christmas,
Californians created a land of flowers, a floricultural empire that helped them to articulate
identities of culture for their state and themselves, that began in part by connecting
flowers, civilization, and notions of taste.

28
Louis J. Stellman, “A Christmas on Russian Hill,” Sunset, Vol. 35, No. 6 (Dec., 1915)
1125-1132, 1127 & 1131.
21
Chapter 1

Concierges of Taste:
California’s Early Floriculturists, 1850s-1870s

How are we to know what is right and what is wrong?. . .Taste is so much
a matter of individual judgment that one person likes what another hates,
and we are very unwilling to take another’s ideas, unless we are quite
convinced that he is an authority. . .What is taste is really almost as hard a
question to answer as what is truth, and if we get on the wrong track there
seems to be no reason why we should ever be led into the right one except
by some happy accident. . .How are we to distinguish taste from fashion,
ephemeral beauty from that which is lasting?
29

M.C. Robbins of Massachusetts, 1892

M.C. Robbins raised the white flag of defeat-by-confusion. Not complaining
about weeds, nor pernicious insects, nor planting or watering schedules, she petitioned
Harvard University botanist Charles Sprague Sargent of Garden and Forest magazine for
assistance. She begged for a set of tests to tease out the critical differences between floral
taste and fashion. She may have understood that her neighbors considered tea roses
tasteful through the end of the 1880s but had read about the growing interest in the merits
of orchids or even daffodils.
30
Lamenting the dearth of educational opportunities for

29
M.C. Robbins, “Correspondence. Some Questions About Taste,” Garden and Forest: A
Journal of Horticulture, Landscape Art, and Forestry (New York: The Garden and Forest
Publishing Company), Vol. V, No. 235 (Aug. 24, 1892), 405.
30
Terry Lanker, “Design Styles,” A Centennial History of the American Florist (Topeka:
Florists’ Review Enterprises, 1997), 112-137 at 113-115 for discussion of popularity of
tea roses. “Horticultural Fashions,” Garden and Forest, Vol. I, No. 5 (Mar. 28, 1888), 49-
50, and “Flowers in Winter,” Garden and Forest, Vol. I, No. 9 (Apr. 25, 1888), 98,
regarding rising interest in orchids. Charles H. Shinn, “Horticultural Notes from
California,” Garden and Forest, Vol. III, No. 100 (Jan. 22, 1890), 46.
22
women in the field of landscape gardening, she sought deliverance out of the cacophony
of voices. She implored, “What is the test to apply?”
31

Robbins lived in a world saturated with flowers, tests, and beliefs about the
dangers to civilization when people made floral mistakes. Her confusion placed her as a
participant in an ongoing set of national and regional conversations about floricultural
and landscaping taste with much grander implications for communities and civilization.
Experts from a range of flower-related fields deemed camellias fashionable in the 1850s
but “worthless” by 1895.
32
In the 1850s, famed seedsman Joseph Breck lamented that
marigolds, candytufts, daisies and a range of the floricultural stars of the eighteenth
century had “all fallen victims to the flickering meteor called taste.”
33
However, by the
1870s, both marigolds and candytufts reemerged as fashionable flowers – at least for
some in California.
34
While dahlias, lilies, and roses experienced generally greater and
greater levels of praise, designer versions of chrysanthemums fell under criticism

31
Robbins, “Correspondence. Some Questions About Taste,” Garden and Forest, 405.
32
“Flowers in Winter,” Garden and Forest, 98. Peter Henderson, Practical Floriculture:
A Guide to the Successful Cultivation of Florists’ Plants, for the Amateur and
Professional Florist (New York: Orange Judd Company, 1895, 5th edition), 154 with
additional discussions of the decade long love of rosebuds and continuing importance of
violets, 154-155 & 189.
33
Joseph Breck, The flower-garden; or, Breck's book of flowers: in which are described
all the various hardy herbaceous perennials, annuals, shrubby plants, and evergreen
trees, desirable for ornamental purposes, with directions for their cultivation (New York:
A.O, Moore, 1858, orig. pub. 1851), 14, 28-29.
34
Evelyn Norwood Breeze, “Two Gardens on Harrison Street, 1870-1880,” ed. Olive H.
Palmer, Vignettes of Early San Francisco Homes and Gardens (Program of the San
Francisco Garden Club, Dec. 1935). F.A. Miller, “Floral Review,” California
Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol. IV, No. 1 (Jan., 1874) 30-32, 31.
23
regarding their beauty and tastefulness. Cultivated, English-style gardens reigned in the
1870s. But regionally-themed gardens demonstrated tasteful success post-1900.
35

Botanical and scientific texts instructed careful observers to recognize flowers’ beauty,
promising to contribute to notions of the development of taste in the 1880s. By 1915,
hybridizers took up the quest for taste (fame and/or profit) and utilized their notions of
good taste to create a debatably more perfect chrysanthemum.
36
Robbins’ cry for
guidance echoed throughout Massachusetts and all the way to California.
From 1850 through 1914, conversations and opinions of taste and flowers
measured societal progress and participated in defining spatial relations. This chapter
and the one that follows examine the actions and conversations of California’s
floriculturists and their connections to floriculturists across that nation. After a brief
discussion of taste more broadly, this chapter focuses on the time period from 1850
through the 1870s. During these decades, early California nurserymen participated in a
national conversation debating and promoting notions of floral taste as part of creating a
societal order and fostering experimentation. The California nurserymen used the
concept of taste to assist them in creating the infrastructure they needed to secure their
business interests and to promote their messages of civilization through flowers. While

35
Amateur, “Hints for Flower Gardeners,” California Horticulturalist and Floral
Magazine, Vol. V, No. 9 (Sep., 1875), 274-276, 274. David C. Streatfield, “Where Pine
and Palm Meet: The California Garden as Regional Expression,” Landscape Journal,
Vol. IV, No. 2 (Fall, 1985), 61-73, 65.
36
Nicolette Scourse, The Victorians and their Flowers (London: Croom Helm, 1983),
141. Luther Burbank, “Fundamental Principles of Plant Breeding,” ed. E.J. Wickson,
California’s Magazine (San Francisco: California Publishers Co-operative Association),
Vol. I, (July, 1915) 193-196, 196. Edward A. White, The Principles of Floriculture
(New York: The MacMillian Company, 1915), 132.
24
some of their dialogues constituted boosterism or economic self-interest, the
nurserymen’s internal and public conversations regarding taste transcended mere
promotion of the state. They tested the terrain, defined the possibilities of the land and
her people, and wondered about the role of women in floriculture.
Across both time periods, taste conversations implicated issues of emerging class
and scientific endeavors’ connections to the state of civilization. Taste professionals
across half a century applied similar terms for analysis, from color to form, even though
they privileged one over another at different moments in time and in varied locales.
Through these conversations, they changed the way Americans celebrated holidays,
mourned, designed gardens, and displayed flowers. In California, floriculturists tied taste
to visions of the state as a civilized participant in national culture yet with distinct
opportunities for internationalism ripe for discovery via laboratory-like experiments in
floral growth. The details of which particular flowers constituted tastefulness at any
given moment, as opposed to fashion or lack of taste, are not critical. However, the
continuing dialogue provides a foundation for thinking about flowers as part of material
culture. Contemporaries considered flowers natural objects and yet objects increasingly
vulnerable to scientific alteration at the hands of humans. Taste experts, amateur
gardeners, and floral consumers intimately linked the concepts of taste and order;
however, conceptions of order shifted over time. Taste was a dynamic concept. Even as
experts judged tastefulness, they continually reconceptualized the causal connections
between the natural environment and the spaces they wanted to make sure were on the
path to civilization. From the 1850s through World War I, conversations regarding taste
25
and order implicated discussions of the interplay amongst science, beauty, and nature.
The concept of taste included both specific taste in flowers and an indicator of civilized
society. Taste conversations also involved definitions and experiences of class, gender,
ethnicity and race.
Taste professionals (a growing group over time from nurserymen to botanists)
used taste as a concept to understand, define and market their terrain. They labeled the
land as distinctively pregnant with possibility and then planted it concurrently with
familiar and unfamiliar plants. Avoiding the tension of a dichotomy between distinctive
and familiar, they framed the dialogues within twin goals of creating orderliness as
beneficial to society and embracing experimentation. These goals played out through
different actions in each broad time period. From the 1850s through the 1870s in
California, nurserymen stressed the orderly importation and planting of exotic (as in non-
native) flowers and teaching taste by example. The experimentation element involved
the planting of California with a range of east coast and international plants and carefully
observing what grew and what withered. But in many ways, this very orderly process
created results far from exotic or experimental. The nurserymen stressed the importance
of horticulture organizations, publications, and education in raising taste and therefore
civility in the new state. They chose many plants already considered tasteful and valued
from east coast nurseries, English gardens, and English colonies such as Australia.
From the late 1870s through World War I, the floral taste conversations in
California evolved towards a more scientific conception of evolving taste and evolving
environments. Emerging professions of florists, landscape architects, and experimental
26
botanists provided varied perspectives to attack notions of taste and connect
environments and societal development. Florists and botanists stressed the importance
of a wider range of cut flowers, scientific botanical exploration through hybridization or
field studies, and the value of wildflowers. The budding floristry business models and
botanical research though also prized orderliness and experimentation. The emerging
businesses developed parallel to a turn of the century construction of a mission style
garden and comforting reworking of the Spanish period. The taste conversations
transcend analyzing transitions from exotic to domestic planting. Instead, such
conversations demonstrate how floriculturists imagined the civilizing influence of
flowers possessed the power to transform their space.
_______________________
From 1850 through the 1870s in the San Francisco Bay area, floral taste dialogues
fell largely into the domain of nurserymen. These nurserymen self-fashioned as
concierges of taste. Their taste conversations tackled issues of how Californians might
increase their tastefulness and how experimentation and education might shape the new
state. The term “nurserymen” in the second half of the nineteenth century referred to a
wide range of plant salesmen.
37
Some nurserymen grew most of the own plants. Others
functioned as dealers who operated on margin and grew relatively little. A third group

37
See Thomas A. Brown, “A List of California Nurseries and Their Catalogues, 1850-
1900,” (unpublished manuscript at the University of California at Davis, 1982); Emory E.
Smith, “Floriculture as a California Industry: Its Growth from Pioneer Times,” San
Francisco Chronicle, Jan. 3, 1897, 12. See also, Elisabeth Woodburn, “Horticultural
Heritage: The Influence of U. S. Nurserymen,” Agricultural Literature: Proud Heritage -
Future Promise: A Bicentennial Symposium, September 24-26, 1975, (Washington, DC:
Associates of the National Agricultural Library, c1977).
27
acted as importers who brought in plants to sell predominantly at auction.
38
Others
crafted multi-layer businesses engaged in a combination of the three activities. Many
nurserymen also functioned as florists into the late nineteenth century, before separate
and distinct floristry businesses emerged.
The first recorded professional nurserymen, such as James L. Lafayette Warren,
set up shops in the late 1840s and throughout the 1850s.
39
As set forth in the
Introduction, many nurserymen and those interested in starting nurseries emigrated from
Europe and the east coast of the United States. They arrived with business connections
and shared experiences from domestic and international apprenticeships.
40
Drawing on
those international networks, they grounded their concepts of good taste and trafficked
plants in a global seed and plant market. As part of their business models, they marketed
themselves as ambassadors of taste. They published magazines, such as California
Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine and The California Florist and shared their
opinions in local newspapers, such as Pacific Rural Press and The Alta California. They

38
Judith H. Taylor and the late Harry Morton Butterfield, Tangible Memories:
Californians and Their Gardens, 1800-1950 (San Francisco, 2003), 53. In the 1960s,
University of California at Davis horticulturalist H.M. Butterfield researched and drafted
as exhaustive a list as possible about the early nurserymen and their offerings. His work
consisted mainly of lists and mini-biographies, which this project utilizes as raw data to
draw the conclusions regarding taste formation.
39
Michael R. Corbett, “Rearranging the Environment: The Making of a California
Landscape 1870s to 1990s,” eds. Steven A. Nash and Bill Berkson, Facing Eden: 100
Years of Landscape Art in the Bay Area (San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San
Francisco, 1995), 3-29. David C. Streatfield, California Gardens: Creating a New Eden
(New York: Abbeville Press, 1994), 37.
40
See also, Taylor and Butterfield, Tangible Memories, 75 for the story Edward L.
Reimer who arrived in San Francisco in 1852 from Berlin by way of New York.
28
formed associations and created regional exhibitions both to show their own wares and to
demonstrate the large possibilities of growing in California.
California floriculturists’ earliest framings of the connections between flowers
and civility derived from global experiences with flowers. Nurserymen forged
connections via apprenticeships and marriage that shaped their development and the
possibilities and expertise they offered California residents. The lives of German-born
nurserymen cousins Frank and Peter Kunz demonstrate the power of international,
apprentice, and familial ties. Frank Kunz was born in 1833 in Zeiskam, Germany. His
cousin, Peter, was born two years later in Bavaria. In 1851, Peter moved to the United
States and started working with Peter Henderson in his Jersey City nursery. By March of
1852, Frank moved to New York as well and joined with his cousin at Henderson’s. In
1854 and 1856, respectively, Peter and Frank Kunz journeyed via Panama to California,
this time both settling in the Hayes Valley and working for Thomas Hayes, a prominent
Irish immigrant with significant land holdings. Both Kunzes founded nurseries and
labored in Sacramento. And they each married a sister of Charles Schimminger, who
partnered with Frank from 1862 to 1877 in running Union Nursery.
41
The web of their
direct experiences drew together the Kunzes, Henderson, Hayes, and Schimminger with
connections in Germany, New Jersey, Sacramento, and San Francisco.
Their connections extended into the next wave of immigrant nurserymen as well.
In 1877, Charles Abraham emigrated from Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. He previously

41
H.M. Butterfield, “Some Pioneer Nurseries in California and Their Plants,” Journal of
the California Horticultural Society, Vol. 27, No. 3 (Jul., 1966; 70-71), No. 4 (Oct.,
1966; 102-108) and Vol. 28, No. 1 (Jan.,1967; 132-139).
29
worked in Dresden and Hamburg in town cemeteries and gardens and apprenticed at a
sub-tropical garden in the Russian Crimea. In the United States, he first started working
for Frank Lüdemann at Lüdemann’s Nursery. He then worked for Frank Kunz in
Sacramento. In 1880, Abraham opened his own Western Nursery in San Francisco. He
maintained a stall at the California Market from 1880 to 1892, where he sold plants he
imported from all over the world: bougainvillea in 1889 from Chile, sub-tropical plants
from South American, Australia, and New Zealand, and flowering apricots and weeping
almonds from China.
42
The web continued to expand generationally, extending to Russia
and the expertise of Lüdemann and became part of a process that experimented with
plants from every corner of the globe from Chile to New Zealand, Italy to China. The
building blocks of a dialogue of taste stemmed from international connections, curiosity,
and visions of the possibilities of growing in California.
California’s international informal community of nurserymen did not simply
import seeds and plants, even in the early stages of statehood. Nurserymen, with their
plants native to California, ventured across the world, gathering information, cementing
business opportunities, and engaging in commercial and taste dialogues. In 1874,
F.A. Miller traveled to the East Coast and Europe. He co-owned Miller, Sievers & Co.
with John Sievers, and the two sold gladiolus, fuchsias, and orchids, amongst other

42
Taylor and Butterfield, Tangible Memories, 57-59. Veronica K. Kinzie, “The Western
Nursery,” ed. Olive H. Palmer, Vignettes of Early San Francisco Homes and Gardens
(Program of the San Francisco Garden Club, Dec. 1935).
30
blooms.
43
The San Francisco press publicized Miller’s journey. His itinerary would faze
even the most seasoned traveler; he stopped in Chicago, St. Louis, Philadelphia,
Washington, New York, Rochester, Hamburg, Bremen, Berlin, Erfurt, Dresden,
Frankfurt, Baden, Ghent, Paris, and London. California Horticulturalist and Floral
Magazine reported that his goals included viewing other nurseries and public gardens and
creating business relationships for imports to California and islands in the Pacific.
44

Limiting the boundaries of floricultural experimentation to the notion of a tasteful
replanting of east coast domestic gardens diminishes the importance of the work of Miller
and others. Early San Francisco nurserymen articulated the endless possibilities of what
San Franciscans could grow from an environmental perspective. They created and relied
upon interpersonal connections and international import/export exchange to successfully
run their nursery operations and test landscape boundaries in the “virgin” earth.
Pinpointing how this internationally framed notion of taste changed over time is
less critical than understanding how taste was conceptually used differently over time.
This chapter avoids detailing specific floral trends by time or region. That highly
speculative work involves sources providing variant answers regarding the popularity of
a seemingly endless number of varieties. Trends changed quickly and specifically by

43
See Miller, Sievers & Co., “Exotic Gardens and Conservatories General and
Descriptive Catalogue of New and Rare Plants, Trees, and Shrubs, Seeds and Bulbs,”
1876, University of California at Davis, Nursery and Seed Catalog Collection, Box 221,
Folder 6344, 15. Brown, “A List of California Nurseries and Their Catalogues, 1850-
1900,” 29.
44
“Personal,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol. V, No. 3 (Mar.,
1875), 92.
31
region.
45
Once florists dominated the cut-flower trade at the end of the nineteenth
century, they created limited records and reports reflecting what they sold at different
times of the year and by region.
46
The earliest and best data for this form of analysis
could be extracted from the 1890 census.
47
This census data suggests that specific trends
in particular flowers existed in this narrow window of time, the decade at the end of the
nineteenth-century. The availability of such data is not uniform across the decades,
making a meaningful study along these lines provisional at best. Regardless, instead of
focusing on numbers of types of flowers in specific places, the analysis of taste must
focus on the dialogues surrounding the sales of particular flowers. Listening to how

45
See J. of Newark, New Jersey, “Dahlias,” Garden and Forest, Vol. III, No. 139 (Oct.
22, 1890), 516, concluding “the flower-loving public alternately takes up and discards the
various forms.”
46
See William S. Lyon, Gardening in California: A Non-technical Hand Book with
Especial Application to this Soil and Climate (Los Angeles: Geo. Rice & Sons, 1897), 98.
In 1897, William Lyon reported that 75-90% of the flowers “used or consumed in
California” were roses, carnations, violets, chrysanthemums, sweet peas and flowers from
bulbs or tubers. See also, Melissa Dodd Eskilson, “Plants & Flowers,” in A Centennial
History of the American Florist (Topeka: Florists’ Review Enterprises, 1997), 86-109,
88-92. See also, Eben E. Rexford, Home Floriculture: A Practical Guide to the
Treatment of Flowering and Other Ornamental Plants in the House and Garden,
(Detroit: D.M. Ferry & Co., 1903, orig. pub. 1890), 127, 235, & 259. Rexford discussed
the popularity of the carnation, the declining interest in the double dahlia, and the “ideal
garden” of roses. See also, Maurice Maeterlinck, Old Fashioned Flowers and Other Out-
of-Door Studies (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1905), 10-11 & 19. Maeterlinck
catalogued a love of “old-fashioned flowers,” including Garden Primroses, Hyacinths,
Crocuses, Scented Violets, Liles of the Valley, Daisies, Periwinkles, Marigolds, and
Garden Chrysanthemums (specifically excluding Japanese Chrysanthemums). Unlike
many others, he claimed he was not interested in newer varietals, such as those from
Peru, China, and Japan.
47
J.H. Hale, Agriculture: Floriculture (United States Bureau of the Census, Census
Bulletin No. 59, April 29, 1891), 8-11. See also, “Recent Publications,” Garden and
Forest, Vol. IV, No. 167 (May 6, 1891), 215-216.
32
those participating in the dialogues used the concept of taste provides a better entrée into
the perception of the role of the flowers (and the perceived pivotal difference between
choosing one flower over another) within society.
These nurserymen utilized terms of art to convey the subtleties of their messages;
the terms taste and fashion shorthanded deliberate distinctions.
48
Supposed deeply-
rooted, ordinary individuals could not easily alter taste over time or from place to place.
Portrayed as both separate from power and a symbol of power, taste’s relationship to
class and hierarchy failed to conform to a simple formula or trajectory. In the case of
California specifically, the correlations with class and gender formed a somewhat
disjointed analysis of taste.
49
For example, California Horticulturalist and Floral
Magazine concluded that wealthy men do not have all the answers with regard to
flowering bulbs in the 1870s; flowers, though “dearly loved” by Californians of all ages

48
This project’s definition and discussion of taste and fashion draws mainly from the
primary sources cited and the conceptual discussions in the following works: Karen
Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1982), James S. Hans, The Sovereignty of Taste (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
2002), and Leora Auslander, Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1996), 1, 2, & 399. Auslander’s project interrogated the
place of style and taste in the making of modern French political and social order, as well
as people’s self understandings via a study of furniture in Parisians’ lives from the mid-
seventeenth century to the early twentieth century. While her work yielded a slightly
different understanding of the permanence of patterns of taste, as opposed to style, her
discussion of taste and style informed my own. See also, Elizabeth Hyde, Cultivated
Power: Flowers, Culture, and Politics in the Reign of Louis XIV (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 32-54; Christopher Browne Garnett, Jr., Taste:
An Essay in Critical Imagination (New York: Exposition Press, 1968); Hannah Ginsborg,
The Role of Taste in Kant’s Theory of Cognition (New York: Garland Publishing, 1990).
49
See Philip J. Ethington, The Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in
San Francisco, 1850-1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), for a
discussion of class in California, 252.
33
were “yet considered by many of our wealthy men as very unnecessary luxuries.” For the
wealthy, the blooms frequently were nurtured “merely for appearance sake.” The editors
concluded that the wealthy men measured sunflowers and poppies more valuable than
hyacinths and lilies of the valley because they focused on size, showiness, or the volume
available for an equivalent price. But in this case, women began the rescue missions.
“Thanks, however, to the ladies, who have gradually inaugurated a new order of things.”
These women focused on the care and nurture of the blooms and could continue to assist
in the mission moving forward.
50
The wealthy man who recognized that his flowers
constituted a necessity contributed to the civilizing project, but his inability or disinterest
in exercising tasteful floral choices thwarted the cause. A woman of the same wealth
status, however, tempered or even freed both the landscape and the man from his
gauche showiness.
The state of tastefulness conjured visions of pure souls, able to appreciate beauty
and goodness in almost “transhistorical” terms.
51
Taste, conversely transcendent of era
and region and socially constructed, resided in a vulnerable state. For some, good taste
blossomed as an innate characteristic; for others, tastefulness required cultivation through
education. Experts and commentators sometimes used taste as a rallying cry or as a
barometer of the success of the cultural growth of the region. For example, in arguing for
the necessity of a horticultural society in California, nurseryman F.A. Miller promised

50
F.A. Miller, “Our Favorite Flowering Bulbs,” California Horticulturalist and Floral
Magazine, Vol. III, No. 1 (Jan., 1873), 5-7, 5.
51
Breck, The flower-garden, 14.
34
that such a society would “create taste.”
52
Others contended that taste could not be
created or taught; taste required sensory observations not equally available to all.
Tastefulness necessitated analyses of color – both of individual plants and in grouping
them in harmonious order. It required attention to scent, as well as the timing of
blossoms and projected heights to create proper aesthetic balance.
53
Not all of this could
be taught, even if, in general, good taste mirrored white European norms.
In contrast, notions of fashionableness championed the use of particular flowers,
methods of display, or persons in or acting within the floral markets, generally on a
temporary basis. Fashion remained rooted in time and region. It correlated frequently
with identifiable peoples or aesthetic movements with definable elements of the fashion.
Unlike taste, fashion frequently involved non-white, non-European ideas, particularly
Japanese and Chinese. For example, the polyanthus narcissus bloomed in water to
celebrate Chinese New Year, a “fashion” that purportedly traveled from China through
San Francisco to the East Coast of the United States and finally to England over a twenty-
five year period.
54
If, however, a particular fashion persisted, it had the potential to alter
taste – for better or worse.
55

52
F.A. Miller, “The Secretary’s Report,” to the State Board of Agriculture, dated
November 20, 1872, reprinted in California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol.
II, No. 12 (Nov., 1872), 361-365, 361.
53
Breck, The flower-garden, 25.
54
“Polyanthus Narcissus,” Garden and Forest, Vol. I, No. 4 (Mar. 21, 1888), 44.
55
See comments regarding fashions of varied durations and either “unfortunate
influence” or those that were “beneficial” to the gardening profession. “Horticultural
Fashions,” Garden and Forest, Vol. I, No. 5 (Mar. 28, 1888), 49-50.
35
While at times taste and fashion clashed, the floricultural battles over taste and
fashion also reveal how the two frequently paralleled even as they continually shaped
understandings of the other.

Taste involved knowing when to hold onto traditional
favorites, plant experimental varieties, or utilize those currently in fashion. At times, the
taste experts pointed out differences between taste and fashion to cement their authority
as “arbiters of taste;” the distinctions they drew between the two concepts may have been
manufactured or exaggerated.
56
In addition, taste varied at times with the professional
status of the speaker, from nurseryman to botanist. Because they frequently also sold the
plants that they labeled either tasteful or in fashion, market forces and their own need to
profit shaped their analyses.
While narcissi or lilies-of-the-valley experienced changes in their status, the
underlying criteria tastemakers considered in evaluating flowers of taste changed little
throughout the period. The necessary elements included form, color, texture, and scent.
57

While different elements held positions of primacy at different moments and by different
speakers, the general analysis remained. Taste professionals explicitly used the criteria
both to label tasteful and gauche flowers and to discern why certain flowers claimed the

56
Auslander, Taste and Power, 398-399. As discussed above, her historical
circumstances were quite different in that the taste professionals and furniture distributors
were generally not the same people. Her conclusions are different than mine, but her
analysis informed my own.
57
Alexander Watson, The American Home Garden (New York: Harper & Brothers,
Publishers, 1859), 436. See also, “Taste in the Cultivation of Flowers,” California
Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol. IX, No. 3 (Mar., 1879), 70-71, 70. See also,
Candace Wheeler, “The Decorative Use of Flowers,” Garden and Forest, Vol. III, No.
100 (Jan. 22, 1890) 38-39. “Form in Flowers,” Garden and Forest, Vol. III, No. 105
(Feb. 26, 1890) 569-570, 569.
36
status of flowers of fashion and others those of taste. Consider the chrysanthemum.
Taste professionals declared in the late 1880s that the popularity of the chrysanthemum
transcended one of those “transient floral epidemics” that categorized the popularity of
the sunflower or daisy. They praised the chrysanthemum for its “rich, mellow tones,”
“merit of symmetry,” and connection to nature rather than showy artificiality, like a
double dahlia or camellia.
58
If the flower fit the taste analysis and enjoyed wild
popularity, it fairly gained the label of both tasteful and fashionable. In the 1890s in San
Francisco, chrysanthemums grew in that space of tastefulness and fashion. Tasteful and
“the most fashionable flower” at present, love for the chrysanthemum rose to a veritable
“craze.”
59
William S. Lyon explained in his gardening handbook in 1897, “There is no
plant grown out of doors in California that comes to greater perfection than the
chrysanthemum. None so spectacular in its gorgeousness, or so responsive to generous
treatment.”

Taste professionals did not require perfection though; Lyon concluded that
the foliage of chrysanthemums not in bloom amounted to the “apotheosis of weedy

58
“Chrysanthemums,” Garden and Forest, Vol. I, No. 38 (Nov. 14, 1888), 445-446, 445.
See also, “The Chrysanthemum,” Garden and Forest, Vol. II, No. 91 (Nov. 20, 1889),
553-554, discussing the celebrations in England and Europe of the 100 years of the
chrysanthemum in Europe and the “mania” from the 34 years prior that was in decline.
However, the article noted that in the United States, the chrysanthemum remained a
“reigning favorite.”
59
Mrs. E.T. Crane, “Chrysanthemums,” eds. Emory E. Smith and C.S. Aiken, Monthly
Proceedings of the California State Floral Society, No. 2 (Oct., 1891), 13-15, 13.
“Chrysanthemum Show at Irving Hall, Oct. 28, 1891,” eds. Emory E. Smith and C.S.
Aiken, Monthly Proceedings of the California State Floral Society, No. 4 (Nov., 1891),
20.
37
ugliness.”
60
Undeterred by the less than ideal foliage, forty-eight exhibitors gathered at
the Chrysanthemum Show at Irving Hall in San Francisco in 1891 to show their blooms.
Young men paraded down Kearny or Market Street with enormous chrysanthemums
eight inches in diameter weighing down their buttonholes. Ladies walked with bouquets
of the blooms.
61
Tasteful and fashionable, the chrysanthemums of one season, though,
faced criticism when compared with the tasteful and fashionable chrysanthemums of the
next season. Specifically, the pompon chrysanthemum largely disappeared from local
gardens, replaced by giant blossoms with “twisted, distorted or lacerated petals.” Lyon
explained that the “standard of excellence” and fashion varied from year to year; “a
variety discarded ten years ago as a worthless single or a semi-double flower, might
today, if sufficiently ‘ragged,’ be considered a prize.”
62

With regard to the element of color, debates regarding color involved both
individual shades and the placement of different hues in close proximity to each other.
Color held the power to comfort, please, and connect to tradition. Nurserymen reinforced
their power through the color debates by setting frameworks and color rules based on
these goals. The color debates also functioned as ways to measure and rank individual
abilities to perceive color. Sometimes experts thought a particular color deserved greater
attention or represented some sort of desirable societal virtue. For example, in May

60
Lyon, Gardening in California, 76-77, 99. See also, Maeterlinck, Old Fashioned
Flowers and Other Out-of Door Studies, 103-104.
61
“Chrysanthemum Show at Irving Hall, Oct. 28, 1891,” Monthly Proceedings of the
California State Floral Society, 20.
62
Lyon, Gardening in California, 76-77.
38
1879, W.C.L. Drew lamented that the “value of white flowers [wa]s overlooked,” since
many considered them not as showy as red, blue or yellow. But Drew deemed white an
important symbol of purity, appropriate for both day and nighttime occasions and most
reverent for funerals.
63
Other experts focused on combinations of colors; their advice
created a complicated patchwork of recommended color combinations. In the early
1870s, experts determined that red or rose-colored flowers should not be paired with
scarlet or orange, nor orange next to yellow. Parsing red from scarlet flowers must have
been a daunting (if not impossible) task. Pleasing combinations included lilac with
yellow and orange with light blue.
64
During the same time period, in different parts of
the country, others concluded blue and purple flowers should be discouraged in bouquets.
Except for in connection with violets, they purportedly “repel[led] all close
communication with others.”
65

Given the importance of judging and using color in connection with determining
and performing good taste, concerns arose over differences in how people viewed,

63
W.C.L. Drew, “Value of White Flowers,” California Horticulturalist and Floral
Magazine, Vol. IX, No. 5 (May, 1879), 144.
64
“Arranging Flowers in Beds,” reprinted from Southern Agriculturist in California
Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol. III, No. 1 (Jan., 1873), 20. See also, Amateur,
“Color in Flowers,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol. IV, No. 8
(Aug., 1874), 242-243, 243. See also, Mrs. Francis King (Louisa Yeomans), The Well-
Considered Garden (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1915), 4-6.
65
Henderson, Practical Floriculture, 226. See also, King, The Well-Considered Garden,
77, discussing desirable colors by season.
39
perceived, and expressed their experiences of color.
66
Language seemed inadequate to
explain the multiplicity of shades of blue flowers, ranging from hyacinths, to violets, to
Chinese wisteria.
67
Strict adherence to rules of color could also lead one to inane garden
designs, such as all blue gardens that yearned for white or pale yellow lilies to enhance
their beauty.
68
At first glance, the disagreements in the aesthetic appeal of colored
blooms and arrangements threaten the analysis of the importance of color to taste-
making. Dissecting the normative values of purple, white, or scarlet blossoms offers a
distraction; tastemakers reaffirmed the power of color in a diverse patchwork of advice as
a tool to exert authority to observe and delineate rules.
Drawing on elements of color and form and comparisons between taste and
fashion, the nurserymen in California set up associations and publications to further
cement their authority, sell their plants, and educate the community about taste. In
looking at the experiences of William C. Walker and James L. Lafayette Warren, this
transition emerges from establishing nurseries to organizing nursery and agriculturally-
interested men into associations. Their work entwined with the development of
floricultural and agricultural empires and taste in California on terms that protected local
interests and encouraged experimentation and importation.

66
E.J. Hooper, “Colors of Flowers,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine,
Vol. V, No. 5 (May, 1875) 141-142, 142. See also, Wheeler, “The Decorative Use of
Flowers,” Garden and Forest, 38.
67
Hooper, “Colors of Flowers,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, 142.
68
Gertrude Jekyll, Colour in the Flower Garden (Portland: Sagapress, 1995; orig. pub.
1908), 105, decrying gardens ruined by strict adherence to color rules.
40
Both Walker and Warren arrived in California in 1849, one with a background in
running a nursery and one with little apparent professional nursery knowledge. Walker
would eventually found the Golden Gate Nursery at Fourth and Folsom. He was born in
Philadelphia in 1814 and began practicing law there in 1836. Walker’s law practice
eventually led him south to Mississippi. But in 1849, he caught gold fever and ventured
west. It is unclear how Walker faired in the intervening years after his arrival in
California and even how or why he entered the nursery business. Nonetheless he
participated in establishing state and local agricultural and horticultural infrastructure. In
1854, in connection with the Mechanics’ Institute Exhibitions, he exhibited acacias,
camellias, fuchsias, and poinsettias.
69
As of September 1859, Walker’s international
wares included imported roses and seeds from M. Guifoyle of Sydney, Australia.
70
By
1860, Walker offered 250 varieties of roses and 70 kinds of acacias and albizzias.
71

Although foreign to the nursery business before moving to California, Walker brought his
life experiences and taste from Pennsylvania and Mississippi and participated in local
flower shows and international plant exchanges.

Walker and Warren’s experiences
illustrate early efforts to establish nurseries in California by novices and experts, who

69
William C. Walker, (Papers of), Catalogue of the Golden Gate Nursery, 1858-1859,
California Historical Society. Butterfield, “Some Pioneer Nurseries in California and
Their Plants,” Journal of the California Horticultural Society, Vol. 27, No. 3 (Jul., 1966),
70-71 & Vol. 27, No. 4 (Oct, 1966), 102-108 and Vol. 28, No. 1 (Jan., 1967), 132-139.
See also Taylor and Butterfield, Tangible Memories, 43-48.
70
H.M. Butterfield, “The History of Ornamental Horticulture in California” (unpublished
manuscript, no date – but likely in the 1960s), 5.
71
Butterfield, “Some Pioneer Nurseries in California and Their Plants,” Journal of the
California Horticultural Society, Vol. 27, No. 3 (Jul., 1966), 70-71 & Vol. 27, No. 4
(Oct, 1966), 102-108 and Vol. 28, No. 1 (Jan., 1967), 132-139.
41
drew on either international or domestic connections, and who utilized their building
blocks of taste as they participated in local organizations and flower shows.

While much has been written about the formation of such organizations and the
role of viticulturists and lumbermen at the early stages, attention must be also paid to
nurserymen and floriculturists.
72
In 1853, Warren created a committee to contemplate the
formation of a state agricultural board. He drew together individuals in lumber,
viticulture, and floriculture to encourage development of their respective agricultural
interests. These men included J.K. Rose, who owned the Sonoma land that Colonel
Agoston Haraszthy would purchase in 1856 to start his winery and lumberman William
Neely Thompson who acted as Secretary. The Agricultural Society incorporated on May
13, 1854 and held their first fair on August 26, 1854.
73
In addition to the cooperative
Agricultural Society, nurserymen and those interested in horticulture and floriculture
banded together and formed the Bay District Horticultural Society of California. From
the beginning, they dedicated themselves to cultivating profitable businesses as well as

72
See David Vaught, Cultivating California: Growers, Specialty Crops, and Labor,
1875-1920 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). Richard Walker, The
Conquest of Bread: 150 Years of Agribusiness in California, (The New Press, 2004). See
also, Harry M. Butterfield, “Builder's of California Horticulture, Part 1,” Journal of the
California Horticultural Society, Vol. XXII, No. 1, (Jan., 1961) 2-7, 28; Harry M.
Butterfield, “Builder's of California Horticulture, Part 2,” California Horticultural
Society Journal, Vol. XXII, No. 3 (Jul., 1961), 102-107; Harry M. Butterfield, “Early
Horticulture in Northern and Central California,” California Horticultural Society
Journal, Vol. XXIX, No. 1 (Jan., 1968), 30-32; Harry M. Butterfield, “The History of
Ornamental Horticulture in California," California Horticultural Society Journal, Vol.
XXVI, No. 2 (Apr., 1965) 47-50.
73
Butterfield, “Some Pioneer Nurseries in California and Their Plants,” Journal of the
California Horticultural Society, Vol. 27, No. 3 (Jul., 1966), 70-71 & Vol. 27, No. 4
(Oct, 1966), 102-108 and Vol. 28, No. 1 (Jan., 1967), 132-139.
42
civilized and tasteful California communities. In the 1870s, members included Robert B.
Woodward of the amusement grounds at Woodward’s Gardens, E.L. Reimer, F.A.
Herrin, Frank Lüdemann, and F.A. Miller.
74
Members visited local nurserymen,
gardeners, and horticulturists to urge them to join in the community effort to develop
“our horticultural and agricultural interests.”
75
At meetings, members discussed a range
of horticulturally-related topics, from specific flowers like roses to forest and shade trees
and on to parasites such as the mealy bug.
76
Additional local and statewide societies
sprouted up with varied goals and participants.
77
By the late 1870s, California boasted a
state-wide Horticultural Society. Members held a preliminary meeting at the Academy of
Sciences on September 1879 and pledged to move forward, establishing an initial
committee to form by-laws that included Charles H. Shinn and E.J. Wickson.
78

The nurserymen used these societies as platforms to spread their taste dialogues,
educate the public, and police their own members. In the fall of 1872, the Bay District
Horticultural Society opened its library to educate members. The library boasted over

74
“Bay District of Horticultural Society of California,” California Horticulturalist and
Floral Magazine, Vol. I, No. 2 (Dec., 1870), 56-59, 56-7.
75
“Bay District of Horticultural Society of California,” California Horticulturalist and
Floral Magazine, Vol. I, No. 4 (Feb., 1871),121.
76
“Bay District of Horticultural Society of California,” California Horticulturalist and
Floral Magazine, Vol. I, No. 5 (Mar., 1871),154.
77
“Editorial Portfolio: Agricultural and Horticultural Societies,” California
Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol. II, No. 7 (June, 1872), 209-210, 209.
78
“Editorial Department: The State Horticultural Society,” California Horticulturalist
and Floral Magazine, Vol. IX, No. 10 (Oct., 1879), 308-309.
43
200 volumes and 30 “leading periodicals.”
79
They hosted speeches and meetings, and
faced criticism for wasting time on “unimportant formalities and discussions.” The
societies encouraged members of different associations to publish and share their
experiences, and declared it was perfectly fine if the gardener was not a gifted writer – he
could just provide the facts of his experiences and thereby benefit all.
80
Nurserymen
encouraged their fellow nurserymen to capture the power of print culture to spread
educational nuts and bolts and meta-messages of taste.
In addition to the organizations’ emphases on sharing tips and experiences to
advance horticultural knowledge, throughout the 1880s, taste professionals professed an
explicit message focused at other nurserymen that connected good taste with education as
well as capitalist business endeavors.
81
As civic participants, nurserymen positioned
themselves as educators with a particular duty and particularized relationship to taste. As
California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine pointed out, the taste and education that
floriculturists offered the public differed from the views that poets and painters presented.
It conceded taste was less consequential in floriculture than in literature or fine art,
perhaps because it concluded that the plants themselves transformed those who worked in
close contact with them. Whether or not the individual had his own sense of good taste,
it argued mere contact with the flowers led him towards greater levels of civility.

79
“Opening of the Hall of the Bay District Horticultural Society,” California
Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol. II, No. 10 (Sep., 1872), 297-301, 297.
80
“Editorial Portfolio: Agricultural and Horticultural Societies,” California
Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol. II, No. 7 (June, 1872), 209-210.
81
Amateur, “Color in Flowers,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, 242.
44
Floricultural taste purportedly wielded the power “to wean” individuals from less
productive activities, “elevate” minds, and appreciate God and His “numberless and
diversified beauties.”
82
This self-proclaimed amateur connected education, business
pursuits and duties, taste, and religious appreciation of nature. Not alone, three years
later, another observed that a love of flowers spread even in the utilitarian society of
California. The increasing taste and its influences on the “popular mind,” promised to
lead to increased practicality, which was expected to then lead to “good progress.” We
“are strongly disposed to believe,” he concluded, that desire increased each season in the
state to “appreciate the beauty, and to take an increasing delight in the well laid out and
neatly kept garden and grounds.” Still, much work remained to be done.
83

Men dominated the early taste conversations. Nurserymen and their publications
favored the professional skills of a gardener or florist with experience of English or
eastern United States gardening. But towards the end of the 1870s, the question of the
role of women as persons engaging with flowers and issues of taste appeared more
significant in two separate fora: as consumers and as possible professionals.
84
This
development coincided with the increasing balancing of sex ratios in the Bay Area.
Women constituted a mere 2% of the population in 1849 and only 15% in 1852. By
1860, the percentage increased to 39% and to 45% by 1900.
85

82
Ibid.
83
“The Flower Garden,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol. VII, No.
2 (Feb., 1877), 39-40, 39.
84
Ibid.
85
Ethington, The Public City, 47.
45
It is not unsurprising that the role of women presented a more prevalent concern
by the 1870s. Consumers offered increased opportunities for profits. Some floriculturists
believed the act of consuming flowers contributed to feminine civility. In the mid 1870s,
Jeanne Carr, amateur botanist and friend and mentor to John Muir, wondered why San
Francisco lacked a flower market; Milwaukee created one when it was only half as
sizeable as San Francisco.
How charming it would be for ladies to go out to a flower market, make
their own selections, and a morning’s work of weaving bouquets and table
decorations which would soften the glitter of crystal and gleam of silver
on their dinner tables!

Carr’s concerns included the act of participating in a public market where women
exercised discretion, perhaps demonstrating or shaping floricultural taste, but also
touched on the power of actions surrounding flowers. She marveled at how much
“tenderer” the gift of a hand-made flower cross “woven by loving fingers” and
questioned by comparison, “What would we think of a letter of condolence or
congratulation ordered from the stationer?” Women exercised refinement through their
actions and vested the flowers and their wares with additional affective societal value.
Further, Carr had an eye towards making an impression on immigrants as soon as they
arrived. She envisioned the flower market would be good for immigrants coming over
the mountains; “the bright flowers are their best welcome.”
86

Perhaps more surprising than encouragement of female floral consumption, male
nurserymen and their publications encouraged women to engage in more floricultural

86
Jeanne Carr, “Flower Market for San Francisco,” California Horticulturalist and
Floral Magazine, Vol. VI, No. 1 (Jan., 1876), 21-22, 22.
46
endeavors on a professional basis as part of a broader societal march towards civility.
Still, the industry continued to be dominated by men. Many sought to understand
women’s reluctance particularly within the paradigm that women might be inherently
drawn to good taste. California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine featured an article
in 1875 seeking to explain female disinterest. The article began with a summary of the
status of women’s cries for employment to the possible detriment of their male
counterparts. And every year, the article concluded, women made significant gains
despite volumes of male applicants. The writer admitted he was perplexed. Why, given
men’s superior overall education and experience, would women even be considered for
the vacant jobs? Floriculture, though, appeared differently to the author; while men’s
work was men’s work and women’s women’s (by his own conclusion), floriculturists’
work included feminine pursuits: “one would think that women would occupy the field to
the exclusion of men.” But he observed women were not interested in “entering upon a
business purely feminine.” This seemed particularly odd because many of the
nurserymen contended that women frequently had a gift for recognizing good taste.
The writer went on to recount that he had visited a floral establishment in New
York in the early 1870s and found that all of the employees were men. He asked why
they did not have women working there. The proprietors explained. First, “’[m]en have
more patience, and are not so impulsive.’” They continued that “[w]omen liked to trifle
with flowers, to amuse themselves with them” but lacked the capacity to cultivate as a
business pursuit. Temperament and ability aside, the New Yorkers then provided an
altogether more intriguing reason. They explained to him that women “would rather
47
labor at a desk, stand in a store, do the hardest kind of men’s work, than engage in any of
these feminine or half-feminine employments.” Women opted to become lawyers,
doctors, and preachers “because these were manly professions.”
87

Sarah Kahn’s flower business on Washington Street in San Francisco in the 1880s
proves that there were some exceptions to the article’s observations.
88
While nurserymen
openly encouraged women to take up the call, it is unclear whether women joined their
ranks in significant numbers in California, although they actively participated in floral
societies. Nonetheless, the issue of the role of women – both as consumers and possibly
as business owners – took root during this period within the rhetoric of taste, to be
addressed over and over again in the next decades.
_________________________

Early California nurserymen shaped taste and participated in taste battles from the
ground to the storefront in an attempt to secure profits and to create civilized homes.
Through their varied international upbringings and apprenticeships from Russia to New
Jersey, they imported specific plants and notions of taste from their pasts. In forming
institutions to discuss horticultural developments and publications offering updates and
advice, they participated in debates about tastefulness and guided amateur gardeners in
their endeavors. While many immigrants traveled with their own seeds, others relied on

87
“Women as Floriculturists,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol. V,
No. 9 (Sep., 1875), 273-274.
88
Sarah Kahn (French florist, San Francisco), Business Ephemera Collection at the
California Historical Society.
48
nurserymen to create a new sense of home. Sometimes these immigrants sought the very
plants that lined window boxes in their previous lives. Nurserymen profited, planted, and
guided their way into a narrative of taste that defined the state as a civilized, international
space. By the 1870s, professionals from an emerging floristry industry and landscape
architecture joined the nurserymen in floricultural taste dialogues. California nurserymen
recognized the expense of growing one’s own flowers and the parallel rise in the floristry
business, particularly in roses and camellias. Gardening had become “a luxury” and an
“art” incapable of meeting the public’s massive demand for flowers.
89
In order to expand
the civilizing mission of taste, florists provided valuable access to fresh cut flowers for
San Franciscans. Some of these florists grew their own flowers while others purchased
them from out-of-town growers, since city land had become pricier. Flowers traveled
easily by rail or wagon from the surrounding cities to city-center florists.
California nurserymen and florists tracked the emerging cut-flower market,
participated in its expansion, and welcomed continued discussions of taste and flowers.
In 1873, California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine reprinted an article by
M.B. Batcham, Secretary of the Ohio Horticultural Society in which he estimated New
Yorkers spent over a million dollars annually on cut flowers, one quarter during
Christmas and New Year’s alone. Rosebuds sold from $5 to $8 per 100, camellias $50,
and tuberoses $10 wholesale; consumers paid double for all the above.
90
One year later,

89
“Cut Flowers,” reprinted from Gardeners’ Monthly in California Horticulturalist and
Floral Magazine, Vol. II, No. 11 (Oct., 1872) 337-338.
90
“Flowers and the Flower-Trade,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine,
Vol. III, No. 5 (May, 1873), 161-162, 161.
49
in California, florists during the holidays struggled to keep up with demand with an
estimated $15,000 “paid for cut-flowers, bouquets, and floral decorations.” Locals
concluded this was a significant sum, considering San Francisco had less than 200,000
inhabitants. The floral offerings even in the dead of California winter overwhelmed the
senses: “Roses, Pinks, Stocks, Candy-tuft, Sweet Alyssum, Violets, Stevia, Gladiolus,
Pelargoniums, Fuchsias, Pansies, Laurustinus, Diosma, Erica, Mignonette, Gypsophila,
and Abutilon” as well as greenhouse flowers, “Camellias, Eucharis, Tuberoses,
Epiphyllums, Agapanthus, Azalea, Heliotrope. . .Spanish Jasmine, Cyclamen, Poinsettia,
Chinese Primrose, Begonia, Cineraria, [and] Orange-blossoms.” Camellia bouquets
during the holidays sold from $2.50 to $5 a bunch and baskets of flowers from $5 to $30;
these prices ran 30-40% higher than standard non-holiday prices.
91

F.A. Miller concluded these sales figures proved San Franciscans loved flowers.
He argued those in Chicago and St. Louis invested less in their higher-priced flowers.
92

San Francisco competed on the same playing field as Chicago, St. Louis, and unnamed
eastern cities. Flowers acted as indicators of civilized society. Over the next few
decades, the cut-flower trade expanded and those who participated in its initial phases as
nurserymen, such as Miller, welcomed a narrative of Californians as those engaged in an
ever-increasing love of flowers. The early nurserymen planted a dialogue of taste,
frameworks for horticultural businesses and societies, and narratives of the connections
amongst education, love for flowers and civic virtue. It would be up to individuals and

91
F.A. Miller, “Floral Review,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol.
IV, No. 1 (Jan., 1874) 30-32, 31.
92
Ibid.
50
the emerging florists to join them as they continued to plant California and define and test
the boundaries of tastefulness and their surroundings.
51
Chapter 2

An Infinite Bouquet of Taste:
New Voices in the Conversation, 1870s-1915

The business is increasing to a vast extent, because people are getting
more cultivated in the knowledge of flowers and plants, which is a very
great improvement in the country. I think the knowledge and love of
flowers are very appropriate to enlightenment of the classes and the
delightful amusement of the masses.

Anonymous comment included in
the 1890 United States Census
Report on Floristry.
93

The chief work of the botanist yesterday was the study and classification
of dried, shriveled plant mummies, whose souls had fled, rather than the
living, plastic forms. They thought their classified species were more fixed
and unchangeable than anything in heaven or earth that we can imagine.
We have learned that they are as plastic in our hands as clay in the hands
of the potter or colors on the artist’s canvas, and can readily be molded
into more beautiful forms and colors than any painter or sculptor can ever
hope to bring forth.

Luther Burbank, at the 1901 Floral
Congress in San Francisco.
94

Like the taste ambassadors before him, experimental botanist and businessman
Luther Burbank publicly asserted his standing in the taste conversation. Speaking before
the San Francisco Floral Congress in 1901, Burbank articulated his joy of transforming
plants and his implicit roll as taste master. “What occupation can be more delightful than
adopting the most promising individual from among a race of vile, neglected orphan

93
J.H. Hale, Agriculture: Floriculture (United States Bureau of the Census, Census
Bulletin No. 59, April 29, 1891), 11.
94
Pacific Rural Press, July 6, 1901, as quoted in Peter Dreyer, A Gardener Touched with
Genius: The Life of Luther Burbank (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).
52
weeds with settled hoodlum tendencies, down-trodden and despised by all, and lifting it
by breeding and education to a higher sphere.” In his case, instead of championing one
flower over another and educating customers, Burbank bred the distasteful – vile,
hoodlum, despised – tendencies out of plants, educating the plants themselves to be more
tasteful. Burbank celebrated that he witnessed the plant “gradually change its sprawling
habits, its coarse, ill-smelling foliage, its insignificant blossoms of dull color to an upright
plant with handsome, glossy, fragrant leaves, blossoms of every hue and with a fragrance
as pure and lasting as could be desired.”
95
With this imaginative mind and deliberate
action, man had not only the power to recognize tasteful flowers but to “create marvels of
beauty and value in new expressions of materialized force, for everything of value must
be produced by the intelligent application of the forces of nature which are always
awaiting our commands.”
96
With the grace of a potter molding his clay, Burbank and his
fellow commercial botanists elevated the stakes of the taste conversations. While many
earlier nurserymen and florists articulated notions of good taste and the path to more
civilized communities, botanists at the turn of the century spoke of harnessing nature’s
power to create tastefulness in floricultural terms within developing conversations of
eugenics.
This chapter continues the discussion of taste from Chapter 1, by analyzing the
taste battles at the turn of and the early twentieth century through the experiences of the

95
Luther Burbank, Quote from his speech at the Floral Congress in San Francisco, May
1901, 15.
96
Luther Burbank, “Fundamental Principles of Plant Breeding,” California’s Magazine,
Vol. I, No. 1 (Jul., 1915) 193-196, 196.
53
three predominant additions to the conversation – florists, landscape architects, and
experimental botanists. At the end of the nineteenth century, conversations regarding
taste on the national and local level gained momentum, taking on previously
underrepresented forms and venues. New groups of participants joined the debates.
Floriculturists used the concept of taste to articulate the relationship amongst individuals,
society, and environmental change. Florists marketed cut-flowers divorced from their
garden homes. Landscape architects included flowers as part of their gardenscapes.
Botanists observed and crossed flowers in propagation fields. Collectively, they brought
a renewed conviction that creating tasteful environments and teaching taste had the power
to transform communities. The characteristics ripe for analysis – color, form, and scent –
remained largely consistent. But, the level of detail they examined became microscopic.
As the century closed, floricultural conversations on a national level started to recognize
a multiplicity of tastes, driven in part by the international work of California breeders
and academics.
The multiplicity of voices and the recognition of a multiplicity of tastes forced a
discussion of the possible limits of education in this civilizing project. For some in the
taste dialogues, highly educated women and immigrant peddlers hit glass ceilings in the
greenhouse of taste. In 1888, H.H. Battles presented a paper at a florists’ convention,
concluding, “Taste, to a very great degree, is a matter of education.”
97
But for others,
education was only one aspect, as environmental evolution changed individuals and

97
“The Florists’ Convention: Extracts from Papers Read,” Garden and Forest: A Journal
of Horticulture, Landscape Art, and Forestry, Vol. I, No. 27 (Aug. 29, 1888), “From the
essay of Mr. H.H. Battles,” at 322.
54
societies as well. The work and writings of plant experimenter Burbank articulated a
relationship amongst taste, floriculture, and eugenics vital to understanding the role of
taste in understanding and crafting turn of the century society.
During this time period, questions of individuality and the role of society in
shaping individual development reached the realm of taste. The narrative followed a
specific logical form, as set out in the national publication, Garden and Forest: After one
met the “primal” needs of food, clothing and shelter, people turned to “increasing
comfort and security, and then the desire to make life interesting.” These desires led men
to art, romance and the “mental employment[s]” that cultivated civilization and
humanity. This included implications for understanding and presenting good taste. More
pressing than in previous eras, tasteful persons bore the burden of rejecting “what was
once highly esteemed.” In this “advanced state of society,” individuals freely satisfied
his needs. Concurrently, though, every such person “would be influenced and aided by
the general taste, judgment and culture of the community about him.”
98
This
“individuality” was one of the “most marked of American characteristics” and translated
into a fiat that with regard to taste and design, the individual should follow his instincts –
“no hard and fast rules can be given.”
99

Dialogues that championed individual discernment and lack of fixed rules might,
at first glance, appear to be the death knell of the rhetoric of taste. Or at least they

98
“The Utility of What Makes Life Interesting,” Garden and Forest, Vol. II, No. 89
(Nov. 6, 1889) 529-530.
99
Helena Rutherfurd Ely, A Woman’s Hardy Garden (New York: The Macmillan
Company, 1907, orig. pub. 1903), 21.
55
threatened to signal the end of era where a group of nurserymen could lead the public in
any one particular direction. The inclusion of more voices at the turn of the century and
the work of commercial botanical experimentation guided the taste conversations towards
a greater level of certainty with regard to the connection amongst environment, humans,
and civilization. While education remained central to spreading tastefulness, the taste
debates of this era demonstrate the perceived limits of education in the contexts of sex
and some groups of recent immigrants. During the decades from the 1880s through
World War I, taste conversations in California persisted and evolved; participants
remained determined to place taste at the center of measuring progress and defining the
space as part of, if not leading, national culture.
_________________________

In connection with the 1890 census, J.H. Hale published a report on floriculture
that touched on the state of the industry and taste. Hale served as the President of the
American Association of Nurserymen in the early twentieth century. Florists’ comments
reprinted in the census report fail to specify the size or location of the florists’ businesses.
However, they capture a range of concerns and developments in fin-de-siècle floriculture.
First, the florists addressed class-related differences in floricultural taste. One florist
commented, “The poorer classes show an increase of a desire for flowering plants of a
soft-wood order, such as geraniums.” This florist framed the poorer classes’ supposed
growing desire for the common, yet respectable, geranium as a positive development.
One florist credited the increase in his business to a citizenry with an ever-increasing
56
knowledge of flowers and plants. He correlated this increase in knowledge with civic
improvement as an active element in the “enlightenment of the classes.” Class progress –
both within particular classes and the totality of all classes – could be measured in part
through flowers.
Second, the florists expressed both hope and anxiety with regard to the expansion
of business in difficult economic times, which may have made the rhetoric of taste as a
marketing tool even more attractive. Third, the florists credited the expansion of plant
sales (up to 33%) to “the diffusion” of floricultural literature.

Finally, florists connected
the expansion of good taste to the expansion of their businesses, measured in a rise in cut-
flower sales.
100
California participated in this national phenomena. By January 1889,
The California Florist crowned San Francisco floral business “better than ever before.”
Although florists experienced a decrease in demand for arrangements, purchases of loose
flowers were on the rise.
101

As set forth in the introduction, the floristry industry achieved significance only
after the Civil War. Peter Henderson estimated that nationwide in 1800, not even 100
florists operated a combined greenhouse space of 50,000 square feet.
102
Hale’s census
report and Garden and Forest were even less generous. The publication argued that in
1800, only one commercial florist operated in the United States, and three additional

100
Hale, Agriculture: Floriculture, 10-11.
101
“Holiday Cut Flower Trade,” The California Florist, Vol. II, No. 1 (Jan., 1889), 7.
102
Peter Henderson, “Floriculture in the United States,” Garden and Forest (New York:
The Garden and Forest Publishing Company), Vol. I, No. 1 (Feb. 29, 1888), 2-3, 2. See
also, Alfred Henderson, Peter Henderson, Gardener, Author, Merchant: A Memoir, (New
York: Press of McIlroy & Emmet, 1890).
57
businesses established from 1810 to 1820.
103
The rate of change accelerated dramatically
in the later quarter century; out of the approximately 5,000 florists recorded in the 1890
census, three-fifths started their businesses after 1870 and one third of those recorded
opening after 1880.
104
Every state and territory except Idaho, Nevada, Indian Territory,
and Oklahoma reported floriculture businesses by 1890. Of the 4,659 establishments
recorded in the census, women owned 312. The census estimated wages of $8,483,600 to
16,847 men and 1,958 women. Total products included the sale of 49,056,253 roses,
which comprised a significant portion of the cut-flower sales totaling $14,175,328.01.
105

The floristry business expanded with such speed in the late nineteenth century for
a number of reasons. Mass industrialization and urbanization provided many with
disposable income and access to flowers, creating a market. Also, after the Civil War,
commercial greenhouse construction expanded (from an estimated 178 greenhouses
nationwide in 1860 to several thousand by 1910). Greenhouses allowed for the
cultivation of a wide ranger of plants and cultivation in places with otherwise
inhospitable climates. Further, the Land Grant colleges that stemmed from the passage of
the Morrill Acts of 1860 and 1890 provided educational opportunities for aspiring

103
“Recent Publications,” Garden and Forest, Vol. IV, No. 167 (May 6, 1891), 215-216.
104
Hale, Agriculture: Floriculture, 3. Hale concluded there was one commercial florist
in 1800, three added between 1810 and 1820, eight in the 1820s, 25 in the 1830s, 45 in
the 1840s, 96 in the 1850s, 313 in the 1860s, 998 in the 1870s, and 1,797 in the 1880s.
See also, “Recent Publications,” Garden and Forest, 215-216.
105
Ibid.
58
agriculturalists and, over time, horticulturalists.
106
Finally, increased western European
immigration brought expertise, interest, and demand stemming from traditions of
celebrating particular holidays with particular flowers in the countries of their origin.
107

The explosion of cut-flower sales and the floristry business changed the place of
flowers in society and within the taste conversations. A single flower cost less than an
entire plant. Displaying a single flower required less of a commitment than nurturing a
plant. But increased access created more opportunities to accidentally choose floral
monstrosities that threatened the movement towards a more civilized home. By taking
the flowers out of the garden, the blooms assumed an even more intimate status. Flowers
moved directly inside homes in greater numbers, graced lapels, and connected with
holidays in new ways. Cut-flowers embodied more fleeting and fragile forms, and thus
were conceptualized as more feminine. Cut-flower arrangements presented a new canvas
for demonstrating tasteful and less-than-tasteful displays. Florists and nurserymen
debated whether arrangements should seek to recreate natural garden arrangements or
break into highly constructed bouquets or shapes.
In some ways, the florists’ rhetoric of taste differed little from that of the
nurserymen. Florists in the census report touched on some of the elements of the taste
debates: enlightenment of the classes, the hope and anxiety of newly emerging

106
See Rebecca Edwards, New Spirits: Americans in the Gilded Age, 1865-1905 (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 19; Jane S. Smith, The Garden of Invention:
Luther Burbank and the Business of Breeding Plants (New York: The Penguin Press,
2009), 19 & 59.
107
Marvin Carbonneau, “Growing,” in A Centennial History of the American Florist
(Topeka: Florists’ Review Enterprises, 1997), 36-43.
59
professional pursuits, the importance of floricultural education for the community at
large, increased levels of good taste, and the formation and continuation of successful
business and floricultural societies. Some of the nurserymen who previously participated
in the taste conversations branched out into floristry and landscape architecture. Some
created blended businesses; others sold their nurseries and turned to commercial plant
experimentation. In California, the line between nurserymen and florists remained fluid
until the late nineteenth century as the cut-flower industry expanded and more of those
who sold flowers began to specialize as florists.
108
The two sometimes worked together
to foster good taste; at times they questioned the work of the other. Together, they
engaged in a more pronounced discussion of the limits of education in the civilizing
power of flowers in the contexts of these new women consumers and immigrant peddlers.
By removing blossoms from their roots and arranging them for indoor display,
floriculturists across the nation expanded the landscape upon which they exerted their
economic power and their rhetoric of the transforming power of taste towards greater
civility. Particularly through celebrations of holidays and special occasions, florists
reinvigorated the discussion of the differences between taste and fashion previously
dominated by nurserymen. Taste and fashion varied based upon the event or occasion –
from weddings and funerals to particular holidays. Holidays demanded more and more
cut-flowers. And these flowers – or those who marketed them – participated in creating
holidays. The emotions and traditions underlying holidays perfectly complemented the

108
Judith H. Taylor and the late Harry Morton Butterfield, Tangible Memories:
Californians and Their Gardens, 1800-1950 (San Francisco, 2003), 60.
60
agendas of floral tastemakers. Holidays fostered community and drew on nostalgic
visions of home or nation or religious tradition. The manner in which celebrants honored
holidays could also be used to mark the progress of life and society. New Year’s Day,
Easter, and Memorial Day topped lists of the holidays associated with gifting or
displaying particular flowers.
109
After 1886, many Southern Californians rang in the new
year with the Tournament of Roses Parade and celebrated the spring with La Fiesta de las
Flores.
110
Likewise, Decoration Day, the precursor to Memorial Day, traditionally
involved leaving bouquets on Civil War graves in the East, starting with patriotically
colored bunches of red roses, white carnations, and blue cornflowers and moving towards
peonies by the 1910s.
111
On Memorial Day in 1894, San Francisco women made
bouquets to honor the fallen at Alcatraz and the National Cemetery at the Presidio. They
fashioned a tribute to solemnly mark the occasion – a cannon of sweet peas defended
both a six-foot high star and eagle comprised of marigolds and a flag of red and white

109
“Retail Flower Markets as of April 6,” Garden and Forest, Vol. I, No. 7. (Apr. 11,
1888), 84, noting that the New York season was “very large” at Easter. “Easter
Flowers,” Garden and Forest, Vol. II (Apr. 17, 1889), 182. “Cultural Department.
Preparing for Easter Flowers,” Garden and Forest, Vol. III, No. 132 (Sep. 3, 1890), 430-
2. See also, Dianne Noland, “Holidays,” A Centennial History of the American Florist
(Topeka: Florists’ Review Enterprises, 1997), 206-255, 250.
110
Noland, “Holidays,” A Centennial History of the American Florist, 250. See also
discussions of Christmas and St. Patrick’s Day, 240, 242, & 250.
111
“Retail Flower Markets as of June 1, 1888,” Garden and Forest, Vol. I, No. 15 (June
6, 1888), 180, discussing Decoration Day flowers in New York, Philadelphia and Boston.
See also, Noland, “Holidays,” A Centennial History of the American Florist, 234-235.
61
geraniums. A cross of Canterbury bells and calla lilies reverently conveyed the mourning
and celebratory ethos of the day.
112

Easter triumphed as the holiday that conjured dreams of the greatest profits and
nightmares of floral shortages, with the lily clearly dominating in sales. Unlike many late
nineteenth-century floral displays of cut-flowers, Easter lily plants remained most
popular until after 1905, when Easter baskets of flowers gained momentum.
113

While the increasing commercial supply of cut-flowers magnified the connections
between holidays and flowers, the floral industry continually attempted to leverage its
economic power and social position. Flowers not only held important ceremonial and
decorative roles in holidays but the floral industry, in promoting holidays, cemented its
greater societal importance. In the early twentieth-century, florists promoted both
Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day. They greatly expanded their productivity and the
importance of the holidays, as well as the flowers deemed most prized to gift on the days,
violets and white carnations, respectively.
114

The floral industry’s work transcended the official holidays that graced the
calendar to mark more private occasions such as weddings and funerals. Florists’ advice
delineated fashion and encouraged celebrants and mourners to display taste as part of

112
“Honors to the Dead: Observance of Memorial Day,” San Francisco Chronicle, May
30, 1894, 10.
113
Noland, “Holidays,” A Centennial History of the American Florist, 216-219;
“Cultivation of Lilies for Easter,” San Francisco Chronicle, Apr. 10, 1898, 12.
114
Noland, “Holidays,” A Centennial History of the American Florist, 226-227. See also
Barry Shank, A Token of My Affection: Greeting Cards and American Business Culture
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), for similar themes in connection with the
rise of commercial greeting cards.
62
cementing social position or honoring departed loved ones. Flowers graced wedding
arches and cakes. Brides commonly chose particular flowers to express sentiments or
their preferences. Newspapers detailed wedding parties’ floral choices with precision.
When Lieutenant Mills and Miss Lilian Lee wed at San Francisco’s Presidio in April
1894, the bridesmaids carried sweet peas.
115
Miss Margaret Elizabeth Whitelaw carried
lilies of the valley during her wedding to Walter Neat Brunt in May 1897, complete with
a corsage of orange blossoms. And Maid-of-Honor Agnes Marshall carried La France
roses.
116
At First Methodist Church in Oakland, Miss Sadie A. Smith and Dr. Harry F.
Worley decorated the chancel with pink flowers; Sadie wore orange blossoms and carried
white carnations, while her sister, Minnie Smith, carried pink sweet peas to match the
sanctuary’s decor.
117
Sometimes, bridesmaids’ bouquets coordinated with either the
bride or perhaps the groom’s military colors. Men wore boutonnieres of gardenias,
camellias, lilies-of-the-valley or tuberoses.
118
Fashion in wedding bouquets exploded
from small to grandiose.
119
By the 1880s, many wedding bouquets expanded to

115
“Wedding at the Presidio: Lieutenant Mills and Miss Lilian Lee Joined in Wedlock,”
San Francisco Chronicle, Apr. 11, 1894, 12.
116
“Weddings of a May Day,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 13, 1897, 9.
117
“Wedded at First Methodist Church,” San Francisco Chronicle, Jul. 1, 1903, 8.
118
Holly Money-Collins, “Weddings,” A Centennial History of the American Florist
(Topeka: Florists’ Review Enterprises, 1997), 142-173, 144 & 146-148.
119
See H.H. Battles, “The Etiquette of Flowers,” Ladies Home Journal, Vol. XI, No. 4
(Mar., 1894), 28. Aunt Addik, “Talks on Floriculture, No. I,” Ladies Home Journal, Vol.
I, No. 1 (Jan., 1884), 2.
63
prohibitively heavy weights. Many weighed too much for brides to carry them down the
aisle, so brides resorted to simply carrying their Bibles.
120

The popularity of florists’ flowers at funerals ebbed and flowed in the last part of
the 1800s – less common in the 1870s and 1890s than in the 1880s.
121
Yet, funerals
dominated the floral business in the early twentieth century; red, white, and pink roses as
well as carnations, lilies, and chrysanthemums commonly graced sizeable floral tributes.
Of course, seasonal availability factored into the possibilities as well, with asters, sweet
peas, and pansies gracing summer funereal arrangements. As in the case of Stanford’s
floral locomotive and horse and the Memorial Day cannon, florists crafted tributes into
symbolic shapes, such as anchors, broken ladders, empty chairs, stars or hearts.
122

Flowers intimately marked families’ stories and provided tangible objects to demonstrate
respect, emotion, and civility.
Beyond the advice floral taste professionals offered at Christmas or weddings,
floriculturists continued to contemplate taste and fashion in the context of a country
bursting with bouquets of cut flowers. They engaged in a layered analysis and concluded
that a floral fashion might lead to a greater love for flowers. Lilies of the valley and other
“common” garden flowers that in the 1860s were previously “unworthy of a place in a
florist’s window or a lady’s hand” became fashionable and by the praise of taste

120
Money-Collins, “Weddings,” A Centennial History of the American Florist, 144-145.
121
Peter Henderson, Practical Floriculture: A Guide to the Successful Cultivation of
Florists’ Plants, for the Amateur and Professional Florist (New York: Orange Judd
Company, 1895, 5
th
ed.), 227.
122
Norah T. Hunter, “Funerals,” in A Centennial History of the American Florist
(Topeka: Florists’ Review Enterprises, 1997), 176-203, 176-184.
64
professionals, tasteful as well. Floriculturists interpreted the greater love for flowers as a
sign of a growing sense of good taste on a national level. For example, in the 1880s,
Garden and Forest traced the connections amongst fashion, floral appreciation, and taste.
First, it articulated recent fashions from bunches of flowers in women’s belts to sending
flowers to funerals to the requirement that young men adorn their dates to operas and
balls with a particular blossom. In these varied scenarios, fashion yielded mixed results
for the state of society. The editors praised the act of sending funeral flowers as a
“beautiful and touching” custom. However, the pressure to provide such a tribute also
constituted a “fashion” that functioned “as a tax upon the friendship of the giver and a
burden upon the conscience of the recipient.” Young men drove themselves into debt
making sure they adorned their dates with blossoms of affection; “young men of
moderate means were almost driven out of social life and the florist’s bill came to rival
the tailor’s as a synonym for one of the worst terrors of city existence.” Despite the taxes
and terrors of floral fashion, the article concluded that a “growth in a real love for
flowers, as well as in good taste and refinement of feeling” emerged of late.
Floriculturists measured the sign of this progress via movements of floral displays. If a
woman displayed her blooms between the curtains and windowpanes in her home, she
attempted to telegraph “good fortune” to passersby. But if the woman placed her display
deeper into the living spaces of her home – between the curtains and the living room –
she signaled a greater love for flowers and a greater degree of refinement. Within the
65
living space, the blossoms graced the residents of the home rather than merely
transmitting a message of civility to passersby.
123

The horticultural press credited this dynamic evolution of fashion and taste in cut-
flowers to the more refined nature of the men engaged in floristry. Many believed that a
“better class of men” operated the recently founded florist businesses thereby raising the
level of the dialogue. Henderson categorized those engaged in commercial floriculture in
the 1850s as “foreigner[s],” uneducated, ex-private gardeners, lacking business acumen.
By the late 1880s, Henderson lauded commercial floriculturists as responding to a
“calling” with the “intelligence and business capacity” of any “mercantile class.”
124
This
framing of the new florists as smarter, capitalist professionals both reflected and
contributed to the dialogue setting up florists as taste professionals capable of shaping
civic interest. Their commission, then, was to educate future communities in the
construction of tasteful surrounding environments. This education would produce future
Americans of solid stock. No longer “foreigners” but domestic leaders, the new florists
carved out a realm of cultural power for themselves.
To increase commercial success and maximize their influence, florists followed
the model of the nurserymen by organizing and creating the Society of American Florists.
By 1888, the Society functioned as a national trade organization with members from

123
“Flowers in Winter,” Garden and Forest, Vol. I, No. 9 (Apr. 25, 1888), 98. Other
“common garden flowers” became popular in winter including lilacs, mignonette, forget-
me-nots, and chrysanthemums.
124
Peter Henderson, “Floriculture in the United States,” Garden and Forest, Vol. I, No. 1
(Feb. 29, 1888), 2-3, 3.
66
every state.
125
In addition to the national society, by the 1890s, florists had formed 965
state and local societies, numerous clubs, and interacted with 358 horticultural societies
nationwide.
126
Many California nurserymen continued to function as both nurserymen
and florists, thus limiting some of the clashes over taste between the two groups of
professionals. Nonetheless some of the new florists considered and promoted their own
roles in fostering good taste, if not at the expense of nurserymen, then pointedly drawing
distinctions between their roles. The consideration of taste factored differently in the
floristry context because florists arranged and combined bouquets of flowers, which
differed from the nurserymen who largely focused on selling whole plants. Tasteful
arrangement in bouquets, though, just as full garden designs, turned on specific sets of
norms and desires. With regard to cut-flower arrangements in the late 1880s, florists
declared improvement in public displays, in part because of the shift away from wiring
flowers to letting them drape naturally.
127
Capturing the natural – in the context of the
artificiality of organized arrangement – epitomized taste in an urbanizing and
industrializing country. Some florists positioned themselves as guardians of tasteful
nature even as nature was reordered like the flowers.

125
“The Society of American Florists,” Garden and Forest, Vol. I, No. 26 (Aug. 22,
1888), 301.
126
“Recent Publications,” Garden and Forest, 215-216, drawing from the 1890 census.
Hale, Agriculture: Floriculture.
127
“Taste in Florists’ Arrangements,” Garden and Forest, Vol. I, No. 35 (Oct. 24, 1888),
409. The article proclaimed that United States’ florists were only second to those in Paris
in making sure the greens complemented the flowers.
67
Increased interest in cut-flower arrangements and the florists’ role in selling
individual flowers fostered a national discussion about florists’ responsibilities. In 1888,
Garden and Forest dissected florists’ “obligations” to the “public taste.” The public
called on florists to decide which of the “old favorites” of available flowers would “retain
their place in popular esteem.” Therefore, florists operated under an obligation to discern
the tastefulness of the “newer rivals” from those “undeserving of favor.” They utilized a
vast array of methods to fulfill their duties. One method featured discerning the
individual flower’s connectedness or distance from nature or naturally occurring
proportions.
128
And yet, florists, like the nurserymen, needed to turn profits. They faced
a potential conflict between trying to teach taste and selling flowers for the greatest fiscal
return. The question inevitably arose, if “buyers demand[ed] monstrosities,” why should
not the florist meet that demand? While industry publications tackled such questions,
some concluded that ultimately, “there is little real conflict” because Americans caught
on to good taste quickly. “The sum of the matter is, that every conscientious florist must
feel that within his sphere, and to the extent of his personal ability, he has some
responsibility for the influence of his craft upon the horticultural taste of the community.”
If florists utilized their powers for good, then they could “develop correct taste”;
however, if they catered to those seeking the monstrosities without gentle encouragement

128
“The Responsibilities of Florists and Nurserymen,” Garden and Forest, Vol. I, No. 29
(Sep. 12, 1888), 337-338, 337. See also, “The Society of American Florists,” Garden
and Forest, Vol. I, No. 26 (Aug. 22, 1888), 301, discussing the joint role of nurserymen
and florists; M.G. Van Rensselaer of Marion, Massachusetts, “Correspondence: The
Responsibilities of Florists,” Garden and Forest, Vol. I, No. 36 (Oct. 31, 1888), 430-431.
68
towards a more tasteful display, they acted “to retard this development.”
129
By shaping
the desires of the market, florists addressed issues of taste and profit together.
While these assertions and debates within and amongst florists regarding their
duties omit explicit references to their nurserymen brothers, California publications
questioned the place of the taste debate in connection with considering nurserymen and
florists. Although florists provided a desired service through the bouquets they crafted
and the tasteful flowers they chose to display, California Horticulturalist and Floral
Magazine cautioned against relying too heavily on florists. It warned: “Defend us from
these people who order their flowers as they do their dinner, without looking at them.”
And then the article counseled, “Don’t, if you love yourself and flowers, leave the matter
to a fashionable florist.” Urging customers to use their personal knowledge and
initiative, individuals could demonstrate love for flowers and appropriate taste. Adding
comically that the customer who was “sure” his taste was “not as good” as the florist’s
deserved “the tame basket grounded with white carnations with red rose buds sticking up
all over it skewer-wise, red and yellow, pink and white, like some culinary garnish.”
130

Attempts at humor aside, floriculturists remained gravely concerned about the
success of their civilizing work, and they reasoned that a better class of men entered
floristry than 50 years earlier. The power over taste and civility that they held required
policing and individual consideration of each and every floral decision. Nurserymen and

129
“The Responsibilities of Florists,” Garden and Forest, Vol. IV, No. 184 (Sep. 2,
1891), 409-10, 409.
130
“Choice of Flowers,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol. IX, No. 7
(Jul., 1879), 227-228, 228.
69
florists co-existed as long as individuals exercised tasteful purchasing decisions and
continued to love flowers. Both plants and cut-flowers contributed to the tasteful
flowering of California. But, would the state’s interest in flowers and market conditions
sustain the floriculturists’ endeavors?
The rise of local and national florist organizations correlated with the “sudden
death” of some local horticultural societies. While florists contended the market could
support the emerging florist businesses and organizations alongside those of the
nurserymen and their horticultural societies, tensions emerged between the two groups of
taste professionals. Members of the Society of American Florists in the late 1880s
argued that those horticultural societies that disbanded in the face of a local florist
organization suffered from “such feeble vitality,” they had “little excuse for surviving.”
The Society continued that “no essential conflict” existed between floral clubs or
societies and horticultural ones because floral organizations specialized and the
horticultural societies covered “a broader field” of non-commercial purposes.
131
While
floral societies declared that they and more general nursery and horticultural
organizations could co-exist, by 1890, the American Association of Nurserymen
expressed some concerns over its future success. At the fifteenth annual meeting of the
organization, held in New York, President G.A. Sweet of Dansville, New York,
expressed to the two hundred attendees that he held “a somewhat discouraging view of
the immediate prospects” of the nursery business. While conceding that many members
failed to share his dismal view, he concluded the nursery business in the United States

131
“The Society of American Florists,” Garden and Forest, 301.
70
could not hope to realize the same profits as a new industry – no doubt a gesture towards
floristry.
132
But this gloominess yielded to sunnier predictions.
Painting a broad transition of either dominant commercial success or a winner in
the taste battles from nurserymen to florists would be simplistic. For example, the
following year, in Minneapolis in June 1891, President S.M. Emery addressed more than
400 members at the annual meeting of nurserymen (double the turnout from the previous
year) and noted both the “improved tone” of the business and that nursery stock brought
in 25-40% more wholesale than in the previous year.
133
In California, nurserymen and
florists co-existed amidst the stress and shifting economic conditions. Both nurserymen
(who started supplying landscape architects with plants for their own taste and design
projects) and florists carved out markets and vocabularies of taste, duty, and education
that although included tensions, still functioned as a fairly cohesive whole.
In addition to the emerging florists, in the late 1800s, professional landscape
architects introduced a new professional discipline and set of taste norms within the
larger United States and eventually within California. The virtue of taste achieved its
pinnacle in discussions over landscape gardening – a slightly less formal occupation than
landscape architecture but closely related. Aesthetics, nature, and art intersected.
Landscape gardeners expanded the taste dialogues by presenting the city and space as a

132
“The American Association of Nurserymen. Fifteenth Annual Meeting,” Garden and
Forest, Vol. III, No. 120 (June 11, 1890), 289-292, 289.
133
“The American Association of Nurserymen. Annual Meeting at Minneapolis,” Garden
and Forest, Vol. IV, No. 173 (June 17, 1891) 286-7. “The Florists’ Convention.-I.”
Garden and Forest, Vol. IV, No. 183 (Aug. 26, 1891) 405-8. See also, “The Florists’
Convention.-II.” Garden and Forest, Vol. IV., No. 184 (Sep. 2, 1891), 418-9.
71
living canvas. Landscape gardening existed merely in its “infancy” in California until the
twentieth century.
134
However, formal landscape gardening in the United States dates
back to the early 1800s and the work of Andrew Jackson Downing, who championed
natural design styles over geometric designs.
135
Born in the Hudson Valley in 1815,
Downing, while not particularly political, advocated an attachment to place that he used
to connect the “’spirit of rural improvement’” to the elevation of national taste.
136
As
with the rhetoric of the nurserymen and florists, Downing extended notions of
tastefulness beyond a specific class; tastefulness could be taught.
137
Though Downing’s
influence dominated the field, the term “landscape gardening” is attributed to Frederick
Law Olmsted who began using it in the 1850s.
138
From 1856 to 1900, professional
landscape architecture professionalized.
139
The American Society of Landscape

134
“Ornamental and Landscape Gardening: Section III, Landscape Gardening,”
California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol. I, No. 3 (Jan., 1871) 79-81, 80.
135
See Charles Elliott, “A. J. Downing, Garden Evangelist,” Horticulture, Vol. LXXIII,
No. 9, (Nov., 1995), 14-22; Judith K. Major, To Live in the New World: A.J. Downing
and American Landscape Gardening (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1997); George B.
Tatum and Elisabeth Blair MacDougall, eds., Prophet with Honor: The Career of Andrew
Jackson Downing, 1815-1852, Vol. 11 (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research
Library and Collection, 1989).
136
David Schuyler, Apostle of Taste: Andrew Jackson Downing 1815-1852 (Baltimore:
John Hopkins University Press, 1996), 4, 5, & 92.
137
Ibid. at 92.
138
Noël Dorsey Vernon, “Toward Defining the Profession: The Development of the
Code of Ethics and the Standards of Professional Practice of the American Society of
Landscape Architects, 1899-1927,” Landscape Journal, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Spring, 1987), 13-
20, 13.
139
David C. Streatfield, California Gardens: Creating a New Eden (New York:
Abbeville Press, 1994), 8.
72
Architects convened its first meeting in 1899.
140
During this time period though, only
eleven landscape architects operated in the United States with merely one in California,
William Hammond Hall, residing in the state. Some accepted California projects from
the east and Midwest; Olmsted submitted plans for Stanford University and expansions of
the University of California at Berkeley. Others provided designs for Golden Gate Park
and redesigns of San Francisco during the City Beautiful Movement of the first decade of
the twentieth century. Homes and home gardens still fell largely within the purview of
nurserymen.
141
The discussions regarding taste and landscape architecture during this
time period in California existed on more theoretical levels. They revealed the hopes of
existing businessmen in reference to the emerging profession. They also pointed to
perceived limits of teaching taste in the context of sex and race or ethnicity.
The issue of the natural within an artificial design defined tastefulness. Defining
ornamental gardening, considered a branch of landscape gardening, required addressing
the question of taste in a particular form connected to enhancing “nature.” Although the
desired effect was “natural,” the construction of the natural environments involved
reordering landscapes tastefully to resemble older, more settled regions of the nation but
also anticipate a future in California of civilized order. This future strangely resembled
other regions’ pasts; in this context, the elements of experimentation or creating a
particularly Californian landscape remained absent from the taste conversation. In 1870,

140
Vernon, “Toward Defining the Profession: The Development of the Code of Ethics
and the Standards of Professional Practice of the American Society of Landscape
Architects, 1899-1927,” Landscape Journal, 13.
141
Streatfield, California Gardens, 8.
73
California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine defined ornamental gardening as: “the
beautifying and ornamenting those small plots which surround our city homes, or certain
select and favorite spots in the more extensive grounds of country residences.” It
explicitly categorized ornamental gardening and landscape gardening as forms of art.
The ultimate goal was emulation – or mimicry – of that valued “in older and more
settled” countries.
142
And yet this mimicry was not categorized as any less genuine a
display of taste than a novel design.
Professionals engaged in the practice of aiding nature through mustering both
their innate skill and education.
143
Nurserymen framed this practice as a truer form of art
than traditional painting. A landscape painter observed what actually grew. In contrast,
the landscape gardener dealt with both the planted materials already growing on the land
and those in his imagination. The painter merely interpreted the present. The landscape
gardener functioned as nature’s “prophet.” While painters merely reflected what they
saw, the landscape gardener envisioned the plants’ gorgeous contribution all year round –
throughout the seasons – and contemplated a visual balance and beauty at each stage.
The landscape gardener “read [the plants’] future.” This required a plan, experience
living in nature, and the ability to consider light and shade.
144

142
“Ornamental and Landscape Gardening, Section I,” California Horticulturalist and
Floral Magazine, Vol. I, No. 1 (Nov., 1870) 10-13, 11.
143
“Landscape Gardening,” reprinted from California Farmer in California
Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol. III, No. 9 (Sep., 1873), 278. Horticulturalist,
“A Common Sense View of Landscape Gardening as an Art,” California Horticulturalist
and Floral Magazine, Vol. V, No. 6 (June, 1875) 173-175, 174.
144
“Editorial Department: The Landscape Gardener,” California Horticulturalist and
Floral Magazine, Vol. IX, No. 4 (Apr., 1879) 117-118, 117. See also, “Matters of
74
While the nurserymen’s championing of landscape architecture at a time when it
had not yet taken root in California seems odd, their discussions further position
California as a place where taste and landscape intertwined. Through these discussions,
nurserymen continued tying together taste, nature, and education. Perhaps they
envisioned a source for future sales. Others might have contemplated joining the ranks of
the landscape architects, as some had branched out into florist businesses. Unlike in the
context of the emerging florists, in general on a national level, the discussion of taste and
landscapes favored male contributions. Many had concluded that floristry was better
suited to female business owners than nursery work, because women possessed the
“correct taste and aptitude for recognizing the beautiful in form and color.” Landscape
architecture posed a radically different scenario.
145

Though women might “be great in a flower-garden,” estates constituted a
different story in the eyes of largely male-dominated floriculture. Since the cottage or
home garden demanded “prettiness, variety, daintiness, [and] delicacy,” women remained
suited to the design and execution of tasteful spaces. But landscape-gardening was
classified as “a masculine art,” requiring “a certain manly vigor of treatment, an
unhesitating despotism, that the gentler sex deprecate[d] as cruel and unnecessary.”
146

Taste,” Garden and Forest, Vol. IV, No. 171 (June 3, 1891), 253. Mark Daniels,
“California as a Place of Homes,” ed. E.J. Wickson, California’s Magazine (San
Francisco: California Publishers Co-operative Association, 1915), Vol. I, No. 1 (Jul.,
1915), 201-207, 203.
145
Sargent was a cousin of painter John Singer Sargent. “The Florists’ Convention.-I.”
Garden and Forest, 405-8. See also, “The Florists’ Convention.-II.” Garden and Forest,
418-9.
146
“Taste Indoors and Out,” Garden and Forest, Vol. V, No. 233 (Aug. 10, 1892), 373-4.
75
This of course ignored the work of Beatrix Jones, a founding member of the American
Association of Landscape Architects and protégé of Charles Sprague Sargent, across the
eastern United States and, in the late 1920s, in Southern California, as well as other early
women in the field.
147

Women remained relegated to the purported skill-level of hired-hand gardeners
rather than artists. It was permissible to leave the “false details” that the men lacked
interest in to women and gardeners who lacked education and travel-related expertise.
Again, this ignored the travels of middle class women at the time and the international
immigrant experiences many of the gardeners possessed.
148
Connecting the acquisition
of the rules of landscape-gardening to learning the laws of household arrangement,
women were deemed capable of “distinguish[ing] between the true and the false, the
meretricious and the really beautiful.”
149
The perception that there was a lack of good
gardeners but plenty of women who were amateurs capable of acquiring horticultural
skills failed to translate into the grander scale of landscape design. In California,
education provided the key to success of the horticulturalist. Women who worked

147
See Thaïsa Way, Unbounded Practice: Women and Landscape Architecture in the
Early Twentieth Century (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009).
Women in Landscape Architecture: Essays on History and Practice, eds. Louise A.
Mozingo and Linda Jewell, (McFarland and Co., 2011).
148
The rhetoric continued that if the gardener attained additional knowledge, he would
abandon gardening and seek greater opportunities.
149
“Taste Indoors and Out,” Garden and Forest, 373-4. This view contrasted with the
view of women in the home. See, Gertrude Jekyll, Flower Decoration in the House
(Covent Garden: Country Life, Ltd., 1907). See also, Mrs. Francis King (Louisa
Yeomans), The Well-Considered Garden (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1915), 13
praising Ms. Jekyll’s work.
76
professionally as horticulturalists did not forfeit “their social status as gentlewomen.”
150

These women posed no threat to uneducated men; “they would oust no one from his
place, and would simply step into a void, filling up the gap between the shining lights of
Horticulture and Botany, and the ignorant, obstinate, jobbing gardener.”
151
Yet, even if
trained in landscape gardening, the scope of women’s work precluded laying out or
professional landscape gardening, in theory more than practice as the century progressed.
Education contained the power to create and encourage tastefulness. But as the
discussion with regard to women illustrated, some delineated limits to those educational
possibilities. Those limits also extended to the lowest proverbial rung of the social
hierarchy of providers of flowers, peddlers. Although by selling significant volumes of
flowers peddlers participated in the taste conversations, records of their comments
regarding taste or the work of nurserymen or florists remain elusive. Peddlers first
started selling flowers on the streets in San Francisco in the 1880s and by the 1920s,
estimates number working peddlers as high as 160.
152
Florists described this competition
with ridicule, concluding in the 1880s that peddlers on the San Francisco streets “make
up and sell the very worst specimens of club-footed floral monstrosities that ever
disgraced the name of bouquets.” Specifically, the peddlers “butcher[ed] their poor,

150
“Horticulture as a Profession for Young Ladies,” reprinted from The Queen in
California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol. III, No. 6 (June, 1873) 170-171,
171.
151
Ibid.
152
Ginny Reutinger Baldwin, “Flowers: A Family Affair for the Sidewalk Vendors,”
Living California: The Magazine of the San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle,
Feb. 14, 1982, 14-19.
77
weakling flowers” causing “heart ache in every breast with the least love for the
beautiful.” Florists queried at how “strange” it was that “enough people sufficiently
lacking in taste [existed] to support them.” They praised the work of the California State
Floral Society in continuing to spread good taste amongst the populace, hoping,
implicitly that this increased taste would drive those consumers from the peddlers into
their own shops.
153
No significant dialogue surrounding the issue of educating the
peddlers on questions of taste took root. This absence may have been related to their
class or their particular immigrant status.
Although the peddlers commonly started as recent immigrants in marginalized
ethnic or racial groups, many peddler families continued their work for generations and
formed some of the foundations for floral culture in the state. Takonoshin Domoto
moved to San Francisco from Japan in 1884; his three brothers followed shortly
thereafter. In 1885, they started a floral business in Oakland, focusing on carnations and
chrysanthemums that they sold on street corners. In 1909, the Domotos helped found the
first indoor flower market in San Francisco as discussed in more detail in Chapter 5.
154

Approximately 15 years after Domoto’s arrival, Enrico Camozzi immigrated to San
Francisco from Italy in 1901 at the young age of 17. He first worked as an apprentice to
a marble cutter in South San Francisco. In a horrific work-related accident, a portion of

153
The California Florist, Vol. I, No. 7 (Nov., 1888), 120. See also, “License of
Venders: The Florists Before the Supervisors: Peddlers Scarcely Earn a Living,” San
Francisco Chronicle, Mar. 16, 1895, 7. But see, Charles Keeler, “The Flower Sellers (A
year-round street scene in San Francisco),” Sunset Magazine, Vol. 23, No. 6 (Dec.,
1909), 596, for a romanticized poem regarding peddlers.
154
Carbonneau, “Growing,” A Centennial History of the American Florist, 36 & 38.
78
his arm was amputated. Searching for a new way to make ends meet, he began peddling
flowers on the streets of San Francisco, a tradition members of his family continued
through the 1980s.
155
Paul Nalbandian arrived in 1915 from Armenia in yet another
wave of immigration to the Bay Area. He peddled flowers at Powell and Market Street in
part to raise money to send for a “picture bride.”
156
These peddlers existed largely
separate from the nurserymen and florists’ taste conversations. Some of these peddlers
later sold their wares in a wholesale capacity to the florists though. Others became more
significant commercial competition, which might explain why the educational aims of the
nurserymen and florists focused on the public (potential customers) rather
than competitors.
The taste conversations though at the end of the nineteenth century and early
twentieth century included not only nurserymen, florists, and landscape architects or
gardeners but also commercial and academic botanists. These botanists used the
language of taste but focused on the evolutionary aspects of the taste project. They
argued that the creation of more tasteful flowers led to healthier environments. And in
turn, better environments led to a more civilized society and improved individuals.
But floriculturists outside the emerging field contested the role of botanical
science in creating a more perfect society. Taste experts expressed scientific
developments in genetic plant design and floriculture both as threats and benefits to taste,
and therefore society at large. The threats fell into two broad categories. First, science

155
Baldwin, “Flowers: A Family Affair for the Sidewalk Vendors,” Living California:
The Magazine of the San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle, 14.
156
Ibid. at 18.
79
threatened to distract the eye from the beauty of the flowers by directing the focus to their
minute and sometimes microscopic parts. By focusing on the wrong aspects of flowers,
the ability of humans to recognize tasteful flowers might diminish over time. This could
contribute both to less aesthetically nurturing and pleasing environments and the decline
(rather than development) of civil society. Further, genetically created new kinds of
flowers might become the next greatest fad or fashion but not represent heights of long-
defined taste. Scientists’ work threatened to impact taste over time in negative ways if
those evil roots of poor fashion took hold.
157

Some argued that the connection between scientific study and fears over the
decreasing perception of beauty needed to be severed. In 1879, Prof. E.W. Hilgard of the
University of California at Berkeley explained a nuanced relationship between botanists
and taste. He conceded some scientists were not blessed with the gift of discerning
beauty. He compared this reality to the situations of those in the general population who
suffered from color-blindness or deafness to “the difference between a negro song and a
symphony of Beethoven.” He began by acknowledging the aesthetic skill and talent
differences amongst scientists by drawing a comparison to the public at large. Scientists
were not superhuman in his calculation. He continued, even for those who might prefer
the spiritual song to the Beethoven symphony, “culture will often bring about a certain
degree of good judgment, if not instinctive appreciation.” Proper education and influence

157
E.W. Hilgard, “Floriculture and the Study of Botany,” California Horticulturist and
Floral Magazine, Vol. IX, No. 1 (Jan., 1879), 1-3, 3. “Botany for Young People,”
Garden and Forest, Vol. III, No. 105 (Feb. 26, 1890), 97-98, 97. See also, Nicolette
Scourse, The Victorians and their Flowers (London: Croom Helm, 1983), 138-141.
80
altered the baser instincts of those who might mistakenly prize the supposedly inferior
music. This led him to his central question: “But can any one imagine that a natural taste
for music or painting could be spoiled by the scientific study of these arts?”
158
While
admitting not all scientists possessed the innate skill for recognizing tasteful flowers, he
rejected completely the notion that the scientists’ work damaged the natural taste gifted to
some individuals.
In the spirit of considered debate, floriculturists also deemed science a benefit to
taste in exactly the opposite two manners. First, science revealed a deeper beauty that
only enhanced appreciation of flowers. This enhanced appreciation in turn fostered good
taste. Second, the creation of new, hardier, more beautiful flowers enhanced the
possibilities for drawing aspiring persons to brighten and transform their lives through
flowers.
159
As Prof. Hilgard proclaimed, studying botany “at once transports the learner
to a region where shoddy and shams can not possible find a footing; but where beauty,
harmony, and unity of intelligent purpose. . .meet him at every step.”
160
The sheer act of
exploration and experimentation into creating new flowers and the resulting new
blossoms inspired people to transform their own existences and, in turn, the composition
of their communities.

158
Hilgard, “Floriculture and the Study of Botany,” California Horticulturalist and
Floral Magazine, Vol. IX, No. 1 (Jan., 1879), 1-3, 1.
159
Ibid. at 3. See also, “Botany for Young People,” Garden and Forest, 97. See also,
Scourse, The Victorians and their Flowers, 138-141.
160
Hilgard, “Floriculture and the Study of Botany,” California Horticulturist and Floral
Magazine, 3.
81
Consider tuberous begonias. Engineered, enlarged begonias were not necessarily
better than traditional begonias. Garden and Forest judged the engineered blossoms too
large for their foliage and instructed that one should look to nature for the proper
proportions.
161
But unanimity eluded discussions of desirable form. In response to
criticism of the tuberous begonias, one gardener wondered,
instead of assailing the hybridizer for lack of taste, why not encourage him
in the production of what is new? Suppose some of the seedlings are not
beautiful according to some ultra-Japanese standard, many of them will be
sufficiently wayward and whimsical to suit the hyperaesthetical, and many
more will delight whose tastes are less highly educated, who can endure a
regular flower and even admire a double Camellia.

Pointing both to a foreign, Japanese standard as well as different grades of sensitivity to
aesthetic form, this gardener argued in favor of experimentation and for a wider
appreciation of various forms.
162
The editor responded that the article condemned not
hybridization but disproportionally large blossoms. The gardener’s criticism
demonstrates the connections between experimentation and questioning static notions of
desirable form. While nature might be “a” guide, human experimentation and taste
generated and validated a growing range of possible aesthetically pleasing forms.
One of the most successful commercial botanists of this or any other era was
Luther Burbank of Santa Rosa. In the late 1880s, Burbank boasted not only of the sheer
number of varietals he produced. He also bragged that flower aficionados chose his lily-
crosses for “health, hardiness, easy management and rapid multiplication, as well as

161
“Form in Flowers,” Garden and Forest, Vol. III, No. 144 (Nov. 26, 1890), 569-70.
162
Quis, “Correspondence. Tuberous Begonias.” Garden and Forest, Vol. IV, No. 151
(Jan. 14, 1891), 23.
82
fragrance, beauty of coloring, grace and abundance of flowers.”
163
As a self-styled
“explorer into the infinite,” Burbank defined his role as the creator of improved flowers
based on a specific set of criteria he outlined.
164
For Burbank, the introduction of a new
flower into the public constituted a careful process, just like creating that flower.
165

Through the creation of the improved flowers, he sought to mould not only taste but also
the very human environments that shaped Americans.
Just as the nurserymen and florists who came before him in California worked
through interpersonal and business networks on domestic and international scales,
Burbank’s community included academics, international partners, and local
nurserymen.
166
He corresponded with Cornell University’s Liberty Hyde Bailey.
Internationally renowned Dutch botanist Hugo De Vries visited Burbank’s experimental
farm in 1904 and 1906.
167
Burbank lectured on plant breeding at Stanford University,

163
Luther Burbank, New Creations in Fruits and Flowers, June 1894 (Santa Rosa, 1894),
21.
164
Burbank, “Fundamental Principles of Plant Breeding,” California’s Magazine, 196.
165
“Working with a Universal Flower – the Rose – How the Burbank and other Roses
were Produced,” eds. Luther Burbank, John Whitson, et al., Luther Burbank: His
Methods and Discoveries and Their Practical Application, Vol. 9 (Luther Burbank Press,
1914), 41-69, 41.
166
Lowell C. Ewart, “Breeding & Plant Selection,” The History of U.S. Floriculture
(Greenhouse Grower, Fall 1999), 11-12. Edward J. Wickson, “Luther Burbank: The
Man, His Methods and His Achievements,” Sunset Magazine, Vol. VIII, No. 2 (Dec.,
1901) 56-68, Vol. VIII, No. 4 (Feb., 1902) 145-156, Vol. VIII, No. 6 (Apr., 1902) 277-
285. “Suggests Burbank as College Head,” Examiner (Aug. 11, 1909), 3, discussing that
Wickson wanted a Horticultural school in Santa Rosa headed by Burbank. “Wickson
Favors Burbank School,” San Francisco Chronicle (Aug. 11, 1909).
167
Hugo De Vries, “Burbank’s Production of Horticultural Novelties,” The Open Court,
Vol. XX, No.11 (Nov., 1906), 641-653, 644.
83
participating in local university culture there in 1905. He exchanged plant samples and
kind words with amateur and academic botanists such as the Brandegees and the
Lemmons, whose work is discussed in Chapter 6.
168
He acted as an honorary member of
the California State Floral Society, along with John Muir, Alice Eastwood, E.J. Wickson,
and John Lemmon.
169
So while Burbank and other commercial botanists’ additions to the
taste dialogues were novel and delivered a distinct set of voices and concerns, significant
continuity existed with the previous century’s participants, industries, and organizations.
Like Warren, Walker, and the Kunzes who immigrated to California with a
certain set of taste experiences, Burbank moved from Massachusetts to California as a
young adult in 1875. He spent his formative years studying nature and flowers and
reading Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,
and Alexander von Humboldt.
170
Upon arrival in California, he rented a nursery near
Santa Rosa and thirteen years later, by 1888, had purchased his own place.
171
During this

168
Townshend Stith and Katharine Layne Brandegee Papers, 1870-1924, Box 1, Folder
66, Jepson Herbaria at the University of California at Berkeley. John and Sarah Lemmon
Papers, Box 2, Folders 41-46, Jepson Herbaria at the University of California at
Berkeley. See also, “The Hybrid Larkspur – and Other Transformations – Introducing a
Miscellaneous Company,” eds. Luther Burbank, John Whitson, et al., Luther Burbank:
His Methods and Discoveries and Their Practical Application, Vol. 10 (Luther Burbank
Press, 1914), 167-197, 174.
169
California State Floral Society, San Francisco Ephemera Collection, California
Historical Society, printed “List of Officers and Members” for 1912 in a booklet.
170
Smith, The Garden of Invention, 16 & 25. See also, Peter Dreyer, A Gardener
Touched with Genius: The Life of Luther Burbank, (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1985).
171
“Luther Burbank – The Early Years in Santa Rosa – the Period of Bitter Struggle,”
and “Luther Burbank – His Patience Rewarded – The Period of Great Achievement,” eds.
Luther Burbank, John Whitson, et al., Luther Burbank: His Methods and Discoveries and
84
time, he functioned as a nurseryman, similar to those discussed in the previous chapter.
However, in 1890, he sold his nursery business to devote more time to his experimental
endeavors.
172
His experiments and the new business that he created from those
experiments expanded fairly rapidly. Beginning in the early 1890s, he produced
numerous catalogues to peddle his plants.
173

Burbank’s philosophical assumptions derived from his readings of Charles
Darwin. He was only ten years old when Darwin published On the Origin of Species.
174

Darwin’s The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication first appeared in the

Their Practical Application, Vol. 12 (Luther Burbank Press, 1914), 60-105 and 106-154,
respectively.
172
De Vries, “Burbank’s Production of Horticultural Novelties,” The Open Court, 643.
173
Ibid. at 641-653.
For nursery catalogs see, “Burbank’s Flower Seeds: The Best that Twentieth
Century Science Forty Years Experience and California Soil and Climate Can Produce.”
(Spring, 1910), featuring hibiscus, marigolds, carnations, poppies, geraniums, and
lobelia. “Nursery Catalog,” 1914 in Luther Burbank Folder in the Townshend Stith and
Katharine Layne Brandegee Papers, 1870-1924. “Burbank Seed Book 1914” (San
Francisco, 1914), featuring Shasta daisies on the cover, along with his face and signature.
“Nursery Catalog” (Luther Burbank Co., San Francisco, 1913). “A Brief Descriptive List
of the New Burbank Giant Amaryllis” (Santa Rosa, Aug., 1909). The 1901 Supplement
to New Creations in Fruits and Flowers (Santa Rosa, 1901). The 1899 Supplement to
New Creations in Fruits and Flowers (Santa Rosa, 1899), featuring a new Oriental poppy
and canna. The 1898 Supplement to New Creations in Fruits and Flowers (Santa Rosa,
1898) championing the new Santa Rosa rose and a new Calla. New Creations in Fruits
and Flowers, June, 1893 (Santa Rosa, 1893), featuring roses, callas, hybrid lilies,
gladiolus, clematis, myrtle, poppy, nicotianas and lilies that he started experimenting with
sixteen years earlier before the printing of the catalogue, 39. “The New Shasta Daisies”
pamphlet from March 1904. “New Gladioli” pamphlet from Feb. 1892.
174
“Luther Burbank – His Boyhood on a Massachusetts Farm - The Conception of an
Idea and the Birth of a Great Ambition,” eds. Luther Burbank, John Whitson, et al.,
Luther Burbank: His Methods and Discoveries and Their Practical Application, Vol. 12
(Luther Burbank Press, 1914), 7-59, 32.
85
United States in two volumes in 1869, and Burbank read them that year.
175
Burbank
commented, “It aroused my imagination, gave me insight into the world of plant life.”
176

Inspired by the work to seek answers to his questions, he surmised, “‘I doubt if it is
possible to make any one realize what this book meant to me.’”
177
Since there was not a
significant body of academic literature regarding breeding when Burbank began his plant
experiments, he continually turned to Darwin, particularly to Effects of Cross and Self
Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom published in 1876 and in the United States in
1877. Burbank mused, as Darwin went on to suggest, “cross fertilizing plants might lead
to offspring that were not only different from either parent, producing the novelty that
was so often the goal in the flower trade, but also better: larger, sturdier, more prolific, or
faster growing.”
178

As early as 1894, Burbank quoted Darwin on the cover of his seed catalogue –
highlighting his role as master of the changing and improving flower.
179
But by the early
twentieth century, Burbank was more than comfortable relying on his own practical
experiences applying Darwinian theory. At the International Plant Breeding Conference

175
Smith, The Garden of Invention, 27.
176
“Luther Burbank – His Boyhood on a Massachusetts Farm - The Conception of an
Idea and the Birth of a Great Ambition,” Luther Burbank: His Methods and Discoveries
and Their Practical Application, 53 & 55.
177
As quoted in Smith, The Garden of Invention, 27. See also, David Starr Jordan, “Some
Experiments of Luther Burbank,” reprinted from The Popular Science Monthly, Vol.
LXVI, No. 14 (Jan., 1905), 201, discussing Burbank’s practical applications of
Darwinian theory.
178
As quoted in Smith, The Garden of Invention, 60-61.
179
Burbank, New Creations in Fruits and Flowers, June 1894, cover.
86
in New York in the fall of 1902, Burbank gave a speech on the fundamental principles of
plant breeding. He concluded that every plant and person “occupies its place in the order
of Nature by the action of two forces – the inherent constitutional life-force with all its
acquired habits, the sum of which is heredity; and the numerous complicated external
forces or environment.” The breeder must guide the forces and accept that change will
be slow.
180

In the context of taste, nurserymen networked, imported, and experimented in
their new home. They created a vision of California as a land that supported the flowers
of the world. In Burbank’s case, he focused on specific elements in flowers that he
wanted to improve and then turned to the world’s plants as his building blocks.
181

California functioned as an incubator or nurturing laboratory for his endeavors. The
breeding work of Burbank and others involved intensive observation and scouting for

180
Luther Burbank, “Fundamental Principles of Plant Breeding,” transcription of speech
from International Plant Breeding Conference in New York, Sept. 30-Oct. 2, 1902, 1. See
also, Burbank, “Fundamental Principles of Plant Breeding,” California’s Magazine, 193.
See also, “What to Work for in Flowers – and How to Proceed,” eds. Luther
Burbank, John Whitson, et al., Luther Burbank: His Methods and Discoveries and Their
Practical Application, Vol. 9 (Luther Burbank Press, 1914), 7-40, 13-14 & 36.
181
Smith, The Garden of Invention, 60 & 62. Burbank “treated cross fertilization
(between plants of the same variety), crossbreeding (between different varieties of a
single species), and hybridization (between species) as different points along a single
progression of biological possibilities.” Sometimes, he used the terms interchangeably.
See also, Richard Craig, “A Breeding Wonder,” The History of U.S. Floriculture
(Greenhouse Grower, Fall 1999), 14-15, writing about the work of Rudolf Jacob Camerer
of Tübingen, Germany, England’s Thomas Fairchild, Linneaus, Mendel and the work of
the United States land grant colleges.
87
plants, at times in the wild.
182
Burbank initially collected his own wildflower seeds. By
the early 1900s, he used scouts in Chile, Mexico, and Australia and purchased seeds from
Europe, Japan, and various parts of the United States.
183
He scouted specifically for the
characteristics in existing plants that he wanted to draw out in others. For example, when
he wanted to experiment with geraniums, he bought all the geraniums he possibly could
from European and American florists and then collected additional varieties from
Canada.
184
Likewise, in creating a new pink daisy, he scouted for specimen, settling on
an African orange daisy and a white daisy. He then planted them next to one another,
letting the bees cross-pollinate them and eventually creating changes in color and
height.
185
Although Burbank engaged in international scouting pursuits, he encouraged
those with more modest means to experiment with the specimen locally available. In
discussing experiments with irises, he noted the gardener did not need to send away to
New Zealand or China. “Any old-fashioned flower garden, such as adorns the door-yards

182
Ed Markham, “Stalking Wild Plants,” The History of U.S. Floriculture (Greenhouse
Grower, Fall 1999), 18-20, noting the work of Mendel, Linneaus, David Douglas, and
Burbank.
183
De Vries, “Burbank’s Production of Horticultural Novelties,” The Open Court, 646.
184
“Four Common Dooryard Flowers and Their Improvement – Work on the Verbena,
the Pink, the Petunia, and the Geranium,” eds. Luther Burbank, John Whitson, et al.,
Luther Burbank: His Methods and Discoveries and Their Practical Application, Vol. 10
(Luther Burbank Press, 1914), 106-134,128.
185
“Let us Now Produce a New Pink Daisy: A Practical Lesson in Harnessing Heredity,”
eds. Luther Burbank, John Whitson, et al., Luther Burbank: His Methods and Discoveries
and Their Practical Application, Vol. I (Luther Burbank Press, 1914), 140-175, 141, 143
& 146.
88
of millions of homes in America, will furnish abundant material.”
186
Thus in the context
of unpacking tastefulness, Burbank’s methods continued to be international and
experimental. He focused on elemental analyses and he capitalized on narratives of
improvement be they of flowers, people, or communities in the context of cellular or
behavioral change.
In Burbank’s hierarchy, fragrance and color deserved his greatest attention.
Fragrance was paramount; he pointed to the popularity of roses and carnations.
187
The
rose was “entitled to be considered pre-eminently the universal flower.” Burbank
considered it the most popular due to its great form, color and fragrance.
188
He also
focused frequently on the element of color in creating desirable flowers. He encouraged
plant breeders to pay attention to the “blending of shades, and the arrangements of lines,
dots, and edges of different color on the petals.” He viewed the breeder’s role in
manipulating color “akin to the painter’s skill in mixing pigments.” Specifically, he
warned against crossing yellow with white as it would likely yield “dingy white.”
Likewise, mixing white and pale pink simply yielded a paler pink, which he concluded

186
“Improvements in the Much Improved Iris – and a Few Other Old Favorites,” eds.
Luther Burbank, John Whitson, et al., Luther Burbank: His Methods and Discoveries and
Their Practical Application, Vol. 10 (Luther Burbank Press, 1914), 39-76, 39.
187
See also, “What to Work for in Flowers – and How to Proceed,” Luther Burbank: His
Methods and Discoveries and Their Practical Application, 23.
188
“Working with a Universal Flower – the Rose – How the Burbank and other Roses
were Produced,” Luther Burbank: His Methods and Discoveries and Their Practical
Application, 66.
89
failed to qualify as an improvement.
189
To the extent that Burbank delivered directions to
others with regard to color, he must have viewed education with regard to tasteful color
was possible; but he also delineated limits on the power of this education.
Burbank joined other floriculturists in his particular attention to color. Amidst the
rising professionalization across a number of industries, one gardener even suggested the
creation of a new profession – “garden colorist” to ease some of the anxiety over color in
the garden. This theoretical garden colorist possessed “a true color instinct.” Further, he
needed concrete experience in floriculture, focusing on a variety of forms and colors.
With this instinct and experience, he would design “planting plans” of “successive
pictures of loveliness melting into each other with successive months.” Finally, as part of
his professional duties, he would visit, “if possible,” his garden once a week, “for no eye
but his discerning one w[ould] see in them the evil and the good.”
190
This color instinct
or ability existed apart from the gardener’s education.
Burbank credited his particularly acute eye for tones with a portion of his success.
In creating a daisy, his gardeners concluded that all of the specimen in a particular row
were white – all the same shade of white. Visitors to his garden agreed. But Burbank
saw none of the specimen as white. All of the blooms appeared differently to Burbank.
Only one of the daisies came close to achieving the desired level of whiteness. Burbank
languished alone in his ability to discern whiteness. Then, one day, an artist from San

189
“Making the Gladiolus Surpass Itself – Teaching the Plant New Habits,” eds. Luther
Burbank, John Whitson, et al., Luther Burbank: His Methods and Discoveries and Their
Practical Application, Vol. 9 (Luther Burbank Press, 1914), 166-202, 192 & 196.
190
King, The Well-Considered Garden, 9.
90
Francisco visited his farm. She saw what Burbank saw.
191
Only the gifted Burbank and
the artist were capable of viewing the deficiencies. Burbank subsequently worked for 15
years on his white daisy.
Part of Burbank’s process involved the educative function of explaining the
details of his experiments, even in the case of the white daisy where the degree of
whiteness might require innate skill. In the case of the white daisy, he reported that he
started with an ox-eye daisy from the east – that had been considered a pest there and had
not been introduced to California until he started experimenting. He then crossed the ox-
eye daisy with a British daisy. Ever mindful of the elements he sought to maximize and
those that he sought to minimize or remove, he concluded that the British version was
“much larger and more robust,” but was “inferior to [the American version] in grace of
form and abundance of bloom.”

With this new specimen, he then created additional
versions, cultivating multitudes of flowers, larger than either parent, but yellowish (to his
eye – if not to the eyes of the untrained or less gifted). He then crossed this new hybrid
with a German daisy and noted a slight improvement. He carefully selected that which
he regarded as the prettiest of these and then grew that flower for five to six years. With
each generation, he recognized improvement, but still failed to create a truly white daisy.
He articulated, “So year by year I anxiously inspected the rows of daisies in quest of a
plant bearing blooms whiter than the rest; and seeds were selected only from the prize
plants.” Finally, after years of efforts, he came across a Japanese daisy. On its own, the

191
“The Shasta Daisy: How a Troublesome Weed was Remade into a Beautiful Flower,”
eds. Luther Burbank, John Whitson, et al., Luther Burbank: His Methods and Discoveries
and Their Practical Application, Vol. 2 (Luther Burbank Press, 1914), 7-39, 7-8.
91
Japanese daisy was inferior to the daisies Burbank previously created; it had an
“objectionable leafy stalk” and a small flower. But the Japanese daisy was “pure white.”
Therefore, he crossed the Japanese daisy with his creation. At first, he was not pleased
with the results. But from those seeds, Burbank generated his Shasta daisy, a daisy
worthy (in his estimation) of being labeled white.
192

In creating the Shasta daisy, Burbank engaged explicitly in taste-making. This
process, as he publicized it, mirrored the larger narrative of California floriculturists and
their use of taste in conceptualizing California. First, the raw material came from
domestic importation – of solid eastern United States stock, and then featured additions
from English, German, and even Japanese influences. Second, the flowers had to be
tended – and tended not by just anyone but by an educated, experienced individual who
also had sensory gifts for discerning tastefulness. Finally, time and patience were
necessary to achieve the desired results; the perfect flower needed generations to evolve
and take in all the environment could offer. Floriculturists fancied that they would lead
California in this pursuit and export her products across the world.
Burbank’s plants blossomed across the country; he manufactured flowers of taste
and created a national distribution system. By 1914, eager home gardeners spent a dollar

192
Ibid. at 8, 10, and 12-14. For additional discussion of color, see “Bringing Forth an
Entirely New Color – and Other Important Work with Poppies,” and “The Purest White
in Nature – Striking Color Changes in the Watsonia,” eds. Luther Burbank, John
Whitson, et al., Luther Burbank: His Methods and Discoveries and Their Practical
Application, Vol. 9 (Luther Burbank Press, 1914), 102-133 and 269-304, respectively.
See also, “The Scented Calla – How Fragrance was Instilled into a Scentless
Flower,” eds. Luther Burbank, John Whitson, et al., Luther Burbank: His Methods and
Discoveries and Their Practical Application, Vol. 2 (Luther Burbank Press, 1914), 73-
101 for a parallel discussion regarding drawing out particular fragrances.
92
and purchased a “Burbank Garden” from the Luther Burbank Company of San Francisco.
It consisted of seeds to raise Burbank Shirley poppies, long season sweet peas, Burbank
morning glories, gigantic evening primrose, gigantic zinnia and others.
193
Burbank’s
specimen appeared in the exhibits for the 1915 Panama Pacific International
Exposition.
194
Famed bulb enthusiast Carl Purdy featured some of them in his design for
the California Garden at the 1915 Exposition.
195
Additionally, other nurserymen featured
his flowers in their own catalogues.
196
In the half century from the 1870s through 1925,
Burbank developed more than 800 varietals of vegetables, flowers, nuts, and grains.
197

He became a celebrity, lauded by some as a hero and attacked by others as a quack and
a nature-faker.
198

193
Advertisement in Sunset Magazine, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Apr., 1914), 910. The Luther
Burbank Society formed in California in 1912 to spread the word about Burbank’s
achievements and his horticultural practices.
194
Official Catalogue of Exhibitors, Panama-Pacific International Exposition, San
Francisco, 1915 (San Francisco: The Wahlgreen Company, 1915), 17.
195
George A. Dennison, Chief of Horticulture of the Panama Pacific International
Exposition, “Horticulture,” California’s Magazine, Vol. I, No. 1 (Jul., 1915), 337-340,
338.
196
C.C. Morse & Co., Annual Catalogue, Plants Seeds Trees 1910 (Rochester, New
York: Stecher Co., 1910) (Business Ephemera, California Historical Society), including
the African hibiscus, godetia, cactus, and Shasta daisy, 51. Carl Purdy, (Plant grower and
dealer, Ukiah), Business Ephemera, California Historical Society. Carl Purdy, Retail
Price List of Californian Bulbs: Burbank’s Hybrid Lilies and The Finest Daffodils
(Ukiah: Dispatch-Democrat Print, 1904). Carl Purdy, Retail Price List of Californian
Bulbs: Burbank’s Hybrid Lilies and The Finest Daffodils (Ukiah: Dispatch-Democrat
Print, 1903). Carl Purdy, Wholesale Price List of Californian Bulbs and Burbank’s
Hybrid Lilies (Ukiah: ?, 1905).
197
Smith, The Garden of Invention, 2.
198
Carl Purdy, “Correspondence: Luther Burbank’s Hybrid Lilies,” Garden and Forest,
Vol. VIII, No. 390 (Aug. 14, 1895) 328-329, noting that Burbank’s work was “well
93
Some of the dialogue surrounding either Burbank’s celebrity or alleged fakery
implicated issues of competition, advancement or jealous, and the connection between
taste and nature, particularly the benefits and threats of crossing or breeding. In his
catalogues, Burbank frequently included examples of the heroic praise. His 1913 seed
catalogue quoted de Vries who declared that Burbank was the “‘leading botanist of the
world’. . .[His Amaryllis] ‘superior to the lilies of Holland.’” David Starr Jordan
purportedly concluded that Burbank was “‘the greatest originator of new and valuable
forms of plant life of this or any other age.’” L.H. Bailey commented, “‘It is an honor to

known throughout the horticultural world” and praising his very “floriferous” lilies. E.O.
Orpet, “Flower Garden Notes,” Garden and Forest, Vol. X, No. 482 (May 19, 1897),
197-198, praising the Burbank Canna. L.H. Bailey, “A Maker of New Fruits and
Flowers,” World’s Work, Vol. 2 (1901), 1209-1214. Charles Howard Shinn, “A Wizard
of the Garden,” The Land of Sunshine, Vol. 14, No. 2 (Feb., 1901) 96-110.
“Gardeners Grill Luther Burbank,” San Francisco Chronicle, Aug. 7, 1909,
discussing the Pasadena Gardeners’ Association accusations of his “nature-faking
methods” as well as the way some misconstrued his comments that he was busier than
President Taft or doing more for plant development that all the government and private
stations across the world. “Luther Burbank: It Is Unfortunate That the Poor Man Cannot
Be Left in Peace,” San Francisco Chronicle, Aug. 10, 1909. W.S. Harwood, “A Maker of
New Plants and Fruits,” Century Magazine, Vol. XXXVI, No. 5, 49-55.
See also the February 29, 1912 speech of Hon. Everis A. Hayes of California
speaking before the Committee of the Whole House in considering H.R. 18960 with
appropriations for the Department of Agriculture for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1913.
While noting that some even within the Department of Agriculture disparaged Burbank,
his experiments have yielded great prosperity for the states. Hayes focused on the Shasta
daisy, dahlias with a more pleasing scent, and the crimson poppy.
But see, Governor Pardee, who stated, “’Like Columbus, Burbank has shown us
the way to new continents, new forms of life, new sources of wealth, and we, following
in his footsteps, will profit by and from his genius.’” As quoted in Smith, The Garden of
Invention, 2, with additional general commentary on his hero status on page 5.
94
California that [Burbank] is its citizen.’”
199
Contemporaries sang Burbank’s praises and
acknowledged his tastemaker status particularly with regard to specific flowers. Carl
Purdy recognized his fame “throughout the horticultural world” and praised his very
“floriferous” lilies.
200
E.O. Orpet championed the Burbank Canna.
201

Wickson summarized the fame “akin to worship” best in his article on “The Real
Luther Burbank,” in Sunset Magazine in 1905. Surveying the press coverage of Burbank
and his work, Wickson noted, “They exalt him to leadership in the world’s science, or the
world’s wizardry, and both distinctions seem to equally excite the multitude to wonder.”
The press exaggerated Burbank’s achievements. Wickson explained that this led to
increased fame and concluded that “[t]here is probably no man in America who is so
exalted by those who really know not for what reason they admire and praise.”
202

Burbank used celebrity power to spread his taste notions and tasteful flowers, even if his
audience failed to understand why (on a biological or aesthetic level) the flowers were
tasteful. To some degree, mimicking tastefulness constituted tastefulness.

199
Seed list and order form 1913 – featuring Burbank’s 1913 Original Gladioli. See also,
Bailey, “A Maker of New Fruits and Flowers,” World’s Work, 1209-1214.
200
Purdy, “Correspondence: Luther Burbank’s Hybrid Lilies,” Garden and Forest, 328-
329. For more information on Purdy, see Carl Mahurin, “Carl Purdy,” California
Horticultural Society Journal, Vol. 2, No. 4, (Oct., 1941) 196-207.
201
Orpet, “Flower Garden Notes,” Garden and Forest, 197-198. For more information
on Orpet, see Mildred Selfridge Orpet, “E. O. Orpet, Horticulturist,” Journal of the
California Horticultural Society, Vol. XIII, No. 2, (Apr., 1952), 39-52.
See also, Shinn, “A Wizard of the Garden,” The Land of Sunshine, 96-110.
202
E.J. Wickson, “The Real Luther Burbank,” Sunset Magazine, Vol. XV, No. 1 (May,
1905), 4.
95
While much of the reactions dwelt at the polar opposites of stark praise or vicious
condemnation, others merely raised the issue of the relationship between these botanists
and florists. Academic botanist E.L. Greene, a former Episcopalian priest, praised the
efforts of botanists and florists to work together and pondered the ramifications of
botanists supplying information to florists. Greene conceded that botanists were not
“mere” lovers of flowers. They mastered science. But, botanists might fail to “very
thoroughly. . .appreciate a florist’s collection of pogonias, dahlias and chrysanthemums.”
The botanist too engaged in science might miss something that the florist would observe.
Greene recognized that botanists and florists evaluated flowers in similar terms though
and were “on many accounts, each other’s friends.” Considering himself a “lover of
flowers of all sorts” with a preference for wild flowers, Greene surmised that “the flower
cultivator has an eye to the beautiful wherever he sees it.” Unlike the botanist who may
be more focused on elements he might want to change, the flower cultivator appreciated
nature. But in the end, Greene acknowledged both the botanist and flower cultivator
recognized “the superlative grace and beauty of wild lilies and calochortus,
cypripediums, and many more. . .all of which are nature’s own offspring, not products in
any way of the cultivated art.”
203
Tastefulness was not about money or standing.
Tastefulness involved recognizing specific elements that were either desirable or less so.
However, Greene’s final conclusion jabbed at experimenting and creating cellular-level
positive change.

203
E.L. Greene, “Native Ornamental Shrubs,” Monthly Proceedings of the California
State Floral Society (San Francisco), No. 13 (Sep. 1892), 91-96, 91-92.
96
Picking out tasteful and desirable characteristics, selecting, and then improving
upon the flowers contributed to a growing conversation about eugenics. Burbank led
conversations connecting his plant studies to social policy. He presented as part of David
Starr Jordan’s National Conference on Race Betterment at the 1915 Exposition, arguing
that humans “‘are like plants. . .and will not prosper without proper selection any more
than vegetables would if indiscriminately planted.’”
204
This was eugenics at the most
basic level, still focused on changing environments. And through improving
environments, social reformers would improve people. For example, Burbank concluded
that “no line of mental effort promises more for the elevation, advancement, prosperity
and happiness of the whole human race” than the practice of plant breeding.
205
He
questioned: “who can estimate the elevating and refining influences and moral value of
flowers with all their graceful forms and bewitching shades and combinations of colors
and exquisitely varied perfumes?” For Burbank, color, scent, and form were all part of
the calculus of understanding and ranking the importance of flowers. For Burbank, the
“silent influences” of the flowers could be “unconsciously felt” even by those who failed
to consciously recognize them. But the effect of the flowers on individuals was only one
part of the analysis. He posited that “with better and still better fruits, nuts, grains, and

204
As quoted in Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American
International Expositions, 1876-1916 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984).
See also, “The Shasta Daisy: How a Troublesome Weed was Remade into a
Beautiful Flower,” Luther Burbank: His Methods and Discoveries and Their Practical
Application, 20 & 23-26.
205
Burbank, “Fundamental Principles of Plant Breeding,” transcription of speech from
International Plant Breeding Conference in New York, Sept. 30-Oct. 2, 1902, 1.
97
flowers,” humans would transform the earth. Specifically, this transformation would
include turning man’s thoughts “from the base, destructive forces into the nobler
productive ones.” These improved thoughts would catapult man to “higher planes of
action toward that happy day when man shall offer his brother man, not bullets and
bayonets, but richer grains, better fruits, and fairer flowers.”
206
Improved flowers and
fruits beget quality environments and then quality individuals, who in turn would create
better and fairer fruits and flowers.
It should come as no surprise that Burbank extended his ideas to children and
childhood. In applying his theories specifically to children, Burbank concluded that
inherited characteristics were first once acquired:
heredity is only the sum of all these past environments, which if impressed
on the heredity long and strong enough in any specific direction will
become a part of heredity itself, and this new heredity already slightly
changed by these late environments will have to meet new environments
as before, which will by repetition become fixed in the ever new and
constantly fluctuating heredity.

Thus, all children must not be treated identically with their different needs. All, though,
absorbed their surrounding environments. Burbank concluded that Americans pumped
blood from “half the peoples of the world within our veins.” And through all this
“crossing,” Burbank found America resembled his plants, with “all the worst as well as
all the best qualities of each. . .brought out in their fullest intensities.” Burbank favored
the “refining” work of eliminating undesirable traits. Utilizing the language of plant
breeding as he explained the “crossed” blood of Americans, just as with his plant

206
Burbank, “Fundamental Principles of Plant Breeding,” California’s Magazine, 196.
98
experiments, he concluded the process would take many years. He experienced changes
in colors, shapes, sizes, and perfumes with his flowers. Therefore, he opined, “All that
has been done for plants and flowers by crossing, nature has already accomplished for the
American people. By the crossings of bloods strength has in one instance been secured, in
another intellectuality, in still another moral force. Nature alone could do this.”
207

Though eugenics conversations could seem removed from floricultural taste
conversations, both ultimately involved humans affecting and being affected by their
surrounding environments – for good or bad.
_________________________

At the beginning of Burbank’s successes, he questioned: “Can my thoughts be
imagined, after so many years of patient care and labor, as, walking among them on a
dewy morning, I look upon these new forms of beauty, on which other eyes have never
gazed?”
208
Imagining was a foundational key to tastefulness – particularly in the early
twentieth century when scientific botany placed the creation of new kinds of flowers
more directly in individual hands. With this imagining, taste also required patience, time,
as well as sharing and educating others. Taste was imported and distributed. It also
implicated reality from the cellular level to that of the larger environment as those

207
“Plants and Children: Luther Burbank Explains How New Environments May Be
Used to Overcome Inherited Traits,” in “Luther Burbank – how does he do it,” pamphlet.
See also, a discussion of Burbank’s comments at the 1915 Exposition National
Conference on Race Betterment. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 223-5.
208
Luther Burbank, New Creations in Fruits and Flowers, June, 1893 (Santa Rosa,
1893), 40.
99
environments shaped individuals. Early nurserymen in California fashioned the building
blocks of the taste conversations as they imported raw materials, exercised their own taste
experiences, and planted and landscaped a vision of California that they also actively
sought to export to the rest of the country and the world.
James S. Hans’ twenty-first century work on taste struggles with the difficulties of
defining taste and its role in society. For Hans, taste exists between the twin “extremes”
of a belief that one exercises “complete conscious control” over his life and the
conclusion that he is “a function of various biological or social substrates.”
209
Drawing on
Fredrich Nietzsche and Immanuel Kant’s arguments regarding taste, Hans posits that
man’s relationship to discerning taste is part of his “ongoing awareness” of the
connection between self and “dynamic interchanges with the world.” This Kantian
conception of taste connects tastefulness more strongly to innate ability, rather than
cultural influences or class consciousness.
210
In this way, man cannot truly acquire taste,
which is connected to how he orders the data his biological senses captures. He can learn
to mimic tastefulness though.
211

Those engaged in floriculture from the 1850s through the turn of the twentieth
century articulated their relationship to taste both similarly and radically differently from
Hans’ conception. Taste functioned as a foundational element of those seeking to create
a particularized form of civil society in California and in communicating the state’s

209
James S. Hans, The Sovereignty of Taste (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002),
2.
210
Ibid. at 2-3.
211
Ibid. at 80-81.
100
promises to the world.
212
While Hans recognizes the role of taste as “the fundamental
organizing capacity of” life, he concludes that man might not explicitly recognize it as
such. These floriculturists recognized and utilized the rhetoric of taste to their own ends.
However, though Hans suggests that the taste conversation involves the extremes of
conscious control over life versus simply living out a biological or class imperative, these
floriculturists lived in a world where those two extremes were not extremes at all. They
seized control of their lives – moving from different parts of the country and world,
starting new businesses and creating new forms of professionalization. They consciously
thought about the place they wanted to live in. By the turn of the century, this also
included figuring out how individuality, biological transformation of flowers, and the
possibilities of a multitude of positive tastes might interact. But, through their
relationship with flowers, they also surmised that individuals were intimately tied to their
environments and class. Changing those environments would create biological (as in
Burbank’s cellular alterations of flowers) and societal changes. They articulated that the
key to this change was their example and education. The floriculturists generally chose
not to delineate between mimicking taste and genuinely displaying taste. Although they
recognized some biological limitations to taste (in different contexts at different
moments), education could raise most to at least an acceptable level of tastefulness for
achieving their societal goals.
Underlying the floriculturists’ conversations was the belief (both sincere and in
their commercial interest) that taste was the instrument they and their fellow Californians

212
Ibid. at 14.
101
could use to order and understand their space. Taste and ongoing taste debates helped
them dialogue an infinite script (capable of changing in the face of scientific development
or urbanization) for defining their visions of themselves and their community, as well as
the limits of acceptable behavior therein.
213
As the following chapter introduces, this
process began at home, no doubt – in the garden.

213
This framing of the floriculturists’ conversations is derived from their records and in
part by Hans, The Sovereignty of Taste, 2.
102
Chapter 3
Seedling Promises:
Refining Men, Women, Children, and California Begins at Home

I believe it is impossible to estimate the influence which flowers and
plants possess over us. Frequent association with them teaches us to find,
in their varied blossoms, as many friends – nay, far more and truer friends
than any drawing room can afford. . .If people will but cultivate flowers in
their gardens and houses, let them grow with their children, let them nod
at the little ones as they bend over their books, let them smile at them as
they play at their games, let them teach their quaint lore to their youthful
minds, and I doubt not, such a perennial fount will be opened, such a well-
spring of faith and true reverence and love, as shall never know [drought],
even on the most arid plains of human experience.
214

“A Talk About Flowers,”
California Horticulturalist
and Floral Magazine,
November 1870

T.E. of San Francisco battled slugs and sparrows in his garden as part of his desire
to create a home and to refine himself and his daughter.
215
Gardening and writing in
1880, T.E. was not a professional landscaper, nor a man employed in the “tilling of the
soil,” although he had a “fondness” for it. That fondness he credited to his own youth; he
believed it was “engrafted in his nature” from a young age. He did not have a rural,
palatial estate on the San Mateo peninsula nor an Oakland mansion with ample grounds
for an Italian style garden. T.E. spent much of his daylight leisure time toiling in his 30

214
“A Talk About Flowers,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine,
Vol. 1, No. 1 (Nov., 1870), 5-6, 6.
215
T.E., “A City Garden,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol. X, No.
2 (Feb., 1880), 36-39.
103
by 10 foot plot of land. His inner drive spirited him onward in his “contest against
weeds, slugs, bugs, drought, sparrows, cats, and vermin” and in “nursing to maturity” all
the flowering plants and shrubs he could “crowd comfortably” within the dedicated
space. While T.E. was quick to detail his garden adversaries, he also eagerly shared the
“silver lining” of his gardening project. His garden served him as a space of personal
pride and a sign of his achievements.
When I hear the exclamation of delight slip over the lips of my visiting
friends at the wealth and size of flower in that pansy bed; the
gorgeousness of my petunias; and the brilliant hues of my verbenas; the
rich golden of that cluster of marigold; the extraordinary size of that
fuchsia blossom; the fragrance of my pinks; the wonderful spikes of my
mignonette; and the rarity of that geranium, I feel rewarded for all the
trouble.

T.E.’s pride resonated on various levels. He used the language of riches through his
discussion of the rarity and volume of his blossoms. He expressed pride in aesthetic
achievements in color and size as well as appeals to the senses of sight and smell.
But the feeling of pride was only a small portion of the reward T.E. sought and
received from his flowers. His little daughter delivered bouquets to an ill neighbor, an
act which helped to shape his daughter’s values and which brought “pleasure” to the sick
member of society living nearby. Further, his garden served as a source of needed
exercise for himself, a man with a “sedentary occupation” in the burgeoning metropolis
of San Francisco at the end of the nineteenth century. Additionally, the garden
blossomed as a mini-laboratory of sorts that allowed him to “study floral growth in all its
stages.” In sum, he noted “a cheerfulness in the surroundings of a city house with a
garden, which may be thrown in, in a general way, with the net proceeds of the
104
institution.”
216
His garden and its flowers affected emotions, added lessons of charity and
happiness to the home, and therefore must be included as a critical part of the
domestic institution.
T.E. and many other Euro-American Californians dedicated themselves to
establishing an ideal California, literally from the ground up by creating home gardens.
217

A dirtier business than discussing taste, they dug, sowed seeds, and watered. This
chapter and Chapter 4 examine Californians’ ideas about and creations of flower gardens
at their homes. After a general introduction, this chapter examines the rhetoric of home
gardens chronologically from the 1870s through the turn of the century and then turns to
the specific promises of flowers for the refinement of men, women, and children. Home
gardens functioned as the local, intimate laboratory of the cultural refining power of
flowers – but a power that then burst forth from the confines of the garden gate. The
home embodied the central institution of civilization. And a home was incomplete,
uncivilized, without a garden.
This chapter and Chapter 4 follow a growing population of settlers who tended
and fought a battle against known and unexplored garden adversaries with three central
goals that shifted from the 1870s through the turn of the century. They strove to create
homes that in turn would secure the soul of California, keeping it safe from immoral,

216
Ibid.
217
“Shall it be a Land of Homes?” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol.
IX, No. 2 (Feb., 1879), 51-53. “Adornment of Home,” California Horticulturalist and
Flower Magazine, Vol. IV, No. 2 (Feb., 1874), 60-61, reprinted from Ex. “Gardens and
People,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol. X, No. 2 (Feb., 1880),
58-59, 59.
105
greedy gold-seekers, speculators, and corrupt politicians. Through the toil in the garden,
they aspired to reform their human natures and nurture their children into model citizens.
To accomplish this, they framed expectations and judged their results. And this was no
simple task. These relatively new Californians recognized that they planted and weeded
in a territory largely foreign to the preeminent garden experts of the eastern coast of the
United States and England. And they sought to understand the possibilities of growing in
California and define the space in geographical terms. These Californians dreamed of
creating a society through the establishment of home gardens based on wider Euro-
American norms but did this by creating spaces that they distinguished as different from
eastern or English lands and prized as international in scope. Race or ethnicity, gender,
and scientific innovations shaped conceptions of flower power. For women, floral home
gardens offered promises of refinement but also opportunities around which to organize
and spread their flowers to those they believed needed their assistance. For children,
floral gardens offered training for the next generation and became part of a nexus
between home and school. The connection amongst homes, gardens, and increasingly
civilized spaces drew the attention of many across the western world in this era. But it is
the force of the rhetoric in a space that these Californians imagined as open for planting
(and in need of civilizing) and the translation of the available gardening information into
California-specific guidance that combined to form a rich conversation about how to
transform California from a dirty, transient, rough destination into a dirt-filled, paradise
of home-dwelling citizens.

106

_______________________

The creation of homes and gardens represented hopeful possibilities for the future
of American civilization. Careful observers and societal critics conjured visions of
individual citizens and immigrants by examining their homes and gardens. At the end of
the nineteenth century, Liberty Hyde Bailey, noted botanist, professor at New York State
Agricultural College at Cornell University and founding member of the American
Society for Horticultural Science, concluded, “A garden is the personal part of an estate,
that area which is most intimately associated with the private life of the home.”
218
The
garden revealed the intimate details of the persons of the home and clues to the kinds of
people dwelling within. In California, from the 1870s through the turn of the century, the
horticultural press, nurserymen and others stressing the importance of creating homes and
gardens offered an evolving range of rationales and doomsday visions if home gardens
failed to proliferate. Drawing on national rhetoric, they tailored it to fit their own
concerns. In the 1870s, they emphasized the importance of homes to fight against
immoral individuals and teased out conclusions regarding their neighbors’ natures,
immigrant roots, and even wealth. By the 1880s, fears of the evils of urbanization
entered the narrative. At the turn of the century, California gardeners added concerns
regarding race.

218
Liberty Hyde Bailey, Garden-Making: Suggestions for the Utilizing of Home Grounds
(New York: The Macmillan Company, 1913, orig. pub. 1898), 3.
107
Californians gardened in a different paradigm than regions with more established
Euro-American communities. Patricia M. Tice argues that nineteenth-century Americans
saw gardens as “microcosms” of agriculture. In the face of growing urbanization,
gardens constituted “agrarianism on the domestic scale.” They preserved time-honored
values and acted as hands-on classrooms to impart those values to future generations.
219

While drawing on a similar Jeffersonian vision or mentality of the benefits of an agrarian
society, Californians developed their agricultural endeavors concurrently with their
domestic environments. The California home garden grew not as an urban substitute or a
throw-back to a rural homeland as it might have in New England. Horticultural and
agricultural development in California expanded at the same points in time, separated in
many instances by mere miles. The connections between home gardens and desired
society blossomed even closer in California than elsewhere; Californians envisioned
gardens less as mini-farms than mini-creations of a new civilization itself. Peeling back
the layers of garden history helps reveal dynamic change in the new society of the
far West.
The 1870s was an age of economic depression, labor unrest, and fear of rampant
political corruption. Home gardens purportedly battled against those powerful forces.
The establishment of these gardens provided an opportunity for detailed evaluations of
individuals – from the degree of their civilization, to their immigrant roots, to indications
of their economic standing. As editor of California Horticulturalist and Floral

219
Patricia M. Tice, Gardening in America, 1830-1910 (Rochester, New York: The
Strong Museum, 1984). Farmers routinely also had flower gardens as well.
108
Magazine, Charles H. Shinn posed the question “Shall it be a Land of Homes?” Yes, he
answered, stressing the vital importance of suburban gardens. Shinn claimed those living
in California and creating homes looked to the future “with hope and ambition” but stood
at a fork in the road. While Shinn sought to honor the leaders of the “Saxon advance” –
“stalwart, eager, defiant of danger” (some of them gold-seekers), he also noted “evil”
gold seekers – gamblers with their “love of chance, and feverish risk” settled in
California.
220
Building homes and gardens factored critically in the former triumphing
over the later for the soul of California. To save the state from speculators in favor of the
brave and honorable, the land had to be domesticated through homes and gardens.
Born in 1852, Shinn moved to California as a young child from Texas. His
parents, James and Lucy Shinn, settled their Quaker family in Alameda County, near
present day Niles. His father worked as a nurseryman, leading Shinn to a life-long love
of horticulture and the natural resources of California. Shinn attended Johns Hopkins
University and focused more on the journalistic aspects of California horticulture and
later conservation. His writings ranged from opinion pieces of the connections of homes,
gardens, and civilization to detailed accounts of specific gardens and horticultural
exhibits.
221
In the 1880s, he published Mining Camps: A Study in American Frontier

220
“Shall it be a Land of Homes?” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, 51-
53.
221
Charles Shinn, “On the Proper Culture of Annuals in California,” California
Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol. 7, No. 12 (Dec., 1877), article reprinted from
Pacific Rural Press, 361-363. Charles Shinn, “Concerning a Satisfactory Flower
Garden,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol. VIII, No. 12 (Dec.,
1878) 369. Charles H. Shinn, “Woodward’s Gardens,” California Horticulturalist and
Floral Magazine, Vol. IX, No. 4 (Apr. 1879), 102-104. Charles Shinn, “Future Gardens
109
Government. His work on mining communities and the possibilities and perils of living
on the frontier colored his analysis of the stakes of creating homes. Later, his work
turned more directly to conservation; he served as the first superintendent of Yosemite
National Park. In the 1890s, he held the title Inspector of Experiment Stations for the
Department of Agriculture’s station at the University of California and joined the
National Forest Commission, working with Gifford Pinchot.
222
For Shinn, the
progression of California civilization was a garden equation: through the creation of
domestic home gardens, California could move from mining communities to civilized
spaces engaged in preserving the natural beauty of the state.
For Shinn, this primal connection between home and civilization moved beyond
satisfying the basic necessities of life to cultivating taste in some of the same arguments
taste professionals utilized in their broader conversations outside the domestic realm.

of California,” The Californian, Vol. 2, No. 8 (Aug., 1880),153. Charles H. Shinn, “For
the Last Time,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol. X, No. 11/12
(Nov.-Dec., 1880), 346-347. Charles H. Shinn, “Coming Garden-Art,” The Californian,
Vol. IV, No. 23 (Nov., 1881), 383. Charles Howard Shinn, “Spring Flowers of
California,” Overland Monthly, Vol. XII, No. 64 (Apr., 1888), 416-418. Charles H.
Shinn, “Horticultural Notes from California,” Garden and Forest: A Journal of
Horticulture, Landscape Art and Forestry, Vol. III, No. 100 (Jan. 22, 1890), 46. Charles
Howard Shinn, “Agriculture and Horticulture at the Midwinter Fair,” Overland Monthly,
Vol. XXIII, No. 136 (Apr., 1894), 393-400. Charles Howard Shinn, “Flower Days of the
Midwinter Fair,” Garden and Forest, Vol.7, No. 329 (Jun. 13, 1894) 232. Charles
Howard Shinn, “A Wizard of the Garden,” The Land of Sunshine, Vol. 14, No. 2 (Feb.,
1901) 96-110, regarding Luther Burbank. Charles H. Shinn, The Pacific Rural Handbook
(San Francisco: Dewey & Co., 1879).
222
See Julia Tyler Shinn and Grace Tompkins Sargent, “Forgotten Mother of the Sierra:
Letters of Julia Tyler Shinn,” California Historical Society Quarterly, Vol. 38, No. 2
(Jun., 1959), 157-163; Vol. 38, No. 3 (Sep., 1959), 219-228, 228. Jill M. Singleton,
“Shinn Family Contributions to the Community,” viewed at
www.museumoflocalhistory.org/pages/shinn.html on October 30, 2012.
110
Home included a “meaning and intention” beyond life’s basic necessities. More than a
locale for sleeping, eating and drinking, home cultivated “pleasure, rational enjoyment
and improvement.” And the man at the head of this home, the “Cultivated man”
exhibited “taste about home.” This home and his taste operated as “the index to his
degree of cultivation.” For Shinn, civilization and taste grew concurrently in a circular
logic of progress; civilization’s advancement led to tasteful homes and “cultivated”
minds yearned for “beautiful” homes. The home acquired its status not for “professional
honors, nor learning, nor talent.” Rather it deemed beautiful for “the evidence of taste,
refinement and culture” surrounding it. This process required not only orderly fences,
proper walkways, and tended trees and vines. Flowers acted as critical elements.
California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine rallied:
A home without flowers! No, let it not be. Let every woman, every child
with tiny hand and growing taste, plant flower seeds and roots in little
nooks, and recesses, and beds. [When] the outside is beautiful, let the
inside be, with order, neatness, comfort, taste, virtue, peace, good-will,
love and happiness.
223

The core values of civilization and the soul of California rested on the creation of orderly
domestic spaces which themselves measured up as incomplete without flowers. The
aesthetic power of the blooms contributed to the future of society.
Gardens offered an element of societal transparency. Shinn observed, “Men have
a curious habit of stamping their personality on the clothes they wear, the team they
drive, the house they live in, and all their property, real or personal.” Therefore, the
home and gardens became “like himself,” or more precisely, delivered “glimpses of his

223
“Adornment of Home,” California Horticulturalist and Flower Magazine, 60-61.
111
nature, and hints of his possibilities” to the careful observer.
224
Shinn drew on a rich,
national tradition of divining the connections between gardens and their gardeners. The
argument that homes and gardens telegraphed particular messages about the personalities
and values of those living and working within was neither confined to California nor to
the 1870s. In the 1850s, famed seedsman and nurseryman Joseph Breck contended that
travelers claimed to “distinguish a pure-minded and more intelligent family,” from the
state of their home and garden. Flowers “surrounded” intelligent families’ homes; “the
windows displayed them – vines were twined with care and taste over the swelling.”
225

Shinn transplanted this sentiment to California. He documented the displacement that
many California immigrants experienced. He connected gardens, flowers, and residents
not necessarily to judge the relative value of their contributions but to express the vast
range of immigrants and plants abloom in California in the 1870s.
226

Shinn playfully and explicitly connected immigration, migration, and specific
blooms. With Holmesian precision, he examined the gardens of Californians and
analyzed the specific American and Euro-American immigrant pasts of those families.

224
Shinn, The Pacific Rural Handbook, 10.
225
Joseph Breck, The flower-garden; or, Breck's book of flowers: in which are described
all the various hardy herbaceous perennials, annuals, shrubby plants, and evergreen
trees, desirable for ornamental purposes, with directions for their cultivation (New York:
A.O, Moore, 1858, orig. pub. 1851), 15. See also Joseph Breck, New Book of Flowers
(New York: Orange Judd Company, 1866); Robert Buist, The American Flower-Garden
Directory (New York: Orange Judd & Company, 1854); and Mrs. S.O. (Daisy Eyebright)
Johnson, Every Woman Her Own Flower Gardener, A Handy Manual of Flower
Gardening of Ladies (New York: Henry T. Williams, 1874), 5, noting, a “ beautiful
garden, tastefully laid out, and well kept, is a certain evidence of taste, refinement and
culture.”
226
Shinn, The Pacific Rural Handbook, 10.
112
Some of the families migrated from within the United States. For example, altheas,
lilacs, and pansies suggested a New England family. He also pinpointed European
immigrants who presumably immigrated directly to California. “An Irish yew tree by the
gate. . .Shropshire damsons and Kentish cherries in the orchard, box borders, and Covent
Garden stocks,” surely meant the family emigrated from “staid, portly old England.” But
yellow marigolds and sunflowers guarding a brightly painted door could “only” have
been a Portuguese family from the Azores. Unlike the analyses that involved degrees of
the civilized nature of individuals, the immigrant status analyses from the gardens in the
1870s reflected not an explicit hierarchy of desirable Euro-American immigrants, but a
promise of the future of California; “It is the charm of California in the eyes of her
children that so many variations are possible here, and so many widely different types of
gardening succeed, and blend harmoniously in our landscapes.”
227
California and
Californians bloomed differently; they had the capacity to incorporate international
styles, plants, and Euro-American peoples.
Flowers also featured as elements of discussions about emerging class distinctions
and membership. Astute observers drew sharp distinctions between the gardens of the
rich and others. While the elites’ “frailest flowers” demanded praise and displayed
coveted grace, the flowers of the developing middle class were more desirable as they
indicated quality families and domestic stability. The revealing element of class in
connection with home gardens in the 1870s was commonly the presence of flowers that
required a greenhouse to flourish. While greenhouses were more commonplace outside

227
Ibid. at 11.
113
of warmer climates, in California they symbolized exoticism and wealth. Shinn noted,
greenhouse treasures “too often tell a story of mere hired and menial proficiency; but the
small, modest gardens, tended by members of the family, are restful, simple,
and picturesque.”
Shinn praised the precious flowers of the rich but shrank from the labor and social
ramifications of those gardens.
228
He extolled the virtues of the gardens tended not by
professional gardeners but by family members; however, his advice for those more
modest gardeners must have perplexed his audience. He instructed that the desired
flowers:
must be of easy culture, showy, and valuable for bouquets. . .There is a
charm about [annuals’] rapid growth and bloom, a richness about their
showy colors, especially when massed, and a peculiar grace and mildness
attached to their use in bouquets.
229

Shinn described these prized flowers for the modest gardeners in words that at first
glance formed a contradiction. They abounded in “richness” and were “showy” – not
necessarily the virtues he championed in either the modest gardens or his ideal society.
But he explained that these showy flowers, when gathered in bouquets, exhibited grace
and mildness. Shinn argued that the modest gardener could cultivate showy blossoms as
long as he did so himself. The modest gardener’s flowers retained their grace and
mildness while still flourishing as eye-catching beauties when his own toil factored into

228
See also, “Editorial Department: Homes of Wealth,” California Horticulturalist and
Floral Magazine, Vol. 9, No. 3 (Mar., 1879), 84-85.
229
Shinn, “On the Proper Culture of Annuals in California,” California Horticulturalist
and Floral Magazine, 361.
114
the equation as a central element. Shinn provided a sideways critique of a Gilded Age
California, suspicious of wealth and labor monopolies.
The importance of home gardens in California only grew in the 1880s; Shinn and
others portrayed the home and garden as remedies for the anxiety of rootless Californians
and a place to escape the troubles of metropolitan life. In February 1880, Shinn
concluded, “These are days of complex and doubtful struggles, anxiety, and, with many,
almost despair.” This struggle derived in part from a perceived turn away from
traditional religious and rural lives, coupled with a “lack of reverence.” However,
hopefulness abounded; Californians turned in a positive direction; California
Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine declared Californians were “facing toward the
light.” Floriculturists argued that humanity did not need to respond to the anxiety and
despair by “breaking its machinery, or by returning to the age of tinder-boxes,
stagecoaches, and mild-mannered shepherdesses.” Alluding to a desire to return to a
simpler age, the publication warned against such a return in the areas of transportation or
temperaments. The Edenic goal, or in this case the “true faery-land” worthy of a return,
rooted “in the homes and the gardens, the roses and the children.”
230

This trend shifted focus throughout the last decades of the nineteenth century as
more women immigrated to the state and families, homes, and gardens proliferated. By
the turn of the century, and connected in part with the Arts and Crafts Movement, a focus
on the aesthetic power of the home as a force against materialism reverberated through
books about gardens. In 1904, Charles Keeler wrote about the California movement of

230
“Gardens and People,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, 59.
115
“the simple home” which emphasized “the gospel of the simple life.”
231
Although born
in Wisconsin, Keeler moved to Northern California in his teenage years and developed a
talent for writing and an appreciation for nature and architecture. A contemporary of
John Muir and architect Bernard Maybeck, Keeler worked at the California Academy of
Sciences. As part of his framing of the Simple Home, the garden acted as an element of
the art of the home but also as a barrier between the private space of the home and the
public realm of the outside world. Keeler limited “art” in this context to art of
architecture and landscape design. The homeowner, through his garden, utilized the art
of architecture to master the power of nature to then reinvigorate his being through life
described as a form of art – the pageant – and colors.
232

For Keeler, the appreciation of the architectural aspect of the home garden
assumed a paramount place: “Let us, then, by all means, make the most of our gardens,
studying them as an art, – the extension of architecture into the domain of life and light.”
He listed the possibilities for these gardens for play or work and to “exhilarate. . .souls by
the harmony and glory of pure and brilliant color.” The architecturally Simple Home and
garden introduced nature to homes and “chasten[ed] our lives by contact with the purity
of the great Earth Mother.”
233
According to Keeler’s language, the garden formed not

231
Charles Keeler, The Simple Home (San Francisco: Paul Elder and Company, 1904), v.
Emphasis in original. See also Eugene O. Murmann, California Gardens: How to Plan
and Beautify the City Lot, Suburban Grounds and Country Estate, including 50 Garden
Plans and 103 Illustrations of Actual Gardens from Photographs by the Author (Los
Angeles: Eugene O. Murmann, 1914), 6, regarding simplicity in garden design.
232
Keeler, The Simple Home, 7.
233
Ibid. at 16.
116
only a barrier, but the benefits of the garden directed almost exclusively inward toward
the family to enjoy the contact with purity, undisturbed from the public,
cacophonous sphere.
However, Keeler’s vision of the Simple Home garden expanded the positive
powers beyond a select groups of individuals; like those in the 1870s and 1880s, he
envisioned the home and garden as protective forces against the great fears of the day –
those of rampant materialism and racial degeneration – through the cultivation of the
ethic of familial service, which he defined as “love realized in activity.” Keeler stated,
“We hear much in these days of race suicide, but the menace comes not from those who
love their homes.” He argued that “in the thought of service lies the salvation of the race
as of the individual.” And “in the simple home, service comes so naturally.” “What is
the home but a temple consecrated to love, where the form of worship is service?” he
questioned. The demands of business and the life of “[m]odern materialism” damaged
family life; the simple home provided the restorative key through rejuvenating energy.
234

He therefore commissioned Californians, “Let those who would see a higher culture in
California, a deeper life, a nobler humanity, work for the adoption of the simple home
among all classes of people, trusting that the inspiration of its mute walls will be a
ceaseless challenge to all who dwell within their shadow, for beauty and character.”
235

234
Ibid. at 53-54.
235
Ibid. at 54-55. See also, Mark Daniels, Landscape Engineer and Superintendent of
National Parks of California, “California as a Place of Homes,” California’s Magazine
(San Francisco: California Publishers Co-operative Association, 1915), 201-207, 201.
117
From the 1870s through the turn of the century, California gardeners and the
floral press participated in a national project investigating and planting home-gardens in
hopes of creating more refined societies based on values long-considered agrarian in
nature. They adopted the rhetoric to address their own fears and needs, including fighting
corruption, knowing and naming immigrants, and illustrating class. The conversations in
California incorporated both thinking about how private gardens transformed public lives
and thinking about gardens as outward boundaries between private and public spaces.
For Californians, their home-gardens differed from those in other regions, revealed the
nature and origin of those who lived within them, and improved both in quality and
reforming society at large. While this rhetoric remained abstract, even theoretical,
garden writers provided concrete illustrations of the power of gardens to transform
individuals and families.
Late nineteenth-century garden writers across the nation agreed that flowers
taught concrete lessons. They described a process that operated on two levels, the power
of the work of the flowers themselves and the transformative act of gardening on the
mind and character. This process implicated every member of the family, and factored
critically in raising California and the nation’s next generation. Although sometimes the
procedural details of the refining power of the gardens remained fuzzy in the eyes of
those promoting growing flowers, they remained confident that this power was at work.
While Californians transformed the national rationale on the basic connections amongst
home, gardens, and society, their discussions of the details of the transformative powers
of flowers and gardening stayed firmly fixed in the national narrative. Botanist Charles
118
Sprague Sargent, the director of the Arnold Arboretum at Harvard University and editor
of Garden and Forest, proclaimed in June of 1888, “If there are sermons in stones, there
are more and clearer ones in the living works of nature.” Specifically, the summer
lessons of flowers included “the lesson of free, persistent and painstaking giving.”
236

These lessons of flowers were thought to be universal, and Americans drew on European
horticultural essayists to support their contentions. The March 23, 1892 edition of
Garden and Forest included a summary of an article by Pierre Joigneaux, a “learned
agriculturist” from France. Joigneaux traced a centuries-long love of flowers; even
savages “relished” flowers and used them as ornaments. Further, “flowers have played a
considerable part in the history of civilization.” They provided “standards” in colors and
form that influenced “the plastic arts.” He even went so far as to argue that “the earliest
suggestion of color to man” came from flowers, perhaps through roots and dyes.
237

These garden writers claimed they drew from centuries of anecdotal data on the
transformative power of flowers.
The lessons the flowers taught persisted over generations – their prolific
abundance illustrated generosity; their color taught the possibilities of the spectrum;
certain plants had traits common to certain types of people. The lessons of gardening and
the effect of tending flowers on the mind and character also had repetitive elements but
garden writers expressed the power of gardening as more context specific and varying by
gender and age. In the 1850s, Breck concluded that the garden was productive for the

236
“The Sermon of the Flowers,” Garden and Forest, Vol. I, No. 18 (Jun. 27, 1888), 205-
206, 205.
237
“Some Uses of Flowers,” Garden and Forest, Vol. V, No. 213 (Mar. 23, 1892), 133.
119
entire family, for the “high and the low, the rich and the poor” and especially the retired,
or for those in need of exercise or those suffering from a “sinking” or “feeble” mind.
238

“Nature, in her gay attire, unfolds a vast variety which is pleasing to the human mind,
and, consequently,” he concluded, “has a tendency to tranquilize the agitated passions,
and exhilarate the man, – nerve the imagination, and render all around him delightful.”
239

The act of gardening purportedly taught moral lessons, assisted in the development of
complex thinking, and fostered positive character traits such as patience. Also, through
outdoor recreation and activity, gardening positively affected mental health. The air and
exercise benefited those in the “autumn” of their lives. In 1870, California
Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine articulated, “It is rest-in-work and work-in-rest. It
is not idleness; it is not stagnation – and yet it is perfect quietude.”
240
In the 1880s,
Garden and Forest observed, “The growing interest in out-of-door life, and in means of
recreation that can be enjoyed in the open air, is one of the most encouraging tendencies
of our time.” Gardening and “the care of flowers and trees” constituted “sane and
wholesome occupations” that constantly increased in their attractiveness to “thoughtful
and cultivated people everywhere.” Gardens provided “relief from weariness and

238
Breck, The flower-garden, 14.
239
Joseph Breck, The Flower-Garden; or, Breck's Book of Flowers (Boston: John P.
Jewett & Company, 1851), 14.
240
“Gardening as a Recreation,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol. 1,
No. 9 (Jul., 1871) 283-4, 283, reprinted from The Cornhill Magazine.
120
‘nervous prostration.’” The editors even boasted that sometimes gardening and breathing
in the fresh air cured ailments more effectively than medicine.
241

While the general message of the transformative powers of flowers and gardening
altered little in the years from 1850 to the turn of the century, the language used to
express both the desirable virtues and the process increased in specificity by
incorporating social scientific language at the turn of the century. In October 1891,
Sargent’s periodical opined on the mental transformations connected to the act of
gardening in “The Effect of Gardening upon the Mind” and concluded that the act of
gardening “gratifies the thoughtful mind.” By forcing the gardener to wait for results,
gardening “inculcates patience in all its teachings – patience not only with processes, but
with results.” Sometimes even the most ardent gardeners faced disappointment;
sometimes even “the best of schemes fail of accomplishment; new enemies arise on every
hand, visible and hidden. To combat them requires perseverance, fertility in resource,
promptness in action.” Gardening transcended mere contemplation; gardening required
“Vigilance.” Drawing the explicit connection between gardening and “love of home,”
the garden functioned as a “school of the higher virtues, of patience, of tranquility, of
vigilance, of fortitude, of unselfishness and high serenity.”
242

Moving beyond the general discussions of the powers of gardens, garden writers
pinpointed specific benefits of gardening that varied by sex or gender and age. For the

241
“The Utility of What Makes Life Interesting,” Garden and Forest, Vol. II, No. 89
(Nov. 6, 1889), 529-530, 529.
242
“The Effect of Gardening upon the Mind,” Garden and Forest, Vol. IV, No. 192 (Oct.
28, 1891), 505-6, 505.
121
man of the house, Shinn in the late 1870s announced: “To cultivate flowers is no longer a
merely feminine pursuit; not to love them is a sad weakness and loss, instead of being
something manly.” The garden provided a haven for men – a place where they could
cover an acre of “naked earth” with tangible “bloom and foliage” – apart from the bustle
of materialist, urban life. Shinn described that men started to comprehend life’s brevity,
the frequency of failure, and the “too often embittered” nature of success. In sum,
“hidden stings” littered public life. But the development of the bloom and foliage of the
garden “endur[ed]” more than marble and blessed the man’s children’s children.
243

Months later, California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine featured
similar sentiments:
After all, there is nothing quite as liberal as a garden. If you run for office
your fellow-men unite in mudthrowing; and to lose brings misery, to win
brings envy and temptation. If you are in business, or manufactures, or
practice a profession, it is still the same struggle, the same endless grind.
The flow and beat of humanity is tiresome at times.
244

The difficulties of life weighed men down; in both politics and business, success and
defeat posed perilous ramifications. More than a mere distraction, tending to the garden
essentially maintained balance and a positive mood.
245
In the garden, men escaped the
issues of the day through positive toiling and let go of the “irritation and fret of the
business world.” The garden’s path to escape involved more than the act of cultivating
flowers. Belle Sumner Angier’s 1906 The Garden Book of California illustrated the

243
Shinn,, The Pacific Rural Handbook, 103.
244
“Gardens and People,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, 59.
245
Ibid. See also, “Flower Culture,” San Francisco Chronicle, Mar. 21, 1886, 9.
122
positive effects for men through simply enjoying the garden via after-dinner strolls.
246

Healthier than lifting weights, a “half-hour of vigorous exercise in the garden in the
morning” had the potential to “furnish a power to meet the business world more natural
and free, more sustaining than the philosophies of any new thought.” The businessman
could accomplish this through experiencing the “charm of the early day, the song of the
birds, [and] the delight in watching the growing things.”
247

Flowers promised (or at least floral rhetoric promised) to transform men. They
escaped, secured their legacies by creating living monuments of their toil and existence,
and demonstrated their manliness in the garden. They combated the disabling influences
of business and politics through mood-balancing work and vigorous strolls in the garden.
The benefits for men connected inextricably to their public lives.
In contrast, the dialogues surrounding women’s work in the garden were much
more intimately connected with the domestic. However, women also used gardens to
blur the lines between their public and private roles. Garden-specific manuals and home
manuals across the country recognized and encouraged the benefits of the garden for
women. Breck’s 1851 The Flower-Garden and Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher
Stowe’s 1869 The American Woman’s Home, educated readers of women’s particular
dispositions to flower gardening for a range of reasons. Women purportedly shared
fragility with flowers. The form of recreation and exercise provided by gardening was

246
Belle Sumner Angier, The Garden Book of California (San Francisco: Paul Elder and
Company, 1906), 3. See also Breck, The Flower-Garden; or, Breck's Book of Flowers,
15.
247
Angier, The Garden Book of California, 3-4.
123
both appropriate and satisfying. At the turn of the century, some even believed that
gardening prevented severe nervous prostration of “rich and fashionable women,”
helping society to avoid “the necessity for the multitude of sanitariums.”
248
In 1906,
Angier explained to her California home-gardener audience, “The hope of America is in
the homes of America. Whatever will lead to the betterment of our home life is to be
sought after. The garden of the world is California, and the ideal home may be made
here.” However, she admitted she was periodically “fearful” for she worried that female
“home-makers” failed to appreciate the “very large influence” the flower garden had on
the “life of the family and of the community.”
249
Despite decades of work by
Californians like Shinn and landscape gardener Frank A. Miller, Angier wanted to
trumpet the message to women. She stated vehemently: “I believe from the bottom of my
heart that there is no more powerful factor in the development of character than garden-
making, just as I believe that flowers are potent to refine the most degraded and cruel
natures, if they are properly used.”
250

Though this rhetoric of women in the garden was less common in California early
on because of the relative lack of women and fewer numbers of home gardens, by the late
1800s and through the turn of the century, Californians both repeated the arguments
found elsewhere across the United States and added their own, including raising the issue
of women’s superior innate skill. Professor of Agricultural Practice at the University of

248
Helena Rutherfurd Ely, A Woman’s Hardy Garden (New York: The Macmillan
Company, 1907, orig. pub. 1903), 205-6.
249
Angier, The Garden Book of California, 1.
250
Ibid. at 4.
124
California, E.J. Wickson, in his 1914 work, California Garden-Flowers, Shrubs, Trees
and Vines Being Mainly Suggestions for Working Amateurs, commented that men
frequently complained their wives succeeded in growing plants in the garden while they
failed. Wickson assured the men that women did not have “a magic touch”; women
simply ministered to the plants needs. He credited women’s success to “quicker
apprehension” and “patient” observations of details than their male counterparts.
251

The national discussions regarding the benefits to women and their natural gift for
nurturing were generally two-fold. First, floriculturists argued women resembled
flowers. For example, Breck concluded that “[t]he cultivation and study of flowers
appears more suited to females than to man. They resemble them in their fragility,
beauty, and perishable nature.” Breck, and others, used specific flowers to discuss the
connections between women and flowers. He noted that the Mimosa resembled “a pure-
minded and delicate woman.” This Mimosa Woman shrank “from the breath of
contamination” and “if assailed too rudely by the finger of scorn and reproach,” withered
and died from shock.”
252
Beautiful, fragile, and pure, women not only shared traits with
flowers but were taught to aspire to similar qualities and virtues.
Second, the act of tending the flowers held positive benefits for women;
publications instructed husbands to encourage their wives and daughters to garden and to
develop a taste for flowers, which would then in turn foster “enlightened” minds,

251
E.J. Wickson, California Garden-Flowers, Shrubs, Trees and Vines Being Mainly
Suggestions for Working Amateurs (San Francisco: Pacific Rural Press, 1915), 55.
252
Breck, The flower-garden, 15.
125
wisdom, “tender” hearts, “gentleness,” and happiness.
253
Floriculture provided beneficial
exercise to increase refinement and mental health. The Beechers focused on this aspect:
“Whenever the laws of body and mind are properly understood, it will be allowed that
every person needs some kind of recreation.” The recreation strengthened bodies,
“invigorated” minds, and rendered women’s daily duties more “cheerfully and
successfully performed.”
254
By this logic, the cultivation of blossoms and women
fostered the acquisition of ideal feminine qualities.
But the home garden was not simply a tool of traditional feminization. It could
also offer the first step towards empowerment and the vote. An 1913 editorial in House
Beautiful commented: “The woman who steps from her door step to plant a few handy
‘yarbs’ at its foot, has quite unwittingly taken her first unconscious step towards the
suffrage.”
255
From the 1850s through the turn of the century, apart from organizing
specifically for suffrage, temperance, or anti-slavery, women carved out spaces for public
social engagement in women’s clubs and floral missions. As early as August 1853, San
Francisco women formed the Ladies’ Protection and Relief Society. They recognized
that the city’s 18 churches, handful of orphanages, almshouse and “‘secret and racial
benevolent societies’” failed to adequately serve ill and dependent women and

253
Ibid. at 16.
254
Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, The American Woman’s Home (New
York: J.B. Ford & Co., 1869), 287. Specifically, the forms of recreation noted included
cultivating flowers, collecting shells, sewing, and practicing music.
255
As quoted in Thaïsa Way, “Early Social Agendas of Women in Landscape,”
Landscape Journal, Vol. 25, No. 2 (2006), 187-204, 187.
126
children.
256
By the early twentieth century, many of these organizations turned towards
encouraging Progressive “municipal housekeeping.” Mary Ritter Beard’s 1915 Women’s
Work in the Municipalities articulated explicit references to education via school gardens
and civic improvement via the encouragement of garden clubs.
257

In California, as elsewhere, many of these organizations focused on a range of
issues beyond the garden from literacy to the kindergarten movement – and flowers, if
not the central focus, functioned as symbols. The Century Club, founded in the summer
of 1888 in the Bay Area after a visit from Julia Ward Howe, drew together the wives and
daughters of prominent Bay Area men. While their stated objective promised to “secure
the advantages arising from a free interchange of thought and from cooperation among
women,” they chose the violet to represent their club and cause.
258
The women’s
tearoom at the Fairmont Hotel featured a garden theme.
259
Flowers decorated the 1896

256
Alice Firor Scott, Natural Allies: Women’s Associations in American History (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1991), 21-22.
257
Mary Ritter Beard, Women’s Work in the Municipalities (New York, 1915) as quoted
in Scott, Natural Allies, 185.
258
Mrs. J.C. (Jennie June Cunningham) Croly, The History of the Woman’s Club
Movement in America (New York: Henry G. Allen & Co., 1898), 249-252. See also,
Elizabeth Murray, “California’s Women’s Clubs,” Sunset Magazine, Vol. X, No. 4 (Feb.,
1903), 342-350; Mary I. Wood, The History of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs
for the First Twenty-One Years of Its Organization (New York: General Federation of
Women’s Clubs, 1912). Mrs. Robert J. Burdette – of Pasadena, president of California
Federation of Women’s Clubs, “California Women’s Clubs and Their Work,” Sunset
Magazine, Vol. VIII, No. 4 (Feb., 1902), 174-178. Rowena Beans, “Inasmuch. . .” The
One Hundred-Year History of the San Francisco Ladies’ Protection and Relief Society
1853-1953 (San Francisco, 1953).
259
Jessica Ellen Sewell, Women and the Everyday City: Public Space in San Francisco,
1890-1915 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 71 & 73.
127
suffrage headquarters, polling places, and in a public performance calling for suffrage in
California, the stage arose under a floral arbor.
260

Women drew from their gardens to transform homes of those who suffered from
illness or lacked the resources to plant their own blooms. In the 1870s, Boston and New
York founded floral missions. Moving from hospitals to homes for the elderly and the
insane then to those living in tenements, the floral missions’ blossoms promised
“fortitude and hope” for the ill, “soothing” to the insane, and a road to health and interest
in employment for those in the tenement house.
261
Floral missions touted a three-part
goal or understanding of a three-part “chain of blessings.”
262
First, the mission aimed to
bless those who picked the blossoms that the floral ambassadors delivered. Second, the
work sought to elevate “the busy, hopeful ones who pick [the buds] over, and chat as they
make bright little bouquets.” Third, the blooms cheered those who suffered under
poverty or illness, “the sick and feeble, in dismal garrets, or stretched on iron bedsteads in
monotonous wards of hospitals, shut out from the crisp scents of woods and fields.”
263

In 1879, the floral press charged Bay Area women to develop floral missions to
minister to the “children of crime and poverty” in the model of New York’s floral

260
Ibid. at 135, 159.
261
F.A. Benson, “The New York Flower Mission,” Garden and Forest, Vol. 1, No. 19,
(July 4, 1888), 220.
262
“The Ladies’ Floral Mission,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol.
X, No. 3 (Mar., 1880), 92-93.
263
Ibid.
128
missions.
264
They stressed that flowers were “needed all over this city, in thousands of
charities, and to brighten countless barren homes.” Those who delighted in gathering up
bouquets of “showy flowers” and strolled the city streets encountered “semi-clad, ragged,
and, if it must be confessed, unprepossessing urchins.”
265
By the next year, “young
ladies” from the churches of San Francisco could be found meeting at
218 Stockton Street on Thursday mornings. They distributed flowers grown from
Berkeley to San Jose to sick, poor, and the “needy.”
266
And they pleaded for
floral donations.
267

As with so much of the floricultural dialogue, women received clear instructions.
Visit the wharves or “the lower blocks of Howard and Folsom” or First Street. Appear
“good natured, and saunter along leisurely, holding your flowers in a genial way.”
Expect a child to approach and ask for one of the blooms.
268
“There should be some
ceremony about the transaction, an air of one conferring a marvelous favor, a moment
allowed for choice. Then, the ice being once broken, another and another will speak.”
Continue the stroll and “scatter flowers, one by one, in places which seldom see a flower.

264
“Flowers for the City Children,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine,
Vol. IX, No. 3, (Mar., 1879), 86-87, 86. See also, “Give Flowers Away,” California
Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol. IX, No. 7 (Jul., 1879), 219. See, F.A.
Benson, “The New York Flower Mission,” Garden and Forest, Vol. 1, No. 19, (July 4,
1888) 220, for additional details regarding the New York Flower Mission.
265
“Flowers for the City Children,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, 86.
266
“The Ladies’ Floral Mission,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, 92-
93.
267
Ibid.
268
“Flowers for the City Children,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, 86-
87.
129
There will be nothing rude or unpleasant. Nearly all the boys and girls will” offer a polite
thank you. Not “one will throw away their flowers, but they will brighten, that night, in
many a little room, as silent teachers of purity.”
269

Perceptions of the efficacy of the floral missions remained mixed. Californians
read about the “shining” buttercups the young lady from the flower mission brought to
Jimmy, an ailing child in “an upper room in a poor tenement-house.” “The dull languid
eye brightened, the tiny emaciated hand opened to receive them; too feeble for a spoken
word, the smile that flitted across the wee white face was eloquence enough. The fingers
closed tightly over the simple flowers that were like yellow sunshine to the little
sufferer.” The young woman returned for a second visit days later and Jimmy’s mother
reported her son gripped the flowers through all his waking hours. The buttercups “had
been more to him than doctors’ visits or prescriptions.” They coaxed a smile and
“lightened and brightened” “long weary hours of convalescence.”
270

In Mabel Craft Deering’s 1905 “Christmas at the Connors’: An Idyll of the San
Francisco Fruit and Flower Mission,” the heroine Miss Edith encountered such mixed
success. She received the assignment to deliver a basket of violets, food, and $10 for
coal to the Connor family. A “recent recruit of the fruit and flower mission,” Miss Edith
was “pretty, sympathetic and sweet, and most enthusiastic over the mission work.” Mrs.
Connor was graced with “an economical soul.” But the Connors led a difficult life. The
family was large, and Mr. Connor suffered from unemployment. Patrick, one of the

269
Ibid. at 87. See also, “The Sermon of the Flowers,” Garden and Forest, 205-206.
270
“Editorial Gleanings ‘Flowers for the Sick,’” California Horticulturalist and Flower
Magazine, reprinted from Harper’s Magazine, Vol. IV, No. 5 (May, 1874), 167.
130
Connor sons, was an invalid. Miss Edith caught the street car and accepted the assistance
of a “well-dressed, gray-haired man” who carried Miss Edith’s basket at the “transfer
point” - for “[w]omen of the Miss Edith type are seldom burden-bearers.” When Miss
Edith finally arrived at the Connors’ home after her trek across the city, she found the
home in disrepair but observed that it “smelled of soap and water” thanks to Mrs.
Connor’s industriousness. All the Connor children greeted her politely by name. The
first visit having gone well, Miss Edith planned to visit on Christmas Day. On the
blessed holiday, she faced travel delays – so “many flowers to put in water; so much
candy to unpack and sample.” By the time she arrived, the Connors were enjoying the
turkey; Miss Edith “wondered what had become of the English holly and violets she had
left – they were nowhere to be seen.” She also discovered the Connors had used the coal
money to purchase photographs of themselves, rather than heat their home. This troubled
Miss Edith. She feared the president of the mission would be upset at her; yet, she found
the Connors to be quite content with their choice.
271
Throughout the tale, Miss Edith
displayed her naïveté. And the Connors arguably wasted the flowers – as well as the
money for coal. But perhaps this is a story about the importance and value of pleasure.
The violets brought pleasure; the floral mission worker delivered the money for the
treasured family photograph (unbeknownst to the president of the mission). Miss Edith
delivered the pleasure of the floral garden, even if all if its intended refining virtues fell
short in practice.

271
Mabel Craft Deering, “Christmas at the Connors’: An Idyll of the San Francisco Fruit
and Flower Mission,” Sunset Magazine, Vol. 16, No. 2, (Dec., 1905), 192-195.
131
For women, the home garden purportedly housed their kindred spirits; like the
flowers, women lived in purity, grace, and fragility. Perhaps because they were kindred
spirits, floral rhetoric positioned women as possibly possessing superior floriculture skills
through their observations of flowers. Flowers provided tools for women to refine their
taste and morals as well as exercise their bodies through home gardening, safely behind
their domestic fences. But they gathered their flowers and opened their front gates; they
organized and harnessed their floral power to transform their own situations and society
more broadly.
Flowers and gardening promised to transform adult men and women. But
children were seen as even more malleable than their grown-up counterparts. The highest
level of rhetoric on the powers of gardening flowers aimed at parents rearing children and
more directly at children old enough to read. The benefits described seemed endless:
children who gardened in a home environment developed a particular ethic. In the most
general sense, gardening taught patience,
272
responsibility, and “thoroughness.”
273

Children learned fiscal responsibility; buying plants was a “better use” of their pocket
money than buying candy – “A new plant for their garden, or another paper of seeds, will
have such attractions that they will learn how much more may be accomplished by a wise
than by a foolish use of money.”
274
Further, the home garden taught them “legendry and

272
A New Contributor, “Gardens for Children,” California Horticulturalist and Floral
Magazine, Vol. IX, No. 5 (May, 1879), 133-134, 134.
273
Angier, The Garden Book of California, 5 & 8. See also, Shinn, The Pacific Rural
Handbook, 113.
274
A New Contributor, “Gardens for Children,” 134.
132
literature” and let their imaginations wander to create their own stories.
275
Gardening
was even viewed as more capable of building “character” in children than reading
books.
276
From the 1870s through the turn of the century, the dialogues regarding the
importance of home gardening for the young increased in volume and specificity and
moved out from the home to schools.
Garden writers throughout the country investigated the influence of gardening in a
young child’s development. The Beecher sisters connected the importance of children’s
work in the garden with two beneficial types of lessons. First, by sharing what they grew
in their gardens, children taught charity in service of those of lesser fortune by their very
examples. Their actions cultivated “[b]enevolent and social feelings” when they shared
the flowers they grew, as well as the roots and seeds used by those who could not afford
to purchase their own. This action promised to trigger a chain reaction; “by giving seeds
or slips or roots to a washerwoman, or a farmer’s boy, thus inciting them to love and
cultivate fruits and flowers, awakens a new and refining source of enjoying in minds
which have few resources more elevated than mere physical enjoyments.” The Beechers
explicitly connected this charity to Christian principles and duties; Christ commissioned
them to serve the poor. Children needed to be instructed to “dispense their little treasures
not alone to companions and friends, who will probably return similar favors; but to those
who have no means of making any return.” The desired nationwide conclusion if the
“rich” extended to the poor “the cheap and simple enjoyment of fruits and flowers,”

275
Angier, The Garden Book of California, 9.
276
Ibid. at 4.
133
would be that the United States would soon literally bloom like a rose.
277
The Beechers
pinpointed that in tending flowers, which the children could then enjoy, they also
gathered the less obviously attractive parts of the plants – the roots and seeds. The
children learned aspects of botany, the value of a multitude of plant parts, and the power
of sharing without hope of an immediate return of the gift – both a moral commission by
Jesus Christ and essential to creating a better society.
Further, children learned the power of observation – particularly through raising
flowers, as opposed to fruits or vegetables. In 1874, California Horticulturalist and
Floral Magazine reprinted “Flower Gardens for Children,” which argued that the
cultivation of flowers by children was more “desirable” in many ways than their
cultivation of fruits or vegetables because flowers appealed “solely to the moral sense”
for they had no obvious other use, unlike tasty fruits. Therefore the flowers “facilitate[d]
the inculcation of generous habits.” And the “most valuable” of these habits or lessons
was “the art of observing.” Children’s natural admiration of flowers aided this process.
However, “so varied, so delicate, so minute, and yet so unerring are the operations of
Nature,” even when children engaged in the “closest study” it was possible to “fail to
fathom her mysteries.” But that was acceptable, even expected. Revealing the “truth” of
nature was only one of the possible gifts of gardening; the rich and surprising rewards of

277
Beecher and Stowe, The American Woman’s Home, 295-6.
134
the act of studying stimulated young minds. And the “interest” in natural objects was
seen to prove unending joy for one’s entire life.
278

While many expressed their opinions as to the effect of gardening on children in
gender neutral terms, others, particularly in their discussions of the tending of flowers,
provided rationales by gender. In 1906, though Angier concluded that the “child-training
theory” of the garden applied equally to boys and girls, she pinpointed two particular
benefits for boys. First, and most straightforward, through gardening, the son learned
“tenacity of purpose” which would benefit him in his adult business life.
279
Second,
through the garden, boys learned “the value of life” and a particular form of tenderness
that was at the same time feminine, desirable, and counter-cultural. “Once in a while we
hear it said of a man: ‘He is as tender and thoughtful as a woman,’” she described. But
she lamented that as he matured, the boy generally lacked lessons in tenderness and
thoughtfulness. “On the contrary, he hears: ‘Stand up for yourself,’ ‘Be manly,’ ‘Don’t
let yourself be imposed upon.’” While she judged them “all good maxims” when
“properly applied,” she feared they were “apt to be carried to an extreme by the headlong,
growing youth, influenced by the cold materialism of the age.” Flowers provided the
necessary remedy. She imagined a world where tending flowers tended civilization.
The constant care of flowers, the gentle stirring of the soil, lest he destroy
the young and tender roots, the gentle sprinkling to cleanse the dust from
choking leaves, the moving and transplanting of each to its own suitable
and best adapted place for a home, will conduce largely to a thoughtful

278
“Flower Gardens for Children,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol.
IV, No. 2 (Feb., 1874), 63-64, reprinted from Home and School. The cultivation of fruits
and vegetables was seen as quite beneficial to more mature children.
279
Angier, The Garden Book of California, 7.
135
and tender handling of larger issues in the constantly uprising emergencies
of domestic life.
280

Angier was confident that the young son would learn the lessons of strength, manliness
and materialism in his daily interactions with others. However, the garden offered an
additional set of lessons to balance out the dominant cultural teachings. The tending of
the garden flowers offered a dress rehearsal or even a training ground for the boy’s future
handling of his own family and the trials of their life together. He learned gentleness,
attention to caring for those weaker than himself, and that each individual member of his
family might need to be treated differently – transplanted into different circumstances
if necessary.
The virtually universal praise of children growing flowers became slightly more
complicated when translated into action; garden-writers disagreed at times as to the
desired level of parental or adult involvement in children’s gardens. An 1874 article,
“Gardening for Children,” decried the lack of comprehensive garden training for children
and further cautioned against having children perform specific tasks in the garden without
a complete explanation as to why each task was necessary. In order to reap the full
benefits, the young gardener needed guidance to grasp the relationship amongst actions,
memories, and future development. Acts of childhood fixed in the memory throughout
the child’s life. The influence of these acts could be “either good or bad, like the act
itself.” It was critically important for parents to use the acts of childhood to teach
children “knowledge which shall be useful to them in future years.”

Yet, the author

280
Ibid. at 6-7.
136
observed that many boys hoed or dug and no parent followed along to explain “any
motive for the act.” This resulted in a chain of negative consequences. First, the boy’s
interest in gardening stalled at the level of “mere manipulation of the soil.” Second,
because his interest stalled, he not only missed out on the “mental recreation and. .
.pleasure” of gardening, but he also associated gardening with “the worst kind of
drudgery.” This entire travesty was so easily avoided; “If he was told why the soil was
stirred and its effect, there would be something more than the usual incentive for work,
and the lesson would be remembered.” Therefore, children “should never be allowed to
do any work without first knowing its object; and the parent that is capable of explaining
this clearly will not be very likely to permit an improper act.”
281
Prof. E.W. Hilgard of
the University of California added five years later, tell the child that plants are “useful”
and “at once he asks the question, which part of it? how? and where? and why? and the
answers received will come up in his mind afterwards, every time that the plant is
sighted, and will lead to more questions and fresh interest.”
282

In contrast, in May 1879, a “New Contributor” cautioned in “Gardens for
Children” that while parents were to be available to answer questions or witness
triumphs, it was laudable that children wished to garden without parental interference.
The contributor recognized a natural “sympathy” and “fellowship” between children and
gardens. He directed parents to give the children a place (a small plot or bed was

281
“Gardening for Children,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol. IV,
No. 4 (Apr., 1874), 112-113. The article suggested that children begin with annuals
because the results require little patience.
282
Prof. E.W. Hilgard, University of California, “Botanical Gardens,” California
Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol. IX, No. 6, (Jun., 1879), 161-163, 163.
137
sufficient) and then to let them plant “what pleases them best.” “I heard of a little girl
who moved her garden from the place first taken at the foot, to the top of a hill, and
carried water up the hill all summer,” the author praised, “simply to avoid being advised
about it.” For older children, additional freedoms were possible; parents could give their
children a seed catalogue and tell them how much they were permitted to spend.
However, parents were urged to give advice if the child requested it. Although the writer
encouraged giving the children this space to create their own garden, the added
instruction reminded the parent that, “when your little girl or boy comes running to tell
you that there is a flower in their garden, don’t be too busy or too tired to go with them
and sympathize in their pleasure.”
283

Parents guided children towards civility and adult productivity though garden
lessons. But the lessons of the home garden for children extended to school gardens as
well. Parents policed teachers; for some children the lessons from the school garden
reinforced the morals of the home garden.
284
For others, the process reversed. And for
still others, the school garden provided lessons similar to a home garden inaccessible to
the child’s family.
During recess in 1879, a child tended the wall-flowers, “the chief product of his
real estate,” within the bricked-in school garden. He and his classmates toiled without
supervision. His friend grew four-o’clocks. The journalist who visited deemed the

283
A New Contributor, “Gardens for Children,” California Horticulturalist and Floral
Magazine, 133-134.
284
Letter to the Editor regarding “Gardening in Schools” by L., California
Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol. IX, No. 7 (Jul., 1879), 209, warning parents
not to rely too heavily on teachers.
138
children’s work a success; “Children who make their own gardens, if left in anywise to
their own resources, are apt to reveal their own selves most positively.” Gardens allowed
teachers to study child development and the journalist urged, “this school of gardens must
be a delightful and acknowledged success.”
285

School garden advocates aimed to “train the moral faculties of children by giving
them flowers and plants to pet and love.” The gardens encouraged the youth “to develop
their physical health by exercise in the light outdoor labors of the garden.” The children
experimented with and learned “about the important textile, economic, and medicinal
plants.” Further, they studied “destructive and beneficial insects.” All together, the
children acquired the skills to “make a practical, daily use of plaints, soil, seeds and skill,
to teach endlessly about the earth and its productions.”
286
School children planted and
beautified their space in after school extension programs by the early
twentieth century.
287

Public and private experts created curricular resources for teachers.
288
L.C.
Corbett, writing for the Department of Agriculture in 1904, encouraged lessons teaching

285
“Flowers in the Schoolyard,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol.
IX, No. 6, (Jun., 1879), 183-184, 183.
286
“California School Gardens,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol.
IX, No. 10, (Oct., 1879), 309-311, 310. See also, “Elementary Botany for Young
People,” Garden and Forest, Vol. 3, No. 149, (Dec. 31, 1890), 629; “School Gardens and
School Grounds,” Garden and Forest, Vol. 10, No. 480 (May 5, 1897), 171-172.
287
Victor O’Brien, “School Extension as Begun in San Francisco,” Sunset Magazine,
Vol. X, No. 1, (Nov., 1902), 76-78, 77.
288
“Recent Publications. A Few Familiar Flowers: How to Love Them at Home or in
School. By Margaret Warner Morley. Boston: Ginn & Co.,” Garden and Forest, Vol. 10,
No. 495 (Aug. 18, 1897), 327. L.C. Corbett, Department of Agriculture, “The School
139
children to prepare soil and understand the importance of crop rotation. Marigolds,
petunias, nasturtium and other blooms joined with tomatoes, beets, and carrots as
suggested experimental plants.
289
By 1920, the Department of the Interior created region-
specific guides to help schools articulate the theories supporting school gardening, design
lesson plans, and cultivate plants appropriate for their climate. Through their garden
work, they would “build the superstructure of literature, art, biology. . .for life is a
continual reaction with nature and her forces and the interpretation of the same.” “It is a
short step from the garden pest to the problem of the community, of the State, in
controlling insect pests.”
290

A flower taught gracefulness by example; gardening flowers created more
effective businessmen, demure wives or future voters, and tender-minded, business-ready
sons capable of addressing society’s ills. The mandate was clear. Grow flowers as a part
of one’s home and grow a better future.
____________________________________

When California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine first began in 1870, its
editors were certain that flowers influenced people and that the cultivation of flowers

Garden,” United States Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Plant Industry,
Horticultural Investigations, Feb. 1904. See also, L.C. Corbett, Department of
Agriculture, “The School Garden,” United States Department of Agriculture, Bureau of
Plant Industry, Horticultural Investigations, Jan. 1905.
289
Ibid.
290
Department of the Interior, “A Manual of School-Supervised Gardening for the
Western States,” (1920), 36.
140
would deliver “faith and true reverence and love” that could counter any water shortage
in the state or droughts of the human heart.
291

The state of civilization itself rested with a blossom. From statehood through the
first decade of the twentieth century, T.E., Shinn, Wickson, Angier, McLaren and others
participated in a continuous California-building project that drew on national dialogues of
the virtues of home gardening and reworked them to create California specific advice,
plans, and arguments about the possibilities of floriculture and the state. Given the
largely male demographics of pre-statehood migration, when the home garden process
began, there were relatively few families, homes, and gardens. Yet by 1915, not only
could a California gardener read region-specific advice or purchase seeds from Chinese
blooms, pre-tested to grow in California, he could take a class through the University of
California to help him devise a plan to lay out his grounds.
As part of creating homes to secure the soul of California and to reform
individuals, Californians gardened and they wrote about gardening. They boasted that
they could identify where residents migrated or emigrated from the planting of sweet
peas versus marigolds. They championed the value of personal labor by praising flowers
grown personally out in the open over those cultivated in a greenhouse by a hired hand.
They drew on a national rhetoric, and they tailored it to fit their own concerns. They
practiced and experimented and passed along those lessons to others. They rethought
design plans, reworked planting schedules, and reexamined the components of their soil.
These early Californians sought to create homes based on wider Euro-American norms

291
“A Talk About Flowers,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, 6.
141
but did this by creating garden spaces that they articulated as new, international in scope,
and different from East Coast flowerbeds or English plots. In seeking to understand
California, they realized that they needed to draw on gardening advice from around the
world, as well as the world’s seeds and plants to test the state’s limits.
142
Chapter 4

From Campers to Home-builders:
Confidently Crafting Garden Advice for California’s Ecology

Deep into the winter of 1893, San Francisco blossomed. Dr. Charles B.
Brigham’s wild garden in his home on Broadway just past Webster exploded in a New
England or Pennsylvania style with forget-me-nots, primroses, mosses, and rough stones.
Smilax and vases of orchids draped his colonial pedestals and statues.
292
Mary
Frauenholtz on Chestnut Street boasted of the finest azaleas and camellias in the city.
Mrs. L.O. Hodgkins’ garden specialized in “single rarities” on Sacramento Street
opposite the turntable at the end of the cable car line. Canna with “pale lemon-colored
blossoms, scented like the Cape jasmine” and geraniums graced her home.
293

While E.J. Wickson, Charles Shinn, and others largely adopted the national
narrative of the transformative power of floriculture, they could not merely mirror eastern
gardening manual techniques when it came to the seeds and soil of cultivating these home
gardens. A primary barrier to success was an information gap. English men and women
and those gardening in the eastern portions of the United States wrote the majority of
garden manuals in the nineteenth century. By the 1870s and 1880s, gardeners repeatedly
cried out for professional assistance in understanding growing in California. In the
1870s, California publications repeatedly reflected frustration at the lack of California

292
“Ovr [sic] San Francisco Conservatories,” San Francisco Chronicle, Jan. 29, 1893, 4.
293
Ibid. See also, “Home Gardening in San Francisco,” San Francisco Chronicle, Oct.
20, 1898, 8; James F. Watkins, “San Francisco,” Overland Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 1 (Jan.,
1870), 9-23, 12; Sarah Williamson, “Roof Gardens in California,” Sunset Magazine, Vol.
XIII, No. 5 (Sep., 1904), 472-473.
143
specific information, delays in the pace of public excitement for flowers, and the lack of
variety of flowers Californians chose to grow. Nurserymen and seedsmen fostered much
of this dialogue. In addition to their rhetorical convictions, they also sought to profit
from increases in home gardening. R.J. Trumbull argued that Californians needed more
knowledge on the possibilities for growing in California specifically since he had found
that the information in national seed catalogues proved unreliable.
294
These Californians
confidently reworked gardening advice, both to fit their own climate and soil and to argue
that “local” in California captured an international range of plants and developed styles
that defined California as a land of homes.

________________________

Although Californians expressed dismay at the lack of clarity for gardening in the
state, even the national advice left plenty of room for confusion. Joseph Breck sold seeds
and flowers and had edited the New England Farmer and the Horticultural Register when
he published the first edition of his manual for beginning gardeners, The Flower-Garden
in 1851. Gardening involved attention to myriad details, and advice was both available
and forthcoming. He picked out the particular issues to address based on his experience
as well as his nursery clients’ questions, focusing on those that he found he did not

294
R.J. Trumbull, “The Kind of Knowledge Needed For California Garden,” California
Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol. 10, No. 11/12 (Nov.-Dec., 1880), 321-322.
See also, Frank A. Miller, “More Variety in Our Flower Gardens,” California
Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol. III, No. 11 (Nov., 1873), 325-327, 325,
conveying his frustration.
144
always have time to answer completely while going about his daily work. He spent 20
years writing his manual, drawing on his own observations, as well as gardening advice
and manuals prepared by famed English gardener John Claudius Loudon, American
landscape architect Andrew Jackson Downing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, T.W. Harris, as
well as numerous periodicals from across America and England. He priced the book
“low” – so that it would be within the “reach of almost every person.”
295
Like Breck, Ida
D. Bennett authored The Flower Garden for amateur gardeners, covering gardening
basics, with particular advice for women. By the early twentieth century, though,
gardening advice proliferated to the degree that Bennett warned against taking it all in
and blindly acting without thoughtful intention.
296

Separated by fifty years, these two publications of roughly the same name formed
part of a constant dialogue of seedsmen, nurserymen, landscape gardeners and architects,
and amateur gardeners regarding the how-to details of flower gardening throughout the
United States. Included with these instructions were arguments as to the purposes and
hopes of home flower gardening that revealed core values and expectations. Near the
turn of the century, the availability, popularity, and variety of publications in general and
on gardening specifically expanded greatly. The options ranged from individually
published books, such as John McLaren’s Gardening in California Landscape and

295
Joseph Breck, The flower-garden; or, Breck's book of flowers: in which are described
all the various hardy herbaceous perennials, annuals, shrubby plants, and evergreen
trees, desirable for ornamental purposes, with directions for their cultivation (New York:
A.O, Moore, 1858, orig. pub. 1851), iii-v.
296
Ida D. Bennett, The Flower Garden: A Manual for the Amateur Gardener (New York:
Doubleday, Page & Company, 1910, orig. pub. 1903), 253-4.
145
Flower and Angier’s The Garden Book of California, to garden-specific periodicals from
California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine to more general publications such as
Ladies Home Journal and Sunset Magazine. Sunset even featured a monthly California
gardening calendar, beginning in 1905, prepared by Wickson.
297
These publications
offered suggestions, fostered discussion, and shaped taste on regional and
national levels.
298

Seed catalogues, periodicals, and books worked in unison, mutually reinforcing
both the necessity of their existence and the specific advice contained within. As such,
they must be examined together. For example, in 1909, Sunset Magazine reviewed
McLaren’s influential Gardening in California – Landscape and Flower, noting that it
was a bestseller on “western bookshelves” that spring. By applying the knowledge
contained within McLaren’s book, Sunset promised, “even the veriest tyro can achieve
results which would make the laborers who call themselves gardeners wonder if there is
anything in their profession beyond rooting up weeds and planting red geraniums
everywhere.” Praising it specifically because it focused on the West and for its

297
Virginia Tuttle Clayton, “Wild Gardening and the Popular American Magazine, 1890-
1918,” in Nature and Ideology: Natural Garden Design in the Twentieth Century, ed.
Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and
Collection, 1997) 130-154, 131. See also, Virginia Tuttle Clayton, “Introduction,” in
Virginia Tuttle Clayton, ed., The Once & Future Gardener: Garden Writing from the
Golden Age of Magazines, 1900-1940 (Boston: David R. Godine, 2000) xi-xxxvi, xiii.
E.J. Wickson, “California’s Garden Calendar,” Sunset Magazine, Vol. XIV, No. 4 (Feb.,
1905), 414-415.
298
Bennett, The Flower Garden, 257.
146
organization as a calendar, Sunset predicted that the book should be “popular and
veritable ‘science and health’ for men and women of all creeds.”
299

In consulting seed catalogues, the gardener sometimes found gardening advice as
well. Hybrid catalogues that involved sections drawing from gardening advice manuals
and other sections with flowers and their prices offered gardeners helpful specifics.
Charles Russell Orcutt’s Flowers in California from the 1890s is one such work that
included general California gardening tips and then Southern California specific ones.
He began with a discussion of the importance of flowerbeds and recommended annuals
because he promised that due to the mild climate of California, annuals retained their
appeals all year round. However, this might tempt one to keep the same plants year after
year, which Orcutt decried as a mistake (perhaps due in part to his desire to earn a living).
He suggested replacing the annuals from time to time and added that the best for beds
were yellow feverfew, low-growing pink oxalis, lobelia, and silver thyme for San
Franciscans, all of which he offered for sale.
300
Orcutt’s catalogue featured a full range
of plants from across the world: roses, chrysanthemums, geraniums, and violets as well as
the novelties of 1892 and imports from the Orient. He also included materials from
George Ellwanger’s The Garden Story, the work of a famed horticulturist and co-founder
of the Ellwanger and Barry Nursery in Rochester, New York. Directly reprinting
Ellwanger’s text, Orcutt included nuggets of advice such as, “Only garden the space you
can maintain order in.” Do not forget to plant “thickly.” “Let there be harmony and

299
“The Gospel of the Garden,” Sunset Magazine, Vol. XXII, No. 4 (Apr., 1909), 439.
300
Charles Russell Orcutt, Flowers in California (1893?), 3-4.
147
beauty of color. Magenta in any form is a discord that should never jar.” Do not overlook
white. And, of course, “Show me a well ordered garden and I will show you a
genial home.”
301

In criticizing the lack of California-specific advice, many provided concrete ideas
for improvement and later celebrated changes in the state of floriculture over time.
F.A. Miller provided ideas to begin to remedy the situation, recommending fuchsias and
pelargonium for local gardens, and purportedly better varieties of verbenas.
302
And year-
by-year, Miller’s publications reflected improvement. The summer of 1879 blossomed
with “a distinct, and very gratifying impression of improvement, as a whole, in the
country gardens. More flower gardens there are now, most certainly, than there were two
or three years ago.” The declaration was clear:
We are not any longer a State of campers; we are home-builders; we mean
to stay here, and eat the fruit of our own orchards, and pick the roses of
our own gardens. This is certainly, a very hopeful state of affairs, [which]
to encourage is our duty and delight.
303

Gardeners such as McLaren satisfied some of those cries for information as well. In the
introduction to his 1908 work, McLaren explained that California’s climate and seasons
differed such that the state promised greater possibilities for the cultivation of flowers

301
Ibid. at 4, 6-19, 21-23.
302
Frank A. Miller, “More Variety in Our Flower Gardens,” California Horticulturalist
and Floral Magazine, Vol. IV, No. 1 (Jan., 1874), 9-10, 9.
303
“The Growth of Horticulture,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol.
IX, No. 7 (Jul., 1879), 220.
148
than Europe and any other part of the United States.
304
California and western-specific
works offered regional, detailed alterations to plans and planting schedules and continued
the arguments regarding the international possibilities for California’s garden culture.
In the introduction to the first issue of California Horticulturalist and Floral
Magazine, the editors repeated the common argument that California’s soil and climate
were different from the rest of the country and varied within the state. Because of this
difference, Californians needed to “deviate from old established rules, and frame a
system of our own.” Working together to share experimentation and results through
publication proved one of the keys to future successes.
305
At the same time that they
stressed the importance of local information, within their first year, they reprinted how-to
articles from publications from foreign places such as Australia, Japan, and England and
a range of domestic locales from Chicago to Rochester. The September 1872 issue
included articles, notices and advertisements from Australia and thirteen states from
Colorado to Maine to South Carolina.
306
The issue also featured notes regarding more

304
John McLaren, Gardening in California Landscape and Flower (San Francisco: A.M.
Robertson, 1909), v.
305
“Introduction,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol. I, No. 1 (Nov.,
1870), 1-2.
306
California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol. II, No. 10 (Sep., 1872). The
articles and notes included: “Horticulture” from Melbourne Times (292-294); “The
Principle of Irrigation” from a meeting of the Colorado Farmers’ Club, reprinted from
Gardener’s Monthly (311-313); Robert E.C. Stearns, “On the Economic Value of Certain
Australian Forest Trees and their Cultivation in California” (313-315); “The Planting of
Trees on Private Property” from the Report of the Royal Commission of Victoria,
Australia (315-316), “The Brazil Nut” from Moore’s Rural New Yorker (316-317); notes
regarding upcoming fairs: Kansas City Industrial Exposition and Agricultural Fair; South
Carolina Agricultural and Mechanical Society Fourth Annual Fair; publications on the
“Exchange Table” to turn to if additional information was needed: The Western Planter
149
than 15 seed catalogs largely from the north Atlantic and Illinois.
307
Paradoxically,
harnessing local knowledge meant capturing the day-to-day experiences of gardeners
across the state and also signified abandoning the reliance on solely United States and
western European gardening rules to include those from the Far East and Australia.
Overall, the publications with garden advice, both nationally and regionally, read
like formulaic predictions for floricultural success, with chapters on drawing the design
plan for the garden, preparing the soil, procuring quality seeds, scheduling planting,
analyzing the desirability of particular plants, and maintaining or pruning plants.
308

Many included appendices, frequently as lengthy as the original texts, commonly

(Kansas City, Missouri), The Science of Health (New York), For Everybody (Buffalo,
New York), The Western Ruralist (St. Louis, Missouri), Western Agriculturist (Quincy,
Illinois), Whitaker’s Milwaukee Monthly, The Southern Agriculturist (Louisville,
Kentucky), The North American Bee Journal (Kentucky), Turf, Field, and Farm (New
York), American Working People (Pittsburgh), The Ladies’ Floral Cabinet and Pictorial
Home Companion (New York), (318).
307
Ibid., Wholesale Catalogue of Trees, Plants, etc. (Mahlon Moon, Morrisville,
Pennsylvania); Wholesale Price List (Bryant’s Nurseries, Princeton, Illinois); Semi-
Annual Trade List (Heike’s Nurseries, Dayton, Ohio); Gould Bros. (Rochester, New
York); Catalogue (James King, New Haven, Connecticut); Vick’s Illustrated Catalogue
of Hardy Bulbs (James Vick, Rochester); Briggs Bros. (Rochester); Hooper, Brother &
Thomas (Cherry Hill Nurseries, Westchester, Pennsylvania); Trade List (A & J
Hammond, Geneva, New York); Wholesale Catalogue of the Mount Hope Nurseries
(Rochester, New York); Wholesale Trade List of Fruit and Ornamental Trees by Sears,
Henry & Co. (Geneva, New York); Catalogue of Choice Flower and Vegetable Seeds
(Henry A. Dreer, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania); Germantown Nurseries (Thomas Meehan,
Philadelphia); Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue of Bulbous Flower Roots (Ellwanger
& Barry, Mount Hope Nurseries, Rochester); Descriptive Catalogue of Plants for the
Greenhouse, Conservatory and open ground (Ellwanger & Barry, Mount Hope
Nurseries, Rochester); Descriptive Catalogue of Ornamental Trees, Shrubs, Roses and
Flowering Plants (Ellwanger & Barry, Mount Hope Nurseries, Rochester), (318-319).

308
For detailed planting schedules, see Belle Sumner Angier, The Garden Book of
California (San Francisco: Paul Elder and Company, 1906).
150
organized by plant to focus on the details of raising each varietal. Publications criticized
others, in the plants chosen, designs set out, or even for making gardening seem too easy.
For example, Helen Albee advised, “The impression made by certain garden books upon
the mind of a reader is that in America a successful garden springs from the soil much as
Minerva did from the head of Jupiter.” The books omitted “any mention of mistakes”
even if individuals languished under “seasons of despair” over their roses or lilies.
309
For
Albee and many others, gardening brought joy but also more complicated emotions,
including despair and frustration. She urged others to abandon humiliation because the
fault was less of their own making than in omissions in the literature leading the
gardeners to unrealistic expectations.
Much of the advice targeted women who presumably had the resources necessary
to purchase specialized tools, to hire gardeners for the labor that was seen as unfit for
such women, and to set aside the leisure time required to devote to the undertaking.
310

Many began with a general statement that the manual was for amateurs and set about
justifying the concept of a garden manual for women in a variety of manners. One of the
most famous and respected manuals for women was Englishwoman Jane Loudon’s
Gardening for Ladies; and Companion to the Flower-Garden. American landscape
architect Downing edited multiple editions of Loudon’s work for gardeners in the United
States. When Loudon first married, she knew nothing of gardening and was ashamed of

309
Helen R. Albee, Hardy Plants for Cottages and Gardens (New York: Henry Holt and
Company, 1910), 1.
310
Mrs. S.O. (Daisy Eyebright) Johnson, Every Woman Her Own Flower Gardener, A
Handy Manual of Flower Gardening of Ladies (New York: Henry T. Williams, 1874), 6.
151
her ignorance. Her husband taught her the basics, and she devoted time to observing and
perfecting her gardens year after year. She explained in her preface that therefore, she
was the perfect author for amateurs because she knew what they wanted to know because
in the not so distant past, she was one of them.
311
In the 1870s, Daisy Eyebright Johnson
offered a different justification; American women spent too much time indoors. They did
so at the peril of their “health and spirits.” “They cultivate neuralgia, dyspepsia, and all
their attendant ills – rather than the beautiful and glorious flowers which God has
scattered so abundantly all over the world.” Johnson sought to coax these women into
the sunshine as a preventive and curative for bodies and minds.
312
In 1910, Albee spun
her manual as a much-needed path out of the confusion; “The average woman seldom
knows what she wants, and she has neither an unlimited purse nor a corps of trained
assistants at her command.” She is “bewildered by the array of scientific names in the
catalogues” – so she ends up with things she is already familiar with – “almost invariably.
. .a few nasturtiums, marigolds, zinnias. . .”
313
For Albee, Bennett and others, it was
necessary for women to turn to publications to master the basics.
Some of these works offered women specific tips not just about seeds and flowers
but also about tools and attire. Johnson suggested women work in the garden with a
carpet or cushion to protect their knees. Soil and dirt washed easily from dark, chintz

311
Mrs. Jane Loudon, Gardening for Ladies; and Companion to the Flower-Garden, ed.
A.J. Downing for US (New York: Wiley & Halsted, second American Edition from the
third London Edition, 1857), ix.
312
Johnson, Every Woman Her Own Flower Gardener, A Handy Manual of Flower
Gardening of Ladies, 6.
313
Albee, Hardy Plants for Cottages and Gardens, 2.
152
dresses; a shade hat and kid gloves provided needed protection.
314
Bennett advised
potential gardeners to wear the right clothing: “Skirts of blue denim, made Princess style,
and ankle length, with comfortable shirt-waists – denim for cool days, calico for warm –
make a thoroughly comfortable outfit.”
315
Further, manuals guided women to keep
detailed notes, scrapbooks, or later photographs of their gardens in order to aid in the
creation of more beautiful spaces in the future and to assist those less seasoned. “If a
scrap-book be kept, in which everything of interest pertaining to the garden can be pasted
or written, it will be found a great help.”
316

For women and men following the manuals throughout this period, the steps to a
respectable garden remained fairly standard – from plans, to soil, to seeds and plants and
then tips on garden up-keep. The details shifted over time and by region, creating
increased opportunities for success and frustrating contradictions. The first step to
having a successful garden involved creating a plan – planning was the single most
important element and comprised significant portions of the garden manuals. The plan
took into account the total amount of space to be gardened, taste, “neatness,”
317

topography and lighting. Walkways, waterways, drainage, beds, areas for benches were

314
Johnson, Every Woman Her Own Flower Gardener, A Handy Manual of Flower
Gardening of Ladies, 7-8.
315
Bennett, The Flower Garden, 257.
316
Helena Rutherfurd Ely, A Woman’s Hardy Garden (New York: The Macmillan
Company, 1907, orig. pub. 1903), 198. See also, Charles Shinn, “Concerning a
Satisfactory Flower Garden,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol. VIII,
No. 12 (Dec., 1878) 369.
317
Breck, The flower-garden,18.
153
set out.
318
Some suggestions seemed straightforward and required little thought on the
part of the amateur gardener, such as “A south slope is the ideal situation for a garden.”
319

But because the plan was for artistic purposes as well as logistical, the amateur gardener
had to consider creative elements as well.
320
As Liberty Hyde Bailey reminded readers,
“Every yard should be a picture.”
321
Joseph Breck urged those creating a plan to think
about what the garden would look like from the inside of the home as its owner peered
out.
322
E.J. Wickson reminded would-be gardeners to make their plans in pencil so they
could change them easily and that “cross-ruled” paper could be of assistance, although
artists would disapprove.
323
By the first few decades of the twentieth century, California
gardens were in full development and the manuals were hyper-detailed. Eugene O.
Murmann’s 1914 California Gardens: How to Plan and Beautify the City Lot, Suburban
Grounds and Country Estate included specifications on creating and perfecting

over 20
different types of gardens from four separate types of Japanese gardens, to Alpine and

318
Frank A. Miller, “How to Make a Garden.” California Horticulturalist and Floral
Magazine Vol. III, No. 5 (May, 1873), 149-151, 149, regarding the importance of
walkways and drainage.
319
Bennett, The Flower Garden, 3.
320
For a discussion of walkways, see Breck, The flower-garden, 20-22.
321
Liberty Hyde Bailey, Garden-Making: Suggestions for the Utilizing of Home Grounds
(New York: The Macmillan Company, 1913, orig. pub. 1898), 121.
322
Breck, The flower-garden,18.
323
E.J. Wickson, California Garden-Flowers, Shrubs, Trees and Vines Being Mainly
Suggestions for Working Amateurs (San Francisco: Pacific Rural Press, 1915), 46-47.
154
Bog varieties, to gardens with specialized color schemes.
324
By 1915, the University of
California offered free correspondence courses in floriculture and home ground
ornamentation that promised assistance with creating a gardening plan.
325

In creating the plan, the gardener had to be introspective, considering the
aspirations for and imagined uses of his garden. The reasoning could be basic. For
example, Shinn desired “masses of color” all year round and flowers to cut; therefore he
planted accordingly.
326
Other goals required more complex analyses; Bennett
recommended that gardens be planted in back or side yards: “The garden proper is
intended to furnish cut flowers, to provide a place of experiment with new varieties, and
to grow hardy perennials which have certain seasons of bloom and cannot be depended
upon, at all times, for ornamental effect. One should feel free to work there unobserved
of the passer-by, and this is impossible in a garden close to the street.”
327
Bennett
required flowers and privacy and positioned her garden to achieve both.
John McLaren divided his section about planning California gardens into two
separate chapters, one devoted to the decision on the location of the garden, made after

324
Eugene O. Murmann, California Gardens: How to Plan and Beautify the City Lot,
Suburban Grounds and Country Estate, including 50 Garden Plans and 103 Illustrations
of Actual Gardens from Photographs by the Author (Los Angeles: Eugene O. Murmann,
1914), 5. The types of gardens covered included Alpine, Bog, Colonial, Japanese Flat
(Hira-niwa), Japanese Hill (Tsukiyama-niwa), Old English, and Special Color Schemes
(blue and silver gray, red and white, etc.).
325
Wickson, California Garden-Flowers, Shrubs, Trees and Vines Being Mainly
Suggestions for Working Amateurs, 46.
326
Charles Shinn, “Concerning a Satisfactory Flower Garden,” California
Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol. VIII, No. 12 (Dec., 1878) 369.
327
Bennett, The Flower Garden, 4.
155
considering elements such as views, access to water, and grading, and a second on the
sketch of the plan. Seeking to follow his designs, one could pick from the nine pre-
planned gardens he included in his book, starting as small as 25 by 120 feet and spanning
as large as ten acres. He even included planting lists to accompany the
pre-planned gardens.
328

Part of the planning, however, which was particularly impacted by California-
specific issues, involved figuring out when to plant. Advice from the east coast did not
necessarily hold true in California. While experts such as McLaren urged
experimentation, he and others also offered concrete translations of the calendars of the
east coast gardeners. He guided his readers that gardeners in the eastern states sowed
pansies in February and the pansies flowered in May or June. California pansies though
needed to be sown in July and bloomed from November to May. The acacia also had a
different planting and tending scheduling. On the east coast, acacias grew best in
greenhouses in pots, under the protection of glass and warmed by artificial means. In
California, McLaren explained that the acacia flourished as a “handsome tree, in any soil
in the open air and flowers in midwinter.”
329
Even though the eastern gardening calendar
required editing, in many ways the temperate California climate was more forgiving of
those who planted at less-than-the-ideal times for particular plants. Regardless, even the
subtlest seasonal changes were dissected to contemplate the best planting schedules. In
considering planting asters, balsam, petunia, zinnia, and stock, the editors at California

328
McLaren, Gardening in California Landscape and Flower, 1-12 and 20-36.
329
Ibid. at v. See also, Wickson, California Garden-Flowers, Shrubs, Trees and Vines
Being Mainly Suggestions for Working Amateurs, 94-114.
156
Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine argued “we are nearly correct in saying that Spring
may come to us at almost any period of the year. However, even in San Francisco at the
present season, Nature seems to exhibit more activity and life, although we cannot
perceive any material climatic changes or differences from other seasons of the year,
excepting in a few rare cases.”
330

In the twentieth century, with the professionalization of landscape architecture,
the planning also involved consultation, but not blind adoption of those professionals’
suggestions. Helena Rutherfurd Ely suggested, in “starting a garden, the first question, of
course, is where to plant. If you are a beginner in the art, and the place is new and large,
go to a good landscape gardener and let him give advice and make you a plan.” She
cautioned though, “don’t follow it; at least not at once, nor all at one time.” Ely
recommended visiting other people’s gardens to extract additional information and to
develop one’s own taste. She also suggested that the homeowner live in the space for a
while, until she had an independent sense of what she wanted and where she wanted it.
Then, “when you know what you want, or think you do, start in.”
331

Although many expert dialogues regarding taste and threats or benefits to taste
focused on individual flowers, discussions of taste in connection with floriculture also
included the design of garden spaces. At times, these two strands of tastefulness
complemented each other, such as in the cultivation and display of roses. At other times,
the two strands acted at odds with one another. For example, William Falconer in 1888

330
“Annuals,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol. II, No. 6 (May,
1872) 161-163, 161-2.
331
Ely, A Woman’s Hardy Garden, 21-22.
157
recommended petunias, poppies, and sweet peas as flowers that could both brighten a
garden and function as fabulous cut flowers.
332
However, a decade later, William S.
Lyon argued that when “planning a garden there can be but one of two possible ends in
view. One, to have it beautiful – the other to have at all times an abundance of flowers.”
Lyon reasoned, “both ends cannot be attained by any combination which fails to accord
to each purpose a widely different treatment.” He continued that one could keep a small
plot in bloom year round but that space would likely not produce any flowers to bring
inside. According to Lyon, although thousands of flowering plants were desirable for the
garden, less than a dozen were beloved solely for their flowers.
333
He expressed
particular concern over carnation plants, which were “at all times. . .deficient in beauty”
and violet beds, which were less attractive than plain dirt. Lyon recommended creating a
garden design to showcase the attractive flowers and grow the cut-flowers in a plot
“virtually unseen” to passersby.
334

Contemplating garden designs adds an additional term that interacted with both
taste and fashion, the concept of style.
335
Most commonly associated with discussing

332
William Falconer, “Annuals for Cut Flowers,” Garden and Forest: A Journal of
Horticulture, Landscape Art and Forestry, Vol. I, No. 4 (Mar. 21, 1888), 45.
333
William S. Lyon, Gardening in California: A Non-technical Hand Book with Especial
Application to this Soil and Climate (Los Angeles: Geo. Rice & Sons, 1897), 98.
334
Ibid. at 99, 101-103.
335
For a more detailed analysis of California garden styles throughout this period, see the
introduction and the following sources. “Ornamental and Landscape Gardening: Section
II, Landscape Gardening,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol. I, No. 2
(Dec., 1870) 39-40, 40. Alice Hooper McKee, “Childhood Memories of Rincon Hill,”
ed. Olive H. Palmer, Vignettes of Early San Francisco Homes and Gardens (Program of
the San Francisco Garden Club, Dec. 1935). Evelyn Norwood Breeze, “Two Gardens on
158
garden layouts and the proper placement of flowers, discussions of how style reflected
notions of taste centered on discussions of bedding out versus “natural” floral designs as
well as the desirability of specific nationally attributed designs, such as Italian or English.
In his 1870 work on urban homes, Frank J. Scott concluded, “However diverse the modes
of decorative gardening in different countries, all represent some ideal form of beauty,
and illustrate. . .diversity of human tastes which is not less admirable than diversity of
productions in vegetable nature.” While Scott’s version of the possibilities of tasteful
garden design was extremely broad, for many the goal was simply to “adapt” Nature “to
our civilized necessities, to idealize and improve, to condense and appropriate her

Harrison Street, 1870-1880,” ed. Olive H. Palmer, Vignettes of Early San Francisco
Homes and Gardens (Program of the San Francisco Garden Club, Dec. 1935). Veronica
K. Kinzie, “The Phelan Garden of the Seventies ed. Olive H. Palmer, Vignettes of Early
San Francisco Homes and Gardens (Program of the San Francisco Garden Club, Dec.
1935). Kinzie crafted the description of James Phelan’s garden from the memories of
“old friends of the family” since the 1906 fire destroyed the records. Sophia Pierce
Brownell, “The Beginning of the Western Addition,” ed. Olive H. Palmer, Vignettes of
Early San Francisco Homes and Gardens (Program of the San Francisco Garden Club,
Dec. 1935). David C. Streatfield, “’Californio’ Culture and Landscapes, 1894-1942:
Entwining Myth and Romance with Preservation,” eds. Charles A. Birnbaum and Mary
V. Hughes, Design with Culture: Claiming America’s Landscape Heritage
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005), 103-135, 109. Michael A. Corbett,
“Rearranging the Environment: The Making of a California Landscape 1870s to 1990s,”
ed. Steven A. Nash, Facing Eden: 100 Years of Landscape Art in the Bay Area
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 3-29, 13. Pierce Lewis, “The Making of
Vernacular Taste: The Case of Sunset and Southern Living,” eds. John Dixon Hunt and
Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn, The Vernacular Garden: Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on
the History of Landscape Architecture XIV, (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks
Research Library and Collection, 1990) 107-136, 112-118. Clayton, “Wild Gardening
and the Popular American Magazine, 1890-1918,” Nature and Ideology: Natural Garden
Design in the Twentieth Century, 130-154, 135-139, 144-145, 150, 154. Florence
Atherton Eyre, Reminiscences of Peninsula Gardens from 1860 to 1890 (San Francisco:
San Francisco Garden Club, December Program, 1933).
159
beauties.”
336
But the underlying dialogue concluded that fixed rules did not determine
levels of tastefulness. Circumstances and individual actions signaled taste or
tastelessness, rather than a specific style.
For example, in the 1880s, in discussing whether bedding out – the style of
grouping together certain types of flowers in borders or beds – was tasteful, conclusive
direction remained elusive.
337
Trends in garden design fluctuated over time amongst
formal Versaille-esque designs, gardens that nominally sought to mimic natural
surroundings, and combinations of the two. The formal flowerbed, associated with the
Versaille-esque garden, certainly inspired some English “Grandmother’s Gardens” which
frequently used formal beds. Garden and Forest concluded that no other question
regarding the art of gardening became a topic of discussion more than this question.
They described the debate as one regarding “whether the formal flower bed is a thing to
praise or to condemn, a thing which gratifies a cultivated taste or one which merely
panders to the taste that delights in vivid chromos and in pinchbeck personal
adornments.”
338
By the 1880s, professionals recognized that the bed had passed from
fashion but was reemerging in borders. And yet, these taste professionals neither praised
nor condemned the recently emerging trend. The question could not be answered

336
Frank J. Scott, The Art of Beautifying Suburban Home Grounds of Small Extent; The
Advantages of Suburban Homes over City or Country Homes; The Comfort and Economy
of Neighboring Improvements; The Choice and Treatment of Building Sites; And the Best
Modes of Laying Out, Planting, and Keeping Decorated Grounds (New York: D.
Appleton & Co., 1870), 16.
337
“Horticultural Fashions,” Garden and Forest, Vol. I, No. 5 (Mar. 28, 1888), 49-50.
338
“Formal Flower Beds,” Garden and Forest, Vol. I, No. 15 (Jun. 6, 1888), 169-170.
160
“categorically.” One had to take into account the entire context of the flowerbed. If the
bed was quite orderly, then an orderly architectural design needed to be near it.
339
The
tastefulness of the garden in part depended on its surroundings. A mere five years later
though, the same publication hinted that wild, English style gardens were becoming more
and more popular.
340
They credited this transition towards the wild to the “improvement
of a cultivated taste” that allowed for “the grace of free and irregular beauty” to replace
the artificial stiffness of a more formal garden. In praising the wild garden, the
publication noted “the immeasurable superiority of undistorted forms shown in all the
wildness and intricacy of natural scenery.”
341

By the early

twentieth century, concepts of style and taste in California gardens
formed a dialogue with specific class terms attached to it. Wealth could threaten both the
creation of a tasteful garden and block the ability of taste professionals and amateur
gardeners to read and understand the civility of the garden’s inhabitants. First, garden
manuals stressed that superior gardens were not simply a function of cash expenditure.
In 1914, Eugene Murmann instructed, “The charm of the garden is not the monopoly of
the rich. It is not secured merely by the expenditure of money; it comes really from the
exercise of good taste and correct judgment in using the natural beauties to the greatest
advantage.” For Murmann, a garden could “easily lose its charm and become too

339
Ibid. at 170.
340
Amateur, “Hints for Flower Gardeners,” California Horticulturalist and Floral
Magazine, Vol. V, No. 9 (Sep., 1875) 274-276, 274.
341
“Planting a Wild Garden,” reprinted from Gardener’s Chronicle in California
Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol. V, No. 12 (Dec., 1875) 381.
161
artificial if made too elaborate and have too little of the touch of Nature to inspire the
proper sentiment.”
342
Further, the gardens of the rich yielded fewer or no clues as to the
tastefulness of the citizens within the dwellings attached to those gardens. The gardens
and flowers did not speak for themselves. Hugh Bryan explained this phenomenon in
E.J. Wickson’s California Magazine in 1915. He began by arguing that “[i]n no other
part of the United States ha[d] the people taken to the witchery of gardening as they ha[d]
in California, and [he was] pleased to note that this evidence of taste and refinement
[wa]s not confined to those of the wealthier classes.” Bryan concluded that middle class
gardens carried “an impression as to the personality of the owner.” One might be of
azaleas, ferns, or lilies and another of roses, pansies. In contrast, larger estate gardens,
designed by landscape architects, “no more represent[ed] the home life, tastes, and
pleasures of the people of California at large than the paintings of Corot represent the
artistic development of the people at large of his time and of his country” – unlike the
middle class and bungalow gardens.
343

If one survived the contradictory and confusing advice to create a plan, they then
needed to evaluate the soil in detail: Was it sandy? Or too damp? Did the soil require
manure? What temperature was the soil at different times of the year?
344
Wickson wrote
that man was still learning about soil but wanted readers to consider “water capacity,”

342
Murmann, California Gardens, 61.
343
Hugh Bryan, “California’s Gardens,” ed. E.J. Wickson, California’s Magazine (San
Francisco: California Publishers Co-operative Association, 1915), 218-221, 218-220.
344
See Albee, Hardy Plants for Cottages and Gardens. Breck, The flower-garden, 17-18.
Ely, A Woman’s Hardy Garden, 13.
162
“permeability,” and “penetrability,” as well as adding humus, “garden loam,” coal ashes
from fires, plaster from “home repairs,” “sawdust,” or manure.
345
In his 1897 work,
Gardening in California, Lyon observed, “The success with violets may be epitomized in
four wordss [sic] Keep the ground cool. . .About the bay of San Francisco the conditions
are ideal, and the flowers in productive quality cannot be excelled elsewhere in the
world.”
346
Even given variations in quality and temperature, though, the general
conclusions of California garden writers were to avoid despair; soil evaluation was
necessary but there were all kinds of additives to remedy soil shortfalls. Miller advised
that one must prepare soil during the rainy season and that San Francisco’s drift-sand was
not as bad as one might first think; try adding horse manure for flowers, trees and
shrubs.
347
Likewise, Wickson reassured the reader that even if the soil was not ideal, one
could grow flowers.
348

Then came the purchases – tools, as well as seeds and/or plants. Authors advised
gardeners to procure the proper tools: hoses, spades, hoes, iron rakes with wooden
handles, “potato-forks” for hand work, trowels, light wheelbarrows – if one had the
money also pruning-shears and garden scissors.
349
Also, one needed the highest quality

345
Wickson, California Garden-Flowers, Shrubs, Trees and Vines Being Mainly
Suggestions for Working Amateurs, 23-31.
346
Lyon, Gardening in California, 63.
347
Frank A. Miller, “How to Make a Garden,” California Horticulturalist and Floral
Magazine, Vol. III, No. 4 (Apr., 1873), 112-114, 112.
348
Wickson, California Garden-Flowers, Shrubs, Trees and Vines Being Mainly
Suggestions for Working Amateurs, 23-31.
349
Angier, The Garden Book of California, 11.
163
seeds or plantings available. Seeds could be saved from a previous season, passed
neighbor to neighbor, purchased from nurserymen or seedsmen – from large commercial
endeavors, more modest ones, or ordered from a catalogue. The Beechers even advised
that ladies in a neighborhood should “unite” and buy wholesale seeds that they then could
also share with “poor neighbors.”
350

After 1875, seed catalogs proved particularly tempting and convenient, offering
brightly colored images of the possibilities for success.
351
One of the most famous was
“Vick’s Flower and Vegetable Garden, and Floral Guide”; the editors of California
Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine reviewed the 1876 edition and praised its “zealous,
refined in floricultural taste, and enterprising proprietor” and boasted that the 1876
version was even better than previous editions.
352
The process of picking the seeds for
gardeners all across the nation required the invocation of the powers of the gardeners’
imaginations and senses of wonder: Helena Rutherford Ely wrote, “There is a pleasure
even in making lists, reading catalogues of plants and seeds, and wondering whether this
year my flowers will be like the pictured ones, and always, in imagination, seeing how
the sleeping plants will be when robed in fullest beauty.”
353

350
Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, The American Woman’s Home (New
York: J.B. Ford & Co., 1869), 296.
351
Robert F. Becker, “American Vegetable Seed Industry – a History,” HortScience, Vol.
19, No. 5 (Oct., 1984) 610.
352
“Vick’s Flower and Vegetable Garden, and Floral Guide for 1876,” California
Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol. VI, No. 1 (Jan., 1876), 32-33, 32.
353
Ely, A Woman’s Hardy Garden, 8.
164
If one decided to use plants that were started at a nursery, Miller advised the
reader to avoid either large or “very small weak plants.” The flowers in full bloom at the
nursery were not ideal to bring home. He advised gardeners to buy plants that grew in
the open air when possible. If open-air plants provided not a possibility, then greenhouse
plants were a decent second choice, particularly if they grew in pots.
354

Region and garden design dictated the range of possible plantings. Although
many argued that anything could grow in California, professionals offered more detailed
analyses with scientific precision. Shinn provided lists of good and bad annuals for
California gardens and subdivided them both into specific usages and corresponding to
the level of detail the individual reader desired. For example, Shinn championed the
following as good for bouquets:
Ageratum, Anagallis (or English Pimpernel), Antirrhinum (or
Snapdragon), Aquilegia, Asters, Balsam, Browallis, Candytuft, Cacalia,
Delphinium formosum, China Pink, Diadem Pink, Digitalis, (or
Foxglove), Godetia, Pansy, Sweet Peas, Phlox, Ten-week-stock,
Salpiglossis, Schizanthus, Whitlavia.

On the other hand, if the gardener favored “massing,” Shinn suggested:
Double Larkspur, Clarkia, Rocket, Candytuft, Collinsia, Convolvulus
minor, Dwarf Nasturtium, Leptosiphon, Scarlet Flax, Lobelia, Petunia,
Verbena, Aster, dwarf French Marigold, Pansy, Portulacca (or Rose-
moss), Sanvitalia, Procumbens, Zinnia, Abronia, Calliopsis.

He included additional categories for “[r]apidly growing vines” and “stately growth for
large beds or shrubberies.” He also offered a list of flowers that were “not approved” for
cultivation in California, including:

354
Miller, “How to Make a Garden.” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine,
Vol. III, No. 5, 150.
165
Agrostemma, Calampelis, Eutoca, Carduus (Thistle), Hieracium (Hawk
weed), Jacobea, Limnanthes, Linaria, Malva, Centurea.

If, however, this was altogether too overwhelming, and if the reader wanted a shorter list,
he added, “if the person gets the best varieties of Asters, Balsams, Pinks, Petunias,
Stocks, and Pansies, they will have those flowers on which painstaking florists have spent
the most labor in years past.” In part, Shinn chose these because of the wonderful “power
of improvement and of variation.
355

But even the types of flowers that were considered desirable varied in part on the
size of the garden. In “Flowers for City Gardens,” C.J. Drew recommended against
flowers in small plots. He suggested violets in spring, as well as primroses, pansies, and
bulbs ranging from hyacinths to tulips and lilies. Then in early summer, he
recommended wallflowers, daisy, mignonette, and tussilago with tuberose, verbena,
phlox drummondii, sweet alyssum, and petunia for late summer and fall.
356

Once one had the seeds or plants, the gardener then planted according to his or her
design and it was at this point that the cacophony of advice overwhelmed. He was at
once cautioned when planting to be careful not to crowd too many plants in a small
space.
357
But also, do not to be stingy in planting flower borders or beds.
358
Color and

355
Charles Shinn, “On the Proper Culture of Annuals in California,” California
Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol. 7, No. 12 (Dec., 1877), article reprinted from
Pacific Rural Press, 361-363, 362-3.
356
C.J. Drew, “Flowers in the City Garden,” California Horticulturalist and Floral
Magazine. Vol. VIII, No. 1 (Jan., 1878), 14-15.
357
Breck, The flower-garden, 25.
358
Bailey, Garden-Making, 137.
166
height were additional factors in creating perfect beds. In picking plants, he was told,
“strike for a mass of bloom at all periods of the year.”
359
Bennett advised it was best to
grow one kind of flower per bed, or at least ones of “harmonizing” in color with the
tallest in the middle. She warned against magenta next to scarlet or purple next to blue
and praised the use of white flowers to separate inharmonious placements. Gardeners
were reminded to think big but not to set their aspirations too high. Bennett warned,
“Don’t try to raise more plants that you have room for, or strength and time to cultivate.
A few plants well cared for are better than a neglected garden – a most discouraging
sight. The gardener will find enough real difficulty without inviting disaster.”
360
And
given the connections amongst homes, gardens and building an ideal California, disaster
in the garden could create wide-ranging negative consequences. Alternatively, the
flowers and gardens might survive even cataclysmic disasters and offer hopeful promises
of rebuilding a civilized city. “It was like the clusters of wild lilies and nasturtium that
here and there have sprung from the ruins of former gardens in San Francisco,” recounted
Edwin Emerson, Jr. after the 1906 earthquake and fires, “flecking the dismal ashes with
gleams of color and fragrance.”
361

359
Charles Keeler, The Simple Home (San Francisco: Paul Elder and Company, 1904),
16.
360
Bennett, The Flower Garden, 10-11, 253.
361
Edwin Emerson, “San Francisco At Play,” Sunset Magazine, Vol. 17, No. 6 (Oct.,
1906), 319-328, 324.
167
________________________

In 1870, Hilda Rosevelt traveled to Alameda to walk what a dear friend told her
was “one of the most charming gardens in the world.”
362
She “had been fêted and feasted
upon superlatives”; nonetheless, the moonlight walk tempted her.
As they strolled amongst tall calla lilies, her friend commented on how “the very
helplessness of a garden, and its dependence on our care, make us gracious. We render
such sweet service as the gods might dispense to mortals, and become more godlike in
the action. When the Utopian dreams of equality are realized, we may become higher
intelligences; but perhaps that high grace of graciousness will pass into a tradition.”
They passed heliotrope and admired roses, and when Hilda reached to pull a
jessamine as a souvenir, her friend reminded her that only she would cut from her own
garden. She was the grand conductor of this space, which perhaps she planned, planted,
and tended.
From manuals’ plans to seedsmen’s advice, from the 1870s through the turn of the
century, the details and region specific information available to California home
gardeners expanded and was refined. The project of building these gardens beneficial to
society became more accessible to growing numbers. Even more was expected from
those seeking to demonstrate their participation in a progressive California-building
project. Hyper planning and scientific analysis marked the gardens. While both national

362
Hilda Rosevelt, “An Evening in a California Garden,” Overland Monthly, Vol. V, No.
5 (Nov., 1870), 469-474, 469.
168
and regional publications drew gardening information from all across the world,
Californians framed their understanding of place as distinct from the eastern United
States and international in possibilities for growth. Home gardeners were to define the
local while embracing an internationalism that was not prized in other floricultural
contexts or state politics more broadly.
169
Chapter 5

Sweet Pea Roguing and Beyond:
Chinese and Japanese American Floriculturists’
Creations of Social Infrastructure in an Anti-Asian Climate

Wong Hung Git, known by his family members and co-workers in Santa Clara
County as Henry Ohn, buried his treasure in the walls of his home near Gilroy.
According to family legend, he told his granddaughter Nellie that in the event of his
death, the secrets from his personal project hidden in the wall would act as an insurance
policy to provide for the family. Ohn was born in 1861 in Kwangtung Province, China.
He moved to California to work for C.C. Morse & Co. – a seed company that already
employed his cousin, Wong Ah Hem. Their boss at C.C. Morse & Co., Frank
Cuthbertson, was an internationally known sweet pea breeder from Scotland, who had
tried for years to create a truly yellow sweet pea.
363
Ohn’s subsequent employers at
Braslan Seed Co., where he toiled as superintendent of a seed farm, would have been
elated with the prospect of the coveted and elusive yellow flower. Unbeknownst to both
of them, Ohn, known as the Chinese Luther Burbank, succeeded where all others failed.
He created the yellow sweet pea. He scribbled down the “formula,” hiding it in the wall

363
Elizabeth Barratt, “Two Cousins from China and Gilroy’s Early Seed Industry,”
http://www.excludedamericans.com/GilroySeed03_HenryOhn.htm (As viewed on
October 18, 2011) and http://www.excludedamericans.com/GilroySeed04_
PeaDevelopment.htm (As viewed on October 18, 2011). Walter P. Wright, The Sweet
Pea Notebook (Self published, The Grey House, Lyminge, Folkestone, 1913), 53, in the
Uncatalogued Materials of the Ferry-Morse Papers, University of California at Davis.
170
of his home, just in case his family needed it if something happened to him.
364
Ohn’s
family lived during a time of trial for Chinese and other Asian immigrants in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But Ohn prepared for the unseen with the
promise of a flower.
This chapter examines the work of Chinese and Japanese American seed growers,
botanists, florists and commercial marketers. The flowers they grew and sold were rarely
singled out as problematic to the state of California’s civility at the same moments that
Chinese and Japanese Americans faced labels of cultural or ethnic inferiority and
inassimilable. Some Californians used flowers to define their state as a white-dominated
sweet pea paradise – drawing on the wide popularity of the sweet pea in Britain.
Simultaneously, many Asian Americans used floriculture to their economic and social
benefit. They started family businesses and created community-based commercial
infrastructure that benefited the floricultural industry as a whole. And they illustrated the
fragility of the vision of California’s civility as white.
Chinese and Japanese American immigrants and their citizen children faced eager
welcomes from many in California in times of labor shortages. They responded to
desperate calls to plant and harvest in agricultural fields or construct railroads. But these
Asian immigrants also faced increasing violence and legal restrictions, ranging from

364
Barratt, “Two Cousins from China and Gilroy’s Early Seed Industry,”
http://www.excludedamericans.com/GilroySeed03_HenryOhn.htm. Barratt related her
own family story in this piece. Per Graham Rice’s 2002 work, yellow sweet peas do exist
in the wild in the Caucasus, Iran, Iraq, India, Turkey, and the Mediterranean. Graham
Rice, The Sweet Pea Book (Portland: Timber Press, 2002), 94-97. See also, Lester
Langford Morse, Field Notes on Sweet Peas (San Francisco: C.C. Morse & Co., 1916
edition, orig. pub. 1907), 8.
171
racially targeted taxes to exclusion, focused initially on the Chinese and then later on the
Japanese. Chinese, Japanese, and Asian ethnic and racial identities were fluid realities.
Through their floricultural work, they constructed – to the extent that construction was in
their power – contested, and experienced their ethnic and racial identities.
365
The ethnic
and racial experiences of these workers and business owners cannot be separated from
analyses of sex/gender and class.
366

Through their work, Chinese seed growers at C.C. Morse & Co. and the Japanese
and Chinese growers who created their own San Francisco Flower Market used flowers
to fulfill personal goals, pushing back against social and legal constructs designed to limit
their social and economic power.
367
The historical specifics of the stories of Chinese and

365
See Kimberlé Crenshaw et al., eds., Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That
Formed the Movement (New Press, 1995), xiii. Robert S. Chang, Toward an Asian
American Legal Scholarship: Critical Race Theory, Post-structuralism, and Narrative
Space, 81 Calif. L. Rev. 1241 (1993). Cheryl Harris, Whiteness as Property, 106 Harv. L.
Rev. 1707 (1993).
366
See Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics,
and Violence Against Women of Color,” Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that
Formed the Movement, (New Press, 1995), 357-383.
367
Charles J. McClain, The Chinese Struggle for Civil Rights in Nineteenth Century
America: The First Phase, 1850-1870, 72 Cal. L. Rev. 529, 531 (1984); Richard P. Cole
and Gabriel J. Chin, Emerging from the Margins of Historical Consciousness: Chinese
Immigrants and the History of American Law, 17 Law & Hist. Rev. 325, 326 (1999);
Chang, Toward an Asian American Legal Scholarship: Critical Race Theory, Post-
structuralism, and Narrative Space, 1241. John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns
of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (Rutgers University Press, 1955), 4. Scholars of Asian
American studies have used his definitions and cited to his book. Chang, Toward an
Asian American Legal Scholarship, 1247. Keith Aoki, “Foreign-ness” and Asian
American Identities: Yellowface, World War II Propaganda, and Bifurcated Racial
Stereotypes, 4 UCLA Asian Pac. Am. L. J. 1 (1996), 39. See also David M. Potter, The
Impending Crisis, 1848-1861 (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 243-259. Mari
Matsuda, “Looking to the Bottom: Critical Legal Studies and Reparations” in Kimberlé
172
Japanese American immigrants are distinct. However, within the context of the San
Francisco Flower Market, both groups worked together – with greater and lesser levels of
harmony. Significant percentages of the flowers the Anglo-dominated floricultural press
promised would refine civilization in San Francisco were grown by those who many
wished to relegate to the margins and branded as threats to that very community.
These Asian Americans quietly utilized flowers to flip the symbol of civilization
and whiteness back at the white population. This occurred at the ground level, as
Chinese Americans rogued sweet pea fields to pull out the undesirable weeds that
threatened to cross with the pure British stock. This public, British or Anglo mask of the
sweet peas of C.C. Morse & Co. hid the efforts of Chinese American labor on the fields,
supervising, and breeding and their successes and trials. Some Californians used flowers
to define their space as a white-dominated sweet pea paradise. But simultaneously,
floriculture highlights the myth and fragility of this version of an Anglo-California. The
Domoto family organized others to create wholesale spaces to market their dahlias and
infrastructural business opportunities that survived them. When Ohn hid the yellow
sweet pea plans in his wall, he used floriculture to fight a much broader battle against
nativism and the construction of California as white. Floricultural work and businesses
provided opportunities for the creation of a make-shift social safety net in violently
uncertain times.

Crenshaw et all, eds., Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the
Movement (New Press, 1995), 63.
173
__________________________

Both push and pull factors drove California immigration from 1848 into the early
1850s. Visions of prosperity on the gold fields called many who had been suffering
from poor economic prospects in their countries of origin. From the Great Hunger in
Ireland to 1848’s upheaval in mainland Europe, immigrants from all over the globe
traveled to California.
368
With regard to the Chinese specifically, the Taiping Rebellion
of 1851 against the Manchu Dynasty launched China into fifteen years of civil war,
which only deepened the poverty of many Chinese.
369
Individuals from Kwangtung
Province in southeastern China attempted to escape this poverty by traveling to the
United States.
370
Those who eventually became Chinese American floriculturists in the
late nineteenth-century largely emigrated from Wong-leung Tu in Chungshan District.
371

Between 1850 and 1880, the Chinese American population catapulted from 7,520 to

368
Jean Pfaelzer, Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans (New
York: Random House, 2007), 8.
369
James J. Rawls and Walton Bean, California: An Interpretive History (McGraw-Hill,
1968, 7
th
Edition 1998), 135. See also Philip P. Choy, The Coming Man: 19
th
Century
American Perceptions of the Chinese (1994), 16-20.
370
Elmer Clarence Sandmeyer, The Anti-Chinese Movement in California (University of
Chicago Press, 1939, ed. 1991 with foreword by Roger Daniels), 12. For more
information on labor immigration patterns, see Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable
Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (University of California
Press, 1971), 1-20. See also, Leigh Bristol-Kagan, “Chinese Migration to California,
1851-1882: Selected Industries of Work, the Chinese Institutions and the Legislative
Exclusion of a Temporary Labor Force,” (PhD Dissertation, Harvard University, 1982),
chapter II, 28-70, regarding conditions in China and migration.
371
Gary Kawaguchi, Living with Flowers: The California Flower Market History (San
Francisco: California Flower Market, Inc., 1993), 35.
174
105,465. In 1870s California, Chinese Americans composed 8.6% of the population and
a quarter of the “wage-earning force.”
372
The vast majority were men.
373
Many of these
new immigrants became cooks, laundrymen and performed heavy mining work during
the gold rush.
374
They then worked on the construction of the transcontinental railroad in
the late 1860s.
375
After the Golden Spike was driven into the ground completing the
construction of the railroad, many Chinese workers moved from a labor source for
railroad building into gardening and nursery businesses. For example, nurseryman
Timothy Hopkins hired Moon Yee who had worked for Timothy’s adopted father Mark
Hopkins at the Central Pacific Railroad Company.
376
Chinese immigrants worked as
gardeners for white-owned seed companies. They also labored as growers near Belmont

372
Ronald Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 19
th
Century America (1979, 2000),
216.
373
Sandmeyer, The Anti-Chinese Movement in California, 13. See also, Holly Lake,
“Construction of the Central Pacific Railroad: Chinese Immigrant Contribution,”
Northeastern Nevada Historical Society Quarterly, Vol. 94, No. 4 (Nov., 1994), 188-199,
190.
374
Sandmeyer, The Anti-Chinese Movement in California, 14. Ping Chiu, Chinese Labor
in California, 1850-1880, (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1967), ix-xi,
9.
375
For additional information on the railroad and Chinese labor, see Paul M. Ong, “The
Central Pacific Railroad and Exploitation of Chinese Labor,” Journal of Ethnic Studies,
Vol. 13, No. 2 (1985), 119-124, 122, Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals
and the Making of Modern America (W.W. Norton & Co., 2011); William Deverell,
Railroad Crossing: Californians and the Railroad, 1850-1910 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1996); Richard J. Orsi, Sunset Limited: The Southern Pacific Railroad
and the Development of the American West, 1850-1930 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2007).
376
Kawaguchi, Living with Flowers, 34.
175
(on the Peninsula) cultivating pompon chrysanthemums, heather, hydrangeas, asters, and
sweet peas.
377

In the 1880s, the Japanese Meiji government opened the gates for limited
Japanese emigration, first to the Queensland region of Australia and then to Hawaii.
During the same time period, Japan actively encouraged industrialization within the
island country. The government heavily taxed farmers who faced limited economic
opportunities. By the late 1890s, approximately 50,000 immigrated to Hawaii’s sugar
cane plantations. In the 1890s, the United States blocked further immigration of Chinese
laborers. This contributed to a labor shortage on the United States mainland. Many
Japanese male workers moved to the western coast to take these jobs. Many lacked
immediate family obligations, which made them ideal for seasonal agricultural jobs that
required a fairly transient existence.
378
By 1900, approximately 24,000 Japanese had
immigrated to the United States, with 10,000 settling in California. An economic
depression in Japan after the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 drove further emigration. A
significant number of the early Japanese immigrants worked in agriculture and
floriculture in the East Bay. Japanese growers were particularly known for their

377
Ibid. at 35. Marvin Carbonneau, “Growing,” A Centennial History of the American
Florist (Topeka: Florists’ Review Enterprises, 1997), 36-43, 38.
378
Noritaka Yagasaki, “Ethnic Cooperatism and Immigrant Agriculture: A Study of
Japanese Floriculture and Truck Farming in California,” PhD Dissertation, University of
California at Berkeley, 1982, 12, 13 & 15.
176
chrysanthemums.
379
Japanese American floriculturists also “introduced” via import
varieties of camellias, wisterias, spearflowers, azaleas, and lily bulbs to California.
380

Chinese and Japanese American floriculturists immigrated on varied timelines
and faced different opportunities and forms of nativism. Some circles welcomed the
Chinese in the early 1850s.
381
Chinese immigrants participated in the San Francisco
memorial tribute to President Zachary Taylor.
382
Some marched in the California
Admission Day ceremonies in October of 1850.
383
The Alta California predicted, “[t]he
China Boys will yet vote at the same polls, study at the same schools, and bow at the
same alter as our countrymen.”
384
In 1852, Governor John McDougal recommended that
the Chinese in California be given land grants. When the Vigilance Committee of 1856
organized, San Francisco’s Chinese merchants, who “already [constituted] a powerful
and concentrated colony, contributed munificently to its funds and received a vote of
thanks.”
385
In the context of Chinese immigrants and flowers, some praised both how the

379
Ibid. Carbonneau, “Growing,” A Centennial History of the American Florist, 38.
380
Vernon Takeshita, “Community in Bloom: A Celebration of the Japanese American
Contribution to the Floricultural Industry,” (Japanese American National Museum, Nov.
5, 1988), 4.
381
Ronald Takaki, Strangers From a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans
(Little, Brown and Company, 1989, 1998), 80.
382
McClain, The Chinese Struggle for Civil Rights in Nineteenth Century America, 535.
383
Gertrude Atherton, California: An Intimate History (New York: Harper & Brothers
Publishers, 1914), 282.
384
As quoted in Laverne Mau Dicker, The Chinese in San Francisco, A Pictoral History
(Dover Publications, 1979), 4.
385
Atherton, California, 282.
177
Chinese used flowers in their homes and for medicinal purposes. In 1869, Reverend
A.W. Loomis noted the adornment of homes with hyacinths (or the shwui sien flower) for
the New Year, “with its golden cup and silver saucer-for it is an emblem of purity.”
386

Overland Monthly reprinted Loomis’ translations of Chinese medicines. Remedies for
wounds and bruises to more general ailments utilized white peony, red flower, and a host
of other plants. Peels and barks steeped like tea promised cures.
387

Chinese Americans also faced violence and racism.
388
Chinese miners were
targeted for violence in the 1850s, along with Miwoks and Latinos.
389
Anglo miners
characterized the “Orientals” as frugal, tireless workers and claimed their frugality
constituted unfair competition. One strain of this argument compared the competitive
threat to white workers from Chinese laborers to that of African American southern
slaves
390
Further, the Chinese laborers’ tireless work was blamed for significant
remittances to China.
391

386
Rev. A. W. Loomis, “Holiday in the Chinese Quarter,” Overland Monthly, Vol. II, No.
2 (Feb., 1869), 144-153, 150.
387
Rev. A. W. Loomis, “Medical Art in the Chinese Quarter,” Overland Monthly, Vol. II,
No. 6 (Jun., 1869), 496-506, 504.
388
See Atherton, California, 282-283. See also, Mary Roberts Coolidge, Chinese
Immigration (New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1969, orig. pub. 1909);
Pfaelzer, Driven Out, “A Litany of Hate” chronology at 256-290.
389
Pfaelzer, Driven Out, 17, 19, 22.
390
Cletus E. Daniel, Bitter Harvest: A History of California Farmworkers, 1870-1941
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 27. Pfaelzer, Driven Out, 26. See also, Leland
Stanford, “1865 Report to the President of the United States, distinguishing slavery or
serfdom from Chinese labor. For more information on how the Chinese were compared
with African Americans, see Ronald Takaki, Iron Cages, 217-9. Though the Chinese
178
Starting in the 1850s, the California Assembly and San Francisco municipal
bodies passed specific legislation burdening the Chinese. The legislation was fueled by
popular nativistic sentiment, motivated by layers of interests, including economic,
moral/religious, and social/political concerns.
392
Concerned both about polluting the
white population with the “dregs” of Asia as well as the effect that the Chinese
immigrants had in deterring “desirable immigration,” politicians and members of the

were not considered socially or politically assimilable, they were considered, by some, to
be superior to the African American race.
For more on Chinese agricultural labor, see Daniel, Bitter Harvest; Bristol-Kagan,
“Chinese Migration to California, 1851-1882,” Section V, 1 & 9-10, discussing entry into
the work force in seasonal labor, then commercial fruit growing, particularly in the
context of grape/winemaking, apples, peaches, berries, pears, olives, citrus, hops,
canning, and sugar beets. Richard Steven Street, Beasts of the Field: A Narrative History
of California Farmworkers, 1769-1913 (Stanford: Stanford University press, 2004), 235-
333.
391
Atherton, California, 282-283. See also, Bristol-Kagan, “Chinese Migration to
California, 1851-1882,” chapter III, 1-65, regarding Chinese labor and mining.
392
Sandmeyer, The Anti-Chinese Movement in California, 25, 33-34. See also, Hubert
Howe Bancroft, History of California, Volume VII 1860-1890 (San Francisco, 1890),
336-338. To illustrate how the motivations overlapped, the Chinese were seen as alien,
inferior, ugly, strange, un-Christian, even “human leeches.” See also, See Charles J.
McClain, In Search of Equality: The Chinese Struggle Against Discrimination in
Nineteenth-Century America (University of California Press, 1994) 10-12. Henry K.
Norton, The Story of California From the Earliest Days to the Present, 7th ed. (A.C.
McClurg & Co., 1924), 283-296. See also Thomas W. Chinn, ed., A History of the
Chinese in California: A Syllabus (Chinese Historical Society of America, 1971) 24.
Saxton noted that the bases of anti-Chinese legislation were rooted in anti-African
American codes of Midwestern states. Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy, 19. See also
Thomas Wuil Joo, New “Conspiracy Theory” of the Fourteenth Amendment: Nineteenth
Century Chinese Civil Rights Cases and the Development of Substantive Due Process
Jurisprudence, 29 U.S.F.L. Rev. 353, (1995).
179
legislature worked to discourage Chinese immigration.
393
They argued that the Chinese
did not want to assimilate and also were not capable of assimilation. In 1869, the Alta
California reported that the typical Chinese immigrant “knows and cares nothing more of
the laws and language of the people among whom he lives than will suffice to keep him
out of trouble and enable him to drive a thrifty trade in the vocation which he
chooses.”
394
Chinese Americans struggled to work and create lives in the midst of
legislation and negative characterization.
The nativistic rhetoric of this time period in the context of agricultural and
floricultural workers was not monolithic. Chinese immigrants posed less of a perceived
threat in these industries. The desire and need for low cost labor tempered the rhetoric.
In July 1872, the editors of California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine concluded
that it was quite difficult to start an agricultural or horticultural business as an immigrant.
These floricultural writers were concerned neither about assimilation nor immigrant
threats to Anglo-dominated agricultural businesses. In the editors’ eyes, immigrants who
could serve as cost effective forms of labor were necessary to allow the United States to
compete with other nations. The editors conceded that the topic of immigration
“continuously agitat[ed] the minds of our statesmen.” But, the editors claimed that the

393
Leland Stanford, “Inaugural Address of Governor Stanford,” Daily Alta California,
Vol. XIV, No. 4344, (Jan.11, 1862), viewed at California Digital Newspaper Collection,
http://cdnc.ucr.edu on May 29, 2012. Robert F. Heizer and Alan J. Almquist, The Other
Californians (Berkeley: University of California Press: 1971). See also, Stanford,
Annual Message of Leland Stanford, Governor of the State of California at the 14
th

Session of the Legislature.
394
McClain, The Chinese Struggle for Civil Rights in Nineteenth Century America, 533-
534. McClain challenged this stereotype and concluded that the Chinese “were keenly
aware both of their political surrounding and of American governmental institutions.”
180
general public viewed the immigration issues as “most essential to the full development
of this country, and most particularly of our Agricultural and Horticultural resources.”
The editors singled out two forms of “attempts. . .to throw cold water upon this continual
flow of population” – anti-foreign rhetoric and formal legislation. The latter was “liable
to discourage the more intelligent classes of foreigners” as well as those “certain classes
of immigrants” less “preferable.” The editors characterized the men who favored such
legislation as both out of touch with the desires of the general population and not worthy
of trust with regard to the management of civic affairs. The editors admitted that
“although the country would perhaps be better off without some [classes of immigrants],”
that if the United States remained “just and true to the principles of an enlightened nation,
[its people] cannot discriminate between the good and the bad, and say who shall come
and who shall not.”
395
The article did not dwell on ethnic or racial identities. Labor
remained paramount.
Through the 1870s, anti-Chinese nativism escalated. By 1870, unemployed
Chinese railway workers flooded job markets. In the east, the post-Civil War depression
led those Anglo-Americans who could to board the train and come west looking for work
and a better life. The railroad that would have been impossible without the Chinese was
a part of the exclusionary policy in that the railroad allowed white eastern labor to come
to the West and this labor surplus aggravated already existing racism against the

395
“Editorial Portfolio: Immigration,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine,
Vol. 2, No. 8 (July, 1872), 242-244, 242 & 243.
181
Chinese.
396
In 1877, four hundred white workers in San Francisco openly attacked
Chinese construction workers.
397
That same year, Denis Kearney catapulted the
Workingman’s Party of California into public discourse. Within the next two years,
initially local anti-Chinese restrictions were encoded in California’s second constitution.
These changes included limiting employment and restricting suffrage.
398

Voices for immigration restrictions existed within the horticultural community as
well. As in previous years, the questions in the agricultural context tied squarely to labor.
But the Chinese ethnicity of the labor entered the conversation more directly. In
December 1879, Henry Shaw of San Rafael concluded in the California Horticulturalist
and Floral Magazine, that the issue was really about “cheap labor” and concerns over
unfair competition. And the Chinese posed a threat:
If we must keep our children from school to compete with Chinese labor,
there are few products we can afford. Some things we must learn slowly,
and slowest of all we seem to learn that in some way we are compelled
more and more to compete with the poorly paid laborers of all parts of the
world.

For Shaw, the appropriate response was not altogether clear. He argued that continued
and increased trade via both land and the ocean exacerbated the threat to the United
States via “evil” competition. Shaw was “sure” the evil could “not be entirely corrected

396
Takaki, Iron Cages, 174, discussing how the railroad opened up white immigration
from the east coast in a new way.
397
Pfaelzer, Driven Out, 77.
398
Ibid. at 78-79.
182
by excluding the Chinese or by imposing heavy duties on imported goods.”
399
The
discussion of immigration in the agricultural context had to address the Chinese issue, but
the remedy remained unclear and even a threat to Anglo-agribusiness.
Others responded with calls for removal and exclusion in the 1880s in
Washington and California, driven in part by Irish and German immigrants eager to
capitalize on opportunities for work.
400
In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion
Act, continuing the race-based exclusionary work begun by the California legislature
over three decades earlier.
401
In 1888, Congress passed the Scott Act that prohibited
Chinese labor immigration. The Scott Act included provisions forbidding reentry into the

399
Henry Shaw, “Horticulture as a Part of Education,” California Horticulturalist and
Floral Magazine, Vol. IX, No. 12, (Dec., 1879), 360-361, 361.
400
Pfaelzer, Driven Out, xx, 111.
401
Recrafting a thorough history and arguing for a particular cause of exclusion are
beyond the scope of this project. For more information on the Chinese Exclusion Act,
see Andrew Gyory, Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese-Exclusion Act
(University of North Carolina Press, 1998). The Chinese Exclusion Act was the first
federal law to restrict immigration on the basis of race. It was also a classist law because
only laborers were originally excluded. Eric Yamamoto, Margaret Chon, Carol L. Izumi
et all eds., Race, Rights and Reparation: Law and the Japanese American Internment
(Aspen Law & Business, 2001) 33. See also, James A. Tyner, Oriental Bodies: Discourse
and Discipline in U.S. Immigration Policy, 1875-1942 (Lanham: Lexington Books,
2006). Gary Y. Okihiro, The Columbia Guide to Asian American History, (Columbia
University Press, 2001) 75-99. See also, Charles J. McClain and Lawrence Wu McClain,
“The Chinese Contribution to the Development of American Law,” Entry Denied:
Exclusion and the Chinese Community in America, 1882-1943 (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1991), 3-24. Estelle T. Lau, Paper Families: Identity, Immigration
Administration, and Chinese Exclusion (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). Erika
Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943
(Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003). Roger Daniels, Guarding
the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants since 1882 (New York:
Hill and Wang, 2004). Natsu Taylor Saito, From Chinese Exclusion to Guantánamo Bay:
Plenary Power and the Prerogative State (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2007).
183
United States even with a valid government-issued reentry pass.
402
The Scott Act
invalidated approximately 20,000 re-entry certificates that were issued to Chinese
temporarily leaving the United States. Additionally, in 1892, Congress extended the
Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 for another ten years in the Geary Act, which also
required immigrants of Chinese descent to register.
403
At the time of the 1892 Geary Act,
70% of the Chinese in the United States lived in California.
404
The policies of exclusion
affected Chinese workers already in California, their employers, and fractured families on
two continents.
The legal restrictions formed only part of the experience of race in the 1890s as
immigrant flower peddlers also faced rhetorical and economic attacks. Chinese, Italian
and Japanese florists peddled and ran stands near Market and Kearny Streets.
405
Anglo-

402
Enid Trucios-Haynes, The Legacy of Racially Restrictive Immigration Laws and
Policies and the Construction of the American National Identity, 76 Or. L. Rev. 369, 393-
4 (1997).
403
Pfaelzer, Driven Out, 292. The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the
Geary Act in Fong Yue Ting.
404
Coolidge, Chinese Immigration.
405
Yagasaki, “Ethnic Cooperatism and Immigrant Agriculture,” 47. Carbonneau,
“Growing,” A Centennial History of the American, 36-43, 38. Toichi Domoto, "A
Japanese-American Nurseryman's Life in California: Floriculture and Family, 1883-
1992," an oral history conducted in 1992 by Suzanne B. Riess, Regional Oral History
Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1993, 157-158.
Takeshita, “Community in Bloom,” 3.
Because the focus of this chapter is floriculture in the context of anti-Asian action,
the Italian experience is not covered in detail. The Italians were predominantly middle
class from Liguria who had settled at the foot of Telegraph Hill, near Washington Square.
They constructed the infrastructure of a community with churches, schools, and
restaurants. Prominent Italian florists included Podesta & Baldocchi, Rossi and Rosaia,
Canepa and Figone, Antonini’s Sutter Street Florist, and Pelicano. Many of the Italian
184
Saxon florists and nurserymen competed with these florists and later purchased wholesale
flowers from those who established more substantial businesses. The rhetoric against
such peddlers was palpable. In 1891, Overland Monthly featured an article noting that
the florist (i.e. the Anglo-Saxon, male florist) faced “discontent.” The discontent
assumed “the form of a settled disapproval of Italian, Japanese, and Chinese
competition.” Additionally, the florists complained of the “immense floral influx, tide-
like in its diurnal regularity” coming from Timothy Hopkins’ “splendid private estate.”
Estimates in 1891 traced 75% of the cut flowers on the San Francisco market to the
Hopkins estate. The Overland Monthly article treated the complaints as separate and
distinct phenomena. But it was commonly understood that Hopkins utilized Chinese
laborers who had previously worked on the railroad. His output directly related to his
labor source. The anti-immigrant nature of the complaint touches both aspects of the
florists’ discontent. Perceptions of unfair competition operated as integral pieces to both
complaints. In this case, florists directed the backlash both to immigrant peddlers and a
white employer.
406

growers working in the Colma, San Bruno, and Burlingame areas, south of San Francisco
on the peninsula, initially focused on violets and ferns. However, over time, their
production expanded to include stock, marigolds, lilacs, sweet peas, snapdragons, irises,
daisies and others. Kawaguchi, Living with Flowers, 33-34; Yagasaki, “Ethnic
Cooperatism and Immigrant Agriculture,” 70. Carbonneau, “Growing,” A Centennial
History of the American Florist, 36-43, 38. Ninetta Eames, “Flower and Seed Growing,”
Overland Monthly, Vol. XVIII, No. 108 (Dec., 1891), 562-581, 569-570.
406
Eames, “Flower and Seed Growing,” Overland Monthly, 569. For post-Exclusion
framings of Chinese and Chinatown as disease ridden, repulsive, and alluring, see Philip
L. Fradkin, The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906: How San Francisco Nearly
Destroyed Itself (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 35-36, 289, 293. Nayan
Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown
185
The experiences of the cousins from China, previously introduced as Wong Ah
Hem and Henry Ohn, provide a different entry point into the analysis of nativism in the
floricultural context. They labored and supervised other workers at C.C. Morse & Co.
fields, and through their hard work and ingenuity, in the words of family member
Elizabeth Barratt, the cousins rose to “social prominence.”
407
Most of the Chinese
immigrants laborers worked diligently and attempted to plan for futures that did not come
to fruition. In part, Ah Hem and Ohn’s success was tied to the success of their employer,
Charles Copeland Morse, and the success of all three was wrapped up in the cultivation
of sweet peas for seed and the strategic framing of the sweet pea as a British or Anglo
flower. The perceived civilizing power of the sweet pea and the economic power built
around it, created opportunities for relative success for Ah Hem and Ohn.
The cousins arrived in California within decades of the company’s founder,
Charles Copeland Morse, who had migrated to California in the 1860s from Thomaston,
Maine by way of the gold camps of Virginia City, Nevada.
408
Their lives followed
similar paths of odd horticultural jobs and work with sweet peas. However, racial
restrictions and likely economic disparities led the three in different directions. Morse

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
407
Barratt, “Two Cousins from China and Gilroy’s Early Seed Industry,”
http://www.excludedamericans.com/GilroySeed00_Intro.htm.
408
Ferry-Morse Seed Co., The Seeds of Tomorrow: Celebrating 100 Years of Service to
Commercial Growers and Home Gardeners, 1856-1956 (1956), 6. Barratt, “Two Cousins
from China and Gilroy’s Early Seed Industry,”
http://www.excludedamericans.com/GilroySeed01_Early.htm.
186
settled in the Santa Clara Valley, taking odd jobs, including painting houses.
409
He
worked at Henry Rengstorff’s Mountain View hay farm and then in 1874, he partnered
with A.L. Kellogg to raise and sell seeds.
410
Kellogg and Morse expanded their offerings
in 1877 when they purchased a pre-existing seed business in Santa Clara.
411
In the mid-
1880s, Morse bought out his partner upon Kellogg’s retirement.
412
C.C. Morse & Co.
was one of a handful of seed companies in the Santa Clara Valley, competing both for
market share and for labor talent. Other seed companies included Braslan Seed Growers
Inc., Pieters-Wheeler Co. of Gilroy, and Waldo Rohnert Co. of Gilroy – with Rohnert
previously having served as a superintendent for C.C. Morse & Co.
413
On a national
scale, C.C. Morse & Co. competed with Breck, Peter Henderson, Burpee, D.M. Ferry,
and Sunset Seed Company.
414
The company formally passed from father Charles

409
Ferry-Morse Seed Co., The Seeds of Tomorrow, 6.
410
Barratt, “Two Cousins from China and Gilroy’s Early Seed Industry,”
http://www.excludedamericans.com/GilroySeed01_Early.htm. Ferry-Morse Seed Co.,
The Seeds of Tomorrow, 6.
411
Ibid.
The previous owner, R.W. Wilson had moved from Rochester, New York to
Santa Clara in 1873 with the hopes of improving his health. When his health did not
improve, he sold his company. Ferry-Morse Seed Co., The Seeds of Tomorrow, 6.
412
Barratt, “Two Cousins from China and Gilroy’s Early Seed Industry,”
http://www.excludedamericans.com/GilroySeed01_Early.htm.
Ferry-Morse Seed Co., The Seeds of Tomorrow, 6.
413
Barratt, “Two Cousins from China and Gilroy’s Early Seed Industry,”
http://www.excludedamericans.com/GilroySeed01_Early.htm.
414
Rice, The Sweet Pea Book, 8. See also, Hamilton Wright, “Derive Millions from Big
Seed Plantations: California’s Young Industry is Already Producing a Third of Total
Output in the Country,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 30, 1903, 7. See also, Peter
Thompson, Seeds, Sex and Civilization: How the Hidden Life of Plants has Shaped our
187
Copeland Morse to son, Lester L. Morse, upon the elder’s death in 1900. However,
Lester had taken on a significant management role the two years prior given his father’s
poor health.
415

At the turn of the century, C.C. Morse & Co. boasted it was the “largest” grower
of sweet pea seed in the world and was known as an international “expert” on sweet
peas.
416
Ah Hem and Ohn labored tirelessly to propel the company to achieve that status.
Ah Hem had worked for Leland Stanford on his Palo Alto stock farm as early as 1870
before joining C.C. Morse & Co. in 1877. There he rose to the position of foreman,
overseeing 80 to 150 seasonal Chinese workers. The company paid the Chinese laborers
the same hourly pay of 10 cents an hour, yet the Chinese workers labored 11-hour days
while the white workers at the same point in time worked 10-hour days.
417
The Chinese

World (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2010) for a general discussion of the importance
of seeds in human history. See, Ferry-Morse Seed Co., The Seeds of Tomorrow, 5 & 36
for information on the history of seedsmen, including the Shakers.
D.M. Ferry and C.C. Morse & Co. merged in 1930. For post-merger history of the
company, see ibid. at 7-9.
415
Ibid. at 7.
416
Wright, The Sweet Pea Notebook, 53. Lester A. Morse, President of C.C. Morse &
Co., “Seed Growing in California,” ed. E.J. Wickson, ed., California’s Magazine (San
Francisco: California Publishers Co-operative Association, 1915), Vol. 1, No. 1 (Jul.,
1915), 155-158, 155; C.C. Morse & Co., 1907 Autumn Catalogue (?: Calkins Publishing
House, 1907) (Business Ephemera at the California Historical Society), 16-18. As late as
2002, Graham Rice concluded, “until relatively recently, much of the world’s sweet pea
seed was produced in California.” Rice is not specific with regards to timing but noted
that the main raisers of Grandiflora, a family of sweet peas – were Henry Eckford in
England and C.C. Morse & Co. and Burpee in California. Rice, The Sweet Pea Book, 33,
129.
417
Barratt, “Two Cousins from China and Gilroy’s Early Seed Industry,”
http://www.excludedamericans.com/GilroySeed01_Early.htm.
188
laborers’ work included the vital task of rogueing, meticulously picking out the weeds
from sweet pea plants so that the weeds would not affect the purity of the sweet pea seeds
and blossoms.
418
Once the seeds were ready to be separated, again, Chinese laborers took
a leading role, gathering and sorting the seed pods. Pods that had already burst or twisted
open were deposited into sacks suspended on stakes. The remaining pods were relegated
to sun dry on Chinese mats.
419
While the laborers experienced disparities in work hours
and intensive labor, Ahm Hem and Ohn were part of a minority who rose to management
roles and assisted with botanical experimentation.
While Ah Hem and Ohn supervised fields and Chinese labor, the company
marketed its prize flower as a British or Anglo civilizing bloom, divorced from the
realities of its cultivation in Gilroy. It is not clear where the first domestic sweet peas
were cultivated – the hypotheses range from Sicily to China to Malta to Sri Lanka.
420

The oft repeated story from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries was that in 1695
Francisco Cupani, a member of the order of St. Francis, noted one in the botanical garden
at Misilmeri that he tended. It is unclear whether or not it was actually growing in his
garden but by 1699, he sent seed both to Casper Commelin, a botanist at the School of
Medicine in Amsterdam and to Robert Uvedale at Enfield in Middlesex. Uvedale grew
sweet peas as early as 1700.
421
Henry Eckford experimented and popularized the flower

418
Ferry-Morse Seed Co., The Seeds of Tomorrow, 12.
419
Eames, “Flower and Seed Growing,” Overland Monthly, 562-581.
420
Rice, The Sweet Pea Book, 5-6.
421
Ibid. Lester Langford Morse, Field Notes on Sweet Peas (San Francisco: C.C. Morse
& Co., 1916 edition, orig. pub. 1907), 9. Rev. W.T. Hutchins, “The Sweet Pea: A Flower
189
in England and the United States.
422
D.M. Ferry introduced “Blanche Ferry” in 1889,
which became the parent flower for most subsequent early-flowering sweet peas. Much
of that breeding work after 1889 was performed in California by C.C. Morse & Co.
423

Morse’s catalogues prominently featured drawings of the coveted, fragrant
blooms. In 1907, the company sold 20 different varieties, ranging in price from 10 cents
to 25 cents an ounce, with better deals for bulk orders.
424
By 1910, C.C. Morse & Co.

for Everybody,” (Lecture delivered before the Massachusetts Horticultural Society on
February 13, 1897) (Boston: Printed for the Society, 1898), 5, in the Uncatalogued
Materials of the Ferry-Morse Papers, University of California at Davis. Alvin C. Beal,
“Sweet Pea Studies- III, Culture of the Sweet Pea,” (Ithaca: Cornell University,
Agricultural Experiment Station of the College of Agriculture, Department of
Horticulture, Sep., 1912, Bulletin 320), 678, in the Uncatalogued Materials of the Ferry-
Morse Papers, University of California at Davis.
422
Hutchins, “The Sweet Pea,” 6-12.
423
Ferry-Morse Seed Co., The Seeds of Tomorrow, 15.
424
C.C. Morse & Co., Morse’s Garden Guide for 1915 (?: 1915), reviewed in the
Oversize Business Ephemera at the California Historical Society, under C.C. Morse &
Co.), 6. C.C. Morse & Co., 1907 Autumn Catalogue, 16-18. See also, Lester L. Morse,
“Pacific Coast Floral Wealth: Flower Seed-rowing in the Santa Clara Valley,” San
Francisco Chronicle, May 16, 1901, 7.
At the turn of the century, C.C. Morse & Co. purchased Cox Seed Co. and
provided a wide range of flowers beyond sweet peas, including hyacinths, tulips,
narcissus/daffodils, irises, lilies, pansies, lily-of-the-valley, oxalis, and ranunculus. See
also, C.C. Morse & Co., Annual Catalogue, Plants Seeds Trees 1910 (Rochester, New
York: Stecher Co., 1910), 67, Business Ephemera at the California Historical Society,
advertising that their pansies came from “noted European specialists.” C.C. Morse & Co.,
Morse’s Garden Guide for 1911 (?: 1911), Business Ephemera at the California
Historical Society.
However, the imports and exports were not unidirectional. In 1893, C.C. Morse &
Co. noticed a dwarf sweet pea on their trial farm in Santa Clara. They grew seven acres
of the dwarf to see if it was a fluke and not one of the dwarf plants became tall. C.C.
Morse & Co. sold the dwarfs to Burpee, who sent them to England. Rice, The Sweet Pea
Book, 27.
190
had three offices – a retail space on Market Street, a wholesale or bulk business on
Jackson Street and then the Farm Office near Gilroy. They also sold their seeds through
others’ businesses, such as the Emporium in San Francisco.
425
Under Lester L. Morse,
business expanded and flourished, with his interest in company-wide systematized
scientific plant breeding. They purchased 900 acres of San Justo Ranch near Hollister
in 1910.
426

While the company maintained a well-diversified portfolio of seed offerings,
Lester Morse specifically championed its sweet peas. He wrote, “Sweet peas, of course,
are the great California leader, and practically the world’s supply is produced here.” He
specifically noted the production in the Santa Clara Valley as well as land south in
Lompoc, and Los Angeles, calculating that “no less than 2,500 acres each year” had been
planted solely for sweet pea seeds.
427
These sweet pea seeds as well as cut flowers of a
tremendous variety were then shipped to Seattle, Salt Lake, and Chicago.
428

The Morses built their seed and sweet pea empire through an unofficial and
maybe unlikely partnership with Ah Hem and his cousin. Though Chinese workers
rogued the fields to protect the genetic purity of desired varieties and participated

425
C.C. Morse & Co., Annual Catalogue, Plants Seeds Trees 1910, 1 & 49. Ferry-Morse
Seed Co., The Seeds of Tomorrow, 7.
426
Ferry-Morse Seed Co., The Seeds of Tomorrow, 3, 7. Barratt, “Two Cousins from
China and Gilroy’s Early Seed Industry,”
http://www.excludedamericans.com/GilroySeed02_AhHem.htm.
427
Lester A. Morse, “Seed Growing in California,” 155-158, 158. C.C. Morse & Co.
formally moved its headquarters from San Francisco to Santa Clara in 1905. Ferry-Morse
Seed Co., The Seeds of Tomorrow, 7.
428
Eames, “Flower and Seed Growing,” Overland Monthly, 572.
191
ceremoniously when visitors came to the grounds, when it came to marketing and
flaming the fires of the sweet pea craze, Lester Morse had a dual message of science and
British civility. Sweet peas, like many other flowers grown for seed, were tracked
meticulously. Company ledgers followed Morse’s crosses from 1911 for almost a
decade, carefully noting “Spence Lavender x Wallacea – 7 Seed” or “Plants tall &
Resemble Wallacea in color.” The ledgers depict not only the specimen themselves but
the routines of rogueing.
429
Although the sweet pea was commonly portrayed as quaint
and old-fashioned, the scientific novelty of tracking and breeding new versions was
modern.
430
In connection with this modern pursuit, C.C. Morse & Co. explicitly
connected the sweet pea to the City Beautiful Movement of Daniel Burnham to elevate
civilization in urban spaces through largely architectural beautification. C.C. Morse &
Co. noted that San Francisco and the Bay Area in general worked “for the ‘City
Beautiful,’” and that there was “nothing that will beautify a garden more than a good row
of bright Sweet Peas.”
431
C.C. Morse & Co. then traced the flower to its British roots –
the “Spencer” type as created in England in 1902. Noting its tremendous popularity
across the pond, C.C. Morse & Co. assured its potential customers that in England sweet
peas were “found in every garden.” Further, growers in England competed with their
neighbors to grow “the finest blossoms and who has chosen the finest varieties.” Flower

429
C.C. Morse & Co., “Sweet Pea Shop 1918,” unpublished field diary tracking crosses
from 1911, p. 2, 22-24 in Box 15, of Ferry-Morse Papers, University of California at
Davis. (There were no folders dividing this box.)
430
Sunset Seed and Plant catalogue, 1897, Huntington Library and Gardens.
431
C.C. Morse & Co., “Sweet Pea Culture and Price List 1912-1913,” 3, in the
Uncatalogued Materials of the Ferry-Morse Papers, University of California at Davis.
192
shows held all across Great Britain, “in every town and village,” featured classes for
sweet peas earned first place awards. Specifically, C.C. Morse & Co. focused on the
Sweet Pea Show sponsored by the London Daily Mail at the Crystal Palace in London in
which 38,000 exhibits were submitted to the 1911 show.
432
Lester Morse even attended
the London National Sweet Pea Society Exhibition in 1912. And by 1915, the company
was awarded Grand Prize for Exhibit of Spencer Sweet Peas by unanimous votes.
433

They also sponsored a children’s sweet pea contest in connection with the 1915 Panama
Pacific Exposition.
434

This public, British or Anglo mask of the sweet pea giant hid the work of Chinese
American labor on the fields, supervising, and breeding and their successes and trials.
For those who visited the fields, however, the Chinese laborers became part of the
spectacle of the company’s success. On July 15, 1899, the Gilroy Advocate covered the
C.C. Morse & Co. tour of 150 delegates at the Association of Agricultural Colleges and
Experimental Stations. “The visitors were given the liberty of plucking all the sweet peas
they could carry, and the ladies were charmed with the beautiful fields of flowers.”
Lester Morse was present and gifted all of the guests with a seed packet souvenir. In
addition to recognizing Morse’s gift, the paper noted that Ah Hem gave each visitor a

432
C.C. Morse & Co., “Sweet Pea Culture and Price List 1912-1913,” 3. See also, C.C.
Morse & Co., “Sweet Peas,” 1910, in the Uncatalogued Materials of the Ferry-Morse
Papers, University of California at Davis.
433
C.C. Morse & Co., Morse’s Bulbs, 15.
434
C.C. Morse & Co., Sweet Pea Culture (?: 1915), 2-3, Business Ephemera Collection
of the California Historical Society.
193
package of tea. Then Chinese laborers set off firecrackers and shouted “Rah! Rah! Rah!.
. .Morse! Morse! Morse!”
435

Ah Hem spent over 25 years working for C.C. Morse & Co. By 1901, C.C.
Morse & Co. ran 1,250 acres in the Santa Clara Valley and Ah Hem supervised labor
there. His cousin, Ohn, also worked as a superintendent and conducted breeding
experiments. Each reached a level of uneasy security and even fame in the face of
difficult circumstances. The Gilroy Advocate even concluded Ah Hem was “one of the
most intelligent of his race in the State.”
436
In 1908, he traveled to China looking for land
for seeds for C.C. Morse & Co. Shortly thereafter, he left his employment at C.C. Morse
& Co. and went into importing, remaining in Asia. Regardless of his economic success,
his daughter, Mary, had trouble reentering the United States because of exclusion laws,
despite her citizenship.
437

While exclusionary nativism first targeted Chinese Americans, as more Japanese
settled in California, nativistic racism broadened its scope to include Japanese
immigrants. San Francisco labor unions formed the Japanese and Korean Exclusion
League in May 1905. Some called for segregated schools by 1906 and for significantly
restricted immigration.
438
In 1907, the Gentlemen’s Agreement between the United

435
Barratt, “Two Cousins from China and Gilroy’s Early Seed Industry,”
http://www.excludedamericans.com/GilroySeed01_Early.htm.
436
As discussed in ibid.
437
Ibid.
438
Yagasaki, “Ethnic Cooperatism and Immigrant Agriculture,” 12 & 13. Kawaguchi,
Living with Flowers, 35.
194
States and Japan halted official labor immigration from Japan but allowed for the wives
of those currently living in the United States to immigrate.
439

Those who immigrated formed the critical foundations of marketing cut-flowers
in California. Some found economic success and many established themselves in
corporations and as landowners before anti-Asian land laws were passed. Among those
early emigrants was Hiroshi Yoshike. Born in Ueda City, Nagano in 1858, he came to
the United States in 1882. He traveled back to Japan in 1885, married, and returned to
Oakland with both his bride and the pompom chrysanthemums with which he started his
business in 1886. While he started as a peddler, within a relatively short time, he
operated a stand in downtown Oakland. By 1890, he ran an acre of land a few blocks
from the stand complete with five greenhouses for his chrysanthemums and carnations.
Unlike many of his contemporaries whose businesses rapidly expanded after the 1906
earthquake and fires, Yoshike retired after the disaster to Napa. He had no heirs to pass
his business to and eventually he returned to Japan to live out his remaining days.
440

However, his legacy did not end with Bay Area floriculture. He sold plants to Sotaro
Endo, who leased and developed land in Los Angeles, at South Main and West Jefferson.

439
Kawaguchi, Living with Flowers, 27.
440
Yagasaki, “Ethnic Cooperatism and Immigrant Agriculture,” 39-40. Naomi Hirihara,
ed., Greenmakers: Japanese American Gardeners in Southern California (Los Angeles:
Southern California Gardeners’ Federation, 2000), 8. Kawaguchi, Living with Flowers,
19.
195
Endo partnered with Jinnosuke Kobata and was part of the inception of commercial
floriculture in Los Angeles.
441

Yoshike’s contemporaries included the Domoto Brothers, who came from an
agricultural family in Wakayama Prefecture. The Domotos were never formally trained
in floriculture.
442
Four brothers – Yonoshin, Kanetaro “Tom,” Motonoshin “Henry” and
Mitsunoshin – immigrated from the early 1880s to 1890. When the brothers first arrived,
they took work as assistants in the kitchen of the Palace Hotel, and as gardeners for the
Adolph Sutro family near present day Cliff House.
443
The brothers were quite young,
Kanetaro only 16, however, they had acquired some English language skills from a
Christian missionary.
444
Yonoshin and Kanetaro led the way to San Francisco and began

441
Peggi Ridgway and Jan Works, Sending Flowers to America: Stories of The Los
Angeles Flower Market and the People Who Built an American Floral Industry (Los
Angeles: American Florists’ Exchange, Ltd./Los Angeles Flower Market, 2008), 14.
Hirihara, ed., Greenmakers, 8. For more information on Japanese American work in
floriculture in Los Angeles, see the above and Yagasaki, “Ethnic Cooperatism and
Immigrant Agriculture,” 102-166, covering from 1892 to 1942.
442
William E. Schmidt, “Toichi Domoto, Nurseryman Over Sixty Years Experience with
Flowers,” California Horticultural Journal (Jul., 1969), 282, attached as Appendix E to
Domoto, "A Japanese-American Nurseryman's Life in California: Floriculture and
Family, 1883-1992." See, Domoto Bros., Inc., Nurseries, “General Catalog – Ornamental
Trees, Shrubs, Etc.,” undated but c. 1915, in Davis, Box 355, Folder 10863, front cover.
Kawaguchi, Living with Flowers, 14 & 16.
In addition to the Yoshike and Domoto families, other Japanese American
floriculturists in the Bay Area during this period and following include the Enomotos,
Maedas, Nabetas, Sakais, Adachis, and Shibuyas. Domoto, "A Japanese-American
Nurseryman's Life in California," 221-222.
443
Domoto, "A Japanese-American Nurseryman's Life in California," 7. Schmidt,
“Toichi Domoto, Nurseryman Over Sixty Years Experience with Flowers,” California
Horticultural Journal, 281.
444
Domoto, "A Japanese-American Nurseryman's Life in California," 2.
196
growing ueki, chrysanthemums and carnations at 80
th
and Olive Streets in Oakland in
1884.
445
An official from the Japanese consulate, Munemitsu Mutsu, who was also from
Wakayama, encouraged them in their endeavor.
446

The Domotos are also likely the first Japanese to purchase land in the Bay Area –
if not anywhere in the United States; their first two acres in Oakland date from 1893.
Adding two additional acres by 1895, in 1904 they moved to a 35 acre plot in southern
Oakland.
447
They imported Satsuma or Unshui oranges from Japan with mixed success
and failure.
448
In contrast, their floral imports were quite successful. They have been
deemed “the originators of commercial production in northern California” of many
flowering Japanese plants from camellias, to wisterias to azaleas, and also imported from
Australia and Belgium.
449
Their 1902 catalogue offered 230 kinds of chrysanthemums
and 50 tea roses.
450
The Domotos maintained two stores in San Francisco – one for

445
Domoto Bros., Inc., Nurseries, “General Catalog – Ornamental Trees, Shrubs, Etc.,”
front cover. Kawaguchi, Living with Flowers, 14 & 16. Domoto, "A Japanese-American
Nurseryman's Life in California,” Riess Introduction.
446
Kawaguchi, Living with Flowers, 14 & 16.
447
Yagasaki, “Ethnic Cooperatism and Immigrant Agriculture,” 40-41.
448
Schmidt, “Toichi Domoto, Nurseryman Over Sixty Years Experience with Flowers,”
California Horticultural Journal, 281.
449
Yagasaki, “Ethnic Cooperatism and Immigrant Agriculture,” 40 & 41. Kawaguchi,
Living with Flowers, 17. See also Domoto, "A Japanese-American Nurseryman's Life in
California," 6, 28-29, 69. Schmidt, “Toichi Domoto, Nurseryman Over Sixty Years
Experience with Flowers,” California Horticultural Journal, 281.
450
Kawaguchi, Living with Flowers, 17. See also, Schmidt, “Toichi Domoto,
Nurseryman Over Sixty Years Experience with Flowers,” California Horticultural
Journal, 281-282 for a detailed description of Descriptive Catalogue of Japanese Plants
and Shrubs,” from 1892.
197
wholesale operations and one for dry goods and cut flowers.
451
The cut-flower business,
specializing in chrysanthemums and carnations, was largely run by the youngest brother,
Henry.
452
Tom also worked in hybridization, initially with chrysanthemums for which he
won awards and later with carnations.
453

Around the time of the 1915 Exposition, their business transitioned, moving from
relying significantly on imports to increased domestic production in response to new
quarantine and inspection laws and to the uneven enforcement of those laws.
454
They
also worked to educate and support other Japanese and Japanese-Americans with their
grounds becoming renowned as “Domoto College” for this work in training future
floriculturists.
455
The success of their business is a testament to their labor and to the
power of familial and community connections. Yet their family’s economic success
though was only one piece of their legacy; the flower market they participated in creating
secured the economic success of many other Asian and later Italian cut-flower growers.
From the 1890s through the first decade of the twentieth century, the Domotos
and other Japanese growers held an open-air flower market twice a week.
456
Chinese

451
Kawaguchi, Living with Flowers, 18.
452
Domoto, "A Japanese-American Nurseryman's Life in California," 2. Schmidt,
“Toichi Domoto, Nurseryman Over Sixty Years Experience with Flowers,” California
Horticultural Journal, 281.
453
Domoto, "A Japanese-American Nurseryman's Life in California," 303.
454
Ibid. at 11 & 16. Schmidt, “Toichi Domoto, Nurseryman Over Sixty Years Experience
with Flowers,” California Horticultural Journal, 282-283.
455
Domoto, "A Japanese-American Nurseryman's Life in California," Riess Introduction.
456
Kawaguchi, Living with Flowers, 21.
198
growers had a second market in Stevenson Alley.
457
After the 1906 earthquake and fire,
Japanese florists organized their efforts in coordinating a wholesale market to showcase
their wares.
458
By 1906, 22 Japanese nurseries operated in the East Bay. This number
expanded to 28 by 1909 and 33 by 1910, with a total of 45 in the entire Bay Area. Many
grew greenhouse carnations, roses and chrysanthemums.
459
After 1906, Japanese
growers expanded into San Mateo, Belmont, Redwood City, and Mountain View.
460
In
1910, 33 Japanese flower growers operated in Oakland with more than 700,000 square
feet of greenhouse space, nurturing 415,000 square feet of carnations, 29,000 square feet
of roses, followed by lilies and chrysanthemums.
461
Twelve operated on the Peninsula.
462

In 1910, the 45 growers in the Bay Area grew 20,569,500 carnations for $276,400; roses
for $155,000; 200,000 chrysanthemums for $54,000; and 170,000 lilies for $40,000.
463

In 1910, in Alameda, flower growers owned 100 acres, 81% of total operated areas. 93%
of the total agricultural land owned by Japanese was owned by flower growers.
464

457
Ibid. at 22.
458
Yagasaki, “Ethnic Cooperatism and Immigrant Agriculture,” 48 & 435. Yagasaki
noted that the Japanese organized before the Italians and Chinese. See also, William F.
Benedict, “Bringing the Flowers to Market: An Army of Growers – Chinese, Japanese
and Italian- Swarm Into the City from Down the Peninsula or Across the Bay In the Early
Hours of the Morning,” San Francisco Chronicle, Jan. 4, 1914, 12.
459
Yagasaki, “Ethnic Cooperatism and Immigrant Agriculture,” 46, 67.
460
Ibid. at 84.
461
Ibid. at 64, 66.
462
Ibid. at 84.
463
Ibid. at 67.
464
Ibid. at 71-72.
199
In May of 1906, the Domotos leased space accessible from the Lick Place alley
between Montgomery and Kearny Streets. The California Flower Growers Association
(Kashu Kaki Saibai Kumiai) opened the California Flower Market. As the enterprise
grew, the California Flower Market expanded to a basement on Bush Street and an open-
air market component at Grant near Sutter, outside of the Podesta & Baldocchi floristry
business. By 1914, they occupied a two story space on Anne Street. At times, the market
shared space with individual florists such as the Domoto Brothers and United Florist as
well as the Japanese Association of America and the Japanese Chamber of Commerce of
San Francisco.
465
The growers routinely used the market to sell to retailers as many
white customers did not buy directly from Japanese. Even though the enterprise required
middlemen, the Japanese growers largely controlled the market.
466

The early years of the market illustrate the difficulties of participation in a
business vulnerable to environmental factors and price competition and further magnified
by a cultural and politic climate hostile to Asian presence. A typical day at the market
started in the wee hours of the morning, as growers delivered and arranged their wares
into the spaces they were assigned based on the particular flowers they offered and a
lottery drawing. At 7 o’clock in the morning, the doors opened. Growers and buyers –
both wholesalers and retailers – evaluated the blooms and negotiated prices.
467
Noritaka
Yagasaki has argued that the California Flower Market provided a “sense of identity,”

465
Ibid. at 49-50. Kawaguchi, Living with Flowers, ix, 32.
466
Kawaguchi, Living with Flowers, 28.
467
Yagasaki, “Ethnic Cooperatism and Immigrant Agriculture,” 52-53.
200
financial cooperative support, as well as a specific locale for exchanging industry-related
ideas.
468
Obtaining financing was a persistent issue of concern, despite the gradual
growth of Japanese banks. From its inception in 1906, the California Flower Market
“provided mutual financing using its own investment and reserve funds.”
469
In addition,
the California Flower Market functioned as a “fraternal organization, sponsoring picnics
and athletic meets.”
470
Further, given the English language gap in the Issei community,
the California Flower Market provided a social outlet with like-language skills.
471
The
market allowed the Japanese Americans to increase their bargaining power in the face of
the rising anti-Japanese rhetoric and Anglo-competition.
472
By 1913, there were 50
Japanese flower nurseries, with annual sales at California Flower Market of $535,000.
473

Those connected to the flower market starting shipping flowers out of state in
1910, beginning with chrysanthemums. In 1913, F.A. Mashihara, a wholesaler in San
Francisco, sent free samples to Chicago, St. Louis, and Kansas City via Wells Fargo
Express. Florists in Chicago replied that they wanted 100 boxes. Also in 1913, S.
Enomoto shipped 50 to 100 boxes of chrysanthemums to New Orleans for the All Saints
Day festival. In 1915, members routinely shipped to the Midwest via a cooperative.
474

468
Ibid. at 52.
469
Ibid. at 278.
470
Ibid. at 56.
471
Ibid. at 436.
472
Takeshita, “Community in Bloom,” 4.
473
Yagasaki, “Ethnic Cooperatism and Immigrant Agriculture,” 67.
474
Ibid. at 437.
201
During this same time period they also started exporting carnations but only on holidays
such as Christmas and Mother’s Day.
475

In January 1912, the California Flower Market incorporated with Motonoshin
Domoto served as the first president. Nine of the 54 stockholders met in June 1912,
capitalizing the enterprise with $10,000 and pledging to move forward as a marketing
cooperative.
476
They drafted official bylaws in Japanese “to facilitate the smooth sale of
flowers in the market.” The bylaws reflect both protective tendencies and straight
forward rules to make the business run smoothly. With regard to the protective
provisions, Article 2 limited participation in the market to Japanese flower growers who
owned at least four shares of stock and Article 4 prohibited members from selling flowers
grown by non-members or face a fine of $20. At some point in time, the restriction on
Japanese only flower-growers “relaxed.” Some of the bylaws governed the day-to-day
activities of the market, including Article 6 that proportionally divided market expenses
in connection with greenhouse space and Article 9 that declared penalties of ten times
regular operating expenses for those who made false reports with regard to the
greenhouse area.
477

The initial rules provided infrastructure for protected growth. But the relaxation
of the Market rules led to further successful cooperative developments inside and outside

475
Ibid. at 92.
476
Yagasaki, “Ethnic Cooperatism and Immigrant Agriculture,” 41, 49-50. Kawaguchi,
Living with Flowers, 32.
477
Yagasaki, “Ethnic Cooperatism and Immigrant Agriculture,” at 54. Translation by
Yagasaki.
202
the Market.
478
Chinese and later Italian growers joined the wholesale market with each
group generally specializing in a particular kind of flowers.
479
The Chinese growers who
participated in the market were mainly from San Mateo and Palo Alto. They drew
largely from four extended families from Canton: the Chews, the Wongs, the Yees, and
the Chows, focusing on asters, sweet peas, then pompons. Japanese growers offered
chrysanthemums and a variety of greenhouse flowers. And Italians contributed violets
and ferns.
480

In 1914, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that the Chinese and Japanese
flower markets were separate.
481
Some argue that split was caused by conflicts over
space with many of the successful Japanese growers relocating in a new space.
482
Others
credit the split to “ill-feeling of long standing.”
483
Regardless by 1914, approximately 25
Chinese growers sold their goods from stalls in the basement of the Shasta Hotel at Bush
and Kearny. Japanese sold from the basement of a brick building adjoining the fire
station at Kearny and Grant on Bush. The Chinese flower market reportedly featured
“solid mass[es] of chrysanthemums” of red, white, yellow, single and double blossoms at
“[r]idiculously low” prices that were up for negotiation. The Japanese market had both

478
Benedict, “Bringing the Flowers to Market,” San Francisco Chronicle, 12.
479
Kawaguchi, Living with Flowers, 28.
480
Yagasaki, “Ethnic Cooperatism and Immigrant Agriculture,” 70. Kawaguchi, Living
with Flowers, 30.
481
Benedict, “Bringing the Flowers to Market,” San Francisco Chronicle, 12.
482
Kawaguchi, Living with Flowers, 30.
483
Benedict, “Bringing the Flowers to Market,” San Francisco Chronicle, 12.
203
more structured rules and more hothouse chrysanthemums than the Chinese market – also
with longer stems.
484

Rooted communities, corporate organization, and infrastructure combined to
insulate growers from some of the effects of anti-Asian legislation, as was also the case
with the 1913 Alien Land Laws.
485
The laws forbade Issei from purchasing real property
and limited leases to three year terms.
486
Although the analysis of this project ends in
1915, by 1920, laws prohibited leasing land to Japanese altogether. Further efforts were
taken to deny Nisei the right to purchase real property.
487
By 1923, crop contracts
between Japanese renters or growers and landowners were illegal.
488
Because Northern
California Japanese growers largely established themselves pre-Alien Land Law, they
were not as seriously affected by the restrictions, particularly those who had children who
were United States citizens by birth who could therefore take or receive title to land.
489

484
Ibid.
485
Hirihara, ed., Greenmakers, 8.
486
Kawaguchi, Living with Flowers, 38. Domoto, "A Japanese-American Nurseryman's
Life in California," 82-83.
487
Kawaguchi, Living with Flowers, 38. Hirihara, ed., Greenmakers, 8. Yagasaki,
“Ethnic Cooperatism and Immigrant Agriculture,” 13. Domoto, "A Japanese-American
Nurseryman's Life in California," 82-83.
488
Hirihara, ed., Greenmakers, 8. Yagasaki, “Ethnic Cooperatism and Immigrant
Agriculture,” 13.
489
Yagasaki, “Ethnic Cooperatism and Immigrant Agriculture,” 74. Takeshita,
“Community in Bloom,” 5.
204
________________________

In an era of crippling nativism, Chinese and Japanese American immigrants in the
world of California floriculture nurtured blossoms and extended families. They utilized
corporate and community coalitions to build their businesses and maximize opportunities
for economic success. They labored, bred flowers, and created wholesale markets.
Different individuals and groups utilized a mixture of tools and strategies as
circumstances required. While some Euro-American Californians, like C.C. Morse,
nurtured and marketed blooms highlighting the whiteness of California, Chinese and
Japanese American floriculturists highlighted the fragility of that narrative by nurturing
the same blooms and through their work gaining some economic and social power. The
Morses, Domotos, and pair of cousins all relied on family networks to grow and sustain
their businesses. Yet the twin forces of nativism and economic disparities helped to
shape different journeys for each – with different conclusions. The California Flower
Market in San Francisco flourished; by March of 1924, the Market moved again, this
time to 171 5
th
Street where it expanded into a virtual flower “terminal” to include
Japanese, Italian, and Chinese growers and sellers.
490
In 1930, C.C. Morse & Co. merged
with D.M. Ferry Company to be known as Ferry-Morse Seed Company, emerging as one

490
Yagasaki, “Ethnic Cooperatism and Immigrant Agriculture,” 50. See Kawaguchi,
Living with Flowers, for more recent history of market and the San Francisco Flower
Terminal at 5
th
, 6
th
, Brannan and Bryant after 1956.
205
of the largest seed companies in the world.
491
But the Ohn family and the secrets hidden
in the wall faced a darker future. When Henry Ohn died, his secret formula for the
yellow sweet pea remained hidden in the walls of his home. The insurance policy that he
carefully crafted sadly failed to provide for his family as he desired. A fire consumed his
former home, burning with it the yellow sweet peas of his imagination and toil.

491
Barratt, “Two Cousins from China and Gilroy’s Early Seed Industry,”
http://www.excludedamericans.com/GilroySeed01_Early.htm.
206
Chapter 6

Poppy Culture:
Wild Botanizing and the Imagining of a Golden California

In June, the orange poppy plains are the glory of outdoor picturings, a
joyful blaze of color, which seems a condensation of all the veined gold in
the earth underneath, and the focal point of all the sun rays overhead.
492

Ninetta Eames, “Flower and Seed
Growing,” in Overland Monthly,
December 1891

Among all the wild flowers which carpet California’s plains and cloak her
hills there is none so distinctively Californian as the Golden Poppy. When
we view from a distance a foothill covered with the aureate bloom of
countless poppies, it looks like a huge mass of the gold that has made our
State famous. The buttercup, the rose, the lily, and a hundred other flowers
belong to no clime, but the Golden Poppy is peculiarly ours. Its rich hues
typify the marvelous richness of the golden West. Its abundant growth in
our fertile soil proves that it has the exuberant energy characteristic of
native sons.
493

California Blue Book or State Roster,
September 1903

On March 2, 1903, Governor George Pardee signed Senate Bill 251, officially
designating the Eschscholzia californica or California poppy, the state flower.
494
At the
signing, legislators marked the occasion by wearing colored-paper poppies on their lapels

492
Ninetta Eames, “Flower and Seed Growing,” Overland Monthly, Vol. XVIII, No. 108
(Dec., 1891), 562-581, 566.
493
California Blue Book or State Roster, drawing from an article in California Review
(Sacramento: 1903), 256.
494
The name Eschscholzia californica derived from Johann von Eschscholtz. The
scientific floral name omits the “t” present in his given name. However, many of the
poets and writers at the turn of the century used the “t” to describe the flower, calling it
the Eschscholtzia.
207
and reading poppy poetry.
495
Amidst the excitement of naming the state’s official floral
symbol, the state roster memorialized a familiar origin myth of the California poppy,
drawing from an article in “California Review”: German born naturalist Johann
Frederich Eschscholtz studied the poppy while on a Russian-led expedition of the Pacific
coast scouting for passage to the Atlantic in 1816, and botanists bestowed the genus of
plants that includes the California poppy with his name.
496
The article rooted the poppy
in a scientific and imperialistic culture of naming and exploring. Further, the article
focused on the aspects of the poppy that made it desirable or noteworthy: its wildness, its
connection via color to the golden nuggets of the California Gold Rush, its abundance
and use of California’s fertile soil, and its maturation alongside California’s “native

495
“Poppy Day in Capitol,” Los Angeles Times, March 3, 1903.
496
California Blue Book or State Roster, 256.
The California poppy differs from the opium poppy and poppy symbolic of
remembrance in British culture. For additional information on poppies more generally,
see E. Buckner Hollingsworth, Flower Chronicles: The Legend and Lore of Fifteen
Garden Favorites (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004, first ed. 1958), 167-
183, regarding Fra. Bartholomeaus Angelicus’ third century observations of the “slepi
herbe,” as well as its medicinal uses in Egypt and Assyria. Peter Coats, Flowers in
History (New York: Viking Press, 1970), 133-137, regarding the poppy in ancient Greek
mythology and as an emblem of remembrance.
For discussions of opium poppies in San Francisco, see “A Stroll Through
Chinatown,” The Californian, Vol. 1, No. 4 (Apr., 1880), 386. Jno. H. Gilmour, “The
Dream-Plant of India,” The Californian, Vol. III, No. 18 (Jun., 1881) 535. “Poppy Juice:
Its Fascinations and Bondage Worse Than Death,” San Francisco Chronicle, Sep. 8,
1879, 1. “Fancy Farming – A Caution to California Farmers,” San Francisco Chronicle,
Apr. 2, 1870. “Opium Raising in Tennessee: Hints of California Producers,” San
Francisco Chronicle (From the Toledo Blade) Aug. 13, 1871, 1. See also, Nayan Shah,
Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2001).
208
sons.”
497
While the official version of poppy history traced interactions with Russo-
German and Anglo Saxon native sons, the Spanish name for the flower, the copa de oro
or cup of gold, and the flower’s Spanish mission past also provided a compelling
romantic narrative for turn-of-the-century Californians.
The story of the rise of the ubiquitous flower to statehood mascot status reveals a
great deal about how Californians – men and women – framed the state by focusing on
the enduring power of its natural resources. Californians and poppies crossed paths in
radically different contexts. Californians connected the flower to varied visions of the
history and future of their state. The history of the California poppy comprises part of the
broader histories of plant hunting, cultural representation in poetry, songs, and art, and
botanizing wildflowers. The process and practice of designating state mottos, flowers,
and seals requires self-reflection on the status of the state, its imagined and experienced
pasts, and desired futures. By picking the wildflower poppy as the state flower,
Californians expressed confidence in their ability to define their own history as a
civilized space that drew not only from Anglo roots but from a reimagined Spanish past.
Concurrent with this process, botanists and amateur plant hunters observed, labeled,
named, and discussed California wildflowers. Through both the scientific and political-
cultural interactions with poppies, and wildflowers more generally, Californians explored
and celebrated what they recognized as a pre-encounter specimen, b the stories and lives
they constructed around poppies and wildflowers emphasized both Spanish and Anglo-
American California. The flower encompassed part of plural visions of a future that

497
California Blue Book or State Roster, 256.
209
championed the cataloging and usage of California’s resources, tracing the roots of Anglo
immigrant progress, and for some women, participating in scientific botanical work and
challenging gender stereotypes. Poppy framings of floral spatial relations focused on
telling a tale of California’s riches by focusing on a flower native to the space and
centuries of international interest and encounters with the land and poppy blooms.
The history of poppy culture at the turn of the century is marked by two
significant strains of representing the flower. Nurserymen, club women, and the
horticultural press fashioned a narrative of the California poppy as a flower with a
historical past. Organizer Sara Lemmon and others urged Californians to adopt the
poppy as the state flower and celebrate the flower through cultural representations. But
poppy culture must also be examined in fields and herbaria through the work of botanists,
the second strain. The Lemmons and the Brandegees’ wildflower botanizing in scientific
and institutional contexts carved out space for women and work with wildflowers. Both
groups created visions of California around the poppy and interrogated the possibilities of
California’s floricultural future. They connected the living organisms and the
evolutionary change they recognized in those organisms to evolutionary changes in
society. The story of California’s state flower captures both efforts to capitalize on its
golden past and to divine an equally promising future.
_______________________

The amateur and academic botanists who flooded California’s gold hills and
valleys tracked and catalogued wildflowers in the centuries’ long tradition of plant
210
hunting. Plant hunters seek the natural gems of a foreign or unexplored (by whatever
standards the plant hunter applies) landscape, commonly with the goal of extracting
samples to further scientific knowledge and to cultivate specimens in the home country.
Plant hunting along the California coast predated Spanish expeditions; indigenous hunters
looked for wild plants for food and medicine. Plant hunting is both international and
domestic in the sense of local botanists exploring uncultivated patches of land for a
similar purpose as international hunters – to observe the plants in their native space,
remove samples to name and study and then grow the plants in captivity. In hunting,
naming, and recreating, the plant hunter defines the landscape, the possibilities for the
future of that landscape and marks his or her own workspace or herbarium as a locus for
scientific study. The domestic plant hunters of turn of the century California – some of
whom had fought on Civil War battlefields in the east – stood on the shoulders of those
who had previously trekked into the hills of the Golden Gate as well as eastern United
States scientists who had the power to name and officially recognize new species.
Those who championed the poppy for state flower capitalized on the rich history
of plant hunting on the Pacific Coast and reframed parts of that narrative.
498
Native
Californians used plant roots to relieve painful toothaches and green leaves for their

498
For more information on the history of plant hunting on the Pacific Coast, see Richard
G. Beidleman, California’s Frontier Naturalists (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2006), 9-70. C. C. Parry, “Early Botanical Explorers of the Pacific Coast,”
Overland Monthly, Vol. II, No. 10 (Oct., 1883), 409-416. For a general framing of plant
hunters, see Susan Orlean, The Orchid Thief (New York: Random House, 1998), 55-74.
211
nutritional benefits.
499
Wildflowers, including the poppy, served as a food source.
500
The
Luiseños living near what would become San Diego and Mission San Luis Rey, used the
petals as a kind of chewing gum.
501
Forty-niners repeated a native legend that the gold in
the ore formed when petals of the Great Spirit Flower dropped to the earth when they sent
pressed poppies home to loved-ones in letters.
502

Moving from the local to the international, the French explored Monterey and its
plant life in the 1780s.
503
The Spanish sailed under Alessandro Malaspina in 1791.
504

Spotting brilliant orange fields of poppies, the Spanish reportedly proclaimed the land
“¡la tierra del fuego!” or land of fire.
505
Archibald Menzies’ British Vancouver
Expedition spanned 1792 through 1795, botanizing in Mendocino and San Francisco Bay
aboard the aptly named Discovery.
506
Although he likely never saw the California poppy

499
Yvonne Savio, “California Poppy History,” Golden Gardens, Vol. 65, No. 2 (Sep.-
Oct., 1996), 27. Beidleman, California’s Frontier Naturalists, 52-53.
500
Richard A. Minnich, California’s Fading Wildflowers (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2008), 62.
501
Savio, “California Poppy History,” Golden Gardens, 27.
502
Emory Evans Smith, The Golden Poppy (San Francisco: Murdock Press, 1902), 57.
Savio, “California Poppy History,” Golden Gardens, 27.
503
Beidleman, California’s Frontier Naturalists, 9-16.
504
Ibid. at 17-23. See also, Minnich, California’s Fading Wildflowers, 10-65 regarding
Spanish exploration and wildflowers.
505
Minnich, California’s Fading Wildflowers, 1.
506
Elizabeth McClintock, “The California Poppy – Natural History,” Pacific
Horticulture, Vol. 37, No. 1 (Jan., 1976), 3-5, 3. Cameron Rogers, Trodden Glory: The
Story of the California Poppy (Santa Barbara: Wallace Hebberd, 1949), 8.
212
in bloom, he did pinpoint the flowers, naming them E. Californica.
507
In 1792, Menzies
sent seeds to Kew Gardens in England but the plants failed to flourish there.
508
Russian
Count Nikolai Petrovich Rezanov traveled with Prussian naturalist Dr. Georg Heinrich
von Langsdorff in 1806.
509
As set forth in broad terms by the 1903 article in the state
roster, in 1815, Russian Count Nicholas Romanzoff commissioned Otto von Kotzebue to
locate a north American passage connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
510
Adelburt
von Chamisso, a French noblemen, poet, and botanist and Dr. Johann Frederich
Eschscholtz, a German surgeon, zoologist and naturalist traveled along. While the crew
failed to locate an ocean passage, they scouted various plants and sent home drawings of
the California poppy.
511
Further, in 1820, Chamisso prepared a scientific account of the
flower, which he named Eschscholzia Californica Chamisso and he sent sample seeds
back to Russia.
512

The British also continued their participation in the international scouting of
California’s wildflowers. David Douglas, perhaps most famous for providing the name

507
Rogers, Trodden Glory, 14-15.
508
Ibid. at 8-20. McClintock, “The California Poppy – Natural History,” Pacific
Horticulture, 3. Beidleman, California’s Frontier Naturalists, 24-41.
509
Beidleman, California’s Frontier Naturalists, 42-47.
510
Bertha Marguerite Rice, Romance of the Golden Poppy: An Appeal for the State
Flower (Bulletin No. 2, Western Out-of-Doors, Published by Roland Rice, Saratoga,
California, 1925), 2-3. Beidleman, California’s Frontier Naturalists, 48-60. Rogers,
Trodden Glory, 21-34. McClintock, “The California Poppy – Natural History,” Pacific
Horticulture, 3.
511
Rice, Romance of the Golden Poppy, 2. See also, Rogers, Trodden Glory, 21-34.
McClintock, “The California Poppy – Natural History,” Pacific Horticulture, 3.
512
Rice, Romance of the Golden Poppy, 3. See also, Rogers, Trodden Glory, 21-34.
213
for the Douglas fir tree that graces many Christmas celebrations, sailed along the coast
starting in 1825 with the Horticultural Society of London. Like Menzies, he sent poppy
seeds to from southern Oregon to Kew Gardens before traveling to California in 1830.
513

And the HMS Blossom graced the coast from 1826 to 1827 with English explorer Captain
Frederick Beechey’s crew of 100, including illustrators, botanists and plant hunters.
514

Centuries of plant hunting in California provided an international narrative of
interest in the state’s natural treasures. But, at the turn of the twentieth century, the
romantic Spanish tradition of glorifying the flower captured poppy promoters’ attention
as had the novel Ramona and the save-the-missions campaigns. The Spanish had lived
amongst the poppies and created their own myths and stories regarding their blooms.
The Spanish called the flower by various names, including copa de oro (cup of gold),
calce de oro (chalice of gold), and dormidera (sleepy one – because the petals closed at
night).
515
Drawing on religious imagery, Father Junipero Serra proclaimed: “‘copa de
oro, holy Grail which holds within its sacred chalice, heaven’s gift of golden beauty,
California’s dower.’”
516
The flower was purportedly a talisman of both riches and

513
Rogers, Trodden Glory. Beidleman, California’s Frontier Naturalists, 113-124.
McClintock, “The California Poppy – Natural History,” Pacific Horticulture, 3 & 4.
514
Richard Steven Street, Everyone Had Cameras: Photography and Farmworkers in
California, 1850-2000 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 23.
Beidleman, California’s Frontier Naturalists, 61-70. Minnich, California’s Fading
Wildflowers, 83.
515
Rice, Romance of the Golden Poppy, 3. Beidleman, California’s Frontier Naturalists,
52-53.
516
Rice, Romance of the Golden Poppy, 3.
214
fertility.
517
Further, it was rumored to hasten hair growth when combined with olive oil
or suet into Pomada de Amapola.
518
Poppy promoters borrowed combinations of images
of riches, natural favor, and fecundity.
Mere botanical interest, however, even that spanning centuries, does not
necessarily translate to popular interest in a flower or the desire to use that flower to
represent the state. In the case of the California poppy, botanists studying wild plants and
the broader societal community of poets, journalists, nurserymen, and club women found
themselves in perhaps an unexpected marriage. Musings about the fragility of flowers
and society, as well as questions regarding the power of change and how environments
shape biological changes, linked the groups. The growing interest in wildflowers and
“historical flowers,” or flowers that dated from before the arrival of Euro-Americans to
California, drove some to articulate the relationship between these flowers and their
spaces.
519
As early as 1875, California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine
championed wildflowers; they estimated the blooms rose to the level of “true
philanthropists of their family and race” and marveled at the “generous profusion and
cheerful display” that greeted “the solitary rambler, or parties of excursionists, with their
merry children, who delight to revel in their blossoming wealth.” The wildflowers
promised to “gladden” the eyes of merchants and businessmen. They delighted and
uplifted but also taught; “the mysteries of nature unfolded to us; daily more and more are

517
Savio, “California Poppy History,” Golden Gardens, 27.
518
Ibid. See also, Smith, The Golden Poppy, 97.
519
“Roses in All Their Glory: The Spring Show Will Open on Thursday,” San Francisco
Chronicle (Apr. 26, 1896), 27.
215
her ‘hidden uses’ made manifest.”
520
In this framing, wildflowers cheered, taught, and
offered glimpses into nature’s hidden mysteries. Botanists and others continued to
explore “uses” of wildflowers over the following decades. Twenty years after the article
in California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, William Doxby concluded that the
wildflower’s “blossom is the origin of most that is useful or beautiful in the organic
world about us.” He predicted, “Strip the world of its blossoms, and the higher forms of
life must come to a speedy termination.” The flower played a “wonderfully important
part in the cosmos.” The bloom embodied “not only a thing of beauty for the
gratification of the aesthetic sense, but the instrument by which Nature brings about the
fullness of her perfection in her own good sense.” The flowers educated children.
Further, the act of naming created “some sort of relation” with the flower. Doxby
concluded though that all of this was not the final word, unlike for botanists of “olden
times” or even of botanists twenty years earlier. In the 1890s, the “plant is. . .recognized
as a living organism, not a dead, unchanging thing. It is vital; it grows; it is amenable to
the great laws of the universe; and we see it daily complying with those laws, adapting
itself to its surroundings – or perishing.”
521
In the twenty years leading up to the
twentieth century, wildflowers transitioned from a window into the “mysteries” of nature
to an example of an evolving organism complying with discernable scientific laws. As
Californians pondered connections between their futures and the natural environment

520
“An Amateur,” “Wild Flowers,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine,
Vol. V, No. 4 (Apr., 1875), 117-118.
521
William Doxby introduction from 1897 edition to Mary Elizabeth Parsons, The Wild
Flowers of California (San Francisco: Cunningham, Curtiss & Welch, 1907), vii.
216
surrounding them, wildflowers provided metaphoric and scientific prisms to understand
their surroundings.
Against the background of exploring, hunting, naming, changing and adapting,
the popularity of the poppy rose in the 1890s, as did the rhetoric explicitly connecting the
poppy and the state. Blanche Pratt of Fruitvale nominated the California poppy as a
candidate for state flower at the fall 1890 meeting of the California State Floral
Society.
522
Although Mrs. L.O. Hodgkins nominated the Mariposa lily and the Society
considered the Matilija white poppy, in mid-December 1890 the Society tallied the votes
and the orange poppy won by a landslide of 22 to 3.
523
The San Francisco Chronicle
reported the nomination and concluded the poppy embodied a “most appropriate choice”
as it “typifies at once the orange groves of Southern and the gold mines of Central and
Northern California.”
524
E.J. Wickson declared in 1892 that the nomination of the poppy
as the state flower constituted “the most popular deed of the society.” Met with
“universal approval,” Wickson concluded, “public opinion has ratified the society's

522
“State Floral Society: The California Poppy in the Lead for State Flower,” San
Francisco Chronicle, Nov. 15, 1890, 3. Smith, The Golden Poppy, 58.
523
“State Floral Society: The California Poppy in the Lead for State Flower,” San
Francisco Chronicle, 3. “The Golden Poppy: Chosen as the State Flower of California,”
San Francisco Chronicle, Dec. 13, 1890, 10. Smith, The Golden Poppy, 58-60. Richard
Schwartz, “The East Bay Woman Who Made the Poppy the State Flower,” The Berkeley
Daily Planet (Dec. 23, 2009), viewed in the Lemmon Biographical Materials file at the
Jepson Herbaria at the University of California, Berkeley.
524
“The Golden Poppy: Chosen as the State Flower of California,” San Francisco
Chronicle, 10.
217
decision” via the poems, essays and artistic renderings of the poppy that
“have multiplied.”
525

The selection of the poppy at the level of the state floral society was only the first
step and part of a rising movement calling for the designation of state and federal flowers.
At the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, a group in the Woman’s Building discussed the
selection of national flowers and created the National Floral Emblem Society towards
those aims.
526
The National Society appointed Sara Lemmon chair of the California State
Committee to select a state flower and push the official designation of that flower through
state legislation.
527
Born in New Gloucester, Maine on September 3, 1836, Lemmon
attended the Female College and Normal School in Worcester, Massachusetts.
528
After a
brief career teaching grammar school in New York before the Civil War, she went to
work in a hospital caring for wounded soldiers. Upon developing pneumonia in the late
1860s, she journeyed to California to recover. Settling in Santa Barbara, she became a
prominent member of the local community, starting a local library and salon for the

525
E. J. Wickson, “California Flower Shows,” Overland Monthly, Vol. XIX, No. 113,
(May, 1892), 472-480, 480.
526
Beidleman, California’s Frontier Naturalists, 426.
527
Ibid. Schwartz, “The East Bay Woman Who Made the Poppy the State Flower,” The
Berkeley Daily Planet.
528
Beidleman, California’s Frontier Naturalists, 418. Linda Bresler, “The Real Dirt On. .
.John and Sara Lemmon,” Let’s Talk Plants! San Diego Horticultural Society, No. 192
(Sep., 2010), 6.
218
exchange of ideas.
529
A member of the California Academy of Sciences, Lemmon
actively participated in a range of groups and activities.
530
Her talents and connections
proved vital to all her endeavors. Lemmon lived until 1923 and remained an active
member of society, illustrating educational materials for the State Department of
Education, chairing the State Red Cross Board, and participating in the California
Federation of Women’s Clubs, the Ebell Society, the Unitarian Church, the Women’s
Christian Temperance Union, and the Woman’s Suffrage League.
531

After the Society appointed Lemmon committee chair, she went to work, urging
the passage of bills in 1895 and 1899 to designate the poppy as the state flower.
532

Despite prevailing both times at the legislative level, Governor Henry Gage doggedly
refused to sign the bills into law,
533
arguing that he did not “‘think the adoption of a state
flower is a proper subject for legislation.’”
534
It is unclear whether Gage resisted on

529
Ibid. Richard Beidleman, Letter to the Editor, The Cupola, (Oct., 2003), 3 & 5, viewed
in the Lemmon Biographical Materials file at the Jepson Herbaria at the University of
California, Berkeley.
530
Beidleman, California’s Frontier Naturalists, 420-421. Beidleman, Letter to the
Editor, The Cupola3 & 5.
531
Beidleman, California’s Frontier Naturalists, 428. “Spotlight on Oakland’s Sara
Lemmon,” The Cupola March, 2003, 8, viewed in the Lemmon Biographical Materials
file at the Jepson Herbaria at the University of California, Berkeley. Beidleman, Letter to
the Editor, The Cupola, 3 & 5.
532
Beidleman, California’s Frontier Naturalists, 426.
533
Ibid. See also, “Wanting Budd’s Name: Many Bills Now Before the Governor,” San
Francisco Chronicle, Mar. 18, 1895, 4. “Poppy Not the State Flower: Legislators Indulge
in a Session of Sentiment,” San Francisco Chronicle, Mar. 3, 1899, 3.
534
As quoted in Schwartz, “The East Bay Woman Who Made the Poppy the State
Flower,” The Berkeley Daily Planet.
219
personal or political grounds. Did the refusal indicate a clash between women’s groups
and horticultural societies on the one hand and state government officials on the other?
Or did Gage disagree about the appropriateness of floral symbols? Regardless, Lemmon
persisted. In May 1901, her husband John Lemmon offered a resolution at the Pacific
States Floral Congress in San Francisco.
535
When the bill passed again in 1902, Gage
went so far as to veto the bill. While the State Assembly mustered sufficient votes to
overturn the veto, the State Senate let the bill die without vote.
536
In 1903, the bill passed
yet again and the new Governor Pardee signed it into law.
537
At the signing, legislators
recited poppy poems and Sara Lemmon received great praise for her efforts.
538

Surrounding and following Sara Lemmons’ efforts, popular and academic
expressions of poppy culture took myriad forms. But the presence of poppy culture
saturated the social landscape and worked as a shorthand to champion and explain the
state. While this praise included some of the same voices as those participating in the
taste conversations, poppy propaganda drew from a more diverse base. Non-academic
guide books offered lists and descriptions of the flower and tales of roadside spottings.
539

535
Beidleman, California’s Frontier Naturalists, 426.
536
Schwartz, “The East Bay Woman Who Made the Poppy the State Flower,” The
Berkeley Daily Planet.
537
Beidleman, California’s Frontier Naturalists, 426.
538
Schwartz, “The East Bay Woman Who Made the Poppy the State Flower,” The
Berkeley Daily Planet. See also, “The Golden Poppy is Our Emblem,” Oakland Enquirer,
Mar. 1903, viewed in the Lemmon Biographical Materials file at the Jepson Herbaria at
the University of California, Berkeley.
539
See Parsons, The Wild Flowers of California. Smith, The Golden Poppy. Emma
Graham Clock, Wild Flowers from the Mountains, Cañons and Valleys of California (San
220
Horticultural publications from across the country offered suggestions for cultivating the
plants – even as far away from California as Orono, Maine where the seeds could be
sown outside in May or under glass in April.
540
Shinn, in 1888, noted that “England’s
best gardens are full of California wildflowers.”
541
Commercial seedsmen and
nurserymen sold wildflower seeds,
542
including poppy seeds.
543
Luther Burbank even

Francisco: H.S. Crocker Company, 1915). Josephine Clifford, “In Summer Shadows,”
Overland Monthly, Vol. IX, No. 2 (Aug., 1872), 164-169, 165. Mary Elizabeth Parsons,
“Our California Wild Flowers,” Sunset, Vol. IV, No. 5 (Mar., 1900), 194-199; Mary
Elizabeth Parsons, “Our California Wild Flowers II,” Sunset, Vol. V, No. 1 (May, 1900),
17-22. Katherine A. Chandler, “Wild Flowers in California,” San Francisco Chronicle,
Feb. 16, 1902, A14, Feb. 23, 1902, SM39 and Mar. 2, 1902, 1. Benjamin P. Avery,
“Summering in the Sierra, No. I,” Overland Monthly, Vol. XII, No. 1 (Jan., 1874), 79-83.
Benjamin P. Avery, “Summering in the Sierra, No. II,” Overland Monthly, Vol. XII, No.
2 (Feb., 1874), 175-183. M.B.H., “Our Wild Flowers: Some Specimens Near at Hand.
They Rival One Another in Beauty,” San Francisco Chronicle, Jul. 12, 1891, 8. Bertha F.
Herrick, “California Wild Flowers,” Californian Illustrated Magazine Vol. 3, No. 1
(Dec., 1892 and May, 1893), 3. Charles Belknap, “Our Wildflowers: Beauties of
California Fields,” San Francisco Chronicle, Jun. 8, 1890, 3. R.V. Boudet, “The Wild-
flower Season,” The Californian, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Mar., 1880), 291. Alice Eastwood, “The
Wild Flower Gardens of San Francisco in the 1890s,” Leaflets of Western Botany, Vol.
IV, No. 6 (May, 1945), 153-156 (Jepson Reprint Files, California D-E). Carl Purdy,
“Correspondence. Wild Flowers in California,” Garden and Forest, Vol. 4, No. 159
(Mar. 11, 1891), 117-118. “Close of the Rose Show: A Beautiful Display of Wild
Flowers,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 3, 1896, 27.
540
W.M. Munson of Orono, Maine, “Eschscholtzia Californica.” Garden and Forest,
Vol. V, No. 239 (Sep. 21, 1892), 453.
541
Charles Howard Shinn, “Spring Flowers of California,” Overland Monthly, Vol. XII,
No. 64 (Apr., 1888), 416-418, 416.
542
“Sunset Seed and Plant Co. (Sherwood Hall Nursery Co.) Seeds and General Nursery
Stock,” Sunset Seed and Plant Co., Box 297, Folder 9103, Nursery Catalogue Collection
at the University of California at Davis. “Cox’s Seed Annual 1882,” Thomas A. Cox &
Co., Box 102, Folder 3120, Nursery Catalogue Collection at the University of California
at Davis, 44. Carbone & Monti advertisement, Overland Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, (Dec.,
1888), 673.
221
created a crimson version of the California poppy at the turn of the century.
544
Artificial
poppies made from cloth with wire printing featured prominently at the Panama Pacific
International Exposition.
545
Famed botanist, professor, and inaugural member of the
Sierra Club, Willis Linn Jepson, in his 1922 Flora of California, reported on his 18 years
of observing poppies.
546

Poppy poems exploded in magazines, collected works, and songs.
547
They filled
the pages of popular publications from Sunset Magazine to Overland Monthly. A literary

543
“Illustrated and Descriptive Catalogue Seeds Bulbs Plants Fall 1894 – Spring 1895,”
Charles C. Navlet, Box 231, Folder 6727, Nursery Catalogue Collection at the University
of California at Davis, 41. “Sevin Vincent & Co.’s Illustrated Seed and Plant Catalogue
and Guide to the Flower & Vegetable Garden for 1879,” Sevin Vincent, 1879, Box 280,
Folder 8435, Nursery Catalogue Collection at the University of California at Davis, 15-
16. “Sunset Seed and Plant Co. 1896,” Sunset Seed and Plant Co. seed catalogue, 1896,
Box 297, Folder 9108, Nursery Catalogue Collection at the University of California at
Davis, 40.
544
“Luther Burbank Turns the Golden Eschscholtzia Red,” San Francisco Chronicle,
Sep. 11, 1904, 2.
545
Benedict, Burton, M. Miriam Dobkin, & Elizabeth Armstrong, A catalogue of posters,
photographs, paintings, drawings, furniture, documents, souvenirs, statues, medals, dolls,
music sheets, books, postcards, curiosities, banners, awards, architectural fragments,
remains, etcetera : from San Francisco's Panama Pacific International Exposition, 1915
(Berkeley: The Lowie Museum of Anthropology, 1982), E59.
546
McClintock, “The California Poppy – Natural History,” Pacific Horticulture, 5.
547
In addition to those analyzed below, see Charles S. Greene, “Eschscholtzia,” The
Californian, Vol. IV, No. 23 (Nov., 1881), 451; Eugene Field, “Buttercup, Poppy,
Forget-Me-Not,” San Francisco Chronicle, Dec. 7, 1890, 7; Grace Ellery Channing,
“Thoughts of the Poppy-Fields,” Californian Illustrated Magazine Vol. 1, No. 2 (Jan.,
1892), 94; Ina Coolbrith, “The California Poppy,” Californian Illustrated Magazine Vol.
4, No. 2 (Jul., 1893), 141; May Cranmer Duncan, “To the Eschscholtzia,” Overland
Monthly, Vol. XXII, No. 127 (Jul., 1893), 50-51. For later works, see Grace Sherburne
Conroe, ed., The California Poppy, Vol. III (San Diego: Press of the City, 1942). Alice
Gray Cowan, “Eschscholtzias,” Overland Monthly, Vol. XIX, No. 113 (May, 1892), 529.
Anna Warner, “Eschscholtzia,” Overland Monthly, Vol. XXII, No. 127 (Jul., 1893), 49.
222
scholar might label the works as poorly written, or overly nostalgic or romantic, but the
verses contain charmingly vibrant, repetitive (if thinly veiled) symbolism. While the gold
fields that once symbolized California’s promise had run out, the gold grew in the
poppies. The beauty of the state might have been compromised by cities or growth, but
the beauty remained in the poppies. While poets and others struggled to represent their
past, they crafted narratives of past and future in the poppies.
The poets described the poppies as gold or being golden.
548
Sometimes, they
used the word in a double context, as a color and as a metaphor of the Gold Rush past.
Other times, they explicitly tied gold to riches and wealth or personified gold as the actor
bestowing the orange hue to the flower. Within each usage, gold tied to a statement
about either the origins of the flower and California’s past or a vision of the future.
Amelia Woodward Truesdell’s 1884 “The California Eschscholtzia” described the
stamen as a “golden pin” and petals as “a tent of the cloth of gold.” But the color shone

Harriet Winthrop Waring, “Eschscholtzias,” Overland Monthly, Vol. XXXIV, No. 203,
(Nov., 1899), 395. Grace Hortense Tower, “California’s State Flower,” Overland
Monthly, Vol. XXXIX, No. 5 (May, 1902).
In addition to the poets, California impressionist painters captured the poppy. See
Susan Landauer, “Impressionism’s Indian Summer: The Culture and Consumption of
California ‘Plein-Air’ Painting,” in William H. Gerdts and Will South, eds., California
Impressionism (New York: Abbeville Press, 1998), 11-49, 12. See Donald D. Keyes,
“From Giverny to Laguna Beach,” California Impressionism, 51-71, 54. See also, Ruth
Lily Westphal, Plein Air Painters of California: The North (Irvine: Westphal Publishing,
1986). Raymond L. Wilson, “Towards Impressionism in Northern California,” in Ruth
Lily Westphal, ed., Plein Air Painters of California: The North (Irvine: Westphal
Publishing, 1986), 5-14). John Gamble, William Jackson and Granville Richmond
capture the poppy repeatedly. William Wendt’s “Red Poppies,” and “Cup of Gold” from
1902 portray vivid poppies. See Gerdts and South, California Impressionism, 36 & 139.
548
Mrs. Jane Klee, “The Eschscholtzia or California Poppy,” Monthly Proceedings of the
California State Floral Society, No. 8 (Apr., 1892), 63.
223
“[m]ore rich than a golden goblet.”
549
In John Vance Cheney’s “Our Poppy” from 1891,
the sun and a star conspired to create “golden weather” and a “bright-eyed metal” on the
ground offered to “help tint every petal.” So the sun and the star during “golden light”
worked from the sky down and gold “burn[ed” up from the soil to create the poppy –
“[o]ur blossom of the gold.”
550
Grace Hibbard’s “Golden Wild Poppies,” lauded the
“[b]eautiful golden wild poppies” and questioned whether “the morning” “painted” their
rich coloring to “mirror the sunset’s hue” or whether the blossoms shimmered as “cups of
gold o’flowing [w]ith jewels of raindrops and dew.”
551
Juliette Jones’ song “California
Poppy” from 1910 praised the flowers’ “golden hue.”
552
Edwin Markham’s “In Poppy
Fields” commanded: “Men that in the cities grind, Come! before the heart is blind. Here
is gold to labor for.”
553

The focus on the golden aspect of the poppy also referenced an imagining of
California’s Spanish past. At the turn of the twentieth century, around the time of the
debates over the state flower and the imagining of a Spanish mission past for California,

549
Amelia Woodward Truesdell, “The California Eschscholtzia,” Overland Monthly,
Vol. III, No. 5 (May, 1884), 520.
550
John Vance Cheney, “Our Poppy,” Overland Monthly, Vol. XVIII, No. 107 (Nov.,
1891), 494-495. See also a poetic reply to Cheney’s poem, H. T., “Our Poppy, a Reply,”
Overland Monthly, Vol. XVIII, No. 108 (Dec., 1891), 603.
551
Grace Hibbard, “Golden Wild Poppies,” Sunset, Volume XIII, No. 1 (May, 1904), 98.
552
Juliette Jones, “California Poppies,” 1910 (bound in Songs and Music Descriptive of
California and San Francisco, an unpublished work at the San Francisco Public Library),
41-43.
553
Souvenir of the California State Floral Society Exhibition, “Early Spring Flowers
from March 1913,” California State Floral Society, San Francisco Ephemera Collection
at the California Historical Society.
224
some became enamored with the copa de oro and the origin myth it represented for
California. The poppy functioned as a common thread through which to stitch a narrative
of statehood. Harriet M. Skidmore’s “Copa de Oro – A Plea for the Spanish Name of the
Eschscholtzia – Copa de Oro (Cup of Gold)” recounted the story of miners who extracted
gold from mountainous rocks as well as Spanish observers and the pilgrim bestower of
the “alien” Eschscholzia name.
554

Long ere the strong-limbed miners tore
From out thy heart, fair land of gold,
Uncounted wealth of shining ore
Deep buried in thy mountains’ hold,

Up from the quartz-veined rocks below, -
Oh, strange yet fitting birth-place!-came,
To greet the sunlight’s kindred glow,
A wondrous flower, with leaves of flame.

They who first hailed its gleam among
The paler blooms of mead and wold
Called it, in soft Castilian tongue,
‘Copa de oro – cup of gold.’

We own the name most sweet and true,
Who see, when vernal skies are bland,
Its golden chalice, gemmed with dew,
Unclose at Morning’s gay command.

In later years, a pilgrim came
From far beyond the tossing sea,
Who bade, with harsher alien name,
Our chosen blossom sullied be.

But let us from its leaves efface
That stain unsightly, and once more

554
Harriet M. Skidmore, “Copa de Oro - A Plea for the Spanish Name of the
Eschscholtzia – Copa de Oro (Cup of Gold),” in Roadside Flowers: A Book of Verse (San
Francisco: A.M. Robertson, 1903), 31-33.
225
Bring back its ancient title’s grace
To desk it as in days of yore.

It is thy emblem true and bright,
O radiant Empire of the West!
It wears thy robe of flame-hued light,
Thy sunbeam-halos wreathe its crest.

In fancies of poetic dreams,
‘T was fashion’d from thy shining ore,
And rose to shed its golden gleams
O’er all thy bloom-enameled shore.

So, wondrous flower with leaves of flame,
In future as in times of old,
Still wear thy sweet Castilian name
Of ‘Copa de oro – cup of gold.’
555

Skidmore’s “Empire of the West” defined a California rooted in a nostalgic Spanish past
of romantic language and botanical discovery. California embodied the organic birth of
the association of place with gold and natural wonder that could be translated into a story
of place, gold and flowers of fire and flames. As the Castilian name persisted as much in
the “future” as in the past, so remained the romantic spirit of the flower.
In her song “California Poppies,” Juliette Jones traced California’s history from
the arrival of the “Knight of Spain” who took the land from the “aboriganee.” The
Spanish brought cattle that tread over the blooms. Then the “emigrant’s long train”
crossed the “dreary plain.” Cities “[p]lanted” where poppies once stood – “[d]evastating
field and wood.” Then the song proclaims Spanish departed, leaving California with
missions “old and gray.” At the turn of the century, Californians shed “a tear [f]or the

555
Ibid. at 31-32.
226
Spanish cavalier” and his guitar music and raven haired maidens. This “dreamy past”
vanished but the blooms remained.
556
In contrast to Skidmore’s work that omitted a
Native American past and labeled Eschscholtz as an “alien,” Jones’ work both included
the “aboriganee” and posed immigrants – of Spanish and Anglo-American roots – as
threats to the flowers. Although the song participated in creating a romanticized version
of the Spanish period, it also championed nature and the poppies that prevailed over the
human and bovine efforts (likely unconscious on both accounts) to displace them.
The poppy poets’ visions of California’s Spanish past presented a different
narrative than previous historians attribute to efforts to reframe the Spanish past during
this period. Phoebe Kropp frames renewed interest in missions and the paving of El
Camino Real as a “vicarious experience of conquest.” The decaying missions ripe for
preservation physically illustrated the decline of the Spanish empire and provided a
“timeline that culminated” in Anglo-colonizers walking in the padres’ footsteps.
557

Matthew Bokovoy traces the framing of New Spain around the era of the Cabrillo
Celebration in 1892 and the San Diego World’s Fair in 1915 “as a haven from the
corruptions of the Protestant Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and the
Enlightenment” where California was part of a “symbolic place” with a reestablished

556
Jones, “California Poppies,” 41-43. See also, Shinn, “Spring Flowers of California,”
Overland Monthly, 416.
557
Phoebe S. Kropp, California Vieja: Culture and Memory in a Modern American Place
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 48-49, 100.
227
church and “indigenous peoples” as a “human template.”
558
The elements of nostalgia
and the desire to frame a timeline by fashioning a Spanish past run through all
three narratives.
But the poppy history version of thinking about the Spanish past offered a
triumphal element. The poppies prized by the Spanish flourished. Though displaced and
ignored at different times, they persisted. In this context, Anglo-American Californians
were not engaged in conquest over a previous Spanish land; the poppies in the poems
conquered the landscape of dusty Spanish missions, wagon trains, and urbanscapes –
sometimes after surviving initial setbacks. The Spanish past in these poems functioned
more powerfully as an element of continuity pointing towards the enduring natural
promise of California than in previous narratives.
In addition to focusing on the golden hue and the poppy’s connection to a Spanish
origin myth, poppy poetry described the poppies as possessing desirable human feminine
qualities, central to the framing of California as a civilized place. Poppies “modestly”
closed at night.
559
They were “honest” and “sturdy.”
560
They were “constant-hearted” to
California.
561
Poppies carefully kept “[s]ecrets.”
562
They possessed beauty.
563
They were

558
Matthew F. Bokovoy, The San Diego World’s Fairs and Southwestern Memory, 1880-
1940 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005), 3 & 13.
559
Truesdell, “The California Eschscholtzia,” Overland Monthly, 520.
560
Skidmore, “Copa de Oro - A Plea for the Spanish Name of the Eschscholtzia – Copa
de Oro (Cup of Gold),” Roadside Flowers, 31-32.
561
Hibbard, “Golden Wild Poppies,” Sunset, 98.
562
Jones, “California Poppies,” 41-43.
563
Hibbard, “Golden Wild Poppies,” Sunset, 98. Jones, “California Poppies,” 41-43.
228
“sweet.”
564
The blooms demonstrated a refined vision of values of loyalty, steadfastness,
aesthetic beauty and inner strength. If these feminine, civilized plants could grow
naturally in California, then citizens would flourish as well. The celebration of poppies
intersected with the celebration of more balanced sex ratios. In this climate and
environment, civilization emerged in sunshine and poppy fields.
To the extent the movement towards a more civilized space faced outside threats,
poppy poets positioned the flower as the emblem of refining fire. The “orange flame” of
a poppy cup “blaze[d] up” like “alter fires;” they blossomed truly as “flowers of
flame.”
565
Morning birthed the poppy’s “flame” and the gold burned up from the ground
to color its petals.
566
The poppy possessed “leaves of flame” and a “robe of flame-hued
light.”
567
Like alter flames of refining fire, the poppies emerged as cleansing blooms.
Clad in royal garments, their petals marked them worthy of the special place in which
they grew. The poetry that focused on the refining power of fire in a Judeo-Christian
tradition was all composed before 1906 when the earthquake and destructive fires swept
through the Bay Area. The metaphorical cleansing power of fire in the context of poppy
poetry may not have survived in the face of actual pyrrhic devastation.

564
H. T., “Our Poppy, a Reply,” Overland Monthly, 603.
565
E.C. Sanford, “Poppies and Grass-Flowers,” Overland Monthly, Vol. III, No. 5 (May,
1884), 520.
566
Cheney, “Our Poppy,” Overland Monthly, 494-495.
567
Skidmore, “Copa de Oro - A Plea for the Spanish Name of the Eschscholtzia – Copa
de Oro (Cup of Gold),” Roadside Flowers, 31-32.
229
More enduring than the symbolism of the flames, the poets described poppies in
mystical and mythical language. Fairies, elves and sprites commonly played amongst the
poppies.
568
Queen Mab coveted the poppies’ amber pollen.
569
A field of poppies
sparkled like a “garden of Midas, as of old, With half its flowers turned to gold.”
570

Sometimes the poetry focused on sleepiness and the manner in which the flowers “nod in
the soft balmy air.”
571
Other times, the poppy story appeared within the context of a
dream; “Though the dreamy past is gone, You are left, accept our song. Our eyelids now
doth heavy grow, With the incense you bestow;. . .Good-night Poppies, we must rest.”
572

The mythical framing of the poppies highlighted the active role of imagination in framing
the flowers and space as a contrast of dreams and realities. Fantasy and California’s real
natural deposits of flowers and gold co-existed in the poets’ poppy fields as they crafted
narratives of California as a place of dreams filled with environmental treasures.
The popular artistic framings of the poppy conjured visions of a Spanish past,
riches, and magic. But poppy culture flourished at the intersection of this metaphor and
the fostering of California’s scientific institutions. Wildflower botanizing in California
shared depictions of the work as unique and serious, as well as romantic. Anglo studies

568
Truesdell, “The California Eschscholtzia,” Overland Monthly, 520. S.A. Wardlow,
“The Poppy Sprite,” Overland Monthly, Vol. XXXV, No. 206, (Feb., 1900), 130.
569
Truesdell, “The California Eschscholtzia,” Overland Monthly, 520.
570
Sanford, “Poppies and Grass-Flowers,” Overland Monthly, 520.
571
Hibbard, “Golden Wild Poppies,” Sunset, 98. See also, Sylvia Lawson Covey, “Her
Poppies,” Overland Monthly, Vol. XXI, No. 125 (May, 1893), 491. Wardlow, “The
Poppy Sprite,” Overland Monthly, 130.
572
Jones, “California Poppies,” 41-43.
230
of California’s flora dated to John Torrey’s Pacific Railroad Survey in the 1850s and
W.H. Brewer and Sereno Watson who collected samples in the 1860s.
573
Botanists
studied wildflowers in hopes of furthering knowledge of systematic botany, and less
explicitly in hopes of putting the academic California botanical community on the
proverbial map then dominated by east coast and European botanists.
574

Wildflower botanizing also increasingly offered California’s women spaces to
seize and create opportunities for work, both amateur and professional. In 1907,
Katherine Chandler wrote: “Public opinion has always esteemed a love of flowers a
feminine quality, in spite of the fact that all the world botanists have been men.” She
lamented that “in the past, only men could venture into new regions and explore
unknown heights, for woman’s place was in the haunts of the home.” Because of this
freedom to explore, men discovered, described, and named new plants. While noting that
this might account for some of the mistakes in the descriptions of floral color palates, she
championed that “Women now find themselves free to tramp anywhere their brothers
may” and these female botanizers have greatly added to the field of botany in their

573
Minnich, California’s Fading Wildflowers, 143-147.
574
W.L. Jepson, “The Botanic Gardens of Europe,” Sigma Xi lecture, 1906-7, Berkeley,
10-C-10-D, viewed in the Botanic Gardens miscellaneous file at the Jepson Herbaria at
the University of California, Berkeley. C.R. Orcutt, “Color Notes on California Wild
Flowers. – I.” Garden and Forest, Vol. 3, No. 133 (Sep. 10, 1890), 438-439. C.R.
Orcutt, “Color Notes on California Wild Flowers. – II.” Garden and Forest, Vol. 3, No.
134 (Sep. 17, 1890), 450-451. Willis Linn Jepson, A Flora of California (San Francisco:
H.S. Crocker, Co., 1914, viewed as part of the Kemble Collection at the California
Historical Society. Willis Linn Jepson, A Flora of Western Middle California (San
Francisco: Cunningham. Curtiss & Welch, 1911, viewed as part of the Kemble Collection
at the California Historical Society.
231
endeavors.
575
Whether as professionals or committed amateurs, women took to the
fields, compiling their results in field notebooks and diaries.
Academics and amateur botanists offered their scientific explanations and
descriptions of the flower. But in these descriptions, they detailed many of the same
elements of the flower that appeared in the poetry. Volney Rattan, a teacher at the Girls’
High School in San Francisco, described 500 plants in his 1879 work, A Popular
California Flora. He encouraged beginners to start by carefully observing plants with
large flowers and using Asa Gray’s How Plants Grow, to write out sample descriptions of
the leaves, stems, and roots. He portrayed the poppy as follows: Eschscholzia, Chamisso.
Sepals coherent into a narrow pointed hood, which drops off from the top
shaped torns when the flower opens. Petals 4. Stamens numerous, with
short filaments and long anthers. Smooth annuals, with colorless, bitter
juice; finely dissected, pale-green alternate petioled leaves, and bright
orange or yellow (rarely white) flowers. . .E. Californica, Cham. Has stout
branching stems, 1 to 1 ½ ft. high; flowers 2 to 4 inches in diameter,
brilliant orange toward the center; capsule 2 ½ inches long, curved.
576

In 1907, Mary Elizabeth Parsons authored an updated edition of The Wild Flowers of
California and described the copa de oro, as she denoted the California poppy, as
follows: stems – 12-18 inches; leaves – “Alternate; finely dissected; glaucous.” Flowers –
“Two or three inches across; usually orange; but ranging from that to white. Summit of
the peduncle enlarging into a cup-shaped torus or disk, upon the upper inner surface of
which are borne the calyx, corolla, and stamens.” She praised the flower’s beauty – one

575
Katherine Chandler, “Sierra Wild Flowers,” Sunset, Vol. 19, No. 4 (Aug., 1907), 333-
335, 333. See also, Charles H. Shinn, The Pacific Rural Handbook (San Francisco:
Dewey & Co., 1879), 102.
576
Volney Rattan, A Popular California Flora (San Francisco: A.L. Bancroft and
Company, 1879), 5-6, 21.
232
that mariners sailing up the coast saw; while she conceded that poppies were now
cultivated worldwide, “one can form no conception of it, pale and languishing in a
foreign garden.” In order to fully appreciated its “prodigal beauty,” one had to visit its
“native hillsides.” She also noted its various names, copa de oro, torosa, dormidera, and
amapola as well as how native Americans boiled or roasted them and ate them as green
vegetables. She explained that the poppy offered a medicinal alternative to morphine to
relieve headaches and insomnia – particularly effective on children. Further, she claimed
Spanish-Californians made hair-oil by frying the poppy plant in olive oil and added
perfume to them to “promote the growth of the hair and to make it glossy.”
577
Botanists
described the scientific aspects of the plants, presenting the average measurements of the
parts and using precise terms of art like caryx and sepals, but their descriptions also
echoed the language of the poppy poets in placing the flower within a historical narrative.
The poppy’s beauty drew in the Spanish sailing past. The poppy existed in a tradition
dating to Native Americans’ uses of the plant as a drug, food source, and beauty product.
Sometimes those preparing these works scouted alone or in small groups.
Sometimes they discussed their observations in clubs and social organizations, as
educators, volunteers, or church members. And some worked in connection with their
spouses as parts of married pairs. The gravestone of John and Sara Lemmon at
Oakland’s Mountain View Cemetery pronounced the two “Companions in Botany.”
578

577
Parsons, The Wild Flowers of California, 118-120.
578
Beidleman, California’s Frontier Naturalists, 429.
For additional information on the Lemmons not detailed below, see Frank S.
Crosswhite, “’J.G. Lemmon & Wife,’ Plant Explorers in Arizona, California, and
233
While the Lemmons were self-taught botanists,
579
Townshend Stith Brandegee and
Katharine Brandegee studied under leading experts at the time.
580
The four shared a love
of plants and spirit of plant hunting. They transplanted their lives to California unlike the
native plants they devoted their time to understanding. They fostered east coast and
international connections and participated in defining the range of indigenous herbaceous
plants. These efforts reveal the limits of women acting alone and the gendered framing
of botany and marital roles.
In October 1866, veteran Civil War solider John Lemmon, a self-described
“‘emaciated, feeble survivor’” of Andersonville prison, woke up at his brother Frank’s
farm near Lake Tahoe. He recalled, “‘As I peered out of the windows, and later groped
about the premises, the strange flowers, bushes, and even the trees proclaimed the fact
that I was in a practically unknown world.’”
581
Having been born near Lima, Michigan
in January 1832, his previous life as an abolitionist, teacher, then Civil War soldier as

Nevada,” Desert Plants Vol. 1, No. 1 (Aug., 1979), viewed in the Lemmon Biographical
Materials file at the Jepson Herbaria at the University of California, Berkeley.
579
Bresler, “The Real Dirt On. . .John and Sara Lemmon,” Let’s Talk Plants! 6.
580
Sources spell Katharine Brandegee’s name both as Katharine and Katherine. She
published under the spelling Katharine. Therefore, this project uses Katharine but
maintains the spelling choices of the authors in direct quotations and citations.
581
Biography from Nevada Botanists 38-42, 39 – John Gibbs Lemon – 1866-1874,
viewed in the Lemmon Biographical Materials file at the Jepson Herbaria at the
University of California, Berkeley. Beidleman, California’s Frontier Naturalists, 415.
Beidleman and others frequently begin their narratives of Lemmon’s life with this same
vignette.
234
part of the 4
th
Michigan Cavalry and prisoner of war faded hundreds of miles away.
582

Upon finding him a mere 85 pounds when he emerged from his war imprisonment at
Andersonville and Florence, South Carolina, his mother sent him to stay with his brother
in California to recuperate. With this new start in life, Lemmon found that California
flora “reawakened” his childhood interest in botany.
583

His wife, Sara, had trod her own path before the two met in Santa Barbara in
February of 1876 when John Lemmon came through town in search of materials for a
collection for the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition.
584
As a couple, their love for
botany increased. In a letter dated August 1876 Sara confessed to John: “as for botany
my love and zeal do not abate and hope I shall always keep it – fresh & green in heart &
mind. I am hungrier than when you & I were all the while” searching for “such rich and
satisfying morsels for there is no one to share my enthusiasm – as I see a familiar flower
the welling greeting is suppressed because it might seem pedantic.” But “how great the
rapture in shouting a name! Now the flowers only breathe and stare at me.”
585

582
Beidleman, California’s Frontier Naturalists, 415. Madrono, Vol. V., No. 2 (Apr.,
1939), 77, viewed in the Lemmon Biographical Materials file at the Jepson Herbaria at
the University of California, Berkeley.
583
Beidleman, California’s Frontier Naturalists, 415. Beidleman describes Lemmon’s
attempt to escape and subsequent parole, where he played the flute in some sort of a
musical ensemble comprised of prisoners.
584
Ibid. at 418. Beidleman, Letter to the Editor, The Cupola, 3 & 5.
585
Sara Plummer [Lemmon], Letter to John Lemmon, (Aug.,16 and 23, 1876), Lemmon
Papers, at the Jepson Herbaria at the University of California, Berkeley, Box 16, Folder
1, 2.
235
The Lemmons became resident members of the California Academy of Science in
January 1878, and the meetings provided their budding relationship opportunities to
grow.
586
From its inception in 1853, the Academy included women pursuing the
sciences.
587
Its official statement declared “‘Be it resolved that we highly approve the aid
of females in every department of natural history, and that we earnestly invite their
cooperation.’”
588
While this “cooperation” may not have been on equal footing in “every
department,” the basic level of inclusion provided Sara and others institutional locales
and resources for their work.
After marrying Thanksgiving of 1880, the pair honeymooned for two years,
botanizing in Arizona and eventually locating in Oakland.
589
Co-working as a pair
continued and in the 1880s, the Lemmons championed the preservation of California
forests.
590
From 1882 to 1892, John served as the botanist to the California State Board

586
Beidleman, California’s Frontier Naturalists, 420-421. Beidleman, Letter to the
Editor, The Cupola, 3 & 5.
587
Nancy Carol Carter, “The Brandegees: Leading Botanists in San Diego,” The Journal
of San Diego History, Vol. 55, No. 4 (Fall, 2009), 191-216, 194, viewed at the Jepson
Herbaria at the University of California at Berkeley, tan file cabinet. Frank S. and Carol
D. Crosswhite, “The Plant Collecting Brandegees, With Emphasis on Katharine
Brandegee as a Liberated Women Scientist of Early California,” Desert Plants (1985),
128-162, 130, viewed in the Brandegee Biographical Materials file at the Jepson Herberia
at the University of California, Berkeley.
588
Crosswhite and Crosswhite, “The Plant Collecting Brandegees, With Emphasis on
Katharine Brandegee as a Liberated Women Scientist of Early California,” Desert Plants
130.
589
Beidleman, California’s Frontier Naturalists, 422. Beidleman, Letter to the Editor,
The Cupola, 3 & 5.
590
Bresler, “The Real Dirt On. . .John and Sara Lemmon,” Let’s Talk Plants! 6.
236
of Forestry.
591
Sara served as Chairman of the Forestry Committee of the California
Federation of Women’s Clubs for three years.
592
In 1884, John accepted the appointment
as superintendent of the Northern Pacific floral exhibit at the World’s Industrial and
Cotton Centennial Exposition in New Orleans. Sara took charge of the Woman’s
Department.
593
When Sara petitioned for the passage of the California bill adopting the
poppy as the state flower, John assisted. Their intelligence and spirits complemented
each other, and translated seamlessly into activism and public participation.
Labeled as the “most renowned botanical couple of nineteenth-century America,”
Katharine and Townshend Brandegee shared much in common with the Lemmons.
594

Unlike the Lemmons’ marriage and work, however, which lacked significant
controversy, the Brandegees’ relationship raised questions of gender roles, perhaps due to
Katharine’s education and demeanor. Mary Katharine Layne Curran Brandegee was born
in western Tennessee in October 1844.
595
As a young girl, she moved to Salt Lake City,

591
Biography from Nevada Botanists, 42.
592
Bresler, “The Real Dirt On. . .John and Sara Lemmon,” Let’s Talk Plants! 6.
593
Beidleman, California’s Frontier Naturalists, 422-423.
594
Carter, “The Brandegees,” The Journal of San Diego History, 191.
595
Katharine Brandegee, Unpublished reminiscences, (Apr., 1916), 1, viewed in the
Brandegee Biographical Materials file at the Jepson Herbaria at the University of
California, Berkeley. Beidleman, California’s Frontier Naturalists, 429.
For additional biographic materials, see Elizabeth Rush, “On Her Terms:
Katharine Brandegee: First Woman of Western Botany,” Pacific Discovery, Vol. 50, No.
1 (Winter, 1997), 22-27, viewed in the Brandegee Biographical Materials file at the
Jepson Herbaria at the University of California, Berkeley. William Setchell Papers,
Jepson Herbaria at the University of California at Berkeley, T.S. and K.B. Brandegee,
Folders 1-4. Nancy Carol Carter, “Roots: Profiles in Horticultural History – Mary
Katharine Layne Curran Brandegee,” California Garden, Vol. 101, No. 6 (Nov.- Dec.,
237
Utah and then to El Dorado County by the age of nine.
596
She married Hugh Curran in
Folsom, who likely suffered from an addiction to alcohol and ultimately died in 1874.
597

Katharine moved to San Francisco to teach and then to attend medical school at the
College of Pharmacy at the University of California.
598
Although she initially thought
she wanted to study birds, she discovered an “accidental” love for botany along the
way.
599
In the United States, botanists commonly studied plants through doctorates of
medicine, like the prominent Asa Gray, rather than through a doctorate of philosophy, as
was common in Europe.
600
She trained with German-educated Hans Herman Behr – also

2010), 16-17. Peter Wild, “Kate Brandegee: Rebel with a Fatal Flaw,” Wildflower, Vol.
14, No. 4 (Autumn, 1998), 42-44.
596
Katharine Brandegee, Unpublished reminiscences, (Apr., 1916), 1, viewed in the
Brandegee Biographical Materials file at the Jepson Herbaria at the University of
California, Berkeley. Untitled, unpublished biographical material on Mary Katharine
Layne Curran Brandegee (1844-1920), viewed in the Brandegee Biographical Materials
file at the Jepson Herbaria at the University of California, Berkeley. Beidleman,
California’s Frontier Naturalists, 429.
597
Beidleman, California’s Frontier Naturalists, 429. Untitled, unpublished biographical
material on Mary Katharine Layne Curran Brandegee. Crosswhite and Crosswhite, “The
Plant Collecting Brandegees, With Emphasis on Katharine Brandegee as a Liberated
Women Scientist of Early California,” Desert Plants, 130.
598
William Albert Setchell, “Townshend Stith Brandegee and Mary Katharine (Layne)
(Curran) Brandegee,” University of California Publications in Botany, Vol. 13, No. 9
(1926), 155-178, 165, viewed in the Brandegee Biographical Materials file at the Jepson
Herbaria at the University of California, Berkeley. Beidleman, California’s Frontier
Naturalists, 429. Untitled, unpublished biographical material on Mary Katharine Layne
Curran Brandegee. Crosswhite and Crosswhite, “The Plant Collecting Brandegees, With
Emphasis on Katharine Brandegee as a Liberated Women Scientist of Early California,”
Desert Plants, 130.
599
Katharine Brandegee, Unpublished reminiscences, (Apr., 1916), 2.
600
Crosswhite and Crosswhite, “The Plant Collecting Brandegees, With Emphasis on
Katharine Brandegee as a Liberated Women Scientist of Early California,” Desert Plants,
131.
238
a member of the California Academy of Sciences, who had been educated in Germany
and traveled and worked in Australia, Asia, and South America before settling in San
Francisco in 1851. Behr enjoyed a reputation both for kindness and for generosity in his
approach to sharing botanical knowledge.
601

After Katharine earned a doctorate of medicine in 1878, in February 1879, the
California Academy of Sciences elected her a resident member.
602
Her work at the
Academy fostered mentoring relationships for her continued growth.
603
Particularly,
Albert Kellogg, the curator of botany, took her under his wing.
604
She assisted with work
in the herbarium and by 1882 commenced collecting local flora for her personal use.
605

Eventually she left the day-to-day practice of medicine to work with plants.
606
In 1883,
when Kellogg retired, she assumed his post, likely making her the second woman in the
country to secure employment as a professional botanist.
607
Publishing more than 20

601
Carter, “The Brandegees,” The Journal of San Diego History, 193.
602
Beidleman, California’s Frontier Naturalists, 429.
603
Carter, “The Brandegees,” The Journal of San Diego History, 194.
604
Ibid. Crosswhite and Crosswhite, “The Plant Collecting Brandegees, With Emphasis
on Katharine Brandegee as a Liberated Women Scientist of Early California,” Desert
Plants, 130.
605
Katharine Brandegee, Unpublished reminiscences, (Apr., 1916), 1. Beidleman,
California’s Frontier Naturalists, 429.
606
Beidleman, California’s Frontier Naturalists, 429.
607
Katharine Brandegee, Unpublished reminiscences, (Apr., 1916), 1. Carter, “The
Brandegees,” The Journal of San Diego History, 194. Crosswhite and Crosswhite, “The
Plant Collecting Brandegees, With Emphasis on Katharine Brandegee as a Liberated
Women Scientist of Early California,” Desert Plants, 130. Carter, “The Brandegees,” The
Journal of San Diego History, 194.
239
articles on a wide range of topics from the flora of Yosemite to the ferns of San
Francisco, in the 1880s, she also resumed publication of the Proceedings of the Academy
of Sciences as the Bulletin of the California Academy of Sciences.
608

Katharine’s work involved particular attention to close details; her focus on
details frequently delayed her publication of her observations – to the degree that a friend
commented to her in a 1912 letter that she “committed a gigantic botanical crime against”
herself.
609
Frank and Carol Crosswhite conclude in their biographical work on the
Brandegees that Katharine successfully competed against men before the 1890s in part
because of the opportunities available to women in the West.
610
Certainly the mentorship
and opportunities she received and capitalized on at the Academy support this argument.
But one must also credit Katharine’s skill, perseverance, and the advantages of her
husband’s connections.
In 1889, she married fellow botanist Townshend Stith Brandegee.
611
Like the
Lemmons, they botanized on their honeymoon, for them a summer long trek from San

608
Beidleman, California’s Frontier Naturalists, 430. Katharine Brandegee, Unpublished
reminiscences, (Apr., 1916), 2. Elizabeth Rush, “Katherine Layne Curran Brandegee, an
Uncompromising Rebel,” Fremontia, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Apr., 2004), 24-28, 24-25, viewed
in the Brandegee Biographical Materials file at the Jepson Herbaria at the University of
California, Berkeley. Carter, “The Brandegees,” The Journal of San Diego History, 194.
609
Marcus E. Jones, Letter to Katharine Brandegee, (Jul. 20, 1912), Brandegee Papers,
1897-1917, at the Jepson Herbaria at the University of California, Berkeley, Box 2 Folder
23.
610
Crosswhite and Crosswhite, “The Plant Collecting Brandegees, With Emphasis on
Katharine Brandegee as a Liberated Women Scientist of Early California,” Desert Plants,
128 & 130.
611
Untitled, unpublished biographical material on Townshend Stith Brandegee (1843-
1925), viewed in the Brandegee Biographical Materials file at the Jepson Herbaria at the
240
Diego to San Francisco.
612
Born in 1843, Townshend was raised in Berlin, Connecticut,
a town equidistant from Boston and New York.
613
Growing up, his country doctor father
collected native plants and instructed his son in the names of plants as they traveled to see
patients.
614
Townshend enlisted at age 19 and served with Company G of the First
Connecticut Volunteers.
615
He fought at Richmond with General Ulysses Grant,
contracted malaria, and recalled “big rhododendrons of Virginia” and “the magnolias
along the Appomattox.”
616
After the war, he studied botany with William Brewer at the
Sheffield Scientific School at Yale and then worked as a surveyor in New York’s

University of California, Berkeley. Crosswhite and Crosswhite, “The Plant Collecting
Brandegees, With Emphasis on Katharine Brandegee as a Liberated Women Scientist of
Early California,” Desert Plants, 129-130.
612
Beidleman, California’s Frontier Naturalists, 431. Edmund C. Jaeger, “Bold Kate
Brandegee: Pioneer California Woman Botanist,” Calico Print, Vol. IX, No. 2 (Mar.,
1953) 8-9 & 33, 8, viewed in the Brandegee Biographical Materials file at the Jepson
Herbaria at the University of California, Berkeley.
613
T.S. Brandegee, Unpublished autobiographical notes, (Apr., 1916), 1, viewed in the
Brandegee Biographical Materials file at the Jepson Herbaria at the University of
California, Berkeley. See also, Obituary Record of Yale Graduates, 1924-1925 (New
Haven: Bulletin of Yale University, 21
st
Series, No. 22, Aug. 1, 1925), 1463-1464 in
William Setchell Papers, Jepson Herbaria at the University of California at Berkeley,
Brandegee, T.S. and K.B., Folder 1.
614
T.S. Brandegee, Unpublished autobiographical notes, (Apr., 1916), 1. T.S. Brandegee,
Unpublished autobiographical notes, (Aug., 1921), 1, viewed in the Brandegee
Biographical Materials file at the Jepson Herbaria at the University of California,
Berkeley.
615
Setchell, “Townshend Stith Brandegee and Mary Katharine (Layne) (Curran)
Brandegee,” University of California Publications in Botany, 157. T.S. Brandegee,
Unpublished autobiographical notes, (Aug., 1921), 1.
616
T.S. Brandegee, Unpublished autobiographical notes, (Aug., 1921), 1. T.S. Brandegee,
Unpublished autobiographical notes, (Apr., 1916), 1. Typed notes in William Setchell
Papers, Jepson Herbaria at the University of California at Berkeley, Brandegee, T.S. and
K.B., Folder 1.
241
Adirondacks and for the Northern Transcontinental Survey in the Yakima and Cascade
Mountains in Washington.
617
He participated in Asa Gray’s tour with Sir Joseph Dalton
Hooker of the western United States in the late 1870s.
618
Townshend scouted for Charles
S. Sargent in the mid-1880s in Washington, California, Nevada and Montana as well as
the Santa Barbara islands.
619
In 1888, he studied insular flora in the Santa Barbara
Islands, and then southern California and Mexico in 1889.
620

Throughout the 1890s, the two continued their separate and collective work. In
1891, Katharine started the California Botanical Club that provided funding and outreach
to amateur botanists, predominantly women, and has been credited as the West Coast’s
first botanical club.
621
In 1892, she gave up her own salary to hire Alice Eastwood as her

617
T.S. Brandegee, Unpublished autobiographical notes, (Apr., 1916), 1-2. Beidleman,
California’s Frontier Naturalists, 430. Untitled, unpublished biographical material on
Townshend Stith Brandegee. T.S. Brandegee, Unpublished autobiographical notes,
(Aug., 1921), 1-2.
618
Crosswhite and Crosswhite, “The Plant Collecting Brandegees, With Emphasis on
Katharine Brandegee as a Liberated Women Scientist of Early California,” Desert Plants,
131.
619
T.S. Brandegee, Unpublished autobiographical notes, (Apr., 1916), 2. T.S. Brandegee,
Unpublished autobiographical notes, (Aug., 1921), 2. Beidleman, California’s Frontier
Naturalists, 430. Crosswhite and Crosswhite, “The Plant Collecting Brandegees, With
Emphasis on Katharine Brandegee as a Liberated Women Scientist of Early California,”
Desert Plants, 133.
620
Setchell, “Townshend Stith Brandegee and Mary Katharine (Layne) (Curran)
Brandegee,” University of California Publications in Botany, 159.
621
Untitled, unpublished biographical material on Mary Katharine Layne Curran
Brandegee (1844-1920). Beidleman, California’s Frontier Naturalists, 431. Katharine
Brandegee, Unpublished reminiscences, (Apr., 1916), 2.
242
assistant.
622
In the early 1890s, Katharine charged Eastwood to continue the work at the
herbarium, and the Brandegees moved to San Diego.
623
But San Diego did not suit the
pair and, in 1906, they donated their herbarium to the University of California and moved
back to the east bay.
624
As a married botanist pair, the two accomplished significant
work collecting samples and publishing results.
625
Between them, they described and

622
Untitled, unpublished biographical material on Mary Katharine Layne Curran
Brandegee. Beidleman, California’s Frontier Naturalists, 430. Carter, “The Brandegees,”
The Journal of San Diego History, 199.
Frank and Carol Crosswhite argue that Alice Eastwood receives some praise for
accomplishments that were actually Katharine’s. While Katharine organized and led the
California Botanical Club and she introduced and mentored Eastwood, eventually turning
over her life’s work to Eastwood. Crosswhite and Crosswhite, “The Plant Collecting
Brandegees, With Emphasis on Katharine Brandegee as a Liberated Women Scientist of
Early California,” Desert Plants, 128.
For additional information on Eastwood, see Alice Eastwood, A Guide for the
Analysis and Description of Flowering Plants Prepared for the Botanical Club,
California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco (San Francisco: Spaulding, 1897).
Susanna Bryant Dakin, The Perennial Adventure: A Tribute to Alice Eastwood, 1859-
1953 (San Francisco: California Academy of Sciences, 1954). Patricia Ann Moore,
“Cultivating Science in the Field: Alice Eastwood, Ynés Mexía, and California Botany,”
(Dissertation, University of California at Los Angeles Department of History, 1996).
Carol Green Wilson, Alice Eastwood’s Wonderland: The Adventures of a Botanist (San
Francisco: California Academy of Sciences, [1955]).
623
Untitled, unpublished biographical material on Mary Katharine Layne Curran
Brandegee. Beidleman, California’s Frontier Naturalists, 431. Crosswhite and
Crosswhite, “The Plant Collecting Brandegees, With Emphasis on Katharine Brandegee
as a Liberated Women Scientist of Early California,” Desert Plants, 137.
624
Beidleman, California’s Frontier Naturalists, 432. Crosswhite and Crosswhite, “The
Plant Collecting Brandegees, With Emphasis on Katharine Brandegee as a Liberated
Women Scientist of Early California,” Desert Plants, 160.
625
Joseph Ewan, “Bibliographical Miscellany – IV. A Bibliographical Guide to the
Brandegee Botanical Collections,” The American Midland Naturalist, Vol. 27, No. 3
(May, 1942), 772-789, viewed in the Brandegee Biographical Materials file at the Jepson
Herbaria at the University of California, Berkeley.
243
named 45 species of California plants.
626
In the early 1890s, Townshend underwrote the
journal Zoe for his wife.
627
The Brandegees developed Zoe into an ongoing amateur
naturalists’ discussion of botany in western North America, featuring a range of articles
on native plants and methods of observing and cataloging. This conversation further
cemented the importance of California as a botanical space and highlighted the
Brandegees’ collective work.
Limiting the discussion of the Brandegees to their careers as a botanizing couple
without discussing the role of Edward Lee Greene in their work clouds the gender-based

For a selected subset of the Brandegee’s publications, see T.S. Brandegee, “Flora
of the Santa Barbara Islands,” Proc. Cal. Acad. Sci., 2d Ser., Vol I, Part 2 (Oct. 11,
1888), 201-226 (Jepson Reprint Files, California A-B); T.S. Brandegee, “Flora of the
Californian Islands,” Zoe, Vol. I, No. 5 (July, 1890) 129-148 (Jepson Reprint Files,
California A-B); T.S. Brandegee, “Southern Extension of California Flora,” Zoe, Vol. IV,
No. 2 (Aug. 22, 1893) 199-218, (Jepson Reprint Files, California A-B); T.S. Brandegee,
“Two Undescribed Plants from the Coast Range,” Zoe, Vol. 4 (Mar. 12, 1894), 397-408
(Jepson Reprint Files, California A-B); T.S. Brandegee, “New Localities for California
Plants,” Zoe, Vol. IV (148-160) (Jepson Reprint Files, California A-B).
Mary K. Curran [Brandegee], “Descriptions of some Californian Plants collected
by the writer in 1884,” Proc. Cal. Acad., 2d Ser., Vol. 1 (Dec. 13, 1888) 151-154, 227-
269, (Jepson Reprint Files, California C); Katharine Brandegee, “Contributions to the
Knowledge of West American Plants. I.” Zoe, Vol. 2 (1891) 75-83, (Jepson Reprint Files,
California A-B); Katharine Brandegee, “Sierra Nevada Plants in the Coast Range,” Zoe,
Vol. IV, 168-176 (Jepson Reprint Files, California A-B).
626
Crosswhite and Crosswhite, “The Plant Collecting Brandegees, With Emphasis on
Katharine Brandegee as a Liberated Women Scientist of Early California,” Desert Plants,
159.
627
Katharine Brandegee, Unpublished reminiscences, (Apr., 1916), 2. Beidleman,
California’s Frontier Naturalists, 431. Carter, “The Brandegees,” The Journal of San
Diego History, 198. Crosswhite and Crosswhite, “The Plant Collecting Brandegees, With
Emphasis on Katharine Brandegee as a Liberated Women Scientist of Early California,”
Desert Plants, 134.
See the Helen Crocker Russell Library of Horticulture at the Strybing Arboretum
at Golden Gate Park for copies of Zoe: A Biological Journal.
244
limits and criticisms of botanizing Katharine faced, and in many ways transcended.
Credited as the University of California’s first “bona fide botanist,” Greene worked with
Katharine at the California Academy of Sciences.
628
Born in Hopkinton, Rhode Island in
August 1843, Greene lived in Wisconsin and Illinois, studying at Albion Academy before
joining the Union ranks. His mother had been an avid gardener. After the war, Greene
returned to Albion to complete his degree in 1866 and he commenced work as a teacher
in Illinois.
629
He then moved to California and served as a minister at St. Mark’s
Episcopal in Berkeley.
630
Criticized for preaching in a manner too Catholic for his
Episcopalian congregation, he faced a forced departure.
631
While working as a minister,
he spent time at the Academy of Sciences herbarium. It may have even been Greene who

628
Beidleman, California’s Frontier Naturalists, 376.
Although a prominent botanist, Greene was not universally praised. See Marcus
E. Jones, Letter to Katharine Brandegee, (undated), Brandegee Papers, 1897-1917, at the
Jepson Herbaria at the University of California, Berkeley, Box 2 Folder 24, at 63,
describing Greene as “financially crooked” and immodest.
For more information on Greene, see Edward L. Greene, Landmarks in Botanical
History; Edward L. Greene, Manual of the Botany of the Region of San Francisco Bay,
1894 (San Francisco: Cubery & Co., 1894). Edward L. Greene, Flora Franciscana: An
Attempt to Classify and Describe the Vascular Plants of Middle California (San
Francisco: Cubery & Co., 1891). University of Notre Dame Library, A Catalogue of the
Edward L. Greene Collection at Memorial Library, University of Notre Dame (Notre
Dame: The Library, 1986). Ellen D. Kistler, Bibliography of the Botanical Writings of
Edward Lee Greene, (S.I., 19--).
629
Beidleman, California’s Frontier Naturalists, 376-377.
630
Ibid. at 430. Albert W.C.T. Herre, “Katherine Brandegee: A Reply to a Fantasy by J.
Ewan,” (Self published pamphlet, c. Jan. 1960), 2, viewed in the Brandegee Biographical
Materials file at the Jepson Herbaria at the University of California, Berkeley.
631
Beidleman, California’s Frontier Naturalists, 376. Crosswhite and Crosswhite, “The
Plant Collecting Brandegees, With Emphasis on Katharine Brandegee as a Liberated
Women Scientist of Early California,” Desert Plants, 139.
245
encouraged Katharine to send samples to Gray. In 1885, Greene and Katharine were
appointed joint curators of botany at the Academy of Sciences. He was also a member of
California State Floral Society as early as September 1891.
632

By most accounts, Greene and Katharine shared a difficult relationship.
633
The
Brandegees believed in evolution and Greene did not.
634
Further, Greene and Katharine
approached taxonomy differently. She worked in a conservative manner, labeled as a
“lumper” – careful about not creating a new species for everything she observed. This
allied her with Asa Gray but placed her in a different camp from that of Greene and
Willis Linn Jepson.
635
Greene was a “splitter”; he named more than 100 new types of
Eschscholzia.
636
Katharine took her taxonomy very seriously, instructing everyone
should be able to name the organisms that surrounded them; one “can scarcely talk or
even think intelligently about a nameless object, and their names being learned a certain
amount of classification follows almost without effort.”
637
Although aligned in approach
with Gray, whom she respected, she desired to perform and performed her own
taxonomy. Rather than perpetually sending her specimen to Gray and the established east

632
Beidleman, California’s Frontier Naturalists, 430.
633
Ibid.
634
Herre, “Katherine Brandegee,” 3.
635
Crosswhite and Crosswhite, “The Plant Collecting Brandegees, With Emphasis on
Katharine Brandegee as a Liberated Women Scientist of Early California,” Desert Plants,
136.
636
J.C. Clark, “The Genus Eschscholzia California Poppies and Their Relatives,”
http://www.csupomona.edu/~jcclark/poppy/history.html, as viewed on April 25, 2013.
Clark notes that of those, eight are still recognized.
637
Katharine Brandegee, Unpublished reminiscences, (Apr., 1916), 2.
246
coast botanists of the day, Katharine desired greater control over her work. Tensions
ebbed and flowed.
638
Greene purportedly told Gray he was the Curator of Botany and
Katharine was his assistant, which was not accurate.
639
Additionally, Katharine “believed
in public reproof of errors.” Some thought her reviews of Greene’s work were “caustic”
and that she wrote with a “bitter pen.”
640
Her allegedly “caustic,” “bitter pen” seemed
even more so given her sex.
Some contemporaries and critics portrayed the Brandegees as a feminine man
married to a masculine woman. Eastern scientists referred to Katharine as a “virago” –
“‘a manlike woman; a bold, impudent, turbulent woman.’”
641
She failed to keep a tidy
home.
642
She neither cooked
643
nor wore fashionable clothes; her students supposedly
offered even to buy her a new wardrobe.
644
Contemporaries described her as “virile.”
645

638
Carter, “The Brandegees,” The Journal of San Diego History, 191-192.
639
Crosswhite and Crosswhite, “The Plant Collecting Brandegees, With Emphasis on
Katharine Brandegee as a Liberated Women Scientist of Early California,” Desert Plants,
136.
640
Setchell, “Townshend Stith Brandegee and Mary Katharine (Layne) (Curran)
Brandegee,” University of California Publications in Botany, 166.
641
Crosswhite and Crosswhite, “The Plant Collecting Brandegees, With Emphasis on
Katharine Brandegee as a Liberated Women Scientist of Early California,” Desert Plants,
130.
642
Herre, “Katherine Brandegee,” 4. Crosswhite and Crosswhite, “The Plant Collecting
Brandegees, With Emphasis on Katharine Brandegee as a Liberated Women Scientist of
Early California,” Desert Plants, 130.
643
Herre, “Katherine Brandegee,” 4.
644
Jaeger, “Bold Kate Brandegee,” Calico Print, 33.
247
Botanist and geologist Marcus Jones remembered meeting Katharine: “She impressed me
as a large woman with commanding personality and perfectly self contained. She wore
her hair streaming down over her shoulders, unkept; had on an old calico dress and a pair
of old slippers.”
646
Head of the Department of Botany at the University of California at
Berkeley, William Setchell concluded, “She was capable of great friendships and of bitter
antagonisms, but her outbreaks of sarcasm were professional rather than personal and she
was amazed at those who could not distinguish between the two, to her, very different
attitudes.”
647
Yet those close to her experienced a greater range of personal
characteristics, including those framed as traditionally feminine. Her self-proclaimed
friend, Albert W.C.T. Herre, mused, “Her voice was soft, and her face lit up when she
spoke of [Townshend] as if she were a girl about to marry her own true love. Happy is
the man whose wife gazes at him with the tender devotion Katherine Brandegee lavished
upon her husband.”
648
Theirs was a mutual love.
649

In contrast, Townshend “was a little man with light brown hair.” Jones
remembered watching Townshend working at his desk; “he looked rather insignificant

645
Crosswhite and Crosswhite, “The Plant Collecting Brandegees, With Emphasis on
Katharine Brandegee as a Liberated Women Scientist of Early California,” Desert Plants,
129.
646
Marcus E. Jones, (undated), Brandegee Papers, 1897-1917, at the Jepson Herbaria at
the University of California, Berkeley, Box 2, Folder 24, 60.
647
Setchell, “Townshend Stith Brandegee and Mary Katharine (Layne) (Curran)
Brandegee,” University of California Publications in Botany, 168.
648
Herre, “Katherine Brandegee,” 4.
649
Ibid. at 1-2. Beidleman, California’s Frontier Naturalists, 431.
248
until I looked into his eyes, - then I saw he was a man of unusual intelligence.”
650
Some
described him as effeminate.
651
Katharine spoke rapidly while Townshend was very
quiet and “few-spoken.”
652
His life was “modest and unassuming.”
He was quick to acknowledge his own mistakes or slips but not willing to
accept meekly what he considered injustice. His mode of life was simple
and quiet, although he appreciated unobtrusive attention on the part of his
friends and colleagues. His humor was quiet and his enjoyment of that of
others was discriminating but sincere.
653

While others defined the relationship, their work and partnership achieved significant
success, particularly Katharine with her intellect, hard work, and efforts to craft her own
space at the Academy. Although women entered the wildflower fields, most found
success as educators, amateurs, or activists in clubs; those who sought access to and
success at the scientific institutional level did so with some success but also with the
possibility of being labeled as wild as the plants they studied.
____________________________________

In 1914, botanist Charles Frances Saunders living in Pasadena surmised: “There is
one California wild flower that every Californian, however unobserving, knows and
loves.” In the way that Brits love daisies or Irish shamrocks, Saunders concluded that

650
Jones, (undated), Brandegee Papers, Box 2, Folder 24, 60.
651
Crosswhite and Crosswhite, “The Plant Collecting Brandegees, With Emphasis on
Katharine Brandegee as a Liberated Women Scientist of Early California,” Desert Plants,
130.
652
Jones, (undated), Brandegee Papers, Box 2, Folder 24, 60.
653
Setchell, “Townshend Stith Brandegee and Mary Katharine (Layne) (Curran)
Brandegee,” University of California Publications in Botany, 164.
249
flower was the California poppy. He explained that poets extolled the flower and artists
painted it. Like clockwork, “[e]very spring millions of its blossoms are brought indoors
and set in vases and bowls” and the plants “illuminate” those spaces “with the glow of
imprisoned sunshine.” And this love was not limited to “a little knot of floral
enthusiasts,” but the flower was the choice “of a whole people, who love it and admit it
into their daily life.”
654
From those who hunted the plants to those who crafted a history
of their state through poems about it, from amateurs to scientific botanists, the poppy was
the “floral emblem” of the state and for some an emblem of defining their own paths
apart from dominant gender norms, as he knew intimately from the work of his first wife,
botanical illustrator Elisabeth Moore Hallowell Saunders. Poppies also provided a
pathway to imagining and participating in the confident defining of that state both
offering promises of wealth moving forward and flourishing as a place with deep
historical international roots of encountering beauty and opportunity.

654
Charles Frances Saunders, With the Flowers and Trees in California (New York:
Robert M. McBride & Company, 1923, orig. pub. 1914).
250
Chapter 7

Dahlias on Display:
Mapping Local, National and Imperial Space with Flowers

E.A. Upton neither gardened as a professional nurseryman nor botanized wild
poppies. He nurtured blooms as an amateur but competed against both amateurs and
professionals with glowing success. At the second Mechanics’ Institute Fair, held from
August 29 to October 1, 1870, Upton won “best display” of dahlias, fuchsias, and
petunias in an “elegant flower stand.”
655
The next year, at the First Annual Exhibition of
the Bay District Horticultural Society, he exhibited no fewer than 450 dahlia specimens.
The July 1877 edition of California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine featured an
effusive review of Upton’s gardens after magazine personnel visited his San Francisco
property at Scott and Turk Streets.
656

Upton dedicated himself to his hobby. “I really love flowers,” he declared, “and
this love has, from boyhood, grown with my growth into manhood’s years, until now it
has become almost a passion.”
657
He diligently pursued his floral passion by compiling a
logbook of his 42 types of roses, 121 varieties of gladioli, 126 of dahlias, 52 of pompone,
11 of lilies, 5 of amaryllis, 25 of fuchsias, 18 of geraniums, 8 of ferns, 11 of hollyhocks,

655
“The Late Horticultural Exhibition at the Pavilion in San Francisco,” California
Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol. I, No. 1 (Nov., 1870), 14-16.
656
“Garden of E.A. Upton, Esq.,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol.
VII, No. 7 (Jul., 1877), 223. See partial copy of the article pasted into E.A. Upton, Copy
of an undated, published, letter to the editor pasted in Eugene A. Upton, Horticultural
Scrapbook, 1869-1877 (1 volume), San Francisco Public Library, SF MSS 9/40.
657
Upton, Copy of an undated, published, letter to the editor pasted in Upton,
Horticultural Scrapbook, emphasis in original.
251
and 8 cacti.
658
He carefully scripted notes about the provenances of many of his plants.
His gladioli, gathered from locals like Moore, grew alongside those from New York’s
Bliss & Son. In addition, he included notes on the specific varieties. Sometimes the
notes simply recorded color and size, such as “Marie” – a gladiolus of “pure white
stained with carmine” or the “Pet” – a “dwarf [dahlia] – a fancy dark maroon, tipped with
white.” Other notes described why the bloom earned a noteworthy status, either to him
or the public at large; the notes next to the “Mrs. Savoy” dahlia read, “This is the flower
that was so much admired at the Crystal Palace, where it had a first-class certificate
by acclamations.”
659

Upton, an amateur, competitor, and self-proclaimed man with a passion for
flowers, participated in a well-orchestrated set of floricultural movements dedicated to
the exhibition of flowers that started in the 1850s and continued into the twentieth
century. From the 1850s through 1915, nurserymen, businessmen, politicians, gardening
clubs, and individuals showcased their flowers and communicated specific messages
about their larger aspirations and goals. Temporary, fleeting, floricultural exhibitions
defined California as a state, as first part of the United States, and later as a central
participant in the United States’ empire after the Spanish American War. Three questions
evolved from what is the nature of California as a state, as a part of the nation, and as a
part of empire? The consistent answer echoed: flowers, flowers, flowers! Considering

658
Upton, Horticultural Scrapbook. The listed flowers were his more significant portions
of the collection that merited pages with carefully scripted titles. In addition, his
scrapbook featured pages and pages of materials on his “miscellaneous” collections, in
alphabetical order.
659
Ibid.
252
Californians could have chosen from a range of answers, from the transcontinental
railroad to ports to agribusiness, the floral chorus, while fanciful, is even
more extraordinary.
This chapter examines floral displays at local exhibits, the Midwinter Exposition,
and the Panama Pacific International Exposition. Floriculturists used floral displays as a
key component in their quest to civilize and present a cultivated image of California.
Thirteen flower shows in San Francisco from 1857 to 1913 and the early successes and
failures of nurserymen and others enticed participants and then institutionalized flower
shows within local society. Businessmen sought to show the country that California,
“The Land of Sunshine, Fruit and Flowers,” was a part of the national economic
community through the Midwinter Exposition of 1894, by hosting exhibits from the
Chicago World’s Fair but reframing those exhibits in California’s climate and landscape.
Poets, newspaper men, businessmen and members of the floricultural and horticultural
community used the landscape and floriculture of the Panama-Pacific International
Exposition in 1915 to place California at the very center of the United States empire
stretching from the Philippines to the District of Columbia.
Historian Barbara Berglund seeks to enrich the analysis of westward expansion by
linking nation and empire-building in her recent book. Her juxtaposition of empire and
nation-building as “coterminous and mutually defining” is rich but her work ends in
1906. Additional applications and modifications to Berglund’s arguments leap from the
reemergence of San Francisco after the earthquake and fires and in the context of the
completion of the Panama Canal in a post-Spanish American War world. In this new
253
space, the United States empire pushed beyond the seashores of California and
capitalized commercially via the canal.
660
To the extent the war and canal pushed the
nation’s political and economic boundaries west, the narrative remains one of westward
expansion. Consider, though, abandoning a strictly linear notion of westward expansion.
Through this work’s focus on floral culture, the evolution of exhibiting flowers to define
local, national, and international emerges in a multi-directional manner. California
floriculturists demanded that the rest of the country and even the world consider their
home as dwelling at the center. Even though they sometimes used “western” language,
their underlying claim was that the state was not west of center but part of an inclusive
whole, defined in reference to Chicago and New York but also to England and Europe,
and ultimately, China and Japan, as the middle point in the United States’ empire.
Sometimes the language danced with hyperbole as San Franciscans announced “Hong
Kong or Manila or Yokohama seem nearer to us than Chicago or St. Louis.’”
661

660
Barbara Berglund, Making San Francisco American: Cultural Frontiers in the Urban
West, 1846-1906 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007), 218 & 220. Phoebe S.
Kropp, California Vieja: Culture and Memory in a Modern American Place (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2006), 276-277, drawing on Alon Confino’s “nation as
local metaphor” from his The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial
Germany and National Memory, 1871-1918 (Chapel Hill and London: University of
North Carolina Press, 1997). Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of
Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916 (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1984), 8.
661
As quoted in Carl Abbott, How Cities Won the West: Four Centuries of Urban
Change in Western North America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,
2008), 73.
254
Sometimes, it forecasted tensions between northern and southern California as a business
in 1913 remarked, “‘Los Angeles is western. . .we are not. We are ‘the Coast.’’”
662

________________________

The sponsors of thirteen floral shows held from 1857 to 1913 sought to promote
nurserymen and floral growth, instruct and challenge Californians on the possibilities for
floriculture, and define San Francisco and California as a civilized, United States space.
The shows fall into three analytical time periods that capture three distinct themes. The
first time period features a stand-alone show in 1857 that demonstrates early hope for the
industry and the efforts of the California State Horticultural Society, who partnered with
the Mechanics’ Institute, to present a flower show in connection with the larger
Mechanics’ Institute Fair. Although the flower show achieved successful reviews, the
next significant cluster of flower shows did not take place until the 1870s. Fears about
declining floriculture and civilization in California darkened the 1870s’ exhibitions, but
were answered by a wider range of floral categories and participants. The failures of the
1870s loomed large, but by the 1890s through the turn of the century, floral shows
emerged as institutions, their success fostered in part by interpersonal connections to
academics and organizations that both created and reflected a more
established metropolis.

662
As quoted from Edward Hungerford, The Personality of American Cities (New York:
McBride, Nast and Co., 1913), 295 in Abbott, How Cities Won the West, 73. See also,
Charles Sedgwick Aiken, ed., California To Day: San Francisco Its Metropolis (San
Francisco: The California Promotion Committee, 1903); the subtitle of the work is “state
that faces the Orient.”
255
From their beginnings in 1857 to their establishment as a fixture in the societal
and intellectual life of San Francisco in the early twentieth century, flower shows defined
the local space as a Euro-western space. The city brimmed with the potential to exhibit a
certain kind of culture; the show planners saw themselves as providing the same
enriching experience that persons of culture enjoyed when they visited flower shows in
Philadelphia or London. Visitors were treated to similar flowers but also to messages
that California’s climate and soil promised superior, untapped, and hidden possibilities
for growing non-European plants, such as cacti and tropical plants. The path from 1857
to 1913 fails to conform to a linear trail of floral disinterest to success; the path winds
about in the financial set-backs and expressed frustrations at lack of participation in the
1870s. But even in the 1870s, the message that quality prevailed and that the flower
show prizes held value survived. In a magazine in 1877, five years after winning, Frank
Lüdemann of Pacific Nurseries at Baker Street still boasted that he earned the “First
Premium for the Largest and Best Collection of Flowering Plants, Fuchsias, Double
Flowering Geraniums, Coleus and Carnations, at the Horticultural Exhibition of 1872.”
663

By the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, academics and local
celebrities planned and added their personal cachet to floral shows and societies, further

663
Advertisement for Pacific Nurseries, California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine,
Vol. VII, No. 12 (Nov.-Dec., 1877), v. The perception of the commercial value of prizes
persisted. See, Victor Dupuis, a French gardener and florist with 35 years of experience,
including working as the second head gardener at Jardin du Luxembourg. He advertised
a list of his awards including First Premium Awarded at the Mechanics’ Pavilion Floral
Exhibition, May 1893, Prize awarded at the New Orleans Exhibit, First Prize Awarded
for Miniature Garden Exhibit and Diploma for Decorations at the Mechanics’ Fair 1899,
and six medals at the Louisiana State Floral Exhibition. Victor Dupuis, (French gardener
and florist, Mayfield), Business Ephemera, California Historical Society.
256
connecting flowers and a notion of a civilized, western society. Some of these
participants concurrently worked on floral displays and messages in other forums, such as
the Midwinter Exposition of 1894.
The Mechanics’ Institute, in connection with the California Horticultural Society,
held one of the first significant floral fairs in September 1857. The horticultural portion
was connected to the larger Mechanics’ Institute exhibits championing industry and
business achievement – central elements of the Mechanics’ Institute charter to provide
opportunities to study literature, the arts, and sciences and then put that knowledge into
practical use.
664
Fifty-eight exhibitors displayed goods in the horticultural portion, which
focused mainly on fruit. The Committee on Pot-Plants and Flowers handed out two
premium awards to W.C. Walker of Golden Gate Nursery and J. O’Donnell of United
States Nursery. The Committee praised Walker for introducing many varieties of flowers
to the state and for his acacias – “being the largest collection ever exhibited in
California.” O’Donnell received commendation for the size of some of his contributions,
including ten feet tall “yellow odiferous blossoms.”
665
More competitors exhibited in the
Bouquet Division, where judges evaluated regular and wax flowers together.
666
At this
first show of the California Horticultural Society, floral aspects were secondary to the

664
Report of the First Industrial Exhibition of the Mechanics’ Institute of the City of San
Francisco (San Francisco: 1858), xv, 5 & 20-22. See also, Mechanics’ Institute Fairs,
San Francisco Ephemera, California Historical Society; Berglund, Making San Francisco
American, 137-139, discussing the Institute fairs and themes of hope and progress.
665
Report of the First Industrial Exhibition of the Mechanics’ Institute of the City of San
Francisco, 148-150.
666
For additional information on prizes, see ibid. at 151.
257
larger Mechanics’ Institute’s fair offerings, participants were few, and the categories of
flowers were limited. The early show though performed the work of defining the new
city by introducing the public to the possibilities of introducing gorgeous specimen, as in
Walker’s blooms and cultivating flowers to flourish to impressive heights, as in
O’Donnell’s. And by connecting the show with the larger Institute fair, planners
attracted visitors and showed-off the possibilities for success and their own achievements.
However hopeful the initial attempt in 1857, the second significant horticultural
and floral fair occurred over a decade later, from August 29 to October 1, 1870. Five
fairs in the 1870s reveal financial struggles, disappointment, and frustration at the lack of
participation and visitors, but also the explosion of additional floral categories, a more
diverse base of sponsors, growing numbers of non-professional participants, such as E.A.
Upton, and entrenched support for the possibilities of California floriculture. The 1870
show included more varied categories of flowers, complex show structure, and
participants. Judges awarded prizes separately to professional and non-professional
growers, although many of the names appeared on both lists. Amongst non-professional
growers, Upton’s dahlias, fuchsias, and petunias prevailed.
667
Moving far past a couple
of nurserymen with roses and dahlias, the 1870 show demonstrates the strides and greater
saturation of floriculture into the local community.
One year later, in 1871, the 70 members of the Bay District Horticultural Society
held their first show – also in connection with a Mechanics’ Institute fair. The show

667
“The Late Horticultural Exhibition at the Pavilion in San Francisco,” California
Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, 14-16.
258
featured 500 square feet of tables and 17,500 square feet of total exhibit horticultural
space.
668
The trend from 1870 of more types of flowers and exhibitors continued, but
some exhibitors expressed concerns about the costs of participation.
669
The first week
featured floral displays, including roses, gardenias, and petunias.
670
The third week
featured cut-flowers and bouquets, which California Horticulturalist and Flower
Magazine concluded “did not exactly meet our expectations; although a few exhibitors
exerted themselves; the majority of those florists who were able to make a good display,
neglected to do so, for reasons best known to them.” However, they did praise the work
of a select few. The magazine was a bit more forgiving for the displays in the fourth
week, deeming it was too hard to keep it all up for a month; the gas-lights created a
difficult environment to keep the flowers looking pristine.
671
While the proliferation of
flowers and participants constituted a positive sign, even if the cut flower bouquets of the
third week fell short of perfection, professional participation emerged as a thorny issue.

668
“The Horticultural Exhibition,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol.
I, No. 9 (Jul., 1871), 277-8. “First Annual Exhibition of the Bay District Horticultural
Society, Held in San Francisco, August, 1871,” California Horticulturalist and Floral
Magazine, Vol. I, No. 10 (Aug., 1871), 303-308, 3. Report of the Eighth Industrial
Exhibition of the Mechanics’ Institute of the City of San Francisco (San Francisco:
Cosmopolitan Printing Company, 1872), 25.
669
“First Annual Exhibition of the Bay District Horticultural Society, Held in San
Francisco, August, 1871,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, 3. “The Late
Horticultural Exhibition,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol. I, No.
11 (Sep., 1871), 331-333.
670
“First Annual Exhibition of the Bay District Horticultural Society, Held in San
Francisco, August, 1871,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, 303-308.
671
“The Late Horticultural Exhibition,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine,
331-332.
259
California Horticulturalist and Flower Magazine reported that some of the florists and
horticulturists complained that participating in the show “‘won’t pay us.’” The magazine
tried to fight against that mentality by labeling those complainers as “cowardly” and
arguing that the exhibits performed the vital work of demonstrating industry
possibilities.
672
The lack of participation was symptomatic both of difficult economic
times and the perceived lack of commercial power of the society.
The following year, though, the Bay District Horticultural Society sponsored its
second show. The show blossomed forth both as a financial success and as of higher
quality than the first show. Although “flowering plants in bloom” suffered because of
cold weather in San Francisco the prior month, the exhibits overflowed with begonias,
hydrangeas, and pansies.
673
There were 62 categories of prizes in full plants, 15 in cut
flowers and 26 in bouquets, ranging from $10 for the best collection of petunias to $5 for
the best pyramid bouquet.
674
The offerings drew from international plantways;
nurserymen E.L. Reimer exhibited an evergreen collection from Australia. Greenhouse
and conservatory plants budded in plentiful supply. As in the year before, the Society
presented awards in various categories, with awards this year for preserved and artificial
flowers all going to women. California Horticulturalist and Flower Magazine concluded

672
“The Horticultural Exhibition,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, 277-
8.
673
“The Exhibition,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol. II, No. 10
(Sep., 1872), 301-311, 301 & 308.
674
Second Annual Exhibition of the Bay District Horticultural Society, August 22 –
September 7, 1872, Business Ephemera, California Historical Society.
260
that “visitors to the Fair were, almost exclusively, of the very best class of
our population.”
675

However, the Spring Exhibition of 1873 proved discouraging and not because of
the weather in the months preceding the event or the displays – which were rumored to be
great. The principal exhibitors included a common cast of nurserymen, E.L. Reimer, F.
Lüdemann & Co., and Miller & Sievers; the 138 entries robustly filled the space. The
exhibition included calls for the teaching of botany in the schools, and Professor E.A.
Carr offered a 50-minute lecture on the history of horticulture stretching from ancient
India to the present day, acknowledging the contributions of “Hindoos,” Chinese, and
Aztecs.
676
And yet, C. Stephen, editor of California Horticulturalist and Flower
Magazine, judged the floral show a disappointment. Before the show, he predicted
parents would bring their children. But San Franciscans failed to turn out in profitable
numbers; “we trusted that sufficient patronage would have been awarded the Society to
have at least reimbursed it in the actual outlay for the music, decorations, and the
numerous etceteras, instead of leaving it” $2,000 in debt and out all the labor of the
members.
677
The spring show of 1873 combined the success in growing numbers of
entries and additional contributions for academics with financial defeat. The show taxed
its members both in fiscal terms and wasted energy.

675
“The Exhibition,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, 301-310.
676
“Spring Exhibition of the Bay District Horticultural Society,” California
Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol. III, No. 6 (Jun., 1873), 180-185, 181-182.
677
C. Stephens, “Editorial Portfolio,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine,
Vol. III, No. 6 (Jun., 1873), 178.
261
Despite the mixed results, however, the shows continued. The spring show was
followed by an equally disastrous, if not more so, fall exhibition.
678
The fall gala started
off well; the show opened with the pomp and energy of a band. The displays received
praises of “brilliant success.”
679
Exhibitors improved the quality of the plants. The
Society presented masses of awards for Woodward’s tropical plants and Miller &
Sievers’ Japanese plants.
680
Perhaps the shadow of the spring exhibition hung heavy over
even the opening events of the fall exhibition or maybe the Society felt a societal turn that
gave them concern. In his opening address, Carr marveled at the potential in California
that Californians failed to exercise; “We are often told that indifference to everything
which does not exhibit quick returns is the vice of new communities.” He recognized,
“California is not wanting in pride in her business enterprises. She only needs to believe
in some of the higher laws of life.” For Carr, those included the law “‘that lovely things
are also necessary; flowers as well as corn.’” While C. Stephens had labeled the financial
outlook from the spring fair a disappointment, he calculated that the fall exhibition
constituted a “most disgusting financial failure.” Curiosity mixed with bitterness when
he reflected, “Strange that the people of San Francisco, expensive as they are in the
coarser amusements, can not appreciate the more refined pleasures of such exhibitions,

678
“Editorial Portfolio,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol. III, No.
11 (Nov., 1873), 340.
679
“Editorial Portfolio: Fairs and Exhibitions,” California Horticulturalist and Floral
Magazine, Vol. III, No. 10 (Oct., 1873), 309-317, 309.
680
“Fairs and Exhibitions,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol. III,
No. 11 (Nov., 1873), 340-343, 340-342.
262
which, in other portions of the civilized world, are so liberally patronized.”
681
The fair
seemed for some like an even greater disaster than that of the spring. But when the
members totaled the receipts, the balance sheet told a brighter story, with significantly
lower losses of $500.
682
The emotional cloud persisted. Months after the repetitive
failures of the Bay District Horticultural shows, F. A. Miller conceded that the Society
moved “so slowly in accomplishing its mission” and he lamented the lack of
public interest.
683

The successes and purported failures of the shows of the 1870s illustrate the peaks
and valleys of California’s early flower shows. The shows grew in scale, but visitors and
even industry members did not keep pace with planners’ hopes and challenged their
visions through disinterest and financial concerns. But by the end of the nineteenth
century and into the early twentieth century, new organizations with clear mandates, such
as the California State Floral Society, connections with academics and popular interest
entrenched flower exhibition within society. The flower exhibition, as an institution,
showcased the regions beauty and progress and highlighted the international ethos of the
local landscape.
Building on the foundations and traditions of earlier floral societies, the California
floral organizations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries set forth ambitious

681
“Editorial Portfolio: Fairs and Exhibitions,” California Horticulturalist and Floral
Magazine, 309-311.
682
“Fairs and Exhibitions,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, 340.
683
F.A. Miller, “Reports of Societies,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine,
Vol. III, No. 12 (Dec., 1873), 376- 378, 376.
263
visions for a floricultural California. For example, President of the California State
Floral Society and professor at the University of California, E.J. Wickson focused on the
goals and mandate of his organization, to “advance floral interests in public esteem” and
“to promote such influences as moving forces to the advancement of taste” and culture.
Noting that the Society welcomed everyone, from professional florists to amateur
gardeners, Wickson promised that the Society sought “recognition of the value of
floriculture in training the senses and developing powers of judgment and
discrimination.”
684
By 1905, in his role as President of the same organization, Prof.
Emory E. Smith engaged in creating the institutional history of the society when he
recounted that for the previous seventeen years, the Society had been active coordinating
no less than 21 flower shows in San Francisco. In the same year, Thomas A. Munro, as
President of the Pacific Coast Horticultural Society also offered a brief on his
organization, only in existence for four years but already counting nurserymen,
gardeners, florists, and dealers amongst its members. He stressed that prospective
members formed the Society to “advance the interest of Horticulture and to increase the
intelligent appreciation of floral beauty.”
685

The shows of these organizations offered even more complex matrices of
categories and a greater focus on academic presentations. For example from May 17 to
20, 1893, the California State Floral Society held their flower show at the Mechanics’

684
“Premium List of the Flower Show held at Mechanics’ Pavilion,” California State
Floral Society (1893), 5.
685
Souvenir: Fall Exhibition, California State Floral Society and Pacific Coast
Horticultural Society, Grand Nave of the Ferry Building, San Francisco (1905), 9, 13.
264
Pavilion at 204 California Street. They featured various classes of competition, with
even more layers within the classes. Class A was dedicated to cut flowers, with one
section for amateurs who did not employ skilled labor for roses in 11 sub-categories
ranging from best collection to six best hybrid teas of one variety, camellias, and two
groups of carnations, sweet peas, and others. Class B was also split over the labor
question and included plants, from azaleas to potted geraniums and pelargonums.
Finally, Class C was a bit of a mishmash of flowering plants, from poppies to orchids.
686

Planners created a plethora of categories to judge participants but more critically to mark
San Francisco as a space of diverse possibilities for growing flowers long associated with
east coast and European civilizations, from roses to sweet peas. At the 1913 show,
University of California Professors Charles F. Shaw of Soil Technology and J.W. Gregg
of Landscape Gardening and Floriculture and the College of Architecture presented
lectures on “Methods of Producing New Varieties of Flowers.”
687
This grander bouquet
of civic and academic speakers transformed the shows into a floral congress.
Organizations like the State Floral Society even began holding what they
advertised as stand-alone flower shows. From May 22 to 24, 1902, exhibitors displayed
100,000 flowers at the Ferry Depot in connection with the Rose Show of the California
State Floral Society. Although it was entitled a “Rose Show,” the Society awarded prizes

686
“Premium List of the Flower Show held at Mechanics’ Pavilion,” 3, 17-27.
687
Souvenir of the California State Floral Society Exhibition, Early Spring Flowers from
March 1913, 1 & 13, California State Floral Society, San Francisco Ephemera Collection,
California Historical Society.
265
for a range of other blooms from carnations to sweet peas, and exhibits of wildflowers
like poppies and buttercups.
688

Shows of the first decade of the twentieth century illustrate the power of
coalitions and the societal strength of the membership of the organizations. The members
and coalitions embedded the shows into the institutional structure of San Francisco.
From November 9 through 11, 1905, the California State Floral Society and Pacific Coast
Horticultural Society joined together to throw their Fall Exhibition at the Grand Nave of
the Ferry Building in San Francisco. The event featured music from the First Regiment
Band and the Reception Committees of some of city’s most important horticulturalists
and floriculturists, including the Lemmons, Prof. and Mrs. E.J. Wickson, John McLaren,
F.A. Miller and Alice Eastwood greeted guests.
689
Likewise, from October 14 through
16, 1909, the Pacific Horticultural Society and the California State Floral Society hosted
the Portolá Flower and Fruit Show in Norman Hall at the Hotel Fairmont. It featured
overwhelming bouquets of flowers and prizes donated by dozens of significant
benefactors, including William H. Crocker, C.C. Morse & Co., John McLaren, and the
Domoto Bros.
690

688
Charles Sedgwick Aiken, “California’s Roses in Convention,” Sunset Magazine, Vol.
IX, No. 1 (May, 1902), 41-42. See also Sunset Magazine, Vol. XII, No. 5 (Mar., 1904),
467, marking the 20
th
exhibition of the California State Floral Society’s spring flower
show at the Ferry building in San Francisco, from March 24th through 26th.
689
Souvenir: Fall Exhibition, California State Floral Society and Pacific Coast
Horticultural Society, Grand Nave of the Ferry Building, San Francisco (1905), 3 & 7,
viewed at the San Francisco Public Library.
690
“Portolá Flower and Fruit Show: Norman Hall at the Hotel Fairmont,” (1909), 1 & 9,
viewed at the San Francisco Public Library.
266
These local flower shows showcased the possibilities of local growth and the
offerings available to consumers. Exhibitors promised international landscapes via plants
they imported and cultivated. And through this ever-growing bouquet, floriculturists
mapped out a landscape of civility. The local flower shows may seem distant from the
international themes of world’s fairs. However, they shared the element of public
display. Exhibitors and planners grappled with the symbolic meaning of place. And the
local flower shows contained like motivations with the international fairs. Both
demonstrated promises of the glory of capitalism and efforts at striving for order.
Societies and displayers created an idealized space that focused visitors on progress and
the future. Additionally, participants in the early flower shows created rituals and
patterns that subsequent exposition and fair planners followed.
In 1894, the call went out to the world: San Francisco “INVITES YOU” to the
fair and to see the sights of Chicago’s Columbian Exposition that have traveled west:
Come and enjoy our sunshine, our flowers, our bracing atmosphere; but
don’t bring your summer clothes, don’t send your tramps, your labor
cranks, your lawless voters, but come yourselves; bring your men of
business, of affairs, of means; come before you die; come, you will not die
so soon; come, study our codes and carry back enthusiasm as to their best
features, or if you will COME TO STAY. . .Business is dull in San
Francisco (we know of no place on earth in which it is not) but the
depression is not so great and the reaction will come more quickly, we
trust, here than elsewhere. Come while business at home can spare you.
691

Fair promoters urgently pointed out that if the visitor found the winter conditions
favorable – he should definitely stay through spring for a real treat. For in the spring,

691
California Midwinter International Exposition (San Francisco: Bancroft-Whitney Co.,
1893), inside cover, pamphlet viewed at the Bancroft Library at the University of
California at Berkeley.
267
“the wild flowers, many-hued and fragrant, being to unfold, bedecking every valley,
mountain slope and wooded height with a gorgeous garment of many colors.” None
shown brighter than the California poppy; the poppy “decorates meadow and mountain
with great masses of gold and orange.”
692
Fair planners designed the Midwinter Fair to
attract a certain type of resident with business interests to visit, enjoy the climate, and
recognize that San Francisco was part of the larger national community. Visitors were
encouraged to decode the message that the explosion of familiar flowers denoted a place
that fostered growth; California promised even to recover more quickly from the national
depression than elsewhere.
In June of 1893, M.H. de Young represented California in Chicago as part of the
World’s Columbian Commission. De Young was a prominent San Francisco business-
and newspaperman. Marveling at the exhibitions and dreaming of attracting men of
means to the far west, he gathered together other California businessmen present at the
exposition to pitch the idea that San Francisco throw its own fair a mere six months after
the Columbian Exposition. The San Francisco version would showcase the appeal and
business opportunities present in California. San Francisco Mayor Levi Richard Ellert
first concluded that the city could not finance an exposition under such circumstances.
But de Young and his contemporaries raised an initial $50,000, convinced the city to

692
Taliesin Evans, “All About the Midwinter Fair, San Francisco, and Interesting Facts
Concerning California,” (San Francisco: W.B. Bancroft & Co., 1894), 9.
268
host, and coordinated with the California State Board of Trade, which worked with the
Mechanics’ Institute and others to make the fair a reality.
693

These men and their civic institutions orchestrated a complex message for their
exposition. One writer describes the fair as a “Cacophony of Wonders,” which fairly
characterizes the multitude of notes struck by the fair but suggests a disorganization in
the breadth of amusements countered by the two central objectives of the exposition.
694

First, by bringing exhibits west from the Chicago World’s Fair to San Francisco, fair
planners drew lines of continuity between their home state and the rest of the country.
San Franciscans, like Chicagoans, were Americans – excited by the delights and
messages of progress of the exhibits of the Columbian Exhibition. Fair planners sought
to show that Californians lived a cultured life like those in the rest of the country and
would spend money at the fair.
695
But fair promoters added a second layer to their
rhetoric. By choosing the Midwinter Exposition’s subtitle, “The Land of Sunshine, Fruits
and Flowers,” they exploited and promoted the winter climate of California and the idea
that possibilities for success flourished in the winter in California that eluded those
elsewhere in the nation.

693
Official Portfolio of the California Midwinter International Exposition (San
Francisco: The Winters Art Lithography Company, ?), 1; Official Guide to the California
Midwinter Exposition in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, California (San Francisco:
George Spaulding & Co., 1894), 19; The Official History of the California Midwinter
International Exposition 1894 (San Francisco: H.S. Crocker Company, 1894), 19.
694
William Lipsky, San Francisco’s Midwinter Exposition (Charleston: Arcadia
Publishing, 2002), 85.
695
This turned out to be true. The Midwinter Exposition was one of the few international
expositions during this time period that made a net profit.
269
Berglund concludes that the fair “articulated San Francisco’s desire to be
considered a thoroughly civilized and American place” and that part of this desired
identity included demonstrating that the city was both domestic and wild. This
combination rendered the space regionally distinct.
696
Within the floricultural context,
her claims of the fair’s message as one of civilization and American assimilation ring
true. But through the floral appeals, fair promoters pointed less vehemently to wildness
and more strongly to untapped possibilities. They sought to capitalize on California’s
naturally occurring promises of nurturing health and economic success. Just as flowers
blossomed in California, California’s climate enriched the health and vitality of
its people.
The grounds of the Midwinter Fair encompassed approximately 160 acres in the
“Concert Valley” portion of Golden Gate Park.
697
The exhibitions covered a range of

696
Berglund, Making San Francisco American, 171-219.
697
For additional general information on the fair, see Robert W. Rydell, John E. Findling,
and Kimberly D. Pelle, Fair America: World’s Fairs in the United States (Washington:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000), 41-44. J.C. Wilson & Co., The Fair (San Francisco:
The T.C. Russell Company, [1894]), 4. Official Portfolio of the California Midwinter
International Exposition, 19-20. See also Marvin R. Nathan, “San Francisco’s
International Expositions: A Bibliography, Including Listings for the Mechanics’ Institute
Exhibitions,” (San Francisco, 1990). See also United States Works Progress
Administration, Inventory of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, San
Francisco, California, 1915 (unpublished, 193?). Zum Andenken In remembrance En
mémoire of the Midwinter International Exposition, San Francisco, Cal. (San Francisco:
American Souvenir & Advertising Company Hergert & Frey, 1894); A Glimpse of the
Midwinter Fair (San Francisco: Dickman-Jones Company, ?); The Official History of the
California Midwinter International Exposition 1894; California Midwinter International
Exposition, San Francisco Ephemera Collection, California Historical Society; California
Midwinter International Exposition San Francisco Cal. January 1
st
to June 30
th
1894.
(Portland, Maine: Leighton & Frey Souvenir Co., 1894); Photo=Gravures of the
Midwinter Fair (San Francisco: Jos. A. Hofmann, 1894).
270
internationally-themed adventures, from the Vienna Prater, which also included a florist’s
shop to the Tamale Cottage featuring Mexicans making tamales under conditions of the
“utmost cleanliness,” where visitors were “waited on by the señoritas.”
698
Planners
dedicated special days to different groups and causes from April 16th's Catholic Ladies’
Aid Society to the Horticultural Congress and Horticultural Days on April 24th

and June
8th, respectively.
699

Central to conveying the committees’ goals for the fair within the general grounds
and at the horticultural exhibits, flowers overwhelmed visitors. Flowers in the general
grounds promoted the state as part of the United States. Further, California’s
horticultural exhibitions presented the state as an American place, with a superior
climate, ripe for opportunity, complete with academic and scientific inquiry.
Flowers present on the grounds were deemed evidence of the rich and nurturing
California climate. They commanded direct comparisons with the South and the East to
show that California equaled, if not surpassed the rest of the country. For example,
Taliesin Evans bragged, “Lawns remain green the year round; tender semi-tropical plants,
such as are raised only under cover in the East, grow and bloom in the open air here
throughout the year.”
700
Maggie Downing Brainard, in “Among the Flowers,” a fair

698
J.C. Wilson & Co., The Fair, 6-10. See also, Guide to the Halls and Galleries of the
California Midwinter International Exposition (San Francisco: H.S. Crocker Company,
1895). The Vienna Prater Daily Programme (San Francisco: Stephen von Szinnyey,
Gustave Nissem, 1894), promising cut flowers at midsummer rather than midwinter
prices.
699
J.C. Wilson & Co., The Fair.
700
Evans, “All About the Midwinter Fair, San Francisco, and Interesting Facts
Concerning California,” 51.
271
publication, wrote about the Cape Jessamine, a tropical southern flower that flourished in
California just as it did in the southern states.
701
Fair planners chose a portion of Golden
Gate Park for the grounds to physically demonstrate that California was the “Land of
Flowers and Sunshine.” They promised fair attendees “great masses of tender callas,
roses in endless profusion, fuchsias laden with pendent drops, geraniums ablaze with
blossoms, and magnolias scenting the air with globes of white at Christmas tide.”
702

The key components to conveying the Fair’s message involved making sure that
an overwhelming abundance of flowers bloomed constantly throughout the entire event
and that specimens featured were either familiar but of higher quality or new to the
visitors. John McLaren took charge of the grounds, and he started his work well in
advance of the Fair. McLaren learned his trade near Edinburgh and in England’s Royal
Botanical Gardens, as well as working in New York in the 1870s before traveling to San
Francisco.
703
Throughout his venerable career, he planned landscapes and authored
guides to California gardening.
At the Fair, McLaren delivered a floral display that “naturally attract[ed] the most
attention from strangers.” McLaren and the planners engaged in very deliberate planning

701
Maggie Downing Brainard, “Among the Flowers,” California Midwinter Exposition
Series of the Illustrated Pacific States, Part I, Vol. I, No. 10 (Dec. 9, 1893), 16.
702
Evans, “All About the Midwinter Fair, San Francisco, and Interesting Facts
Concerning California,” 31, 51.
703
Although McLaren became famous for his planned landscapes at the Midwinter
Exposition, Golden Gate Park and later the Panama-Pacific International Exhibition, he
generally believed in deferring to the inspiration he found in the wild. The poppy was
tapped to “play an important part.” Untitled article, California Midwinter Exposition
Series of the Illustrated Pacific States, Vol. XVI, No. 12 (Jan. 20, 1894), 3.
272
(maybe a little floricultural trickery as well) to present this land of flowers. Promoters
specifically advertised the force of the attraction as threefold. First, they boasted of the
flowers’ “extraordinary profusion, which seems to the eye accustomed to the moderate
limits of a flower-pot almost wickedly extravagant.”
704
But nature unaided failed to
provide the requisite profusion. McLaren expertly plotted schedules that provided for
flowers that bloomed constantly.
705
Second, the official verse proclaimed that McLaren
grew flowers that could be grown in the East under glass; he fostered them outdoors and
they thrived “in a riotous fashion that goes beyond all bounds.”
706
Despite promises of
specimens that only elsewhere required indoor cultivation, McLaren nurtured bundles of
pansies and other spring flowers in greenhouses and then transplanted them throughout
the grounds.
707
In fairness to McLaren, once he planted them out-of-doors, he tended to
their impressive growth. Third, McLaren drew people in with exotic plants – “strange,
big, gorgeous and queerly shaped plants of the semi-tropics.”
708
This last promise was
planted for maximum dramatic effect.

704
Official Guide to the California Midwinter Exposition in Golden Gate Park, San
Francisco, California, 170-171.
705
Evans, “All About the Midwinter Fair, San Francisco, and Interesting Facts
Concerning California,” 51.
706
Official Guide to the California Midwinter Exposition in Golden Gate Park, San
Francisco, California, 170-1.
707
Untitled article, California Midwinter Exposition Series of the Illustrated Pacific
States, 3.
708
Official Guide to the California Midwinter Exposition in Golden Gate Park, San
Francisco, California, 170-1.
273
While the grounds demonstrated the power of the California climate to improve
on flowers grown elsewhere in the country and host plants from around the world, the
planners’ message clarified that such gains were only possible after California became
part of the United States. Evans’ pamphlet, “All About the Midwinter Fair, San
Francisco, and Interesting Facts Concerning California,” recounted that during the
Spanish period and the first two years of “American occupation,” the land slept as
“strictly a pastoral territory.” The “real development of California. . .occurred since the
discovery of gold and through the agency of its fertile soil and genial climate.” As of the
time of the fair, Evans boasted that current Californians finally tapped into the
horticultural and agricultural possibilities of their state.
709
To fully harness the power of
the climate and soil, California needed more Americans.
In addition to the floricultural message of the grounds, the Midwinter Exposition
featured an Agricultural and Horticultural Department and Building, led by Stanford
University Professor Emory Smith who moved his office from Palo Alto to the southwest
corner of the main floor of the dedicated hall.
710
Smith brought both professional
expertise as well as institutional continuity between previous floral exhibitions in San
Francisco and the Midwinter Exposition. Born in Blacksburg, Virginia, at the time of the
fair, he had studied horticulture for fourteen years, the preceding six years in California.
Smith served as editor of California Florist and Gardener, assistant editor of Pacific

709
Evans, “All About the Midwinter Fair, San Francisco, and Interesting Facts
Concerning California,” 4-5.
710
“Horticulture and Agriculture,” California Midwinter Exposition Series of the
Illustrated Pacific States, Vol. XVI, No. 12 (Jan. 20, 1894), 4.
274
Rural Press, and editor of California Fruit Grower. He organized the State Floral
Society and held the role of secretary for three years. Further, he organized and was the
first President of the Floral Club of California.
711

The Agricultural and Horticultural Department and Building design telegraphed a
combination of California’s Spanish romanticized past as well as its dreams for the future
– and specifically how horticulture fit into those dreams. Samuel A. Newsom designed
the building to resemble a California mission, although it looked more like a mission-
style fortress or castle. Internationally famous for her work on the language of flowers,
Kate Greenaway provided figures in bas-relief that danced on the entrance arches.
Further, the building featured a large central dome made of glass permitting necessary
sunshine.
712
The building tied together a romanticized image of California and a
forward-looking dome allowing in the light of horticultural possibility.
Within the building, fair planners anticipated that the floral and horticultural
exhibits would “get the earliest and longest attention from the Eastern visitor,” because
they “embodied the wonderful story of the fertility of California’s soil and the rare
quality of its incomparable climate.”
713
Visitors received free flower bouquets in the Hall

711
The Official Catalogue of the California Midwinter International Exposition, San
Francisco (San Francisco: Harvey, Whitcher & Allen, 1894), 33. “Professor Emory E.
Smith,” California Midwinter Exposition Series of the Illustrated Pacific States, Vol.
XVI, No. 12 (Jan. 20, 1894), 11.
712
Official Portfolio of the California Midwinter International Exposition, 7 & 10;
Official Guide to the California Midwinter Exposition in Golden Gate Park, San
Francisco, California, 43.
713
Evans, “All About the Midwinter Fair, San Francisco, and Interesting Facts
Concerning California,” 73. See ibid, 75-79 for a list of the agricultural exhibits.
275
from the city of San Rafael, which displayed flowers and the bouquets under the dome in
the northeast corner of the building, promising – “It is to be a continued flower show.”
714

Additionally, formally local flower shows transplanted to the fairgrounds. In April, a
wildflower show delighted guests; “Visitors from abroad were astonished to see the great
variety of flowers that grow wild in California, and there were many Californians who
participated in the surprise.” The State Floral Society put on a rose show, featuring 4,000
vases of cut flowers and 500 flowering and decorative plants.” The May 19
th
Floral
Festival even featured floral floats, “exemplifying California’s floral supremacy.”
715

Smith and his team successfully coordinated with local floral societies and interested
parties to fashion a picture of the current status and future dreams of the possibilities of
California that also remained grounded in his status as academic and scientist.
As part of the Chicago World’s Fair, Frederick Jackson Turner delivered his
frontier thesis to the meeting of the American Historical Association. In moving exhibits
from that fair to the west coast Midwinter Exposition, Californians visually articulated
that the frontier was truly closed in a different way; present and future Californians
accessed the same culture and exhibits available to Chicagoans. The frontier closed
through the climactic metaphor of the Exposition’s theme; business opportunities ripened
for the picking in California’s nurturing climate – opportunities grew like flowers.
Planners used the exhibits to demonstrate their own inclusion in the national story also by

714
“Bouquets for Visitors,” California Midwinter Exposition Series of the Illustrated
Pacific States, Vol. XVII, No. 6 (Jun., 1894), 17.
715
The Official History of the California Midwinter International Exposition 1894, 109.
276
placing them on a deliberately planned California landscape and adding their own
horticultural and floricultural hall and expertise.
Within the next few years, after the United States expanded through the Spanish
American War in 1898, Californians worked to reframe themselves symbolically from
westerners into middle-westerners at the edge of the Pacific Ocean. Californians
captured the perfect opportunity to accomplish this goal by hosting the Panama Pacific
International Exposition in 1915. Etched into the walls of an Exposition building were
Walt Whitman’s words,
Facing West from California’s shores – inquiring tireless seeking what is
yet unfound – I a child very old over waves toward the house of maternity
the land of migrations look afar – look off the shores of my Western sea
the circle almost circled.
716

In the spirit of Whitman’s inquiring gaze, many at the Panama-Pacific International
Exposition looked west from the proverbial West and contemplated where and how San
Francisco and California fit into the nation and international empire. In his poem, “The
Lotus and the Rose,” Vachel Lindsay used the lotus and the rose to represent East and
West, as he pondered the meaning behind the completion of the Panama Canal.
717
In the
poem’s preface in Sunset Magazine, Lindsay was credited with demonstrating how the
geniuses of the East and West were to be “merged and mingled in one through the world”

716
As quoted in Robert Lieber and Sarah Lau, eds., The Last Great World’s Fair: San
Francisco’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition, 1915 (San Francisco: Golden Gate
National Parks Conservancy, 2004), 44.
717
Nicholas Vachel Lindsay, “The Lotus and the Rose,” Sunset Magazine, Vol. 32, No. 6
(Jun., 1914), 1288. For additional poetry composed in connection with the Panama-
Pacific International Exposition, see Edward Robeson Taylor, In the Court of the Ages:
Poems in Commemoration of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (San
Francisco: A.M. Robertson, 1915).
277
and the “initial celebration” of this phenomena would be at the Panama-Pacific
International Exposition.”
718
In the same tradition as Lindsay, Exposition planners used
flowers and landscaping to explicitly define San Francisco as national and international, a
message executed in great detail but not fully received. Although the theme might have
started as the centrality of San Francisco, it became that the Exposition demonstrated
possibilities for peace, a metaphor that also touched on floricultural and
horticultural elements.
Much of the previous scholarship on the Panama-Pacific International Exposition
focuses on the themes of progress, optimism and rebirth of San Francisco after the 1906
earthquake and fires. Without tremendous mental energy and fiscal investment, the city
would not have been able to rebuild or host the world’s fair; it was undoubtedly a
mammoth undertaking worthy of critical analysis. The initial idea of hosting the fair
came in 1904, before the devastation of April 1906, and is generally credited as being
related to Phelan’s Association for the Adornment and Improvement of San Francisco
(the “AAISF”), the City Beautiful Movement, and the Association’s invitation to Daniel
Burnham – the director of Chicago’s exposition – to create a redesign plan for San
Francisco.
719
After the events of 1906, any and all plans for hosting an international
exposition were tabled. However, rebuilding the city and preparing the city for the fair
emerged as intertwined within a few short years. In describing the efforts of San

718
Preface to “The Lotus and the Rose,” Sunset Magazine, Vol. 32, No. 6 (Jun., 1914),
1288.
719
Marjorie M. Dobkin, “A Twenty-Five-Million-Dollar Mirage,” eds. Burton Benedict,
et al., The Anthropology of World's Fairs: San Francisco's Panama Pacific International
Exposition of 1915 (Berkeley: Scolar Press, 1983), 66-93, 67-68.
278
Franciscans after the 1906 earthquake and fires to rebuild and create the Panama-Pacific
International Exposition, Louis J. Stellman proclaimed: “Henceforth we came oftener, we
Dreamers of the Dream, we San Franciscans, and, little by little, we became Planners of
the Plan instead.”
720
Although Stellman argued for an evolution of San Franciscans from
dreamers to planners, San Franciscans were both from California statehood on. Perhaps
the tragedies of 1906 left them with the perception that they once again had a blank slate
on which to build their dreams. At the time of the Exposition, San Franciscans had both
dreamed and acted; their city featured 360 miles of paved streets, 315.4 miles of sewers,
278.58 miles of street railway lines. The population was approximately 530,000 in the
city itself, with 750,000 in the larger bay district. San Francisco housed the largest
shipbuilding plants on the Pacific Coast and the most substantial fruit and vegetable
cannery in the world.
721

Ultimately attracting participation from 28 foreign nations and 32 states, well-
connected business and civic leaders planned the Exposition.
722
The Executive Officers
did not include the usual floral or horticultural exhibitors. Charles C. Moore started as
the finance chairmen and then became the president of the Exposition’s Board; he served
as the president of “one of the nation’s largest hydroelectrical engineering firms,” the

720
Louis J. Stellman, That was a dream worth building; the spirit of San Francisco’s
great fair portrayed in picture and words (San Francisco: H.S. Crocker Company, 1916),
10 & 12.
721
Lieber and Lau, eds., The Last Great World’s Fair, 10.
722
Benedict, Dobkin, & Armstrong, A catalogue of posters, photographs, paintings,
drawings, furniture, documents, souvenirs, statues, medals, dolls, music sheets, books,
postcards, curiosities, banners, awards, architectural fragments, remains.
279
president of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, and was a director of banks and
railroads. The Board included such luminaries as William H. Crocker – the son of the
transcontinental railroad executive Charles Crocker, who was president of Crocker Bank,
vice-president of Pacific Telephone and Telegraph, and a regent of the University of
California.
723
Additional key players included Reuben Hale – director of the Chamber of
Commerce, a department store chain, as well as the Merchants’ Association; I.W.
Hellman, Jr. – the president of Union Trust Co. and the director of a handful of banks;
Leon Sloss – the president of Northern Commercial Company and a trustee of Stanford
University; and James Rolph –a ship-owner, merchant, president of Mission Bank, mayor
for three terms from 1911 to 1921, president of the Merchants’ Exchange, trustee of the
Chamber of Commerce, and future California governor.
724
These men, seemingly
disconnected from flowers, recognized the importance of horticulture and floriculture to
the Exposition. The Panama Pacific Exposition was the first international exposition to
create a separate, and independent Department of Horticulture. Chief of the Horticultural
Department G.A. Dennison and Chief Landscape Gardener John McLaren worked
together to landscape the Exposition that blossomed out into a three part display,
including not only fruits and flowers but the methods and tools for their
successful culture.
725

723
Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 213. Dobkin, “A Twenty-Five-Million-Dollar Mirage,”
The Anthropology of World's Fairs, 73.
724
Dobkin, “A Twenty-Five-Million-Dollar Mirage,” The Anthropology of World's Fairs,
70 & 74.
725
The Blue Book: A Comprehensive Official Souvenir View Book of the Panama-Pacific
International Exposition at San Francisco 1915 (San Francisco: Robert A. Reid, 1915),
280
Planners used the Exposition to celebrate both the wonders of the newly
completed Panama Canal as well as the rebirth of San Francisco after the 1906
earthquake and fires.
726
But they also declared to the world that California dwelt in the
middle west of the United States empire and crafted a vision of their future.
727
Ten years
before the exposition opened, Rufus M. Steele proclaimed in Sunset Magazine: “An
explosion in Havana harbor in May, 1898, may be said to have been the signal of a
season of greater prosperity in San Francisco.”
728
The imperial expansion of the United
States during the Spanish American War offered San Francisco not only the opportunity
to play the role of a more important western port city during the war, but afterwards also
allowed Californians to argue that they were now not the “west” of the United States but
the middle west. For example, in January of 1904, Hale drafted a letter to potential
investors and declared:

12. Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition: Being the Official History of the
International Celebration Held at San Francisco in 1915 to Commemorate the Discovery
of the Pacific Ocean and the Construction of the Panama Canal (New York: G.P.
Putnam’s Sons, 1921), Vol. I, 110. The three parts included the outside exhibits in the
nine plus acres of the Horticultural Gardens, the Conservatory exhibits, and the
Economical Horticulture Section. Todd, The Story of the Exposition, Vol. III, 311. See
also, George A. Dennison, Chief of Horticulture of the Panama-Pacific International
Exposition, “Horticulture,” ed. E.J. Wickson, California’s Magazine (San Francisco:
California Publishers Co-operative Association, 1915), Vol. 1, No. 1, (Jul., 1915), 337-
340, 337.
726
Melanie L. Simo, Forest & Garden: Traces of Wildness in a Modernizing Land, 1897-
1949 (Charlotte: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 91.
727
Simo argues the later part of this sentence, that the fair was about the future of
California. Ibid. at 109.
728
Rufus M. Steele, “How San Francisco Grows,” Sunset Magazine, Vol. XIV, No. 2
(Dec., 1904), 103-118, 103.
281
Horace Greeley said, ‘Go West, young man’; but when he goes west from
San Francisco he goes east. It is the beginning of the east, and the ending
of the west. We are the center around which trade revolves between the
United States and all European countries that are looking for trade with the
Orient and other Pacific Ocean points. . .
729

In this rapidly changing world, west was east and east was west. In 1910, Steele
concluded California could only be considered “remote” to the American “whose
consciousness has failed to keep pace” with the expanding United States. He measured
the nation’s empire and concluded the United States had five capital cities: New York,
Chicago, San Francisco, Honolulu, and Manila. In continuing his pitch for the city, he
teased, California’s San Francisco had red blood, a clean heart, and “hospitality as rich
and undiscriminating as the breath of its flowers.”
730
The Exposition preserved the
vehicle to help cement this middle west position in the eyes of both the national and
international communities.
731

In part, fair planners approached achieving this goal by thinking about recreating
the entire world within the Exposition grounds. Frank Morton Todd, in the “official”
history of the Exposition, argued that Exposition planners wanted to create in San
Francisco “a microcosm so nearly complete that if all the world were destroyed except
the 635 acres of land within the Exposition gates, the material basis of the life of today

729
R.B. Hale, Letter to the Directors of the Merchants’ Association from Jan. 12, 1904,
reprinted in Todd, The Story of the Exposition, Vol. I, 35-37.
730
Rufus M. Steele, “San Francisco the Exposition City,” Sunset Magazine, Vol. XXV
(25), No. 6 (Dec., 1910), 607-620, 608-609 & 620.
731
Panama-Pacific International Exposition, Publications on PPIE: Report, “A Resume of
the PPIE and its Relation to Other World Expositions” (1933), 1, San Francisco
Ephemera Collection, California Historical Society.
282
could have been reproduced” from the examples.
732
And the recreation included goods,
buildings, and landscapes. California’s flowers and climate provided the
connective tissue.
For example, the head of color design for the Exposition, Jules Guerin, drew on
California’s landscape for the Exposition’s color scheme; “‘I saw the vibrant tints of the
native wild flowers, the soft brown of the surrounding hills, the gold of the orangeries,
the blue of the sea; and I determined that, just as a musician builds his symphony around
a motif or chord, so must I strike a chord of color and build my symphony on this.’” He
then worked with the McLarens to “harmonize flowerbeds with adjacent walls.”
733

Although much attention has been paid to the architecture, educational goals, and
recreational aspects of the Exposition, contemporaries were quick to point out that the
floral and garden aspects of the Exposition competed on equal footing with these other
elements. The Exposition glimmered as “a great landscape epic, impressive beyond
words, and eloquent of the fecundity of California soil and of the magical maturing
power of her climate.”
734
Todd concluded, “The gardening was an essential and

732
Todd, The Story of the Exposition, Vol. I, xiv-xvi. See also, Stellman, That was a
dream worth building, 28 & 30; John Brisben Walker, “The 1915 Exposition and
Education: The Subjects Submitted for Consideration by Educational Congresses During
the Panama-Pacific Universal Exposition,” Sunset Magazine, Vol. 28, No. 6 (Jun., 1912),
751-758.
733
Gray Brechin, “Sailing to Byzantium: The Architecture of the Fair,” The
Anthropology of World's Fairs, 94-113, 100-101.
734
Donald McLaren, “Landscape Gardening,” ed. E.J. Wickson, California’s Magazine
(San Francisco: California Publishers Co-operative Association, 1915), Vol. 1, No. 1,
(Jul., 1915), 345-348, 348.
283
inseparable part of the Exposition picture” and imagined that the gardens could not have
been created anywhere else in the world.
735

McLaren transformed the Exposition plot into “the garden of our Wonderland-to-
be.”
736
Having successfully cultivated the Midwinter Fair grounds, he was appointed
Landscape Engineer for this next world’s fair and accepted the vital commission in
February 1912. Months later, in May 1912, he hired his son, Donald, as his chief
Assistant.
737
Tasked with gardening 26 separate areas, McLaren accepted the planners’
substantial budget to create the Exposition version of Eden.
738
Landscaping 73 ½ acres
at a rate of $8,400 an acre, he spent “nearly” $95,000 on 55,000 cubic yards of loam and
30,000 cubic yards of fertilizer alone, over $20,000 on a garden water distributing
system, and $10,000 on the construction of greenhouses. Nearly $406,000 “more was
spent directly on the establishment of the gardens” and operation and maintenance during

735
Todd, The Story of the Exposition, Vol. I, 311 and Vol. II, 338. See also, Arthur Z.
Bradley, “Exposition Gardens: How Landscape Architects at California’s Two
Exhibitions Have Kept Pace With Planners of Palaces, Designers of Sculpture and
Wizards of Imagination,” Sunset Magazine, Vol. 34, No. 4 (Apr., 1915), 665-679, 665.
736
Stellman, That was a dream worth building, 8.
737
Todd, The Story of the Exposition, Vol. I, 307-8.
738
Ibid. at Vol. I, 313-4. These included: Loam spaces, Greenhouses, Temporary
Gardens, the Fine Arts Building Garden, the Education Building Garden, the Liberal Arts
Building Garden, the Manufacturers Building Garden, the Varied Industries Building
Garden, the Machinery Building Garden, the Mines and Metallurgy Building Garden, the
Agriculture Building Garden, the Food Product Building Garden, the Horticulture
Building Garden, the Festival Hall Garden, the Ferry Building Garden, the California
Building Garden, the Service Building Garden and proposed adjacent Garden adjacent,
the Main Court and Tower, the West Court (Court of Four Season), the East Court (Festal
Court), the South Gardens, the Court of Palms, the Court of Flowers, the North Garden,
the Music Concourse and adjacent gardens, and the Garden Distributing System.
284
construction totaled $23,250, with $66,000 more in costs during the Exposition. The cost
of plants topped $75,000. In total, the “whole outlay for landscape gardening” including
all of the above amounted to $620,784. After the Exposition, they salvaged $17,642 from
the grounds.
739
Cost measurements varied slightly, in all amounting to somewhere
between $597,535 and $603,142.
740

The mammoth task required gardeners to transform dunes, swamps, and wetlands
into verdant landscapes.
741
They “displaced” water via pumping up mud from the floor
of the Bay – mud “in which no sun-and-air loving plant life could thrive.” Then
McLaren and his team deposited 18 inches of soil over 200,000 yards of the “muddy,”
“reclaimed” plot.
742
The soil combated the sandy consistency of the reclaimed space;
clay and loam were critical to the success of new growth, but it was deemed too costly to
move soil up the river by barge, so McLaren moved soil around from within the
Exposition grounds.
743

Those grounds included a Court of Palms and a Court of Flowers, as well as
designated outdoor gardens and the flowers surrounding individual buildings. McLaren’s
team recreated the world – showcasing San Francisco’s ability to not only sustain but
nurture to abundance any and all varieties of flowers. For example, the Court of Flowers
featured 50,000 yellow pansies, and the same number of red anemones, red tulips, and

739
Ibid. at Vol. II, 4 and Vol. I, 311.
740
Ibid. at Vol. I, 311 and Vol. II, 4.
741
Donald McLaren, “Landscape Gardening,” 345.
742
Bradley, “Exposition Gardens,” Sunset Magazine, 668.
743
Todd, The Story of the Exposition, Vol. I, 309.
285
red begonias.
744
Further, the South Garden recreated “a formal French garden”
surrounding fountain pools with “low blooming flowers that resemble[d] rich tapestry,”
spotlighting yellow daffodils and tulips with “masses” of pansies beneath them.
745
Todd
estimated 200,000 each of yellow pansies, daffodils, and tulips graced the space. The
blooms unfolded in a “succession of colors,” with daffodils followed by tulips, and a
“living carpet of yellow pansies.” Moving past the yellow-themed blossoms, visitors
encountered 20,000 pink begonias “blended” into a floricultural “old-rose carpet around
the Fountain of Energy.”
746
Orchids, lilies, bulb begonias surrounded the Palace of
Horticulture, as well as alternating areas of plants and ponds, like a Japanese garden.
747

The eight to nine acres south of the Palace featured the Gardens of the Horticultural
Department and offered individual nations outdoor exhibition space.
748

In addition, state and regional gardens represented the varied gardens of the
United States. For example, the Massachusetts Garden captured the colonial era with
carnations and gladioli from Mr. B. Hammond Tracey – “most noted gladioli growers in

744
Todd, The Story of the Exposition, Vol. II, 340. See also Macomber, The Jewel City,
Its Planning and Achievement, 78 and the fictional account in Elizabeth Gordon, What
We Saw at Madame World’s Fair: Being a Series of Letters from the Twins at the
Panama-Pacific International Exposition to Their Cousins at Home (San Francisco:
Samuel Levinson, 1915), 54.
745
The Blue Book, 24 & 132. See also, Maud Wotring Raymond, The Architecture and
Landscape Gardening of the Exposition, A Pictorial Survey of the Most Beautiful of the
Architectural Compositions of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (San
Francisco: Paul Elder and Company, 1915, second edition), 18.
746
Todd, The Story of the Exposition, Vol. II, 340.
747
The Blue Book, 20.
748
Ibid. at 132. Dennison, “Horticulture,” California’s Magazine, 337.
286
America.” Likewise, the “Eastern Garden” featured roses from Rhode Island and
Maryland, heliotropes “of exquisite color and rich fragrance” from New Jersey, and iris
and peonies from Pennsylvania.
749

Regional and individual nations’ exhibitions comprised only one aspect of the
international vision of the gardens. McLaren and his team accepted seeds and bulbs from
Japan, Holland, Belgium and England.
750
Specifically, in June 1914, the Landscape
Department ordered more flowers than one can even really comprehend.
The order included:
7,000 rhododendrons,
200,000 daffodil bulbs,
158,000 May flowering tulips,
10,000 early tulips,
45,000 anemones,
23,000 ranunculus,
15,000 hyacinths,
35,000 Spanish iris,
5,000 Japanese iris,
30,000 narcissus,
3,000 red azaleas,
1,500 tree peonies,
9,000 lilacs,
and over 100 Australian tree ferns.

And the blooms emigrated from all over the world, from Japan to Belgium,
supplementing the thousands of blooms from local growers.
751

Drawing on plants from around the world, McLaren and his team prepared for the
Exposition by growing flowers and “bedding plants” in greenhouses years in advance of

749
Dennison, “Horticulture,” California’s Magazine, 339.
750
Todd, The Story of the Exposition, Vol. I, 308.
751
Ibid. at Vol. II, 339.
287
the Exposition.
752
They began as early as March 1912 by collecting and nurturing
seedlings. They set up a temporary nursery in Golden Gate Park and then a permanent
one in November of 1912 in the Presidio that consisted of six greenhouses and thousands
of flats of seedlings that were painstakingly transplanted from Golden Gate Park to the
Presidio.
753
McLaren then purportedly “rehearsed the whole floral scheme” for three
seasons before the Exposition opened. Day by day, he “knew the time that would elapse
between the planting and blooming of any flower he planned to use.”
754

Although McLaren and his team worked on the grounds and conveyed the
message of the international position of the state, the honor and task of designing the
California Garden fell to Carl Purdy, who was widely known for his work on the
domestication of California wildflowers. The garden featured “blossoming exhibits of
rare excellence and interest.”
755
Donald McLaren interpreted the garden for visitors and
those who would only imagine the landscape. The California Garden rested within the
cypress hedge surrounding the California Building and was designed to mirror the
Forbidden Garden in Mission Santa Barbara. Only California plants grew there. The

752
Lela Angier Lenfest, “Interesting Westerners: The Landscape Gardener of the
Panama-Pacific International Exposition, 1915,” Sunset Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 6 (Dec.,
1913) 1215-1217, 1216.
753
Todd, The Story of the Exposition, Vol. I, 308-9. Raymond, The Architecture and
Landscape Gardening of the Exposition, A Pictorial Survey of the Most Beautiful of the
Architectural Compositions of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, 6-7.
754
Macomber, The Jewel City, Its Planning and Achievement, 20. Todd, The Story of the
Exposition, Vol. I, 308. Bradley, “Exposition Gardens,” Sunset Magazine, 665.
755
Todd, The Story of the Exposition, Vol. IV, 314. Dennison, “Horticulture,”
California’s Magazine, 338.
288
“compactness [of the flowering created] a carpet of exquisite color and design from
which the larger shrubs and trees [emerged] in their stately heights.” He concluded, “the
scheme of the California Building’s exterior and the California Garden together is to
epitomize the State as she is known in art and nature. Mission architecture and native
flora join in unity of purpose.
756
In an intriguing way, at the same time that fair planners
wanted to promote the city and state as the center of the United States’ empire, the
California Garden portrayed the state separately as a regional, Spanish-mission styled
place of folklore. Participating in this vision of California, nurserymen – many of whom
displayed blooms in the local shows – stepped up to both fill the space and draw attention
to their stock. For example, the California Garden included flowers from Luther
Burbank, gladioli from Metzner Floral Company, roses from Gill Nursery Company, and
conifers from the California Nursery Company.
757

Dennison’s horticultural exhibits complemented the work of the grounds in telling
the story of a worldly California. As Chief of Horticulture for the Exposition, Dennison
articulated five purposes for the horticultural exhibits: they were “to appeal with equal
interest” to five target audiences. The tourist needed to see “the pride and glory of the
soil” from every corner of the world. The visitor must be “entertained by the beauty and
novel wonder of all that is before him.” The student should find “an unequaled
opportunity to increase his store of knowledge of all points pertaining to the horticulture
of the earth.” The business man could find every item so perfectly arranged that he could

756
Donald McLaren, “Landscape Gardening,” California’s Magazine, 348.
757
Todd, The Story of the Exposition, Vol. IV, 314. Dennison, “Horticulture,”
California’s Magazine, 338.
289
make an order before even leaving the display. And the investor might “discover,
through actual living evidence, the productive possibilities of soil from almost every
section of the earth.” In furtherance of the five-part goal, the Department of Horticulture
built a massive conservatory, measuring 672 by 320 feet and featuring a central dome
larger than St. Peter’s in Rome at a cost of $341,000.
758
Horticultural contributions
flourished from over 14 nations and 23 states.
759

While the Panama-Pacific International Exposition welcomed the world, fair
planners carefully prepared to ensure foreign exhibitors did not put California’s
horticultural interests and growing industries at risk. Plants began arriving from around
the world in October 1913, months before the official opening of the Exposition. The
Quarantine Division of the State Commission of Horticulture was tasked with fulfilling
the twin goals of satisfying exhibitors and protecting California’s industries. The State
Inspectors stationed in San Francisco worked alongside additional agencies, including the
Collector of the Port and the Federal Horticultural Board. They built an inspection shed
and fumigating room, and required all horticultural material arriving from outside
California to travel directly from the point of entry to the shed without being unpacked.
After inspection, the non-offending plants received a certificate. Unofficial prizes were
awarded to Japan and the Netherlands for spotless exhibits for the Japanese and only one

758
Dennison, “Horticulture,” California’s Magazine, 339-340.
759
Ibid. at 337. Official Catalogue of Exhibitors, Panama-Pacific International
Exposition, San Francisco, 1915 (San Francisco: The Wahlgreen Company, 1915), 11-
28.
290
offending specimen from the Netherlands.
760
The fairgrounds were policed for vision to
make sure the idealized space mirrored every corner of the world. But the policing
extended down to the level of individual plants also to make sure no import threatened
California’s plants and industries.
From the internationally gathered gardens and exhibits to the flowers both planted
and displayed, Dennison and McLaren captured the world and harnessed the power of
flowers to entertain, educate, define space, and even attempt to inspire investment in local
businesses. Planners deliberately planted messages about the centrality of the state in
commerce and the United State’s empire. But the concurrence of the Exposition with the
start of what would become World War I distorted how visitors internalized
the Exposition.
Within the rich scholarship on expositions and fairs, few works see the flowers
through the parades, souvenirs, and architectural marvels. Robert W. Rydell and Nancy
E. Gwinn look to developments in technology, science, mass marketing, mass
entertainment, and souvenir consumer culture as part of the contributions of world’s fairs
as “laboratories of modernization” and part of the “‘culture industries’” – in the Frankfurt
school sense of the term.
761
Yet, as James Gilbert points out, fairs cannot be viewed in a

760
Frederick Maskew, “The Work of the Quarantine Division in Connection with the
Panama-Pacific International Exposition,” The Monthly Bulletin of the California State
Commission of Horticulture, Vol IV, No. 8 (Sacramento, Aug., 1915) 351-360.
761
Rydell and Gwinn, “Introduction,” Fair Representations, 1-9, 1. For a discussion of
the longer historical view of world’s fairs ranging from those in ancient Egypt to
“preconquest” Mexico, see Benedict, “The Anthropology of World’s Fairs,” The
Anthropology of World's Fairs, 1-65, 3.
291
monolithic manner, for fair by fair, committees have “conflicting agendas and
contradictory purposes.”
762
And moving beyond planning committees, participants such
as visitors and those involved on the ground level in exhibiting offer their own valuable
experiences and counter-narratives. Rydell concludes, “Without exception, these
expositions were upper-class creations initiated and controlled by locally or nationally
prominent elites.” Their goals were long-term profit, authority and their class priorities.

Robert W. Rydell, John E. Findling and Kimberly D. Pelle divide the scholarship
on world’s fairs into six historiographic approaches. The first they label the cultural
hegemony school which is “Producer centered” as it analyzes fairs through committees’
and planners’ “intentions” and has yielded works on how fairs were created to champion
imperial national policy. See Rydell, All the World’s a Fair; Tony Bennett, The Birth of
the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (Routledge, 1995). The second is the audience-
centered approach, which looks at the ways that the planners’ goals were received,
rejected, and modulated by visitors to the fairs. See James Gilbert, Perfect Cities:
Chicago’s Utopias of 1893 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993). The third
is the counter-hegemony school which demonstrates how women and exhibited colonial
peoples, such as Native Americans, used fairs to challenge hegemonic constructions of
their identities. The fourth approach, which Rydell’s team did not provide a simplified
name for, grew from Benedict Burton’s analysis of fairs as modern day potlatches of
ritual and gifting to see fairs as part of the process of modernization and consumerism.
The fifth approach involves a documentary focus on “technological, scientific,
architectural, and urban planning,” as exemplified by the works of Eric Breitbart,
Kimberly D. Pelle, and David Nye. The sixth approach, I label the ephemera approach,
examines newspaper reports and memorabilia. The authors then argue for a more
totalizing view of fairs that “stresses the complex and often contradictory nature” of the
expositions. Rydell, Findling, and Pelle, Fair America, 5-7. While dividing the analysis
of fairs into six sub-categories offers clear explanations of different methods to think
about fairs, and comes to the correct conclusion that the most successful works will offer
complex views of fairs that draw on a wealth of sources and perspectives, even the works
within some of their designated approaches rely on approaches or sources from other
categories rendering the strict divisions of the six categories not particularly useful for
my discussion. Benedict, “The Anthropology of World’s Fairs,” The Anthropology of
World's Fairs, 3.
762
James Gilbert, “World’s Fairs as Historical Events,” eds. Robert W. Rydell and Nancy
E. Gwinn, Fair Representations: World’s Fairs and the Modern World (Amsterdam: VU
University Press, 1994), 13-27, 14.
292
Expositions largely provided a hegemonic function because they “propagated” the above
listeds’ ideals.
763
These included industrial capitalism and the combination of selling
goods, ideas about goods, and the connectedness of nation.
764
For Walter Benjamin, fairs
were “‘sites of pilgrimages to the commodity fetish.’”
765
Scholars have focused on goods
as communicators of social meanings; goods “are parts of a cultural information system. .
. .[they] say something about the status of givers and the recipients. They become
metaphors of power and prestige.” Corresponding to rank and offering possibilities to be
ranked, goods and the messages surrounding goods in this system of consumer capitalism
emerged concurrently with the vastly expanding middle class who were focused not just
on money but on “acquiring a whole culture” in part through acquiring the proper
possessions. And yet, as Benedict argues, the fairs and exhibits were not just catering to
middle class taste, but also active forces in creating it.
766

While this scholarship is rich, where are the flowers? The flower shows,
Midwinter Exposition and Panama-Pacific International Exposition most clearly reveal
hegemonic action, particularly in the floricultural context. They were also rife with strife,
frustration, and messages reinterpreted by visitors. While the planners of exhibits and

763
Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 3, 235.
764
Benedict, “The Anthropology of World’s Fairs,” The Anthropology of World's Fairs,
2. See also discussion of souvenirs at world’s fairs, Jon B. Zachman, “The Legacy and
Meaning of World’s Fair Souvenirs,” eds. Robert W. Rydell and Nancy E. Gwinn, Fair
Representations: World’s Fairs and the Modern World (Amsterdam: VU University
Press, 1994), 199-217; Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 2.
765
Rydell and Gwinn, “Introduction,” Fair Representations, 1.
766
Benedict, “The Anthropology of World’s Fairs,” The Anthropology of World's Fairs,
2 & 11.
293
fairs examined in this chapter certainly included themes articulated by previous scholars,
they did so by explicitly including natural elements to ground the fairs in the promises of
California and in an attempt to convey a message about the local, national, or imperial
status of California.
After the Exposition gates closed on the final day, the Exposition committee
gathered portions of the many letters that it received during the Exposition detailing
visitors’ thoughts about the Exposition and their visits to California. The reality that the
committee chose which letters to include complicates efforts to understand the public
response to the Exposition. Yet, because the committee likely chose many of the letters
for the relative importance of the writers, the collection remains valuable for
understanding responses to the Exposition. Overall, the letters reveal that while the
message of California at the center of things resonated, the dark shadow of World War I
loomed in the consciousness of many of the visitors. The aspects of drawing the world
together and possibilities for peace dominated the printed letters. Some of the letters
were quick to point out the value of the Exposition in connection with promoting
industry, peace, and even the “high ideals” connected with plants and flowers. Drawing
on the image of a flower, T. Morey Hodgman, the President of Macalester College in St.
Paul, Minnesota, noted, “The Panama-Pacific International Exposition is the handmaid of
civilization, of which the perfect flower is industry and peace.”
767
C.A. Tonnenson, the
Secretary of The Pacific Coast Association of Nurserymen of Tacoma, Washington,

767
James A. Barr and Joseph M. Cumming, The Legacy of the Exposition, Interpretations
of the Intellectual and Moral Heritage left to Mankind by the World Celebration at San
Francisco in 1915 (San Francisco: 1916), 87.
294
proclaimed the Exposition provided “every opportunity” to study flowers and “featured
high ideals through this work of landscape art” that benefited all who visited. He even
contended the beneficial influence would impact future generations.
768
From Washington
to Minnesota, the floral imagery captured visitors’ imaginations and they tied those
blooms to uplifting civilizing values.
The middle-west concept blended with the rhetoric of peace. Lyman Abbott,
writing as editor-in-chief of New York City’s The Outlook concluded,
The Panama-Pacific International Exposition has not only testified to the
unity of America, but it has served to bring to the national consciousness
the truth not yet adequately realized, that the Pacific Coast with its western
outlook is as important as the Atlantic Coast with its eastern outlook, and
that it is as essential to the interests of America and to establish and
maintain friendly relations with Japan, China and India toward the west as
with the European nations toward the east.
769

Abbott’s rhetorical labyrinth of east and west demonstrated that the Exposition succeeded
in at least fostering greater thought on the connectedness of the Pacific Coast and the
centrality of California in world commerce in a world finding “friendly relations”
increasingly threatened.
________________________

From the flower shows of 1857 through the landscaped gardens of the Panama-
Pacific International Exposition of 1915, California’s nurserymen and business leaders
assembled bouquets of flowers, refined their exhibitions, and marketed the state as a

768
Ibid. at 165.
769
Ibid. at 4.
295
civilized space. Nature in these symbolic landscapes of displaying flowers participated in
the process of creating and understanding local, national, and later imperial terrain.
770
In
this ongoing narrative, the aspect of the flowers as commodities blended with their status
as decoration, symbol, and also something not manufactured but cultivated.
The flower shows, Fair, and Exposition flourished as symbolic landscapes. Built
environments of the fairgrounds and shows created an ordered, sanitized, richly symbolic
space. Other scholars describe this space as the “ordered world” and the “symbolic
universe.”
771
The grounds of the late nineteenth-century fairs were filled with symbolism
ready for decoding, that George Starr argues was part of a love of symbolism and the
process of picking apart meaning in everyday objects that had a rich tradition in the
United States. Whether this connected to religiosity or the concepts of Manifest Destiny,
the symbolic aspects both permeated and became an expected part of the
fair experience.
772

770
See also Berglund, Making San Francisco American, 218 & 220. Kropp, California
Vieja, 276-277, drawing on Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor. Rydell, All the
World’s a Fair, 8.
771
Benedict, “The Anthropology of World’s Fairs,” The Anthropology of World's Fairs,
2. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair. See also Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The
Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (New York:
Anchor Books, 1967), 92-108. Rydell also connected the phenomena of the United
States’ international expositions to Robert Wiebe’s writings on the “search for order”
from 1876 to 1916. See Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 4; Robert H. Wiebe, The Search
for Order, 1877-1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968).
772
George Starr, “Truth Unveiled: The Panama Pacific International Exposition and its
Interpreters,” eds. Burton Benedict, et al., The Anthropology of World's Fairs: San
Francisco's Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915 (Berkeley: Scolar Press,
1983), 134-175, 135 & 139.
296
While the grounds or displays were certainly “ordered” and “symbolic,”
reframing these sites as symbolic landscapes vitally refocuses the analysis to include the
planted portions of the grounds. So much of the rich scholarship on fairs fails to connect
landscape to the individual displays. Benedict Burton presents the standard analysis of
fair grounds: “They presented a sanitized view of the world with no poverty, no war, no
social problems and very little nature. . .They created a world in which everything was
man-made. Nature was excluded or allowed in only under the most rigorously controlled
conditions.” Offering an example of this phenomena, he turns to recreated versions of
Grand Canyon.
773
While kitschy recreations of larger sites of natural wonders certainly
fit his analysis, by focusing instead on the planters and horticultural halls, “nature” is not
so easily dismissed. As evidenced by the Midwinter and more explicitly the Panama-
Pacific International Exposition, the rhetoric and inclusion of natural elements, namely
flowers, presented the clearest picture of the symbolic landscape the planner’s sought to
communicate to visitors. Further, “world” and “universe” artificially lead one to think of
the grounds as separated worlds. Though constructed as walled spaces, fairgrounds yield
greater understandings of their meanings and importance when examined as intimately
connected to the spaces beyond their walls.
The thirteen flower shows in San Francisco from 1857 to 1913 shine as the most
obvious examples of the nexus between commodities and the expression of floral
commodity culture. The shows defined California as a place that was like any other

773
Benedict, “The Anthropology of World’s Fairs,” The Anthropology of World's Fairs,
5. See also Gilbert, “World’s Fairs as Historical Events,” Fair Representations, 22.
297
cosmopolitan city in the western world, complete with floral displays to rival those in
Boston or London. While the nurserymen and amateurs who started their mission in the
1850s failed to harness wide-spread participation, by the turn of the century, in part by
partnering with academics and socialites, the growers and planners participated in
societal projects beyond the stand-alone flower show – including the Midwinter and
Panama-Pacific International Expositions. The businessmen of the Midwinter
Exposition dreamed of replanting Chicago in “The Land of Sunshine, Fruit and Flowers”
to draw new Americans of means to the state by showing them that California was part of
the national economic community. By replanting the exhibits on their own landscape,
they highlighted the powers of the California climate through flowers and floral
metaphors. But the more ambitious retrenching was in connection with the Panama-
Pacific Exposition when the planners sought to recreate the world in the fairgrounds,
using flowers to define the space as international, in the middle of the world, and central
to commerce.
In 1916, in thinking about the Panama-Pacific Exposition, novelist and lecturer
Peter Clark MacFarlane of New York City concluded: “The Exposition was a perfect
flower.” And its “fragrance lingers.” The Exposition “helped the world to become
acquainted with itself” by revealing mankind’s “neighborliness.” And although the
Exhibition had closed, it “passed only out of the gates in order to make the whole world
into an exposition of the things for which that institution stood and which it has inspired.”
For the Exposition’s “material features. . .are buried like seeds, to sprout again – the
seeds of this perfect flower – in every country in the world, to grow up in the lives of
298
men, in better houses, better governments, better industry, better art, better life, better
ambitions, better everything.”
774

MacFarlane captured the universalism of exhibitions in his floral metaphor. He
focused on seedling ideas, sprouting opportunities, the temporality of plants and present
existence, and hopeful possibilities for superior re-growth in every aspect of life from
politics to commerce to culture. Instead of seeing California as a middle-west as the
planners probably would have appreciated, he pinpointed the Exposition as a place where
the world was summed up and then pushed the metaphor towards an image of the world
at peace – in “essential neighborliness.” His reactions illustrate the tradition of the
progression of the plans of the nurserymen in 1857 at work. MacFarlane lost himself in
the world of the fairgrounds, imagining the possibility that the Exposition world was the
world. Californians fashioned their state as a respectable part of an international space
and a space where all flowers of the world flourished, along with commerce and business
interests. The neighborliness he described included the civilized representation of human
relations the early nurserymen desired for their city and those seeking the calm those
living in the turbulent world of 1915 desperately craved. Capturing all of these
observations in a floral metaphor, MacFarlane – as an out-of-state observer of California
and the Exhibition – invoked the same power of defining space with flowers or the
language of flowers as generations of Californians did before him. From the early local

774
Barr and Cumming, The Legacy of the Exposition, Interpretations of the Intellectual
and Moral Heritage left to Mankind by the World Celebration at San Francisco in 1915,
119.
299
shows to the international fair in 1915, Californians exhibited their flowers with an
expanding message of their refinement and the international importance of their state.

300
Chapter 8

Encountering the Espiritu Sancto:
Walking through Woodward’s Gardens and
Golden Gate Park Across Three Decades

In 1896, Alice Eastwood walked along Washington Street in San Francisco’s Nob
Hill. As Head of the Department of Botany at the California Academy of Science and an
avid botanizer, she encountered flowers differently than many of her neighbors; she
counted them. In a single day, she tallied 64 different species. Eastwood trekked up hills
“too steep to permit anything except the cable cars being hauled up and down,” and
catalogued a “wilderness of plants. . .often so dense as to conceal the cobble-stones
beneath.” And in this urban, “dirty, shabby, and ugly” space, “oases of verdure”
demonstrated the power of nature to “cover over the defacements of man and once again
make all beautiful.” Of the 64 species she counted, 55 were foreigners, six “peculiar” to
the Pacific Coast, two natives of the Rockies and one from Mexico. She concluded that
the plants that “spontaneously” sprouted amidst the cobble-stones demonstrated by their
“cosmopolitan character the final effects of civilization.”
775

The preceding chapters followed floriculturists as they created businesses and
homes or wandered fields taking samples for botanical studies. Yet the impact of
changes in the floricultural landscape also belongs to those like Eastwood, who walked
outside the boundaries of their home gardens, down their streets and into gardens created
for public education and enjoyment. The walkers’ experiences frame the larger shifts in

775
Alice Eastwood, “The Plant Inhabitants of Nob Hill, San Francisco,” Erythea, Vol.
VI, No. 6 (Jun. 27, 1898), 61-67, 61-63, viewed at the Jepson Herbarium at the
University of California at Berkeley, loose file: California D-E.
301
both floriculture and the state. Consider two series of walks.
776
In the first, visitors
wandered through Woodward’s Gardens in the 1870s. In the second, eager floriculturists
visited Golden Gate Park as the Panama Pacific International Exposition opened in 1915.
Strollers experienced gardens in particular moments; landscapes evolved
constantly. Combining the experiences of many captures a wider array of observations
and themes. From the 1870s to 1915, the landscape shifted, moving communal floral
experiences from private to public. The role of exotics and the expanding diversity of
offerings highlighted the appearance of the landscape of the world flourishing in
California, fostered by trans-national connections and the region’s purportedly
international climate. The scale of the floral project and articulated goals grew. An
amateur writer for California Horticulturalist and Floral in the 1870s quoted a poet who
proclaimed: “‘There is a lesson in each flower.’”
777
These walks trespass on those
struggling to define themselves and their surrounding landscape as civilized and refined
and to the lessons they ascribed to the flowers as they worked towards fulfilling
their goals.

776
The idea of describing a walk through a garden came from Anne Lamott, Bird by
Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1994), 77-78.
777
An Amateur, “Teachings of Flowers,” California Horticulturalist and Floral
Magazine, Vol. V, No. 3 (Mar., 1875), 80-81. See also, An Amateur, “Moral of Flowers,”
California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol. V, No. 2 (Feb., 1875), 47-48, 47;
“The Sermon of the Flowers,” Garden and Forest, Vol. 1, No. 18, (Jun. 27, 1888), 205-
206, 205.
302
________________________

Woodward’s Gardens, the “Central Park of the Pacific,” grew at Mission Street
between 13
th
and 15
th
. The private grounds featured a range of enticements, from a
marine aquarium and art to exotic floral offerings aimed at the three-part goal of
providing education, recreation and amusement.
778
The Gardens opened to the public in
1866 after a civic group requested access for an event honoring Civil War veterans. The
event was such a success it led Robert Woodward to conceive of the gardens as a
destination, although some believed Woodward fashioned a “gigantic” plan, maybe even
a “scheme,” as early as 1860.
779
Woodward, no stranger to the hospitality and
entertainment industries, migrated to California from Rhode Island during the gold rush
and owned the “What Cheer Hotel and Restaurant” at Sacramento and Leidesdorff

778
“Woodward’s Gardens,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol. 1, No.
6 (Apr., 1871), 181. “Woodward’s Gardens,” California Horticulturalist and Floral
Magazine, Vol. II, No. 1 (Dec., 1871), 23. “Woodward’s Gardens,” California
Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol. III, No. 12 (Dec., 1873), 378. Back cover
advertisement for Woodward’s Gardens, California Horticulturalist and Floral
Magazine, Vol. VII, No. 12 (Dec., 1877). See also, John P. Young, San Francisco: A
History of the Pacific Coast Metropolis, Vol. I (San Francisco: The S.J. Clarke
Publishing Company, 1912), 433.
779
Richard N. Schellens, “Woodward’s Gardens,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 18,
1889. Ethel Malone Brown, “Woodward’s Gardens,” ed. Olive H. Palmer, Vignettes of
Early San Francisco Homes and Gardens (Program of the San Francisco Garden Club,
Dec. 1935). Illustrated Guide and Catalogue of Woodward’s Gardens (San Francisco:
Francis & Valentine, Book and Job Printers, Engravers, Etc., 1873), 3. See also, Terence
Young, Building San Francisco’s Parks, 1850-1930 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2004), 39. See also Judith H. Taylor and the late Henry Morton
Butterfield, Tangible Memories: Californians and Their Gardens, 1800-1950 (self
published, 2003), 55-56.
303
Streets.
780
A Temperance advocate and businessman, Woodward joined the Bay District
Horticultural Society. With those who worked for him, he participated regularly in the
cities’ floral exhibitions, contributing exhibits to the First Annual Exhibition of the Bay
District Horticultural Society in August 1871 and the Spring Exhibition in 1873.
781
The
Gardens received awards in the Fall Exhibition of the same year and from the Mechanics’
Fair in fall of 1877.
782
Woodward’s private endeavors contributed to the re-imagined
landscape of the city and the deliberate marketing of that landscape.
For a modest 25 cents in adult admission and 10 cents for children, visitors
crossed the entranceway into the self-proclaimed “Eden of the West,” which had been
built on the grounds of the late General John C. Frémont’s estate.
783

780
Walter J. Thompson, “When We All Went to Woodward’s,” San Francisco Chronicle,
March 11, 1917, from a scrapbook of newspaper articles, Vol. VI, pp. 35-6, 35 at the
California Historical Society.
781
“Bay District of Horticultural Society of California,” California Horticulturalist and
Floral Magazine, Vol. I, No. 2 (Dec., 1870), 56-59, 56-57. Barbara Berglund, Making
San Francisco American: Cultural Frontiers in the Urban West, 1846-1906 (Lawrence:
University Press of Kansas, 2007), 70-71. See also, California Horticulturalist and
Floral Magazine, Vol. I, No. 1 (Nov., 1870), 20, thanking Woodward for his assistance
and the use of his library. “First Annual Exhibition of the Bay District Horticultural
Society, Held in San Francisco, August, 1871,” California Horticulturalist and Floral
Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 10 (Aug., 1871), 303-308. “Spring Exhibition of the Bay District
Horticultural Society,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol. III, No. 6
(Jun., 1873), 180-185, 182.
782
“Editorial Portfolio,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol. III, No.
11 (Nov., 1873), 340. “Fairs and Exhibitions,” California Horticulturalist and Floral
Magazine, Vol. III, No. 11 (Nov., 1873), 340-343, 341-343. “Pavilion Garden –
Mechanics’ Fair,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol. VII, No. 9
(Sep.,1877), 282-285, 283.
783
Back cover advertisement for Woodward’s Gardens, California Horticulturalist and
Floral Magazine. Brown, “Woodward’s Gardens,” Vignettes of Early San Francisco
Homes and Gardens. Berglund, Making San Francisco American, 70-71, describing
304
In anticipation of the day’s adventure, floral explorers reviewed an illustrated
guide of the grounds complete with a playful acrostic spelling out “Woodward’s Gardens
in San Francisco” using the first letter for each line of the poem.
784

Where is the place far off in western land
Of wonders, wrought as if by magic hand,
Of Science’s brightest fields of recreation,
Delight the eye to fairest approbation?
We know its fame – for this is Woodward’s Gardens,
As proved by children, and their candid wardens
Read in their countenance the pleasure;
Day-Festivals bring joy in fullest measure,
Securing always hours of delight.

Go see the living Animals and thousand Museum Cases,
And now to Zoögraphicon, Art Halls and Flower Vases,
Right quick around we sail by Rotary-boat;
Done there, to Pavilion performance leads the road.
End coming – let us view Aquarium, Ponds and Bowers,
Nor fail to walk amongst the Trees and Ferns and Flowers.
So passes time – we miss the Swings and thousand other showy things.

In will we go again at times, and find so many changes;
Nor do we tire, for novelties the Manager arranges.

Since San Francisco came to be the bright Star of the West –
As youngest city she has won her fame – the very best.
Not without pride their citizens speak well of Woodward’s Garden,

Woodward’s Gardens as a place for working and middle class persons to receive both
education and an amusing afternoon.
784
Illustrated Guide and Catalogue of Woodward’s Gardens (1873).
305

For California’s gold ’t was said the soul did sometimes harden;
Right well their people lead the way of Progress and Advance,
And every cosmopolitan agrees with this perchance.
No wonder Art and Science claim at last a higher range –
Creates a love of nobler sense and gives a magic change.
It is a life of brighter days, when Knowledge rules the land,
Success is certain, friends and foe in union clasp their hand;
Civilization’s triumphs bear their standards quite supreme,
Of California’s foremost rank its banner not to screen.
785

The poem raises questions about the nature of California, already 30 years into statehood.
The pamphlet posits that the space remained peripheral to something undefined – “far
off.” Labeling the space as “Western land” begged further inquiry into the nature of
“Western.” And yet, the poem declared San Francisco “bright Star of the West.” If San
Francisco was a beacon of something, the poem omits details of the precise nature of the
distinction, leaving one to consider a range of options from divinely blessed as the star
marking the stable over a Bethlehem stable to simply the most glamorous, civilized
space. More particularly within the space of the garden, how might this promised
mixture of science, wonder, civilizing influence and delight, all included within the
poem, become a physical embodiment on one pleasure ground?
Although privately run, the Garden attracted a broad spectrum of the public, from
the powerful, moneyed, and notable, to the local worker of more modest means. For
those who paid admission, their walks led them past prized acacias and begonias and

785
Illustrated Guide and Catalogue of Woodward’s Gardens, compiled by F. Gruber
(San Francisco: Francis, Valentine & Co., Book and Job Printers, 1879/80), 87.
306
signs shouting: “Do not pick the Flowers!”
786
They passed picnickers, many of whom
used to lunch in Hayes Valley.
787
Groups of children, more elderly visitors, and the
occasional young couple in “the bloomtime of youth. . .chasing sunbeams of love”
wandered “flower-bordered paths.”
788
The grounds attracted prominent visitors, from
former President Ulysses S. Grant, to the King and Queen of the Sandwich Islands, and
from P.T. Barnum to artists and professors, such as Albert Bierstadt and
Charles H. Shinn.
789

The Gardens attracted horticultural writers from across the world. One, from
New York, marveled that the state supported “trees from the snowy summits of the Sierra
Nevada, by the side of the tropical palm, coffee and orange.” He observed that the
Atlantic states’ apple and pear trees thrived as cacti blossomed with geraniums. He
calculated that the branches of trees from Australia, China, and Japan “twin[ed]” and
“mingl[ed]” together.
790
For a young Californian who cultivated a plot of dirt and knew
no other home or land – no other climate, the New Yorker’s amazement at the
juxtaposition of the cacti and geranium might have been confusing. For that young

786
“Woodward’s Gardens,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, (Apr.,
1871), 181; “Woodward’s Gardens,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine,
(Dec., 1871), 23. Illustrated Guide and Catalogue of Woodward’s Gardens (1873), 3.
787
Schellens, “Woodward’s Gardens,” San Francisco Chronicle.
788
Thompson, “When We All Went to Woodward’s,” San Francisco Chronicle, 35.
789
Illustrated Guide and Catalogue of Woodward’s Gardens, compiled by F. Gruber
(1879/80), 85. Charles H. Shinn, “Woodward’s Gardens,” California Horticulturalist and
Floral Magazine, Vol. IX, No. 4 (Apr. 1879), 102-104.
790
“Woodward’s Gardens, San Francisco, Cal.” California Horticulturalist and Floral
Magazine, Vol. I, No. 1 (Nov., 1870), reprinted from New York Horticulturist, 9-10, 10.
307
Californian, the work of a quarter decade of nurserymen introducing plants and
encouraging experimentation was invisible. The landscape was so completely
transformed that the juxtaposition of the two was natural and normal. But for the
previous generation and those who traveled to observe California through private
gardens, the juxtaposition remained striking.
The experience of walking through a garden is comprised of both the phenomena
of the juxtaposition of plants and individual assessments of particular specimen. As
walkers visited Woodward’s Gardens in the 1870s, they were treated to the Espiritu
Sancto that bloomed in the tropical area after arriving all the way from Panama. The
leaves resembled those of a lily, although the flower was a type of orchid. From its
center, a four-foot stem burst upwards towards the heavens. The flower reached taller
than many child visitors. Visitors described the flower as a dove, like that which
represent the Holy Spirit many of those children learned about in church. The flower
smelled “rich and delicious,” which is maybe why the gardener at Woodward’s Gardens
said the indigenous people favored the bloom.
791
California Horticulturalist and Floral
Magazine marveled at its “immaculate color,” the purple dots of the petals and “delicate
tinge of carmine on the tiny bill.” The bloom carried such an “air of saintly innocence
and repose” that one could “hardly help bowing before it, in imagination at least, as
before a genuine vision of the Holy Spirit.”
792

791
Illustrated Guide and Catalogue of Woodward’s Gardens (1873), 52-53.
792
“’Flower of the Holy Ghost’ at Woodward’s Gardens,” California Horticulturalist and
Floral Magazine, Vol. V, No. 11 (Nov., 1875), 350-351.
308
Flowers such as these provided walkers an added opportunity for moral education.
Contemporaneous with the bloom at Woodward’s Garden, self-titled amateurs
contemplated the spiritual and refining power of flowers. They imagined the flowers
“admonish[ed] us of the instability of earthly grandeur and beauty” because flowers were
so fragile and lived for such a short time. Flowers taught “the utter foolishness” of the
“pride” of “personal adornments and gaudy trappings.” Although the “prosperous” or
proud might have found themselves admonished, “the poor, the lowly, and the fallen,”
could find in the flowers “sympathizing friends, whispering words of comfort and hope,
sharing their sorrows, and thus rendering the burden easier to bear.” Imagining the
flowers as friends might have perplexed a walker.
793

After encountering the religious bloom, walkers passed through the
Ornithological Gallery with vultures, hummingbirds and flamingos. They crossed the
Zoological Gallery with everything from sea urchins to an anaconda attacking a jaguar.
Finally, they entered into the Botanical Department that included a rotunda, Conservatory
and Orangery. The “bright sky-blue” of the Plumbago Carpenti bloomed amidst the
fragrance of white flowers from Buenos Aires, the Mandevilla Grandiflora, known as the
Chili Jasmine. Within the Conservatory, oleanders, geraniums, lantanas, and Passion
flowers overwhelmed the senses.
794

793
An Amateur, “Teachings of Flowers,” California Horticulturalist and Floral
Magazine, 80-81. See also, An Amateur, “Moral of Flowers,” California Horticulturalist
and Floral Magazine, 47; “The Sermon of the Flowers,” Garden and Forest, 205.
794
Illustrated Guide and Catalogue of Woodward’s Gardens (1873), 3-4, 9, 16-17, 45-
46, 49-50.
309
Once walkers escaped through the Orangery to the Plant and Tropical
Greenhouses, they experienced a magical transportation to a miniature version of the
plant life of the entire world. They saw magnolia grandiflora from North Carolina,
Japanese and South American plants, primroses, fuchsia, geraniums, cacti, Camellia
Japonica, ferns, and orchids native to Mexico and Central America.
795
Woodward’s
Gardens proved that all of the plants of the world flourished and grew in California.
Through walks in Woodward’s Gardens, visitors experienced a day of education
and amusement in a private setting. They viewed exotic imports and likely used the
flowers to teach religious and moral lessons. Observers recognized the work of
nurserymen in changing the landscape fostering the growth of exotic and domestic plants
side by side. And walkers mixed pleasure with market activity both by paying admission
to the Gardens and by shopping for plants at Miller, Sievers & Co. – a nursery next door
– on their way home.
796
The space they walked was a self-fashioned wonderland,
championing the exotic. After Woodward died in August 1879, the future of the gardens
remained in question as his estate passed to his son and three daughters. The siblings

795
Illustrated Guide and Catalogue of Woodward’s Gardens (1873), 50-52. See also,
California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol. V, No. 2 (Feb., 1875).
796
“Editorial Portfolio: Exotic Gardens and Conservatories, Opposite Woodward’s
Gardens,” California Horticulturalist and Floral Magazine, Vol. V, No. 12 (Dec., 1875),
385-386, 385, reporting that Miller, Sievers & Co. opened a nursery across from
Woodward’s Gardens. See Miller, Sievers & Co., “Exotic Gardens and Conservatories
General and Descriptive Catalogue of New and Rare Plants, Trees, and Shrubs, Seeds and
Bulbs,” 1876, University of California at Davis, Nursery and Seed Catalog Collection,
Box 221, Folder 6344.
310
maintained the grounds as they legally partitioned the property.
797
Although
Woodward’s Gardens’ popularity lasted into the 1880s, Golden Gate Park drew more and
more San Franciscans in the last decades of the nineteenth century.
798
Woodward’s
Gardens ultimately closed in 1893.
799

Woodward constructed his gardens as a place of education, amusement, and
refinement, open to the public but as a private endeavor; in contrast Golden Gate Park
embodied the public version of a similar morally refining structured leisure. Municipal
leaders presided over the forging of Golden Gate Park from 1,040 acres of “undulating
sand hills” and mismatched landscapes from Stanyan to Baker Streets, that the city took
possession of in the 1870s.
800
Golden Gate Park fits into a larger patchwork of urban
parks constructed nationwide between 1850 and 1930. In 1850, municipal public parks
were unheard of, but by 1908, as Terence Young’s work on parks examines, only one of

797
Schellens, “Woodward’s Gardens,” San Francisco Chronicle. Brown, “Woodward’s
Gardens,” Vignettes of Early San Francisco Homes and Gardens.
798
Terence Young, Building San Francisco’s Parks. Brown, “Woodward’s Gardens,”
Vignettes of Early San Francisco Homes and Gardens. See also Taylor and Butterfield,
Tangible Memories, 55-56.
799
Brown, “Woodward’s Gardens,” Vignettes of Early San Francisco Homes and
Gardens. Berglund, Making San Francisco American, 70.
800
“Golden Gate Park: The City’s Great Pleasure Ground,” San Francisco Chronicle,
Aug. 25, 1893, 4. “Golden Gate Park: History of the People’s Garden, How It Was
Reclaimed From Sand,” San Francisco Chronicle, Oct. 30, 1892, 12. “The Genesis of
Golden Gate Park: Its Development From Desolate Dunes and Scrub Oaks to the Home
of Nature and Art,“ San Francisco Chronicle, Jan. 12, 1896, 8. John P. Young, San
Francisco, 432-433. See also Taylor and Butterfield, Tangible Memories, 63.
311
the 157 United States cities with populations of more than 30,000 (that being Butte,
Montana) failed to construct one and transform the city-scape.
801

Municipal leaders and park superintendents created Golden Gate Park to foster
community and transform individual character. Unlike the amusement-park landscape of
exotic excesses featured in Woodward’s Gardens, the city parks retained a romantic
naturalism more closely resembling what one might imagine untouched landscape to
appear like. However, public parks were highly constructed spaces, with deliberate

801
Terence Young, Building San Francisco’s Parks, xi. See, “Golden Gate Park: History
of the People’s Garden, How It Was Reclaimed From Sand,” San Francisco Chronicle,
12, comparing Golden Park to Central Park, as well as to parks in Boston, Philadelphia,
Berlin, Vienna, London, and Chicago.
Much has been written about urban parks during this time period. While much of
it is beyond the scope of this project, many of the themes of the urban park movement
parallel those expressed by those working with flowers. See Roy Rosenzweig and
Elizabeth Blackmar, The Park and the People: A History of Central Park (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1992), 18. See also, Dominick Cavallo, Muscle and Morals: Organized
Playgrounds and Urban Reform, 1880-1920 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1981); Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978). See also, Rachel Iannacone, “The Small
Parks in New York City and the Civilizing Process of Immigrants at the Turn of the
Twentieth Century,” eds. Michel Conan and Jeffrey Quilter, Gardens and Cultural
Change: A Pan-American Perspective (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research
Library and Collection, 2007), 87-103, 87, discussing the tension between landscape
architects and reformers at turn of the century. See also, Dorceta E. Taylor, The
Environment and the People in American Cities, 1600s-1900s: Disorder, Inequality, and
Social Change (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 319.
For primary sources articulating different visions of the goals of public parks, see
“Golden Gate Park: History of the People’s Garden, How It Was Reclaimed From Sand,”
San Francisco Chronicle, 12, articulating “morally the beneficent effect” of the park.
See also, “Gardening Art in Public Parks,” Garden and Forest, Vol. 3, No. 102 (Feb. 5,
1890), 61-62, 61, not specific to Golden Gate Park. “The True Function of City Parks,”
Garden and Forest, Vol. 4, No. 158 (Mar. 4, 1891), 97-98, 97, not specific to Golden
Gate Park. “Public Gardens,” Garden and Forest, Vol. 4, No. 194, (Nov. 11, 1891), 529-
30, not specific to Golden Gate Park.
312
thought expended on each element and the overall experience. One Golden Gate Park
engineer envisioned the park as a “‘cultivator. . .of public taste.’”
802
But the Park had
been very difficult for working-class families to access its first ten years in existence,
given the lack of low cost transportation to its remote location, limiting its power to
shape taste.
803

While refinement and taste-making continued as the goals throughout, the
methods and objects – the tools – changed. Woodward’s Gardens maintained an
amusement park feel under the vision of Woodward, his employees, and heirs.
Throughout the Gardens’ operation, Woodward added exhibits in an attempt to out-
perform his previous specimen. But the overall atmosphere remained fairly constant;
flowers consistently played a substantial role in the experience. Golden Gate Park
planners, in contrast, brought different ideas about desirable forms of landscape. Some
maintained a romantic notion of nature as godly and capable of conveying beauty and
goodness in a form without dedicated displays of blooms. Sprawling grounds greeted
visitors on a scale that dwarfed Woodward’s Gardens. In the 1870s, Golden Gate Park
Superintendent William Hammond Hall and others believed that the work of moral
ordering and reordering operated most effectively when guests did not consciously notice

802
Robert Richardi Weyeneth, “Moral Spaces: Reforming the Landscape of Leisure in
Urban America, 1850-1920,” dissertation, University of California at Berkeley, 1984, 65.
803
B.E. (Benjamin) Lloyd, B.E., Lights and Shades in San Francisco (Berkeley: Berkeley
Hills Books, 1999, orig. pub. 1876 by A.L. Bancroft & Company), 123. Weyeneth,
“Moral Spaces,” 77.
313
specific horticultural choices.
804
Instead of entertaining walkers like fair exhibitions as in
Woodward’s Gardens, Golden Gate Park unrolled in waves of more subtle landscape.
Some park planners even displayed a relative dislike for flower-beds. Others
championed particular blooms. Superintendent John McLaren, hired by Hall in 1887,
had a particular interest in rhododendrons.
805
By 1888, more and more visitors ventured
to the Park; in the late 1880s, 50,000 visited the Conservatory of Flowers – one of the
most commonly visited portions of the Park.
806
“For many years,” the San Francisco
Chronicle declared, the Conservatory “was the Mecca of pilgrims to the city’s breathing
spot.”
807
Plants remained only one set of tools of park advocates. Others championed the
playground movement and later community centers.
808
Many Progressives and people,
including Daniel Burnham of the City Beautiful Movement, envisioned parks more as

804
Terence Young, “Trees, the park and moral order: the significance of Golden Gate
Park’s first plantings,” Journal of Garden History, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Autumn, 1994), 158-
170, 159.
805
Terence Young, Building San Francisco’s Parks, 142. See also Taylor and Butterfield,
Tangible Memories, 66-69. See, John McLaren, Gardening in California Landscape and
Flower (San Francisco: A.M. Robertson, 1908 copyright and 1909 publication); John
McLaren, Gardening in California Landscape and Flower (San Francisco: A.M.
Robertson, 1914).
806
Weyeneth, “Moral Spaces,” 81. Tennebaum-Manheim Engineers, “The Conservatory
of Flowers Complex in Golden Gate Park: Historical Structures Report,” May, 11, 1998,
7, 21.
807
“The Genesis of Golden Gate Park,“ San Francisco Chronicle, 8.
808
Terence Young, “Trees, the park and moral order,” Journal of Garden History, 164.
Weyeneth, “Moral Spaces,” 166. See also, “The Proper Use of Public Parks,” Garden
and Forest, Vol. 2, No. 83 (Sep. 25, 1889), 457-8, regarding the “indispensable” nature
of urban parks to the “well being” of the city’s inhabitants.
314
spaces to house structures and it was the structures (or perhaps statutes) that acted as
civilizing factors on the visitors.
809

A little over two decades after the walks through Woodward’s Gardens, visitors
flooded Golden Gate Park in 1915 for the Panama Pacific International Exposition.
Although the Midwinter Fair in 1894 dominated the Park, by the time of the Panama
Pacific International Exposition, park advocates envisioned the Park as a necessary bit of
nature inappropriate for transformation into fair grounds.
810
They permitted the
construction of a temporary nursery for Exposition blooms in the Park. The temporary
nursery for the Exposition consisted of six greenhouses. Park guests encountered
gardeners tending flats of acacia seedlings, eucalyptus, hydrangeas, marguerites, and
fuchsias, awaiting to be transplanted from the Park to the Presidio.
811

Walkers venturing past the Exposition blooms wandered amongst “artistically”
divided grass lawns, flower beds, shrubbery, trees, and endless walkways.
812
Some
concluded that the design was poor, the Park suffered from limited nursery stock and

809
Weyeneth, “Moral Spaces,” 166.
810
William Hammond Hall, “The Panama-Pacific International Exposition Site: A
Review of the Proposition to Use a Part of Golden Gate Park, Addressed to the Executive
Committee of the Board of Directors of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition,”
1911, 5, 10-12, viewed at the Helen Crocker Russell Library of Horticulture at Golden
Gate Park.
811
Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition: Being the Official History of the
International Celebration Held at San Francisco in 1915 to Commemorate the Discovery
of the Pacific Ocean and the Construction of the Panama Canal (New York: G.P.
Putnam’s Sons, 1921), Vol. 1, 309.
812
Taliesin Evans, All About the Midwinter Fair, San Francisco, and Interesting Facts
Concerning California (San Francisco: W.B. Bancroft & Co., 1894), 58.
315
even that the trenching had been performed in “a most unworkmanlike manner.”
813

Despite the shortcomings, visitors continued to explore the grounds, from the
Conservatory of Flowers to the new Exposition greenhouses.
As visitors approached the Conservatory of Flowers, they took in the large
Victorian Conservatory structure, the pieces of which were originally commissioned by
James Lick. The enormous dome spanned 60 feet with “arch-shaped wings” flying forth
from the dome, stained glass, and significant ornamental woodwork.
814
Lick migrated to
California from Pennsylvania seventeen days before the discovery of gold at Sutter’s
Mill. Amassing a significant fortune in real estate, Lick imagined that the Conservatory
would compliment part of his personal holdings on his own property. But upon his death
in 1876, a group of local citizens purchased the pieces of the soon-to-be Conservatory
and gifted them to the city.
815
Twenty-eight men, ranging from Charles Crocker and
Leland Stanford to Charles Lux and A.J. Pope worked together to deliver the
Conservatory to the Park.
816
The Conservatory, like the Park, changed with the times; in

813
“Detailed observations about Golden Gate Park,” California Horticulturalist and
Floral Magazine, Vol. II, No. 4 (Mar., 1872), 119-120.
814
Tennebaum-Manheim Engineers, “The Conservatory of Flowers Complex in Golden
Gate Park: Historical Structures Report,” 8, 21, 77, 83-86. Sazevich, Treasures of the
Conservatory of Flowers, 9, noting that pieces may have come from France, England or
Ireland but that the redwood appears to have been locally grown.
815
Tennebaum-Manheim Engineers, “The Conservatory of Flowers Complex in Golden
Gate Park: Historical Structures Report,” 7 & 44. See also, Charles S. Greene, “The
Parks of San Francisco,” Overland Monthly, Vol. XVII, No. 99 (Mar., 1891), 225-243,
235. Nina Sazevich, Treasures of the Conservatory of Flowers (Berkeley: Heyday
Books, 2006), 8-9.
816
Tennebaum-Manheim Engineers, “The Conservatory of Flowers Complex in Golden
Gate Park: Historical Structures Report,” 45 & 164, drawing from the San Francisco
316
the 1880s, the Park commissioners added more flowers from across the world,
demonstrating the possibilities for plant diversity and the power of the colorful blooms to
“‘charm the eye and elevate the mind.’”
817
In the 1890s, visitors approaching the
Conservatory noticed “scrolls” of “ribbon-gardening,” “in elaborate pattern[s of] red and
yellow foliage plants.”
818
In 1900, Park planners added greenhouses for roses and
orchids that then survived the 1906 earthquake. From 1908 to 1909, they built a
Lath House.
819

The floral treasures of the Park grew within. In the 1890s, the Holy Ghost or
Espiritu Sancto, flower bloomed, the same type of flower in Woodward’s Gardens
decades earlier. The morality tale attached changed little; a “perfect white dove on a nest
of such whiteness that it rouses pure and holy thoughts in every beholder.” Lavender
orchids from the Philippines, Mexico, Guatemala, and Brazil greeted guests in the first

Municipal Reports for the Fiscal Year 1877-78, June 30, 1878, 416. Official Guide to the
California Midwinter Exposition in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, California (San
Francisco: George Spaulding & Co., 1894), 171. See also, The Conservatory of Flowers:
Guide Handbook (unpublished manuscript from the vertical files of the Helen Crocker
Library Russell Library at Golden Gate Park, filed under “Conservatory,” [May, 2008],
9-12. “Golden Gate Park: The City’s Great Pleasure Ground,” San Francisco Chronicle,
Aug. 25, 1893, 4.
817
Terence Young, Building San Francisco’s Parks, 147. M.B.H., “Flowers at the Park,”
San Francisco Chronicle, Sep. 28, 1890, 9.
818
Ella M. Sexton, “Gardens of Christmastide,” Overland Monthly, Vol. XXII, No. 132
(Dec., 1893), 561-569.
819
Tennebaum-Manheim Engineers, “The Conservatory of Flowers Complex in Golden
Gate Park: Historical Structures Report,” 118.
317
few years of the twentieth century.
820
The Conservatory housed more than orchids,
hosting special floral events, from flower shows to featured blossomings. In the fall of
1890, the San Francisco Chronicle predicted the blooming of a Victoria Regia within a
half hour. People flocked to the Conservatory at 7:30 in the morning to catch a glimpse
of the 18-inch white bloom with the pink center.
821
That fall, local dignitaries including
Colonel C.F. Crocker (Charles Crocker’s son) and John Lemmon visited to take in the
blooms at the Chrysanthemum Show.
822

Just as Woodward’s Gardens drew persons and plants from across the world, the
Park, and more specifically the Conservatory, did the same on a larger scale.
823
Foreign
and domestic gardeners and nurserymen involved in designing and caring for the Park
contributed to the change over time as well as the expansion of offerings. Hall, the first
superintendent of the Park, served in the United States Engineer Corps from 1865 to 1870
and bid the project to design the Park in 1870. Having studied the work of Frederick Law
Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, Hall pictured a naturalistic landscape design with a 12-acre

820
Greene, “The Parks of San Francisco,” Overland Monthly, 235. “Rare Orchids Bloom
in Park,” San Francisco Chronicle, Jul. 21, 1902, 5, describing orchids from the
Philippines, Mexico and Brazil. “Rare Orchids Seen At Park,” San Francisco Chronicle,
Jan. 4, 1904, 12, describing Brazilian and Columbian epiphytes of “soft lavender, with
deep purple velvety lips” as well as white orchids with tiger brown spots from
Guatemala.
821
“The Victoria Regia: A Wonderful Sight at the Park,” San Francisco Chronicle, Oct.
24, 1890, 10.
822
“The Flower Show: Close of the Chrysanthemum Exhibit, A Flower of the Victoria
Regia Opens in the Hall,” San Francisco Chronicle, Nov. 9, 1890, 13.
823
“Golden Gate Park: The City’s Great Pleasure Ground,” San Francisco Chronicle, 4.
318
botanical garden that was never built.
824
When Hall sought to employ gardeners, he
turned to Arthur Lowe, who worked in England during the 1830s and1840s, then came to
California like thousands of others looking for gold. Lowe utilized his previous expertise
working on General H.M. Maglee’s estate in San Jose and then the Lick estate. In 1872,
Hall hired him to “oversee the planting” of the park, but he only lasted a year due to age
and his dislike of the climate.
825
Hall then hired F.W. Poppey in the mid 1870s upon
Olmsted’s suggestion. Poppey previously worked at New York’s Central Park. He
graduated from the Royal Horticultural College in Berlin, studied in England and France
and then with Olmsted, worked in San Antonio, at Poughkeepsie’s Hudson River State
Hospital, and at Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. Like famed American landscaper Andrew
Jackson Downing, he sought to recreate untouched nature in his landscape gardens.
Poppey only lasted two years however, leaving California in 1876 to go back to New
York and Olmsted.
826

Likewise, local nurserymen lent their international expertise. Charles Abraham of
the Western Nursery, who apprenticed in Germany and Russia before becoming a
nurseryman and importer in San Francisco, frequently shared his sub-tropical imports

824
Terence Young, Building San Francisco’s Parks, 70, 73 & 78.
825
Raymond H. Clary, The Making of Golden Gate Park, The Early Years: 1865-1906
(San Francisco: California Living Books, 1980), 23. See also, “The Administration of
Public Parks,” Garden and Forest, Vol. 2, No. 50 (Feb. 6, 1889), 61-62, 61.
826
Clary, The Making of Golden Gate Park, The Early Years, 23. Terence Young,
Building San Francisco’s Parks, 90.
319
with the Park.
827
Edward L. Reimer, who arrived in California in 1852 from Berlin by
way of New York, sold his nursery business after the 1906 earthquake and fire and
worked at the Park until his death in 1913.
828
The Park drew from this full range of
experiences, from local and as close as San Jose, to national from New York and Texas,
to international from England, Germany, and France.
The Park’s Conservatory flowers also represented the world, from orchids from
the Philippines, Mexico and Brazil to English begonias.
829
For the Midwinter Fair in
1894, park gardeners “stocked” the Conservatory “with a collection of the rarest tropical
plants and orchids in existence, a pond enclosed in it containing among other things a
specimen of the gigantic Amazonian water lily” that traveled to the Park from Kew
Gardens in Britain.
830
Shinn noted “French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and oriental
influences,” “while the guiding spirit of the whole [wa]s clearly American.”
831
By the

827
Veronica K. Kinzie, “The Western Nursery,” ed. Olive H. Palmer, Vignettes of Early
San Francisco Homes and Gardens (Program of the San Francisco Garden Club, Dec.
1935).
828
H. M. Butterfield, “The History of Ornamental Horticulture in California”
(unpublished manuscript, no date – but likely in the 1960s) and Journal of the California
Horticultural Society, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Apr., 1965), 47-50 (just the first part was in the
printed article.)
829
“Rare Orchids Bloom in Park,” San Francisco Chronicle, 5.
830
Evans, All About the Midwinter Fair, San Francisco, and Interesting Facts
Concerning California, 59-60. See also, Charles Howard Shinn, “Flower Days of the
Midwinter Fair,” Garden and Forest, Vol.7, No. 329 (Jun. 13, 1894), 232. See also,
Harry C. Robinson, “Golden Gate Park: ‘Glory and Pride of the Metropolis,’” San
Francisco Chronicle, Dec. 28, 1913, 3, discussing the Park and the Fair.
831
Shinn, “Flower Days of the Midwinter Fair,” Garden and Forest, 232.
320
time of the completion of the Panama Canal and all the preparations for the Panama
Pacific Exposition, the lotus truly was meeting the rose.
The layers of imported and carefully designated flowers of the Conservatory were
not the only blooms that received such attention. Walkers stumbled upon wildflowers as
they journeyed, which appeared to have predated the groomed landscape of the Park.
Even though the wildflowers looked like they grew of their own free will, park gardeners
planted the poppies, scarlet larkspur, and blossoms of white to dark purple in this specific
place.
832
In the Park, as in home gardens and the city as a whole, the floricultural
landscaping involved deliberate and layered human action to construct and present
particular images of California.

832
“California Wild Flowers in Golden Gate Park,” San Francisco Chronicle, Jan. 15,
1899, 9.
321

Epilogue

Considering California’s Floricultural Past, Present, and Future

From those who ventured west in search of gold in the late 1840s or to celebrate
the completion of the Panama Canal at the World’s Fair in 1915, to those who created
homes, businesses and institutions from associations to parks, Californians toiled to
understand, define, and represent their new state. “The land of sunshine and flowers” –
beyond mere boosterism or rhetoric – captures the sometimes tenuous rootedness of these
new arrivals and the role of flowers in creating and practicing taste, culture, and
civilization. The trans-national world of floriculture from the Gilded Age through the
Progressive Era involved a layered nexus of family, home, business, nature, science,
imagination, and pleasure.
From the 1850s through 1915, the population, urban, business, and floral
demographics of California shifted violently. All along, newcomers and residents
described the space as a garden of Eden. Some of the building blocks of this Eden, such
as climate or soil composition, predated the new settlers. But gardens and landscapes are
imagined, planted, tended, and experienced. Floriculturists – broadly defined – imported,
marketed, and crossed plants to form new varietals and test the limits of California and
Californians. They farmed seeds en masse and exported them globally. Californians
prepared cut-flower arrangements for flower markets, florists’ windows, churches,
holiday celebrations, dining tables, and street corners. They debated the connections of
particular garden designs and specimen in the process of creating civilized homes. They
322
battled the limits of their environment, from overly sandy soil to access to raw materials.
They competed with each other for shares of the economic benefits of the market and the
to define professional boundaries of their businesses, from nurserymen to landscape
architects to horticultural writers. They struggled with their anxiety over whether
Californians cared enough about flowers and whether economic downturns threatened
their civilizing floral work. They created and contested racial, gender, and class
distinctions through access to and activities surrounding flowers.
In the early twentieth century, academics Josiah Royce and E.J. Wickson
articulated this relationship of nature, floriculture, and community in connection with
creating California. Their different views and conceptualizations mirrored strains of
inquiries of other Californians. For philosopher and historian Royce, the connection
amongst nature, civilization, and California was undeniable. But the outcome remained
unclear – be it paradise or chaos. For Wickson, the picture was more promising.
Wickson served as a professor of horticulture at the University of California at Berkeley,
Honorary President of the California State Floral Society, Editor of the Pacific Rural
Press, and author of numerous horticultural and agricultural publications including One
Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered. In a 1915 piece, he
imaginatively teased that California might be up for consideration for the Garden of Eden
and focused on the innumerable participants in the world of floriculture.
In 1908, Royce directed those interested in describing how civilization had been
affected by geography and climate to look first to the “inner life of the Californian.” Ask
the Californian how nature and climate influenced his mind and his body, Royce
323
suggested. And through that inquiry, the academic asked how nature and climate
“indirectly” affected the social order. Admitting that this inquiry “treads upon ground at
once fascinating and enormously difficult,” he concluded that “[g]eneralization is limited
by the fact of great varieties of personal character and type with which we are dealing.”
Royce may have believed that nature simply amplified inherent characteristics – whether
that be of industriousness, indolence, or moral carelessness. However, he presented a
complicated vision of California, far from simplistic notions of Edenic landscape. Of San
Francisco, he surmised: “It is possible to cultivate roses in one’s garden throughout the
greater part of the year. These, the rainy season will generally encourage in their
blooming. On the other hand, the stormy wind will from time to time destroy them with
its own floods of cruelty.”
833
For Royce, the connection between the possibilities of
growth in California and the civility of the future of its people was palpable. But the
direction that evolution headed was not inevitably towards a version of Eden. Nature,
climate, and the social order connected but the path could be stunning roses or
destruction by the “floods of cruelty.”
Wickson’s view, almost a decade later, focused on perceived successes of the
numerous people involved in shaping California. He wrote, “California has rewarded the
world’s confidence by producing a new type of mankind, a new point of view, a new
phase of literature, a new freedom of thought, a new conception of enterprise.” But
California did not simply work to refine itself; by Wickson’s estimation, the state

833
Josiah Royce, Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems (New
York: Fordham University Press, 2009, orig. pub. 1908), 128, 132, 137.
324
“enriched the world” with “new plants, new ways of growing and handling plants in
industry, new installation of plant-beauty in the heart and in the home.” The range of
participants made this change possible. He listed the “very praise-worthy work of
women’s clubs, the introduction of horticultural studies in the public schools, the
continuous exhortation of agricultural speakers and writers, the multiplication of floral
festivals, and the commendable enterprise of seedsmen and nurserymen – all these and
other agencies. . .extending knowledge of rural improvement and stimulating desire for
the enjoyment of it.” From this day-to-day work to lobbying for the poppy as state
flower, the California project was a success in Wickson’s eyes and California had
positioned itself globally for a bright future.
834

Royce and Wickson were but two participants in the conversation of
understanding the cultural significance of flowers with the creation of the young state.
That conversation captures both the imaginations and work of countless numbers of
individual actors across various occupations and contexts. Some planted flowers in their
gardens or in window boxes, others in fields to raise cut-flowers for mass sales. Some
were drawn to floral scents, others to particular colors or forms. Some made careers out
of aspects of floriculture, from academic and commercial botanists to seed company men
to nurserymen and florists, who sold their goods in organized flower markets and store
fronts to peddlers who sold from carts. Some expressed love, celebrated holidays and
weddings, and mourned losses with the blooms. Some used flowers to encourage cultural

834
E.J. Wickson, California Garden-Flowers, Shrubs, Trees and Vines Being Mainly
Suggestions for Working Amateurs (San Francisco: Pacific Rural Press, 1915), 8, 10.
325
assimilation by delivering flowers via organized troops of women to recent immigrants
and the ill. Others maintained their immigrant cultures and languages by working
together to foster business loans and opportunities for their ethnic compatriots within the
floral industry. Some studied flowers growing in wild fields, while others crafted new
professions designing tasteful orderings of flowers in gardens and vases. Some visited
flowers in local shows and private and public gardens. Others wrote and read about them
in botanical publications and newspapers. Some used flowers to refine notions of taste.
Others defined childhood, ethnicity, and gender via floral cues. Some joined horticultural
clubs to exchange information and socialize. Others used the blooms to explicitly
position California and San Francisco as extraordinary places and the center of the United
States’ empire after the Spanish American War. Not all of the floriculturists had the
same visions or concerns. Yet through this work, floriculturists transformed their spaces
from what they originally saw as blank canvases into an international garden of landscape
and commerce.
The power of floriculture and the interactions amongst individuals, communities,
and their gardens continued to evolve after the Panama Pacific International Exposition.
Community, school, and victory gardens through the two World Wars altered the
landscape. During the flower-power of the 1960s, the Mamas & the Papas’ 1967 hit,
“San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)” became an anthem not only for
California flower-power but also for those seeking freedom during the 1968 Prague
326
Spring.
835
Residents and visitors of and to San Francisco still flock to the Conservatory
of Flowers in Golden Gate Park and to the various flower shows and farmers’ markets
throughout the city that feature local blooms. Millions across the world start each new
year watching Pasadena’s Tournament of Roses Parade.
However, current analyses of California floriculture shift significantly from that
of the time period that stretched from statehood to 1915. One wonders how the
globalization of flowers and flower trade changes the questions for the analysis of the
role of floriculture in any particular culture. This globalization privileges easily
transportable varieties, such as roses, carnations, and chrysanthemums.
836
Biological
alterations continue to be made to flowers to enhance profitability in this global market.
Those who seek to understand the late twentieth and early twenty-first century
globalization of flowers track journeys of specific flowers to market that span much
greater distances than those of the Domotos’ chrysanthemums from the East Bay to the
California Flower Market in San Francisco. Today, a rose is plucked from a greenhouse
somewhere in Latin America. By the same afternoon, it has been “stripped, graded, and
packed,” spending the night in an artificially chilled environment, resting in a “special
solution” to prepare it for the journey. In the morning, a refrigerated truck transports it
from the loading arena. The rose is secured in a box, fastened on a pallet, and lugged to

835
Max Kolonko, “From Baby Boomers to the Plastic Generation – the Coming of Age
of American Youth and Their European Buddies,” Goethe-Institut Experts’ Essays, Jan.,
2011, viewed at http://www.goethe.de/ins/cz/prj/fas/exp/en7174865.htm on May 10,
2012.
836
Amy Stewart, “Flower Power,” Foreign Policy, Vol. 44, No. 9 (July/Aug., 2007), 44-
52, 51-52.
327
the local airport. Catching a passenger jet with the rest of the luggage, the rose travels to
a city in the United States. Department of Homeland Security personnel inspect it for
parasites or “contraband.”
837
After this process in the hub city, the rose finds itself on
another truck – this time within the chain of a particular importer or wholesaler – that
takes it to maybe two or even three more “warehouses, distribution centers, or wholesale
markets” before it appears in the window of a florist’s shop or grocery store. The rose is
one of almost three billion stems that immigrate each year; these imports constitute 78%
of the flowers Americans purchase.
838

The analysis of the culture of flowers throughout the last half of the twentieth
century and into the twenty-first must be global in a manner Charles H. Shinn or Wickson
might not have comprehended, causing one to wonder how these flowers, which are both
from everyplace and from no-easily-discernable-place, complicate the analysis of the
cultural implications of flowers. Amy Stewart’s recent work on global “flower power,”
presents one model. She concludes that in such a market, “only the most durable flowers
survive,” noting that sweet violets that were the height of fashion 100 years ago were
both too fragile and too short-lived in today’s market. However, intriguingly for the

837
Ibid. at 45-46. See also, Amy Stewart, Flower Confidential: The Good, the Bad, and
the Beautiful in the Business of Flowers (Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2007). Niala
Maharaj and Gaston Dorren, The Game of the Rose: The Third World in the Global
Flower Trade (Utrecht: International Books, 1995), provides a detailed overview of the
worldwide flower market through the mid-1990s. Catherine Ziegler, Favored Flowers:
Culture and Economy in a Global System (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007),
providing a modern-day case study of the cut-flower commodity chain.
838
Stewart, “Flower Power,” Foreign Policy, 46.
328
purposes of this project, she notes one commercial grower of sweet violets still operates
domestically. He sells his blooms in a “100-mile radius of his northern
California farm.”
839

Is this violet grower an anomaly or a harbinger of a new floral California? The
question remains in this moment whether analytically a local analysis of floriculture
reveals something particular about California. What could a twenty-first century walk
through Golden Gate Park or Descanso Gardens reveal about the role of flowers in
defining space? In November 1880, as Shinn concluded his editorship of California
Horticultural and Floral Magazine, when the publication was sold to the Pacific Rural
Press, he proffered the following benediction.
May life be wonderfully sweet and bright for you all.
May flowers bloom about your homes, and birds sing there, and the voices
of merry children thrill the soft twilight.
May each and all of us help to make this Golden State a realm where art
and literature thrive.
Let us continue to believe in California.
840

It is this ever-shifting definition of California and its relationship to nature, and more
particularly flowers, that connects Shinn to the sweet violet grower of today. Neither
Royce nor Wickson’s predictions transpired in their entirety – though elements of both
materialized as California flower-growers expanded their businesses and floriculture
went global. While this process is not likely to reverse its course, current popular and
commercial interests in local and organic farming implicate the flower business. The

839
Ibid. at 51-52.
840
Charles H. Shinn, “For the Last Time,” California Horticulturalist and Floral
Magazine Vol. X, No. 11/12 (Nov.-Dec., 1880), 346-347, 347.
329
profit margin on locally-grown flowers is higher for many small organic farmers in
California than that for vegetables, so more and more regional businesses are turning to
flowers to make their farms profitable. This return to the local might re-nurture the
connection amongst blossoms, place, and culture, creating grounds for continuing a
floricultural discussion that started over 150 years ago and leaves one to ponder if flowers
may yet define spatial relations and identity in a novel way.
330

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