HEROINES OF HORTICULTURE BY STEFAN WHITE

A celebration and a salute to 100 brave, determined, creative women over the past few centuries who have shaped North America’s heritage and landscapes through their horticulture work and contributions.

 

Through tales of invention, creativity, dogged research, innovation, perspiration, and inspiration spanning from the early 1700s to the mid-1980s, Heroines of Horticulture offers readers insight into 100 influential women who met and overcame obstacles to contribute a horticulture legacy that has helped shape the land that surrounds us today in North America. Many of the featured women are unknown or forgotten figures of horticulture history, making this book an overdue opportunity to acknowledge their work and celebrate their achievements that have left a lasting legacy.

 

Profiles include the following:

• Martha Danielle Logan (1704–1779): An early American botanist who was instrumental in seed exchanges between Britain and the North American colonies. She wrote an influential gardening advice column and was a major collector of plants endemic to the Carolinas.

• Annie Linda Jack (1839–1912): The first Canadian professional female garden writer. Upon her marriage, she had stipulated for 1 acre of land to be devoted to any department of horticulture she chose, the profits to be her own pocket money. She wrote about her experiences in the Rural New Yorker, under the title "A Woman's Acre." The American horticulturalist Liberty Hyde Bailey referred to Annie Linda Jack's garden as "one of the most original gardens I know."

• Mary Gibson Henry (1884–1967): An American botanist and plant collector from Lower Merion Township, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia, who also served as president of the American Horticultural Society. The daylily Hymenocallis henryae is named in her honor.

• Nelva Weber (1908–1990): An American landscape architect who wrote extensively about landscape design. She opened her practice in 1945 in New York City. Prior to that, she worked on the Palisades Parkway with C. C. Combs. She was also employed by the architecture firm Shaw Maess & Murphy and later as a designer on city parks for the New York City Parks Department.

• And many more

Heroines of Horticulture is the perfect addition to the shelves and coffee tables of gardening enthusiasts and women’s history and feminist history readers and makes a great gift for anyone with a love of gardening or landscape design and history.

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