Florida Gardening, 85 Years Ago

by Bill Pitts

Has gardening in Florida changed much since the mid-1920s?

The answer to this question can be found in two of our earliest gardening books. In Florida Gardens, by Gertrude Wilson and Mary Ferguson, was published in 1924 and focuses on the northern part of our state. Ornamental Gardening in Florida, published by Charles Torrey Simpson in1926 (and down-loadable from Googlebooks), concentrates on the southern peninsula. Together they offer a fascinating glimpse into the Florida gardening scene some 85 years ago.

Perhaps the first thing that strikes modern readers is the strong emphasis on natives. “A wider use of native planting material will give a charm, a restfulness, and luxuriance to our gardens, also a freedom from worry to the gardener...” write Wilson and Ferguson. “Today’s addition to landscape work seems to be the use of native things,” they go on to say, dispelling any notion that the native plant movement is a recent phenomena.

Simpson is even more pro-native. “I see no reason why gardens may not be made...that contain nothing but our wild things,” he says. He advises those blessed with native plants to “leave this glorious vegetation essentially as nature made it.” Of his native grass “lawn” he brags, “I have never seen a time even in the coldest weather when I could not pick at least 25 kinds of flowers there.”

Both books’ native plant lists are exhaustive and include plants rarely seen in Florida gardens today. These include the lowly paw paw (Asimina speciosa -- “which should be included in all native plantings,” Wilson and Ferguson say); dwarf huckleberry (Gaylussacia dumosa) and several hawthorns (Crataegus spp.).

In addition to an enthusiasm for native plants, these books reflect that, just like today, Florida garden design in the 20’s ranged from the formal to the wild.

Simpson leans towards the latter. “Nature is the great landscape gardener,” he says. Disdainful of the formal, he writes, “topiary... seems to me to be in bad taste, trees and shrubs so mutilated appear to be in torture.” On fountain statuary, he says, “I cannot understand the motive that leads so many designers...to construct figures of humans and animals that throw water from their mouths.”

Wilson and Ferguson however are fond of the formal. “Many suggestions should be taken from Italian garden craft,” they write, “the permanent green — independent of flowers -- the blending of water and marble, with the skillful placing of conifers make a charm that Florida gardeners might well imitate.” But they also like the “naturalesque” grass gardens again in fashion today: “Ornamental grasses lend grace and lightness...and with the numerous forms and sizes, plantings may be made of grasses alone.”

Of course, Florida gardeners 85 years ago did not have all the plants we do now. There is no mention in either book of pentas, and they did not have our hybrid impatiens, but grew Impatiens balsamina and I. sultani instead. They had full-sized yaupon hollies, not ‘Schilling’s Dwarf’, and the variety of salvias (only S. splendens and S. coccinea are listed) seems meager compared to what we enjoy today.

That said, it is the vast variety of plants they had to work with that is striking. One expects to find old standards like Turk’s cap, but hardly the four varieties that Simpson lists, nor the three types of plumbago or nine types of crinum. Wilson and Ferguson mention scores of bulbs. Simpson devotes three chapters to palms alone. Together the books include some 15 roses, in addition to our Louis Philippe “cracker rose,” and Wilson and Ferguson comment that it is “impossible to find space (in their book) for all the beautiful varieties of roses which thrive in Florida.” Simpson lists 45 annuals being grown throughout the state. Florida gardeners of the 1920s were growing three types of cuphea, eight bamboos, dozens of azaleas and hundreds of crotons, as well as unusual edibles like moringa (horseradish tree).

But there was no concept of invasive plants as we understand them. Simpson describes melaleuca as a “very desirable” tree. Wilson and Ferguson praise the camphor tree as “exceedingly beautiful when clothed with its new bronze leaves.” Simpson rejects the Australian pine on aesthetic grounds, not environmental. Wilson and Ferguson also advocate digging up plants from the wild — a no-no today.

Finally, there was already in the 1920’s a sharp awareness of the challenges of gardening in Florida.

“No plant will perfect its flowers if diseased or covered with insect pests,” Wilson and Ferguson say of roses. Simpson voices stronger opinions on this subject: “One cannot honestly say that roses are at home in Florida.” Though he has been “hauled up and criticized repeatedly” for this statement, he maintains he can “only repeat and even add to it.” He acknowledges that, “They can be grown successfully”(his italics). Remember that the writers are not talking about our modern hybrid teas, but what we now call “antique roses” — supposedly the easy ones.

Simpson grumbles that his three types of butterfly bushes are all of “weedy appearance” and “unsatisfactory.” His lemon verbena? “Utterly failed.” Hoya? “It has not succeeded.”

“Over nearly all the state insect life is abundant and somewhat aggressive,” Simpson says with understatement rare for him. He offers the still-sound advice of adding native mosquito fish to fern pools.

“The state has a reputation for poor land that is well merited,” he complains. His remedy? The same as ours: cover crops and compost.

“One of the greatest scourges the cultivator must contend with is root knot, caused by a Nematode worm,” Simpson writes. His solution? Heavy mulch.

“In January, 1924, there was an usual and unexpected frost,” write Wilson and Ferguson with the sadness we still know well, “and in all the northern part of Florida the gardens were stricken and treasures lost.” Looking on the bright side, they hope the freeze will cure gardeners of zone denial.

“It was a hard but much-needed lesson,” they say. “Too many tender tropical plants had been used and the equally- beautiful hardy ones forgotten.”

Will we ever learn?

Bill Pitts lives and gardens in DeLand.

© 2010 Bill Pitts. Originally published in Florida Gardening, Feb/Mar 2010. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.