Southern Plant Lists - Southern Garden History Society

INTRODUCTION
Plants are the major component of any garden, and it is paramount to understanding the
history of gardens and gardening to know the history of plants. For those interested in the garden history
of the American south, the provenance of plants in our gardens is a continuing challenge. A number of
years ago the Southern Garden History Society set out to create a ‘southern plant list’ featuring the dates
of introduction of plants into horticulture in the South. This proved to be a daunting task, as the date of
introduction of a plant into gardens along the eastern seaboard of the Middle Atlantic States was different
than the date of introduction along the Gulf Coast, or the Southern Highlands. To complicate maters, a
plant native to the Mississippi River valley might be brought in to a New Orleans gardens many years
before it found its way into a Virginia garden.
A more logical project seemed to be to assemble a broad array plant lists, with lists from
each geographic region and across the spectrum of time. The project’s purpose is to bring together in one
place a base of information, a data base, if you will, that will allow those interested in old gardens to
determine the plants available and popular in the different regions at certain times. This manual is the
fruition of a joint undertaking between the Southern Garden History Society and the Colonial
Williamsburg Foundation.
In choosing lists to be included, I have been rather ruthless in expecting that the lists be
specific to a place and a time. Some lists are more specific than others, as an example, the Bernard
McMahon lists of 1802 and 1806 are a nurseryman’s seed list, an exhaustive list of every seed he had
available and every seed that he thought he could obtain for resale. While we know that McMahon in
Philadelphia sold seeds in the South, we do not know if a specific garden had which plants. Having
considered that, it is important to know that these seeds were available in 1802 and 1806. It is also
interesting to ponder varieties in the 1802 list that didn’t make it into the 1806 list, and vice versa.
Peter Hatch from Charlottesville supplied a number of 18th and 19th century nurserymen’s
advertisements from Virginia newspapers. It stands to reason that nurserymen were advertising the most
popular plants and those varieties in which they had the best supply. Likewise George Stritikus from
Montgomery has ferreted out a number of lists of plants from herbariums and scrapbooks that, while
being rather modest, suggests what was planted in the gardens of mid-19th century Alabama.
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