Alice Morse Earle
Old Time Gardens
When an herbalist gardening friend told me that Old Time Gardens by Alice Morse Earle was one of the most influential books she’d read as a gardener, I decided to take a closer look at my copy of that book. It’s been sitting on my bookshelf for many years, waiting for me to open it and check it out.
Her Biography
I had no problem finding information about Alice Morse Earle, who is better known as a historian than a garden writer.
From the Dartmouth Historical and Arts Society:
Alice Morse Earle (April 27, 1851 – February 16, 1911) was an American historian and author from Worcester, Massachusetts. She was christened Mary Alice by her parents Edwin Morse and Abby Mason Clary. On 15 April 1874, she married Henry Earle of New York City, changing her name from Mary Alice Morse to Alice Morse Earle. Her writings, beginning in 1890, focused on small sociological details rather than grand details, and thus are invaluable for modern social historians. She wrote a number of books on colonial America and especially the New England region.
She was a passenger aboard the RMS Republic when, while in a dense fog, that ship collided with the SS Florida. During the transfer of passengers, Alice fell into the water. Her near drowning in 1909 off the coast of Nantucket during this abortive trip to Egypt weakened her health sufficiently that she died two years later, in Hempstead, Long Island.1
She had four children. One of her children, Alice Clary Earle Hyde was a botanical illustrator. (Perhaps a lost lady for another day?) She dedicated her book, Old Time Gardens (1901), to her, using this knot illustration. You have to read slowly and follow the knot to figure it out!
I poked around a bit on ancestry.com and discovered that Alice lived in Brooklyn, New York, on Henry Street for most of her adult life. Looking at the pictures of that location today, I suspect Alice didn’t have a garden of her own. Or if she did, it wasn’t very big. Her husband, Henry, died in 1906, five years before Alice died.
But living in what appears to be an apartment building should not disqualify her from writing her Old Time Gardens, nor the follow-up book Sun-dials and Roses of Yesterday (1902) which are as much history as gardening.
Her Books
Wikipedia has a long list of the books written by Alice, beginning with The Sabbath in Puritan New England, published in 1891, and ending with Two Centuries of Costume in America, 1620 -1820 (2 volumes), published in 1903. In between are 14 other books, including the two we are most interested in: Old Time Gardens (1901) and Sun-dials and Roses of Yesterday (1902).
(Yes, we might also be a little interested in Curious Punishments of Bygone Days (1896). But we’ll save that for another day and focus on her two books about gardening.)
Old Time Gardens
When I told a friend I was checking into a book about old-time gardens written in 1901, we both wondered what the author considered “old time” 125 years ago. Alice’s “old time” was referring to colonial times in America, which is what most of her other books are about. She starts with a story of the pilgrims:
“After ten wearisome weeks of travel across an unknown sea, to an equally unknown world, the group of Puritan men and women who were the founders of Boston, neared their Land of Promise; and their noble leader, John Winthrop, wrote in his Journal that “we had now fair Sunshine Weather and so pleasant a sweet Aire as did much refresh us, and there came a smell off the Shore like the Smell of a Garden.”
A Smell of a Garden was the first to welcome our ancestors from their new home; and a pleasant and perfect emblem it was of the life that awaited them.”
The book contains 22 chapters with information on everything you might want to know about old time gardens, including some information that is puzzling, like the chapter titled “Joan Silver-pin.”
“Garden Poppies were the Joan Silver-pin of Gerarde, stigmatized also by Parkinson as "Jone Silver-pinne, subauditur ; faire without and foule within."
I’ve never heard anyone refer to poppies as Joan Silver-pin but after a bit of looking up, I found a reference to it in the Merriam-Webster dictionary online.
Alice certainly knew her history so if you like history and gardens, it is worth reading her book from 1901, which is fortunately readily available to read online.
Sun-dials and Roses of Yesterday
Alice says she wrote her second book, Sun-dials and Roses of Yesterday (1902), because so many people, even strangers, wrote to ask more about sun-dials, which she covered in one chapter in Old Time Gardens. She dedicated her second book to her daughter, Mary.
She starts the first chapter, The Charm and Sentiment of Sun-Dials, with this quote:
“A Dial is the Visible Map of Time, till Whose Invention 'twas follie in the Sun to play with a Shadow. It is the Anatomie of the Day and a Scale of Miles for the Jornie of the Sun. It is the silent Voice of Time and without it the Day were dumbe….It is ye Book of ye Sun on which he writes the Storie of the Day. Lastly Heaven itself is but a generall Dial, and a Dial it, in a lesser volume.” — Heliotropum Sciotbericum, ROBERT HEGGE, 16302.
She follows with chapters on just about anything and everything you might want to know about sun-dials… classifications, construction, types, suitable mottos to put on them, etc. There are also a few chapters on roses, but they are some of the last chapters, along with a chapter titled “Rural Saints and Prophets.” She quotes Abraham Lincoln at the beginning of that chapter:
“Die when I may, I want it said of me by those who knew me best, that I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower where I thought a flower would grow.” - A. Lincoln”
How Best To Read Alice Morse Earle’s Books?
If you go back and check out the Dartmouth site, you’ll find they’ve provided links to digital copies of many of Alice’s books. If you love reading about old gardens and learning the lore of old flowers and gardeners, I think you’ll enjoy them in bits and pieces. Find a chapter you are interested in and dive in for some gardening, some history, and some interesting quotes. But be aware that Alice didn’t use botanical names—just common names for most plants—so sometimes you have to do a little digging to figure out which plant she’s talking about.
Like Broom flower, which she describes as “the emblem of mid-summer, the hottest yellow flower I know — it seems to throw out heat.” I think it is likely Cytisus scoparius, Scotch broom, which is now considered a noxious weed in most places in the United States, but I digress.
I’ve enjoyed this brief time spent with Alice and her gardening books. I hope you also have a chance to read and enjoy her books. You’ll learn some old-time gardening lore in the process.
Do you know of other women authors of gardening related books that I should research as Lost Ladies of Garden Writing? Send them my way via a comment or email!
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I’ll return with the next Lost Lady of Garden Writing article in two weeks, on January 22. In the meantime, you can find me in several other places online: my website and blog, The Gardenangelists podcast, and my weekly newsletter, In the Garden With Carol.
That shipwreck is a rabbit hole! Per several newspaper articles. “The RMS Republic is one of the world's more famous shipwrecks because it involved the use of Marconi's wireless radio to send and receive messages during the disaster. Due to the use of Marconi's device, rescuers and newspaper reporters were able to receive updates on the situation at sea. The sinking of the RMS Republic was the world's first event to be covered “live.” Also, there are still rumors that the ship was carrying gold coins, “now worth over a billion dollars, bought by the Bank of France to help Russia's Czar Nicholas II fight the Bolsheviks.” I stopped researching at that point so I don’t know if anyone recovered that gold earlier this century. I’m researching garden writers, after all!
Robert Hegge (1599-1629) wrote a Treatise on Dials and Dialing, “in which book is the representation of a dial in Corpus Christi College Garden, made by Nicholas Kratzer, with a short Discourse upon it.” It is not available online, but his work The Legend of St. Cuthbert is on archive.org.
Loved looking back in time to connect with a lady gardener!