Dorothy Mallet-Prevost Cloud and Katharine Mallet-Prevost Cloud
Sisters!
I presented about lost ladies of herbal and garden writing last week to the Herb Society of America and someone asked about Helen Morganthau Fox. She’s been on my list for a while. Perhaps that question was the nudge I needed to write about her? When I looked her up in my notes, I discovered, again, that she was once the chairwoman of a committee that put together a collection titled: Gardens & Gardening: A Selected List of Books Prepared by The Garden Club of America, The Horticultural Society of New York, and the New York Public Library, published in 1927.
Not even weeds taking over my garden on a sunny day could keep me from looking through an online copy of that book again to find more Lost Ladies of Garden Writing.
And that’s how I found Dorothy Mallet-Prevost Cloud and her book, The Culture of Perennials (1925). For some reason, she intrigued me. Then I found her sister, who also wrote a few books, and now this article is about the Cloud sisters. (Helen M. Fox will have to wait a few more weeks1)
Their Biographies
Dorothy and Katharine are two of three sisters involved in the horticultural world. Their other sister, Beatrice, did not write any books, as far as I can tell, but was a landscaper.
Beatrice was born in May 1887, Dorothy in October 1888, and Katharine in August 1894. They also had an older half-sister, Elizabeth, born in 1877.
They were the daughters of Edward Cloud and Ysabel Mallet-Prevost Cloud, who sometimes showed up in various searches as Esabel or Isabel, but on official records, she seems to be Ysabel. Per ancestry records, Ysabel, who was born in Mexico, died in 1930 in Rome while on a trip with her daughters.
In the 1950 census, Beatrice, Dorothy, and Katharine were living together in a shared home in Ardmore, Pennsylvania. Beatrice’s occupation was listed as landscaping, but the census didn’t record Dorothy and Katharine’s occupations. However, we know Dorothy and Katharine wrote gardening books. We also know one other piece of biographical information from their books. They all attended the Pennsylvania School of Horticulture for Women.
And as far as I can tell, the three sisters always lived together and never got married.
Beatrice died in July 1963, Katharine in December 1978, and Dorothy in October 1979. They are buried with their parents in the Church of the Redeemer Cemetery in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.
Their Books
As noted, Dorothy wrote The Culture of Perennials, published in 1925. In it, she wrote,
“Of all the gifts with which Nature has endowed the plant world, there are none lovelier than the perennials which fill the principal place in the garden, and like old friends reappear from year to year, always impressing us anew with their grace and beauty.
The book is mostly filled with cultural information for a long list of perennials, along with information on propagation, how to use them in a garden, and how to control pests. Reading through her book, I am reminded again why we should never follow old-time pesticide suggestions. I don’t know where you would even find whale oil soap in the 21st century, and arsenate of lead just sounds too deadly to even handle.
Katharine wrote four books that I found: Practical Flower Gardening (1926), The Cultivation of Shrubs (1927), Evergreen and Flowering Shrubs For Your Home (1957), and Evergreens for Every State: How to Select and Grow Them Successfully in Your Locality (1960).
In The Cultivation of Shrubs, Katharine wrote,
”The planting of shrubs constitutes one of the most important features in the artistic development of a landscape, affording as they do a great variety in color, form and foliage, an intimate knowledge of the many kinds of shrubs available for use is a study which should not be overlooked by any who are striving to improve or to develop their surroundings.”
The rest of the book includes descriptions of various shrubs and how to use them in hedges and landscapes.
I spent a little more time browsing Practical Flower Gardening online and discovered that, like many old books, there are dozens of rabbit holes to fall into as you discover plants, like Tausendschoen Roses, that you’ve never heard of before.
Still So Many Questions
I feel like I still don’t know the Cloud sisters as well as perhaps I should. I suspect they traveled to Europe a few times and otherwise made their living in the gardening world in and around Philadelphia.
I am also sorry that I don’t have a picture of them to share. There are a few old photos that have been uploaded to Ancestry.com, but those aren’t really in the public domain, so I won’t share them here. I also won’t share a picture of the home they lived in beginning in 1948, because someone is living there today. I found it online and looked at it via a real estate site. (It was just a drive-by look, as there weren’t pictures of the inside.)
If I’m ever browsing in an antique store or used bookshop and find one of their books, I’ll probably buy it, more out of curiosity than anything else. But that’s mostly why I buy these old books anyway.
Let me know if you’ve ever heard of the Cloud sisters and their work in the gardening world of the early 20th century. They may not be as interesting as Hedwig Michel, the last Lost Lady of Garden Writing I wrote about, but they, too, have a place in the garden writing world.
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!
And if you find these articles interesting and think others will, too, please share them and subscribe.
I’ll return with the next Lost Lady of Garden Writing article in two weeks, on May 14th. 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.
Special note: I'll be on the “Thursday Garden Chat” with Noel Kingsbury on Thursday, May 1, 2025, at 1:00 pm Eastern Time. This is for his podcast/YouTube channel, Garden Masterclass. To join live, go to their events page for details. Our topic is the Lost Ladies of Garden Writing, or as I now think of it, “Gardening with the Lost Ladies of Garden Writing.”
In the meantime, I ordered a “good used” copy of one of Helen Morganthau’s books and expect it any day now. I’ll write about her after I get the book.