Edna King Mandeville

Of the Mandeville & King Seed Co., plus how I do my research

Print from Library of Congress

I thought it might be interesting for you to see how I discover and research these Lost Ladies of Garden Writing. Follow along as I find out about Edna King Mandeville, another Lost Lady of Garden Writing.

How Do I Find Lost Ladies of Garden Writing

I found Edna King Mandeville—I’ll refer to her as Edna for the rest of this article—when I was looking for information on another writer, Algine Neely. I saw Edna’s name in a byline on a newspaper gardening page, where I was reading another article by Algine. I added her to my Trello board¹ for later research.

Other sources for Lost Ladies are my own library, suggestions from others, and random encounters in used bookstores. Occasionally, I also sometimes go searching for a writer who meets a specific set of criteria, like when I went looking for garden writers from Indiana and found Zila A. Robbins.

Piecing Together a Biography

To find these Lost Ladies’ biographies, I start with a simple online search. Sometimes that leads to a Wikipedia article about them. That usually makes the rest of the research easier, though I like to find extra info not on Wikipedia, so it also means I need to dig a little deeper. Also, if I do find a Wikipedia article, I like to double-check some of the facts, just to be sure they’re accurate.

In Edna’s case, there was no Wikipedia article, but the search did toss up a Find-A-Grave listing. Based on that, I’ve figured out that she was probably born in 1879 and died in 1966 in Rochester, New York, if she’s the only “Edna King Mandeville.”

My next search is usually on Newspapers.com, a paid subscription I keep to do this type of research. If I’m lucky, I find an obituary. When it mentions that the person wrote about gardening, so much the better. Though sometimes, obituaries are rather brief and just tell a few details about when and where the funeral service will take place.

Here’s Edna’s obituary from the June 13, 1966 edition of the Democrat and Chronicle, Rochester, New York:

“Miss Edna King Mandeville, 86, chairman of the board of Mandeville & King Co., seed distributor, and a life member of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, died unexpectedly Friday (June 10, 1966) at home, 1640 East Ave.

Miss Mandeville was a member of a pioneer Rochester family. Her maternal grandfather, Johnathan King, came here from Massachusetts in 1825.

Miss Mandeville, the daughter of Wilbur J. Mandeville, a co-founder of the seed company, was president many years before becoming board chairman in the early 1950s.

Her father bought the seed company, then at 1040 University Ave., from John Boardman in 1874 and in 1879 entered into a partnership with his brother-in-law, Herbert S. King, under the name of Mandeville & King Co.

Mr. King died in 1890 and Mr. Mandeville died several years later. Miss Mandeville then became head of the company, which was moved to 1250 University about 10 years ago.

Miss Mandeville attended the Nichols School, a private school here for girls; a private school in Buffalo, and Miss Farmer’s School of Cookery in Boston.

She is survived by a brother, Arthur W. Mandeville of Mt. Vernon, a nephew, Capt. Dean Mandeville, stationed at Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas., and a niece, Mrs. Bernard Weston Morosco of Irvington.”

This obituary gives us a tie into the horticultural world—a seed company—and also opens up a couple of possible rabbit holes. What became of the seed company? Why did Edna become the chairman of the board and not her brother? Plus, what type of school is the Nichols School? And I’d love to know more about Miss Farmer’s School of Cookery in Boston.

Via a simple search, I found out that Miss Farmer’s School of Cookery in Boston was started by Fannie Farmer in 1902, so Edna was probably among her first students. (Fannie Farmer is on Wikipedia, but everyone knows who she was, right?)

Next, with or without a good obituary, I check Ancestry.com to verify what I’ve learned so far and add other interesting information.

Via Ancestry.com, I now know Edna was born on November 9, 1879, and died on June 11, 1966. That is consistent with her obituary (one day off on the death date) and her grave marker. I also discovered that she had a younger sister, along with her younger brother, who we know of from her obituary. Her younger sister was born in 1881 and died in 1932.

Via Ancestry.com, I can also check census records. In the 1925 census records, Edna, her sister Lois, and her brother Arthur are all living together. In the 1930 census, it’s just Edna and Lois. Their mother died in 1921. One interesting thing about census records is that what Ancestry shows you is often wrong or misleading due to not being transcribed correctly. I usually go back and check the handwritten source document if something looks “off.” For example, in the 1925 record, it shows Edna as 40 years old, but she’s really 45. In the 1930 census, it shows her correct age as 50 years old.

Sometimes, when I have some time and am just being nosy, I’ll also look up the addresses I find in the census records. Occasionally, I find a picture of what I think is a lost lady’s original house, at least how it looks today. I don’t usually publish those exact addresses out of respect for the privacy of any current owners. (Okay, yes, I made an exception with her obituary above. I looked up her address, and it looks like an old apartment building.)

Once I’ve decided I have enough biographical information, I start researching our Lost Lady’s writing life.

Finding Her Writing

If I don’t have a book written by the Lost Lady in my library, or I didn’t discover her by stumbling on an online copy of her book, I do several searches to find books.

First, I usually search archive.org and openlibrary.org using the author’s name. In Edna’s case, the only thing I found was a brochure listing all of the seeds offered by her family’s seed company, which were sold through retail outlets, not via mail order.

I also search on books.google.com with the Lost Lady’s name. This sometimes leads to old articles they’ve written, or gives me snippet views of where they were quoted. For Edna, I got one snippet view of a recent book in which she is mentioned, and lots of references to the seed company, which advertised “triple-tested seeds!”

I’ll also search bookfinder.com with the author’s name. If a book is for sale anywhere, you can almost always find it via that website. If I have time, I might also search eBay. You just never know what’s out there. For Edna, eBay offered up several old seed boxes used to display the Mandeville & King seeds.

Unfortunately, I didn’t find any books written by Edna. Was she really a writer? Did she write just the one article I found while searching for something else?

One more search on newspapers.com and I’m assured that Edna was a garden writer. There are thousands of results, mostly, I think, because her articles were published across the country for decades.

Reading Samples of Her Writing

Next, I try to read some of what the Lost Lady of Garden Writing wrote, and decide how it relates to us today. Not surprisingly, most of Edna’s articles are about flowers because that’s what her seed company sold and what she seemed to know the most about. I found numerous articles she wrote about new flower varieties that came out each year. I found another article where she wrote about hybrid flowers, explaining what they were and why those seeds were more expensive. If a flower can easily be grown from seed, chances are good that Edna wrote about it.

For example, I found a charming article she wrote in 1965—which means she was writing about flowers well into her 80s—about grandma’s garden, “Grandma Would Find Her Garden Changed.”

“Walk with me in grandmother’s garden to a world of yesterday where peace and tranquility are disturbed only by the buzz of honeybees or the speeding wings of a hummingbird. Yesterday cannot be brought back, but seeds for many of the flowers in grandmother’s garden are still available in the seed assortment at your favorite store.”

I can imagine someone writing something like that today. Don’t we still long for those old-fashioned, flower-filled gardens?

I also discovered from one of Edna’s articles that the green Zinnia, ‘Envy,’ was introduced in 1965. It got quite a bit of attention at the time.

Finding Good Pictures

One of my goals in doing my research is to find a picture of the Lost Lady. Sometimes, as in the case of Edna, I can’t find one. Though she probably wrote hundreds (no kidding, at least that many!) of articles for newspapers, I never found a picture of her. My usual sources include all those I searched earlier, plus the back covers of any books they may have written.

If I find a picture on Ancestry.com, I don’t use it. I consider those to be private, something a family member added for their own use, plus I think it is a violation of the terms & conditions of Ancestry to download photos that aren’t your own.

Another nice discovery is finding where someone has written a newspaper article about the lost lady. That gives me more insight into who she was as a person. Unfortunately, no one seems to have written about Edna, at least as far as I know. Did I mention there are thousands of newspapers with her byline? Any article about her is probably buried deep in those archives.

Deciding What Else I Could Research

Once I have some basic info, I decide if I need to do some related searches. For Edna, I could do more research on the Mandeville & King Seed Company, reach out to local historians in Rochester, New York for family info, or check one of several books I have on women in horticulture, garden writing, etc. I did check a couple of those books and didn’t find anything about Edna.

And then there’s the fact that Edna was running the family business at a time when women weren’t often running businesses. I’m sure there’s a story there if one could only find it.

Watching Out For Rabbit Holes

One of the dangers/delights of researching these garden writers is you never know what paths they might send you down. In Edna’s case, she wrote an article titled “Seeds Being Irradiated” in 1961.

“I certainly never expected to see the day when the wondrous effects of atomic energy could be observed in my own back yard. But now it has happened—and without the slightest danger, too! In line with government policy of promoting the peaceful uses of atomic energy, flower and vegetable seeds are now being irradiated with the gamma rays of Cobalt-60. And this spring for the first time, a seed house of high standing is offering atomic irradiated flower and vegetable seeds for sale in retail stores throughout the country.

So many questions come to mind. Was that her seed company offering those “atomic flower seeds?” How safe were they? After they were irradiated, could you safely handle them? What about where they irridated them? Are those areas still off-limits to people? Feel free to do your own searches on “atomic gardening” if you are curious, but let me tell you, it’s quite the fascinating rabbit hole. Here’s an article called, "Gamma Gardens: Atomic Plant Breeding,” to get you started or head over to Wikipedia.

Moving On To the Next Lost Lady

I hope you’ve enjoyed meeting Edna and learning a little about my process for researching and writing about these Lost Ladies of Garden Writing. If you have some ideas or tips to help me in my research (some secret website I don’t know about, for example), let me know.

And as always, if you know of a Lost Lady of Garden Writing that I should do more research on, let me know via email or a comment. I have a separate tab with an indexed list of everyone I’ve written about so far (Edna is number 53!) and a list of those I could potentially write about (40 or so entries on that list.) If you see someone on the potential list that you really want me to research next, let me know.

For the time being, I’m focusing on American women garden writers, mostly because of the online resources available to me. I can only search U.S. newspapers and Ancestry.

I’ll be back in two weeks, on September 3, with another Lost Lady of Garden Writing!

(One final, last question that I did a bit of research on. Was Edna related to Henry Mandeville (1773-1861), a British diplomat and gardener, for whom the genus Mandevilla is named? As far as I can tell, at least not directly! I feel like, given the history they included in her obituary, if she had been a descendant, they would have included that fact.)

1. Trello is an online organizing tool where I keep all of the links and ideas for the Lost Ladies,