Gertrude B. Foster
Herbs For Every Garden!
I purchased Herbs for Every Garden, by Gertrude B. Foster (1966, E. P. Dutton & Co.) at a local antique mall. I think. I’m not sure. It’s certainly been on my bookshelf for quite a while, and since Gertrude was new to me when I started to look up information about her, I don’t think I sought out her book in particular.
So the book must have sat on a shelf, probably for several years, until I pulled it out and decided to do some research on Gertrude B. Foster, known to all her family and friends as Bunny.
She was fairly easy to find online, once I started my search. I found her obituary, a few blog posts by her daughter, and some newspaper clippings without too much effort. I also found a few loose ends and interesting tidbits.
Her Biography
Her obituary appeared in the New York Times in November 1997, and from it we learn that she was born on November 17, 1920 in Morristown, New Jersey to Putnam and Emeline Bates. She was married to Philip W. Foster. Together, they started Laurel Hill Herb Farm in Morristown in 1942 and then moved to Falls Village, Connecticut, in 1946.
Bunny and her husband started The Herb Grower magazine in 1947, which appears to have launched her award-winning writing career:
“She wrote extensively for horticultural and popular publications, including the garden section of The New York Times. She traveled widely, lecturing on herbs, their culture and uses. She was an Honorary Life Member of the Herb Society of America, and received its Helen DeConway Little Medal of Honor, for outstanding contributions to horticulture in 1975. She was also a Fellow of the Royal Horticultural Society, member of the American Horticultural Society, and the Connecticut Botanical Society.” (New York Times, November 29, 1997.)
To further honor Bunny, The Herb Society of America established the Gertrude B. Foster Award for Excellence in Herbal Literature in 1998. “The award honors those who have published a scholarly study of herbs.”
Bunny had a son and a daughter, and both were also writers. Her daughter, Rosemary, had a blog at one time with a few posts, including one about her parents’ garden, and another post about her mother. Her son, Christopher, known as Kit, wrote a blog post about Bunny in 2005.
Mother Earth Living also posted an excellent article about Bunny in 2009.
She died in 1997.
Clearly, Bunny may have been “lost” to some of us, but she is certainly well remembered in the world of herbal garden writing.
How They Got Started with Herbs
Bunny told the story of how she and her husband got started with herbs in an article published in the New York Times on October 7, 1979.
“We were renting a small place near a highway,” Mrs. Foster recalled. “We put out a sign saying ‘Plants,’ but no one bought them. The average American knew nothing about herbs at that time. So we collected the seeds and sold those, for 10 cents a packet.”
It was wartime, and supplies of seeds that used to come from abroad had been cut off; the Fosters began Laurel Hill Herb Farm, which they describe as the first place in this country to offer herb seeds exclusively. With mail orders came requests for information, and the Fosters wondered if there might be interest in a magazine; the mimeographed prospectus they sent out brought more than 300 subscribers.
The article continues:
“That was the start of The Herb Grower Press, the small business they had dreamed of starting…After some years, Gertrude and Philip Foster were able to realize another dream: a move to northwestern Connecticut, an area he had loved since childhood. They rented a small house, dug up their plants (by then they had some 200 species of herbs) and moved themselves, their two children, their furnishings and their printing equipment. By that time, Mr. Foster had decided that doing business with printers was expensive and irksome and had started producing the magazine himself.
“We had no money at all,” said Mrs. Foster, “and Phil had the inventiveness to be able to do it.”
He still does all the printing in the basement and takes all the photographs and processes them himself. He has also reprinted a number of rare 18th‐ and 17th‐century herbals, almanacs that had been unavailable in modern times. Mrs. Foster is writer and editor for The Herb Grower Press; she has written numerous pamphlets and a book, “Herbs for Every Garden,” which was published by E. P. Dutton.”
The Gerard Society
One of the other interesting items I found online was a letter written in 1956 to Helen Keller by Bunny on letterhead for “The Gerard Society - To Spread the Knowledge of Plants, Past, Present and Future.” I was intrigued by this Gerard Society but found very little information about it, even with the help of a garden writing friend, Teresa Watkins, who did her own deep dive.
I assume the Gerard Society was named after Gerard’s Herball (first published in 1597) and that it faded away after Bunny’s death.
So Many Herb Garden Writers
Once I started looking through all the garden writers who specialized in herbs, I found that those from the same time period seemed to all know each other. Bunny mentioned both Rosetta E. Clarkson and Anne Ophelia Dowden, two previous Lost Ladies of Garden Writing, in the acknowledgement of her book. She wrote that it was Rosetta who gave her a copy of Gerard’s Herball, along with other rare herb books. She had conversations with Anne about herbs while Anne was painting illustrations for another book.
I learned more about Bunny’s personality in this snippet in the Mother Earth Living article:
“Gertrude Foster, or Bunny as her friends knew her, was the antithesis of renowned herb expert Adelma Simmons in every way, except for their shared passion for herbs. Bunny was quiet, conservative and earnest, qualities that were leavened by a sense of humor. Where Adelma inspired a generation by her stimulating herbal luncheons at Caprilands Herb Farm in Coventry, Connecticut, her flamboyant appearance and atmospheric plantings, Bunny was a private person, immersed in her family, correspondence and her gardens in Falls Village, Connecticut.”
I featured Adelma Simmons as a Lost Lady last year.
Her Books:
Bunny wrote Herbs For Every Garden (1966). Another book often listed is It Is Easy to Grow Herbs (1950), but most used book sites list it as a pamphlet, one she published herself through The Herb Grower Press.
She also wrote another book, Park Seed’s Success With Herbs (1980), with her daughter, Rosemary Louden. But most of her writing was done for The Herb Grower, the quarterly magazine she and her husband Phil published as “a labor of love.” Apparently the magazine, published for four decades, never accepted advertising and was not profitable. It was, per Mother Earth Living’s article, a labor of love.
Questions
After reading all the articles about Bunny, the only question I have is what became of The Gerard Society?
But now I’ll be on the lookout for old copies of The Herb Grower, which may pop up occasionally in places where they sell old books and magazines, perhaps on eBay. And it is possible that I might find articles written by Bunny in those 1959 Horticulture magazines I have, or maybe in the earliest editions of The Herb Companion magazine from 1996. I’ll start looking, leaving you with this quote from her book, Herbs for Every Garden.
“The herbs you grow will allow you to embark on the adventure of gourmet dining if you use them well.”
Do you know of other women authors of gardening 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. In the meantime, you can find me in several places: my website and blog, The Gardenangelists podcast, and my weekly newsletter, In the Garden With Carol.
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