Search Results

This chapter discusses several books published in the 1650s, with serious attention given to horticulture. Pride of place in the literary effort to promote horticulture was given to John Evelyn because he exerted great influence over gardening. He wrote several books about horticulture and these include The French Gardener and Elysium Britanicum. Another book on horticulture had appeared by John Worlidge, including Systema Horticulturae. Ralph Austen and John Beale also contributed by publishing Herefordshire Orchards.

This chapter focuses on the importance of dairying, horticulture, and poultry-keeping as they entered on a new phase of enterprise in the years after 1879. Horticulture and poultry-keeping had been given a strong stimulus in the 16th century when contacts were strengthened with the food and farming traditions of Continental Europe. Dairying started to take its place in the agricultural industry around 1650. While the profits of grain and meat production were good enough, other branches of farming effort were not closely explored.

The main idea in this chapter is that the "love of plants should be inculcated in the school." While there "are many practical applications" for children to gain knowledge of "plants and horticulture," Bailey indicates that the knowledge is more than "information of plants themselves." Rather, such knowledge "takes one into the open air… It increases his hold on life." The chapter concludes with types of school gardens: ornamenting the grounds, establishing a collection, making a garden for instruction, and providing a test ground for new varieties.

The poetic entry for the term "Oak" from Bailey's Standard Cyclopedia of Horticulture is offered here. The oak "connects the present with the past. It spans the centuries." As elsewhere, the poetic and the scientific merge in this essay about this commonly known tree species.

Gourds are distinct both in that their autumn harvest "contains" the summer months and in that their use for domestic ornamentation carries them "through to the holidays and beyond." Bailey notes that the primary interest in gardening gourds and the development of their fruits belongs to "the gardener and the horticulturist."

This chapter explores the historical role of orange orchards in the contested process of rooting Jewish people in Palestine in the interwar period. It details the importance of asexual reproduction techniques like grafting and budding learned by Jewish horticulturalists from their Arab counterparts to the success of settlement communities. More than reproducing new forms of life, what was at stake was the ability of reproduction of sameness, of delivering to international markets always the same standardized orange – the shamouti, or Jaffa orange. Obsessions over degeneration of orange trees opened the door for experimenting with Californian methods for producing rootstocks and buds, or what Californian scientists called cloning, inaugurating the modern use of the term. Based on the scientific correspondence between agriculture scientists at the Rehovot Experiment station in Palestine and American breeders at the University of California Citrus Experiment Station in Riverside, the text traces the processes by which scientific discussions over how to properly reproduce oranges became discussions of how to differentiate modern Jewish orchards from alleged traditional Arab ones. In other words, engineering life through cloning sustained the vision of a divided Palestinian landscape, separating Jews from Arabs.

Chapter 7 examines how new improving organisms, fruit trees, moved into the landscape through commercial networks. Between 1820 and 1850, fruit landscapes changed dramatically—semi-wild seedlings gave way to named varieties, each the product of cuttings from a single tree. Fruit trees became relatively cheap markers of rural refinement, which sometimes descended traceably from aristocratic gardens, but also filled commercial orchards planted for domestic and global markets. Since fruit varieties reproduced only through human networks, they can show us the rising dominance of the nurserymen who came to refer to themselves as “pomologists.” Nurserymen struggled to create markets for named fruit, because varieties were easily confused and counterfeited and shifted their character as they were moved. Nurserymen partially stabilized varieties through the writing of books of description, the creation of profiles and systems of taste, and then finally, through huge pomological conventions at which they battled over and rated fruit. Their efforts to fix value borrowed from other features of the antebellum economy, like counterfeit detectors, and credit ratings. Ultimately, tensions between marketability and connoisseurship produced at best, uneasy compromises about the nature of value, compromises continually disturbed by the stream of novelties on which the tree market depended.

This chapter explores interwar suburban gardening. There were some four million new suburban gardens created over this period and probably, at least as many new gardeners. Gardening became a mass leisure activity for the first time, while suburban gardens also served a number of other valuable functions, such as growing produce. This chapter examines the range of attitudes among suburban families towards gardens which could be seen as a resource and/or a chore. Garden provision by local authorities and speculative housing developers is reviewed. Typical uses of the front and back garden are then discussed, together with sources of gardening materials and advice; garden styles, designs, and functions; and the role of gardens in encouraging both neighbourly cooperation, rivalry, and, in some cases, resentment.

Industrialists exploited the powerful cultural, symbolic and metaphorical meanings of gardens and parks to ‘engineer’ particular feelings, ideas, modes of behaviour and well-being amongst employees and consumers, particularly women. Gardens and landscaping had at times been employed for these means since the beginning of the factory system, but by the end of the century, landscaping at factories was becoming more sophisticated in terms of design and amenity. In America from the 1880s and to a lesser extent in Britain from the 1900s, the expertise of professional landscapists with specialist design and horticultural knowledge made it possible to enhance the beauty, function and symbolic value of the available space with the ultimate aims of increasing productivity and profit. Whilst promoted as a means to create a healthy environment, the union of gardens and factories was a form of social engineering to manipulate employees and to promote industrial capitalism as healthy, respectable, responsible and sustainable; therefore gardens and parks became agencies of control.

This chapter discusses Oshosi/Ochosi (minor God of Hunting), Orisha Oko/Oricha Oko (God of Horticulture and Farming), Ibeji/Ibeyi (the Sacred Twins), and Aganju/Agayú (ruler of the desert-like earth and owner of volcanoes). It also looks at minor Nigerian orishas who are also known in Cuba. Each god has their own worship practices, traditions, and myths in Africa and Cuba, which are discussed in detail in this chapter.

In Louisa May Alcott’s Work, the independent-minded protagonist Christie Devon learn the limits of her self-sufficiency as a wage laborer in nineteenth-century America and is driven to the brink of suicide by financial and social dislocation. To recover her bodily and spiritual health, Devon moves to the country to work in a greenhouse that buffers her from the alienating and uprooting work in industrializing America. In the country, Devon works to heal herself within an economy of salvation that rejects the system of wage labor that rewards individuals who seek independence by accumulating private property. In Work, people learn to be themselves by producing the right kinds of dependence. Rather than free themselves from social forces, characters like Devon realize that their attempts to achieve freedom from social constraints are misplaced. Faced with harsh realities, they reframe their personal goals in terms of moral responsibility to change an unjust world.

Chapter 17 investigates the development of the Iranian institutions of estates and gardens. It examines the continuities and changes in the development of the paradise as well its ideological role from the Achaemenid to the Sasanian period.

Although species diversity may be a useful shorthand for addressing ecosystem health and function in relatively circumscribed areas, plant species richness and its effect in small designed landscapes in an urban matrix are not easily quantified. Functional and structural diversity at higher taxonomic levels are more appropriate measures for assessing diversity. Even when horticultural layouts include both remnant native species and appropriate introduced species, urban gardens do not contribute significantly to ecosystem function in cities or suburbs.

This chapter invites the reader to consider ways in which farm based dementia care may offer alternative ways of engaging in nature among settings such urban day centres. This chapter outlines the importance of sharing innovative practices which may challenge notions of dementia care and aims to provoke debate about diversification in dementia services for all.

Chapter 5 focuses on archaeological investigations along the Chickahominy River and a history of residential settlements, subsistence practices, and burial grounds during the Middle to Late Woodland transition. In the sixth century A.D., Native communities living along the Chickahominy River began to bury the deceased in communal burial grounds (ossuaries) located in the drainage’s swampy interior. During the Late Woodland period, new places were established along the Chickahominy with the construction of dispersed farmsteads, burial grounds, and a palisaded compound. In this history of placemaking we see evidence of the spatial practices whereby forager-fishers became the Chickahominy. As is apparent from colonial accounts of the Chickahominy, the “coarse-pounded corn people,” a horticultural economy was a part of this ethnogenetic process. Bioarchaeological study of skeletal remains from the Chickahominy, including stable isotope analysis, provides a basis for considering the history of maize-based horticulture in the region.

This chapter dives into a discussion on the need to increase the agricultural population to achieve a resilient food system. It highlights that this goal is not easy when the divide between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’ has widened: the comfortably middle-aged at one end and the assetless, with aspirations to work the land — and unable to find affordable housing — at the other. The chapter tackles the unique situation in the UK where houses in the countryside are more expensive than those in the cities. Furthermore, the chapter explores how the COVID-19 pandemic drove consumers to turn to small-scale producers and farm shops when supermarket shelves emptied. The chapter stresses the necessity of workable land and the need to ensure that potential new entrants to agriculture and horticulture can gain a first step on the farming ladder. Moreover, it acknowledges an inspirational movement created by local growers and producers who are creating short, field-to-fork supply chains around Britain.

The soils of western Europe are marked by superficial accumulation of organic matter as a result of its climate being temperate, rather wet, and leading to leaching and soil acidification. Soils are largely of Holocene age, many properties still being determined by their highly varied parent material. Even more prominent are the impacts of man in this densely populated and highly industrialized part of Europe, causing many soils to be partly or completely of anthropogenic origin. In this chapter, these main soil traits, their origin and distribution will be discussed, attention also being paid to the terminology used and its backgrounds. In the temperate, humid climate of western Europe, organic matter tends to decompose slowly, giving rise to accumulation of above-ground litter and to dark-coloured, humus-rich mineral topsoils. The retarded decomposition is associated with a low activity of soil biota and rather massive production of soluble organic acids, and particularly brought about by the prevailing site conditions such as relatively poor drainage, high precipitation, low temperature, and acid parent material. These site conditions are found over large tracts of western Europe, which therefore have acid, nutrient-poor soils with prominent accumulation of organic matter, such as Podzols and Histosols of the North European Lowlands, and Umbrisols of the middle and high altitude mountains. Bioturbation in these soils is generally weak and therefore soils have distinct horizons and a sharp boundary between the organic surface and mineral subsurface horizons, and thus exhibit large contrasts in soil properties with depth. Where parent materials are more basic and capable of neutralizing acids (e.g. limestone and marl) or climatic conditions are more favourable (e.g. in southern France), litter decomposition proceeds faster and soil biota are more active. In such soils, finely divided organic matter is intimately mixed with mineral material, litter layers are thin or absent and soil reaction tends to be neutral to slightly acid. Moreover, soil horizon differentiation is less prominent as a result of bioturbation, particularly by earthworms. The variation in topsoil properties is so prominent that it was immediately recognized in the early days of soil science and led to a still existing terminology for the description of topsoil organic matter.

This chapter discusses several economic empowerment programs that were specifically designed for women who have experienced various forms of trauma and abuse, or that have been adapted for use with this population. The chapter offers examples of especially innovative program and highlights a therapeutic horticulture program located at a battered women’s shelter. The chapter also reviews the available empirical evidence regarding the outcomes of these programs and implications for prevention of revictimization.