Katherine Whiteside

This is a good resource for anyone wanting to plant a historical 18th or 19th century garden in North America, replete with the flowers that European settlers, particularly English settlers, found comforting and beautiful. With the growing urgency to take steps to plant flowers and trees that nurture the insects which sustain wild birds, I’m now planting flowers native to my part of Ontario and finding them more beautiful than the English garden, especially when covered with butterflies.

Also, I was appalled by the chapter on purple loosestrife, encouraging readers to plant a flower which presents a serious threat to wetlands and is publicized by the government of Ontario (among others) as an invasive plant which should never be planted in gardens. The author acknowledges that its escape from garden plantings has been deleterious but claims that plants bought in nurseries are no threat whatsoever. This naïveté would be endearing if it wasn’t so dangerous. Wikipedia says only that “in some cases”, nursery stock is sterile: not invariably. And the stuff spreads by means of rhizomes as well, actually clogging watercourses. It’s extremely irresponsible to dismiss the threat of introducing purple loosestrife to the home garden and if I were using this book as a reference for planning an historical garden, I’d carefully check the advisability of using any plant suggested.… (mehr)