Seventeenth and eighteenth-century America had established nurseries—George Fenwick’s in Connecticut in the 1640s, John Bartram’s in Philadelphia (approximately 1729) and Robert Prince’s on Long Island (1737)—that traded plants to and from Europe. The owners were accomplished botanists and plant collectors.
Carrie H. Lippincott (featured in our previous post) exploited the potential that seed catalogs offer in a business setting. Ethel Z. Bailey recognized the potential of seed catalogs in an entirely different application: cultivated plant research. Ethel Z. Bailey, daughter of Liberty Hyde Bailey (botanist, a foremost leader in American horticulture, and the first dean of Cornell University’s College of Agriculture) and Annette Smith Bailey, was born in Ithaca, New York on November 17, 1889.
Recent reports indicate that the number of women-owned businesses have increased by 54% in the last fifteen years. But while we may be seeing a rise in the number and cultural acceptance of women-owned businesses today, this was not always the case.
When you think of an “heirloom plant”, you may be imagining a plant that has changed little in over a hundred years—something our great- great-grandparents would have farmed and eaten. However, the definition of an heirloom plant is a bit more fluid than that, and not only includes edibles but also plants such as flowers, herbs, bulbs, and shrubs. In fact, there is no singular consensus on how many years a plant has to have remained unchanged to be considered an heirloom. Some groups use cut-off dates—meaning dates after which the plant has not changed. For instance, 1940 is the cut-off date used by the Southern Exposure Seed Exchange in Virigina.
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