Growing "Flower City"
Nurserymen and Horticulture in Nineteenth-Century Rochester, New York
Dissipated Habits
How many a fine farm have we all known not half cultivated growing comparatively wild...
Patrick Barry
Productiveness
Land
Labor
Capital
Rochester, NY (1838)
- Alexis de Tocqueville
he will plant a garden and rent it just as the trees are coming into bearing; he will clear a field and leave others to reap the harvest; he will take up a profession and leave it, settle in one place and soon go off elsewhere
transforms what is only a tame meadow and a bleak aspect into an Eden of interest and delights… It gives a bit of soil, too insignificant to find a place in the geography of the earth’s surface, such an importance in the eyes of its possessor that he finds it more attractive than countless acres of unknown and unexplored ‘territory.'
"Planted one tree where we should have planted
Twenty
...allowed weeds to grow up around doors and windows, instead of
Flowers.
-Patrick Barry
there are few places within the limits of our city, where an hour can be spent more profitably and pleasantly than at the Mount Hope Garden
Mount Hope Nursery Sales (1845)
1845 Sales
1855 Sales
The influence of commercial gardens on the neighborhood where they are situated is one of the best proofs of the growth of taste…Take Rochester, N.Y., for instance—which, at the present moment, has perhaps the largest and most active nurseries in the Union
- A.J. Downing
ASLE
By Camden Burd
