American Gardens in the Eighteenth Century: For Use or For Delight

American Gardens in the Eighteenth Century: For Use or For Delight
by Ann Leighton
ISBN: 0-395-24764-0
Format: Hardcover with Dust Jacket, 514 pages
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company
Pub. Date: 1976
Dimensions:   9 x 6.2 x 1.5 inches
Weight: 2.5 pounds
Condition: Various (Refer to main bookstore category page for definitions)
List Price: Rare / Out of Print

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Description:  Ann Leighton planted and tended seventeenth century period gardens. Her books are extremely well researched, well documented, yet remain very readable. Focusing on the gardens of early New England settlers, this highlights the plants they depended upon for their household purposes from food to drinks to medicines. In this handsome and copiously illustrated book Ann Leighton continues the exploration of gardening in colonial America that she began so delightfully in "Early American Gardens."

European settlers in the New World, wrestling homesteads from the coastal wilderness that stretched from New England to Georgia, came upon many new trees, flowers, fruits, grains and vegetables, and berries the uses and delights of which they often learned from the Indians. Transatlantic traffic in plants, seeds and seedlings quickly ensued -- one of the most intensive intercontinental exchanges of plants in the world's history, the consequences of which still affect our daily lives.

For the eighteenth-century homesteader, however, life itself depended upon his understanding of the plants that would best enable him to survive a North American winter. Not only humble farmers but colonial leaders, from William Penn to Washington and Jefferson, devoted much of their time to the study and cultivation of new-found plants. It is this burgeoning period of horticultural richness that Ann Leighton, after a lifetime of study, describes to the reader. For anyone interested in managing an 18th century period garden, the origins of gardening in the United States, in history, or in early agriculture, this book will become one of your treasures.