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Events
Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
Jun. 30 | 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies Teaching, Advising, and Program Development due
Oct. 1 | Travel Grants for Graduate Students
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Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
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Veder, Robin Maremant. "How Gardening Pays: Leisure, Labor and Luxury in Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Culture," American Studies Program, College of William and Mary, December 2000.
In the United States during the second half of the nineteenth century, flower gardening was popularly described as an anti-materialistic and morally improving occupation. This case study shows that this ideology was premised upon early-nineteenth-century British working-class flower gardening for profitable leisure and labor reform. British urban Protestant weavers, particularly the militant silk-weavers of Spitalfields, London, practiced floristry as an integral and profitable part of workshop culture. When artisanal floristry declined with the onset of industrialization, agricultural and industrial capitalists reinterpreted and revived flower-gardening as a rational recreation that prevented labor riots and the formation of trade unions. Such reform efforts were often thwarted by surviving traditions of working-class floristry and the rising interest in flowers as fashionable luxuries. These conflicting circumstances materially and ideologically shaped the development of commercial horticulture in the northeastern United States via imported texts and the network of British horticulturists who immigrated to Philadelphia at mid-century. Consequently, parlor gardening is shown to have emerged as a bourgeois translation of the techniques of artisan florists, the rhetoric of flower gardening as rational recreation, and elite consumption of flowers as luxury goods.
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