It dawned on me that in this situation I should be the one to write the book. Never mind that I knew no more than the average well-educated person about these trees, the notion kept going around and around in my head, giving me no peace. The result was The Olive in California: History of an Immigrant Tree.
Doing the research, and traveling all over the state to learn about its history and the stories of people who had grown olive trees all their lives, was so enriching that the book was almost just a bonus. Seven years at Oxford honed those skills. When you have to write an essay every week during term for four years about a wide range of scientific topics and defend them to your tutor, your writing develops a lot of polish.
He combines encyclopedic knowledge with a riveting narrative, a narrative which yet has a slight crisp edge to it. Kevin Starr is another model. His ability to see unique aspects of even quite ordinary events and clothe them in golden prose continues to amaze me. I was no longer merely a retired physician and tentative amateur, but now I had a clear goal and idea of where I was going. As you can tell, I delved into horticultural history and found several niches. Californians and Their Gardens, , was the result of finding an unpublished manuscript in a box in the archives at the University of California , Harry Butterfield's work formed the core of my book.
It required a great deal of augmentation and rewriting. I put both names on the cover when it appeared. How the World Got into Your Garden. I examined how many plants in our present gardens actually originate elsewhere. Using different sources of evidence, I satisfied myself that the descendants of exotic plants form the majority of plants sold and grown in the United States today.
- Taylor, Judith M. 1934-.
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They finally stopped when they reached the Pacific coast and settled in Orange County. He was the second of eleven children. To show how hard things were then, it took him and his next eldest brother two years to complete the last stage of high school.
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One of them would work and the other attend school. Harry was the first member of his family to go to college. After a few apprentice years, he joined the university extension service. His task was to be the interface between the science of the academy and the person in the garden. Butterfield wrote numerous pamphlets and lectured widely on the best ways to grow flowers and vegetables.
During the Second World War his advice was invaluable, as more and more people turned to growing their own food. It is not clear when he became interested in the history of California horticulture. It could be said that Butterfield almost created the discipline. He contributed many articles and papers to the literature on pioneer California nurseries and the horticulture of the past. Many scholars value his compilation of the dates that exotic plants were introduced into California. Butterfield died in before he could get the book published. Courtesy of Dorothy Butterfield Rucker.
Butterfield attended grammar school in Tustin, in Orange County, when he was six.
Early California Gardens
It had the most beautiful gardens when Butterfield was a boy. On one side are old graceful trees with drooping limbs, on the other are well-kept cypress hedges trimmed square or even, or long natural barriers of ever-blooming geraniums [ Pelargonium ] in numerous varieties, of every favorite shade of color from crimson to palest pink. Over the hedges we look into bluegrass lawns, green and well-kept and exceedingly attractive. Butterfield remembered the cypress tree from which switches were cut.
There was also a green rose from China which a San Francisco nurseryman exhibited in On another farm was a Seven Sisters rose over the doorway. The swaying branches of a weeping willow tree made a soft sound which lulled me to sleep as a child. Matilija poppies [ Romney coulteri ] grew there, white faces uplifted, and speckled trout swam in the stream beside me. The scene had changed by The pepper trees still grew in Tustin, El Modina, Orange, and Santa Ana, but some were beginning to show signs of age.
The grevilleas, the elm, and the umbrella tree Genus species were there just as in his boyhood, yet the former simplicity of the open spaces was lacking. Modern Tustin, however, has taken good care of its horticultural heritage. In , Carol H Jordan, a staunch member of the historical society, published a small monograph on the landmark street trees of Tustin.
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Theodosia Burr Shepherd, taken before Photocopied from her catalog. Courtesy of the Regents of the University of California. Theodosia Burr Shepherd was a frail woman of twenty-eight when she arrived in Ventura-by-the-sea with her husband and children in Her husband, a lawyer by training, became editor of the Ventura Signal, and Edith, her fourth child, was born there on August 5, Because of family difficulties, Theodosia had married Will Shepherd, a good but impractical man, at an early age.
The family had no money except for the pittance from the newspaper. It was essential for Theodosia to earn some money herself. Her children needed clothes and some amusements, even if only very meager ones; they also needed books for their education. Mrs Shepherd always managed to have some sort of flower garden wherever they lived, and even in fly-blown Ventura, achieved considerable renown for her skill. The response to her exchange activities gradually became overwhelming. She pressed all her children into service, making the floral ornaments, and working extremely hard to grow the seeds.
In , she sent a package of California curiosities and several types of flower seeds to Peter Henderson in New York.
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You have the exact conditions of climate necessary to grow seeds, and I would advise you to at once begin systematically. After two years of exchanging seeds and plants, her collection had outgrown her grounds. She coaxed her husband into buying an adjoining two acres. By , she issued her first catalog and then a wholesale catalog the year following. Between then and , she issued three more. One morning, she showed her neighbor, Mrs Gould, how to do this and proposed that she specialize in this flower. A night-blooming cereus probably Nyctocereus serpentinum was thirty-five feet high, and the tree begonias were ten feet tall.
There were papyrus, cyclamens, bouvardias, and costly novelties. She grew heliotrope Heliotrope arborescens along her two-hundred-foot frontage on Main Street; one can only imagine the enticing fragrance that arose from that planting. Once Upon a Time in Texas. Moths, Myths, and Mosquitoes. Voices from the Wild Horse Desert. Sebastopol's Gravenstein Apple Industry. Western Sonoma County Historical Society.
It Happened on the Mississippi River. History Of Riverside County California. History of Orange County, Ca. North Carolina's State Historic Sites. It Happened in New Jersey. Cemeteries of San Diego County.
Horthistoria » Books by Judith M. Taylor » Tangible Memories
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