Michelle wrote:"It's  a shame that the horticultural trade does not
include dates on theirlabels, or a tiny amount of basic history relating
to a plant. Surely that
might make us, the consumers, see them in another light sometimes. It is
lamentable that such collective knowledge can be lost by "laisser faire""

I'm always amazed about how incurious so many gardeners are. When I meet a
new gardening friend, there are two things in particular I look for.  You
might be surprised to learn that a plenteous collection of plants is not
one of them.  The two things I look for are cold frames and a good
library.  While I'm checking out the cold frames, I'm also listening to
see if the library has had any influence. The "collective knowledge" whose
apparent loss Michelle deplores is not lost at all - it's still there in
the old books. It's always surprising to me how poorly read most persons
in the horticultural community are - and those with undergraduate degrees
in horticulture are no exception. Until recently there was an
understandable excuse for this: the older literature was scattered and not
easily accessible.  One of the recent developments that I'm really glad to
see is that some early twentieth century books and periodicals have been
scanned and made
available on line. If that continues, then we should experience a huge
surge in horticultural knowledge. 

Michelle is right though: as a culture we have lost this knowledge, if we
ever had it. It seems to be a rare gardener who reads anything but
catalogs these days.  Most of the gardens I see are what I think of as
"farmer gardens" or "suburban sprawl gardens" or "hoarder gardens".  To me
it's obvious that our primary gardening accomplishment, the thing we are
best at, is acquisition. I'm a stubborn old-timer in this regard: to me, a
pile of plants does not a garden make. And a pile of plants presided over
by someone who does not know the names of those plants might as well be
a pricey compost heap in my opinion. The worst ones are the ones who don't
know the names but sure can quote the catalog prices! 

Michelle also mentioned dates. My own appreciation of gardening has been
hugely enhanced by a fair grasp of when and how things happened. But a
preoccupation with dates can also lead to a sort of fanaticism,
reminiscent of those people who work quotations from Shakespeare or the
Bible into everyday conversation. Our knowledge of the dates of
introduction of many plants is comically inadequate. Self styled garden
historians  often use dates of introduction based on the appearance of a
plant in one of the famous old herbals or other books. If you see the
dates 1597, 1601 or 1629, be suspicious: those are the dates respectively
of Gerard's Herball, Clusius' Historia and Parkinson's Paradisus. Those
citations might in fact be the first in the printed literature, but in
most cases the plants themselves almost certainly existed long before
that. Another pitfall with dates is that Americans, joined at the hip as
we were with England for so long, often take the
dates of introduction to England as the dates of introduction to America.
With many plants it can be difficult to determine if the date cited is
based on the date of commercial launch or the date the seed which
produced the plant germinated (to cite two extremes, extremes which in
the old days might be a decade apart). 

One of the big problems with dates is that it can be extremely difficult
to determine the identity of old plants. Of course you can recognize the
genus, and in unhybridized plants perhaps the species, but the more
granularity you expect in the identification, the more likely you are to
be off the mark. 

So dates are interesting, but I think they often need to be taken with a
grain of salt, especially the old ones.  

I like to collect plants introduced in my year of birth, something easy to
do with well documented plants such as roses and tulips. But I don't take
those dates too seriously. 

Jim McKenney
jimmckenney@jimmckenney.com
Montgomery County, Maryland, USA, 39.03871º North, 77.09829º West, USDA
zone
7
My Virtual Maryland Garden http://www.jimmckenney.com/
<http://www.jimmckenney.com/> 
BLOG! http://mcwort.blogspot.com/
Webmaster Potomac Valley Chapter, NARGS 
Editor PVC Bulletin http://www.pvcnargs.org /<http://www.pvcnargs.org/> 
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