Calendars and Clocks Cycles of Horticultural Commerce in Nineteenth-century America Marina Moskowitz
Introduction
The Pulitzer Prize-winning essayist, editor and children’s book author E.B. White (1899–1985) was, in a lesser-known avocation and in tandem with his wife Katherine, a gardener. In January 1952, writing as he often did for the ‘Notes and Comments section of the New Yorker, White explained the ritual many gardeners undertook each year at that time – his first trawl through the seed catalogues. Employing the first-person plural voice characteristic of the column, White recorded:
Our first communication of the year 1952 was a card from a seed company, and this seemed a good omen. A new bush bean, rich in flavor. A new pickle, early, dark green, delicious. A new muskmelon, thick orange flesh of top quality. A new petunia, giant fringed, dwarfish. So starts the year on a note of planning and dreaming. The card went on to chide us – said no order had been received from us since 1949. That is a fantastic accusation; we virtually supported that seed house last year and the year before and the year before, back into the dim, infertile past. However, we don’t expect seed companies to keep accurate records; the whole business is so wild, so riotous, so complex, it’s no wonder they forget who their own best friends are. If there is any doubt on that score, though, we will gladly send the management a jar of our wife’s green-tomato pickle from last summer’s crop – dark green, spicy, delicious, costlier than pearls when you figure the overhead. (White 1990: 4–5)<sup>1</sup>
Unpacking White’s evocative prose reveals a number of ways in which seed houses and gardeners traded on the natural cycles of planting. White shows the full fruition of a commercial exchange in seeds that developed over the course of the nineteenth century. Although seeds had been exchanged as gifts and traded informally for centuries, and were often highly prized, it was not until the nineteenth century that seeds were commodified on a large scale. One of the earliest businesses in the United States to employ mail-order sales, the seed trade relied on print culture to reach consumers. Trade catalogues and other ephemera served as calling cards to establish a commercial relationship and facilitate the exchange of horticultural knowledge. Like White’s tongue-in-cheek offer to send his wife’s green-tomato pickle, the language of the early commercial correspondence was often suffused with motifs of friendship and gift exchange. Keeping this market relationship going year after year was a way of inculcating and demonstrating brand loyalty; though White is humorously slighted that his regular trade has not been recognized, he is also eager to show his status as an annual customer to any in ‘doubt’. To keep things interesting in these long-term market relationships, firms developed new commodities, ‘novelties’ such as the bean, melon and petunia that White describes. White’s mention of home-made relish also shows the cyclical quality of natural commodities and the uses to which they are put. The commodity of the seed is not an end in itself, as many consumer goods are, but rather implies the growth of some further natural object – flowers, produce, more seeds – which may be consumed by the grower, but which might also form the basis of additional exchange, whether commercial or affective. Not only might consumers (of seeds) become producers (of a variety of crops), but seed firms themselves acted as consumers, buying at least part of their stock to sell on. The seed trade was indeed as ‘complex’ as White states, though many a nineteenth-century proprietor would have taken umbrage at his suggestion that the firms were ‘riotous’ and disorganized. While obviously reliant upon the rhythms of nature, many seed firms as they developed in the nineteenth century tried to impose industrial time on agrarian practices (or at least they tried to present themselves as doing so), and might even encourage their consumers to do the same. For both purveyors and consumers of horticultural commodities in the nineteenth century, issues of time, calendars and routine behaviour were at the heart of their exchange. In an era when many consumer markets were expanding due to the increasing tempo of mechanized production, the seed trade reached a national market while still respecting, and even imprinting, an annual cycle of consumption.
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