Narrating Gendered Tree Cultures in Histories of the Horticultural Transformation of America

Historian Jared Farmer observed, “Personification is intrinsic to treeness.”¹ But, so is gender scripting. Western tree stories and images construct human-tree relations in decidedly masculine and feminine terms, a binarism that disregards the complexity of sexuality among both humans and trees.² Gendered personifications of trees are as old as our ancient mythologies. The Norse myth describing the creation of the first man and woman as human incarnations, respectively, of the Ask (ash) and Embla (elm) tree is but one illustration.³ The ubiquity of gender in tree cultures became evident as I repeatedly encountered a particular World War I period photograph of an apple tree (Figure 1), standing amid a group of young women in wartime school uniforms, an ensemble situated in a Pennsylvanian school orchard. As I viewed various copies of the image in archives and various media, flooding my consciousness were vivid memories of my own youthful tree-climbing experiences, also captured in photography (Figure 2). Those memories, formed as a young boy and revisited as a grown man, shaped my reception and interpretation of the archival photograph’s subject, as one composed of multiple infusions of gender.

In this essay, I attempt an “arboreal meditation,” an autoethnographic storytelling of my meetings with trees—experienced in situ and through pictures and texts.⁴ Memories, artifacts, and literature provide portals to those past tree cultures. In this meditation I journey between the site of an Illinoisan schoolyard tree of my childhood and that of the Pennsylvanian apple tree appearing in an archived photograph. The distinct contexts of the trees are elaborated herein, and ultimately interwoven as part of a common, interconnected “overstory.”⁵ I begin with my memories.

1. Remembering: Dunning’s Old Mulberry Tree

A favorite school project—carried out at age nine or so—awakened my early curiosity about the natural history of trees. For a tree scrapbook (a kind of herbarium), I collected, pressed, affixed, and labeled colorful, autumnal tree leaves from my Irving Woods neighborhood in the Dunning community area of Chicago, Illinois, situated in the midwestern United States. I vividly remember the excitement of encountering distinctive leaves—ash, elm, birch, maple, oak, mulberry. While hunting and gathering, and later preserving and studying, I connected to an expansive, arboreal world.

Readings of tree poems and stories solidified that connection as a distinctly gendered one. I became that boy in Robert Frost’s poem Birches, responsible for the bending of trees “to left and right,” because “some boy’s been swinging them.” I pictured birches as Frost described, “their trunks arching” and “their leaves on the ground | Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair | Before them.” So, too, was I that boy companion to the maternal Giving Tree, who “would climb up her trunk,” “and swing from her branches,” “and eat apples.” Trees, as poet Joyce Kilmer observed, participated in a vibrant, interconnected—feminized—nature, of divine creation: “A tree whose hungry mouth is prest | Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast,” and who “may in Summer wear | A nest of robins in her hair.” Kilmer’s tree, who “lifts her leafy arms to pray,” invited me to a transcendent experience, achievable through the muscular act of climbing. A tree like Winnie the Pooh’s oak provided comfort and “escape by Climbing Trees” from worldly concerns and dangers, such as “the Terrible Flood” that rushed through the fictional Hundred Acre Wood.⁶

Pooh residing within a tree reinforced a further arboreal-human association: trees as homes.⁷ There was one favorite, specific tree many of us schoolchildren climbed: the old mulberry tree of Arthur E. Canty Elementary School. The gnarled specimen stood in a grassy yard, just outside the classroom where Mrs. Brammeier directed the herbarium project.⁸ This sprawling beauty had a knotted trunk that offered steps up to large, broad boughs, an overstory into which we boys (and a few girls) ascended, as if entering the upstairs rooms of a house. My favorite room was the “attic” at the tippy top, where few of us dared to summit. In late springs, up in the tree we plucked, threw about, and feasted on fat, purple mulberries. During one of my solitary visits, Mrs. Brammeier noticed me there, summoned me from her window, and soon handed me a large bowl—and five dollar bill—to harvest ripe berries for her own consumption. Tree climbing also held economic value.⁹

The schoolyard scene of the old mulberry tree partook in a broader urban ecology of northwest Chicago. Our neighborhood sat between the Schiller Woods flanking the Des Plaines River (an indirect feeder of the Mississippi River), and semi-developed prairieland. The entire area was forcibly taken from Indigenous peoples by white settlers in the early 1800s. Following the land conflicts that led to the Chicago Indian Treaty of 1833, an influx of land speculators from the eastern states (their travel facilitated by the newly-opened Erie Canal) bought up parcels of prairie. Enacting scenes of muscular land development, prospectors devastatingly converted Native prairielands into farm and housing settlements.¹⁰

One of the pioneering farmers, David Samuel Dunning, arrived from Vermont. His eldest son Andrew Dunning, a Civil War veteran and “Fruit Nursery Keeper,” purchased, farmed, and developed a subdivision adjacent to the campus of the county’s asylum for the poor. Both the train station (no longer extant) serving the county hospital, and the Chicago community area that incorporated Andrew Dunning’s subdivision, officially bore his name, but Chicagoans also commonly dubbed the asylum itself as “Dunning”—as did my father when he described it as my grandmother’s final resting place. While Andrew Dunning’s village project withered in his own lifetime, his horticultural interests flourished. In 1897 he was elected president of the Cook County Agricultural and Horticultural Society.¹¹ His career instantiated a wider trend in nineteenth-century agriculture and horticulture, coded by contemporary social norms as masculine fields, within the public sphere of men’s work.¹²

The only mulberry species native to Chicago and elsewhere in North America, the red mulberry is recognizable for its distinctive berries; when fully ripe, they resemble blackberries.¹³ An attractive tree, it became a favorite among American landscape gardeners. This brings to mind the possible origins of the Canty specimen in Andrew Dunning’s nursery. Whether from Dunning or another nurseryman, that old mulberry tree participated in a gendered culturing of nature, providing a poignant context for my meetings with trees, performing boyhood, and budding as a scholar.¹⁴

2. Interpreting: Portrait of an Apple Tree

My memories of climbing the Canty mulberry tree were triggered when I met with a quite different arboreal culture of the past. That meeting occurred in archives where I researched the subject of American women in farming and gardening. A specific image greeted me, repeatedly, among the boxes of photographs and news clippings held in multiple collections.¹⁵ At the center of that image (see again Figure 1), an emblematic apple tree stands in an orchard of the Pennsylvania School of Horticulture for Women, in the farming town of Ambler, nearby Philadelphia, in the eastern United States. At the turn of the twentieth century, this orchard formed part of the seventy-acre farm of the late Irish immigrant, Samuel McAlonan. Amid the many historical artifacts of the school superseding the farm, the 1913 portrait of the tree just mesmerized me, as it disrupted my latent, gendered sense of human-tree relations. In the picture, instead of an archetypal boy collecting fruit in the “hair” of a feminized tree, there is perched up in the apple tree a girl in skirts, extending a pruner to cut an unwieldy branch.¹⁶ There appears a formality of dress and purpose that contrasts sharply with those of my former tree-climbing escapades. Here, young women students assembled, and indeed climbed, in dresses styled after “middy” (or midshipman) uniforms, marking their wartime patriotism during their training for horticultural vocations. Indeed, those included the cultivation of foodstuffs among a network of women’s “land armies” that, on the domestic front, contributed to the nation’s efforts in World War I.¹⁷

Learned society in Gilded Age New England found the recently-established Ambler school a curiosity, confirmed by the wide attention given it by newspapers. The founders and board members—led by the Bryn Mawr graduate Jane Bowne Haines, also of a prominent family-based tree nursery—contributed to the publicity as a means to recruit students and patrons.¹⁸ The dual emphasis on science-based instruction and hands-on training of women in fields that the Gilded Age had gender-scripted masculine, attracted public reactions vacillating between criticism and encouragement. Flooding the press, photographs bore witness to the students and teachers performing muscular labor in the school’s fields and orchards, including the pruning of fruit trees like the Ambler apple tree. As landscape historian Sonja Dümpelmann noted, horticultural schools like Ambler’s entered a postsecondary educational climate starkly segregated by gender and race; the exclusively white student body of young women underlined both the outcome and perpetuation of those segregations amid first-wave feminist movements.¹⁹

In the public consciousness, as historians Roberta Wein, Linda Kerber, and others observed, a “cult of feminine domestic sanctity” defined education and work for women in accordance with their presumed natural and preordained roles and abilities, and as applicable to the reproductive sphere of the home—as opposed to the men’s sphere of public-oriented occupations.²⁰ As I have analyzed more fully elsewhere, proponents of women’s advancement in agriculture and horticulture leveraged this domestic logic to categorize fruit cultivation among the “lighter branches of agriculture,” in close relationship with home-based food productions like jam-making and sales in local markets—all judged to be suitable activities for young women.²¹ Because the logics of those discourses troubled women’s fitness for “heavy” manual labor, imagery of women tree climbers handling large pruning shears fueled antagonistic responses from the fields’ gatekeeping men. But such imagery also bolstered counternarratives pushing for an equality perspective, like suffragist Phebe Hanaford’s vignette of Mary Wilson, a 72-year old proprietor of 180 acres of farmland in Ontario County, New York, who “swings a scythe and handles a pitchfork with the ease of a man in his prime.” ²² Among these competing discourses, the often-reproduced snapshot of the Ambler pruning demonstration confirmed feminine prowess while troubling contemporary ideas about sex-based roles and abilities.²³

Such gendering of tree cultures extended well beyond Ambler’s orchards. Fields like forestry and landscape architecture either patently excluded women or stood hostile to their incursions, and this component to the segregations provoked the movement for establishing the women’s schools. Young women interested in pursuing horticultural studies at the coeducational state universities were met with resistance, such as that experienced by Pennsylvanian Mira Lloyd Dock, who studied botany at the University of Michigan from 1895 to 1896, but then abruptly stopped, without explanation or degree. Instead, she returned to her hometown Harrisburg and fashioned a career in popular science writing and lecturing. Hints of Dock’s awareness of sex discrimination suggest it as the impulse for her departure. She referenced scientific men “afraid of learned women” in her diary, and she sometimes invoked the common apology “although a woman” in her letters addressed to them. The invocation prompted a defensive response from one correspondent, the forester Bernhard Fernow: “had you known me you would not have put into parentheses ‘although a woman’, for I believe that intelligent women, well instructed, are capable of doing more good than most men ….”²⁴

Dock’s affinity for trees compels me to dwell further on her career as it related to Ambler. She became an internationally recognized lecturer who campaigned for tree conservation and urban beautification through silviculture and landscape gardening. Owing to her acclaim, she received an invitation to report on U.S. women in horticulture at the International Congress of Women held in London in summer, 1899. She joined other presenters and discussants from Great Britain, Ireland, and Denmark for the section on horticulture organized by Francis Rollo Wilkinson, a London landscape gardener and co-founder of the Women’s Branch of the Horticultural College, Swanley—Britain’s earliest collegiate horticultural program for women that inspired others to follow, including the Ambler school. Dock offered an intervention into the section’s subject through a paper focused on “Forestry and Village Improvement,” expressing the hope that their “opportunities for employment will attract from the overcrowded profession of teaching”—naming one of the characteristic areas of stereotyped “women’s work” in science.²⁵ Dock bemoaned the fact that while “all our States have agricultural colleges, most of them with departments of horticulture, and in the great majority of cases with exactly the same opportunities for women as for men,” nevertheless “a very small proportion [of the students] were women.”²⁶

Dock’s widely publicized tour of Britain’s and Europe’s gardens, parks, and forests during the summer of the International Congress spurred on Pennsylvania-based civic organizing efforts that linked local communities and municipalities with state, national, and international promotions of women’s work in horticulture, all emphasizing its value for bettering civil society. Indeed, the larger role that Dock enjoyed in civic endeavors disrupted the Victorian “cult of feminine sanctity.”²⁷ To return to Ambler, Dock served as a founding board member of Pennsylvania School, and she followed its progress over the years, periodically visiting its campus to lecture on trees.

3. Narrating: Migrations of Trees and Peoples

In addition to serving as an outdoor classroom, the Ambler orchard instantiated common characteristics of the Pennsylvanian apple industry. The school modeled on a relatively small scale the standard process of annually sorting harvested apples for market or apple cider production.²⁸ As narrated “pomocentrically” by journalist Michael Pollan, the broader American apple experience was famously symbolized by the career of John Chapman, popularly known as “Johnny Appleseed,” an early-nineteenth century pioneer who migrated westward to establish a chain of nurseries from Ohio into Indiana. From Allegheny County, Pennsylvania he brought along “bushels of seed” separated out “from the fragrant mounds of pomace that rose by the back door of every cider mill.” Pollan recalled Henry David Thoreau’s (gendered) words in extending the idea, through Johnny’s story, of “how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man.”²⁹

The arc of Chapman’s story parallels that of our other protagonist, the westward-bound, nursery pioneer, David Samuel Dunning (and the legacy carried forward by his son Andrew). Chapman and the Dunnings—and their nurseries’ trees—participated in what historian Philip Pauly termed the “horticultural transformation of America”: the conversion of ceded Native prairies into farms, orchards, and landscaped settlements. Then followed the parks and schoolyards, “beautified” places where waves of European immigrants and their progenies—including my parents’ families—lived, learned, and formed relationships with trees.³⁰ Leading in that transformation, yet too often overlooked, were women horticulturalists like Fanny Rollo Wilkinson, Mira Lloyd Dock, and Jane Bowne Haines, whose coordinated efforts challenged the gender order of nature, by putting women in trees, at pulpits on behalf of trees, and in professions cultivating trees.³¹

Meditating on my past tree experiences, while interpreting photographic evidence for writing histories of horticultural pasts, unexpectedly surfaced assumptions I held about gender in tree cultures. In examining those assumptions critically, I am reminded there is little that is inherently binary or naturally masculine or feminine in cultures of human-tree relations. My boyhood tree acrobatics, imbibement of fictionalized tree cultures, and meditations on old tree portraits, formed a poignant journey—geographically, literarily, and imaginatively—between Chicago’s Dunning neighborhood and Ambler’s McAlanon farm, one that seemingly retraces steps in America’s horticultural expansion. Features of that expansion include a horticultural education craze and the migration of trees—from region to region, nursery to schoolyard—amid displacements of Native peoples and transformations of land. Tree cultures—and memories of them—are archives of horticultural pasts, intertwining plant and human histories. They participate in gendered, transcendent overstories for environmental historians to revisit, reinterpret, and retell.

Acknowledgments

Funding from DePaul University Research Council supported the archival research benefiting this project. I thank Jan Baedke for the opportunity to present an earlier version of this paper in the online lecture series of “The Return of the Organism in the Biosciences: Theoretical, Historical and Social Dimensions,” hosted by Ruhr Universität Bochum on January 27, 2025, whereupon I received very helpful advice during the Q&A. Special thanks to Tina Gianquitto, Catherine McNeur, Adrienne Petty, and Ashanti Shih for their encouragement, conversations, and feedback at various stages during the writing process. Spot-on advice by the two anonymous peer reviewers also informed the final revisions made to this paper.

1. Jared Farmer, Elderflora: A Modern History of Ancient Trees (New York: Basic Books, 2022), 3.[↩]
2. Historical works both accounting for and troubling the binary include Leah DeVun, The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021), and Lincoln Taiz and Lee Taiz, Flora Unveiled: The Discovery and Denial of Sex in Plants (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).[↩]
3. David A. Leeming, Creation Myths of the World: An Encyclopedia, 2nd ed. (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2010), 211–212.[↩]
4. “Meetings with trees” adapts Katty Baird’s title, Meetings with Moths: Discovering their Mystery and Extraordinary Lives (London: 4th Estate, 2024).[↩]
5. To be imagined both literally and figuratively, as in Richard Powers, The Overstory: A Novel (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018).[↩]
6. Robert Frost, “Birches,” in Mountain Interval (New York: Henry Holt, 1916), 37–40; Joyce Kilmer, Trees, and Other Poems (Garden City, NY: George H. Doran, 1914), 19; Shel Silverstein, The Giving Tree (New York: Harper & Row, 1964); A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh, reprint ed. (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, Limited, 1962), 131. For an example of literary studies attending to the gender of trees, see Timothy C. Baker, “The Gender Politics of Trees,” in Yvonne Liebermann, Judith Rahn, and Bettina Burger, eds., Nonhuman Agencies in the Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Novel (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan), 169–186.[↩]
7. As does Elliot Reed’s recent novel, A Key to Treehouse Living (Portland: Tin House Books, 2018).[↩]
8. Lorraine Ann (Russo) Brammeier (1926–1991); The Chicago Tribune, May 10, 1991, 98. The Chicago Public School was named after Arthur Edward Canty (1891–1946), a school custodial “engineer” (census records, Ancestry.com); “History of Arthur E. Canty,” Canty Elementary School, https://www.cantyschool.org/canty-history.html (accessed January, 25, 2025); Lauren Fitzpatrick, “Who Are Chicago Public Schools Named For?” Chicago Sun-Times, December 30, 2020, https://graphics.suntimes.com/education/school-names/.[↩]
9. An online search, in vain, for an extant photograph of the Canty mulberry tree (prior to its removal to provide space for a new parking lot) led to my discovery of a similar one situated next to Hartley Library at the University of Southampton, England, serving as the subject of a meditative blog post: Simon Crook, “Fountain and Tomb … and Mulberry Tree: The Garden of Sheikh Zubair,” The Grammar of Matter (September 7, 2014), https://thegrammarofmatter.wordpress.com/2014/09/07/fountain-and-tomb-and-mulberry-tree-the-garden-of-sheikh-zubair/ (accessed January 26, 2025).[↩]
10. Anselm J. Gerwing, O.S.B., “The Chicago Indian Treaty of 1833,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 57, no. 2 (1964), 117–142. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40190019. On the wider pattern of American settlement with a focus on horticulture’s role, see Philip J. Pauly, Fruits and Plains: The Horticultural Transformation of America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 187–194; Conevery Bolton Valencius, The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land (New York: Basic Books, 2002).[↩]
11. The Chicago Tribune, “The Village Called ‘Jefferson’,” The Chicago Tribune, August 6, 1986, https://www.chicagotribune.com/1986/08/06/the-village-called-jefferson-2/ (accessed January 14, 2026). Genealogical records (accessed at Ancestry.com) show that David S. Dunning (1812–1901), born in New York, managed a farm in DuPage County, further west of his family’s residence in Jefferson Village (afterwards annexed as the Jefferson Park neighborhood of Chicago). Andrew Dunning (1839–1907) purchased the 120 acre parcel, likely in partnership with his father, after having served in the Union Army of Illinois during the U.S. Civil War. Frank Suerth, “Andrew Dunning,” Northwest Chicago Historical Society Newsletter, no. 16 (July 2012), 14–15, https://nwchicagohistory.org/newsletters/ (accessed January 25, 2025); Marilyn Elizabeth Perry, “Dunning,” The Encyclopedia of Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2004); “Community Area #17: Dunning,” Chicago Historic Resources Survey (Chicago: City of Chicago, 1996), III-121–123, https://www.preservationchicago.org/resources/chicago-historic-resources-survey-chrs/ (accessed January 25, 2025). The 1870 U.S. Census lists Andrew as “Fruit Nursery Keeper”; in 1880 as “Farmer.” My grandmother Gertrude (née Guske) Opitz (1910–1964) suffered from complications of Huntington’s Disease, a genetic neurodegenerative disease leading to serious cognitive and physical disabilities for which few effective therapies existed in her time, apart from hospitalization and acute nursing care.[↩]
12. Further on this theme, see Donald L. Opitz, “‘My Daughters of Ceres’: Domestications of Agricultural Science Education for Women,” In Donald L. Opitz, Staffan Bergwik, and Brigitte Van Tiggelen, eds., Domesticity in the Making of Modern Science (Palgrave Macmillan, London), 107–128.[↩]
13. Floyd Swink and Gerould Wilhelm, Plants of the Chicago Region (Lisle, IL: The Morton Arboretum), 494.[↩]
14. On the cultural embeddedness of natures, or “naturecultures,” see Donna J. Haraway, How Like a Leaf: An Interview with Thyrza Nichols Goodeve (Milan: Tartaruga, 1999).[↩]
15. Collections holding reproductions of the photograph include the university archives of Temple University, Ambler Campus; the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society; and the Schlesinger Library, Harvard University. For a press clipping example, see “Dynamite Has No Terrors for the Girl Students of the Pennsylvania Horticultural School,” The North American (Philadelphia, PA), January 26, 1914, reproduced in Gary Moore, “The Pennsylvania School of Horticulture for Women, The Friday Footnote: Focusing on the History of Agricultural Education and Rural America, May 11, 2023, https://footnote.wordpress.ncsu.edu (accessed January 16, 2026).[↩]
16. On the “middy” dress style, see Jenny Carey Rose and Mary Anne Blair Fry, A Century of Cultivation, 1911–2011 (Philadelphia: Temple University, 2011), 13. Dating of the photograph to 1913 is based on this attire, introduced in that year, and the publication of the photograph in early 1914 (see n. 15 above). On Samuel McAlonan (1809–1877), see genealogical records at Ancestry.com. The Pennsylvania School of Horticulture for Women is now the landscape architecture campus of Temple University.[↩]
17. Cecilia Gowdy-Wygant, Cultivating Victory: The Women’s Land Army and the Victory Garden Movement (Pittsburgh: The University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013).[↩]
18. Valencia Libby, “Jane Haines’ Vision: The Pennsylvania School of Horticulture for Women, 1910–1958,” Journal of the New England Garden Society, 10 (2002), 44–52, on 44–45.[↩]
19. Sonja Dümpelmann, “Landscape Gardening, Outdoor Art, and Landscape Architecture: The Beginning Of Landscape Architecture Education in the United States, 1862–1920,” in Dietrich Bruns and Stefanie Henneck, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Landscape Architecture Education (New York: Routledge, 2022), 121–134, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003212645-15. For the larger context of feminist attitudes toward race, see Kimberly A. Hamlin, From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women’s Rights in Gilded Age America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press), 40–48.[↩]
20. Roberta Wein, “Women’s Colleges and Domesticity, 1875–1918,” History of Education Quarterly, 14 (1974), 31–47, on 31; Linda K. Kerber, “The Republican Mother: Women and the Enlightenment—An American Perspective,” American Quarterly, 28 (1976), 187–205.[↩]
21. Opitz, “‘My Daughters of Ceres’.” Emblemizing the widespread discourse is the book, Edith Bradley and Bertha La Mothe, The Lighter Branches of Agriculture, The Woman’s Library, Vol. 6 (London: Clapham and Hall, Ltd., 1903). The conservative logic, persisting well into the twentieth century, linked horticultural training to students’ marriageability and homemaking careers, observing that “an attractive outdoor setting is one of the essentials of a home”: “Where Women Learn to Make Things Grow,” The Woman Citizen 7, no. 8 (September 9, 1922), 4.[↩]
22. P. A. Hanaford, Daughters of America; or, Women of the Century (Augusta, ME: True, 1882), 704.[↩]
23. In histories, see, e.g., Libby, “Jane Haines’ Vision,” 46. Further period photographs of women pruners in the school’s trees are reproduced in Rose and Fry, A Century of Cultivation, inside cover and 10, 25, and 37.[↩]
24. Mira Dock’s diary entry for January 23, 1899, quoted in Susan Rimby, Mira Lloyd Dock and the Progressive Era Conservation Movement (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), 24; Bernhard Eduard Fernow to Mira Lloyd Dock, November 15, 1897, box 1, fol. 2, Mira Lloyd Dock Papers (MSS18689), Library of Congress.[↩]
25. Margaret W. Rossiter, “‘Women’s Work’ in Science, 1880–1910.” Isis 71, no. 3 (1980), 381–398. https://doi.org/10.1086/352540. Dock singled out, without naming it, Cornell University as a case in point. This was an apt example, given its leadership in the Nature Study educational movement; see Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, Teaching Children Science: Hands-On Nature Study in North America, 1890–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).[↩]
26. Mira L. Dock, “Forestry and Village Improvement,” in The Countess of Aberdeen, ed., Women in Professions, being the Professional Section of the International Congress of Women, London, July, 1899 (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1900), 158–161, on 159. On Dock’s participation in the Congress, Rimby, Mira Lloyd Dock, 33–34.[↩]
27. Dock reported on the Congress proceedings and her observations while touring gardens and forests in a report commissioned by the state: Mira Lloyd Dock, A Summer’s Work Abroad, in School Gardens, Home Gardens, Play Grounds, Parks and Forests. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, Bulletin No. 62 (Harrisburg: Wm. Stanley Ray, 1900), available: https://archive.org/details/summersworkabroa00dock (accessed January 19, 2026). This partook in the City Beautiful movement; see William H. Wilson, “‘More Almost than the Men’: Mira Lloyd Dock and the Beautification of Harrisburg,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 99, no. 4 (1975): 490–499, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20091005.[↩]
28. Carey and Fry, A Century of Cultivation, 25.[↩]
29. Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s Eye View of the World (New York: Random House, 2001), 4–5, citing Henry David Thoreau, “Wild Apples,” in The Natural History Essays, with introduction and notes by Robert Sattelmeyer (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1980), 178–210, on 178.[↩]
30. Pauly, Fruits and Plains.[↩]
31. Pauly only obliquely noted women’s interest through suggestive references, like the poems of Katharine Lee Bates, whose “America the Beautiful” is famous. However, he dismissed the rise of garden clubs from the 1910s onwards as “female suburban networks … which left few records of their activity,” and mischaracterized gardening as a private hobby in contrast to the public projects of horticulture (Pauly, Fruits and Plains, 235, 259). Fortunately, historians are correcting such mistaken speculations; see, e.g., Gowdy-Wygant, Cultivating Victory. Extensive archives of garden clubs and associations held by the Schlesinger Library, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Museum of English Rural Life, Reading, England, are indicative of the mounds of preserved records.[↩]