Last month, I shared photos of my daughter’s landlady’s lovely garden and wrote about the flowers that brought color and beauty to homes in the Old West.
This month, another garden sent me wandering down a different historical trail.
I’m writing this from my sister Carol’s house, where we’re getting ready to celebrate Hana’s college graduation. The celebration may be coming at the end of July, but better late than never!

Before the guests arrive, I’ve been admiring Carol’s magnificent garden.
She has flowers blooming everywhere, vegetables ripening, and enough green growing things to make me wonder why my own gardening efforts usually result in one brave tomato plant struggling for survival. Er, it usually looses the struggle. My sister has the green thumb in the family. I have the thumb of death when it comes to gardening. 

But, as  I walked around looking at everything this morning, a question popped into my mind.
Where did gardeners in the Old West get their seeds?

Many families saved seeds from one year’s harvest to plant the next. Friends and neighbors also traded seeds, bulbs, roots, and cuttings. A woman might carry seeds from her mother’s garden when she moved West, preserving a little piece of home in a new and unfamiliar place. But as mail service and transportation improved, gardeners gained another tempting source.

The seed catalog.

By the latter half of the nineteenth century, commercial seed companies were sending catalogs throughout the country. Customers could sit at a kitchen table hundreds, even thousands of miles from the company’s warehouse, and choose what they wanted to grow. They’d mail in an order, and eventually receive little packets filled with possibilities.

A garden really could come in the mail.

D. M. Ferry & Company of Detroit was already publishing illustrated seed annuals in the 1870s. Its catalogs offered descriptions and pictures of flowers, fruits, vegetables, farm seeds, and even gardening tools. Then there was W. Atlee Burpee.
Burpee began his mail-order business in Philadelphia in 1876, when he was only eighteen years old. He started by selling poultry and livestock. His customers soon began asking for a dependable source of garden seeds, and by the following year, seeds were becoming the heart of the business.

Imagine some farm wife opening one of those catalogs during the coldest part of winter. Outside, the wind might be rattling the windows. Snow could be piled against the barn. The garden would be nothing but a frozen patch of ground.
But inside that catalog? Tomatoes hung heavy on the vine. Cabbages grew to enormous size. Flowers bloomed in colors almost too perfect to believe. Somewhere between the sweet peas and the squash, spring waited patiently.

By the 1880s, many seed catalogs had become sizable booklets filled with bold, colorful illustrations. Improvements in printing, transportation, and mail service allowed the catalogs to reach more customers, and for some seed companies, the catalog became their primary salesman. And what a salesman it must have been. I don’t know about you, but I can be overly optimistic when looking at gardening pictures. Some part of me believes that if I purchase the correct packet of seeds, I’ll also receive rich soil, perfect weather, endless patience, and some mysterious ability to remember to water everything. Ha!  I suspect nineteenth-century gardeners occasionally fell under the same spell.

Of course, their gardens weren’t merely decorative. A successful kitchen garden could provide a family with beans, peas, onions, carrots, cabbages, squash, lettuce, melons, herbs, and cucumbers to eat fresh, dry, pickle, or preserve for winter. Flowers mattered too. Even when every inch of land had to earn its keep, women planted hollyhocks beside cabins, morning glories near porches, and sweet peas along fences. A few bright blossoms could soften a rough new home and make an isolated place feel settled.

Mail-order seeds also gave gardeners access to varieties they might never have found in a local store. A catalog from a large Eastern or Midwestern company could introduce something new to a farm, ranch, or small Western town. Before Rural Free Delivery began on an experimental basis in 1896, many rural families still had to travel into town to collect their mail. That trip could take hours. Imagine finally reaching the post office and discovering that the seed order had arrived!
Those little packets must have felt like promises. A row of beans. A bed of asters. Cucumbers for pickles. Marigolds beside the front steps. Those seeds meant food for the table and beauty for the soul, all tucked into an envelope or small parcel.
                                

Carol’s garden is already bursting with the results of this year’s planting. But looking at it made me think about all the gardens that began long ago with a catalog, a pencil, an order form, and someone dreaming of spring.

Have you ever ordered seeds or plants through the mail? And what is the one flower, fruit, or vegetable you would always make room for in your garden?