Alice Morse Earle: Historian of Gardens and Nature’s Gentle Lessons
This botanical history post was featured on The Daily Gardener podcast:
April 27, 1851
On this day, American historian and author Alice Morse Earle was born.
She was a gentle curator of garden memory whose books—Old Time Gardens (1901) and Sun Dials and Roses of Yesterday (1902)—return us to latticed porches, herb borders, and the manners of flowers. Browse books by this author.
Alice once said,
Farm children have little love for nature and are surprisingly ignorant about wildflowers save a few varieties.
The child who is garden bred has a happier start in life, a greater love and knowledge of nature.
To Earle, a garden was both schoolroom and sanctuary.
Even the peony, dignified and dimpled, suggested a heroine in her Sunday best:
[She] always looks like a well-dressed, well-shod, well-gloved girl of birth, breeding, and of equal good taste and good health; a girl who can swim, and skate, and ride, and play golf.
Reader, who among us hasn’t met that peony—perfect posture, impeccable timing—standing at attention by the gate?
