ISSUE 24, HISTORIC NURSERIES, Part 3: Prince's Linnaean Garden, Flushing NY
The Nursery that Established American Stone Fruits
The Linnaean Garden
Nothing remains of the first great nursery in North America, not a tree, building, historic marker, or open space. As you walk around Flushing, Long Island, New York looking for reminders, there is only a short street of modest row houses—Linneaus Place. A misspelled echo of the famous Linnaean Botanic Gardens that from the 1730s until after the Civil War displayed the stone fruit trees, berry bushes, bulb flower beds, and shrubbery hedges maintained by four generations of the Prince family. Robert, the founder, first put spade to soil in an expanse of land south of the Dutch Reformed Church sometime around 1737. There erection of a house and the first layout of orchards took place in the 1740s with apple and plum trees being the first planted.
It wasn’t until the 1770s when William Prince, Robert’s son, expanded the plantings with the aim of making it a supply of the best European and North American stone fruits and evergreens. I’ve reproduced Prince’s broadside catalog of 1771, to point out several things: under every category of stone fruit there varieties that no longer exist. The peaches contain several new varieties that lack firm names. The apples feature three of the classic colonial era apples, all of which flourish today: the Rhode Island Greening, the Esopus Spitzenburg, and the Newtown Pippin. The pears tend strongly to the French butter pears rather the English Perry pears. The Mulberries list the English Black and the American Black, but the latter is more probably the American Red Mulberry. 40 years later grandson William Robert Prince, would introduce the Chinese White Mulberry variety in order to supply feed for silk worms. 1830s America was smitten with the notion that winter farmers could cash in on their slack time by raising silk worms and creating a native silk industry. Fig tree varieties are not particularized.
It has been said that pomology is the most literary of the branches of botany, depending on correspondence across continents to secure specimen trees and to exchange information on pests, grafting techniques, and rooting methods for scion wood. William Prince lived during an era when pomologists realized that open pollination of fruit trees in orchards with multiple varieties might lead to mongrel seedling trees. For every good seedling there were multitudes of mediocre. So the asexual propagation of fruit trees began in earnest. The contents of the 1771 broadsheet indicates that Prince had contacts in Europe. But Linneaus’s project of botanical understanding was global, and William Prince’s son, William Prince II (1766-1842) aspired to the same breadth of coverage. The younger Prince scoured New York City for persons capable of translating his letters into foreign languages to secured the globe’s great fruit and nut trees. It was William Prince !! that made the layout of the plantings in Flushing illustrate the Linnaean system. He built glass houses on the grounds to nurture those trees too intolerant to cold to thrive. The scope of his ambition can be grasped by a listing of “interesting plants” viewable at the Linnaean Garden that was published by the New York Mirror in 1827:
Cinnamon, Cassia, Coffee, Bread Fruit, Mano, Guava, Banana in flowers, Plantain, Mammee, Alligator Pear, Rose Apple, five species of Granadilla, Annatto, Fustic, Gum Guacum, Tea Camillias, Black Pepper, Calthamuus quadrisida, Gloxinia spaciosa, Sacred Banyan, Amaryllis Longifolia, Cashew Nut, Boham Upas, Red Lac, Sour Sop, Cherimoya, Rinyon, Cocoa Nut, Ebony, Mahogany, Logwood, Brazilletto wood, Amaryllis gigantea, Gloriosa superba, True Caper, Cocoloba, Mexican Calabash, Columbian Cotton Tree, FuChinese Wax Flower, 20 varieties of Gardenia, Hibiscus, and numbers of cacti. (June 16, 1827), 371. When a cruel winter occurred in 1828, William Prince II dispassionately reported in The New York Farmer those foreign plant varieties that survived the conditions, and those that didn’t.
During the 1820s an annual Birthday celebration honoring Linneus was held on May 24th in the Garden and the national membership of the American Linnaean societies would convene. Among the most enthusiastic celebrants was William II’s son, William Robert Prince (1795-1869). While William Robert’s great grandfather, grandfather, and father were firmly tree people, his father Willliam !! had become convinced that grape culture would be as important as sylvaculture in America’s future. They were greatly interested in the work of French vigneron Nicholas Herbemont in South Carolina with crosses between Native grapes and European noble Vitis vinifera grapes. William and William Robert shared the dream of making New York a center of wine making and employed three grapes from South Carolina, the Isabella, the Catawba, and the Herbemont Grape to begin a viticultural enterprise. In 1830 they collaborated in the History of the Vine, a work intended to prime a public fascination with wine making.
William Robert Prince entertained one horticultural fascination that his forbears did not much share: floraculture. He was smitten with roses, with tulips, with lilies, with crinums. In his enthusiasm he was much in tune with the age. Rose mania was beginning to take root in the country. Among the elite and learned class the connection between bloom aesthetics and understanding biology made the cultivation of flowers a kind of intellectual refinement as well as a direct pleasure. The Linnaean Garden became a gaudy paradise, a must see attraction for those venturing out from Manhattan. William Robert’s catalogs of flower varieties reveal the state of the art of flower breeding in the United States.
William Robert Prince in 1836 became smitten with the ideal of silk culture as a home past time and secured the rare Chinese White Multicaulis Mulberry into the country. He sunk much of the accumulated wealth of the nursery into the project, but tariff payments killed America’s nascent silk industry and force William Robert to turn the nursery to his brother-in-law Gabriel Winter, a businessman rather than a horticulturist. The conflicts hastened the death of William Prince II. That death brought the nursery back under control of William Robert who immediately turned it over to his sons and departed to California. Gold had been discovered there. A spiritualist, he had received a message from his departed father to leave for the West Coast. He took with him sorghum, was a founder of Sacramento, and became fascinated with Asian root vegetables.
His sons shared neither the knowledge or the passion to keep the Linnaean Garden operating, and sold most of the land upon the cessation of the Civil War. For a century and a quarter the Garden had stood at the center of American horticulture. It passed quickly into memory. And now it is less than a memory . . .