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Gardens and Historic Plants of the Antebellum South, by James R. Cothran. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003. 321 pp. $49.95 cloth.
IT'S HARD FOR MOST SOUTHERNERS to imagine a time before the landscape was redolent with Japanese honeysuckle, when English ivy didn't blanket moist woodlands, and when the last remnants of vast coastal forests were not smothered by Asian wisteria-a time before these and now-beloved plants like garden roses, winter jasmine, and Chinese azaleas had been brought to our shores. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, many of these plants still grew in the wild in their native regions of Asia and Europe, though some, like the camellia, had been cultivated in Asia for centuries and were known to European gardeners; likewise, Eastern U.S. natives like fringe tree, Virginia creeper, flowering dogwood, and sweet shrub still grew in their natural environments, but gardeners had discovered and begun to cultivate a few of them, like the Southern magnolia. James R. Cothran escorts readers back to the period immediately before many plants that are now mainstays of Southern gardens and ubiquitous in the Southern landscape were introduced into the Southern gardening repertoire. He shows us the South before it was heavily populated, when each city, town, or settlement was intimately tied to the landscape it occupied, and most gardens were primarily used for culinary and medicinal purposes. Then, he takes us step by step through events, ideas, fashions, and plant introductions that dramatically altered Southern landscapes and gardens between 1820 and 1860.
Mr. Cothran, who is a fellow in the American Society of Landscape Architects, an urban planner, and a practicing landscape architect in Atlanta, has dedicated many years to the study of Southern garden history and is active in several Southern garden history organizations. With his broad understanding of plants and landscapes throughout the South, he is eminently qualified to edvicate readers on important connections between landscape design and plants. He carefully explains the origins of landscapedesign elements and the ways these forms were interpreted in the South, using plants adapted to the Southern climate and...