Growing the U.S. Horticultural Boom

by Cheryl Lyon-Jenness

Between 1850 and 1880, enthusiasm for horticulture swept the nation, particularly the Upper Midwest. Nursery owners and seed traders welcomed the escalating demand for trees and flowers but soon faced consumer complaints about their questionable business practices. Customer dissatisfaction had many sources, ranging from unethical entrepreneurs to faltering industry infrastructure and underhanded dealing. The nurserymen and seed dealers worked diligently to overcome these criticisms, sharing information to improve industry methods and attempting to deflect responsibility for fraudulent practice onto disreputable competitors or inexperienced customers. The conflicts between commercial horticulturists and their broadening customer base reflected tensions within America's rapidly expanding consumer culture and suggested that traditional restraints on industry practice based on personal ties and shared values would no longer suffice when dealing with a newly diversified and seemingly intractable clientele.

First-hand sales strategies
Although catalogs developed effective, if somewhat problematic, links with distant customers, horticultural firms also bolstered demand through firsthand customer contact. Nurserymen routinely developed networks of agents to represent their interests in regions far removed from the firm's headquarters, often enlisting local shopkeepers, businessmen, or even farmers with horticultural proclivities to handle their tree, shrub, or flower inventories. Seldom traveling far from home, these agents typically used their roots within the local community to develop trust, and they usually generated business from friends and neighbors. They also established a variety of relationships with the home nursery. Some agents sold plants on commission, taking a portion of the profits when the plants sold. Others bought nursery stock outright and then resold the merchandise at their own rates. Occasionally, local agents were simply avid horticulturists, anxious to spread interest in their region and very willing to take pay in plants or promote sales with no thought of compensation.51

Many established nurserymen actively recruited agents, for a reputable representative could validate their presence among distant customers, give them "eyes and ears" to evaluate demand and pricing, and even offer firsthand commentary on the competition. Typical of the practice, Illinois nurseryman John Kennicott established agents for his Grove Nursery throughout Illinois and in the adjoining states and territories to the west. One of his agents, William J. Green, a young lawyer and businessman from Chicago, attempted to supplement his income by selling plants on Kennicott's behalf in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Green, in one instance, warned Kennicott that local residents were likely to dig shade trees and conifers from the neighboring forest, making "richer finer varieties" more likely to sell than the "commoner kind."52

Reputable agents like William Green were normally a real boon to the industry, but as the links stretched over ever greater distances or involved a proliferating network of individuals, the system could create headaches for the home nursery. Agents, themselves lacking horticultural experience, sometimes failed to properly tend the plants in their care and, as a result, delivered an inferior product to local customers. Errors in gauging local demand for particular varieties could leave customers without desired plants, or conversely, could saddle the agent with an excess inventory. Out from under the watchful eye of the home nursery, an unethical agent might boost prices, fail to provide adequate horticultural information to inexperienced customers, or perhaps inadvertently jumble horticultural varieties, so that eagerly awaited fruit trees or flowering roots were not "true to name." Responding to what they perceived as inferior goods, local customers might refuse delivery on plants they had ordered or neglect to pay the local agent for trees and flowers they had actually received, leaving both customer and agent with the sour taste of a deal gone bad.53

Large eastern nursery firms like Ellwanger and Barry sometimes maintained regional agents, but many came to depend upon their own itinerant sales force to extend the nursery's reach into distant households. Like dry-goods or notions peddlers, these traveling agents moved over a vast territory, visited potential customers in their homes, and used their persuasive powers to sell trees and flowers. As employees of their respective home nurseries, itinerant nursery agents often worked on commission but were also paid expenses and a monthly salary. Most agents limited sales to stock from their employer's inventory. As a part of their relationship with the home nursery, these "official" agents usually received some horticultural training, enabling them to offer prospective customers sound advice on cultural techniques or the regional hardiness of specific plants. Many agents traveled the countryside in winter or early spring prior to the planting season, took orders for plants, and then returned to the home nursery to monitor their customers' orders. Once orders were filled, nursery agents supervised their distribution, either by delivering plants directly to customers, or by holding plants at a central location until customers could call for them. In most instances, nurseries employing an itinerant sales force filled customers' orders from their general inventory, and they understood that the company's reputation rested on healthy plants, accurately named. While not the first to establish an itinerant sales force, Ellwanger and Barry were firmly committed to the strategy by the 1840s. Others noted their success, and by the 1850s, traveling agents from a number of eastern nurseries competed with regional and local businesses for the midwestern plant trade. The sales strategy was so effective that many regional nurserymen were eventually forced to employ traveling agents in order to remain competitive.54

Both the ubiquity of nursery agents and their apparent success drew the attention of individuals looking for a lucrative trade, and soon a varied group, hoping to benefit from the horticultural bonanza, roamed the midwestern countryside, promoting fruit trees and flower gardens. Lacking firm ties with any particular nursery and often derisively dubbed plant or tree peddlers, these "free agents" took orders throughout a region, often filling them with stock from whichever nursery was most convenient or offering the lowest wholesale prices.55

Since neither the nursery nor the tree peddler expected to develop an ongoing relationship with customers, there was little incentive to supply robust plants or carefully named varieties. Also in contrast to agents of established firms, these self-employed plant peddlers seldom had undergone horticultural training and hence had little capacity for helping their inexperienced customers to make sound horticultural choices. Often obtaining what critics claimed were the "leavings" from commercial nurseries at low prices, tree peddlers could sell at prices well below those of established firms, and they quickly found a market for their goods among gardeners looking for inexpensive refinements. Some free agents combined strategies in order to shield deceptive practices behind a mask of respectability. "The most common mode of defrauding their customers," the American Agriculturist explained in 1863, "is to get a certificate of agency from some respectable nursery, and do just enough business for that nursery to keep their agency good, and then to take orders and supply them with inferior and untrue trees picked up here and there at nominal prices."56

The horticultural industry routinely grumbled about the numbers and practices of free-agent plant peddlers, but at the same time it began catering to their needs. Advertisements directed to "persons selling, or about to sell trees in the west" were increasingly common in the 1860s and 1870s, often indicating that the nursery would "deal liberally" with any who called for plants.57 Most large nurseries routinely offered plant peddlers wholesale prices on a selected group of plants. Typical of the practice, the Columbus Nursery featured plants suited to midwestern cultural conditions, and it provided agents with a list including nine species of evergreens, twelve deciduous ornamental trees, and eight types of ornamental shrubs, along with assorted roses, flowers, and greenhouse plants.58

Other firms specialized in enhancing plant peddlers' sales techniques. Because nursery agents did not carry plants with them while taking orders, illustrations depicting fruit types or the ornamental potential of flowers and shrubs were critical to plant sales. In the late 1850s, sensing a lucrative niche in the booming horticultural trade, a Rochester bookseller named Dellon Marcus Dewey began producing brightly colored illustrations of fruits, flowers, and ornamental trees that he termed "plates."59 By the 1870s, the D. M. Dewey company offered over 2,300 illustrations, usually accompanied by at least some descriptive material and horticultural information. After nursery agents designated the plates they desired, Dewey offered several packaging options, such as boxes or a system of loosely connected plates that enabled the salesman to display a number of brightly colored illustrations to customers at the same time. Considering ease of transport, many agents opted for Dewey's convenient pocket-sized plate book, which he developed in the 1870s.60 Soon, other Rochester firms were competing for the trade, and even a few midwestern nurserymen advertised colored plates and plate books for agents.61

To promote the booming plate-book trade even further, D. M. Dewey published The Tree Agents' Private Guide in 1875. The Guide urged agents to be honest with their customers, discussed appropriate behavior and appearance, provided some practical information on the care of plants, and even included a guide to the pronunciation of horticultural name and terms. Effective sales strategies were the real focus of the Guide, however, and Dewey encouraged plant peddlers to view interaction with customers as a finely tuned performance. A practiced agent, Dewey insisted, could exert a "mesmeric influence" over potential customers. Playing on customer pride, exploiting the colorful images in plate books, and weaving commentary about plantings already present in the customer's yard were surefire strategies for winning sales, Dewey claimed.62 In a world often devoid of colorful images, brilliant plates spread across a farmwife's kitchen table, coupled with a well practiced sales pitch, gave itinerant plant peddlers a tremendous advantage. Perhaps enchanted by the beauty of the illustrations, customers placed orders with virtual strangers and with little consideration for cultural details or regional hardiness.

One reviewer described Dewey's Guide as containing some "excellent rules for the use and guidance of those who sell trees," but feared that those who "sold on deceptive principles" would not be swayed by arguments for honesty.63 The concern proved prophetic, for plant peddlers soon came under fire for polished performances that misrepresented both their horticultural expertise and the goods they sold. In his 1879 critique of the traveling-agent industry, Bates Harrington warned readers to beware of "oily-tongued fellows with florid prints of impossible fruits faithfully depicted between richly bound lids." Worried that plate books gave plant peddlers an undeserved authority, Bates emphasized that anyone, no matter what his qualifications for selling plants, could obtain the colorful illustrations. Michigan horticulturist Dr. O. Marshall validated those concerns in remarks made before the Michigan Pomological Society in 1880. "They [tree peddlers] have an illustrated book from some nursery," Dr. Marshall complained, "and go over the country taking orders."64

A slick sales strategy was only part of the problem. According to the horticultural and agricultural press, association reports, and the private writings of individuals who had been "badly gulled," tree peddlers were everywhere and really did perpetrate fraud.65 In 1860, for example, Levi Thumb of Irving, Illinois, wrote John Kennicott that the "meanest agents" imaginable were in his area selling the "rubbish" of eastern firms. Several years later, a Fort Wayne, Indiana, nurseryman echoed the sentiment, telling Kennicott that his region was "swarming with tree peddlers," making it difficult for residents to avoid the persistent sales pitch, whether they wanted to buy or not.66 Complaints about peddler numbers and poor-quality stock were most frequently expressed, but other concerns also surfaced in an ongoing tirade against these itinerant salesmen. The American Agriculturist reported a widespread scam involving blue roses and tree strawberries and cautioned readers to beware of peddlers in their region displaying pictures of "astonishing fruit."67

Some peddlers seemed to prey on customers with at least some horticultural knowledge. In 1855, the Horticulturist published a commentary from a Germantown, Ohio, correspondent complaining that a salesman in the region was touting "peach trees as being worked on imported stocks of a kind exempt from the attacks of the Borer or Peach Worm," northern muscadine grapes as superior to any in cultivation, and a common rose purported to be a constant bloomer. All claims were false, the correspondent argued, yet "many people are induced to believe these false representations."68

Excerpted with permission from "Planting a Seed: The Nineteenth-Century Horticultural Boom in America," Business History Review, Vol. 78, No. 3, Autumn 2004.

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Cheryl Lyon-Jenness is director of undergraduate studies in the Department of History at Western Michigan University.