Explore the field of garden history with Early Canadian Gardening, an indispensable guide to horticulture and gardening practices in Upper Canada in the early nineteenth century. The book provides detailed descriptions of plants and seeds available at the time (many of which have evolved dramatically over the last 150 years) and examines not only which plants were grown at the time but also their value to pioneer gardeners and early settlers.

Reproducing a rare 1827 plant and seed catalogue, possibly the earliest extant catalogue of its kind in Canada, Early Canadian Gardening presents an extensive range of garden plants -- trees, shrubs, fruits, and flowers -- that were grown for food, medicines, and dyestuffs as well as ornamental purposes. Eileen Woodhead provides a detailed description and brief history of the cultivation and use of each plant up to the present day. Most of the descriptions are accompanied by detailed drawings by the author, who found and grew many of the original varieties in the catalogue. The book provides a valuable account of the business of horticulture in the first decades of the nineteenth century -- the practices of importers, merchants, farms, and households -- placing it within the broader context of social history. It includes an appendix of historic sites and botanical gardens in Ontario, as well as sources for heritage seeds. Early Canadian Gardening is a ground-breaking account of the practice and significance of horticulture during the period of settlement in Upper Canada and stands as a remarkable work of historical botany. It will be an invaluable source document for horticulturists and botanists, historians, and garden enthusiasts with an interest in heritage plants.

"In a land as fertile and rich with the bounty of its farm and timberlands, it is not surpising that the history of gardening and gardening movemnts in Canada is a story at once as colourful, and fascinating as that of the country itself. And at no time in the history of Canada was the subject more closely intertwined with the recreational, educational, and social fabrics of our own daily lives than in the early years of the present century. Here is the uniquely Canadian story of the development of ornamental and civic gardens, of public parks and parkways that goees hand in hand with the growth of towns and cities across the land, of Canada's "railway gardens", championed by the Canadian Pacific as a beckoning, floral advertisements of the fertility and hospitality of the Canadian west."--Dust jacket.

The story of what gardens and gardening have meant to Canadians over the centuries has, until now, been unavailable in one volume. A History of Canadian Gardeningtells that story in words and stunning historical images. Beginning with the extensive cornfields tended by the Huron before the Europeans arrived, it describes more than 400 years of gardening in Canada -- including the adventures of early botanical explorers, the Hudson's Bay Company's attempts to grow vegetables in the north, the difficulties faced by pioneer gardeners, the City Beautiful Movement at the turn of the twentieth century, early school gardens and garden clubs, botanical gardens across the country, the back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s, the recent interest in heritage seeds, and the current passion for everything to do with gardens.

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The National Library of Canada presents an online exhibit entitled "Cultivating Canadian Gardens: The History of Gardening in Canada." The exhibit covers the development of gardening in Canada from the 17th century through the end of the 20th century.