Areas
Judith Major, Professor
University of Kansas School of Architecture
Two nineteenth-century American journals, the Horticulturist at the midpoint, and Garden and Forest at the close, argued in favor of native trees for the country's gardens, parks, school yards, and streets. Nationalistic, aesthetic, economic, practical, and moral reasons for the use of indigenous trees mingled with attitudes on culture and race. The 1840s saw the development of a distinctively racialist ideology in America. Prompted by contemporary European thought and by their own experience with slaves, American Indians, Mexicans, Spaniards, Asians, and certain groups of European immigrants, white Americans identified Anglo-Saxon descent with authentic American identity and regarded the Anglo-Saxon race as superior. This idea generated a heightened sensitivity to racial differences and an atmosphere in which racial generalizations flourished. These ideas on race were readily interchangeable; one editor observed, "As in the man, so in the plant." Trees not able to be "Americanized" were reviled-those from Asia especially so. The paper will trace the coverage of "tree foreigners" in the Horticulturist and in Garden and Forest.