Annie Jack

Annie Jack by William Notman

Annie L. Jack (1839 - 1912) (née Hayr) was the first Canadian professional woman garden writer. Born in Northamptonshire, England, to John Hayr on 1 Jan 1839. In 1852, Annie Linda Hayr moved to Canada from Troy, New York where she had attended Miss Williard`s Academy. She married the Scottish-born fruit farmer, Robert Jack, and settled at his farm called "Hillside" in Chateauguay, Quebec.[1]

Life

At Hillside, over the next fifty years Annie Jack raised 11 children while also developing and maintaining her garden. Upon her marriage, she had stipulated for one acre of land to be devoted to any department of horticulture she chose, the profits to be her own pocket-money. She wrote about her experiences in The Rural New Yorker under the title " A Woman's Acre." The American horticulturalist L.H. Bailey referred to Jack's garden as "one of the most original gardens I know" [2] Her husband died in April, 1900.

Jack was the author of the column on flowers and fruit "Garden Talks" in the Montreal Daily Witness, and published the first Canadian gardening book, The Canadian Garden: A Pocket Help for the Amateur (1903, with a second edition in 1910 in Toronto). This remained the only Canadian gardening book available until after World War I, when Dorothy Perkins published Canadian Gardening Book (1918).[3]

She contributed to the Canadian Horticulturalist and she also wrote stories and poems for various newspapers and magazines including "Women's Work in New Channels," for Harper's Young People. In 1902 she published a volume on the life of the French Canadian habitant called The Little Organist of St. Jerome, and Other Stories.[4]

References

  1. ↑ Canadian Encyclopedia: Annie L. Jack
  2. ↑ Quoted in Edwinna Von Baeyer, Ed. Garden Voices: Two Centuries of Canadian Garden Writing. Toronto: Random House, 1995.
  3. ↑ Edwinna Von Baeyer, Rhetoric and Roses: A History of Canadian Gardening, Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 1984, p. 146.
  4. ↑ Henry James Morgan, Types of Canadian women and of women who are or have been connected with Canada, Toronto, 1903