Louise Beebe Wilder

Louise Beebe Wilder (1878–1938) was an American gardening writer whose books are now considered classics of their era.

Biography

Louise Beebe was born to a well-to-do family in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1878. She showed an early interest in gardening.[1]

In 1902, she married architect Walter Robb Wilder, and the couple moved to Pomona, New York,[2] where she transformed the rural property (known as Balderbrae),[3] adding pathways, a pair of half-moon fountains, a grape arbor, terraces, flowering trees, a walled garden, and an herb bed.[1] Later, they moved a bit further south to the village of Bronxville, where she designed Station Plaza and founded a local Working Gardeners Club (1925).[1] She designed residential gardens across the county; her philosophy, influenced by the aesthetic of British gardener Gertrude Jekyll,[4] was to create something "formal in design but most informal in execution".[1]

Wilder wrote ten books about her experiences as a gardener that were popular for offering clear, explicit advice rather than flowery nature writing.[1] She also wrote for newspapers and gardening and shelter magazines such as Horticulture, House & Garden, and the New York Times.[1] In particular, she took up the challenge of adapting Jekyll's aesthetic—developed for a substantially different climate and range of plant species—to the needs of American gardeners.[4] The title of her second book, Colour in My Garden, deliberately echoes Jekyll's influential 1908 book Colour in the Flower Garden.

Wilder's "socio-botanical commentaries"—as author Michael Pollan termed them[5]—captured the spirit of a moment in America when suburban gardening and its attendant forms of landscape design were on the rise and an older, more formal style of large estate garden was in decline. A New York Times editor called her a Romantic, but one "with a strong vein of scientific curiosity that she exercised on a domestic scale.”[1] Another New York Times editor, after noting that she was conversant with both classic British and recent American horticultural literature, praised her for the sharpness of her field observations.[6] Her books—especially Colour in My Garden—are now considered classics,[4] and in 2001 some were reissued as a four-volume collection, The Louise Beebe Wilder Gardener’s Library: Four Classic Books by America’s Greatest Garden Writer.[1]

Wilder also served on the board of the New York Botanical Garden.[2]

She was honored with the Garden Club of America's Gold Medal for Horticultural Achievement in 1937.[1]

Walter committed suicide in 1934, and Wilder herself died April 20, 1938.[1]

Publications

Notes and references

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Robbins, Dan. "Landscaping Matriarch Louise Beebe Wilder Brought Gardening Clubs To Westchester County". Westchester Magazine, April 2014. Accessed Dec. 22, 2015.
  2. 1 2 "The Fragrant Path". Horthistoria website. Accessed Dec. 22, 2015.
  3. ↑ Wilder's second book, Colour in My Garden, is about Balderbrae, and the illustrations in the 1918 edition show many details of the garden design. In the 1980s, Balderbrae was renovated with a large new main building, but Wilder's original house (a stone cottage) and some of her landscaping elements still exist. See Joni Webb, "What a Mess: Balderbrae Then and Now!!!", Cote de Texas website, Oct. 12, 2010; accessed Dec. 22, 2015.
  4. 1 2 3 Tankard, Judith B. "An American Perspective on Gertrude Jekyll’s Legacy". Reprinted from the Journal of the New England Garden History Society, vol. 6, Fall 1998. Accessed Dec. 22, 2015.
  5. ↑ Pollan, Michael. "A Gardener's Guide to Sex, Politics, and Class". New York Times, July 21, 1991. Accessed Dec. 22, 2015.
  6. ↑ Lacy, Allen. "A Gardener's World; British Roots in American Soil? A Cry for Straddling the Fence". New York Times, Dec. 12, 1990. Accessed Dec. 22, 2015.
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