People enjoyed Florida long before Europeans came. Human artifacts in North Florida go back over 14,000 years at the Aucilla River. The southern coasts were settled much more recently, about as long as there has been dry land. Their archaeology has been the subject of recent studies, largely by Dr. Lee Newsom at Pennsylvania State University. According to Dr. Newsom (personal communication and assorted publications) South Florida’s indigenous peoples were not big-time gardeners, but they had some horticulture going on. There exist remains of apparent crop plants, some a little surprising, such as papaya.
That primitive South Floridians had papayas raises the unsettled question as to whether papayas are “native” to Florida, or if they came here via contact between Florida Native Americans and those of the Caribbean. The extent of such contact, if any, is unknown. In this connection Florida has also”native” agaves that almost certainly had to come here ultimately from Mexico, or around the Gulf Coast, or in a canoe.
This interests me personally, because I once conducted a study of the agaves of the Lesser Antilles and formed the distinct impression that the plants had been moved around substantially by Pre-European peoples, probably as sources of fibers for hammocks, fishing nets, and similar purposes. With reference to fishing nets, South Florida’s Native Americans apparently grew bottle gourds, perhaps as floats for fishing nets.
Bottle Gourds are probably ultimately African, and it is unknown whether they arrived with early human migrations from Asia, or if they floated across the sea, or neither.
Drifting back to fact from speculation, another “surprise” from indigenous settlements are seeds from red peppers, and again these raise the question of ancient commerce beyond Florida’s shores. Peppers would be useful in preserving foods.
The South Florida archaeological remains include also seeds from squash (genus Curcurbita), which probably include Florida’s native Okeechobee Gourd (Cucurbita okeechobeensis), found near Lake Okeechobee and also (taken there by ancient people?) near the St. Johns River.
Additional edible or useful plants are associated with prehistoric shell middens accumulated over the centuries by pre-European peoples. Such plants may have been cultivated, or may have been “camp followers,” or somewhere in between. These include Red Mulberry (Morus rubra), Coontie (Zamia pumila), and Large-Rooted Morning Glory (Ipomoea macrorhiza).
William Bartram 1739-1823
Skipping across the 1600s and up to the time of the American Revolution, the next important horticultural event in Florida history was visitation by William Bartram. William’s father, John Bartram was the “King’s Botanist” in the Colonies, and operated a plant nursery in Philadelphia. Bartram’s Gardens still exist and are open to the public as a botanical garden and historical site on the shore of the Schuylkill River not far from the Philadelphia Airport. Bartram father and son toured the Southeast, then William came back alone for an extended trip that included north Florida. He was an eccentric genius who learned everything there was to learn, from the Native languages to the plants and animals.
He was also a gifted artist and writer, and his book “The Travels of William Bartram” describing his quest from 1773-1777 came out in 1791, and “went viral” by contemporary standards, especially in Europe. Bartram documented eloquently and beautifully much of the plant life, human life, and animal life in Florida at the time. He discovered Royal Palms growing near Gainesville, and, most famously, the beautiful flowering shrub, Franklinia alatamaha near the Florida-Georgia border.
Although popular in cultivation, resembling a large Camellia (or Gordonia), the shrub was never found again the wild despite repeated efforts. Every plant lover in Florida should know who William Bartram was.
One of Bartram’s horticulturally relevant discoveries in Florida was a population Royal Palms far too north, near the St. John’s River. Here is a link to that on my other blog, Treasure Coast Natives.
This timeline gives the active periods for several early horticulturists. The bars show the durations from my idea of the person’s horto-activity in Florida to their death. (Most of these individuals were active until death or nearly so.) Take it to be a rough yardstick, not exact.
The diseases, personal losses, calamaties, and setbacks during these lifetimes are dismaying to a spoiled air conditioned community college teacher. Accomplishment back then was more then “get the job done,”—it was get the job done in the face of hurricanes…literally and figuratively, not that life is free of troubles..but those historical figures got more then their share. Missing from the list below there were certainly many tragedies I just don’t know about. Here are some of the trials, tribuations, and sorrows I do know:
James E. Hendry: killed in car wreck
Theodore Mead: lost daughter, lost brother, robbed
Julian Nally: lost his main Gloriosa crop to viral disease
Henry Nehrling: lost two daughters as well as first wife, alost “ruined” by 1917 freeze, mortgage default in Naples, 1926 hurricane, apparently swindled near the end of life
Henry Perrine: drank arsenic, suffered Cholera, murdered on Indian Key
Egbert Reasoner: lost brother Pliny, lost his own son Pliny, Jr. in shotgun accident
Pliny Reasoner: died from yellow feer at age 25
John Soar: severely ill after carry dead skinned rattlesnake from Paradise Key
Charles Torrey Simpson: serial troubles relating to lovelife including wages of adultry, lost daughter and first wife, dommunity tensions to the point of leaving town, malaria, ataract surgery 1920s style, apparent nervous breakdowns, friction with step-daughter, 1926 hurricane, robbed
The earliest significant South Florida horticulture was in and near the keys, centered on Key West. Most of the earliest growers in southernmost Florida were farmers from the Bahamas. Keep in mind that horticulture flourished throughout the Caribbean for hundreds of years before South Florida was settled. By the 1820s there were Bahama farmers on Key Vaca (Marathon) growing sea island cotton and pineapples. A prominent leader in that community was Squire Temple Pent (1894-1868) who was farming around Miami in the 1820s and on Key Vaca by the 1830s. Henry Perrine knew these farmers and was a doctor to them.
Squire Temple Pent
By the 1840s Key West was a sprawling community. The city grew rapidly and became a major urban center by the time of the Civil War. The large population demanded a lot of produce, so that there were farmers spreading through the keys from the 1840s and beyond. Pineapples became the primary crop in the keys, shipped not only to Key West, but also north to the major cities by boat and later by a train along the Atlantic Coast.
Pineapples head north
Florida plant enthusiasts know the Geiger tree, drawn beautifully by Audubon, arguably native to Florida, and named for John Geiger. His home still stands on Key West, and is now called the Audubon House. John’s brother Henry Geiger d. 1872 was farming Geiger Key adjacent to Key West by the early 1840s.
Geiger Tree
Some of those early growers were also wreckers or various types of scoundrels. Happy Jack Jonathan Thompson 1790-1858 had a plantation on Sugarloaf Key before 1849. I would’ve liked to have met his drinking buddies Jolly Whack, Paddy Whack, Red Jim, Lame Bill, and Old Gilbert, or maybe not. Happy Jack did not have a happy ending. He were shot by his own gun booby trap.
Captain Ben Baker 1818- 1889 in the 1850s and 60s had the first major commercial pineapple operations, on Plantation Key and Key Largo.
By 1870 all lower the keys were farmed. By the 1880s veggie gardens in the keys served Key West and northern markets. The pineapple growing center migrated during the early 1900s briefly to Central Florida, then to East Coast (for example, Yamato Colony 1903-1908). In 1910 over a million crates per year came from pineapple belt between about Ft Pierce and the Miami area; decline started around 1910 and ended by WWI. Toward the end, if the Florida pineapple industry suffered from disease and pestilence, hurricanes, frost, depleted soils, and competition from Cuba.
Now with this context, let’s return to Henry Perrine. Henry grew up in New Jersey and became a medical doctor. Going to the frontier where he was needed, Henry became a physician in Ripley, IL for 5 years, known as “the lil’ hard riding doctor.” In 1821 an odd mishap changed his life. He accidentally drank a bottle of arsenic. This almost killed Perrine, and left him unable to withstand cold weather. So he migrated southward to Natchez, Mississippi where malaria was a problem. Being a doctor, he took an interest in malaria and became a national authority on using quinine to treat malaria. Even in Mississippi he suffered from the cold and decided to move someplace truly tropical. Perrine secured a job as U.S. Consul in Campeche, Mexico in 1827. During the time Henry was in Mexico an epidemic of cholera struck. Thousands of people died each day. Perrine took a leadership role during the crisis and became a hero attributed we’re saving many lives and easing the discomfort of the disease. He caught cholera himself but survived.
Also during Perrine’s Mexico tenure, President John Quincy Adams directed United States consuls to ship plants back home. Perrine complied by sending specimens to Charles Howe on Indian Key. In 1838 the Perrine family moved there despite warnings of dangers relating to Native Americans.
Perrine home
The family lived on Indian Key, which at the time was a substantial community, from 1838 to 1840. Perrine introduced about 70 species to Florida’s first plant introduction garden. Among the species he brought were aloe, avocado, betel vine, cinchona, key lime, logwood, mango, sapodilla, many palms, and many cacti. Perrine’s main plant interests were agaves, especially the sisal agave for which he is the botanical author. Perrine wrote an entire book about agaves.
In 1840 Seminoles invaded Indian Key, killing Perrine, although the family escaped by going through a trapdoor in the floor into the water beneath the home.
The surviving Perrine family
[See source list on “About” page, also Robinson, R. T. Henry Perrine, Pioneer Horticulturist of Florida. Proc. Fl. State Hort. Soc. 1937 (on-line reprint: http://digitalcollections.fiu.edu/tequesta/ files/1942/42_1_03.pdf)]
Immediately after the Civil War a wave of development arrived along the Southern Florida Gulf Coast. Some of the development was fueled by displaced veterans from the Civil War, including union soldiers who had acquired a taste for the south, and including persons displaced from the Confederacy. By 1867 in Sarasota there was a tourist resort and also fruit packing house. Although railroads did not arrive in Sarasota until 1902, there was good ship service to the area. Harper’s Magazine had multiple articles about Florida during the 1870s.
Harpers Magazine 1876
This wave of development brought the Reasoner Brothers to the Sarasota area, more specifically to the Bradenton area, and to be more precise, to what is now part of Bradenton, then called Oneco. They founded the earliest continuously operated and one of the most important plant nurseries in Florida, dating back 1881. Almost as old, the Glen Saint Mary Nursery in North Florida started in 1882.
The Reasoners came to Florida as a family from a farming background in Princeton, Illinois. First to come was Pliny at age 17 alone in 1881. He single-handedly tackled carving out a plant nursery at Oneco. In 1885 his younger brother Egbert joined in, and the rest of the family followed soon.
At roughly that time, during the winter of 1884 and 1885 a series of freezes hit that area and hurt the young nursery. It was not a total loss, because the brothers learned a highly valuable lesson: that a nursery able to withstand a frost is well positioned afterwards. As a consequence, they took extreme efforts in frost protection including lath houses, sheds with retractable canvas tops, glass houses, and a system for protecting citrus trees in the groves. The next severe freeze a decade later in the 1894 and 1895allowed the Reasoner Brothers nursery to expand its business.
Freeze of 1894 and 95
Pliny must have been a genius. Not only did he start a business empire as a kid, in his late teenage years and early twenties achieved national prominence as a horticultural author and authority. In 1887 through the USDA Division of Pomology, he published their first Brochure which was a full-size book, entitled Report on the Condition of Tropical and Semi-Tropical Fruits. The book is a richly informed and color illustrated encyclopedia of the vast number of fruits known if the time and influenced by Pliny’s efforts to be suitable for cultivation and South Florida.
Along with another famous early horticulturist, Charles Torrey Simpson, Pliny served on a sheriff’s posse, and brought royal palms into cultivation. We will defer those two occurrences to the writeip on Charles Torrey Simpson.
During his short years in Florida Pliny made a plant exploration trip to Cuba. This did not go entirely well, and foreshadowed Pliny’s premature death. Yellow fever was a menace in those days. Travelers were not permitted to go to Cuba and return to the United States unless the could prove they were already immune to yellow fever by having had the disease. Pliny traveled to Cuba despite not being certified as a yellow fever survivor, and for that reason was barred from returning to the mainland. Stowing away on a ship, he slipped home illegaly in violation of quarantine laws.
Not long after that, Pliny was in Cincinnati Ohio preparing a plant exhibition when yellow fever struck the Bradenton area. He could have stayed safely in Ohio, but instead returned to Oneco to assist with a crisis, caught yellow fever, and died. This occurred in 1888 at the age of 25.
Upon Pliny’s death, brother at Egbert assumed the lead role at the Reasoner Brothers Nursery, which by then was called the Royal Palm Nursery. Egbert achieved prominence and success in his own right and built the business magnificently despite tragedy within his own family.
Reasoner Brothers Nursery offered just about everything that grows. They were important early suppliers of budded citrus to the fruit industry, and through correspondence developed an inventory of fruits, palms, and ornamentals, shipping plants all over the country and beyond. Their handsome annual catalogs are books. They also offered cut flowers, and eventually, landscape design services.
Among countless achievements, one will serve as an interesting example. The pink grapefruit appeared in 1906 as a sport on one branch of a tree in the large Atwood Groves near the Reasoner Brothers. An employee of Atwood’s thought it was pathological and showed it to Egbert. Egbert realized the sport might have value, and propagated large numbers of it by budding, amassing perhaps thousands of trees. It turned out they did not sell in Florida. He could not even interest the Florida State Horticulture Society. The grapefruits found a home when a buyer from Texas carted them off…to become the basis for the Rio Grande grapefruit industry.
Egbert and wife Sarah, in their home called Beth Salem raised three children. Daughter Julia in old age wrote an account of the nursery. Son Pliny, Jr. died at age 15 in a hunting shotgun accident. Son Norman carried the torch into the next generation, and that was not easy, as he saw the nursery through bankruptcy in the Depression Era, and rebirth as Reasoners Tropical Nursery after WWII. The home was demolished in 2015.
Theodore Mead came from a well-to-do New York family. His youth was privileged, well equipped, and well traveled. He took good advantage of his advantages.
Theodore studied civil engineering and some law at Cornell University but apparently never worked as an engineer. I don’t think he ever really needed to work, as he spent is life passing through a series of interests having to do with nature and horticulture. His early passion was butterflies, where achieved much success highlighted by an 1871 trip of 12,000 miles to the western U.S., largely Colorado, where he discovered several new species, as well as the famous Florissant Fossil Beds. Mead’s wife Edith was the daughter of entomologist William Edwards.
In 1882 the Meads came to Florida to grow oranges, first near Eustis, and they settled later at Lake Charm by Oviedo, near Winter Park. Mead taught some at Rollins College in Winter Park, where the Mead Botanical Garden established in 1940 commemorates his accomplishments. Rollin College maintains an archive of Mead materials, some on-line.
Mead invested in real estate, launching the upscale Mead Manor development ahead of its time, and he was a Boy Scout leader. He owned one of the first cars in the area, but was reputedly so inept at driving, it became necessary to pile sandbags against the rear wall to avoid continued damage to the garage. In one mishap he rolled the car with Edith in it, and happily both were unhurt. As with most of our other early horticulturists, the Mead family suffered tragedy, however. They lost a young daughter in 1892, and Mead’s brother died by gunshot.
Mead with Eagle Scouts
The freeze of 1894 and 1895 drove Mead frustrated out of orange growing and into a series of botanical-horticultural interests less susceptible to Jack Frost. He grew palms, and sold plants (palms?) to the Reasoner Brothers Nursery.
And Mead became an innovator in orchid breeding and propagation. This orchid breeding chamber depicted below was remarkable. (I drew schematically from his verbal account.) It was 30 feet long and partly filled with moist sphagnum. On the sphagnum he placed cheesecloth pillows stuffed with ground oak leaves, fungal inoculum taken from other orchids, and moss. Sprouting orchid seedlings on the pillows required warm moist filtered pressurized air forced into the chamber by the apparatus on the left.
Leading into the growth chamber was a container holding pots of moss to boost and control the humidity. Leading into the moss zone was another chamber containing a lamp, vented to exclude combustion fumes. In with the lamp was a fan spinning at 1000 rpm. This obtained power linked to a paddlewheel in a neighbor’s pressurized artesian spring. Mead’s orchid work suffered a setback in a robbery while he was out of town.
His plant breeding interests extended into gladiolus, crinums, and most famously, amaryllis, leaving the world with the “Mead Type Amaryllis.” Grower B. M. Sangster commercialized the Mead Amaryllis, breeding-in Dutch lineages and growing Amaryllis commercially on 70 acres in Apopka until the 1950s.
Charles Torrey Simpson arguably had the most diversified life of any of the early horticulturists. His life was complex, and so were his intellect and character. He was highly intelligent as well as superhumanly mentally and physically tough. He was generally regarded as kind and gentle, although some were hurtful and destructive. Simpson’s emotions were volatile. He seems to have been a bit of a ladies’ man, which caused one well documented disaster, and there are hints of others, one in a very young age and another at an advanced age. He had an enormous skill set ranging from carpentry to the scientific study, and although he did not like public speaking, he was apparently good at it. With time he became an accomplished writer and conservationist, a voice for preservation of the Everglades.
Simpson young
Simpson grew up in Illinois close to where the Reasoner family has their farm. The familys perhaps knew each other in Illinois, which would make it no coincidence that Simpson turned up in Bradenton right after Pliny Reasoner. The two spent four years as good friends.
From his home in Illinois Simpson wound up in the Union Army during the Civil War, and had the good fortune to see almost no combat. He did march with Sherman the sea, and late in life was active in veterans activities. Upon coming back to Illinois from the Civil War Simpson had what he referred to as a “muss” with a young lady and perhaps as a consequence of that wound up in the Navy for three more years. During that time he saw the world, expanded what became his lifelong interest in mollusks, and acquired toughness and nautical skills that served him well later in life.
In 1882, after army, navy, in a period of mining coal, Simpson moved to Bradenton, becoming a neighbor of the Reasoner’s, and spent four years working primarily as a carpenter going by the name of Charlie Carpenter.
In the company of Pliny Reasoner, these were eventful years. Simpson had a friend who owned a small sailboat named The Permit. They used the boat to explore for plants along the Gulf Coast, with Cornelia Simpson along on the trip pregnant and miserable with probably a combination of morning sickness and seasickness. From near the Cape Sable region they brought royal palms into cultivation, prompting a name change from the Reasoner Brothers Nursery to the Royal Palm Nursery.
In or near 1884 a game of hoodlums merged the Sarasota postmaster Charles Abbe, causing the local sheriff to gather a posse. Pliny Reasoner and Simpson served on the posse, which more or less it did its job of upholding justice. This had consequences however if. Remembering that this was shortly after the Civil War, there were tensions in the community between native Floridians and Yankee carpetbaggers. The gang represented the native Floridians, and the posse represented the Yankees. Apparently in retribution, the Reasoner Brothers nurseries suffered vandalism, although that trouble settled down and everybody lived happily ever after, except for Simpson. He made some additional bad choices.
In addition to the posse, Simpson antagonized the local community by having an extramarital affair with his pregnant wife’s caretaker. The husband of the paramour was a business partner of Simpson’s. Predictably enough this blew up in Simpson’s face. Adultery did not play well in 1880s South Florida. Possibly contributing even further to the trouble, Simpson listed himself as “infidel” under religious preference on a voter registration. Even Mrs. Reasoner was against him not approving of Pliny’s friendship with this rascal. The daughter resulting from Cornelia Simpson’s pregnancy died in infancy.
As a consequence of this perfect storm Simpson and Cornelia left town, buying a farm in Nebraska in 1986. Charles did not take well to the cold Nebraska weather, but being there allowed him to continue his interest in mollusks by studying freshwater mussels. He must have done that well because he received an invitation to work at the Smithsonian institution.
So in 1990 they went to Washington, DC and stayed a dozen years. This was not a completely happy time, as Simpson suffered certain professional frustrations and interpersonal tensions, although he made friends with John Brooks Henderson, Jr. who also studied mollusks. His father John Brooks Henderson, Sr. was a will to do senator from Missouri and author of the 13th amendment abolishing slavery. The younger Henderson remained a lifelong friend of Simpson’s and help pay for the latter’s mollusk publications.
During that time in DC, son Pliny Simpson entered the world. Cornelia left the world, and Simpson remarried in 1902 Flora Roper Simpson, the widow of a former colleague.
In 1903 the newlyweds retired back to Florida, to Lemon City, which is now part of Miami. Simpson spent almost 30 more years becoming famous in the Miami area, achieving prominence as a horticulturist, as a voice for conservation, as a prolific author, as proprietor of a botanical garden, and as a lifelong student of mollusks.
He built a beautiful home called the Sentinels on the shore of Biscayne Bay and turned the site into a magnificent garden, which at the same time was his personal retreat yet also a destination for curious visitors, out of towners, VIPs, and garden clubs. Simpson was a gracious host to his visitors, which he thought numbered over 50,000 but behind the scenes the constant trespassers upset Simpson and contributed to what might be described as his nervous breakdowns.
The Sentinels, named for the paired pines
During the Miami years Charles managed to publish his most important earlier treatise on mollusks along with new work on that topic, and he wrote four more books. The one most relevant to horticulture was his 1916 Ornamental Gardening in Florida. The subsequent three books had to do with exploring, nature, conservation, and wildlife. Bryant Walker, a Detroit Attorney, associate of Henry Ford, and student of mollusks helped in the Miami years by providing funds to publish Simpson’s long dormant and controversial magnum opus on freshwater mussels.
A few years before Simpson’s return to Miami, the Soar Brothers followed the 1896 arrival of the railroad at Miami by founding the Soar Brothers Nursery there a year later. The brothers were John, Victor, and Francis. Victor worked as horticulturist for Henry Flagler, while the other two brothers concentrated more on the nursery, which split into two in later years. The three brothers and Simpson took up exploring for plants around the southern Everglades and the Miami area. They were joined at times by iconic botanist John Kunkel Small.
Left to right: Paul Mathaus (Deering employee), Victor Soar, Laban Bethel (Deering emplyee, cook), Simpson
Plant exploring takes resources, and in South Florida that includes boats. Access to a boat and extra hands including a cook, came from Charles Deering, the wealthy son of the founder of International Harvester Company. Deering on repeated occasions was a financial patron of botany and horticulture in Florida; his first estate in Miami was a botanical garden in its own right. Simpson and the Soars seem to have no scruples about removing orchids, bromeliads, cacti, palms, and other plants from their natural habitats to bring back for gardening.
The Soar Brothers nursery made two especially prominent introductions to horticulture. One was the Paurotis Palm. The other was the Boston Fern. According to legend the fern went from the Soar Brothers to Boston where it acquired its name, and became the main foliage plant of that era.
John Soar’s car
Growing a tropical fern in northern greenhouses was expensive. In 1912 a clerk at a greenhouse in Springfield Ohio had the smart idea of growing fern far less expensively back in Florida where it is native. Harry Ustler came from Ohio to Orlando and initially worked as a waiter in a hotel. A guest of the hotel help the young entrepreneur financially to begin growing Boston Ferns in an old pineapple facility in Orlando. Later, Ustler and his brothers started the Ustler Brothers Nursery in Apopka as the first large foliage growing operation there. Not long after that the leather leaf fern if also became a major crop, and those two species were the foundation of the Apopka foliage industry until approximately 1930, to which we will return when we discuss Robert D. Mitchell.
Tornado damage in Apopka 1918
Another person important in Simpson’s life was David Fairchild, the most active exotic plant introducer of all time, and namesake of Fairchild Garden. At that time Fairchild was in charge in of a USDA plant introduction station in Miami. Fairchild took Simpson under his wing and put him on the payroll to promote plant introductions, earning Simpson through Fairchild’s efforts the Frank Meyer Medal for plant introduction in 1923. They don’t give awards anymore for introducing exotic species! In fact, a year later in 1924 the USDA sharply restricted this activity.
There was yet another prominent horticulturist in the Miami area during essentially the same years as Simpson. William Krome was the chief construction engineer for extending the railroad from Miami to Key West. Krome lived in Homestead, which was a transition point and still is between Miami and the Keys.
William Krome
As a secondary interest Krome started growing fruit and became the founding father of the Homestead fruit industry, especially in connection with avocados. His property was the site where research showed the unique pollination system of avocados. The Kromes donated their land to become the core of the University of Florida’s research and education center at Homestead. Krome is commemorated to this day by the Florida State Horticultural Society’s Krome Memorial Institute.
Krome’s Homestead house
Although Krome and Simpson were both luminaries in horticulture at essentially the same place and almost exactly the same time I don’t know what their relationship was. There seems to be one small divergence of views outside of horticulture. One of Simpson’s interests was the land snails of the Keys and of the Miami area. With Krome as the construction engineer in charge, Simpson objected publicly and in writing to the habitat damage from the railroad construction.
Simpson was an early voice helping to plant the seed for preservation of the Everglades as national park much later. An early step along that path was Simpson’s and many other’s love of what was then called Paradise Key, which he explored with the Soars and John Kunkel Small in 1903. Carrying a dead rattlesnake out of Paradise Key, John Soar became severely ill due to the snake or otherwise. With advocacy and assistance, Paradise Key became Royal Palm State Park, thanks in part to Mrs. Henry Flagler making a matching land gift to make it possible.
As we progress into the middle and late 1920s, Simpson had increasing troubles, including but not entirely advancing age. He had suffered malaria all his life. He had surgery for cataracts in his eyes. The 1926 hurricane devastated his garden. And there was a robbery. One major bright spot occurred however: Simpson received an honorary doctorate degree from the University of Miami in 1927, living, writing, and promoting conservation issues until his death in 1932.
In 1910 near Oviedo John Hakes discovered a new orange in his citrus grove, on just one tree, grafted to grapefruit rootstock. He new he had something good, and so did William Chase Temple.
William Chase Temple (1862-1917) was—among many corporate and industrial involvements—a Pittsburgh Steel Executive (Babcock and Wilcox) turned citrus grower and President of FL Citrus Exchange. Temple was owner of Pittsburgh “Nationals,” and is credited with launching the World Series in 1895, setting the rules and donating the trophy of the era, the Temple Cup, which now resides in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Temple was also the first lifetime member of AAA, and was first owner of a pro football team. His son- in-law, Del Mason played pitcher for Rollins College then went to the majors. Temple became Mayor of Winter Park. He was a serious bigshot who liked baseball, oranges, and cars. (Back in that era, cars belonged to VIPs.)
Given the place and time, with two important prominent wealthy horticultural enthusiasts in the same neck of the woods, Theodore Mead and Temple certainly knew each other well, but I do not know if Mead had any involvement in the Temple Orange.
Hakes showed Temple the delicious new easily peeled orange, which is technically a tangelo (orange X tangerine hybrid). Temple directed Hakes to DC Gillett of Buckeye Nursery, Tampa, a major grower at that time.
Gillett patented the cultivar, making a deal with Hakes. Hakes did not want the orange named for him, so Hakes named it for Temple. Gillett introduced it for sale 1917, and by the 1970s there were over 2 million Temple Orange trees, all propagated by budding.
The origin of the tree in the Hakes grove is interesting. It seems to have originated in Jamaica, where tangelos were common, and actually arrived in Florida more than once. Possibly somebody in Jamaica sent this tangelo to friends in Oviedo around 1896. Budwood from it possibly was grafted to the “mother” grapefruit tree before the Hakes bought the land.
In Winter Park a second tree turned up producing the same fruit. The owner said Hakes gave him permission to take budwood, although Hakes denied it and built a fence around the tree to thwart budwood snitchers.
And then after all this, two more similar tress turned up, near Oviedo—and according to some local old timers, a retired sea captain might have brought the original budwood from Jamaica, with Hakes-Temple-Gillett being the first to recognize its market significance. The “other” similar trees were called “Jamaica Oranges.”
The original Temple Orange, stay out!
Much of this account comes from Swanson (see the “About” page.)
Henry Nehrling , like some of the other early icons achieved prominence before horticulture later in life. Nehrling was an accomplished ornithologist who wrote about birds in German and in English, and whose magnum opus was Die Nordamerikanische Vogelwelt, the World of North American Birds, published in 1891, and later in English as Our Native Birds of Song and Beauty. It is now a prized rare book.
A German American, he was born in Wisconsin before his family moved to Illinois. In 1874 he married his wife Sophie and began teaching in a series of Lutheran schools, which he continued in Texas (1878-1882) and in Missouri (until 1884). Henry became a customs inspector in Milwaukee, then Curator of the Milwaukee Public Museum until 1901.
Young Henry
In 1885 at age 32 Nehrling purchased sight unseen 40 acres in Gotha, Florida, not far from Orlando. (He visited in 1886.) Gotha was a German community, and thus not an odd place for Nehrling to plan to settle. He probably knew others there, and moved his family to Gotha in 1902. (1902 and 1903 were eventful years: this was the time CT Simpson moved to Miami, and also the Wright Brothers flight.) The Gotha property, Palm Cottage Gardens, was the site of his best horticultural efforts, and after a long period of neglect, has come under restoration in recent years.
Still in Milwaukee in 1893, Henry visited the Chicago Columbian Exposition and was smitten by Caladiums, brought for display from Brazil where the plants are native.
He and his family lived approximately 15 years at Gotha, where Nehrling took up horticulture with bells on. Through correspondence he imported all manner of species from around the world, coming to the attention of the king of plant importation, David Fairchild with the USDA. Nehrling received the Frank Meyer Medal for plant introduction in 1929, probably with Fairchild’s involvement. (Interestingly, back in 1924 the USDA, Fairchild’s employer, imposed strict limitations on plant introductions, frustrating Nehrling and no doubt Fairchild.) Henry knew Thomas Edison, who had a winter home in Ft. Myers, and he worked for Edison growing rubber-bearing plants.
Nehrling’s main claim to fame is the Florida Caladium industry. He bred and grew them in massive quantities, perhaps having as many as a quarter million plants representing a couple thousand variants. The industry went forth and flourished, as it does today, around Lake Placid and Sebring, where one of the early large growers was David Mitchell (1907-1954). Mitchell legendarily dynamited a neighbor’s dam for sequestering too much irrigation water, and went on to become Mayor of Sebring.
Caladiums at Gotha
Nehrling was a friend of another Ft. Meyers garden enthusiast, James E. Hendry (1878-1955), grandson of Francis Hendry (1845-1917), a founding father of Ft. Meyers, and reputedly the person who introduced Bougainvilleas there. Jame’s daughter-in-law Helen Hendry (born 1931) was a prominent landscape architect until recently. James Hendry owned the Everglades Nursery in Ft. Meyers, where Nehrling’s stepson Robert D. Mitchell was manager in 1929.
Everglades Nursery, Ft. Meyers, Zinnias
Near Ft. Meyers at Estero was an odd but benign utopian community called the Koreshan Unity headed by visionary Cyrus Teed. Their village is preserved in part now as a state park. Henry was a friend of the Koreshans, exhibiting plants and certainly speaking there. The Koreshans published and archived much of his horticultural writing.
The Nehrling children were six. Both daughters died young. So did wife Sophie, leading Nehrling to remarry, Betty Mitchell. The sons mostly went on to careers in Botany and Horticulture. Arno was a Horticulture Professor at Cornell and prolific author. Walter taught Botany at the Illinois State Normal School. Werner worked for the Orlando parks system, and grew oranges. Bert was the only son to step off the horticulture path. Stepson Robert D. Mitchell (1899-1989) went on to be a major Florida grower in his own right. Back to him in a moment.
Arno, Henry, Walter
In 1917 a record freeze clobbered Florida horticulture. Nehrling was nearly ruined at age 67. But he started over by moving his center of operations southward to Naples, with partial success, although troubles caught up with him. Naples was not as frost free as he hoped. Nor did it escape the 1926 (and 28) hurricane(s). Wife Betty stayed behind in Gotha. And worst of all perhaps, Nehrling defaulted on his Naples mortgage and had to vacate. The property was looted, including his papers, eventually becoming the site of Caribbean Gardens. By then in his 70s, Henry tried to start once again at Sebring in about 1927 but, with the details murky, the Caladiums wound up at the Sebring Ornamental Nursery with no payment to Nehrling. He died not long thereafter, shortly before the death of his contemporary Charles Torrey Simpson.
Postcard of Gotha
Robert Mitchell, the stepson, went to study Horticulture in St. Louis at the then-and-now famous Missouri Botanical Garden, under George Pring. Upon completing studies and a stint of work in St. Louis, Mitchell returned in 1929 to Florida to manage James Hendry’s Everglades Nursery. In 1930 he struck off on his own, going to Orlando and starting the Shore Acres Nursery. This was early in The Great Depression when the Orlando-area (mostly Apopka) fern industry was in depression, having had a good run since around 1912. The foliage industry needed a shot in the arm, and Mitchell provided it.
In St. Louis he became familiar with Heartleaf Philodendron introduced from South America by botanist Jesse Greenman to the Missouri Botanical Garden and cultivated around St. Louis and a little in Florida. Mitchell commercialized it into the next big foliage crop with the help of his friend Glenn Turner (not the one recently in the news) who ran the National School of Floral Design and who promoted the plant broadly. Later and likewise through Missouri Botanical Garden connections, Mitchell introduced Aglaonemas, and then Epipremnum…now a Category II invasive exotic. Oops.
After Nehrling’s death, the Gotha property came under the ownership of Julian Nally, erstwhile Radio Announcer and son of former RCA President Edward Nally. Julian commercialized Nehrling’s old Gloriosa Lily line, seeing Gloriosas become a corsage fad during the WWII Era. A viral disease ended that around 1950, and Nally switched his priority to Bromeliads.
A striking aspect of early Florida horticulture is the involvement of non-horticultural and quasi-horticultural rock stars of the era. True to this day there’s a link between wealth and horticulture. Well-to-do persons often enjoy horticulture, have homes to landscape, and travel. Such folks are frequently patrons of the arts, or hire horticulturists for their “upscale landscapes.” I know! I live in Palm Beach County. Some of our students have good jobs thanks to the 1-percenters.
But “back in the day,” it wasn’t just that. A second factor in the old wealth-horticulture linkage was that the 1890s-early 20th Century was a time of growth, expansion, science, and discovery. Plant introduction and plant breeding were on a “progress” par with other science and industry, with airplanes, light bulbs, and radios, and the early horticulturists hobnobbed with with other luminaries of wealth, science, and industry. In some cases, they were wealthy VIPs or scions of successful families : Theodore Mead, Julian Nally, and William Chase Temple, for instance.
To expand this list to wealthy clients of notable landscape architects, such as William Lyman Phillips, would get long and boring, think Edward Bok for starters. That sort of linkage extends to every mansion from Palm Beach to Miami to Ft. Meyers and Naples.
Here are some more interesting examples:
Alexander Graham Bell was David Fairchild’s father-in-law.
Charles Deering was a son of the founder of International Harvester, and was an officer there himself. So was his brother who built Vizcaya, now a historic estate mansion in Miami. Charles had two estates in Miami, the first had its own botanical garden and zoo, part of which he let the NY Botanical Garden use as an experimental garden. Arguably the greatest botanist ever active in Florida was John Kunkel Small from the NY Botanical Garden. Deering supported Small’s work, including plant exploration with Charles Torrey Simpson, the Soar Brothers, and others. Deering provided a boat, the Barbee, and two employees, Paul Mathaus and Laban Bethel for these trips.
Thomas Edison had a winter home in Ft. Meyers, where he researched rubber-bearing plants, an effort into which he brought Henry Nehrling. The elite of the era knew each other, and Edison knew David Fairchild, Henry Ford (adjacent propert in Ft. Meyers), and certainly the Hendry Family. He also visited Egbert Reasoner.
Henry Flagler was the development king of South Florida, think hotels and railroads. He supported David Fairchild’s early plant introduction garden in Miami, employed Victor Soar as a horticulturist, and employed William Krome as construction engineer. Mrs. Flagler donated land to help establish Royal Palm State Park.
Henry Ford was Thomas Edison’s immediate neighbor in the winter in Ft. MeyersFord was a friend of David Fairchild’s who networked everybody who ever crossed his path. Back in Detroit, Ford was an associate of Walker Bryant, a bigshot attorney involved in the car industry. Both Ford and Bryant were instrumental in promoting the Detroit Zoo. Bryant was also a student of mollusks, and thus knew and supported Charles Torrey Simpson, especially by funding publication of Simpson’s lifelong book on freshwater mussels.
John Brooks Henderson, Sr. was a Senator from Missouri, and author of the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery. His son JBH, Jr. was a student of mollusks and long-standing friend of Charles Torrey Simpson. The Hendersons helped fund Simpson’s work.
Edward Nally was a President of RCA. His son Julian, a radio announcer, bought Henry Nehrling’s Palm Cottage Gardens after Nehrling’s death.
William Chase Temple was one of those all-round titans of industry. He had his hand in (at high levels) many business enterprises and industries of the era. He was the first owner of a pro football team. He was the founding father of the baseball World Series. (You can go see the Temple Cup at Cooperstown.) And he is the Temple of the Temple Orange, having been instrumental in its discovery and promotion.
Orville Wright was a friend of David Fairchild’s. So was Orville’s airplane rival Glenn Curtiss, who had horticulture interests at his estate outside Miami. (Also, Alexander Graham Bell became involved in early aviation.)
(Note: This entry rests predominantly on the book by F.R. Jackson cited at the end of the present summary.)
William Lyman Phillips was Florida’s preeminent Landscape Architect. Riding the winds of socio-economic-political trends, William Lyman Phillips had just about the most mixed career a landscape architect could have: landscaping the Panama Canal, building military bases, burying WWI dead, supervising Civilian Conservation Corp projects in the Depression, landscaping the rich and famous, and designing most of Florida’s botanical gardens, including Bok Tower Garden, McKee Garden, and Fairchild Tropical Garden. His fingerprints are all over Florida.
William Lyman Phillips, courtesy of Fairchild Tropical Garden Archives, with permission.
Phillips was a Bostonian. He attended and excelled at Harvard and spent most of his career working for the famous Boston architecture firm of Olmsted Brothers. After graduating and working briefly in the Boston area, and touring Europe to give his subsequent work a classical foundation, Phillips took a job as urban planner for the new Panama Canal town, Balboa. Interpersonal conflict there led to his premature resignation, but not before leaving his mark on the town, a mark still evident today.
Returning to the U.S., William had trouble settling down until he volunteered in 1918 to lend a hand in the First World War designing military bases. Not many G.I.s passing through basic training knew that the placements of the mess halls and latrines were at the hands of one of the nation’s most prominent landscape architects. After the war, Phillips went to France to lay out cemeteries for U.S. war dead. The experience benefited him in two critical ways. The stay in France allowed Phillips to explore continental landscape architecture in depth, and more importantly, he met his wife Simone who returned to Florida with him.
The military experience demonstrates a key point: Phillip’s success in part was due not only to talent and to connections, but also to adaptability. He was willing and able to meld aesthetics, divergent viewpoints, and utter practicality, and to do what the moment required, not necessarily what he wanted. The WWI experience initiated an intermittent lifelong trend to pitch in on projects as needed, ranging from the mundane and unglamorous to hobnobbing with the rich and famous. Phillips was unpretentious, especially given his prestige, education, abilities, and associates. Much of his career transpired during the Depression when the privileged prevailed with a vengeance in Florida alongside the poor and displaced. He served both.
William spent eight years, approximately 1925-1933, as the Olmsted Brothers Representative and landscape-architect-in-charge at the Mountain Lake Colony near Lake Wales, an exclusive early high-end development of large homes on landscaped lots, with golf, socializing, and orange blossoms. His job entailed developing lavish gardens for a wealthy clientele who wanted “Olmsted” designs. During those years Phillips became increasingly connected with homeowners in Palm Beach, Miami, and beyond. As was almost inevitable, his growing personal demand in high-society circles, autonomy, and personal earning power (which was brief, as the Depression caught up with him), created tensions with his Boston-based employers.
It is almost impossible to generalize accurately about the design style of an individual as dynamic and diversified as Phillips. Setting aside for the moment his work on public parks, here are my impressions from seeing several of his sites, and from examining the plans presented in his biography by F. R. Jackson from which much of the present account originates.
Phillip’s ornamental gardens had a series of recurring tendencies, often a bit formal. At times, the goal seemed to be along the lines of “adapt tropical plants to classical European styles,” which would have resonated with his well-traveled Europhilic clients. He liked symmetry, sculpture, stone stairwells with turns and terraces, balustrades, emphatic borders separating garden areas, and dramatic vistas. Mediterranean-influenced architecture was popular at the time, and Phillips applied his tropical experience in Panama accordingly, to the delight of his clients.
Especially in flat terrain such as Florida’s, Phillips tended to build his designs on a backbone of a wide, straight, dominating axis, often with “ribs” of smaller axes branching off. He then sometimes lined his broad axis with rows of palms leading to the horizon, despite a stated personal distaste for Royal Palms, which he called “feather-dusters.” Also prominent were winding curving pathways connecting points of interest, especially in his more naturalistic creations, such as McKee Gardens. Echoing his European experience, some of the designs, such as the Bok Tower Garden, contain savanna-like “bosques,” that is, open, easily navigated, airy groves of trees, a taste psychologists demonstrated in later years to be hard-wired into innate human preferences.
Phillips’s sites glisten with lagoons, ponds, reflecting pools, and views to lakes. One who likes water also likes bridges, which almost seem to be Phillips signatures. Many of his designs feature small arched bridges, often made of stone. Heavy stonework is abundant through his creations.
One of the leading residents of Mountain Lake Colony was Edward W. Bok, Editor of the Ladies Home Journal. Bok aspired to and succeeded in developing a garden sanctuary adjacent to the Mountain Lake Colony. The sanctuary occupied the “mountain” (sand dune) and surrounding land with no regard for the fact that this was sacred ground to the Seminoles, whose views did not count for much in that time and place. Atop the Mountain Bok erected his 205-foot singing tower carillon, and the site today is Bok Tower Gardens. Phillips was the chief designer and had an ongoing relationship with Bok and with Bok’s reluctant wife after Edward’s death.
The Depression, beginning in 1929, hurt Olmsted Brothers and Phillips, who eventually found himself adrift and under-employed. He attempted briefly to launch a landscape architecture firm in West Palm Beach. About the time that failed he was selected to supervise Civilian Conservation Corps projects, beginning with the now-defunct Royal Palm State Park near Homestead, working there while his family remained in West Palm Beach. Then came CCC work on Highlands Hammock State Park clouded by strife, Greynolds Park in Miami, Matheson Hammock in Coral Gables, and Crandon Beach (and zoo) Park on Key Biscayne.
These park projects exposed a new facet of the flexible genius. He often had a heavy classical hand in designing purely ornamental gardens, and he was one of the state’s great disseminators of invasive exotic species. His planting lists would bring howls of protest from today’s horticulturists.
But to return to the important point of the moment, that new facet, Phillips’ public Depression-era parks tended toward restraint, ecological awareness, respect for nature, and preservation of natural beauty. This is noteworthy, because in my opinion he displayed more respect for natural Florida than might be expected in an architect with little biological or ecological training. An exception was Greynolds Park in Miami which was degraded quarried land from the get-go. To Phillips it was a sandbox for whimsical play. There he built an artificial ruin, a coral castle present to this day.
Then came Fairchild Tropical Garden, dedicated in 1938, which in some ways is an extension of adjacent Matheson Hammock. Most U.S. botanical gardens are the estates of dead rich people who collected plants. That is not how Fairchild Tropical Garden came about. Rather, it grew out of a constellation of favorably aligned events. First, David Fairchild was living nearby at his private estate called the Kampong, and it was natural to create a garden to showcase his lifetime of plant collections. Second, his friend Col. Robert Montgomery, who owned neighboring land donated in part to the project, was an avid wealthy plant collector and the major sparkplug for the project. Third, Florida’s leading landscape architect, William Lyman Phillips, was not only available literally next door, but was under-employed, working at Matheson Hammock while directing free labor from the CCC.
By donating 69 acres for the Garden as nominally a component of Matheson Hammock (retaining a private parcel as the Montgomery Palmetum), and by exploiting connections among the local officials, Montgomery engineered the use of CCC labor to build Fairchild Garden.
Phillips designed the Garden and remained allied with it for about 20 years, until changing personnel, changing ideas, and advancing age broke the bond. The project had a little bit of an identity crisis, as all botanical gardens do. Ask 10 people, even those in the know, what a botanical garden is for and you will get 10 different answers, and this becomes a problem if those 10 people are all part of the project. It is easy at such times to get tangled in divergent views about aesthetics, research, public education, scientific rigor, plant trials, and more. Many botanical garden directors (including me) have foundered on those rocky shoals. Phillips, especially in his mature days, was the perfect diplomatic genius to orchestrate all of this, managing to please almost all of the people almost all of the time.
He achieved beauty aided by the heavenly site, complete with a 15-foot escarpment dividing the garden into an upland with magnificent views of the watery lowland. The elevation change offered also an opportunity for the stonework Phillips liked. Despite decades or changing ideas, changing circumstances, and hurricanes, Fairchild has some of the most beautiful vistas of any U.S botanical garden.
Perhaps because the Garden had an underlying scientific current—plant introductions—and was conceived by individuals with formal botanical instincts, a decision was made, perhaps unsual for U.S. botanical gardens. The concept was to base planting areas on plant families, that is to site species on the basis of their classifications. A strong conflicting argument was made at the inception to group plants with similar needs instead of those with similar ancestry, and of course there was always the obvious case for purely aesthetic groupings. For botanists and horticulturists interested in coming to know plant families, Fairchild remains a place to see plant family reunions, a feature largely lost on the public and on ornamental gardeners more interested in usage-groupings, yet true to the vision of the founding fathers. Somehow Phillips managed to unify divergent egos and an arcane academic planting plan into a place of beauty and harmony, no small feat!
[Principal Phillips reference: Jackson, F. R. Pioneer of Tropical Landscape Architecture, William Lyman Phillips in Florida. xxi + 274 p. Univ. Press of FL. 1997.]
Florida Horticulture History 