Native, Exotic, or Novel? The Commercial Distribution of Plant Material in Nineteenth-Century America

Prior to the nineteenth century, whatever planting was done by Americans (first colonists and then citizens) started with seeds that were saved from previous plantings, traded informally both on the North American continent and across the Atlantic, or received as small gifts. By the end of the nineteenth century, over 800 companies had been formed to supply growers of all sorts with seeds. The seed trade was among the first in the United States to reach a national market, and both promoted and reflected the rise of horticulture as an American pursuit. The commodification of seeds, as well as the scale of the national market in the United States, complicated the designations of plant material as ‘native' or ‘exotic.' Seed sellers sought to expand their stock through the selection, cultivation, and breeding of plant material that transcended traditional categories. While the nursery trade upheld the category of the exotic as a high-end product often requiring special care, the seed trade was based on the premise that the grower of average skill and knowledge could raise the items they sold from seed. Exotics were domesticated by the seed trade through selection, crossing, and breeding, and introduced to the market as ‘novelties.' For nascent American horticulturalists, the plants that provided familiar building blocks of landscape design, often borrowed from European precedent, were not necessarily those native to American soil. At the same time, horticulturalists needed to be convinced of the worth of plants found on the expanding American terrain, whether in the woodlands of the eastern seaboard or the specimen collected on expeditions such as Lewis and Clark's. Negotiating these regional, national, climatic, and horticultural boundaries, the seed trade translated the language of native and exotic plant material into the market culture of imports and exports.