Press » The other California immigrants -- plants and trees / Women were often first cultivators of imported flora, stories recall
Hazel White • October 25, 2003
A dip here and a dabble there in "Tangible Memories: Californians and Their Gardens, 1800-1950" reveals that city budget cuts have been around for a while,
and at least one official perhaps took drastic steps to get funds restored. As much fun as it is to read Judith M. Taylor's new book, the absence of stories about women and minorities makes it a bittersweet experience.
One story reveals new dirt on "Uncle John" McLaren, the director of Golden Gate Park from 1887 to 1943. It appears that he just may have driven his city- assigned car into a lake on purpose. The park commissioners had thought to trim their budget by laying off McLaren's chauffeur and having McLaren drive himself. The first morning without the chauffeur, the car went into a lake, and the chauffeur was reinstated.
McLaren comes across as someone who liked to exercise his power. As well as the car story, Taylor relates how he'd have his gardeners plant large trees one day and then replant them the following day 6 inches to the left or right. Or he'd order whole beds of newly installed plants torn out; in one instance the plants had to be returned to the nursery because "McLaren did not care for Griselinia littoralis 'Variegata.' "
Taylor doesn't say when griselinia, native to Australia, first appeared in a California nursery catalog, but she gives the first listings of about 150 other ornamental plants. Maybe griselinia arrived with the first acacia trees, in 1853, brought here by Col. J.L.L. Warren, an "Easterner," who had won a prize for growing the first tomato in Massachusetts.
Dipping into Taylor's book reminds me of a visit with my English grandmother: story after story of the old days, and so much excitement surrounding the exploits of men. Sometimes the tales would end with a comment like "Of course, he'd never let his wife . . .," and then my grandmother would smack out the creases in her apron rather ruthlessly, and pour more tea.
It was Mrs. Charles V. Gillespie -- let's for goodness' sake call her Sarah -- who grew the first acacias from seed in California. She arrived in 1848 on the clipper ship the Eagle from Canton, China, at the age of 33. She lived on Chestnut Street in San Francisco with her husband, "a very worthy soul," according to the late Harry M. Butterfield, a plants man and writer, who died in 1970. Butterfield's unpublished manuscript titled "California Gardens of Memory" is the basis of Taylor's book; she chanced upon it at the University of California at Davis Library when she was researching her first book, "The Olive in California: History of an Immigrant Tree."
On a Friday morning in the fall of 1853, writes Taylor, Sarah Gillespie entered some plants in the first California state flower show, as did Warren. One of the plants she exhibited was Passiflora alata.
But Butterfield overlooked Sarah's passionflower; the first passionflower he lists was a later one. The next year, at the same show, Sarah exhibited 108 new ornamental plants. No one else came anywhere near her volume of entries. Yet Warren's entries that year made it onto Butterfield's lists, and Sarah's didn't. Although she lived for another 40 years, after "her dazzling debut, Mrs. Gillespie disappeared from the public scene as a gardener."
My grandmother might have allowed herself a sigh over Sarah's short-lived fame. Before anyone could comment on the subject, though, there would be a new connection remembered.
So it is in Taylor's book: Sarah's husband was employed as managing assistant to M.D.M. Howard, the manager of William Leidsdorff's estate. William Leidsdorff was the first African American entrepreneur of San Francisco before the Gold Rush. He ran a successful business, and in the 1840s his house on Kearny, near Clay Street, was the only house in town with a garden.
You could sit all afternoon, dipping into this book for stories of California history that surround the new plants that came here. You can enter the book looking for a favorite plant or your neighborhood history or be drawn in by a chapter on the history of the trees on the University of Berkeley campus. What might bring you up short, before you've wandered far, is the fact that Butterfield's manuscript is predominantly about one group of people, European American men.
Between chapters on the gardens in the Sacramento Valley and the gardens of the San Joaquin Valley is a chapter on Stockton, mostly devoted to its founder,
Capt. Charles M. Weber. Weber came to Stockton in 1841 and quickly became partners in a store with a Mexican citizen, Don Guillermo.
"Through this partner . . ., who had secured a grant of Rancho Campo de los Franeses containing 48,747 acres on January 13, 1844, Weber was finally able to get a foothold in what later became the Stockton country." He actually got entire possession of all those acres, reportedly "for canceling a grocery bill of about $60," writes Taylor. The text then continues with stories of Weber's "generosity."
At my grandmother's, there would come a point when I'd have to stride out the back door and splash in the mud up some cart track or other. With the fancy tea things left behind I could better imagine that I lived in a different world. Taylor sometimes anticipates such a response to Butterfield's manuscript.
In the chapter titled "Spanish California Gardens," she tells us which books to buy for more modern views of California history: "Legacy of Conquest, " by Patricia Limerick, and Richard White's "It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own, A New History of the American West."
I also recommend another book on the West, full of women's stories, "African American Women Confront the West, 1600-2000," edited by Quintard Taylor and Shirley Ann Wilson Moore. I'm headed out to Golden Gate Park with it right now, to get a fresh perspective. I'll try to avoid sitting under a McLaren-era tree.
A dip here and a dabble there in "Tangible Memories: Californians and Their Gardens, 1800-1950" reveals that city budget cuts have been around for a while,
and at least one official perhaps took drastic steps to get funds restored. As much fun as it is to read Judith M. Taylor's new book, the absence of stories about women and minorities makes it a bittersweet experience.
One story reveals new dirt on "Uncle John" McLaren, the director of Golden Gate Park from 1887 to 1943. It appears that he just may have driven his city- assigned car into a lake on purpose. The park commissioners had thought to trim their budget by laying off McLaren's chauffeur and having McLaren drive himself. The first morning without the chauffeur, the car went into a lake, and the chauffeur was reinstated.
McLaren comes across as someone who liked to exercise his power. As well as the car story, Taylor relates how he'd have his gardeners plant large trees one day and then replant them the following day 6 inches to the left or right. Or he'd order whole beds of newly installed plants torn out; in one instance the plants had to be returned to the nursery because "McLaren did not care for Griselinia littoralis 'Variegata.' "
Taylor doesn't say when griselinia, native to Australia, first appeared in a California nursery catalog, but she gives the first listings of about 150 other ornamental plants. Maybe griselinia arrived with the first acacia trees, in 1853, brought here by Col. J.L.L. Warren, an "Easterner," who had won a prize for growing the first tomato in Massachusetts.
Dipping into Taylor's book reminds me of a visit with my English grandmother: story after story of the old days, and so much excitement surrounding the exploits of men. Sometimes the tales would end with a comment like "Of course, he'd never let his wife . . .," and then my grandmother would smack out the creases in her apron rather ruthlessly, and pour more tea.
It was Mrs. Charles V. Gillespie -- let's for goodness' sake call her Sarah -- who grew the first acacias from seed in California. She arrived in 1848 on the clipper ship the Eagle from Canton, China, at the age of 33. She lived on Chestnut Street in San Francisco with her husband, "a very worthy soul," according to the late Harry M. Butterfield, a plants man and writer, who died in 1970. Butterfield's unpublished manuscript titled "California Gardens of Memory" is the basis of Taylor's book; she chanced upon it at the University of California at Davis Library when she was researching her first book, "The Olive in California: History of an Immigrant Tree."
On a Friday morning in the fall of 1853, writes Taylor, Sarah Gillespie entered some plants in the first California state flower show, as did Warren. One of the plants she exhibited was Passiflora alata.
But Butterfield overlooked Sarah's passionflower; the first passionflower he lists was a later one. The next year, at the same show, Sarah exhibited 108 new ornamental plants. No one else came anywhere near her volume of entries. Yet Warren's entries that year made it onto Butterfield's lists, and Sarah's didn't. Although she lived for another 40 years, after "her dazzling debut, Mrs. Gillespie disappeared from the public scene as a gardener."
My grandmother might have allowed herself a sigh over Sarah's short-lived fame. Before anyone could comment on the subject, though, there would be a new connection remembered.
So it is in Taylor's book: Sarah's husband was employed as managing assistant to M.D.M. Howard, the manager of William Leidsdorff's estate. William Leidsdorff was the first African American entrepreneur of San Francisco before the Gold Rush. He ran a successful business, and in the 1840s his house on Kearny, near Clay Street, was the only house in town with a garden.
You could sit all afternoon, dipping into this book for stories of California history that surround the new plants that came here. You can enter the book looking for a favorite plant or your neighborhood history or be drawn in by a chapter on the history of the trees on the University of Berkeley campus. What might bring you up short, before you've wandered far, is the fact that Butterfield's manuscript is predominantly about one group of people, European American men.
Between chapters on the gardens in the Sacramento Valley and the gardens of the San Joaquin Valley is a chapter on Stockton, mostly devoted to its founder,
Capt. Charles M. Weber. Weber came to Stockton in 1841 and quickly became partners in a store with a Mexican citizen, Don Guillermo.
"Through this partner . . ., who had secured a grant of Rancho Campo de los Franeses containing 48,747 acres on January 13, 1844, Weber was finally able to get a foothold in what later became the Stockton country." He actually got entire possession of all those acres, reportedly "for canceling a grocery bill of about $60," writes Taylor. The text then continues with stories of Weber's "generosity."
At my grandmother's, there would come a point when I'd have to stride out the back door and splash in the mud up some cart track or other. With the fancy tea things left behind I could better imagine that I lived in a different world. Taylor sometimes anticipates such a response to Butterfield's manuscript.
In the chapter titled "Spanish California Gardens," she tells us which books to buy for more modern views of California history: "Legacy of Conquest, " by Patricia Limerick, and Richard White's "It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own, A New History of the American West."
I also recommend another book on the West, full of women's stories, "African American Women Confront the West, 1600-2000," edited by Quintard Taylor and Shirley Ann Wilson Moore. I'm headed out to Golden Gate Park with it right now, to get a fresh perspective. I'll try to avoid sitting under a McLaren-era tree.
SF Gate, October 25, 2003
