Flowers from Days Gone By

My friend Kevin Richardson is a remarkable guy.  Besides being the truest friend anyone could ever hope to have, he’s a fascinating, well-read, erudite bibliophile, a passionate lover and collector of the fine and decorative arts, and a fellow possessed of a level of decency, grace, and propriety not seen in humanity’s masses for several generations.  He treats all people – friends and strangers alike – with what can only be described as sincere, old-fashioned decency.  He embraces the decorum of nobler times, internalizes it, and monograms it in singular, Kevin fashion.  He’s a gentleman, and he’s also much more – my friend Kevin Richardson is truly a man out of time.  And nowhere is this fact more clearly manifest than through his Christmas and birthday gift-giving proclivities. 

For my birthday recently, I received from Kevin a gift of two Edwardian Era flower seed catalogs.  The catalogs were printed in 1904 and 1910 respectively, and feature the seed selections of Miss Emma V. White, of No. 18 Nicollet Ave., Minneapolis, Minn. (and 3010 Aldrich Ave. S., Minneapolis, Minn., for the 1910 catalog).  The front and back covers of both catalogs features stunning Edwardian artwork, and the beautiful, meticulously detailed illustrations featured on every single one of the pages between them, are exhibition-worthy.  The seed selection is extensive, and there can be no question about the quality of the seeds themselves: Miss White would never have provided such glorious attendant illustrations if these beauties weren’t going to grow, and grow extravagantly.  Further, she proudly takes personal responsibility for the quality of her seeds, and the beauty of their ultimate states of fully-developed planthood through the consistent use of such phraseology as “My Three Warrants,” “My List of Choice Flower Seeds,” and “This is my special mixture…”  And each listed individual selection is accompanied by a turn-of-the-century price, which, as you can guess, is astonishing.  But the typesetting across the pages of these little gems not only offers a glimpse of the state of the U.S. economy in the early 1900s, more importantly, it reveals the diligent, earnest, and gracious character of Miss Emma V. White herself, and maybe the nation as a whole at the time, as well.

A little research showed me that Miss White was a true pioneer.  As one of the first three women in the state of Minnesota to own and operate a legitimate plant seed business,¹⁻⁴ she published her first seed catalog in 1896.¹  She played an active role in the administration of the Minnesota Horticultural Society,³ and would ultimately become known as the “Northstar Seedswoman.”²  Although Emma V. White’s pioneering entrepreneurial accomplishments are fairly well documented, and information about them can be found in a number of published resources,¹⁻⁴ I learned of her own love of plants and flowers, her belief in the quality of her products, her commitment to her enterprise and to the satisfaction of her customers, and her personal integrity by reading through her beautifully designed, plaintively written 1904 and 1910 seed catalogs.  Miss Emma V. White’s personal character, as well as the character of her flower seed enterprise and its jewel-like catalogs, were, in large part, reflections of their time.  But I also like to think that the character of turn-of-the-century America, or at least a small but important part of it, was in turn equally influenced by the beauty that Miss White espoused and purveyed.