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Secret Garden | SEED CATALOGUES HOLD GENERATIONS OF GARDENERS' DREAMS

EMILY DICKENSON DESCRIBED hope as "the thing with feathers/ that perches in the soul." Gardeners might say that it looks more like a seed catalogue, pages bursting with promises of high yields and robust blooms. Cornell's collection of vintage seed catalogues, housed in the L.H. Bailey Hortorium, is the country's largest and most comprehensive, with more than 134,000 examples from all over the world. The oldest dates from 1804.

The collection began, like so many at Cornell, with Liberty Hyde Bailey, who started gathering seed catalogues sometime after 1888 to research the taxonomy of cultivated plants. Now named after his daughter, who maintained the collection from about 1911 until her death in 1983 at the age of ninety-three, the Ethel Zoe Bailey Horticultural Catalogue Collection continues to accumulate several hundred publications per year.

Read as cultural artifacts, these catalogues provide social commentary on the times that produced them.Whiffs of patriotism infuse the Dingee and Conard Company's illustration of its 1899 "Victory" rose, paired with a portrait of General George Dewey, the Spanish-American War hero who captured Manila. The catalogues also record technological advances, as lithographs eventually gave way to photographs in the early twentieth century.

Today, nurserymen consult the collection for sources of rare plants, while genealogists use it to uncover long-lost family businesses. Landscape architects refer to the catalogues when replicating gardens that might have surrounded a house built during a particular period, such as the Victorian era. The one aspect that hasn't been studied, says collection coordinator Sherry Vance, is the elaborate illustrations on catalogue covers and inserts. Anonymous lithographers depicted such wonders as Miss C.H. Lippincott's "Pink Comet" aster, drenched in brilliant magenta and Barbie-doll pink, with colors that remain vibrant, even in catalogues from a century ago.

The collection's more recent additions, like their precursors, still illustrate only the most succulent tomatoes and lushest ranunculi. Over the years, one thing remains the same: something as small as a packet of seeds holds the gardener's hope for abundance.

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