Bernard M'Mahon--Changing Gardens & Gardeners
The motives and results of pleasure gardening in 18th century America differed greatly from those in the mother country. In 1784, George Washington wrote to the wife of the Marquise de Lafayette encouraging her to accompany her husband on a return visit to the new American republic, “You will see the plain manner in which we live; and meet the rustic civility, and you shall taste the simplicity of rural life.”
Even though he had never been across the Atlantic, Washington was well aware that the pleasure gardens of the gentry in the new republic were much less sophisticated than those in England & Europe. But the face of the new nation was changing at the end of the century.
Immediately after the Revolution, clever European gardening entrepreneurs immigrated to America to entice the new nationals to buy their books, seeds, & services. They set about to create a market not only among the already pleasure gardening gentry but among the rising merchant & working classes as well. And they succeeded.
At the end of the century, pleasure gardening was growing among rich & middling groups alike. Gentlemen were becoming interested in agriculture and botany. Ladies were becoming more interested in decorative flowers & potted plants. The motives for this rapidly expanding interest in pleasure gardening in America were as varied as the gardens themselves.
The most important among the immigrant gardening entrepreneurs was Bernard M'Mahon (1775-1816), who came to Philadelphia from Ireland in 1796, to establish a seed & nursery business. “He enjoyed the friendship of Thomas Jefferson…the Lewis & Clark expedition was planned at his house…[he was] instrumental in distributing the seeds which those explorers collected.” Contemporaries reported that M’Mahon’s store was meeting place for serious botanists & hobby horticulturalists, a haven for artists & scientists.
A contemporary wrote, "Bernard M'Mahon found American gardening in its infancy, and immediately set himself vigorously to work to introduce a love of flowers and fruit. The writer well remembers his store, his garden and greenhouses.
The latter were situated near the Germantown turnpike, between Philadelphia and Nicetown, whence emanated the rarer flowers and novelties, such as could be collected in the early part of the present century, and where were performed, to the astonishment of the amateurs of that day, successful feats of horticulture that were but too rarely imitated.
His store was on Second Street, below Market, on the east side. Many must still be alive who recollect its bulk window, ornamented with tulip glasses, a large pumpkin, and a basket or two of bulbous roots; behind the counter officiated Mrs. M'Mahon, with some considerable Irish accent, but a most amiable and excellent disposition, and withal, an able saleswoman.
Mr. M'Mahon was also much in the store, putting up seeds for transmission to all parts of this country and Europe, writing his book, or attending to his correspondence, and in one corner was a shelf containing a few botanical or gardening books, for which there was then a very small demand; another contained the few garden implements, such as knives and trimming scissors, a barrel of peas and a bag of seedling potatoes, an onion receptacle, a few chairs, and the room partly lined with drawers containing seeds, constituted the apparent stock in trade of what was one of the greatest seed-stores then known in the Union, and where was transacted a considerable business for that day.
Such a store would naturally attract the botanist as well as the gardener, and it was the frequent lounge of both classes, who ever found in the proprietors ready listeners, as well as conversers; in the latter particular they were rather remarkable, and here you would see Nuttall, Baldwin, Darlington, and other scientific men, who sought information or were ready to impart it."
McMahon became the steward of the plants and seeds that the Lewis & Clark expedition sent back east and he was said to be Thomas Jefferson's gardening mentor. But probably his most important contribution was his garden book.
In 1806 M’Mahon gave America its first great gardening book, The American Gardener’s Calendar, which was printed in eleven editions between 1806 & 1857, when it was superseded by Andrew Jackson Downing’s 1841 Theory & Practice of landscape Gardening. A Philadelphia newspaper called M'Mahon's book “a precious treasure” that “ought to occupy a place in every house in this country.”.
Frederick Traugott Parish (1744-1820). Berberis nervosa, the "Oregon grape" collected by Lewis & Clark and reassigned the name Mahonia by Thomas Nuttall in 1818, a new genus named in honor of the seedsman Bernard M'Mahon, who was responsibile for raising the seeds collected & sent back to Philadelphia by Lewis and Clark.
Gardener & artist from Saxony, Frederick Traugott Pursh (1744-1820) arrived in the United States in 1799 and worked in a succession of gardens in the mid-Atlantic states. He became acquainted with Bernard M'Mahon at his shop in Philadelphia. By 1801, he had introduced himself to America's foremost botanist, Benjamin Smith Barton, and was working at the Woodlands, the estate of William Hamilton.
Departing the Woodlands in 1805, Pursh was hired by botanist Barton (with the recommendation of Bernard M'Mahon) to collect plant specimens in Virginia and New York state and, afterwards, to illustrate the western specimens collected by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on their transcontinental expedition.
Pursh was not paid his promised salary for his illustrations and angrily returned to London. There he produced a 2 volume Flora Americae Septentrionalis containing the first formal descriptions of the America flora collected by Lewis and Clark. Among the western plants he drew & described, one was named for Lewis; one for Clark; one for M'Mahon (Mahonia) and Pursh himself (Purshia).
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