In First Person

C.L. Fornari

Vice President of GardenComm International, an organization of professional communicators in the green industry Author of serval books on gardening Founder of the annual Cape Cod Hydrangea Festival

For ‘In First Person,’ Leaflet Editor-in-Chief Wayne Mezitt interviews people in horticulture and adjacent fields by asking a standard set of questions about their work. The column offers an opportunity for people in these fields to share with readers about their passions, what motivates them, and how they define and measure success. Based on the idea that we’re often reluctant to talk openly about ourselves because of the potential for miscommunication or misinterpretation, Wayne transforms his conversation with interviewees into a personal story from the interviewee’s first-person perspective.

Idescribe myself as a speaker/writer/radio host/artist––aka garden communicator or professional juggler. For 28 years, I’ve worked for Hyannis Country Garden, a family-owned garden center on Cape Cod, and I do some independent design consulting as well. I’m proud that I was the founder of the Cape Cod Hydrangea Festival, which raised over $100,000 for local non-profits in 2022. With everything I do, my goal is to share the excitement and wonder about plants and gardens.

My core motivation is to keep horticulture in popular culture. For a while, the awareness of how fundamental plants are to us was slipping away from people’s day-today awareness, and talking about horticulture was considered snobby, maybe because public felt confused by scientific names. Happily, today through their cell phones, everyone can quickly google a botanic name and immediately know what plant we’re all talking about. Garden communicators like myself can use common and botanic names, making both more accessible to the public by relating a plant to everyday experiences.

We still have challenges; to this day, when we’re asked to identify the industry where we work on many websites or social media, it’s common to find that horticulture or even natural sciences isn’t on the list that’s provided. For years, there was no horticulture or gardening section on Apple Podcasts––now “Gardening” is there, but it’s placed under “Leisure Activities.” The people who labelled those categories clearly have never made and tended gardens…leisure? I think not.

So, if it’s not a leisure activity, how do people come to be garden makers? For me, it was because I was blessed to grow up in a time when kids were pushed outside and told not to come back in until mealtime. We made our fun outdoors, in nature. A downed tree would become our entire world for a week, as we turned it into houses/spaceships/exotic lands. We tried to weave baskets out of grass, made hollow dandelion stems into flutes (note: they taste terrible), and smashed berries in order to watch the ants gather around them. Plants were a constant presence and source of entertainment.

Although I grew up with that constant contact with plants, I never intended to be a garden communicator. I was an Art major in college and for most of my young life, all I wanted to do was go into the studio and make stuff. But beginning in the late 1980’s my artwork kind of stalled. This coincided with a time when we rather abruptly moved to Manchester-by-the-Sea on the North Shore, so that my older son could attend his middle grades at the Landmark School for Dyslectic Students. For those years I was without my gardens, and my artwork wasn’t progressing. As a result of this situation, I resolved that if art wasn’t what I was intended to be doing, I’d remain open to other possibilities, and the path that opened was into garden communications.

I’ve been very fortunate early on to have met and married a completely generous man. Dan is a scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic and he also loves plants. In fact, when we met at the University of Wisconsin, we bonded over the fact that we both would spend time in the Botany Department’s greenhouses, even though neither of us was a Botany major.

I’m equally fortunate to be a part of several plant communities. From The Horticultural Club of Boston, to GardenComm International and the Perennial Plant Association, these groups have provided and continue to provide inspiration and education. I also learn from “my people” ––the customers at Hyannis Country Garden who need help, the callers to my radio show, and attendees when I speak. They let me know what they need to be more successful with plants and I’m pleased to assist them.

Aside from history and supportive communities, I wonder if the route to plants or garden communications might be genetic? Is there a “plant gene?” My maternal grandmother, Dorothy Young, had a special way with plants, as did my mom.. As a young adult, I remember walking into my mother’s plant-filled living room. “Your plants are thirsty,” I said to Mom, without even thinking about it. She looked at me and said, “Oh! You can do that too!” Plants speak to both of us. Genetics? I wouldn’t be surprised.

When I try to characterize my particularly critical skills, abilities, and strengths, I guess I’d say that I’m lucky that my brain is hardwired to generate ideas. My friend and podcast cohost, Ellen Zachos, calls it “the Fornari Idea Store,” and for better or worse, I can’t turn it off. I have countless files on my computer of ideas for books, articles, events, marketing plans and more. I only wish there were more hours in the day, but I guess two of the most elementary things that gardens teach us are flexibility and patience.

The benefits of plants and gardens continue to be well documented, and many such studies are readily available on the National Initiative for

Consumer Horticulture (NICH) website: https://consumerhort.org/. People need easy access to information and inspiration about how they can take joy from plants and gardens, while continuing to share space with weeds and wildlife. It’s important that people are changing their relationship with the natural world. During the 20th century people were all about dominating nature. The mandated Covid isolation may have helped realign our awareness about life’s priorities. Now we are (hopefully) starting to recognize that everything is connected to everything else, and that Mother Nature has the controlling hand.

How I define success changes from day to day, hour to hour. On one day I might feel successful because I got an article or blog post written. The next day I might feel like a total failure because I haven’t gotten an agent or publisher for the book I’m writing. Two days later I feel successful when I help someone see their property “with new eyes,” so they can make changes they’d never envisioned. On Saturday morning I might feel good because I answered questions called into GardenLine. Yet the next day I’m unhappy that I wasn’t selected to present at a conference where I was hoping to speak.

But here’s where I never feel like a failure: in my gardens. Of course, I have plants die, some from natural causes and others from my neglect. There are plants that thrive and others that sulk. But in the garden, I know that I’m not completely in charge…in fact, it’s more a classroom. I ask “What have you got to teach me, Mother Nature?” and I’m always astounded by the answer.

I measure my progress as a garden communicator by the responses of my audience. I love hearing back that they’ve tried a particular plant and love it, or that their gardening was made easier because of suggestions I made. In 2020, when the pandemic lockdown began, I started a virtual, weekly Friday evening Horticultural Happy Hour for my garden center. It was a way to help people focus on plants and gardens, which is one of the most life-affirming things we can do. I had over 200 people on every Friday in the spring and summer of 2020. To this day people come up to me and say, “Your Horticultural Happy Hours got me through Covid.”

To share information with me, please contact me through my website or at clfornari@gmail.com. All the best from my garden at Poison Ivy Acers on Cape Cod, to yours.

Featured Collection: Library Webpage

Have you explored the Library’s webpage? It contains lots of useful and interesting information such as research and finding aids, links to our Collections and electronic copies of some of our valued artifacts. These aids, compiled by our volunteers, summarize many of the Library holdings that are not in our online catalog. Most of the items are searchable.

Here are some of the resources you will find:

• Honorary Medals – You will find the names and other information of past recipients of the Society’s most prestigious awards: The White Medal of Honor, and the Dawson, Roland, gold, silver, centenary and Hunnewell medals.

• Links to historical records of the Society’s proceedings published on Internet Archives.

• Plans – A listing of plans held at the Library, primarily of Horticultural Hall in Boston, Elm Bank.

• Seed and Nursery Catalogs – Historic national and international catalogs as well as contemporary catalogs. These are sought by researchers, writers and the public throughout the world.

• Pamphlets – Pamphlets capture moments in history and were designed to be temporary. However, they are often the only record of what occurred in history and give valuable glimpses into our past. They can be a treasure trove for researchers.

• Links to images in our Lincoln Negative Collection and Botanical Print Collection hosted by Digital Commonwealth.

• A listing of rare images in the Society’s Member Albums from the 19th century. We maintain these albums at the Library at Elm Bank.

• A list of the original holdings of the Society’s Library, the oldest horticultural Society in the United States.

• A memoir written by Elizabeth Clapp Cheney for her family. Cheney was the widow of Benjamin Cheney and mother of Alice Cheney Baltzell who constructed the beautiful Manor at Elm Bank.

• In 1938, floral designer and business woman, Margaret Helburn, collected postcards and correspondence from consulates around the world on flower markets. This collection provides a glimpse of what there was and wasn’t on the eve of the Second World War.

Current projects include historical 19th century photographs of Elm Bank, a finding aid for historical correspondence of the Society, biographical files and gardens.

Book Club

The next meeting of the Book Club is on Tuesday, August 15 at 1:30pm. Meetings take place in the Crockett Garden. If the weather is poor, the meeting will be in the Education Building. All are welcome to attend.

Here is the line-up for our upcoming book discussions:

» August 15: A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold

» September 19: The Brother Gardeners by Andrea Wulf

» October 17: Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden

by Camille Dungy

» November 21: Otherwise Normal People: Inside the Thorny World of Competitive Rose Gardening by Aurelia C. Scott

» December 19: Strange Bright Blooms: A History of Cut Flowers by Randy Malamud

» January 16: Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer

The Windows – Children's Books on Frogs!

Help Grow our Collections

Consider making a donation from the Society’s Amazon Smile Wishlist. It is just a click away!

COME VISIT!

The Library is open on Thursdays from 10am-1pm, by appointment and when the lights are on. Please email Library & Archives Manager Maureen O’Brien at mobrien@masshort.org for an appointment if you want to schedule a visit.

Excerpts from Charlotte Nichols Saunders Horner, trailblazing botanist

By Lisa J. Delissio and Lindsay Hall Department of Biology, Salem State University

While little known within today’s botanical community, Charlotte Nichols Saunders Horner (July 5, 1823 - July 18, 1906) was among the most highly accomplished American botanists of her time. At a time when fewer than seven percent of women botanists in the United States and Canada earned a bachelor’s degree or higher, the Massachusetts Horticultural Society served as Horner’s academic home.

Although women had been allowed to participate in its activities for 38 years, she was the first woman to give a scientific talk to the Society in what was its 51st year. This 1880 talk was entitled “Native Plants” and was published in the Society’s transactions. Although couched in a Victorian woman’s language of modesty and piety, her talk demonstrated botanical leadership and expertise. In her address, she encouraged public education and field study, and continued to advocate for the widespread use of scientific names. Horner stated that, counter to common perceptions, many plant species are not dormant in winter; in fact, quite a few even bloom in the colder months. Having kept detailed phenological records, she listed the exact dates of bloom for 15 species from November to March during the period 1867–1880. Horner encouraged the horticultural use of North American species that would be hardy and profitable as plantings in Massachusetts, including species she had recently received as pressed specimens from Colorado. To demonstrate her points, she exhibited more than 38 identified, freshly collected specimens, many with flowers or other interesting features. The event attracted “an unusual number” of women. More than 15 attendees, almost all men, participated in the lively, in-depth discussion that followed, described in detail in the transactions of the Society.

Horner had a prominent role in the Boston-area botanical and horticultural scene and regularly attended Saturday meetings of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society at Horticultural Hall in Boston and was sometimes invited to lead discussions. […] her displays for the Massachusetts

Horticultural Society were considered “centres of interest and instruction to the large number of visitors.”

Her many exhibits on native flowering plants tended to be among the largest and were labeled with scientific names. They included the largest-ever display of native flowering plants with “over 260 species and varieties,” 110 native specimens as the only presenter, and “160 varieties of native plants” displayed at Music Hall in Boston, now the Orpheum Theatre. In 1885 she exhibited Habenaria (now Plantanthera) hookeri Torr. ex A. Gray from Georgetown to some excitement.

Between 1871 and 1896, Horner won dozens of awards and cash prizes for her displays of many hundreds of specimens including flowering plants, ferns, mosses, fungi, vegetables, and fruits presented at weekly, monthly, and annual exhibitions of the Horticultural Society and the Essex Agricultural Society. In 1877, her displays of rare native species won the most first-place prizes of all the entrants in the native plant category. In 1880, she became the first recipient of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society’s silver medal for native plants. It was written of her exhibit that day, “Mrs. C. N. S.

Horner exhibited a very large and well-arranged collection of native plants, with their names. This was without a doubt the best among the many fine exhibits she has made, and your Committee were glad of the opportunity to express the high estimation in which the members of the Society hold her attainments as a practical botanist.” Practical botany is a field of science that deals with “plant life in all its aspects” and which forms the basis for all applied and economic botany. Two years later, Boston newspapers commended her receipt of a second silver medal for “100 species and varieties of native plants.”

She created for the Massachusetts Horticultural Society a competitive display of invasive species described as “plants, particularly injurious in cultivated or grazing lands, only one of which is indigenous in this vicinity, though all are found growing wild.”

In 1877, Horner became a founding member of the Window Gardening Committee of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, which had the aim of involving “the laboring classes,” and their children in particular, in practical botany. It was the Society’s first program to engage children in botany. During this period, the practice of keeping houseplants was common in Europe, but had not yet been widely adopted in the United States. The committee advertised in the Boston Herald, enlisted pastors and teachers to spread the word about the project and developed a plan to award prizes. Wolcott, the Secretary of the committee, reported that, “The touching spectacle of the procession of little children bearing their plants so proudly through the street, and presenting them to the Committee, carried its blessing.”

Excerpts with sources removed. Reprinted with permission from: Delissio, Lisa, and Lindsay Hall 2023. Charlotte Nichols Saunders Horner, trailblazing botanist. Salem State Digital Repository. DOI 10.13140/rg.2.2.11078.24643

To see the entire paper with sources, visit: http://hdl.handle. net/20.500.13013/2926

About the Artist

Marianne Orlando is a Framingham artist who has a masters in landscape architecture and has illustrated four books. She left the field of landscape architecture to become an editor after realizing she could possibly be doomed to designing an endless series of parking lots.

Orlando founded a freelance illustrations business, Marianne Orlando Illustrations, in 2016, and since then has created more than 150 portraits of homes, pets and people for folks all over the US. After 45 years in the corporate world, she is delighted to be spending her time doing drawings, marketing her business, playing the violin, singing in her church choir, and gardening. She has a love of both nature and art and admits to being “obsessed by plants.” She’s been known for stopping in traffic to stare at a particularly beautiful Cornus florida. She is delighted to be working with Massachusetts Horticultural Society.

You can see samples of her work at www.marianneorlando.com

By Marianne Orlando