All about Flowers

James Vick's Nineteenth-Century Seed Company

Thomas J. Mickey

• Publisher: Swallow Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780804041140
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Horticulture
• Index: Biological Sciences

A nineteenth-century entrepreneur's bold, innovative marketing helped transform flower gardens into one of America's favorite hobbies.

"There is much that is hard and productive of sorrow in this sin-plagued world of ours; and, had we no flowers, I believe existence would be hard to be borne." So states a customer's 1881 letter—one of thousands James Vick regularly received. Vick's business, selling flower seeds through the mail, wasn't unique, but it was wildly successful because he understood better than his rivals how to engage customers' emotions. He sold the love of flowers along with the flower seeds.

Vick was genuinely passionate about floriculture, but he also pioneered what we now describe as integrated marketing. He spent a mind-boggling $100, 000 per year on advertising (mostly to women, his target demographic); he courted newspaper editors for free publicity; his educational guides presaged today's content marketing; he recruited social influencers to popularize neighborhood gardening clubs; and he developed a visually rich communication and branding strategy to build customer loyalty and inflect their purchasing needs with purchasing desire.

1

Vick the Writer

James Vick wrote his seed business into existence. His words don’t just tell his story. They are his story.

From the beginning, Vick was a writer, and he sharpened his skills throughout his life. When he wrote articles or answered letters from his customers, he chose his words well, always intent on being understood clearly and on building a community of gardeners who loved flowers. Long before he began writing his own catalog in the early 1860s and his magazine in the 1870s, he had been involved in publishing for many years.

In 1833, at the age of fifteen, James Vick sailed to America with his parents from Portsmouth, England. Arriving in New York, he set out to learn the printer’s trade. He set type on various publications, including a new magazine called the Knickerbocker, where he met journalist (and later politician and reformer) Horace Greeley. The Knickerbocker was a monthly literary publication appealing to the educated reader who cared about politics as well the arts. Greeley, a few years older than Vick, had arrived in New York in 1831 with the dream of becoming an editor and publisher. After leaving the Knickerbocker in 1834, he went on to found a weekly literary and news magazine called the New-Yorker.

When Vick moved to Rochester in 1837, he continued to work in the publishing business, starting by setting type for several newspapers. He soon rose to become the first foreman of Frederick Douglass’s newspaper, the North Star. Strongly reflecting the abolitionist ideals of his mentor, Horace Greeley, Vick managed the publication in which Douglass denounced slavery and advocated for freedom for all.¹

* * *

But the country’s diverse readers were interested in more than politics. From the early 1800s, farm-related journals, some weekly and others monthly, were published in many cities and towns. Though the names of such publications might include the words “horticulture” or “garden,” these “papers,” as they were generally called, were written for farmers needing to keep up to date on the newest methods and materials for producing agricultural crops. Sometimes, though, they did include articles for readers interested in horticulture or even ads specifically targeting the gardener.

In 1831, Rochester publisher Luther Tucker had the former group of readers in mind when he founded his Genesee Farmer, a journal of agricultural improvement and reform.² Also in Rochester, beginning in 1850, Daniel D. T. Moore, with an “able corps of Assistants and Contributors,” published Moore’s Rural New Yorker, a weekly that included articles on both farming and gardening.

In this active publishing environment, James Vick found his niche. He wrote and edited several of these journals and ultimately began his own. From 1849 to 1855, Vick served as both writer and editor for the Genesee Farmer. In 1849, he also became corresponding secretary of the Monroe County Agricultural Society and in that group met many of the key figures in the agricultural and horticultural business in the Rochester area.

After the sudden death in 1852 of Andrew Jackson Downing, the most famous American landscape gardener of that time, Vick purchased Downing’s magazine, the Horticulturist. He asked his friend Patrick Barry, from Rochester’s well-known and respected Ellwanger and Barry Nursery, to assume the job of editor. After just one year, because he did not have a nursery of his own to fund the magazine, Vick had to sell it, admitting his own lack of preparation and forethought. He would later correct the mistake, combining his writing career with a new one in seed sales, but not before he gained considerably more experience as a writer and editor.

In 1855, he bought the venerable Genesee Farmer. Under his ownership, the writing improved and the emphasis shifted toward horticulture and away from general farming. Vick added a section called the Horticultural Department, edited by Joseph Frost. A year later he sold the journal to seedsman and nursery owner Joseph Harris, who also served as editor. By 1860, the name of the publication had changed to The Genesee Farmer: A Monthly Journal Devoted to Agriculture & Horticulture, Domestic and Rural Economy, which Harris described in his Editor’s Notes as “an indispensable companion to every tiller of the soil, whether he cultivates much or little land.”³

From 1856 to 1857, Vick published his own garden magazine, the Rural Annual and Horticultural Directory. In volume 1, in a column titled “The Lawn and the Flower Garden,” he wrote, “In order to make our work complete and interesting to all classes of horticultural readers, a few hints on the arrangement and management of the Flower Garden appear desirable.”⁴ Vick encouraged Irish-born landscape gardener Robert Robinson Scott (1827–77) to write the section dedicated to the flower garden, and he became a frequent contributor.

While Vick was developing his publishing skills, he also gained substantial knowledge of agriculture as both business and hobby, came to know many professionals and amateurs in farming and gardening, and deepened his understanding of what growers needed and loved. His later expansion into the seed trade drew on his knowledge not only of the practicalities of business but of the entire culture that supported seed sales in the United States.

From 1857 to 1862, while Vick was the horticultural editor of Moore’s Rural New Yorker, he was experimenting with seeds in his spare time.⁵ In 1860, he began his seed business, and a year later he published his first catalog, the Floral Guide and Illustrated Catalogue, the name that he would use for the next two decades. At first he wrote his seed catalog twice a year, for the spring and late fall. Later, he published it four times a year. He let his readers know that the illustrations were prepared from plants in his own garden and often mentioned that his artist was busy at work on the material for a coming issue. Vick knew that gardens growing from his seeds were the best way of promoting business: “The gardens of my customers are the best advertisements I have.”⁶

* * *

At the same time that ornamental plantings were appearing in the pleasure gardens of wealthy Americans, middle-class and working-class families were also growing flowers. As the Eagle Country Press of Polo, Illinois, published in 1867, “All who spend a few dollars in beautifying their grounds with flowers will find a rich reward in the enjoyment of the beauty thus added to their homes.”⁷ The interest in flower growing that was spreading around the country was due in no small part to the commercial seed catalogs. Companies selling flower seeds multiplied after 1850, and many targeted specifically those middle-class and working families.

In his introduction to the Lawn and Flower Garden section of the Rural and Horticultural Directory in 1856, Vick had written, “More has been done to enrich the conservatories of the more wealthy of our citizens by foreign rare introductions than to extend the general taste for gardening among the operative [i.e., working] classes.” In the same issue he stated his life-long goal: “We hope to see every family in possession of a flower garden.”⁸

To accomplish this, Vick wanted to help his readers become more knowledgeable about gardening and to make gardening, especially with flowers, available to all classes of people. He wrote, “So long as the taste [for gardening] is confined to a few, or at least the means for gratifying that taste, just so long will we continue dependent on the more perfect arrangements of Europe for our supplies, not only of new plants and new fruits, but for the current horticultural literature.”⁹

By the late 1860s, many of Vick’s customers were so enthusiastic that they began asking for a photograph of him. Finally, in the 1872 edition of his seed catalog, which he sent to a hundred and fifty thousand customers, he included a photo of himself (fig. 1.1). Those less fortunate had to be satisfied with a lithograph portrait. He wrote, “So many persons ask for my Photograph during the busy season, when it is very difficult to furnish them, that I determined to present all my own customers, if not all, with a copy.”¹⁰

* * *

Almost as a prelude to the magazine he would start in 1878, Vick wrote in his catalog of 1873, “We have long felt the need of more frequent communication with our customers, and this was the object mainly in making our Guide [catalog] quarterly. Could we spare the time from other duties, nothing would please us more than to visit our friends Monthly with a little counsel, a little information, and a good deal of gossip. In time we may be able to accomplish this.”¹¹

Only after he had managed his seed business for several years did Vick take his next and greatest step in writing. The first volume of Vick’s Illustrated Monthly appeared in January 1878. In the years leading up to this new venture he’d developed a name and a company, ensuring an audience ready to support his magazine—unlike his earlier, doomed efforts with the Horticulturist.

He published Vick’s Illustrated Monthly in order to have the space to write in more detail about plants and their cultivation, to cover a given topic in greater particularity in each issue. He would also be able to answer questions about garden problems, such as why a reader’s plant didn’t grow or why insects seemed to be invading a particular flower.

Each issue of the magazine contained articles, woodcut illustrations, and often a colored plate in the front “painted expressly for Vick’s Monthly Magazine” (fig. 1.2). Vick said of the magazine, “It is designed to spread a taste for the beautiful all over the land, and to encourage the culture of Flowers by insuring success, as much as it is possible to do so, by printed instructions.”¹² Vick himself supplied many of the articles, which he wrote in a friendly tone. He also included items by correspondents as well as letters from his readers, which he often answered.

Vick had proved already that his writing could touch his customers. In the process, he became a spokesperson for Victorian floriculture. In the first issue of the magazine, Vick wrote, “Each number of the Monthly will contain thirty-two pages, printed on the best paper we can procure, and liberally illustrated with engravings, while with every issue we shall give an elegant colored plate of some flower, or family of flowers, as fine and true to nature as the work of the best artists and our own supervision can produce.”¹³ In fact, it would be recognized in a 1901 tribute to Vick that Vick’s Illustrated Monthly “was the best illustrated magazine of floriculture that A...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontispiece
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Vick the Writer
• Chapter 2: Flowers in the Garden: Flora, Goddess of Flowers
• Chapter 3: The Garden Industry in the Nineteenth Century
• Chapter 4: Women and Flowers
• Chapter 5: Flower Garden Fashion
• Chapter 6: The Vick Seed Company: Founded on Flowers
• Chapter 7: The Garden Catalog: Means of Business
• Chapter 8: Promoting the Seed Business
• Chapter 9: Building His Business
• Chapter 10: Vick Lays Out the Flower Garden
• Chapter 11: Vick Sells the Same Flowers Year after Year
• Chapter 12: Victorian Flowers That Vick Loved
• Chapter 13: Vick’s Success: We Still Love His Victorian Flowers
• Conclusion
• Postscript
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index