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Louise Beebe Wilder (1878–1938) was an American gardening writer whose books are now considered classics of their era.

Biography

Louise Beebe was born to a well-to-do family in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1878. She showed an early interest in gardening.^[1]

In 1902, she married architect Walter Robb Wilder, and the couple moved to Pomona, New York,^[2] where she transformed the rural property (known as Balderbrae),^[3] adding pathways, a pair of half-moon fountains, a grape arbor, terraces, flowering trees, a walled garden, and an herb bed.^[1] Later, they moved a bit further south to the village of Bronxville, where she designed Station Plaza and founded a local Working Gardeners Club (1925).^[1] She designed residential gardens across the county; her philosophy, influenced by the aesthetic of British gardener Gertrude Jekyll,^[4] was to create something "formal in design but most informal in execution".^[1]

Wilder wrote ten books about her experiences as a gardener that were popular for offering clear, explicit advice rather than flowery nature writing.^[1] She also wrote for newspapers and gardening and shelter magazines such as Horticulture, House & Garden, and the New York Times.^[1] In particular, she took up the challenge of adapting Jekyll's aesthetic—developed for a substantially different climate and range of plant species—to the needs of American gardeners.^[4] The title of her second book, Colour in My Garden, deliberately echoes Jekyll's influential 1908 book Colour in the Flower Garden.

Wilder's "socio-botanical commentaries"—as author Michael Pollan termed them^[5]—captured the spirit of a moment in America when suburban gardening and its attendant forms of landscape design were on the rise and an older, more formal style of large estate garden was in decline. A New York Times editor called her a Romantic, but one "with a strong vein of scientific curiosity that she exercised on a domestic scale.”^[1] Another New York Times editor, after noting that she was conversant with both classic British and recent American horticultural literature, praised her for the sharpness of her field observations.^[6] Her books—especially Colour in My Garden—are now considered classics,^[4] and in 2001 some were reissued as a four-volume collection, The Louise Beebe Wilder Gardener’s Library: Four Classic Books by America’s Greatest Garden Writer.^[1]

Wilder also served on the board of the New York Botanical Garden.^[2]

She was honored with the Garden Club of America's Gold Medal for Horticultural Achievement in 1937.^[1]

Walter committed suicide in 1934, and Wilder herself died April 20, 1938.^[1]

Publications

• 
  My Garden (1916)


• 
  Colour in My Garden (1918; limited edition of 1500 with color plates by artist Anna Winegar)


• 
  Adventures in My Garden and Rock Garden (1923)


• 
  Pleasures and Problems of a Rock Garden (1928)


• 
  Adventures in a Suburban Garden (1931)


• 
  The Fragrant Path (1932)


• 
  The Rock Garden (1933)


• 
  What Happens in My Garden (1935)


• 
  Adventures with Hardy Bulbs (1936)


• 
  The Garden in Color (1937)

Notes and references