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Wandering willows flower seed5/20/2023 ![]() Delcomyn and Ellis describe selecting and planting seeds, recount the management of a prescribed fire, and capture the prairie’s seasonal parades of colorful flowers in concert with an ever-growing variety of animals, from the minute eastern tailed-blue butterfly to the imperious red-winged blackbird and the reclusive coyote. The first book to celebrate a smaller, more private restoration, A Backyard Prairie offers a vivid portrait of what makes a prairie. It has been said, “Anyone can love the mountains, but it takes a soul to love the prairie.” This book shows us how. In A Backyard Prairie, they document their journey and reveal the incredible potential of a backyard to travel back to a time before the wild prairie was put into plow rows. Ellis scored, seeded, monitored, reseeded, and burned these acres into prairie. Over the next seventeen years, Delcomyn, with help from his friend James L. In 2003 Fred Delcomyn imagined his backyard of two and a half acres, farmed for corn and soybeans for generations, restored to tallgrass prairie. Library of Congress QK938.P7D453 2021 | Dewey Decimal 577.44Īll the makings of natural wonder in your backyard Expand DescriptionĪ Backyard Prairie: The Hidden Beauty of Tallgrass and Wildflowers 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. Vick was genuinely passionate about floriculture, but he also pioneered what we now describe as integrated marketing. He sold the love of flowers along with the flower seeds. 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. “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. Library of Congress SB443.3.M535 2020 | Dewey Decimal 338.1759Ī nineteenth-century entrepreneur’s bold, innovative marketing helped transform flower gardens into one of America’s favorite hobbies. Expand DescriptionĪll about Flowers: James Vick's Nineteenth-Century Seed Company This beautifully illustrated book will please flower enthusiasts, gardeners, and history buffs alike. Taylor has tapped into an enormous trove of stories about extraordinary people with vision and skill who added to our enjoyment piece by piece, starting about 150 years ago. In this companion volume she uncovers information about another eight familiar flowers: poinsettias, chrysanthemums, gladioli, pansies, carnations, water lilies, clematis, and penstemons. In Visions of Loveliness: Great Flower Breeders of the Past, Judith Taylor wrote engagingly about the vivid history and characters behind eighteen types of popular flowers. The personalities of the breeders, from an Indiana farmer to Admiral Lord Gambier’s gardener, were as various and compelling as the beauty they conjured from skilled hybridization. Every blossom we take for granted now is the product of painstaking and imaginative planning, breeding, horticultural ingenuity, and sometimes chance. At one time these fanciful blooms were the rare trophies of the rich and influential-even the carnation, today thought of as one of the humblest cut flowers. ![]() ![]() Walk into any nursery, florist, or supermarket, and you’ll encounter displays of dozens of gorgeous flowers, from chrysanthemums to orchids.
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