A Magazine of Nature: "Garden and Forest" and the Rise of American Environmental Awareness

Abstract

This work is a comprehensive study of an American magazine, Garden and Forest: A Journal of Horticulture, Landscape Art, and Forestry published from 1888 to 1897. By applying prosopography, this work explores how a group of American intellectuals in the late 19th century shaped the environmental awareness in an urban industrial society. Botanist Charles S. Sargent and journalist William A. Stiles were its editors. Its 600 contributors included the nation's leading landscape architects, foresters, botanists, horticulturists, art critics, and amateurs. This work demonstrates that, although these people came from diverse social and educational backgrounds, and placed emphasis on different aspects of nature and society, they shared some common social values. Finding no necessary confrontation between aesthetic sentiment and scientific practice, the magazine believed that a truly civilized society should be an integrated landscape, incorporating nature and culture, garden and forest, beauty and utility, art and science, and city and countryside.