The engineering of plants has a long history on this continent. Fields, forests, orchards, and prairies are the result of repeated campaigns by amateurs, tradesmen, and scientists to introduce desirable plants, both American and foreign, while preventing growth of alien riff-raff. These horticulturists coaxed plants along in new environments and, through grafting and hybridizing, created new varieties. Over the last 250 years, their activities transformed the American landscape. "Horticulture" may bring to mind white-glove garden clubs and genteel lectures about growing better roses. But Philip J. Pauly wants us to think of horticulturalists as pioneer "biotechnologists," hacking their plants to create a landscape that reflects their ambitions and ideals. Those standards have shaped the look of suburban neighborhoods, city parks, and the "native" produce available in our supermarkets. In telling the histories of Concord grapes and Japanese cherry trees, the problem of the prairie and the war on the Medfly, Pauly hopes to provide a new understanding of not only how horticulture shaped the vegetation around us, but how it influenced our experiences of the native, the naturalized, and the alien--and how better to manage the landscapes around us.

In The Roots of Flower City, Camden Burd explores the economic and ecological significance of Rochester plant nurserymen over the course of the nineteenth century. As the first boomtown in the United States, Rochester was an embodiment of nineteenth-century market economies and social reform movements. Connected to the eastern seaboard by the Erie Canal, the city's unique economic, cultural, and environmental conditions fostered and sustained a vast and influential commercial plant nursery industry that attracted the nation's most prominent horticulturists and nurserymen. Rochester-area nurserymen built parks and rural cemeteries, landscaped homes and schools, and promoted horticultural pursuits regionally and nationally. As their influence grew, many of these horticultural entrepreneurs developed into the city's elite and played a leading role in shaping Rochester's economic, social, and physical landscape. Most significantly, nurserymen enthusiastically participated in the American imperial project, selling and distributing fruit, shade, and ornamental trees, shrubs, and flowers across the continent, transforming landscapes and ecologies far beyond New York. The Roots of Flower City tells the remarkable history of Rochester's outsized influence on the homes, estates, towns, and cities of nineteenth-century America as it weathered economic downturns and competition from other regions. One threat, however, proved to be too much to overcome. As Burd details, the spread of the destructive San Jose scale through the transcontinental plant trade prompted federal legislation that would lead to the decline of the Rochester plant nursery industry in the last decade of the nineteenth century, ending a sustained era of success and ecological impact.