Further Uses of Photography

Photography in seed and nursery catalogues was not limited to plants and gardens. W. R. Rawson’s catalogue of 1897 has a painted back cover photograph of a Boston street scene, including the company’s store, with a corresponding key on the inside back cover. Catalogue photographs showed company founders, greenhouses, and workers harvesting, washing and packing plants and seeds. Scans below show diverse subjects from an orchid-collecting expedition in Colombia, to changes in a storefront over time. After the First World War, we find the first aerial photographs of company premises, such as that of Sutton & Son in 1921. Photographs in British catalogues in the 1920s often advertised winning exhibition specimens and trophies, showed products in prestigious locations, and documented visits to the nursery by members of the royal family. Photographers posed company staff or family members with flowers, smiling farmers who grew the advertised seed, and gardeners using tools sold in the catalogues. American catalogues during the Second World War printed photographs of Victory Gardens, or step-by-step sowing instructions for beginning gardeners who were joining the patriotic effort to keep as much food as possible for the military. During the 1940s and 1950s, some American catalogues used photographs to promote idealized suburban life, in which plants played an integral role—subjects included landscaped houses, and women and children with flowers.

Catalogues with photographs were not immune to exaggeration: British farm supply catalogues from the 1920s showed photographs of root crops that made them look as large as livestock, and many color photographs were painted over in almost fluorescent hues. Today, digital photoediting programs can make plants in catalogues appear brighter, larger or more floriferous than they are in life.