{"id":249,"date":"2011-03-28T04:24:27","date_gmt":"2011-03-28T12:24:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/garden\/?p=249"},"modified":"2015-11-24T07:32:57","modified_gmt":"2015-11-24T15:32:57","slug":"elizabeth-white","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/elizabeth-white\/","title":{"rendered":"Elizabeth White"},"content":{"rendered":"

ELIZABETH WHITE
\n<\/font><\/font><\/strong>
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong>I have a soft spot for all kinds of gardeners, but especially for women who were pioneers in the field.\u00a0 If I could host an imaginary garden party for some of those green-fingered females, I would include Ellen Willmott, a rich, twentieth century Englishwoman who cultivated plants and gardens to the point of bankruptcy; Napoleon’s consort, Empress Josephine, who had even more money, even more plants and even bigger debts and Vida Sackville West, who wrote so beautifully about the denizens of her own garden and those of others.\u00a0 Madame Pompadour, eighteenth century French courtesan and flower lover, would be in attendance, as would Sarah Elizabeth Backhouse, breeder of daffodils in the early twentieth century.\u00a0 Naturally I would also invite Beatrix Jones Farrand, Ellen Biddle Shipman and Marian Cruger Coffin, stars in the male-dominated firmament of landscape architecture and garden design in the first two thirds of the twentieth century.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 My guest list would undoubtedly get so long that I would bankrupt myself buying punch and finger sandwiches.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I would also make a point of inviting Elizabeth Coleman White (1871-1954), entrepreneur, horticulturist, farmer, native plant collector and mother of New Jersey’s commercial blueberry business.\u00a0 Not long ago, I visited her home, Suningive, which still stands in the heart of New Jersey’s Pine Barrens.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Elizabeth White was a Quaker–one of a long line of Society of Friends’ members who played pivotal roles in American and English horticulture.\u00a0 She was born thirty years after her grandfather, James A. Fenwick, purchased over four hundred acres of swampy, degraded land in the Pine Barrens.\u00a0 By the time of her birth, her father, J.J. White, had turned Fenwick’s small scale cranberry farming operation into a major enterprise, encompassing over 3,000 acres.\u00a0 The little village of Whitesbog, near Browns Mills, was the self sufficient hub of the cranberry business, with a general store, worker housing, storage and processing facilities and a schoolhouse.\u00a0 After graduating from Quaker schools in Philadelphia, Elizabeth, the oldest of White’s four daughters, went to work in the family business.\u00a0 By the time she was forty, she had succeeded her father as proprietor of the cranberry operation and established herself as a leader among New Jersey cranberry producers.\u00a0 Instead of having a mid-life crisis, she had a mid-life renaissance, reaching out to a noted botanist with an offer to underwrite and collaborate on research and breeding efforts to develop a commercially viable strain of the wild highbush blueberries that grew in southern New Jersey.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Ms. White paid local Pine Barrens natives, known as “Pineys,”\u009d top dollar to locate the best wild blueberry bushes.\u00a0 These were planted in test beds at Whitesbog and cross bred until stable varieties were developed.\u00a0 One of those varieties, ‘Ruble’, was the progenitor of blueberry cultivars that are still in widespread commercial use.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The blueberry bushes were cultivated alongside the cranberry bogs and succeeded as a commercial crop.\u00a0 Other farmers soon began raising the berries, leading Elizabeth White to found the first New Jersey blueberry growers’ cooperative.\u00a0 Today, sixty years after her death and one hundred years after the first blueberry crop, New Jersey ranks second in the nation in production of cultivated blueberries.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 While she was running her agricultural enterprises, Elizabeth White also nurtured an interest in native plants, especially those that grew in the highly acidic, boggy soil of the Pine Barrens.\u00a0 She had a special interest in hollies and heathers, some of which still grow at Whitesbog.\u00a0 She also grew uncommon species like swamp magnolia, sand myrtle and Pine Barrens gentian in her garden at Suningive and took every opportunity to spread the native plant gospel by way of local and national articles and radio appearances.\u00a0 In her early eighties, she established a native plant nursery, “Holly Haven,”\u009d close to Whitesbog.\u00a0 Though it did not survive long after her death, the nursery shipped hundreds of hollies and other plants to native plant aficionados, thereby increasing cultivation and awareness of acid-living species.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cranberries still grow on part of the Whitesbog property, which is now owned by the State of New Jersey as part of the Brendan Byrne State Forest.\u00a0 A non-profit organization, the Whitesbog Preservation Trust, which is headquartered at Suningive, is in the process of restoring the little village and replanting Ms. White’s native species in her garden and elsewhere on the site.\u00a0 Whitesbog’s buildings have been stabilized and the General Store on the property is open on weekends.\u00a0 As spring progresses, the native wildflowers, blueberry bushes, azaleas and magnolias will burst into bloom.\u00a0 In late June, Whitesbog will hold its annual Blueberry Festival, which draws hundreds of visitors.\u00a0 Some of them will even be greeted by a costumed interpreter in the guise of Elizabeth White, whose spirit and inspiration still resonate in the Pine Barrens and beyond.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 For more information about Elizabeth White and Whitesbog, go to www.whitesbog.org.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ELIZABETH WHITE \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I have a soft spot for all kinds of gardeners, but especially for women who were pioneers in the field.\u00a0 If I could host an imaginary garden party for some of those green-fingered females, I would include Ellen Willmott, a rich, twentieth century Englishwoman who cultivated plants and gardens to the point … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-249","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-interest"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=249"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1542,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249\/revisions\/1542"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}