It is amazing how far afield you can go on a rainy day when you are trying to order garden phlox.\u00a0 In my case I went all the way to Long Island in the 1920\u2019s, with detours that went even further back.\u00a0 All of this started as a quest for information about a particular tall lavender-blue phlox, Phlox paniculata \u2018Katherine\u2019.<\/p>\n
The phlox was named after Katherine Aymar Sands Havemeyer (1871-1951), the wife of Theodore A. Havemeyer, Jr., sportsman, public servant and heir to a sugar processing fortune.\u00a0 The Havemeyer\u2019s, whose 1893 wedding was an opulent society affair, had an estate, \u201cCedar Hill\u201d in Brookville, Long Island.\u00a0 In the 1920\u2019s, a young gardener, working at \u201cCedar Hill,\u201d bred a new pink phlox and, with an eye on professional advancement, named it after the wife of his employer.\u00a0 The gardener was Martin Viette, who went on to found an eponymous nursery on Long Island in 1929.\u00a0 The business continued to be run by Martin and later, his son, Andre, until it was sold in 1976.\u00a0 After selling the Long Island nursery, Andre and his family moved to Fishersville, in Virginia\u2019s Shenandoah Valley, and established the Viette Nursery, which is still going strong.\u00a0 According to the company history on the Viette website, \u2018Katherine\u2019 was lost to commerce for some time between the mid 1960\u2019s and 1976, when author and nurseryman Fred McGourty discovered it growing in an old Connecticut garden.<\/p>\n
Now thankfully restored to the retail marketplace, \u2018Katherine\u2019 will soon be installed in my home garden.<\/p>\n
Mrs. Havemeyer was honored with at least two other namesake plants\u2014a rose-pink peony, introduced in 1921 and a double-flowered lilac, Syringa vulgaris \u2018Katherine\u2019.\u00a0 The latter, with lavender blooms, was a sufficiently \u201cgood grower\u201d to receive the Royal Horticultural Society\u2019s Award of Garden Merit.<\/p>\n
Katherine Havemeyer rests peacefully in the Brookville Cemetery in Upper Brookville, Long Island. \u00a0Her namesakes live on all over the world.<\/p>\n
It is amazing how far afield you can go on a rainy day when you are trying to order garden phlox.\u00a0 In my case I went all the way to Long Island in the 1920\u2019s, with detours that went even further back.\u00a0 All of this started as a quest for information about a particular tall … 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":[4,6,2,3],"tags":[323,320,238,303,322,186,319,189,321,207,318,317],"class_list":["post-559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall","category-general-interest","category-spring","category-summer","tag-american-estate-gardens","tag-andre-viette","tag-garden-history","tag-heirloom-peonies","tag-heirloom-phlox","tag-heirloom-plants","tag-katherine-havemeyer","tag-lilacs","tag-martin-viette","tag-phlox","tag-phlox-paniculata-katherine","tag-viette-nursery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559","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=559"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1478,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559\/revisions\/1478"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}