Despite scholarly work and books, the contributions of American women in garden design and landscape architecture have not received their recognition as those of their overseas contemporaries have. Perhaps due to United States’ European colonial history, Americans have looked towards Europe for inspiration and with varying degrees of success attempted to replicate the styles here. And there is no discounting the romantic appeal of the Edwardian flower borders, the Italianate waterworks, and Grecian ruins, all of which were not created in a nascent country. Well-do Americans increasingly made the trans-Atlantic journey to visit and see them, and certainly returned home, buoyant from their travels and receptive for a piece of ‘Europe’.

During my research into the ‘tropicalismo’ or ‘Victorian subtropical bedding’ in North America, I began to note the regularity with which the same female names appeared in magazines and books. These women boasted distinguished careers as strong as Gertrude…