Louise Beebe Wilder

Louise Beebe was born to a well-to-do family in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1878. She showed an early interest in gardening.[1]

In 1902, she married architect Walter Robb Wilder, and the couple moved to Pomona, New York,[2] where she transformed the rural property (known as Balderbrae),[3] adding pathways, a pair of half-moon fountains, a grape arbor, terraces, flowering trees, a walled garden, and an herb bed.[1] Later, they moved a bit further south to the village of Bronxville, where she designed Station Plaza and founded a local Working Gardeners Club (1925).[1] She designed residential gardens across the county; her philosophy, influenced by the aesthetic of British gardener Gertrude Jekyll,[4] was to create something "formal in design but most informal in execution".[1]

Wilder wrote ten books about her experiences as a gardener that were popular for offering clear, explicit advice rather than flowery nature writing.[1] She also wrote for newspapers and gardening and shelter magazines such as Horticulture, House & Garden, and the New York Times.[1] In particular, she took up the challenge of adapting Jekyll's aesthetic—developed for a substantially different climate and range of plant species—to the needs of American gardeners.[4] The title of her second book, Colour in My Garden, deliberately echoes Jekyll's influential 1908 book Colour in the Flower Garden.

Wilder's "socio-botanical commentaries"—as author Michael Pollan termed them[5]—captured the spirit of a moment in America when suburban gardening and its attendant forms of landscape design were on the rise and an older, more formal style of large estate garden was in decline. A New York Times editor called her a Romantic, but one "with a strong vein of scientific curiosity that she exercised on a domestic scale.”[1] Another New York Times editor, after noting that she was conversant with both classic British and recent American horticultural literature, praised her for the sharpness of her field observations.[6] Her books—especially Colour in My Garden—are now considered classics,[4] and in 2001 some were reissued as a four-volume collection, The Louise Beebe Wilder Gardener’s Library: Four Classic Books by America’s Greatest Garden Writer.[1]

Wilder also served on the board of the New York Botanical Garden.[2]

She was honored with the Garden Club of America's Gold Medal for Horticultural Achievement in 1937.[1]

Walter committed suicide in 1934, and Wilder herself died April 20, 1938.[1]

• My Garden (1916)
• Colour in My Garden (1918; limited edition of 1500 with color plates by artist Anna Winegar)
• Adventures in My Garden and Rock Garden (1923)
• Pleasures and Problems of a Rock Garden (1928)
• Adventures in a Suburban Garden (1931)[7]
• The Fragrant Path (1932)
• The Rock Garden (1933)
• What Happens in My Garden (1935)
• Adventures with Hardy Bulbs (1936)
• The Garden in Color (1937)