Gardening shaped Chicago and its suburbs

If the town where you live - say Arlington Heights, Barrington or Wheaton - has a distinctive personality, Cathy Jean Maloney wants you to understand how gardening helped it develop.

Arlington Heights was an agricultural village that developers turned into a commuter suburb as early as 1874, drawing train-riding buyers with such improvements as shade trees.

Barrington's rolling hills led to terraces and arbors.

Not only did Wheaton residents realize early the importance of green space, but prospective buyers were encouraged to take advantage of the railroad for careers as market gardeners.

"Chicago Gardens: The Early History," University of Chicago Press, $35, describes 100 years of gardening from Chicago's 1883 incorporation to the World's Fair of 1933.

"Horticulture and gardening were hand in hand with the growth of Chicago," said Maloney in an interview. "Chicago was the fastest-growing city in America at the end of the 19th Century, which was the heyday of American horticulture. Literally and figuratively Chicago was in the thick of things, the hub of the nation."

Conventioneers came here and saw new growing methods and garden designs and spread them around the country.

Today's gardeners can still learn from those early residents who wrested blooms from the prairie, said the author.

"As I read the writings of early horticulturalists, they knew things we have forgotten today, common sense basics of why things grow," said Maloney.

Readers of the book might be lucky enough to have conversations with gardeners of earlier generations, she said.

For example, her mother mentioned that black walnuts scattered in front of a door step can keep ants out of the house.

After laying out big, green nuts and worrying that people would step on them and fall on her walk, Maloney went back to her mother and learned she was supposed to not only husk the nuts but crack them and crush the meat to create an ant deterrent.

"In her day, everyone knew that," but despite her experience as a garden writer, Maloney had missed that wisdom.

The cyclical nature of garden trends is also obvious in the book.

The call for planting native plants, which seems so new to us, was alive in the 19th Century. Many trees that settlers from Europe or the Eastern United States were familiar with did not grow well here.

David Hill of the Dundee area established a thriving business selling trees suitable for this climate. Lewis Ellsworth, who started a nursery in Naperville in the 1840s, was also a champion of "Western" trees.

But native plants were considered common and not cultured, said the author, until Jens Jensen, who designed landscaping for estate owners, gave them cachet in the 1880s.

The book fills in historical details about landmarks, including those that were private homes or estates such as the Morton Arboretum in Lisle, Lombard's Lilacia Park, Fabyan Forest Preserve in Geneva and Ragdale in Lake Forest.

Maloney wants Chicago area residents to be proud of accomplishments by its early gardeners, horticulturalists, naturalists and nurserymen.

"I'm a staunch Chicagoan," said the author. "Chicago always had this chip on its shoulder. It was considered uncouth with not a bit of culture or class or anything, a ruffian outpost. Chicago should have a sense of pride in its history."

Things you might not know

• If you see a curved streets in any pre 1940s Chicago community, someone designed it for aesthetic reasons. One prominent example is the village of Riverside, where Frederick Law Olmsted emulated the curves of the Des Plaines River.

• Batavia as a windmill capital demonstrates the technological advancements that grew out of the Chicago area. Others include farm equipment and techniques to drain the swampland.

• Not to be missed is Maloney's list of what varieties grew in the Chicago region when. For example, among the earliest plants popular in Chicago were Holland Pippin apples, rose of Sharon, lilac, honey locust, Norway spruce and nasturtium.

From "Chicago Gardens: The Early History" by Cathy Jean Maloney, (University of Chicago Press, $35).