Women in Horticulture

Founded in 1911, the Pennsylvania School of Horticulture for Women (PSHW) was one of the first schools of its kind in the nation. Its founder, Jane Bowne Haines, was inspired by the horticultural training programs for women in England and Germany, and sought to establish an institution that would enable women to take their place in the male-dominated field of practical horticulture. She purchased 71 acres of farmland north of Philadelphia, recruited an all-women board of trus

Fannie Lou Hamer (1917 – 1977) was born into a sharecropping family in Mississippi and become a leader in civil rights. She established a cooperative farm to provide economic support to her community. Fannie Lou Hamer was born to a family of sharecroppers in 1917 in Montgomery County, Mississippi. She began picking cotton with her family at age 6. She was able to attend school sporadically and learned to read and write, but she began working full time by age 12. After marryin

Although she was born into slavery in Georgia in 1829, Carrie Steele was one of the first black landowners in Atlanta and left behind a legacy that forever changed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. She is an unsung hero in the horticulture world. Steele moved to Atlanta, Georgia after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Executive Order of 1862, the Emancipation Proclamation. We do not know much about Steele’s early years, apart from the fact that she was abandone

After reading A Woman’s Hardy Garden by Helena Rutherfurd Ely for the WinH inaugural book club meeting, we thought it was more than appropriate to interview Quill Teal-Sullivan as our Featured Horticulturists for June. Quill is the Director of Historic Preservation at Dunn Gardens in Seattle, WA but prior to that she was the Garden Manager and Curator at Meadowburn Farm (Ely's historic garden) in Warwick, NJ. She holds a MS in Public Horticulture from University of Delaware a