From the archives: Gardening show blossomed

This story was first published on Sept. 16, 2007, in the Montreal Gazette.
“We are glad to see that the taste for Horticulture, one of the most simple and innocent and most refined, which exists in civilised communities, seems to have taken a firm hold of the minds of our fellow colonists.”
The Gazette, Thursday, Sept. 16, 1852
Fashionable though gardening might be nowadays, it doesn’t preoccupy the whole community the way it seemed to do a century and a half ago.
By 1852, the