13 minSummaryRead it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at cost
Audiobook editionPaperback · 6 × 9 in · 294 pagesHardcover · 6 × 9 in · 294 pagesAbout this book
What can a patch of herbs and a flower-lined path tell you about the people who call it home?
In Old-Time Gardens, Newly Set Forth, Alice Morse Earle steps into the dooryards and flower beds of earlier days. Drawing on old garden books, family records and gardeners’ memories, she explores what people grow, why they choose it, and how a garden becomes a living piece of home.
Seeds, roots and bulbs cross the Atlantic with settlers who want something of the English homes they leave behind. Within fences, walls and hedges, useful herbs grow beside favorite flowers. Earle follows these household gardens through changing tastes, as Victorian fashions push new and showy plants forward and old favorites aside.
What you’ll discover
- Gardens close to home Explore simple, orderly beds that belong to everyday households rather than grand estates.
- The working herb patch Discover plants used to flavor food, scent linen, make remedies and keep pests away.
- Flowers rich with memory Meet roses, lilies, tulips, hollyhocks and pinks through their place in household life.
- Plants passed between neighbors Follow seeds, roots and slips as gardeners share their favorites with relatives and neighbors.
- Old favorites, changing fashions See how Victorian tastes challenge familiar flowers and reshape the look of the garden.
Who will love it
You will love this book if you enjoy gardens, old flowers and herbs, colonial history and folklore, or a warm voice that talks about the past like a friend over the garden fence.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- A garden begins with belonging
- Seeds carried comfort across the sea
- Each garden reveals its household
- Boundaries give gardens their character
- Box keeps old gardens in memory
- Herbs sustained the whole household
- Flowers reach beyond the eye
- Childhood makes gardens deeply familiar
- Gardens carry the lives of their makers
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Old-Time Gardens, Newly Set Forth in 25 languages, side by side, paragraph by paragraph, once the book texts are online: the way to learn a language with a book you love.
Old-Time Gardens, Newly Set Forth
by Alice Morse Earle · 1901
Puritan women cross the sea with seed packets and Bibles, and plant a garden that still blooms in your own border.
Challenging5–10 hours to read20 languages
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“The chief use of flowers is to illustrate quotations from the poets.”
In short
What does land smell like after ten weeks at sea? John Winthrop, sailing toward Boston with the Puritan settlers, wrote that the air from the shore smelled like a garden.
Old-Time Gardens, Newly Set Forth at a glance
- Reading time
- About 6 h 25 min5 h 5 min fast, 7 h 40 min slow
- Length
- 92,200 words
- Library level
- Challenging long sentences, a rich vocabulary
- First published
- 1901by Alice Morse Earle
Reading time at 238 words a minute (fast 300, slow 200). How long the classics take to read · Updated
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
Homesick women carried the first gardens across the sea
The Puritans who founded Boston met a smell of garden from the shore before they ever landed. Earle takes it as a sign that these settlers would become tillers of soil and makers of gardens.
She pictures every woman bringing some small packet of seeds or bulbs from her English home. These women left comfortable lives for conscience. They brought little else besides their Bibles and flower seeds.
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Puritan women cross the sea with seed packets and Bibles, and plant a garden that still blooms in your own border.
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Details
- First published
- 1901
- Language
- English
- Level
- Challenging
- Paperback
- 294 pages · 6 × 9 in
- Hardcover
- 294 pages · 6 × 9 in
- Large print paperback
- 488 pages · 6 × 9 in
- Large print hardcover
- 488 pages · 6 × 9 in
- Delivery and returns
- Printed when you order. Usually here in 12 to 14 days.Arrives Wed 2 Dec to Tue 8 Decto United States, printed for you at cost
For Christmas, order by Thu 12 Nov
Cite this edition
Earle, Alice Morse. Old-Time Gardens, Newly Set Forth. Library of Alexandria, 2026, libraryofalexandria.com/products/old-time-gardens-newly-set-forth.
Earle, A. M. (2026). Old-time gardens, newly set forth. Library of Alexandria. https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/old-time-gardens-newly-set-forth (Original work published 1901)
Earle, Alice Morse. Old-Time Gardens, Newly Set Forth. Library of Alexandria, 2026. https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/old-time-gardens-newly-set-forth.
@book{earle2026oldtime,
author = {Earle, Alice Morse},
title = {Old-Time Gardens, Newly Set Forth},
publisher = {Library of Alexandria},
year = {2026},
url = {https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/old-time-gardens-newly-set-forth},
note = {First published 1901}
}
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What is Old-Time Gardens by Alice Morse Earle about?
It describes colonial and nineteenth-century American gardens, including front yards, herb beds, box borders, lilacs, roses and sundials, with history, poetry, folklore and personal memories that show why old garden flowers are loved.
Is Old-Time Gardens a true account or fiction?
It is nonfiction. Earle draws on old letters, herbals, travel accounts and visits to real gardens, adding her own childhood memories and a few short anecdotes. It was written in the early twentieth century.
What does the term sundial motto mean in the book?
Earle collected short sayings engraved on sundial faces, such as reminders that time passes or that only sunny hours count. She treats them as small lessons in plain language, placed where every passerby could read them.
The author
Alice Morse Earle
1851–1911 · American historian
Alice Morse Earle (1851–1911) was an American historian born in Worcester, Massachusetts. She later lived in Brooklyn, New York. She wrote about everyday life in colonial America. Her books included The Sabbath in Puritan New England (1891), Home Life in Colonial Days (1898), and Old-Time Gardens, Newly Set Forth (1901).
“The chief use of flowers is to illustrate quotations from the poets.”
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