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The Blooming of Flushing

America's first commercial nursery was visited by President George Washington

By George DeWan | Staff Writer

At the western end of Flushing there is a dreary commercial patch that includes an auto parts store, an asphalt plant, a glass signs shop and a lumberyard, all bathed in the exhaust fumes of a constant flow of trucks and cars. Here and there alongside the cracked concrete sidewalks grow the ubiquitous ailanthus and the irrepressible chicory, its lavender flowers the only bright spot in a dismal panorama, a hint, perhaps, of a more fragrant past.

Here, more than 250 years ago, the air was filled with the more pleasing smells of apple, plum, peach, nectarine, cherry, apricot and pear. This unlikely garden spot was the site of the first commercial nursery in America, eight acres planted by Robert Prince in 1737, expanded eventually to 113 acres and continued by the Prince family until just after the Civil War.

Prince's Nursery gathered trees and plants from around the world for resale, and became renowned through the American colony for its exotic wares. George Washington, six months after he became the new nation's first president in the spring of 1789, made a trip by barge to visit the nursery. The British who occupied Long Island during the Revolutionary War had considered it so special that they put an armed guard around the nursery to protect it from predators. When Meriwether Lewis and William Clark explored the Northwest during the Jefferson Administration, many of the botanical treasures they found were sent back to the Prince Nursery.

In a 1771 broadside, the nursery advertised 33 different kinds of plum trees, 42 pear trees, 24 apple trees and 12 varieties of nectarines. On March 14, 1774, Prince's son, William, advertised in the New York Mercury:

William Prince at his nursery, Flushing Landing, offers for sale one hundred and ten Carolina magnolia flower trees raised from the seed -- the most beautiful trees that grow in America -- 4s [shillings] per tree, four feet high, fifty large Catalpa trees, 2s per tree, nine feet high to the under part of top and thick as ones leg; thirty or forty almond trees that begin to bear, 1s and 6d [pence] each; gooseberry bushes, 6d; Lisbon and Madeira grapevines; English and American strawberry plants; one thousand five hundred white and one thousand black mulberry trees; also Barcelona filbert trees, 1s.

When Robert Prince opened his nursery, Flushing was a small, rural community and the business was built adjacent to Flushing Creek, allowing for shipping of plants and trees via Flushing Bay. First limited to the propagation and sale of fruit trees, the business later expanded to shade and ornamental trees, thus becoming a major force in the landscaping of Long Island.

The Revolutionary War led to the 7-year occupation of Long Island by the British in 1776, the Prince Nursery was cut off from most of the outside world, and business declined. It got so bad that at one point the nursery offered for sale 30,000 grafted cherry trees, proposing they be used as barrel hoops.

By 1789 the nursery had regained its business and its reputation. Washington, at heart a Virginia planter even though he had recently been sworn in as president, decided to pay a visit to the nursery. At the time, the seat of government was in New York City, and Washington lived in a house at the corner of Cherry and Pearl Streets. In his diary for Oct. 10, he notes:

``I set off from New York, about nine oclock in my barge, to visit Mr. Princes fruit gardens and shrubberies at Flushing.'' He was accompanied by Vice President John Adams and others. Washington was not overly impressed, perhaps because the nursery had not yet fully recovered from the war; or perhaps because his Virginia standards were so high. ``These gardens, except in the number of young fruit trees, did not answer my expectations. The shrubs were trifling and the flowers not numerous.''

Of course, it was October, not quite flower time on Long Island. And Washington's account books show that he later bought fruit from Prince's trees.

In 1793, William Prince Jr., Robert's grandson, established a new Prince nursery north of Broadway, now Northern Boulevard. The two nurseries would later be combined. Prince called it the Linnaean Gardens, after the Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus, who at mid-century had devised the system of plant classification called binomial nomenclature, still in use today. For example, the American white oak is known as Quercus alba, consisting of a Latin genus name followed by a descriptive name.

William Jr. introduced in 1798 some of the first Lombardy poplars seen in America, advertising 10,000 of them for sale, from 10 to 17 feet in height. This tall, graceful and column-like tree that conjures up images of formal French allees became quickly popular on Long Island, in spaces where long avenues of trees could be planted. But a century later, interest in them waned.

There were failures as well. William Jr. decided in the spring of 1827 to raise silkworms, so he imported the first of a special variety of white mulberry trees, on whose leaves the silkworms feed. In a recent exhibit on the nursery at the Queens Historical Society, a small plaque read: ``William Robert Prince -- Imported mulberry trees to establish a cocoonery for silk worms -- almost bankrupted the family business.'' Prince also was unsuccessful at growing wine grapes, in great part due to his inability to control a deadly fungus.

Beginning with the Prince family enterprise, Flushing became a community of nurseries as others sprang up to compete. Best-known was the Parsons Nursery, begun by the Quaker Samuel Parsons in 1838, and for a time the only grower of rhododendrons and hardy azaleas. It was located at the site of the present Flushing High School. Parsons introduced the pink-flowering dogwood, and in 1847 Parsons brought back from Belgium an oddity in a four-inch pot called the weeping European beech. This old tree, with several of its descendants surrounding it, still lives next to the Queens Historical Society at 143-35 37th Ave. There also were the Bloodgood Nursery and the Garretson Seed Farm.

As population pressure became more intense, Queens farmland was given up to the building of homes and businesses. So, too, did the nurseries die out in western Queens.