Plant Something Day

In 1789 the newly elected president rode out to see it. George Washington arrived with John Adams, New York governor George Clinton and John Jay, which made the visit the closest thing American horticulture had to a state occasion.

He left unconvinced. Washington noted plenty of young fruit trees, then dismissed the shrubs as "trifling" and the flowers as "not numerous." Flushing had spent the previous seven years under British occupation, and almost nothing had been able to move in or out; the recovery was real but not permanent; in 1839 William Robert Prince imported more than a million mulberry trees from France, speculating heavily on the domestic silk industry; the price collapsed, the mortgage did not, and by 1841 the family lost the Linnaean Botanic Garden and Nurseries in foreclosure.

Somewhere in the following decade, those two words picked up a date, and who attached them to May 19 is not recorded anywhere: not in a proclamation, not in a trade announcement, not in a newsroom, not on the campaign's own pages, which carry no date at all. A founder does circulate: holiday-listing sites credit the National Initiative for Consumer Horticulture with creating the day in 2012. Search engines have repeated that back as settled fact.

It cannot be true. NICH's founders published the group's formation history in HortTechnology, and it dates the first outline of the initiative to a conference session in July 2014. The same paper records that when the group met in Washington that November of 2015, the participants reached no consensus on leadership going forward.

The organization's own history page opens in 2015 and never mentions the day. Neither does anything else. The earliest page for Plant Something Day held in the Internet Archive was captured in August 2022, eleven years after the archive first captured the campaign that shares its name.