Henry Nehrling
A Short Biography (1853-1929)
By David Driapsa
Nehrling's Palm Cottage in Naples, Florida.
Learn More
H. Nehrling’s Tropical Garden and Arboretum
Landslide:Spotlight on the Garden
Henry Nehrling was a popular nature writer, recognized as an authority in American ornithology and spoken of as a “Wisconsin Audubon”. With a literary style resembling that of John Burroughs, during the last quarter of the nineteenth century his writing reached international fame. His popular book in two volumes, Our Native Birds of Song and Beauty, included quotations from Burroughs and revealed a similar emphasis on native birdlife with corresponding descriptions of the ecological niche where each bird resided.
Throughout his life Nehrling was drawn to the wild places of America. Born in 1853, his youthful foundation was laid in the great primeval pine forests of Sheboygan County, Wisconsin. His German immigrant parents settled there among the native hardy pioneers that populated the forests ahead of the farms and towns. His adolescence didn’t equip him with the scientific names of birds or plants, but that didn’t inhibit his enjoyment of the native woodlands. On walks to school or herding his father’s cattle, through the old growth forest, he learned where to find the song birds and how to associate their comings and goings with the seasons.
After an absence of twenty years, Nehrling returned to the place of his youth – farms and towns had reduced and diminished the forest to make way for productive fields and meadows. Also gone were his celebrated song birds, once found deep in the forest during his youth. He observed that springs no longer welled up from the earth and the flowing streams ran dry where the forest was felled. These dramatic changes to his beloved landscape resulted in writings that were full of mourning for the loss of the primeval landscape. From this moment on Nehrling pledged for the conservation of wild nature, and this land ethic abided with him throughout the remainder of his life.
Nehrling was home-schooled and later graduated with a Classical education from the Lutheran Teachers Seminary in 1873. He entered teaching in the Oak Park neighborhood of Chicago, there married, and soon departed the suburbs with his bride for the wilds of Texas, stopping briefly in Houston and later moving west to the arid Post Oak forests of Lee County. Here, and later in the Ozarks of Missouri, he remained for ten years, living among nature, trekking through wilds, honing skills as a writer, and contributing essays on ornithology to scientific journals. Those ten years in the Southwestern Gulf States enabled Nehrling to travel afield as far as Louisiana and Florida where the evergreen Southern Magnolia, Mocking bird and balmy climate stirred romantic sentiments. Memories of the Southern Gulf States led him to purchase a rural estate on the outskirts of the hamlet of Gotha in the lake district of Central Florida. He gained influential friends who came to his assistance when an opportunity arose for him to return to Wisconsin to fill the position of custodian and director of the new Public Museum of Milwaukee.
Collections in the Public Museum of Milwaukee grew under Nehrling’s administration to be ranked among the top three natural history museums in the nation. Nehrling visited the World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago, purchasing exhibits and arranging to ship them back to Milwaukee at the closing. He also purchased for his own possession, the collection of tropical Caladiums from the Brazilian exhibition. He returned to Milwaukee with the brilliant leaved Caladiums and grew them in a greenhouse at his residence and there hybridized them. His hybrid creations increased in number and their brilliance received fame among plant enthusiasts. His passion for plants grew voraciously and he purchased plants from collectors around the world. Many plants were shipped from his greenhouse to Florida and set out in the garden he was making there, the Palm Cottage Garden.
Nehrling retreated from Milwaukee for the month of November each year and sometimes longer, to Gotha, where he devoted all his leisure to trekking about, pursuing his literary work, and to creating his garden. In 1904, under political intrigue within governance of the museum, Nehrling resigned his position with the Milwaukee Museum and moved permanently to Florida, first landing briefly at the Philadelphia Natural History Museum. Once settled in Florida he rarely travelled again outside its borders.
Palm Cottage Garden developed into one of the most beautiful and unique gardens in Florida. Thousands of visitors came annually to see his brilliant Caladiums growing in great rows. He supplied his finest Caladiums in bulk to commercial establishments, which were sold to the consumer market. In addition to this commercial crop, Nehrling filled his garden with exotic plants from around the world, first woody evergreens of Japan, later full collections of very rare palms and tender tropical species. Nehrling obtained plants through international correspondence with leading botanical gardens and front-line plant collectors. Many plants had never been seen as a living specimen outside of their native environment and were known by specialists only as dried specimens in herbariums. Leading plant scientists visited Palm Cottage Gardens to study these plant collections. Nehrling was appointed a collaborator with the Division of Foreign Plant Introduction of the United States Department of Agriculture. His garden swelled with government-provided plants which he carefully observed and recorded, making more than three hundred new introductions.
Occasionally, an Arctic blast of cold air pushes into Florida with devastating results on living plants. Nehrling anticipated such a freeze and searched for a more southerly place to establish a second garden for strictly tropical plants. Caught unprepared, a severe freeze in 1917 caused the loss of his entire commercial crop of Caladiums, as well as many rare, tender plants. Not all was lost, but it certainly was a setback.
Nehrling was invited to Naples to reestablish his tropical plant nurseries. The Ohio-based developer of the fledgling resort offered a cash advance and favorable terms on land if he would establish a tropical garden. It appears from letters exchanged that Nehrling moved some of his plants to Naples before the freeze. His nursery operations were underway at Naples within the year following the freeze, and by 1925 more than three-thousand species of ornamental plants were growing at Naples in his ‘Garden of Solitude’. It was the largest collection of tropical ornamentals within the state, where living plants growing outdoors in the earth exceeded the finest indoor collections in northern conservatories. Except for poor sandy tracts, Naples was accessible only by water; still leading scientists, industrialists and nature lovers found their way to Naples to see these plant collections.
Nehrling favored using native species of plants for the structural foundation of a garden and in Naples he perfected this approach. He selectively and lightly cleared the land to make room for his plant experiments, retaining much of the existing native plant material, and elaborated upon it with exotic plantings. His garden consisted of xeric-uplands, seasonally wet pine flatlands, tropical hardwood hammock, cypress swamp, estuary marsh, and mangrove swamp. He utilized each environmental niche, filling them with plants suitable for the location based on potentialities of the land for supporting the particular plant. Through his process of selective editing and elaboration he created the first designed wilderness garden in Florida.
Nehrling wrote a weekly column through the decade of the 1920s for the American Eagle, the journal of the Koreshan Unity Blazing Star Publishing House of Estero, Florida. The Eagle grew into a leading horticultural journal as Nehrling spread his knowledge of plant lore, horticulture, gardening, and more especially his conservation land ethic.
Nehrling died in Gotha in 1929, surrounded by letters of condolence and encouragement from friends, collaborators, and admirers, such as the celebrated horticultural writer, Liberty Hyde Bailey who had visited him the previous week. Newspapers across the nation and in Europe eulogized his life and mourned this death of a great American Naturalist.