Annie Jack
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Annie Jack (1839 - 1912) (née Hayr) was the first Canadian professional woman garden writer. Born in Northamptonshire, England, to John Hayr on 1 Jan 1839. Jack moved to Canada as a teenager from Troy, NY, where she had attended Miss Williard`s Academy. She married a Canadian farmer, Robert Jack. She settled at "Hillside" in Chateauguay Valley, Quebec.
[edit] Life
At Hillside, Jack raised 10 children in addition to maintaining her garden. Upon her marriage, she stipulated for one acre of land to be devoted to any department of horticulture she chose, the profits to be her own pocket-money. She wrote about her experience in the Rural New Yorker, under the title " A Woman's Acre." The American horticulturalist Liberty Hyde Bailey referred to Jack's garden as "one of the most original gardens I know" (quoted in von Baeyer). Her husband died in April, 1900.
In the Montreal Witness, Jack wrote a column on social topics, the letters of "Loyal Janet." Jack was the author of the column on flowers and fruit "Garden Talks" in the Montreal Daily Witness, and published the first Canadian gardening book, The Canadian Garden: A Pocket Help for the Amateur (1903, with a second edition in 1910 in Toronto). This remained the only Canadian gardening book available until after World War I.
Jack wrote stories and poems for various newspapers and magazines. She wrote "Women's Work in New Channels," for Harper's Young People. In 1902 she published a volume on the life of the French Canadian habitant, " The Little Organist of St. Jerome, and Other Stories." [1]
[edit] References
Edwinna Von Baeyer, Ed. Garden Voices: Two Centuries of Canadian Garden Writing. Toronto: Random House, 1995.
Canadian Encyclopedia: Annie L. Jack [2]
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