Annie L. Jack (1 January 1839 - 15 February 1912) (née Hayr) was a Canadian writer. She was the first

Canadian Canadians (french: Canadiens) are people identified with the country of Canada. This connection may be residential, legal, historical or cultural. For most Canadians, many (or all) of these connections exist and are collectively the source of ...

professional female garden writer.

Biography

Born in

Northamptonshire Northamptonshire (; abbreviated Northants.) is a county in the East Midlands of England. In 2015, it had a population of 723,000. The county is administered by two unitary authorities: North Northamptonshire and West Northamptonshire. It is ...

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...

, to John Hayr on 1 January 1839. In 1852, Annie Linda Hayr moved to

Troy, New York Troy is a city in the U.S. state of New York and the county seat of Rensselaer County. The city is located on the western edge of Rensselaer County and on the eastern bank of the Hudson River. Troy has close ties to the nearby cities of Albany ...

, where she attended Troy Female Seminary. She married the Scottish-born fruit farmer, Robert Jack, and settled at his farm, "Hillside," in

Châteauguay Châteauguay ( , , ) is an off-island suburb of Montreal, in southwestern Quebec, located both on the Chateauguay River and Lac St-Louis, which is a section of the St. Lawrence River. The population of the city of Châteauguay at the 2021 Cen ...

Quebec Quebec ( ; )According to the Canadian government, ''Québec'' (with the acute accent) is the official name in Canadian French and ''Quebec'' (without the accent) is the province's official name in Canadian English is one of the thirtee ...

. At Hillside, over the next fifty years Annie Jack raised 11 children while also developing and maintaining her garden. Upon her marriage, she had 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 experiences 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". Her husband died in April 1900. Jack was the author of the column on flowers and fruit "Garden Talks" in the '' Montreal Daily Witness'', the success of which led to her book '' The Canadian Garden: A Pocket Help for the Amateur'' (1903). It was the first Canadian book on gardening and remained the only such book available until after

World War I World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...

, when

Dorothy Perkins Dorothy Perkins is an online British women's fashion brand based in the United Kingdom. Formerly a store chain, it sold both its own range of clothes and branded fashion goods until February 2021, when it became part of Boohoo.com, having bee ...

published ''Canadian Gardening Book'' (1918). She contributed to the ''Canadian Horticulturalist'' and she also wrote stories and poems for various newspapers and magazines including "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 called ''The Little Organist of St. Jerome, and Other Stories''.

References

External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Jack, Annie 1839 births 1912 deaths Canadian non-fiction writers Canadian women non-fiction writers Canadian garden writers Canadian gardeners Emma Willard School alumni Wikipedia articles incorporating text from A Woman of the Century