Francis Oswald Canning
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The Bodine family recruited botanist, horticulturist, and gardener Francis Oswald Canning from his work at Fairmount Park to become the superintendent for the Bodine family’s Stoneleigh estate. He oversaw the entire grounds, gardens and greenhouse complex designed by architect Frank Miles Day.
Francis and his wife Sarah Jane Holmes Canning were both immigrants (he from England, she from Ireland), and the 1910 census confirms that they lived in Stoneleigh’s Superintendent’s Cottage.
During his tenure, Canning made presentations about dahlias and summer flower gardens to the Farmer’s Institute at Philadelphia, wrote about chrysanthemums for The American Florist, and his time as Superintendent bookended an appointment as Instructor of Horticulture at the Massachusetts Agricultural College (an institution still going strong over 100 years later).
In a 1903 issue of The American Florist, he shared a photograph of early spring tomatoes interspaced with string beans, giving us an inside view of these productive greenhouses. That photograph accompanied his short article describing how the Lorillard tomatoes were grown, with tips like “give the vines a vigorous tapping on sunny days, when in flower, to assist pollination.”
Canning’s remarkable story ends in tragedy, as the cause of his untimely death at the Superintendent’s Cottage was listed by the coroner as “accidental poisoning supposed to be caused by eating toadstools.”
There were numerous obituaries in gardening and horticultural periodicals describing his impressive career and noting that he was “highly esteemed by all who knew him.” But how could it be possible that a 44-year old gardener with his level of expertise and at the peak of his career was poisoned by deadly mushrooms? A 1911 obituary in Horticulture gives us the devastating answer: he was poisoned by mushrooms "gathered by one of the men employed under him and given to his wife to cook without his looking them over. Few gardeners knew the edible kinds better than he.”
Francis Canning is interred at Westminster Cemetery in Bala Cynwyd, marked with a solitary
headstone, and attempts to trace what became of his no-doubt-heartbroken wife of 18 years, Sarah Canning, have turned up no answers.
From here, we continue our tour by following the path back to the Oak Tree by the brick wall of the Greenhouse.
