took shape in front of him. Only the year before, he had returned to France with the settlers of Port Royal as the crown withdrew its support for the Acadian colony and demanded that its leaders justify further investments in the settlement of French colonies in the region.5 For both Champlain and the broader colonial effort in which he was an integral part, the stakes were high as the first frost fell and winter threatened its arrival.
Gardens were an essential element of the expanding footprint of French colonialism in northeastern North America. “While the carpenters, sawyers and other laborers worked at our lodgings,” Champlain wrote, “I put all the rest to clearing around the habitation, so as to make gardens in which to sow seeds to see how they would all succeed, for the soil appeared quite good.”6 The grape-bearing vines that the explorer had transplanted into colonial gardens took pride of place in the written account of these first months at Québec. When, the following year, he returned to France to inform his superiors of his progress, the vines were neglected and he complained bitterly about their loss. He explained that “after I had left the habitation to return to France, they were ruined for lack of care, which distressed me very much at my return.”7 Champlain was upset again when the same thing happened in 1610–11. Those who had been left in charge of the gardens “took no action to conserve them … [and] at my return, I found them all broken, which brought me a great displeasure, for the little care that they had had for the conservation of such a good and beautiful plot, from which I had promised myself something good would come.”8
Other colonists also cultivated gardens as France’s colonial presence pushed out from the habitation. Rather than the closed garden familiar to medieval Europe (the hortus conclusus), these too were created as ambitious projects that aimed to engage with and reshape American environments. The lawyer, colonist, and author Marc Lescarbot had earlier drawn Renaissance-inspired gardens in the landscape of early Acadia.9 When the Récollet missionary Gabriel Sagard traveled to the region that he called Canada in 1625, he described the gardens of his order as “very beautiful, and of a good base of soil; for all of our herbs and roots do well there, and better than many gardens that we have in France.”10 Like Champlain’s habitation, these landscapes blurred the transition across a trench that surrounded the residence and fields of “flowers, particularly those that we call Cardinales and Martagons,” and raspberry bushes that soon became part of the colonial diet.11 The effect was that his order’s residence resembled “a little house of the rural nobility, rather than a monastery of the Franciscan friars.”12 Nearby on the plateau, Sagard reported seeing the cultivated lands of the apothecary and colonist Louis Hébert, and in particular “a young apple tree that was brought from Normandy and young vines which were very beautiful.”13 These would soon be joined by the gardens of the Society of Jesus after missionaries from this order came to join the Récollets in New France, as well as those areas of cultivation that continued to expand from the original site of settlement at Québec.14
Figure 1. Samuel de Champlain, “Habitation of Quebec,” Les voyages du Sieur de Champlain, 1613. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island.
Cultivated spaces were well represented in images of Champlain’s settlement of Québec that show gardens touching up against the margins (Figure 1). They echo similar features in representations of earlier settlements at Île Sainte-Croix and Port Royal also included in Champlain’s 1613 Voyages (Figure 2). In each case, the prominence and location of these intricately designed landscapes amplified Champlain’s focus on the cultivated spaces in his written text and changed the tone of images that might otherwise be read as defensive or even hostile to local environments. At both Québec and Port Royal, the habitations’ firing cannons could have spoken to a desire to cut off contact with the outside world to which the French had come. Yet as the expansive gardens in the image pushed at the borders of the image, they effectively blurred the division between the fortress-like habitation that occupied the center of the composition and the natural world around it. No matter how far the smoke of the cannons could drift from the habitation, Champlain’s intricately laid-out parterres extended beyond them.
In images such as these, tilled fields and cultivated gardens became recognizable as sites in which the novelty of New France was tested. One of the foundational acts of Champlain’s settlement, after all, was the introduction of local flora—grains and vines included—into French colonial environments.15 Québec’s gardens were experiments as much as they were a source of sustenance, and they welcomed a wide range of American and European plants including “kitchen herbs of all sorts with very beautiful corn, wheat, rye, and barley that were sown and some vines that I had planted during the wintering.”16 Some grew from seeds that had been brought across the Atlantic, but others had homes in the forest and fields that Champlain so passionately described as he ascended the Saint Lawrence River.17 Near Québec, he described seeing “all of the types of trees that we have in our forests on this side of the ocean, and a number of fruits, even though they are sauvage for lack of cultivation: such as butternut, cherries, plums, vines, raspberries, strawberries, and green and red currants.”18 Elsewhere he noted “vine that produces reasonably good raisins, even though it is sauvage, which once transplanted & labored, will produce fruits in abundance.”19 It was these plants—roughly similar as recognizable sauvage (wild) versions of plants that grew in Europe—that Champlain brought into his gardens. They were, or perhaps could become, “like those we have in France.”20 These were spaces that visually represented a managed abundance that naturalized French colonialism as a well-governed and desirable hybridity.21
Figure 2. Samuel de Champlain, “Port Royal Habitation,” Les voyages du Sieur de Champlain, 1613. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island.
When Champlain called the grapevines and American plants at Québec sauvage he marked them as a site of tension between the familiar and the foreign. Sauvage has more often been studied when it was used as a noun within French colonial discourse to refer to indigenous peoples, but the term itself blurred distinctions between the human and non-human world.22 The word pointed less toward a neat ontological distinction than, as historian Sophie White has recently written, a “protean” marker of identity defined by its “flexibility.”23 It marked out a spatial and cultural liminality.24 The Thresor de la langue francoyse, written by Jean Nicot in 1606, provided synonyms including “semiferus,” “sylvestris,” and “erratico.” If “semiferus” suggested a partial ferality, “sylvestris” and “erratico” instead connected the term to the forest or an errant path and from there to conceptual and spatial borderlands. The entry further suggested that it was possible to “become sauvage” or “make or render all sauvage,” highlighting that the state identified as sauvage was neither fixed nor completely conquerable.25 Where generations of historians translated the term simply as “savage,” scholars now often prefer to interpret it as “wild” or leave it untranslated altogether, as I do here.26
When Champlain wrote that local flora was “sauvage for lack of cultivation,” he signaled that the manifest differences of American environments were remediable defects and hinted at the ecological ambitions of France’s colonial project.27 As a metaphor, the discourse of cultivation evoked by sauvage related the process of conversion to the domestication of wild plants and animals.28 In the colonial context of northeastern North America, the domestication of place and peoples became explicitly linked by colonists who cast themselves as cultivators and framed empire itself as an
