of the Colonies
Williamsburg exemplifies colonial gardening before the focal period of this book, the 1800s. The colonies along the East Coast shared a common heritage in their gardens, and so there were striking similarities.61 Williamsburg illustrates for us the prevailing early colonial landscape design, the sources for seeds and plants for the garden, and the garden literature important for that time. Though seeds and plants in nineteenth-century industrialized America would come from commercial houses, whose owners would write garden books and publish garden magazines, the decades before the start of the nineteenth century showcase a garden style that was already dependent on English plants and English garden writers.
English colonists first arrived in Virginia in 1607, at Jamestown. By the eighteenth century Williamsburg had become an important political and cultural center as well as a center of gardening activity.62 Although in the mid-eighteenth century the landscape design of England was changing to a more natural, picturesque style, the gardens of Williamsburg retained the older seventeenth-century English landscape style, which featured a more formal and geometric look.
Lieutenant Governor Francis Nicholson’s plan for the original Williamsburg in the early eighteenth century is still largely intact. The town boasts a series of broad, straight streets with impressive public buildings, including the Governor’s Palace and the Capitol. This material has been used to superb effect in the restoration of Colonial Williamsburg. This privately managed living museum today covers more than three hundred acres and includes about one hundred gardens. The gardens provide a key to understanding how later styles of nineteenth-century English picturesque American gardening contrast with the older formal English style of Williamsburg.
In the 1930s, Boston landscape architect Arthur Shurcliff, who pre-viously had worked with American landscape pioneer Frederick Law Olmsted, re-created the landscape of the Governor’s Palace. Its geometric garden runs along a central north–south axis. Today its restored landscape (fig. 2.1) includes rows of boxwood shrubs and other evergreens, perfectly pruned, reflecting the English formal style. Behind each of the houses that lined the streets is a series of gardens. The garden style is mainly one of linear symmetry.
Figure 2.1. The formal landscape of the Governor’s Palace at Colonial Williamsburg illustrates England’s early eighteenth-century landscape design.
The settlers did not choose the more open, naturalistic garden made popular through the influence of landscape designers such as Capability Brown, whose ideas dominated from the 1750s to the 1780s.63 Brown’s preferences replaced the more formal, geometric design the English had enjoyed for decades. John Custis, who took pride in his carefully trimmed shrubbery, admitted that his landscape taste was not the modern, or more natural, design.
A Williamsburg garden took on a more formal design, and like older English gardens, it had to be enclosed within a wall, fence, or hedge. In fact, colonial law eventually required that fences be built around each lot. While the garden plots throughout the town were limited in space because of the unpredictable and often threatening environment, an enclosed garden provided safety and gave the colonists more control over what they were growing.
Plants
The colonial gardener displayed his wealth through the number of English plants represented in the garden. The garden also demonstrated the gardener’s identification with England, where the colonists felt the most important plants could be found. Donald Wyman, horticulturist at Boston’s Arnold Arboretum from 1935 to 1970, wrote that before 1752 English plants such as the horse chestnut, European birch, cedar of Lebanon, English beech, English holly, Scotch pine, European linden, and English elm were thriving in Williamsburg.64
In the American colonies, the seventeenth-century gardens had been almost totally what garden historian Ann Leighton once called “relevant”:65 they existed to feed, clothe, clean, cure, and comfort the settlers. The primary way people engaged with plants was as a source of food and medicine. Farming and growing crops of various vegetables served the basic need for food. Until the late eighteenth century, the colonists seldom had time for more than utilitarian gardens with simple flower and herb beds.66
When the colonists arrived and settled in Williamsburg, they, of course, wanted to garden. The vegetation they encountered there, however, was unlike anything they had known in England. English gardens depended on the mild, damp climate of the British Isles,67 and the look and style of these Old World gardens were rooted in a particular ecology. Although the climate of Virginia differed drastically from England’s, that did not deter the colonists, for the English had long believed that their gardens were the best in the world.
The colonists wanted their plants from home—so they brought plants with them, such as the English ivy (though they also used the native plants found in the region). The dandelion, for example, came from Europe and was used as a green for cooking. Today’s popular ground cover for shade, vinca, or creeping myrtle, was brought here as well.
The majority of fruit trees came to Virginia from the Old World, where they had been grown in English gardens for hundreds of years.68The fruits introduced from England included the apple, plum, pear, peach, cherry, apricot, nectarine, and quince. The quince, for example, was brought to Virginia from England in 1648. For a century it was a more popular fruit than apples or pears, which had been introduced by the French missionaries and then adopted by the Indians. Cultivating fruit would become the major form of horticulture for American gardeners in the early to mid-nineteenth century when C. M. Hovey’s magazine provided an important resource for fruit growers, covering cultivation, insect issues, and the countless new varieties.
Europeans introduced peas, cabbage, carrots, beets, and most leaf vegetables. The potato, a South American native plant, is believed to have been introduced to North America from England in 1565, when John Hawkins brought it to Virginia. It eventually became popular in Europe when, in Germany in 1710, it became an important food crop. The story is the same with rhubarb and the strawberry, which were brought to North America from Europe. The tomato came to Virginia in the late 1700s from Jamaica. By the nineteenth century it had become a staple for the table. There were also marigolds, both the African and the French varieties, first brought to England from Mexico, and later to the colonies.
Conversely, Native Americans introduced many plants to the English colonists. Among these was tobacco, a native plant that by 1650 had become the major crop in Virginia; tobacco was harvested, dried, and sent to En-gland. Native Americans also introduced the colonists to peppers, maize, beans, pumpkins, and squash.
Williamsburg today has over five hundred kinds of cultivated plants, either indigenous to Virginia or introduced from abroad during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries.69 Cultivated native trees included the catalpa and the black locust. Plants within Williamsburg sometimes came from nearby plantations, for there was a strong relationship between the horticultural practices on the plantations and the gardens of Williamsburg. Thomas Jefferson, for example, received swamp mallow from marshes near the town and a fine apple tree from the garden of George Wythe’s house in Williamsburg.70 The fruit of that tree, he wrote, “was the most juicy apple I have ever known . . . very refreshing as an eating apple.”
The plants of colonial-era Williamsburg were thus a collection of both imported and native plants, reflecting the influences of English, French, and Spanish colonists as well as Native Americans. The gardens of Williamsburg were so distinctive that people even traveled to the town to see them.71
The Gardens of Williamsburg
In Williamsburg, raised beds were the preferred way of planting herbs and flowers because this was also the old method of gardening in En-gland. In addition, the wealthy had extensive parterres, topiary, and terraces, as reflected in the garden design at the Governor’s
