explained, “I can say without lying that I have never worked my body so hard, for the pleasure that I took to lay out and cultivate my gardens … to make parterres, to align the allées, to build the cabinets, to sow wheat, barley, oats, beans, peas, garden herbs and to water them, such was my desire to recognize [reconoitre] the land through my own experience.”19 For as much as the horrors of scurvy and frigid isolation shaped the experience of early colonists such as Lescarbot and Champlain, the simple act of setting roots—both figurative and real—in New France was a reassuring one. Cultivated spaces became sites in which to experience a harmony only possible as the result of a concerted effort by skilled husbandmen and an experience of desire and pleasure made possible by the fulfillment of a duty to cultivate place and people.
Lescarbot was particularly concerned with foregrounding this “little labor” that “God has blessed” in his accounts, but he was not unusual in his efforts to claim that agricultural labor provided an authority that was both moral and epistemological. As the Protestant polymath Bernard Palissy explained in the sixteenth century, the labor of cultivation was inspired by both God and Roman precedent. It was in the classical era that people had
wisely set themselves to plant, sow and cultivate to aid nature, which is why the first inventors of something good, to aid nature, have been so esteemed by our predecessors, they were reputed to have been participants in the spirit of God. Ceres who advised us to sow and cultivate wheat was called a goddess; the good man Bacchus (not at all a drunkard as the painters have made him) was exulted because he advised us to plant and cultivate the vine: … Bacchus had found sauvage grapes, Ceres had found sauvage wheat; but these were insufficient to feed them as well as when they were transplanted. From this we know that God wants us to work to aid nature.20
It was through labor that the productive essence of sauvage plants was revealed and the foundations for European civilization laid.
Authors were inspired by developments in the evolution of renaissance gardens that created spaces in which the natural and artificial were intentionally blurred to demonstrate the skillful labor of a benevolent patriarchal authority.21 In a description worth quoting at length, Champlain hinted that rich landscapes that aimed to blend human and natural agencies were as important in North America:
As soon as the said Sieur de Monts had departed, some of the forty or forty-five who stayed behind began to make gardens. I also, in order not to remain idle, made one which I surrounded with ditches full of water wherein I placed some very fine trout; and through it flowed three brooks of very clear running water from which the greater part of our settlement was supplied. I constructed it near the seashore a little sluiceway, to draw off the water whenever I desired. This spot was completely surrounded by meadows, and there I arranged a summer-house with fine trees, in order that I might enjoy the fresh air. I constructed there like-wise a small reservoir to hold salt-water fish, which we took out as we required them. I also sowed there some seeds which throve well; and I took therein a particular pleasure, although beforehand it had entailed a great deal of labor. We often resorted there to pass the time, and it seemed as if the little birds thereabouts received pleasure from this; for they gathered in great numbers and warbled and chirped so pleasantly that I do not think I ever heard the like.22
Agricultural and horticultural authors in the sixteenth century had laid claims that these sorts of labors were particularly virtuous, translating an act that could be conceptualized as one of Adam’s punishment into a site where God could be encountered and where His designs could be made legible, and where one could expect rewards of pleasure and beauty.23 These were places, therefore, of both pleasure and toil, and accounts of these landscapes demonstrated the possibility of creating the “third nature”—a skillful display of the subtle manipulation of natural agencies—that renaissance and early modern gardens championed.24
In this way, colonial narratives framed French colonialism less as imposition than as redemption and extended a project that had thus far targeted the environments of rural France for improvement into the Atlantic world.25 Imagining effective husbandry as an encounter that cultivated farmer and farmed alike, it encouraged both confidence in the ability of French colonists to weather the influence of New World environments and a belief that civilization would allow for the expression of latent identities—a possible Frenchness—in both place and peoples. It offered French colonists and colonial promoters an image of themselves and their project that differed substantially from the bloody conquests of New Spain and Peru and that allowed them to imagine sovereignty over New World possessions and control over American peoples as recompense in a consensual and mutually beneficial exchange of lands, goods, and cultures.26 For the cultivator could not be a conquistador, and the manifestation of his (for this figure was invariably male) will was imagined as operating far more subtly, offering a glimpse at an understanding of the importance of the agency of both the cultivator and the cultivated to the success of colonization.27
Narratives of cultivation in New France translated French practices of mesnagement, or stewardship, flourishing in France across the Atlantic and into American soils.28 In France, the reclaiming and improvement of agricultural and horticultural lands by French cultural and political elite was part of a broader strategy of political centralization that produced a robust visual and material culture of royal authority in early modern France that drew upon the metaphor of a benevolent patriarch who enriched both his own holdings and his subjects.29 These produced frequently formal landscapes that were sites of political practice where new visual and practical forms of power were articulated and experimented.30 Texts on gardening and estate management had begun to proliferate in France after the middle of the sixteenth century following military adventures in Italy, both introducing classical authorities on the subject and developing a French aesthetic and landscape theory.31 During this period, gardeners and landscape designers hired from Italy produced gardens such as Fontainebleau and invented the French mannerist style.32 The French formal garden was born in the seventeenth century in gardens such as the Tuileries and the Luxembourg palace through royal support and horticultural innovation that emphasized the aesthetic beauty of purposeful design and utility.33
In France and England, authors were reengaging the georgic tradition of Virgil and other classical authors that valorized the active management of estates by their noble owners.34 The horticultural theory that emerged in late sixteenth-century France celebrated the empirical roots of botanical knowledge acquired through the virtuous labor that expanded patriarchal authority in French rural landscapes. In the 1600 Théâtre d’agriculture et mesnage des champs of Olivier de Serres, a leading horticultural theorist patronized by Henri IV, we can see how the practice of mesnagement brought the disparate concerns of epistemology, agricultural improvement, and authority into a productive relationship. Serres proposed understanding agriculture as a science that observed and adapted to local environmental conditions.35 It was a “science more useful than difficult, provided that it was understood by its principle, applied with reason, led by experience and practiced with diligence.”36 Serres had escaped the ravages of France’s wars of religion on his estate and had there learned practices for effective estate management that he felt were a moral obligation ordained by God. “For as much as God wants us to content ourselves with the places that he has given us,” he wrote, “it is reasonable to take them from his hand as they are and serve him the best as possible trying to remedy their defaults through artifice and diligence.”37 What he developed at his estate could be applied to the state, with the king conceptualized as a bon ménager of the kingdom. These writings were particularly resonant in a France still feeling the effects of economic and cultural disruption that had characterized much of the sixteenth century.38 Particularly relevant to the ambitions and concerns of Henri IV, Serres drew upon classical texts to argue that the management of people and the management of place were twinned and inseparable.39
Serres’s calls for a nation of nobles who understood their role as effective managers
