We hope you enjoy your visit to our garden and we hope you stay awhile. I decided to place here a short history of the gardens in Williamsburg, Virginia since Williamsburg is a center focal point during the Colonial times. I shall place information here of plants, shubery and flowers that were grown during this era. So, again, please enjoy your visit.
A Williamsburg Perspective on Colonial Gardens
Gardens have always been an important aspect of the Williamsburg scene, both in the eighteenth century and today when at least three generations have come to appreciate this town and its gardens as an integral part of America's historical heritage. (60k image) Colonial Williamsburg's political and historical legacy is well known, but despite its popularity, relatively few realize that in addition to being an important political and cultural center in eighteenth-century Virginia, Williamsburg was a center of gardening activity.
In the eighteenth century, Williamsburg was the capital of the largest, wealthiest, and most populous of the colonies and the center of cultural life in Virginia. But compared to Philadelphia or Charleston, Williamsburg remained a small, but beautiful, green country town. During the Revolution, the Virginia capital was moved to Richmond because it was felt that Williamsburg was too vulnerable to attacks from the British. With this move Williamsburg slowly changed into a quiet town that time and development seemed to forget. While few of the public buildings survived, many of the old homes and shops remained in use into the twentieth century.
Due to its prudent town plan, Williamsburg did not grow with the same hodgepodge disorder of the earlier Jamestown settlement. Lieutenant Governor Francis Nicholson's plan for Williamsburg was laid out around an orderly grouping of public buildings, each relating to the others in a spacious overall scheme. Characterized by its broad, straight streets and its impressive public buildings, the new capital had distinctly urban qualities. Its baroque-style vistas pulled the public buildings into the landscape, and the useful open spaces reflected current European city planning trends. Nicholson's early eighteenth-century plan is still largely intact, and Williamsburg today demonstrates how well conceived his planning vision truly was.
It is a credit to the conservative English taste of Williamsburg's gardeners that this small Virginia town had some of the best examples of Anglo-Dutch gardens in the colonies. This garden style, characterized by geometric symmetry within an enclosed space, was common in England in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Historical evidence suggests that the emerging trend toward naturalistic gardens in contemporary England did not appeal to the settlers in Virginia. To those Virginians, a natural landscape did not need to be re-created; there were ample reminders of that at every turn. To them, a garden was nature tamed, trimmed, and enclosed within a fence or hedge. The colonists tended to create the gardens they remembered, or their parents remembered, in the England of William and Mary. Consequently, these styles persisted longer in America where they had been adopted than in England where they had been fashioned.
The first gardens of any size or consequence in Williamsburg were at the College of William and Mary, in "the college yard" at the east front of the oldest structure, the Wren Building. This decorative, formal garden filled with topiary may have looked out of place in the predominately natural landscape of Virginia, but judging from surviving eyewitness accounts, this was certainly an appealing garden. This garden disappeared not long after the Revolutionary War.
The real greening of Williamsburg began when Lieutenant Governor Alexander Spotswood arrived in 1710. Embarking on a path that would ultimately compromise his relationship with the House of Burgesses, he undertook at great expense the task of building a monumental garden at the governor's mansion. For elegance and extravagance, nothing in the colony exceeded the governor's gardens, and the reconstructed gardens have been enormously influential in telling the history of American colonial gardening.
For Spotswood, gardens were synonymous with civilized and elegant living, and his garden designs were traditionally formal, geometric, and well balanced. This is the conclusion we can draw from a copperplate engraving discovered in 1929 by a Colonial Williamsburg researcher in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, about 190 years after it was originally executed. This "Bodleian Plate" was of paramount importance in guiding the garden restoration efforts at the Palace.
Plants in Colonial Gardens
By and large, the plants found in the gardens of Colonial Williamsburg are those native to the tidewater area or those introductions made by 1780. North America's contributions to the gardening world are chiefly its trees, flowering shrubs, and vines. American wildflowers have become essential perennials and annuals in flower borders around the world. The English colonists brought with them all manner of seeds, bulbs, and roots of their favorite flowers from back home, so their gardens became an amalgamation of those Old World favorites and the native plants they had found in the New World.
In the eighteenth century, the colonists carried on an extensive exchange of plants and horticultural information with the homeland. Much of what is known about plants available in Williamsburg's colonial times comes from correspondence about this exchange. John Custis, a prominent citizen of Williamsburg, corresponded for twelve years with Peter Collinson, the amateur English naturalist. Their letters are filled with the details of the joys and trials of the exchange of plants across the Atlantic. English gardeners were eager for the new American plants--exotics like black-eyed Susan, goldenrod, and the fall-blooming aster--that became popular in all of Europe. Likewise, literally hundreds of plants came to America from Europe. Some, like yarrow and daylily, escaped into the wild and have become thoroughly naturalized wildflowers of the American landscape. The majority of fruit trees, vegetables, herbs, and flowering bulbs came to Virginia from the Old World where they had been grown in English gardens for hundreds of years. Additionally, some vegetables native to Central and South America, such as potatoes and tomatoes, were introduced to North America and Virginia via Europe where Spanish and Portuguese explorers had taken them in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
There is still much research to be done on the history of ornamental plants grown in colonial Virginia gardens, for there will always be the source yet to be researched. References to plants in the seventeenth and eighteenth century are hampered by the unsystematic naming of plants before the Linnaean system of Latin genus and species names was established in 1753. Even more of a challenge is trying to match the proper genus and species names to the more colorful and unusual common names given to plants in colonial times. Since the planting of the first re-created gardens at Colonial Williamsburg, many plants have been added to the plant palette and more than a few have been deleted because of newly acquired information.
As summer days lengthen, Williamsburg's gardens, like other old Virginia gardens, take on a depth of greenness all their own. The source of this serenity is often the boxwood, and it is the plant, above all others, that people typically associate with Williamsburg. (64k image) Boxwood has proven itself the Virginia gardeners' best evergreen friend, withstanding winterkill and summer burn alike. While interesting when precisely trimmed in formal parterre gardens, boxwood is at its best when left to grow naturally into undulating and billowing masses.
Among the native ornamental trees available to gardeners of the eighteenth century were the dogwood, redbud, magnolia, and catalpa, all renowned for the beauty of their flowers. Commonly used trees that provided shade were the elm, chestnut, poplar, sycamore, oak, and pecan.
Fruit trees were very important in Williamsburg's early gardens. Fruits were eaten fresh, cooked, or preserved. The fruits of the Old World were in great demand and were usually grown in quantity. Fruits had been useful to the settlers of Virginia who found a natural bounty of grapes, and wild strawberries, huckleberries, blackberries, and raspberries that soon found their way into the garden. The native tree fruits proved to be less useful: the crab apple was small and bitter, the wild cherry was practically worthless, and the plum was inferior in quality to European varieties. The apple, quince, plum, pear, peach, cherry, apricot, and nectarine were all introduced from Europe.
In tribute to Williamsburg's vegetable gardening heritage, we like to remember that John Randolph, a distinguished Virginian and resident of Williamsburg, wrote the first American book on kitchen or vegetable gardening. John Randolph was the king's attorney and was dubbed "John the Tory" because of his loyalist sympathies. Randolph's Treatise on Gardening, modeled on a similar manual by English nurseryman Philip Miller, was printed in America in 1788, four years after his death. Prior to that, only books written for English gardeners and the British climate had been available in the colonies, and thus provided little help with the particularities and peculiarities of this climate.
References
Brinkley, M. Kent and Gordon W. Chappell. The Gardens of Colonial Williamsburg. Williamsburg, Va.: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1996
Colonial Williamsburg: Gardens & Gardening
|
