Because my property includes many trees, I am always on the hunt for shade-loving plants. The mayapple fits that description well. I grow it along the back of the house, which the nearby trees shade most of the day.
English garden writer William Robinson included this plant in his nineteenth-century classic The Wild Garden in a list of plants for naturalizing beneath trees. Robinson attacked the Victorian style of carpet bedding, which demanded high maintenance from the gardener. He preferred a garden style with perennials like the mayapple. American nurserymen soon adopted Robinson’s ideas as well.
Liberty Hyde Bailey refers to the native American plant Podophyllum peltatum, or mayapple, as a most desirable plant for the wild garden when planted in a colony.57The plant is an herb common in woods throughout the eastern United States.
The mayapple is a perennial that blooms starting midspring and continuing to late spring. The mayapple requires part shade to full shade, a medium amount of water, and little maintenance. It will reach a height between six and eighteen inches.
The leaf arrangement is opposite with only one to two leaves. Each plant has a single stalk topped with one or two broad, deeply divided leaves that vaguely resemble umbrellas. The fruit of the mayapple, hidden under the large leaves, is a berry that resembles a lime in shape. It is edible when ripened, but all other parts of the mayapple are toxic.
Since 1820 the mayapple has been recognized for its medicinal value. Native Americans used the root of the plant as a laxative to treat worms and other diseases. It was also used as an insecticide on crops. Today the root of the mayapple is used in certain cancer medications.
A Furor for Plants from England
In his Magazine of Horticulture, in 1868, Hovey wrote about the new hybrid coleus:
Since the introduction of Coleus Vershaffeltii, with its rich deep colored foliage, it has formed a prominent object for bedding purposes, especially in England, where the style of ribbon borders had extensively prevailed. The introduction of another kind, called C. Veitchii, increased the taste of rich foliaged plants, and by the skill of the hybridizer, a great number of new sorts have been raised between these two, which seem to have attracted unusual attention, amounting almost to a furor for these plants. The successful grower of these hybrids was M. Bause, of the Chiswick garden, who has raised twelve of these seedlings. . . . All of these, or a portion of them, will no doubt find their way into American collections.58
2: The English Garden Influence at Williamsburg
Frustrated with his family problems and his business, tobacco grower and member of the Governor’s Council John Custis (1678–1749), of Williamsburg, Virginia, took up gardening as his escape. He said, “I have a pretty little garden in which I take more satisfaction than in anything in this world.”59 Custis looked to England for plants for his garden. In the process he would develop a twenty-year friendship with Englishman Peter Collinson.
Like many other eighteenth-century English gardeners, Peter Collinson and his friend Lord Petre, who cultivated one of the largest collections of plants from around the world, sought to add more American plants to their gardens. Collinson corresponded with John Custis, and the two men exchanged plants for twelve years, from 1734 through 1746. Collinson shared the seeds and plants with Petre and his other “Brothers of the Spade,” a name he used to refer to his fellow gardeners.
Williamsburg provides an early example of the English garden influence in America: English gardeners inspired the landscape design for the town and wrote the garden literature the town’s citizens read. Additionally, gardeners in colonies such as Williamsburg came to depend on seeds and plants from England.
Collinson, for example, shipped the latest in English garden fashion, though often the seeds would not germinate or the ship captain killed the plants by overwatering. Custis’s letters tell us that sometimes problems ranging from high temperature to winds to Williamsburg’s proximity to the sea prevented the seeds from germinating. Indeed, the double tulips, the lily of the valley, and the crown imperials sent by Collinson failed to come up for Custis in the spring of 1738.
Despite such failures, Custis managed to cultivate a four-acre garden on Francis Street, where he grew the newest varieties of plants in an English garden style that was more formal than naturalistic. His gift plants from England included Chinese aster and globe thistle. Letters from Collinson often mention the seeds and plants shipped to Custis’s garden, including a box of “Horse Chestnuts, and peach stones of the Double Blossoms.”60
Custis wanted to keep his garden full of the newest plant varieties. For that he looked to England. In turn, he sent Collinson plants from Virginia such as the dogwood and laurel. And so Custis and Collinson, too, became “Brothers of the Spade.”
The Landscape and Garden 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