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 Palace. The lots at Williamsburg were half an acre, one acre, or two acres in size, with the landscape design extending in straight lines from the centrally located building. The straight lines catered to the practical needs of the gardener, especially in simplifying the maintenance of fruiting plants, vegetables, and herbs.
The influence of the English garden style held strong well into the nineteenth century, when Americans began to develop their own way of gardening while remaining dependent on the English style. Garden historian and landscape architect Rudy Favretti maintains that the formal geometric style of Colonial garden design can be dated from 1620 until 1840 because design did not change significantly during that period.72
After Richmond became Virginia’s capital in 1780, Williamsburg, Virginia’s previous capital, was forgotten until the early part of the twentieth century, when it assumed its role as an important site of America’s history. In the 1920s, Williamsburg was, in a sense, rediscovered when the creation of Colonial Williamsburg was begun with the restoration of the buildings and the gardens. In the process, landscape architects researched what colonial gardens looked like. Their resources included letters and deeds but also incorporated garden designs from other cities of that period. The garden design of Colonial Williamsburg, though reconstructed in the twentieth century, displays distinct English characteristics from the earlier period.
Today a visitor to Colonial Williamsburg can see what colonial gardening was like for both the commoner and the wealthy class.73 The style in the gardens, as well as the buildings, is called Colonial Revivalism, a reconstruction of the eighteenth-century design of the home and garden. Though the style was produced in the previous century, some have, perhaps rightly, criticized it as a twentieth-century interpretation.
Some of the colonial plants were native, but most were imported, primarily from England. There were no American seed companies or nurseries offering catalogs yet. If a seed company—such as the David Landreth Seed Company, which emerged in Philadelphia in 1794—printed anything for marketing its seeds, the document was usually a small circular or a handbill. The residents of Williamsburg might have purchased plants through the Prince or Bartram nurseries, two of the earliest eighteenth-century American gardening enterprises, but they had no involvement with the American seed companies and nurseries that would become national businesses in the nineteenth century. Any commercial seeds they planted, except for those few that they saved from the previous harvest, came mainly from English seed companies that exported to America.74
Commercial Sources for Seeds and Plants
America’s additions to the gardens of England during the colonial period were mainly trees, flowering shrubs, and vines. The English perennial garden is also indebted to America for many of its plants, such as the black-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia hirta), bee balm (Monarda didyma), coreopsis, goldenrod, garden phlox (Phlox paniculata), and the cardinal flower, which Robert Beverley praised in his book on the history of Virginia. Eventually, these plants would return to become part of American perennial beds, but only after American seedsmen and nurserymen began to sell them. Early among these American commercial garden enterprises of the eighteenth century are Bartram’s botanical garden at Kingsessing, near Philadelphia, and the Prince Nursery on Long Island.
Having been encouraged to collect native American plants, John Bartram in 1725 started a business selling his plants. The name “Bartram” was synonymous with botany and horticulture in the fledgling United States, and the Bartram garden became known around the world as a source for American plants.75 Though most of Bartram’s