A Dear, Old-Fashioned Garden

When Arthur A. Shurcliff and other landscape architects of the 1920s and 1930s sought information about historic gardening, they frequently turned to the books of Alice Morse Earle and Grace Tabor. Both women were important influences on the development of Colonial Revival gardens. 

I wrote about Earle here, and though I focused on her writing on early American material culture, she was also quite well known as a writer on old gardens. Earle’s two books on gardens, Old-Time Gardens, Newly Set Forth (1901) and Sun-Dials and Roses of Yesterday (1902), were scholarly works, but they also were tinged with her own sentimental feelings about gardens—the garden of her childhood home in Worcester, Massachusetts, as well as the garden of her home in Brooklyn Heights, where her own children grew up.

The Earle children in their Brooklyn garden, 1880s

For Earle, gardens provided a direct connection with her Puritan ancestors and especially with Puritan women. She imagined that the women who first arrived in Massachusetts brought with them “across seas some little package of seeds and bulbs from her English home garden, and perhaps a tiny slip or plant of some endeared flower; watered each day, I fear, with many tears.” These flowers helped turn the houses they built in the new land into true homes. Now, said Earle, “when I see one of the old English flowers, grown of those days, blooming in my garden, from the unbroken chain of blossom to seed of nearly three centuries, I thank the flower for all that its forebears did to comfort my forebears, and I cherish it with added tenderness.”

Earle was especially fond of those plants she felt were most strongly associated with the colonial era. Like Arthur Shurcliff, she was a great lover of boxwood. While some people thought the aroma of boxwood was unpleasant, Earle found it “redolent of the eternal past; it is almost hypnotic in its effect.” Indeed, she believed the love of boxwood was a genetic trait: “This strange power is not felt by all, nor is it a present sensitory influence; it is an hereditary memory, half-known by many, but fixed in its intensity in those of New England birth and descent, true children of the Puritans.”

Other favorite plants included peonies, lilacs, and hollyhocks. “There is no more emblematic flower to me than the Lilac; it has an association of old homes, of home-making and home interests.” The hollyhock was “the most popular, and most widely known, of all old-fashioned flowers. It is loved for its beauty, its associations, its adaptiveness. It is such a decorative flower, and looks of so much distinction in so many places.” No surprise, then, that Earle chose a design of hollyhocks as the motif for the front cover of Old-Time Gardens. 

Gardeners who wished to create their own old-fashioned gardens could turn to the work of Grace Tabor, one of the first women to work as a professional landscape architect in the United States. Tabor was born in 1873 in Cuba, New York and studied at the Art Students League in Buffalo and New York City, as well as the New York School of Applied Design for Women. Tabor’s articles and garden plans appeared in popular magazines such as The Garden Magazine and Country Life in America. In 1920 she began writing a regular garden column for Woman’s Home Companion which would run until 1941. Tabor reached a wide audience through this magazine, which was one of the most influential women’s publications in the country.

Advertisement for Tabor’s column, 1922

Tabor began her book Old-Fashioned Gardening (1913) by cautioning readers that they would find no romanticism, no “lovely ladies nor courtly cavaliers” here. “Here all is sober reality and no dream; here is the truth about old gardens, not select glimpses of a path.” One of her goals was to pin down just what exactly was meant by “old-fashioned gardens”—a term that she felt most people used far too loosely and casually to refer to anything quaint or charming.

For Tabor, an old-fashioned American garden was one created between around 1635 (when the first gardens appeared in the English colonies) and ca. 1815 (so as to include the gardens of Mount Vernon and Monticello). Of course, there was a good deal of variation over time and in different regions. Tabor traced the history of five different gardening traditions in North America: the Spanish in Florida, English cavaliers in Virginia, the Dutch in New Amsterdam, Puritans in New England, and Quakers in Pennsylvania.

Tabor’s plan for a Spanish-style garden based on
those found in St. Augustine, Florida

Modern-day Americans who wanted “old-fashioned” gardens were advised to choose from among these five styles, according to their personal taste and circumstances. The compact Dutch garden, for example, was well suited to small, urban lots, while those with more space could use the plantations of Virginia as their model. Gardeners could simply draw on these garden traditions for inspiration, or if they were truly committed, they could attempt to reproduce an old-fashioned garden. “There is no reason against reproducing an old design,” Tabor wrote, “providing every phase of it receives proper attention and no anachronism is permitted.” However, she argued strongly that an old-fashioned garden built around a modern style house was “unpleasant.” Those living in colonial, Georgian, or mission-style houses, on the other hand, were advised that only gardens of old design were really suitable. Tabor provided simple plans and a list of plants known to have been used prior to 1815. She also reminded readers that old gardens were above all useful, providing food, beverages, medicines, and dyes, and that all plans should be made with that goal in mind. Otherwise, one risked producing something that was merely “a blank form and lifeless shell.”

There are very few images of 18th-c.
women working in gardens. This one
actually shows a French noblewoman
pretending to be rustic at Versailles.

While Tabor’s book was meant to provide practical advice to gardeners, it is clear that she was not immune to the romance of old gardens and that she, like Earle, was very much in sympathy with the Colonial Revival. Both she and Earle quoted the same passage in which Mrs. Anne Grant reminisced about the Dutch gardens of mid-18th century Albany: “I think I see yet what I have often beheld in both town and country, a respectable mistress of a family going out to her garden in an April morning, with her great calash, her little painted basket of seeds, and her robe over her shoulders, to her garden labours...A woman, in very easy circumstances and abundantly gentle in form and manners, would sow and plant and rake incessantly.”

Gardening had traditionally been the domain of women and was essential to the maintenance of the household. While that was no longer true for middle-class households in the early 20th century, Tabor and Earle hoped that women could recapture some of the virtues of their foremothers by creating gardens that were both beautiful and useful, and passing garden lore on to their children.

Sources:

Alice Morse Earle, Old-Time Gardens (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1901)

Alice Morse Earle, Sun-Dials and Roses of Yesterday (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1902)

Grace Tabor, The Landscape Gardening Book (New York: McBride, Winston & Company, 1911)

Grace Tabor, Old-Fashioned Gardening: A History and a Reconstruction (New York: McBride, Nast & Company, 1913)