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)

Boxwood on the Brain: Arthur Shurcliff’s Colonial Revival Gardens

Arthur A. Shurcliff as a young man

Long before he took up the position of landscape architect at Colonial Williamsburg, Arthur A. Shurcliff had already begun his love affair with boxwood. Thirty years before he arrived in Williamsburg, in the summer of 1898, Shurcliff and his friend Bob Bellows took a bicycle tour of the historic town of Newburyport, Massachusetts. At this time, Shurcliff was working as an apprentice in the landscape architecture office of John Charles Olmsted and Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., so this was a working vacation as well as a pleasure tour. Shurcliff kept detailed notes of his trip in a notebook entitled “Log of 5 Days in Newburyport, August 1898,” and he wrote in this journal that it was “Dedicated to an old box hedge.” This shrub, of the genus Buxus, was first introduced to North America in the mid-17th century but would reach its peak popularity in the 20th century as the quintessential Colonial Revival planting—thanks, largely, to Arthur Shurcliff.

19th-century botanical illustration
of Buxus sempervirens

 Arthur and Bob visited old houses, made gravestone rubbings, and sought out what they called “antique” gardens. Shurcliff wrote in his journal, “Wednesday morning saw me in the old-fashioned gardens of the heart of the town. These old places although now gone to decay are filled with a kind of golden glory which is lacking in the new gardens. The old lattice trellises and ruined box hedges and even the weedgrown paths seem to have the glamor of the sunshine of the olden days that are only to be lived over again in books or in these old gardens themselves.” In addition to these musings, Shurcliff drew garden plans and made a list of plants he had been informed were “old-fashioned.”

It’s clear that Shurcliff felt that there was something special about boxwood, perhaps because it was one of the few plants that could potentially have survived since the time when these antique gardens were new. A few years after his trip to Newburyport, Shurcliff published an article in House & Garden about two Nantucket gardens that dated from the early 19th century. He also believed that there was “evidence to support the tradition that they were copied from much older gardens then in their prime”—but what this evidence might be, Shurcliff did not say. Nonetheless, here, too, boxwood played an important role. Boxwood hedges marked the main outlines of the garden's plan, and boxwood was used for decorative effects, being planted and trimmed into “ribbons, strings, and knobs.”

Foliage of Buxus sempervirens, or American boxwood

It comes as no surprise, then, that when Arthur Shurcliff became Colonial Williamsburg’s landscape architect in 1928, one of the first things he did was begin a collection of boxwoods. First he gathered them from Williamsburg and the immediate vicinity, but soon had to go further afield, to North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, in order to supply the demand created by his plans. In addition to the plants that were grown in Williamsburg, entire mature boxwood hedges were purchased and transplanted to the historic area in order to create instant fullgrown plantings. By March of 1934, the Restoration had purchased and transplanted one and a half miles of boxwood.

Although there was very little hard evidence for the presence of boxwood in Williamsburg’s gardens in the 18th century, Shurcliff felt that his studies of other southern gardens justified their presence. In his first report to Restoration architects Perry, Shaw & Hepburn, he argued, “in replanting the Williamsburg places much use should be made of Box even to the extent of allowing it to dominate the parterres and bed traceries of which it once formed only a part.” Along with Shurcliff’s romantic love of boxwood was a practical reason—“Generous use of box in this manner is also justifiable because the display and upkeep of flowers especially in the dry season would not be necessary.”

St. George Tucker House before restoration

To Williamsburg residents, Shurcliff’s obsession with boxwood was a bit puzzling. Mrs. George Coleman, who lived in the St. George Tucker house, wrote in her diary of an encounter with Shurcliff in January 1931: “Today I was asked to go over the Tucker House yard with Mr. Arthur Shurcliff...to discuss the laying out of brick walls, boxwood hedges, etc. I found him a very alarming person! Somehow the idea of changing the yard and garden is much more repellent to me than changing the house, and this is such a terribly enthusiastic man!”

Boxwood in the restored Tucker House garden

In May 1931, Shurcliff was back, “[coming] down like a wolf on the fold again today. He rushed in and out several times with charts and plans for all sorts of alarming ‘landscapes’ in our yard. He has boxwood on the brain.” However, like most people, Mrs. Coleman found it impossible to resist the force of Shurcliff’s ideas, and even ultimately came to like his plans for the Tucker house garden. 

Others were much more easily won over by Shurcliff’s garden designs. As soon as Colonial Williamsburg officially opened in 1934, his Colonial Revival style gardens—and boxwood—began appearing all over the United States. However, there is still some debate as to whether boxwood can successfully be grown in this part of the country. If anyone has experience with it, we would love to hear from you!

Sources:

M. Kent Brinkley and Gordon W. Chappell, The Gardens of Colonial Williamsburg (Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1996).

Elizabeth Hope Cushing, Arthur A. Shurcliff: Design, Preservation, and the Creation of the Colonial Williamsburg Landscape (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014).

Charles B. Hosmer, Jr., “The Colonial Revival in the Public Eye: Williamsburg and Early Garden Restoration,” in Alan Axelrod, ed., The Colonial Revival in America (Winterthur: Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, 1985), 52-70.

American Boxwood Society

F. S. Lincoln, “St. George Tucker House Kitchen,” John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, accessed April 29, 2015, https://rocklib.omeka.net/items/show/566.

“St. George Tucker House Before Restoration,” John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, accessed April 29, 2015, https://rocklib.omeka.net/items/show/564.

The Gardens of Colonial Williamsburg

Garden and Nursery, Colonial Williamsburg

It may technically be spring, but as I look out at the snow falling, it sure doesn’t feel like it. I spent some time in Colonial Williamsburg last week, and even in Tidewater Virginia, it’s been a hard winter—but I did see some signs of life. Daffodils are blooming and some courageous vegetables are growing under their glass cloches. It got me thinking about gardens and what ideas from Colonial Williamsburg we might incorporate into the grounds at the Alice.

Colonial Williamsburg was originally conceived of as primarily an architectural restoration, but landscape gardening was an important component of the overall appearance of the historic area. The Foundation hired Arthur A. Shurcliff, a Boston landscape architect who had worked closely with Perry, Shaw, and Hepburn, the architectural firm in charge of the restoration, to design gardens and other outdoor spaces that would complement the restored structures. Shurcliff served as Chief Landscape Architect from 1928 to 1941, and his vision of the colonial garden proved to be enormously influential for decades.

James Galt House after restoration, 1935

Gardens are by their very nature changeable and ephemeral, and there was very little physical evidence left by the 1930s of what Williamsburg’s gardens had looked like in the 18th century. Shurcliff and his staff had to piece together many small bits of information and add a good dose of imagination to come up with their garden plans. They read travelers’ accounts, letters, and journals; they looked for accounts by explorers and naturalists who described local flora; they examined tax records and insurance policies, which sometimes included sketches of lot layouts. Some archaeological work was done, which uncovered landscape features such as the foundations of outbuildings, walkways, paved service areas, and wall and fence lines.

Shurcliff based the Custis Tenement garden
on one of Sauthier’s designs.

Shurcliff also studied surviving plantation homes and gardens in the region. He was particularly influenced by the 18th-century towns of North Carolina and the gardens designed there by Claude Joseph Sauthier, a French landscape gardener, surveyor, and mapmaker who came to the colony in 1767. Sauthier left detailed plans of his urban gardens, which indicated that the garden plans fashionable in the colonies were very similar to those that had been popular in England in the late 17th and early 18th century.

These colonial gardens were characterized by “geometric symmetry within an enclosed space.” Walls and hedges delineated the space of the garden, and plantings kept to defined spaces separated by straight walkways. By the mid-18th century, more “naturalistic” gardens were becoming fashionable in England, but these did not appeal to colonists, who had more than enough nature to contend with. To them, “a garden was nature tamed, trimmed, and enclosed within a fence or hedge.”

Kitchen garden behind Wetherburn’s Tavern

Shurcliff and his staff worked with the best information available to them, but over the years it’s become clear that they (like everyone) were influenced by the aesthetic tastes of their own time. Today, Shurcliff’s gardens are considered better examples of the Colonial Revival than they are authentic recreations of colonial gardens. As new sources are found, changes are being made to Williamsburg’s gardens. New archaeological techniques have been particularly valuable—traces of plants and even pollen have been found and identified, leading to more accurate information about what species were known in the area in the 18th century. As CW comes to focus more on the everyday life of ordinary individuals, kitchen gardens, where vegetables, fruit, and herbs were grown, have joined the more elaborate formal gardens of the Colonial Revival era.

Hand-colored lantern slide showing the formal gardens
of the Governor’s Palace, 1935

We have very little information about what the Alice’s grounds looked like during the early days of the Museum, but the Colonial Williamsburg style of garden was so wildly popular from the 1930s to the 1950s that I have to think Alice Miner was influenced by it. If you have any photographs that show the outside of the museum during this period, we would love to see them! In the meantime, I will be continuing to research this fascinating topic—and dreaming of warmer days.







Sources:

M. Kent Brinkley, The Gardens of Colonial Williamsburg (Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1996)

“The Restoration of Colonial Williamsburg,” special issue of The Architectural Record (December 1935)

Marley R. Brown III and Edward A. Chappell, “Archaeology and Garden Restoration at Colonial Williamsburg,” Journal of Garden History 17, no. 1 (1997): 70-77

Colonial Williamsburg Gardens

F. S. Lincoln, “James Galt House, Exterior From Left,” John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, accessed March 27, 2015, https://rocklib.omeka.net/items/show/320

F. S. Lincoln., “Governor's Palace Garden,” John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, accessed March 27, 2015, https://rocklib.omeka.net/items/show/589