Playing Garden Sleuth

Just as with your house, researching your old landscape can be half the fun.

By Nan Chase

	Visiting house museums of an age similar to your home's, or historic re-creations, can help you capture the feel of landscapes past. The parterre garden at Colonial Williamsburg's Custis Tenement features formal paths edged with boxwood and overflowing with larkspur. Photo Courtesy of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation

Imagine the day has come at last. You've finally finished restoring your old house with every architectural detail authentic, from the chimney pot down to the mud sill. You hoist a glass of champagne to celebrate your hard work, glance out the window Oops. Been avoiding the garden? You're not alone. Many homeowners with superb plastering skills or an intuitive grasp of interior decorating don't know where to start when it comes to historic garden designÑthat is, matching the look of a garden to the time and place their house was built.

It's no crime to take the easy way out, opting to install the most readily available new plants from the local garden center. But by bringing back the impression of a period landscapeÑeither through general shapes and textures or specific rescued features and heirloom plantsÑyou can create a sense of harmony that begins at the front gate, whether the setting is a Hudson River mansion, an Appalachian cabin, a prairie cottage, or a Southwestern adobe rancho.

Landscape historians disagree heartily about details, but are unanimous in advising homeowners to honor the spirit of the past. I think the question is less what people 'install' at their period house than what they rediscover and save of the real historic garden that is still there, no matter how difficult for modern eyes to see, says Scott Kunst, owner of Old House Gardens, an antique bulb supplier in Ann Arbor, Michigan. A new garden is always richer, I'd say, when it honors and builds on its past lives. For example, Kunst retained what was left of an iron grape arbor that once stretched across his entire property, dividing the more formal front garden from the work area in back. He initially saw it as a rusty, teetering structure that blocked the view from his office; it's now a shady retreat and the heart of the Kunst landscape.

While hardscape features like the arbor or a brick path may have marked a garden for generations, the same isn't true of plants. Says Wesley Greene, garden historian of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, The historic garden was not a static affair during its heyday, and I think it is a mistake to try and freeze it in time today. A healthy garden is one that is going through continuous change; the old plants come out and the new go in. On any historic site, when you claim to duplicate history you do a disservice to the people who actually lived at this time.

Greene points out that plant fads are nothing new. There were 18th-century gardeners with good taste, bad taste, and no taste, just as we find today. They did not all walk lockstep with current fashion. Greene quotes from a 1736 letter written by John Custis, a wealthy Williamsburg planter whose son was Martha Washington's first husband. Custis expressed his admiration for a striped boxwood and other variegated plants. I am told those things are out of fashion; but I do not mind that I always make my fancy my fashion.

Susan Hitchcock, a landscape historian for the National Park Service, believes that very few gardens can truly be restored. A feature in the landscape such as an allee of trees, a fountain, edging, or a drainage swale can be restored in many cases, says Hitchcock, but to restore an entire landscape is very problematic. I think at best I can have a few historic varieties maintained within a garden that I hope will be appropriate to the architecture of the house.

Where's the average homeowner to start? Take inventory of what's already there. That goes hand in hand with careful cleanup, and the process should take a yearÑa complete growing season. It could be you're sitting on some treasures, says Thomas Durden, a garden designer whose current project is replanting the grounds of Nuits, an 1853 Hudson River villa. Herbaceous perennials, such as peonies and bulbs like daffodils and lilies can be invisible fall and winter; an heirloom shrub may not be identifiable until it blooms in spring. If you have an old wisteria stump that sends up an occasional shoot, says Darden, it could actually be of some interest to nurture it back to health.

Peggy Cornett, director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for Historic Plants at Monticello, agrees. I would say one of the most common mistakes is to 'clean up.' I've visited many sites where they've gotten a diligent gardener or landscaper working away for months, mowing, pulling up weeds, cutting down the overgrown areas and by the time I get there it's a complete blank. Just vast expanses of nice, neatly mowed lawns. They've been manicuring for so long, there's no chance of anything from the past still surviving. Years of benign neglect is usually better.

Don't just sit and wait through this year-long discovery process. Begin your research into what the garden might have looked like in the past and which appropriate plants are available today. Photography goes back more than 150 years, so that's a rich resource. Old family photos, illustrated magazine articles, local newspaper photos as well as nursery ads, and archives of state and local historical societies all can help. Then there are such sources as garden club documents, state arboretum records, and personal correspondence and diaries. For gardens that existed before photography, it may help to visit an art gallery.

Read up on garden history in general. You'll learn not only about changing fashionÑthe popularity of Asian landscapes or rock gardens at certain periods, for instanceÑbut also about horticultural advances over the centuries (plant exploration, the use of greenhouses) and what they meant for garden design. Garden history also explains how certain practical considerations shaped the way a garden looked.

Sometimes I think we can put too much emphasis on the specific plant material and not enough emphasis on the processes, the living context, the needs, the limitations and advantages of a particular time and place, says Bill Finch, who writes about garden history and restoration for Alabama's Mobile Register. The processes that created many historic landscapes were fundamentally different than the processes that lead to the creation of modern gardens, everything from the toolsÑor lack thereofÑfor maintenance and propagation, to the sources of plants, to the use of the landscape for grazing, cooking, laundry, and fire protection.

Other garden practices are largely archaic: hauling all water from a well, keeping yards bare against snake infestations, using scythes instead of mowers, letting bugs live onÑand munch onÑplants, and letting plants die during droughts. Williamsburg's Greene adds, Few people are willing to go so far as to put the streets back to mud and manure, rip up the brick walks, return the lawns to dirt, wood shavings, clinkers, and broken pots.

Instead, landscape historians urge home gardeners to aim for reinterpretation. If you are just interested in having a garden that matches the historic period of the style of your house and you enjoy gardening, I think you shouldn't miss the rare opportunity gardens give you to actually work with an art form, says Chuck Gleaves, director of Kingwood Center in Mansfield, Ohio, which reflects the underpinnings of a garden first designed in 1926. They should study the historic period and style that they think would be appropriate and then install a garden 'in the style of' what they chose.

Nevertheless, while the plantings at Kingwood have changed a lot since 1926, the basic layout and most structures are the same. That's where all of these experts agree-research well what remains or might have been and document it, even if it means photographing an old pool before filling it in. Says Kunst, Just as we protect historic buildings and particularly historic districts because those structures and environments are part of our collective inheritance and not just personal property, we need to encourage all historic property owners to consider their landscapes as just as worthy of preservation.

If we can help people see what they have in their own yards that is historic-be that plants, constructed features, or simply design and layout from the past-I think they will be less apt to rip it all out and do something else that erases all that history. Nan Chase is reinterpreting her own old garden in Boone, North Carolina.


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