Williamsburg Horticulture

Williamsburg Horticulture

English influence was predominant, as exemplified by Williamsburg

Horticultural explorers introduced plants from South America, Africa and thOrient by

the late 1700's.

Commercial nurseries become well-established

A Colonial Garden in Williamsburg, Virginia

-arrangements are formal, controlled, and highly structured

-simple topiaries and clipped hedges

-extensive use of bulbs, exotic plants, and ornamental flowers

At right: The gardens at the Governor's Mansion in Williamsburg, VA.

· Thomas Jefferson

No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and

no culture comparable to that of the garden. I am still devoted to

the garden. But though an old man, I am but a young gardener.

-1743 - 1826

-Developed landscape gardening as a fine art in the US

-Such gardening was influenced by European traditions, but was independent

enough to set its own course

-Monticello, his estate in Virginia, is a premier example of the new American

use of the landscape

-Demonstrated how 'a nation of farmers could live in a setting uniting utility

and profit (growing crops & livestock) with beauty and pleasure (ornamental

gardens)'

-See an excellent site on from the University of Virginia.

· Andrew Jackson Downing

-1815 - 1852

-Best known for 'Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening'

-Editor of the popular magazine The Horticulturist

-Created American landscape gardening and influenced country life in every

aspect

-Stood for 'the simple, natural, and permanent as opposed to the complex,

artificial, and emphemeral'

-'Greatest single figure in the history of American horticulture.' (arguably)

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L. H. Bailey, in his 1901 edition of Cyclopedia of Horticulture writes:

'In North America there was little commercial Horticulture before the opening of the

nineteenth century.'

'The earliest writings on American plants were by physicians, and naturalists who desired

to exploit the wonders of the newly discovered hemisphere.'

'The colonial ornamental gardens were unlike our own in the relative poverty of plants, in

the absence of the landscape arrangement, in the rarity of greenhouses, and the lack of

smooth-shaven lawns (for the lawn mower was not invented till this [19th] century. These

gardens were of two general types: the unconventional personal garden, without form but

not void, in which things grew in delightful democracy; the conventional, box-bordered,

geometrical garden, in which things grew in most respectful aristocracy.