Old Fashioned Gardens

Rebecca Hyde Rowan Public Library

            What makes a garden?  Why do we seem to choose certain plants and planting patterns?  Historical perspective might help. 

            Old-fashioned gardens have been in fashion for a long time, even in terms of our country’s short history.  We had our own indigenous garden style, but it was overlooked by garden historians who saw only the influence of English high Victorian ribbon beds, the Arts and Crafts Movement, or formal Italian and French landscaping.

            For American art historian and novice gardener May Brawley Hill (“Grandmother’s Garden:  The Old-Fashioned American Garden 1865-1915”) here was a mystery to be solved.  In American paintings of the late nineteenth century, with titles such as “Old Garden,” “The Old Fashioned Garden,” or “Grandmother’s Garden,” there appeared “an immensely appealing garden, small in scale but generous in its planting.”  Hill turned to garden books published after the Civil War and found her painted garden well described.  Many of these books were written by women.  Then followed the centennial of 1876, which encouraged a patriotic and nativist interest in America’s past, some of it imagined.  By the 1890s this interest was also shared by garden writers, novelists, popular historians, and civic reformers, who saw in grandmother’s garden style a refuge from the social upheavals of industrialization.  As shown in Hill’s book, filled with paintings and photographs, these gardens were usually small enough to be maintained by one person.  The hardy flowers, in contrast to exotics imported for estate gardens, were usually arranged informally in rectangular beds with low borders of plants or stone.  The planting scheme could be haphazardly exuberant, but often showed a painter’s eye for color and contrast.  The book refers to the “modest gardens in North and South Carolina,” and mentions the box-bordered Murdock garden on Bank Street and the Boyden garden on Fisher Street, which occupied several acres.  May Brawley Hill is a Boyden descendant, with memories of “overgrown boxwood, indomitable old shrub roses, giant crepe myrtles, rampant wisteria … and an indestructible peony hedge.”

                        In “Heirloom Gardening in the South,” William C. Welch and Greg Grant offer a cultural history of contributions to our Southern gardening tradition, a handbook covering a wealth of Southern heirloom plants, and narratives of the creation of two personal gardens.  Emanis House is Greg Grant’s garden in Arcadia, located in East Texas.   The old farmhouse belonged to his maternal grandparents, Marquette and Eloy Emanis.  The landscape is full of elements of rural Southern life (dogtrot houses, home food production and storage, cisterns), but Grant has always thought of it as “the grandest place on earth.”

            Welch’s country cottage garden has developed around an 1860s Texas ranch house, so termite ridden his wife named it “Fragilee.”  According to Welch, the list of plants that have failed is long, but so is the list of those that thrive. 

            For both Welch and Grant, examining our garden heritage will help us create distinctive and useful new gardens and landscapes that truly reflect our region and its people.