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Gardening for Amusement

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Gardening for Diversion & Amusement

Eighteenth century ladies and gentlemen sometimes referred to flowers, botany, and their gardens as amusements, their diversions.

William Stephens (1671-1753), President of the Province of Georgia from 1741-51, kept a diary between the years of 1742-43. In March of 1741, he wrote, "Thursday...I busy'd my self good part of it at the 5 Acre lot in gardening, and propagating Variety of Seeds and Plants, which I always thought an Agreeable amusement when I could find proper Leisure."

At another point Stephens wrote, "No Want of Diversion to employ my Time and Thoughts...: It was a Pleasure to see my Corn coming on, and other Things that were planted, very promising...and all hitherto in a hopeful Way: Besides the Amusement it gave me, in forming Schemes for many future Improvements in Gardening, and more curious Cultivation of Land, for the Production of Vines, Mulberries, Cotton, &c. of all which, I had provided a small Nursery, in the little five-Acre Lot near home."

Early botanist Jane Colden Farquher (1724-66) came from a traditional patriarchal family. Her physician father Cadwallader Colden (1688-1776) sailed to New York in 1710, He was Lt. Governor of New York from 1761 until his death; member of the Council of New York; & Surveyor General for New York. His scientific curiosity included a personal correspondence with Linnaeus.

Colden thought women should study botany because of "their natural curiosity & the pleasure they take in the beauty and variety of dress seems to fit them for it." Moreover, he viewed such study as an ideal substitute for idleness among his female children, when he moved his family to the country in 1729.

He believed gardening and botany "an Amusement which may be made agreable for the Ladies who are often at a loss to fill their time." He went so far as to recommend that perhaps from Jane's example "young ladies in a like situation may find an agreable way to fill up some part Of their time which otherwise might be heavy on their hand May amuse & please themselves & at the same time be usefull to others."

Jane Colden far surpassed her father's amusement theory. She was the first scientist to describe the gardenia. Although she had to read the works of Carolus Linnaeus in translation, she mastered the Linnaean system of plant classification perfectly. She catalogued, described, and sketched at least 400 plants. She actively collected seeds & specimens of New World flora & exchanged them with others on both sides of the Atlantic.


Peter Collinson wrote Linnaeus that Jane Colden “is perhaps the first lady that has so perfectly studied your system. She deserves to be celebrated.” The South Carolina scientist Dr. Alexander Garden wrote that Jane Colden “is greatly master of the Linnaean method, and cultivates it with assiduity.” Her work on plant classification was in a Scottish scientific journal in 1770, four years after her death.

Rosalie Stier Calvert (1778–1821), who lived near Washington D. C. just when it was becoming both a political & social capitol, thought women should hold themselves above an discussion of politics, especially during the mud-slinging surrounding Thomas Jefferson's personal life & loves. She called gardening her “greatest diversion.”

Rosalie Stier Calvert and her daughter.

In 1807, she observed, "I see so many women making themselves ridiculous by discussing politics at random without understanding the subject that I am disgusted with all controversy except about flowers! Their culture absorbs me more every day, for as I go out rarely, it is my chief amusement."

In South Carolina, Eliza Pinckney (1722-1793), who was responisble for changing the economy of South Carolina by introducing indigo agriculture, wrote in 1760, “I love a garden & a book; & they are all my amusement.”

The gardens at the Girls’ School in Salem, North Carolina, were described as “designed for literary repast, & evening amusement.”

Men were not above simply amusing themselves in their gardens either. George Washington reported that gardening had become his amusement.

Thomas Jefferson was constantly change his house and his gardens at Monticello. "Architecture is my delight," he said, "and putting up and pulling down, one of my favorite amusements."

But George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, & John Adams knew that gardening was more than just an amusement to occupy their idle hours. Each were aware of directions in garden design that had been spearheaded by the political leaders of centuries past & which were the basis for gardens in early America. The spiritual importance of gardening & the agrarian way of life was not lost on the gentlemen shaping American's future.
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English-style Natural Grounds in America

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Most early American pleasure gardening gentry intentionally adopted practical, geometric, ornamental gardens for their properties.

In 1789, Jedidiah Morse (1761-1826), noted clergyman & geographer, wrote of one country seat, “Its fine situation. . .the arrangement and variety of forest-trees - the gardens...discover a refined and judicious taste. Ornament and utility are happily united. It is, indeed, a seat worthy of a Republican Patriot.”

Generally, American gardeners shared John Adam’s (1735-1826) negative attitude towards the excesses of the English natural grounds movement. During his 1784 tour of English gardens with Thomas Jefferson, he announced, "It will be long, I hope, before ridings, parks, pleasure grounds, gardens, and ornamented farms grow so much in fashion in America."

In the same year, George Washington (1732-1799) wrote to the wife of Marquise de Lafayette (1757-1834) encouraging her to accompany her husband on a return visit to the new American republic. "You will see the plain manner in which we live; and meet the rustic civility, and you shall taste the simplicity of rural life."

In the early Republic, many gardeners strove for a balance of useful plants & trees & genteel design. On both town & country plots, most gentry, merchants, shopkeepers, & artisans planned gardens that were both practical & ornamental in geometric patterns.

Some gentry who gardened were aware of the new English natural style & sometimes added serpentine entry roads & paths that meandered through the wooded edges of their grounds, but they overwhelmingly designed their gardens with traditional rectangular beds & approaching straight avenues of trees.

Why were early American gardeners slow to adopt the English natural grounds movement? Their untamed surroundings & their interest in ancient precedents prodded them toward designing the orderly gardens, that they planted around their dwellings. Early in his 1806 garden bookwork, Philadelphian Bernard M’Mahon described “ancient gardens,” by which he meant the gardens common a hundred years earlier in Britain & Ireland.

Ironically, just as the English were rebelling against their “ancient” geometric garden designs, M’Mahon found America’s new citizens clinging to the formality of the classical past. Perhaps the young nationals were looking for the security of precedents to reinforce their present unsteady situation. The ordered & hierarchical implications of classical terraced gardens probably appealed to the gentry, who were losing their privilege of rank through association with the British & groping to maintain that privilege through natural, & therefore inevitable, order instead of through historical precedent.

Americans found the enlightened ideas & orderly, geometric gardens of the Italian Renaissance particularly attractive during the early national era. Thomas Jefferson once boasted, “Ours are the farmers who can read Homer.” Southern gentlelady, Eliza Lucas Pinckney, recounted in 1742, “I have got no further than the first volume of Virgil…to find myself instructed in agriculture as well as entertained by his charming pen.” More than 70 years later, Jefferson’s bother-in-law Henry Skipwith wrote to a friend who was planning an orchard, “Virgil’s Georgics would have given you a full idea of his Quincunx.”

Library records indicate that America’s literate gardeners were also reading Richard Bradley’s 1725 Survey of the Ancient Husbandry & Gardening, & Adam Dickson’s 1778 Husbandry of the Ancients, published in 1788, and the original writings of Columella, Virgil, Cato, & Pliny, whom they saw as providing models of day-to-day estate & garden management, including food production.

One British visitor to the Chesapeake observed, “Frenchmen...appear to me to be the best judges of gardening in America, perhaps because their own climate & soil are more nearly similar to those of America, than either the English or Scotch.” Even Thomas Jefferson, touted by many as a promoter of the English natural grounds movement, claimed to admire the controlled, geometric French gardening above all others.

Benjamin Henry Latrobe, upon his initial tour of America between 1795 & 1798, condescendingly noted the classical influence prevalent in the Chesapeake. He wrote that the gardens at Mount Vernon were “laid out in squares, & boxed with great precision…for the first time again since I left Germany, I saw here a parterre, chipped & trimmed with infinite care into the form of a richly flourished Fleur de Lis: The expiring groans I hope of our Grandfather’s pedantry.” Americans were clinging to European gardening traditions rather than adopting the natural grounds movement.

M’Mahon had come from the British Isles when English landscape architects were abandoning Western traditions of formal garden design & embracing more natural forms, which were applied to the larger expanses they called pleasure grounds. The extreme formality of French & the fussiness of the miniature Dutch flower gardens helped spark this British movement against geometry & artificiality in the garden.

Influenced by writers such as Joseph Addison & Alexander Pope (whom Charles Carroll of Carrollton claimed was his favorite poet), & by the romantic landscape paintings of the French artists Claude Lorraine & Nicolas Poussin, English landscape architects rejected centuries of traditional Western garden design. English garden design reformers, such as Lancelot “Capability” Brown, & their followers favored peaceful landscapes featuring created & controlled green lawns for grazing deer & livestock, stands of needed trees, & serpentine rivers that would invite fowl & animals.

The English landscape itself was to become the ultimate garden. Intricately planned serpentine rivers & lakes reflected “natural” hills planted with carefully chosen trees & shrubs. M’Mahon’s gardening treatise reviewed the use of the popular English ha-ha, a wall or ditch sunk below the level of garden, which was intended to make the gentleman’s lawn appear to flow into the surrounding countryside. In England, where laws kept all but the rich from hunting deer & small game, these ha-has kept the hunting preserve of the gentry secure.

Ha-has were used occasionally in the 18th-century Chesapeake, but they usually surrounded grounds still dominated by formal geometric gardens. The ha-ha was not just an invisible barrier to keep intruders out of the garden & grounds. It was simply the area that divided the stage upon which patricians exercised paternalism safely separated from their hopefully awe-filled audience, all of their lesser neighbors. The ha-ha was a device to make the gentry seem at one with their personal external environment, in which they could place themselves on top but within the safe confines of an invisible wall.

Eighteenth-century English pleasure grounds were never truly natural. As M’Mahon explained, they were planned to look natural & were then decorated, often with classical Roman ruins or oriental ornaments. Chinese garden concepts excited the European gentry, when first reports of them reached Europe in the 18th century; but Western attempts to emulate Oriental design usually resulted only in copies of their architectural features.

Chinese architecture directly influenced some 18th-century American homes & garden structures. Pagodas, garden houses with upswept eaves, & Chinese style bridges decorated a few American garden grounds, but the garden spaces themselves were still divided into geometric partitions, often on terraced falls.

Until fairly recently, garden historians generally agreed that by the end of the 18th century, very few formal gardens, with traditional geometric bed designs, remained in Britain. This may not be the case, but apparently, the British had reached a level of sophistication that allowed them the freedom to resist their highly structured civilization & their hedged landscapes. This change, combined with the need to conserve dwindling supplies of timber & game, led to the natural grounds movement in England. The movement did not spread quickly in America.
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Bernard M'Mahon Changing American Gardens

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Bernard M'Mahon--Changing Gardens & Gardeners

The motives and results of pleasure gardening in 18th century America differed greatly from those in the mother country. In 1784, George Washington wrote to the wife of the Marquise de Lafayette encouraging her to accompany her husband on a return visit to the new American republic, “You will see the plain manner in which we live; and meet the rustic civility, and you shall taste the simplicity of rural life.”

Even though he had never been across the Atlantic, Washington was well aware that the pleasure gardens of the gentry in the new republic were much less sophisticated than those in England & Europe. But the face of the new nation was changing at the end of the century.

Immediately after the Revolution, clever European gardening entrepreneurs immigrated to America to entice the new nationals to buy their books, seeds, & services. They set about to create a market not only among the already pleasure gardening gentry but among the rising merchant & working classes as well. And they succeeded.

At the end of the century, pleasure gardening was growing among rich & middling groups alike. Gentlemen were becoming interested in science & botany. Ladies were becoming more interested in decorative flowers & potted plants. The motives for this rapidly expanding interest in pleasure gardening in America were as varied as the gardens themselves.

The most important among the immigrant gardening entrepreneurs was Bernard M'Mahon (1775-1816), who came to Philadelphia from Ireland in 1796, to establish a seed & nursery business. “He enjoyed the friendship of Thomas Jefferson…the Lewis & Clark expedition was planned at his house…[he was] instrumental in distributing the seeds which those explorers collected.” Contemporaries reported that M’Mahon’s store was meeting place for serious botanists & hobby horticulturalists, a haven for artists & scientists.

A contemporary wrote, "Bernard M'Mahon found American gardening in its infancy, and immediately set himself vigorously to work to introduce a love of flowers and fruit. The writer well remembers his store, his garden and greenhouses.

The latter were situated near the Germantown turnpike, between Philadelphia and Nicetown, whence emanated the rarer flowers and novelties, such as could be collected in the early part of the present century, and where were performed, to the astonishment of the amateurs of that day, successful feats of horticulture that were but too rarely imitated.

His store was on Second Street, below Market, on the east side. Many must still be alive who recollect its bulk window, ornamented with tulip glasses, a large pumpkin, and a basket or two of bulbous roots; behind the counter officiated Mrs. M'Mahon, with some considerable Irish accent, but a most amiable and excellent disposition, and withal, an able saleswoman.

Mr. M'Mahon was also much in the store, putting up seeds for transmission to all parts of this country and Europe, writing his book, or attending to his correspondence, and in one corner was a shelf containing a few botanical or gardening books, for which there was then a very small demand; another contained the few garden implements, such as knives and trimming scissors, a barrel of peas and a bag of seedling potatoes, an onion receptacle, a few chairs, and the room partly lined with drawers containing seeds, constituted the apparent stock in trade of what was one of the greatest seed-stores then known in the Union, and where was transacted a considerable business for that day.

Such a store would naturally attract the botanist as well as the gardener, and it was the frequent lounge of both classes, who ever found in the proprietors ready listeners, as well as conversers; in the latter particular they were rather remarkable, and here you would see Nuttall, Baldwin, Darlington, and other scientific men, who sought information or were ready to impart it."

In 1806 M’Mahon gave America its first great gardening book, The American Gardener’s Calendar, which was printed in eleven editions between 1806 & 1857, when it was superseded by Andrew Jackson Downing’s 1841 Theory & Practice of landscape Gardening. A Philadelphia newspaper called M'Mahon's book “a precious treasure” that “ought to occupy a place in every house in this country.”
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Frederick Traugott Parish (1744-1820). Berberis nervosa, the "Oregon grape" collected by Lewis & Clark and reassigned the name Mahonia by Thomas Nuttall in 1818, a new genus named in honor of the seedsman Bernard M'Mahon, who was responsibile for raising the seeds collected & sent back to Philadelphia by Lewis and Clark.

Gardener & artist from Saxony, Frederick Traugott Pursh (1744-1820) arrived in the United States in 1799 and worked in a succession of gardens in the mid-Atlantic states. He became acquainted with Bernard M'Mahon at his shop in Philadelphia. By 1801, he had introduced himself to America's foremost botanist, Benjamin Smith Barton, and was working at the Woodlands, the estate of William Hamilton.

Departing the Woodlands in 1805, Pursh was hired by botanist Barton (with the recommendation of Bernard M'Mahon) to collect plant specimens in Virginia and New York state and, afterwards, to illustrate the western specimens collected by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on their transcontinental expedition.

Pursh was not paid his promised salary for his illustrations and angrily returned to London. There he produced a 2 volume Flora Americae Septentrionalis containing the first formal descriptions of the America flora collected by Lewis and Clark. Among the western plants he drew & described, one was named for Lewis; one for Clark; one for M'Mahon (Mahonia) and Pursh himself (Purshia).
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Chinese Influence on Early American Gardens

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Chinese Garden Architecture & Design

By the 1760s, colonial British Americans were becoming restless with their limited choices in an expanding world. (And then, of course, there was that taxation problem.) Britain controlled what they could import & what they could manufacture. And, yet, they knew of the world beyond the limits imposed by the mother country.

Voltaire, although he had never been there, fancied China to be a diest philosopher's paradise. The colonials were banned from direct contact with goods from China by the British East India Company, but they could see Chinese designs in porcelain, textiles, wallpapers & pattern books and on trips abroad. They longed to show that they, too, had a larger view of an Enlightenment world filled with cross-cultural inspiration.

Books displaying Chinese designs, such as Matthais Lock & Henry Copland's 1752 New Book of Ornaments; Thomas Chippendale's 1754 Gentleman and Cabinet-maker's Director; William Chambers' 1757 Designs for Chinese Building, Furniture, Dresses, Machines, and Utensils; and Thomas Johnson's 1762 New Book of Ornaments, were widely circulated in the British American colonies. By 1774, the first American furniture book with Chinese designs appeared, The Carpenter's Rules of Work, in the Town of Boston.

From 1755-1758, London-trained indentured servant architect & carver William Buckland (1734-1774) was installing Chinese detailing in George Mason's home Gunston Hall at Mason Neck in Fairfax County, Virginia. Buckland & his chief carver, William Bernard Sears, were creating Chinese-style chairs for the house. Gunston Hall was filled with Chinese fretwork & moldings on the fireplace, doorways, & windows. Originally Buckland had been hired on a 4 year indenture to create a Chippendale parlor "in the Chinese taste" for George Mason's brother Thomson.

Hannah Callender wrote in her diary in 1762, of William Peters' Belmont near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, "We left the garden for a wood cut into vistas. In the midst is a Chinese temple for a summer house. One avenue gives a fine prospect of the city...Another avenue looks to the obelisk."

1772. William Paca of Annapolis painted by Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827). Maryland Historical Society.

Young Annapolis attorney William Paca (1740-1799) had traveled to England in 1761, to further his legal training abroad. Shortly after his return, he married wealthy Philadelphian Ann Mary Chew in 1763, & began to plan their Annapolis home & gardens, which he began building in 1765.

1772. Detail of Chinese Bridge in painting of William Paca by Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827).

William Buckland is credited with designing his garden, which was dominated by geometric terraces that fell to a small naturalized wilderness garden boasting a pond, a Chinese-style bridge, & a classical pavilion.

Chinese bridge in restored gardens at William Paca home in Annapolis, Maryland.

In 1768, New York City's public pleasure garden Ranelagh offered a musical concert & fireworks featuring "Three Chinese Fountains, with Italian Candles, and a garandole."

Maryland newspaper advertisements offered fancy wooden paling constructed "emulating Chinese designs" for sale in the Chesapeake region by the late 1760s.

Mayor Samuel Powel (1738-1793) of Philadelphia redecorated his house after returning from 7-year-long Grand Tour of Europe in 1769. Young gentlemen of means often deferred the start of a career for the opportunity to broaden their knowledge & language skills on a Grand Tour. Among those he met on his continental travels were the Pope & Voltaire. Upon his return, Powel redesigned his garden & hung Chinese-style wallpaper in the parlor. Powel's cousin, financier Robert Morris (1734-1806) soon ordered Chinese wallpaper from Europe for his Philadelphia home.

Although he never built them, Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) looked to William Chamber's book, when he was contemplating building 2 Chinese pagoda garden pavilions at Monticello in Virginia in 1771.

Soon after the Treaty of Paris ended the war & ended the British East India Company's monopoly over the China trade in the colonies, America sent the vessel the Empress of China from the port in New York to China on George Washington's birthday in 1784.

Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1786, "the Chinese are an enlightened people, the most anciently civilized of any existing, and their arts are ancient, a presumption in their favour."

A former employee of the Dutch East India Company, who frequently traveled to China, settled in America in 1784, Andreas Everardu van Braam Houckgeest (1739-1801). He was known as van Braam. In 1796, he built "China's Retreat" at Croydon, near Philadelphia, featurning sliding windows & a cupola with Chinese fretwork balustrade.

Visitor Moreau de Saint Mery wrote that "the furniture, ornaments, everything at Mr. van Braam's reminds us of China. It is even impossible to avoid fancying ourselves in China while surrounded at once by living Chinese (servants) and by representations of their manners, their usages, their monuments, and their arts."

Catharina van Braam (1746-1799) & her daughter Francoise. Unknown Chinese Artist. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

In van Braam's home hung a Chinese portrait of his wife & daughter clad in classical costumes & seated in a garden. But the garden was not Chinese. On a 1794 trip to Guangzhou, China, van Bramm commissioned the reverse glass painting, for which Chinese artists used engraved versions of paintings by, among others, the German painter Angelika Kaufmann (1741-1807). The subjects’ faces often were copied from miniatures; but for the rest, the paintings were direct imitations of Kaufmann’s originals. The portrait of Catharina & Françoise is based on a 1773 Kaufmann painting of Lady Rushout & her daughter Anne, from a stipple engraving made by Thomas Burke (1749-1815) in 1784. Burke’s engraving apparently made its way to Guangzhou.

After only 2 years of living at his Philadelphia new mansion, van Braam sold it to a Captain Walter Sims in 1798. Captain Sims was also enamored of Chinese culture & ornament; so he, too, enjoyed the exotic atmosphere of the mansion. His only change was to rename it "China Hall."

In 1798, a newspaper advertisement offering for sale a small plot of land in New York City noted that, "A Chinese Temple, placed on one or two inviting spots, would render the appearance at once romantic and delightful."

These depictions of Chinese gardens during the period give a glimpse into the inspiration for Chinese designs in colonial America & the new republic.

Engravings of the Yuan Ming-Yuan Summer Palaces and Gardens of the Chinese Emperor Ch'ien Lung. by Giuseppe Castiglione. (Published 1786)

Giuseppe Castiglione (1688-1766) was an Italian Jesuit brother serving in China as a painter at the court of the Emperor. Castiglione was sent there as a missionary, arriving in China in 1715, and remaining until his death in 1766.

As a youth, Castiglione learned to paint from Carlo Cornara & Andrea Pozzo, a member of the Society of Jesus at Trento. In 1707, at the age of 19, Castiglione formally entered the Society and traveled to Genoa for further training. By this time, his skill as a painter was recognized, & he was invited to do wall paintings at Jesuit churches. At the age of 27, he received instructions to go to China, completing wall paintings in Jesuit churches in Portugal & Macao along the way.

While in China, Castiglione took the name Lang Shining. In addition to his court duties, he was also in charge of designing the Western-Style Palaces in the imperial gardens of the Old Summer Palace.

He practiced his art & his religion as court painter to 3 Emperors during the last Chinese Quing dynasty for 51 years. He introduced the ideas from his Italian Renaissance training of perspective, anatomical accuracy, and depicting 3 dimensional objects by using light & shade to Chinese art. He also absorbed Chinese artistic techniques into his own works.


Giuseppe Castiglione (1688-1766). 1786 Xushuilou dongmian, east façade of Reservoir.


Giuseppe Castiglione (1688-1766). 1786 Xieqiqu beimian, north façade of Palace of the Delights of Harmony.

Giuseppe Castiglione (1688-1766). 1786 Xianfashanmen zhengmian, façade of gate leading to Hill of Perspective.

Giuseppe Castiglione (1688-1766). 1786 Wanhuazhen huayuan, the Maze.

Giuseppe Castiglione (1688-1766). 1786 Haiyantang dongmian, east façade of Palace of Calm Seas.

Giuseppe Castiglione (1688-1766). 1786 Dashuifa nanmian, Great Waters, south side.
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Jacob Bigelow. American Medical Botany. Boston, 1817.

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The author of American Medical Botany Jacob Bigelow (1787-1879) graduated as a doctor but pursued his interest in botany leading him to publish the first systematic plant survey of the flora indigenous to Boston, in 1814. Along with William Barton's Vegetable Materia Medica, publication of which was almost simultaneous, Bigelow's book was one of the first two American botanical books with colored illustrations. American Medical Botany: being a collection of the native medicinal plants of the United States, containing their botanical history and chemical analysis, and properties and uses in medicine, diet and the arts was published in 6 parts, later bound into 3 volumes, appearing in 1817-1820.

Bigelow taught botany at Harvard University while maintianing his medical practice. He also was the botanist & landscape architect for Mount Auburn Cemetery. Mount Auburn Cemetery was founded in 1831, as "America's first garden cemetery", or the first "rural cemetery", with classical monuments set in a rolling landscaped terrain. The use of this gentle of landscape coincides with the rising popularity of the term cemetery, as opposed to graveyard. Cemetery evolves from the Greek term for "a sleeping place." The 174 acre Massachusetts cemetery is important both for its historical precedents & for its role as an arboretum.


Jacob Bigelow. American Medical Botany. 1817-20. Iris versicolor, Blue flag, or flower de luce


Jacob Bigelow. American Medical Botany. 1817. , Datura stramonium, Thorn apple.



Jacob Bigelow. American Medical Botany. 1817. Apocynum androsaemifolium (dog's bane)


Jacob Bigelow. American Medical Botany. 1817. Datura stramonium (thorn apple)


Jacob Bigelow. American Medical Botany. 1817. Euphorbia ipecacuanha


Jacob Bigelow. American Medical Botany. 1817. Geranium maculatum (common cranesbill)


Jacob Bigelow. American Medical Botany. 1817. Ictodes foetidus (skunk cabbage)


Jacob Bigelow. American Medical Botany. 1817. Illicium foridanum (starry anise)


Jacob Bigelow. American Medical Botany. 1817. Kalmia latifolia (mountain laurel)


Jacob Bigelow. American Medical Botany. 1817. Laurus sassafras (sassafras tree)


Jacob Bigelow. American Medical Botany. 1817. Liriodendron tulipifera (tulip tree)


Jacob Bigelow. American Medical Botany. 1817. Magnolia glauca - small magnolia


Jacob Bigelow. American Medical Botany. 1817. Menyanthes trifoliata (buck bean)


Jacob Bigelow. American Medical Botany. 1817. Nicotina tabacum (tobacco)


Jacob Bigelow. American Medical Botany. 1817. Nymphea odorata - sweet scented water lily


Jacob Bigelow. American Medical Botany. 1817. Rhododendron maximum (american rose bay)


Jacob Bigelow. American Medical Botany. 1817. Rubus villosus (tall blackberry)


Jacob Bigelow. American Medical Botany. 1817. Sanguinaria canadensis (blood root)

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Mid-Atlantic Gardens After the Revolution

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The Republican Garden

In 1789, Jedidiah Morse (1761-1826), noted clergyman & geographer, wrote of one country seat: “Its fine situation. . .the arrangement and variety of forest-trees - the gardens - the artificial fish-ponds. . .discover a refined and judicious taste. Ornament and utility are happily united. It is, indeed, a seat worthy of a Republican Patriot.”

In the early Republic, many gardeners strove for a balance of useful plants & trees & genteel design. On both town & country plots, most Mid-Atlantic gentry, merchants, shopkeepers, & artisans planned gardens that were both practical & ornamental.


Generally, Chesapeake gardeners shared John Adam’s (1735-1826) negative attitude towards the excesses of the natural grounds movement of the English. During his 1784 tour of English gardens with Thomas Jefferson, he announced, "It will be long, I hope, before ridings, parks, pleasure grounds, gardens, and ornamented farms grow so much in fashion in America."

In the same year, George Washington (1732-1799) wrote to the wife of Marquise de Lafayette (1757-1834) encouraging her to accompany her husband on a return visit to the new American republic. "You will see the plain manner in which we live; and meet the rustic civility, and you sahll taste the simplicity of rural life." Until rather recently many garden historians assumed that by the end of the 18th century, few formal gardens with their traditional geometric bed designs remained at the homes of the royals & gentry in Britain.

In the 18th-century Mid-Atlantic, gentry who gardened were aware of the new English natural style & sometimes added serpentine entry roads & paths that meandered through the wooded edges of their grounds, but they overwhelmingly designed their gardens with traditional square beds & approaching avenues of straight trees.

Maryland Gardens, a Balance of Utility & Ornament

Charles Carroll of Annapolis (1702-1782) was one of the wealthiest men in the colonies, but he planted the beds of his terraced gardens at his home in the capitol of Maryland with an eye toward practicality. Orderly squares filled with vegetables surrounded by low privet hedges decorated the flats of Carroll’s falls garden. Painter Charles Wilson Peale reported, “the Garden contains a variety of excellent fruit, and the flats are a kitchen garden.”


Included among the vegetables Carroll grew in the flats of his decorative terraces were early York, battersia, red, & green savoy cabbage; white, purple, & green broccoli; cauliflower; solid & upright celery; green & white endive; green & brown Dutch lettuce; several sorts of beans & peas; round & prickly spinach; prickly, early, & long prickly cucumber; white & silver corn; Spanish onion; salmon radish; mustard; cresses; & marrow.

Gardens at Baltimore Country Seats

Charles Carroll lived in Annapolis, the political hub of Maryland. But as early as 1769, provincial secretary William Eddis wrote of the developing commercial center of Baltimore, "Persons of commercial and enterprising spirit, emigrated from all quarters to this new and promising scene of industry. Wharfs were constructed; elegant and convenient habitations were rapidly erected; marshes were drained; spacious fields were occupied for the purposes of general utility; and within 40 years, of its first commencement (1729), Baltimore became not only the most wealthy and populous town in the province, but inferior to few on this continent, either in size, number of inhabitants, or the advantages arising from a well-conducted and universal commercial connexion..."

Wealthy planters found the harbor of Baltimore a convenient place to dispose of their produce & to buy goods. These tasks employed growing numbers of merchants, agents, shipbuilders, brokers, seamen, shopkeepers & artisans. During the Revolutionary War, unlike Charleston, Savannah, Norfolk, Philadelphia, & New York, all held or blockaded by the enemy, Baltimore's port was usually free of British cruisers.

George Washington wrote of Baltimore in 1783, that it was his "earnest Wish, that the Commerce, the Improvements and universal Prosperity of this flourishing Town my if possible, increase with even more Rapidity than they have hirtherto done." In the same year, General Nathaniel Greene visited Baltimore, & noted in his diary, "a most thriving place. Trade flourishes and the spirit of building exceeds belief. Not less than 300 houses are put up in a year...The inhabitants are men of business."

Post-war German visitor Dr. Johann David Schoepf noted, "Philadelphia excepted, there are nowhere in that country so many merchants gathered together and ready to take up what is offered," especially the backcountry tobacco & grains for export & the foods & goods arriving at the town's wharfs. Merchandise came to Baltimore's importers on consignment or in response to specific orders; and emptied vessels filled with exports, as they left the harbor.

By 1798, more than 70 combination pleasure & kitchen gardens were thriving in & near Baltimore. At the end of the 18th century, Baltimore’s well-to-do merchants often maintained a country house, in addition to their city dwelling, to escape the disease & oppressive heat that seized the port town in the summer months. These country seats were usually only a mile or two from town, allowing a businessman to travel to his office in town as conveniently as possible.

Thanks to the comprehensive 1797 mapping of “Warner and Hanna’s Plan of the city and Environs of Baltimore” we are able to know the layouts of many of Baltimore’s larger country seat gardens. Written descriptions of the gardens drawn on this map closely match the cartographer's depictions. Of the 70 geometric plots dotting the Baltimore hillsides, gardens with four beds, probably planted with fruits & vegetables, were by far the most numerous, more than 35 in number & varied in style.

Terraced Falling Gardens

Because the land around the harbor at Baltimore was hilly as it dropped toward the bay, many builders chose terraced falling gardens for the south side of their homes. Even the terracing of gardens itself served both aesthetic & practical purposes in the colonial Mid-Atlantic.

On uneven hillsides, terraces created flat areas for planting & helped control erosion. In 1772, Charles Carroll of Annapolis wrote to his son, who was improving his gardens which dropped to the bank of Spa Creek, “If you wish to make a continental slope from ye Gate to ye wash house, I apprehend the Quantity of Water in great Rains going ye way may prove convenient.”

The elder Carroll was still fretting about those garden slopes in 1775, as he wrote his son again: “Examine the Gardiner strictly as to...Whether he is an expert at leveling, making grass plots & Bowling Greens, Slopes, & turfing them well.” Carroll was well aware that falls were functional devices which could divert water drainage & reduce soil erosion.

Typical Terraced Falling Garden. Chairback by John & Hugh Findley c 1804. View by Francis Guy 1760-1820. Garden Facade of Mount Deposit. Baltimore Country Seat of David Harris (1752-1809) Baltimore Museum of Art.

Pragmatic Mid-Atlantic landowners often constructed their terraces when the dwelling house was newly built; so that the earth, clay, and rubbish that come out of the cellars & foundations could be used to shape the falls. The same practicality sometimes prompted Mid-Atlantic landowners to build mounds. The products of cellar digging, heaped up into a mound, could be used as the base for another structure, such as a summerhouse or detached library, as well as an elevated site for surveying the surrounding landscape or just a spot for catching cool air on sultry summer days.

Classical Quincunx Garden Beds

Charles Carroll of Annapolis also advised his son to plant the flat beds on his terraces in the classical quincunx style. In 1777, Carroll gave his son privet rather than boxwood to outline his new garden beds & advised him to keep the privet trimmed to a small size, “not to Exceed 12 inches in Width.” Carroll did not want the privet roots to interfere with the smaller vegetables he planned to grow in the beds each season.
Thomas Jefferson’s brother-in-law Henry Skipwith advised a young orchard gardener in 1813, to consult Virgil to learn about a “quincunx, which is nothing more than a square with a tree at each corner and one in the center and thus continued throughout the orchard.” Adopting conservative, classical forms was common in early Chesapeake gardens. Jefferson himself wrote, “I should prefer the adoption of some one of the models of antiquity which have had the approbation of thousands of years.”

Homes of Baltimore Merchants Robert Oliver & John Salmon

Detail. Cartographer Charles Varle. Engraver Francis Shallus. Warner & Hanna's Map, Plan of the City of Baltimore. 1801. 2nd edition. Drawn 1797. (1st edition 1799)

Of the more traditional four-bed gardens near Baltimore, fifteen sat on terraced falls. Typical of these was merchant John Salmon’s home, which perched atop a Baltimore County hill adjoining the country seat of his fellow merchant, Robert Oliver (1757-1834). Oliver was an Irishman from Belfast who arrived in Baltimore in 1783, working there as a merchant until 1819. The neighbors’ homes had mirror-image four-bed terraced gardens descending in the direction of the bay. Also arriving in Baltimore in 1783, Salmon built a two-story home with a balcony & piazza facing south, overlooking his falling gardens. Salmon & Oliver enjoyed smoking "segars" & wagering over cards at each other's homes.

Happy with his view from both his northern entrance facade & from his southern garden facade, Salmon built a second piazza, on the entry façade, facing north. Contemporaries reported that the situation was “admirable,” commanding a view of the town, harbor, & harbor below. An observer reported of Salmon’s 5 acres, “The garden…is laid off in beautiful falls: in it is an excellent cold bath and a milk house through which there runs a constant stream of water.”

With & Without Walls & Fences


Gardens divided into quadrants but not terraced & with few other embellishments appeared at 13 homes. At least one of these kitchen gardens had a stone wall surrounding its four beds.

White fences near homes & gardens. Chairback by John & Hugh Findley c 1804. View by Francis Guy 1760-1820. Entrance Facade of Greenwood. Home of Philip Rogers. (1749-1836) Baltimore.

Most of Baltimore's country seats had fences defining the entrance & garden areas of the property. Fences close to the house were usually painted white.

No visible fence. Chairback by John & Hugh Findley c 1804. View by Francis Guy 1760-1820. The Vineyard. Home of William Gilmor (1775-1829). Baltimore.

Some of the homes dotting the hills above Baltimore's harbor did not have fences exhibiting a more natural grounds approach toward their landscaping.

No visible fence. Chairback by John & Hugh Findley c 1804. View by Francis Guy 1760-1820. Montebello. Home of Samuel Smith (1752-1839) Baltimore.

One home without any visible fencing was Homewood, was constructed between 1801-03 by Charles Carroll, Jr., the son of Charles Carroll of Carrollton, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and one of the richest men in America. In 1800, the elder Carroll, as a wedding present, presented his son with a 130-acre tract, referred to as Homewood Farm, and offered to pay for the construction of a house.

No visible fence. Chairback by John & Hugh Findley c 1804. View by Francis Guy 1760-1820. Homewood. Home of Charles Carroll the Homewood. (1775-1825) Baltimore Museum of Art.

The younger Charles Carroll of Homewood was an alcoholic; and in 1816, his wife returned to her family in Philadelphia, taking their 5 children with her. He lived in the house tossing empty glass spirits bottles out of his window onto the surrounding gardens & grounds, until his death in 1825. The land at Homewood is now the home to The Johns Hopkins University.

No visible fence. Chairback by John & Hugh Findley c 1804. View by Francis Guy 1760-1820. Home of Judge Walter Dorsey (1771-1823) Baltimore.

Gardens of Baltimore Painter & Glazier James Walker

One unusual example of garden design was at the home of painter & glazier James L. Walker, whose four garden beds were not arranged in the typical square. Three long rectangular beds were lined up side by side & a 4th was set perpendicular to them & in front of the house. Walker was an artist.

Walker's shop was in downtown Baltimore, "Market-Street, near the Court-House Baltimore, Sign of the Painting Muse." In 1792, he wrote a broadside advertisement for his business titled Painting in General. Here he announced that he painted coaches; signs; rooms; chimney, fire, & candle screens; landscapes; & floor cloths, as well as sold paints, watercolors, crayons, varnishes, "lacker," & chalk. He also opened a looking glass manufactory which supplied glass for mirrors, pictures, & windows. A receipt from his Baltimore business appears in the correspondence of Robert Carter (1728-1804) now at the Virginia Historical Society.

Detail. Cartographer Charles Varle. Engraver Francis Shallus. Warner & Hanna's Map, Plan of the City of Baltimore. 1801. 2nd edition. Drawn 1797. (1st edition 1799)

Garden of Baltimore Tailor William Hawkins.

Four Baltimore country seats were possessed of a single large rectangular garden plot, which probably served as the traditional kitchen garden. One of them was the home of William Hawkins (1754-1818), which sat on the busy road that ran to Frederick, Maryland. Hawkins was a merchant tailor who was also a preacher in the Baltimore Methodist church movement. He served at the Methodist meeting house at the corner of Light Street & Wine Alley, and was active in Baltimore's 1798 anti-slavery society. He married Frances Cunningham, in 1779, just 6 years after arriving in Baltimore from England, with his brother John who was also a tailor on Fleet Stree in Fells Point.
Detail. Cartographer Charles Varle. Engraver Francis Shallus. Warner & Hanna's Map, Plan of the City of Baltimore. 1801. 2nd edition. Drawn 1797. (1st edition 1799)

Growing fruits & vegetables was considered a practical necessity at country seats, since many of Baltimore’s well-to-do moved to these residences during almost the entire growing season. Nine Baltimore homes had gardens of twin rectangular beds, & 2 of these were terraced, falling toward the harbor.

Garden of Baltimore Court Crier William Bigger.

Two of the remaining homes with double-bed gardens had accompanying avenues of trees leading to the house, like that of court crier William Bigger, or trees lining the road before the house. Only 2 Baltimore gardens consisted of 3 matched rectangular beds & neither was terraced.

Detail. Cartographer Charles Varle. Engraver Francis Shallus. Warner & Hanna's Map, Plan of the City of Baltimore. 1801. 2nd edition. Drawn 1797. (1st edition 1799)

Baltimore Garden Plan for Druid Hill by Nicholas Rogers.

Most of the gardens dotting Baltimore’s hillsides contained no mound, however, & were not terraced although some had avenues of trees leading to the entrance facade. Typical of the simple, flat four-bed garden was the one envisioned by Colonel Nicholas Rogers (1753-1822). As Rogers planned a new home on the lat 1700s, he designed the four-part garden at the back of his house with an eye to both utility an decoration. Order & symmetry dominated Rogers’ plan.

Colonel Nicholas Rogers 1801 Garden Plan for Druid Hill, Baltimore, Maryland. Drawing by Susan Wirth. Plan at the Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore.

Rogers' garden beds were each 80' by 62', separated & surrounded by garden walks 10 feet wide. An additional 10 feet of land bordered the garden walks. Down the exact center of these verges, Rogers planted fruit trees at 20', 22', & 25' intervals. Fruit trees on the property included 25 apple, 20 peach, 10 pear, 6 quince, 5 cherry, & 2 plum. In the middle of each rectangular garden bed sat one fruit tree, & an additional fruit was planted in each corner. This style of placing trees was typical in colonial gardens ad was called a quincunx.

Of the 2 gardens plots closes to Col. Rogers’ Baltimore country seat, one contained a combination of vegetable & melon plants, & the 2nd was dedicated solely to fruit.

The 2 quincunx plots farther from the Roger's house were devoted largely to vegetables. Four additional beds were bordered by 60 currant bushes placed 4' apart in single rows along the center garden walk. In the rear beds, 60 raspberry bushes planted 4' apart in single rows ran along the rear garden walk. Rogers also planted 200 strawberry plants in row 2' apart in the fruit garden.

Planting many fruit-bearing shrubs & trees in the garden occasionally had its downside. In 1720, William Byrd reported that he ate “so many plums” on a walk one evening that he “could not sleep.”

Rogers’ house was 36' wide & sat in the extreme northeast corner of the 210' square that enclosed the 4 gardens plus the 3 utility areas that ran to the back of the property directly behind the house. The meat house & the well signaled the beginning of a 2nd yard, also measuring 36' by 40', that continued without interruption from the first.

Across the garden walk from this second yard, Rogers dedicated a plot measuring 36' by 82' to his servants. Within this area was an 18' by 16' slave quarter. Rogers’ slaves used the remainder of this long rectangular area as their kitchen garden. The kitchen garden for slaves was usually referred to as a “huck patch” during the period. At the end of the salves’ vegetable patch, a 36' by 18' hog pen abutted the rear of the property. A two-seat privy stood along the outside verge of fruit trees that separated the formal garden plots from the servants’ garden.

Rogers planned a utility road to run just outside the 210'-by-210' main grounds on the north side. The road was 12' wide with 10' verges on either sided, and it was also planted with fruit trees at 20', 22', & 25-foot intervals. Just opposite the well house on the utility road side of the main grounds, Rogers build his horse trough, handy to both the well & the road.

Rogers’ private road approaching the entrance facade on the east-facing house was also 12' wide with 12' grass verges lining each side. About 30' directly in front of the entrance sat a circle of grass 56 feet in diameter. The entrance road encircled the grassed area. Two maples were the only plantings within the circle, but matching double rows of trees shaded the approach to the house. According to his written list, Rogers’ ornamental trees included 6 maple, 4 cedar, 2 weeping willow, 1 horse chestnut, 2 catalpa, 2 ash, & 14 locust.

Fruit trees were not the only practical yet attractive trees used in planting. Nut trees & sugar maples offered important benefits. As agricultural enthusiast John Beale Bordley observed, “The maple is a handsome clean tree. A grove of them, two or three acres, would give comfortable shady walks, and sugar for family use.”

Avenues, Alleys, & Rows of Trees

Chairback by John & Hugh Findley c 1804. View by Francis Guy 1760-1820. Woodville. Home of Jeremiah Yellott . 1805. Baltimore Museum of Art.

Along his utility road, Rogers planted practical rows of cherry trees, like those that William Lux had planted nearly 40 years earlier to lead the way to his Baltimore home, Chatsworth. Avenues & alleys of fruit-bearing trees were common in colonial gardens throughout the 18th century. Rows of trees were used to define property lines & to separate one area on the grounds from another.

Row of trees defining property line. Chairback by John & Hugh Findley c 1804. View by Francis Guy 1760-1820. St. Paul's Chairity School. Baltimore.

Many Mid-Atlantic plantations & country seats included avenues of rows of trees well into the last decade of the 18th century, long after such linear plantings were being shunned in England.

Chairback by John & Hugh Findley c 1804. View by Francis Guy 1760-1820. Entrance Facade of Grace Hill Home of Hugh McCurdy from 1790-1805. Baltimore Museum of Art.

During most of the 18th century, homeowners in the colonies & states along the Atlantic planned avenues approaching their plantation houses as wide, straight roadways lined with single or double rows of trees & usually cutting symmetrically through a lawn of grass. Avenues were usually as wide as the house & sometimes wider. They were the entrance used by carriages. Alleys were narrower lanes which usually transversed the gardens.

Grounds of Baltimore Merchant John Philip Henry Christopher Raborg.

Detail. Cartographer Charles Varle. Engraver Francis Shallus. Warner & Hanna's Map, Plan of the City of Baltimore. 1801. 2nd edition. Drawn 1797. (1st edition 1799)


The grounds surrounding the country seat of John Philip Henry Christopher Raborg (1750-1815), a copper merchant, who arrived in Baltimore during the Revolution. At the age of 3, he had sailed Philadelphia with his parents from Hanover, Germany. His family moved to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where he served an apprenticeship, and married Catherine Barbara d'Ormond; before moving to Baltimore, where he opened his own foundry on Water Street. He made the cooper acorn ornaments on the State House in Annapolis, and served in the Revolutionary War.

Raborg's garden boasted a dramatic straight avenue of evenly spaced trees leading to a simple dwelling on a property with no other formal gardens or ornamentation. Apparently Raborg bought most of his produce at one of the Baltimore farmer's markets.

Baltimore Garden of Thomas Yates.

Detail. Cartographer Charles Varle. Engraver Francis Shallus. Warner & Hanna's Map, Plan of the City of Baltimore. 1801. 2nd edition. Drawn 1797. (1st edition 1799)

At most large Mid-Atlantic country seats of the period, however, avenues & alleys of trees were only one component of more complicated garden plans, such as those at Major Thomas Yates’s (1740/41-1815) house in Baltimore. Yates was born in England, arriving in Maryland in 1774. He married Mary Myers in 1778, while he was serving as an officer in the Revolutionary War. He was a linen draper, and then he became "the auctioneer for Baltimore Town" during the 1780s. In 1790, he took on a partner in the post, Archibald Campbell. His 1st wife died in 1796, & his only son died in 1810. He remarried in 1799, Mrs. Mary Atkinson, but she died 3 years later.

Practical Squares of Flowers, Fruits, & Vegetables.

Garden planners continued to define garden spaces by outlining individual beds & squares with borders, often of fruit trees & bushes. The garden of Charles Norris in Philadelphia was, “laid out in square parterres & beds, regularly intersected by graveled and grass walks and alleys…with…rose intermixed with currant bushes, around its borders.” Near the end of the century, flowers were once again popular. In 1800, Philadelphian Henry Pratt’s garden was composed of 20 squares each with a 3-foot-wide border, “the border of every square…decorated with pinks and a thousand other flowers.”

Shopkeepers & artisans stuck with practical plants, often using vegetables in their borders. In Williamsburg in 1786, Joseph Prentiss “Sowed Lettuce Seed, on Border on left Hand under small Paling in the large Garden….Sowed Lettuce on small Border under Yard Pales.” In Annapolis in March of 1792, William Faris “Sowed a border next the Dining Room with Radish & Large Winter Cabbage.” And he planted sage around his ornamental statue.

Ornamental But Practical Grounds with Outbuildings & Yards.

Because the majority of country seats were nearly self-sufficient units, the grounds usually contained several practical auxiliary buildings & work yard areas in addition to the main house & its geometric ornamental & utilitarian gardens. The majority had a springhouse, a milk house, a smokehouse, & a stable. Many of the grounds also contained barns, sheep houses, cow houses, pigsties, icehouses, washhouses, root cellars, poultry houses, & summer kitchens; & a few had greenhouses, stovehouses, chaise houses, & bathhouses as well.

The Ridgely Family Garden & Grounds at Hampton in Baltimore County.

North of Baltimore, at Hampton, Charles Carnan Ridgely wanted his grounds to be a showplace but also planned the grounds of his newly inherited estate (from Charles Ridgely 1729-1790) to be self-contained, in order to support the day-to-day activities of his family & numerous workers.

At present-day Hampton, a national historical site, a curved approach to the entrance facade winds through level turfed ground, but Ridgely laid out the majority of Hampton’s gardens in a terraced design. Even the entrance facade probably had an avenue of trees, when the mansion was initially built. At the mansion’s garden façade, a turfed area 250 by 150 feet (alternately called the bowling green, the treat terrace, or the south lawn) crowned three additional terraced falls, connected by grass ramps, looking down toward Baltimore, ten miles to the south.

At Hampton & in most Maryland falls gardens, landowners chose to build simple turfed ramps, in place of the stairways familiar in European terraced gardens as well as in a few earlier Virginia falling gardens. Ridgely planned the Hampton’s first garden terrace to come 18 ' below the bowling green; the second dropped a further 6 '; & the third was 4 ' lower than the second. A grass walkway bisected the formal falling garden lengthwise from just below the bowling green to the kitchen garden at the base of their turfed terraces. Many Chesapeake gardeners planted fenced or walled kitchen gardens at the base of their ornamental terraces.

Hampton’s springhouse was similar to others dotting Baltimore’s hillsides. Springhouses, & the cold baths that sometimes accompanied them, needed a constant supply of cool water; the temperature of spring water at its source is normally in the mid-fifties Fahrenheit in the Mid-Atlantic. The cool water would circulate in channels beneath the brick or stone floor level of the well-ventilated building. Often there was little dry floor area, but the largest portion of area was devoted to the spring water channels, in which crocks were placed to cool. At Hampton’s springhouse, the fresh water spring emerged from under a decorative Gothic stone arch, circulated through the container channels, & left through an outlet purposefully made small, to discourage entry by unwanted animals.

The Falling Terraced Gardens at Hampton, Baltimore County, Maryland.

A second practical structure on Hampton’s grounds was the icehouse, located on the north side of the mansion. This particular icehouse was, however, more elaborate than most. Hampton’s ice vault was a turf-covered mound with a domed brick ceiling, fieldstone walls, & an underground vaulted passageway. The central cylindrical chamber was almost 34' deep. Ice, cut from nearby ponds in the winter, was packed in straw & stored for use during the heat of summer. Mid-Atlantic milk houses usually had a nearly supply of ice, which was used to harden butter as it was taken from the churn & worked on a slab of cold marble inside the milk house.

Rosalie Stier Calvert's Maryland Gardens at Riversdale.

As the 19th-century dawned, some Mid-Atlantic garden designers familiar with the natural grounds movement advocated the addition of artificial lakes. One of these was Rosalie Stier Calvert of Riversdale in Prince George’s County, Maryland, who pointed out that her beautiful ornamental lake supplied ice for food preparation & fish for the table.

On December 10, 1808, she described in to her brother: “A lake just finished which looks like a large river before the house on the southern side gives a very beautiful effect, and furnishes us at the same time with fish and ice for our ice house.” She had fled to Maryland from Europe with her wealthy parents in the 1790s, had lived at the terraced Strawberry Hill plantation near Annapolis as a child & later at the Paca House. Rosalie Stier married George Calvert, the son of a governor of the state. She designed he gardens & grounds at their estate with the help of her father in Belgium & a variety of professionals.

Although the privileged Rosalie Calvert was concerned with balancing beauty & utility; she carried it to an aristocratic extreme. In the carefully landscaped grounds on one side of her house were some of the plantation’s slave cabins, which she designed to look like small rustic huts, complete with quaint thatched roofs. She even styled one slave cabin like a small temple with classical columns.

Adrian Valeck's Gardens & Grounds at Baltimore's Harlem.

A superb example of balancing utility & beauty was the Baltimore estate of Adrian Valeck, a merchant from Holland who arrived shortly after the Revolutionary War & was named Dutch consul in 1784. Contemporary observers described his 31-acre property, called Harlem, as “a large garden in the highest state of cultivation, laid out in…walks and squares bordered with espaliers…the greatest variety of fruit trees…from the best nurseries in this country and Europe...a grove and shrubbery of bosquet planted with…the finest forest trees, odoriferous & other flowering shrubs.”

Detail. Cartographer Charles Varle. Engraver Francis Shallus. Warner & Hanna's Map, Plan of the City of Baltimore. 1801. 2nd edition. Drawn 1797. (1st edition 1799)

These accounts of Harlem also mention a fenced kitchen garden, a greenhouse, two hotbeds with twelve moveable frames, and on an eminence a pavilion, under which was “a well-constructed ice vault.” The main house, a gardener’s house, & stable for 7 horses & 12 cows were all of brick, the stable & carriage house of frame construction. A dairy “laid in marble” & a “pidgeon” house completed the property.

Adrian Valeck's Baltimore Country Seat, Harlem, painted by Nicolino Calyo in 1834. Winterthur Museum, Delaware.

An expensive brick wall surrounded the garden at Harlem, signaling that Valeck was a man of means & also serving a practical purpose. His gardener espaliered fruit trees along the brick wall, which absorbed the sun’s heat & brought Valeck’s fruit to ripeness weeks earlier than his neighbors’ fruit on unprotected trees standing exposed to the whims of the elements. Colonials often called espaliered fruit trees & shrubs “wall fruit.”

Robert Gilmor's Natural Grounds at Beech Hill in Baltimore.

Detail. Cartographer Charles Varle. Engraver Francis Shallus. Warner & Hanna's Map, Plan of the City of Baltimore. 1801. 2nd edition. Drawn 1797. (1st edition 1799)

Baltimore did boast a few exceptions to the traditional ordered garden. Beech Hill, built by Colonel John Dorsey about 1770 & purchased by Scots merchant Robert Gilmor (1748-1822) in 1797, was laid out with apparently carefully planned natural grounds. There were no terraces, even though the property sat high above the bay with a spectacular view that was celebrated in paintings for decades.

Francis Guy (1760-1820). View of the Bay from Near Mr. Gilmor's. (From Beech Hill Down to the Baltimore Harbor.) 1804. Maryland Historical Society.

The land around Beech Hill contained an S-shaped driveway lined with rather evenly spaced trees but no accompanying rectangular beds or parterres were in evidence on the grounds.

Chairback by John & Hugh Findley c 1804. View by Francis Guy 1760-1820. Beech Hill. Home of Robert Gilmor (1748-1822). Baltimore Museum of Art.

Many European travelers remarked that the groves, clumps, copses, & bosques so carefully cultivated in their countries, were more easily assembled in the colonies. “In order to have a fine garden, you have nothing to do but to let the trees remain standing here & there, or in clumps, to plant bushes in front of then, & arrange the trees according to their height.” In England, the natural grounds movement owed part of its popularity to the fact that timber was getting scarce in the countryside. The British gentry planted their “natural grounds” with trees they needed to grow.

Two of the most ambitious traditional four-part terraced gardens were built near Baltimore, after the Revolution. They belonged to George Grundy (1755-1825), a merchant, & Solomon Birckhead (1761-1836), a physician, whose home was called Mount Royal.

Solomon Birckhead’s Gardens at Mount Royal in Baltimore.

Here traditional gardens had geometric designs within its squares. The garden fell in the direction of the bay from Birckhead’s two-story stone dwelling, which measured 54' by 31' & had a two-story 31' by 18' addition. The 101-acre grounds a Mount Royal also contained an unusual one-story round milk house measuring 10 ' in diameter, a frame smokehouse 12' by 12 ', two barns of two stories, one stone & one frame, both measuring 46' by 24 ', & a two-story stone mill 51' by 41 '. The house & its geometric gardens were built around 1792.

George Grundy's Bolton in Baltimore

Chairback by John & Hugh Findley c 1804. View by Francis Guy 1760-1820. From the North the Entrance Facade of an early Bolton. Home of George Grundy (1775-1825) Baltimore.

A short distance from Mount Royal sat Bolton, which George Grundy built immediately after he acquired the 30-acre property in 1793. In addition to a 65-by-37-' two-story brick home, he constructed a barn, two coach houses, a wash house, a smokehouse, & an icehouse, with orchards of fine peach, apple, & cherry trees. Near a spring of pure water & beside the enclosed kitchen garden area sitting at the base of his falling turfed terraced, Grundy build a comfortable two-story frame dwelling for a gardener.

Detail. Cartographer Charles Varle. Engraver Francis Shallus. Warner & Hanna's Map, Plan of the City of Baltimore. 1801. 2nd edition. Drawn 1797. (1st edition 1799) (5)

Grundy planned his garden at Bolton to consist of three individually fenced rectangular turfed falls dropping south toward the harbor. These terraces were more that three times the width of the house, & initially the lowest rectangular terrace was planted in rows to serve as a kitchen garden. Gravel walks defined each terraced division, & a walkway ran from the house bisecting each terrace.

Francis Guy (1760-1820). Bolton From the South Garden Facade. 1800 Maryland Historical Society. Baltimore. Detail from the road down to the Baltimore harbor.

At the turn of the century, Grundy altered the lower garden to a semicircular bed surrounded by a white picket fence that projected from the fencing enclosing the rectangular terrace just above it. In the center of this semicircle was a large flowering tree or group of shrubs surrounded by a circular walkway. Outside of this walkway & within the picket fence were rectangular beds now planted with flowers instead of vegetables & herbs.

Francis Guy (1760-1820). Detail of Bolton From the South Garden Facade. 1800 Maryland Historical Society. Baltimore.

The large flowering tree or group of shrubs in the middle of the lowest flat at Bolton may have been a living bower or arbor. Colonial Americans had for decades planted trees, shrubs, flowering beans & vines for cooling shade. A visitor reported in 1679, “We had nowhere seen so many vines together as we saw here, which had been planted for the purpose of shading the walks on the river side.” In 1787, at Grey’s Gardens near Philadelphia, Manasseh Cutler reported, “At every end, side, and corner, there were summer-houses, arbors covered with vines or flowers or shady bowers encircled with trees and flowering shrubs.”

Francis Guy (1760-1820). Bolton From the South Garden Facade. 1800 Maryland Historical Society. Baltimore. Detail Vegetable Garden at the bottom of the falling terraces.

It is possible that the unusual large circle of shrubs or trees in the midst of Bolton’s garden may have been similar to the one in Salem, North Carolina, where a visitor wrote, “into the garden…we saw…a curiosity…extremely beautiful. It was a large summer house formed of eight cedar trees planted in a circle, the tops whilst young were chained together in the center forming a cone. The immense branches were all cut, so that there was not a leaf, the outside is beautifully trimmed perfectly even & very thick within, were seats placed around and doors or openings were cut, through the branches, it had been planted 40 years.”

Francis Guy (1760-1820). Bolton From the South Garden Facade. 1800 Maryland Historical Society. Baltimore. Detail Lower Garden with the unusual arbor in the center, surrounded by flowering beds.

At Bolton, Grundy planted the approach from the north with evenly spaced tall cedars along the wooden fence bordering the property. An elaborate white picket gate opened from the public road onto Grundy’s private driveway, which let to a second wooden gate, situated directly opposite the central door of the house on the north entrance façade.

Francis Guy (1760-1820). Imporved Entrance Facade of Bolton.

The house on this side was totally surrounded by a rectangle of white picket fencing. The driveway within the closest fenced area was a semicircle, with no deliberate plantings, either naturalistic or symmetrical. Bolton was a prime example of a traditional Chesapeake post Revolutioary War garden.

John Carriere's Libourne in Baltimore

Detail. Cartographer Charles Varle. Engraver Francis Shallus. Warner & Hanna's Map, Plan of the City of Baltimore. 1801. 2nd edition. Drawn 1797. (1st edition 1799)

But Baltimore also had nontraditional gardens, such as the curious garden of five distinct rectangles owned by a French merchant John Carriere (1768-1837). This country seat was unusual not only for he number of garden beds it boasted, but also because the house, an elegant structure named Libourne, sat in the middle of the largest of the beds, where it was intimately surrounded by the glory of its garden.

Paul Charles Gabriel de Ghequiere's Formal Gardens in Baltimore

Several Baltimore homes sat perched above six-bed terraced gardens. One of he most sophisticated was built by Paul Charles Gabriel de Ghequiere (1754-1818), a grain merchant who designed his home & gardens upon arriving in Baltimore in 1782, from Courtney, France. Ghequiere chose an avenue of tall lombardy poplars standing like soldiers at attention along the path to the entrance façade.

Detail. Cartographer Charles Varle. Engraver Francis Shallus. Warner & Hanna's Map, Plan of the City of Baltimore. 1801. 2nd edition. Drawn 1797. (1st edition 1799)

The intentionally ordered approach demanded respect for the owner. He built a wide gravel walk that divided the front yard. Rectangular beds, outlined by whit picket fencing, bordered the walkway to the brick house, which measured 50' by 24'. He planned that the doorway on the back of the house would open onto a garden of six geometrically planted beds surrounding a fountain or water bason. Ghequeire’s country seat contained 56 acres & boasted a fine view across Baltimore to the harbor.

John Eager Howard's Belvedere at Baltimore

The nearby home of Colonel (later Governor) John Eager Howard (1752-1827), called Belvedere, contained a geometric garden area whose design matched Ghequiere’s & boasted a spectacular view down to the harbor. Howard erected Belvedere between 1783 & 1786.

Chairback by John & Hugh Findley c 1804. View by Francis Guy 1760-1820. Entrance Facade of Belvedere. Home of John Eager Howard. (1752-1827) Baltimore.

The large hipped-roof mansion was noted for its magnificent gardens & for statues, which dotted the grounds just as at the papal Belvedere, where Julius II displayed his collections of statues during the Italian Renaissance. The Papal Belvedere had served for centuries as a focal point for the sculptures of the ancients. There were alcoves boasting Apollo, Venus, Cleopatra, Hercules, and the river gods Nile & Tiber. Fountains danced among the lifeless figures surrounded by the sweet aromas of green gardens.
Detail. Cartographer Charles Varle. Engraver Francis Shallus. Warner & Hanna's Map, Plan of the City of Baltimore. 1801. 2nd edition. Drawn 1797. (1st edition 1799)

Governor Howard’s garden in Baltimore was remarkable for more than its statuary. Howard planned hat the garden facade of Belvedere would contain a large porch, running the full length of the center block, which had a projecting two-story bay in the center. Howard enjoyed entertaining visitors for breakfast on this porch, overlooking the terraced formal gardens & the natural area of shrubs & trees that fell south toward the harbor. The entrance side of the house, on the north, faced a totally natural setting.

View of Baltimore from the Howard Park at Belvedere. 1796 George Beck Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore.

A French visitor to Baltimore remarked on “a hill owned by Colonel Howard that dominates the town to the north. The mansion & its dependencies occupy the forward part while a park embellishes the rear. The elevated situation, the mass of trees, an appearance that evokes despite itself European ideas.” Apparently Belvedere owed more to its natural surroundings than it did to its large & elaborate gardens & impressive classical statuary.

Belvedere, Home of John Eager Howard, Baltimore, Maryland, 1786-1794, painting by Augustus Weidenbach c 1858.

Classical Statues in Republican Gardens.

Some gardeners emphasized the ancient republican aspects of their gardens with statues. They might set statues in the midst of a natural open green leading to the house, or in pairs on either side of the entrance gate. Others chose the seventeenth-century style of placing statues in the middle of a turfed garden square. In 1791 a visitor to the garden of Joseph Barrell, a Boston merchant reported seeing, “a young grove…in the middle of which is a pond, decorated with four ships at anchor, and a marble figure in the centre…The Squares are decorated with Marble figures as large as life.”

Garden statues produced by American & European artists were widely available by the last decade of the 18th century. In Philadelphia, a 1796 ad read: “To be sold…Six elegant carved figures, the manufacture of an artist in this country, & made from materials of clay dug near the city, they are used for ornaments for gardens…they are well burned and will stand any weather without being injured…they represent Mars, and Minerva, Paris and Helen, A Male and Female Gardner.” Even non-gentry, like Annapolis craftsman William Faris, might have a statue in their 1790s garden.

A grove of trees in early America was a small woods or large cluster of trees, usually occurring naturally & intentionally left in the landscape or occasionally purposefully planted in the pleasure grounds around a dwelling. Often a grove consisted of large trees whose trimmed branches shaded the ground below. Groves also produced food for songbirds & served as settings for obelisks or statues meant to inspire the garden visitor. Abigail Adams wrote that Andrew & James Hamilton’s Bush Hill had “a beautiful grove behind the house, through which there is a spacious gravel walk, guarded by a number of marble statues, whose genealogy I have not yet studied.”

By the 1790s, Chesapeake gentry were coming up with ingenious places for their statues. If statues were meant to stand in groves of lofty trees, then why not be practical & put them in orchards, where the trees have some utility as well. And that’s just what Margaret Baker Briscoe (1745-1814) & her husband Gerard Briscoe (1732-1801) did in their orchard at Clover Dale in Frederick County, Maryland. In a 1799 portrait, Charles Peale Polk depicts Mrs. Briscoe proudly seated before a view of her orchard, in which each long row of trees is guarded by a full-sized statue perched on a marble pedestal.

John Donnell's Grounds at Willow Brook in Baltimore.

Near the end of the 18th century, John Donnell (1752-1827) began the construction of his Baltimore gardens & pleasure grounds called Willow Brook. Like many other Baltimore estates, the entrance to the 26-acre country seat followed a traditional design, planted with avenues of trees & outlined with rectangular white picket fence. But adorning the entrance facade of the house were four statues sitting on classical pedestals.

Contemporary observers reported that the property was “divided and laid off into grass lots, orchards, garden…with the greatest variety of the choicest fruit frees, shrubs, flowers…collected from the best nurseries in America and from Europe…with vegetables of all kinds…In the garden is a neat wooden house…a gardener’s house, ash house, spring house, stable and carriage house, a fish pond well stocked with fish, and an elegant bath with two dressing rooms, bath and spring house.”

Statues placed across the front of the home. Chairback by John & Hugh Findley c 1804. View by Francis Guy 1760-1820. Willow Brook. Home of John Donnell (1754-1827). Baltimore Museum of Art.

Statues from Europe poured into American market. European artists were even making likenesses of American heroes for export. A New York newspaper reported on a local public garden that had “lately imported from Europe…nineteen statues…Socrates, Cicero, Cleopatra, Shakespeare, Milton…the illustrious and immortal Washington…and miscellaneous figures from Greek mythology.” By 1805, Vauxhall Gardens in New York City had, “procured from Europe a choice selection of Statues and Busts,…Washington, Cicero, Ajax, Antonious (in two poses, Hannibal, the Belvidere Apollo (in four sizes), Venus, Hebe (in two poses), Hamilton, Demostenes, Plenty, Hercules, Time, Ceres, Security, Modesty, Addison, Cleopatra (in two poses), Niobe, Pompey (in two poses), Pope, The Medici Apollo, and Thalia.”

William Gibson's Garden at Rose Hill in Baltimore.

Chairback by John & Hugh Findley c 1804. View by Francis Guy 1760-1820. Rose Hill. Home of William Gibson (1735-1832) Baltimore Lanvale Street at Eutaw Place.

The second eight-bed garden graced the home of William Gibson (1753-1832), the Baltimore County Clerk, who built Rose Hill in the early 1790s. Rose Hill’s formal gardens were falling terraces consisting of four squares divided diagonally by walkways, creating eight triangles. A fountain or water bason sat in the middle of the formal gardens, & the walkways radiated from it like rays.

Detail. Cartographer Charles Varle. Engraver Francis Shallus. Warner & Hanna's Map, Plan of the City of Baltimore. 1801. 2nd edition. Drawn 1797. (1st edition 1799)

Gardens & Grounds at David Harris' Mount Deposit in Baltimore.

Francis Guy (1760-1820). Entrance Facade of Mount Deposit. 1805 Maryland Historical Society.

A country seat probably more remarkable for its name than its falling gardens was Mount Deposit. This home was situated on about 260 acres acquired by David Harris (1752-1809), who built the house & gardens between 1791 & 1793. Harris was the cashier of the Office of Discount & Deposit, a leading banking institution in Baltimore, after which he apparently named his estate.

The county seat was described by contemporaries as, “a large and elegant dwelling, containing ten rooms, besides kitchen and garrets, with extensive porticoes; a large barn, stables and granary, coach house, ice house and smoke house, two orchards of fruit and a well cultivated garden.” The approach to the entrance façade of Mount Deposit from the north allowed the visitor to look past the house towards Fells Point on the harbor.

Francis Guy (1760-1820). Detail Entrance Facade of Mount Deposit. 1805.

This side of the home was defined by a white picket fence that ran the width & twice the depth of the house & enclosed the land immediately in front of the dwelling. Ordered plantings of trees dotted the traditional, rectangular fenced courtyard area.

Francis Guy (1760-1820). Garden Facade of Mount Deposit. 1805.

Exiting the home on the garden side, a visitor would find three terraced falls deliberately carved our of the rather steep existing slope. The falls were wider than the house itself, planted with grass & shrubs but no flowers, enclosed by a white picket fence, & divided down the middle by a walk leading from the central door of the house & intersected by crosswalks.

Charles Francois Adrien Le Parlmier d'Annemours' Belmont at Baltimore

Northeast of Mount Deposit sat a more intricate & formal garden of four squares internally divided with circles & triangles & surrounded by a row of fruit trees on one side & a grove of trees on the other. This country seat, named Belmont, was built around 1778 by Charles Francois Adrien Le Parlmier d’Annemours (1742-1809), who was the French consul General to Maryland & Virginia until 1792. In that year he built “an obelisk to honour the memory of…Christopher Columbus…in a grove in one of the gardens…on the 3rd of August, 1792, the anniversary of the sailing of Columbus from Spain.”

When the Baltimore estate of French Consul General d’Annemours was sold in 1800, it was not the elegant obelisk honoring Christopher Columbus that sold the property. The estate was described as “beautifully situated” with “a handsome grove of lofty oaks and an extensive kitchen garden and orchard well stocked with fruit of the best and choicest kind.” The practicality of the garden was the attraction. The estate was sold to Archibald Campbell.

Detail. Cartographer Charles Varle. Engraver Francis Shallus. Warner & Hanna's Map, Plan of the City of Baltimore. 1801. 2nd edition. Drawn 1797. (1st edition 1799)

Clearly, in the early American Republic, ornament was consistently counter-balanced by usefulness. In early America, if you needed a grove of trees as a setting for a statue, you planted sugar maples. If you needed a border for garden beds, you mixed currant bushes with the roses. If you needed a row of trees to define the road to the house, you chose cherry trees over poplars. There was an implicit moral sanction keeping garden design from tipping too far toward the purely ornamental.

When an English visitor wrote of one Maryland plantation, he observed, “the adjacent grounds are so judiciously disposed that utility and taste are everywhere.” These were the pretty & practical gardens of conservative new republicans.

From Frivolous Flowers to Simple Grass Plats

During & immediately after the Revolution, a few gardeners began banishing flowers in favor of turf. Philadelphian Elizabeth Drinker wrote in her diary, “flower roots…were dug out of ye beds on ye south side of our garden--as my husband intends making grass-plots and planting trees.”

During this period, plain grass flats often defined the terraces of the gentry. During the same period, however, a flood of newly arrived professional seed merchants were enticing the growing gardening public to plant curious bulbs & roots imported from Europe. This flurry of marketing paid off, and the style that caught on. By the 1790s, specimen gardens & flowers once again flourished in the Chesapeake.

Horticultural Status Seekers with Leisure Time & A Bit of Cash

By the turn of the century, the popularity of intricate flower beds once again soared. Flowers remained a garden favorite, but gardeners in the tended to segregated flowers by type rather than integrating them into a complicated design. Diarist Anne Grant reported that, in the gardens she saw before the Revolution, flowers “not seen in ‘curious knots’, were ranged in beds, the varieties of each kind by themselves.”

Botany & new classification systems for plants also caused a surge in collecting plants. In 1789, William Hamilton instructed the gardeners at his Philadelphia estate, Woodlands, to plant “exotic bulbous roots…at six or eight Inches from each other…taking care to preserve the distinctions of the sorts.”

In 1805, Rosalie Steir Calvert (1778–1821) wrote to her father from Riversdale in Prince George's County, Maryland, "The fancy for flowers of all kinds is really increasing; everyone takes an interest, and it is a great honor to have the most beautiful.” The next spring, she was “curious to know if it is becoming fashionable in your country to become horticulturalists. Here we occupy ourselves with that more every day and are getting much better.” Her father sent tulip bulbs in late 1807, and Rosalie Calvert wrote back, “now I will have the most beautiful collection in America, and I assure you my reputation is already quite exalted.”

A new cycle in American pleasure gardening had begun.
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Gardeners in South Carolina

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Gardeners in South Carolina produced gardens not just for their necessity but also for the pleasure of their beauty and fragrance almost from the conception of the province.


As early as 1682, twelve years after the settling of the Province and only two years after the establishment of Charleston in its present location, Thomas Ash wrote in his Carolina, or a Description of the Present State of That Country that “now their Gardens begin to be supplied with such European Plants and Herbs as are necessary for the kitchen, viz. Potatoes, Lettice, Colesworts, Parsnip, Turnip, Carrot and Reddish…Their Gardens also begin to be beautified and adorned with such Herbs and Flowers which to the Smell or Eye are pleasing and agreeable, viz. the Rose, Tulip, Carnation and Lilly, &c.”

In South Carolina, landowners used apprenticed & indentured white servants, free & slave blacks, & professional gardeners to plan and maintain the gardens on their plantations and town dwellings. Occasionally, family members also assisted in planting and maintaining the gardens and grounds. At the homes of the gentry, the family seldom helped with garden tasks, except that the wives usually managed the daily activities of the kitchen garden, as well as the house staff. In South Carolina, slaves carried the largest burden for planting and maintaining of both ornamental and kitchen gardens.


1697
The first professional gardener on record in South Carolina was a Frenchman. Mathurin Guerin was a French Huguenot who took refuge in the province and requested to be naturalized as an English citizen under the act passed on March 10, 1697, designed to grant to all aliens that were inhabitants of the Province of South Carolina the same privileges as those persons born of English parents. Mathurin Guerin was a native of St. Nazaire, son of Pierre Guerin, and of Jeanne Bilbau. His wife was Marie Nicholas, daughter of Audre Nicholas and Francoise Dunot.

While Guerin may have been the first French Huguenot gardener in South Carolina, he certainly was not the last. French gardeners and seedsmen arrived in the Mid-Atlantic and upper south after the Revolutionary War. But in South Carolina, French gardeners influenced the gardening from the beginning of the 18th century. South Carolina saw a large influx of French Huguenots – individuals who were probably familiar with the garden designs of Le Nôtre. Garden designs in South Carolina continued to have a formal aspect well into the 19th century.

1719
Many more independent white gardeners appear in South Carolina records earlier than in the northern colonies. While most independent gardeners in the Mid-Atlantic and upper south worked in public gardens, fewer independent gardeners appear in the records at private properties in early Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia during the first half of the 18th century.

South Carolina’s next gardener of record was Bartholomew Garret who was dead in 1719, when his widow Elizabeth (Major), originally of London, declared her “love and affection” for Thomas Hayward of Charleston.


1734
Independent professional architect and draftsman Peter Chassereau, newly came from London, advertised in the Charleston newspaper in January, 1734. "Mr . Peter Chassereau, newly come from London, surveys Lands, and makes near Maps thereof, draws Plans and Elevations of all kind of Buildings whatsoever, both civil and Military, likewise perspective Views or prospects of Towns or Gentlemens Houses or Plantations, he calculates Estimates for Buildings or Repairs, inspects and measures Artificers Works, sets out ground for Gardens or Parks, in a grand and rural manner, and takes Level ; young Gentlemen and Ladys will be attended at their own Houses to be taught Drawing ." He may have been visiting relatives in South Carolina. He would return to York, England and execute plans of towns, country houses, & gardens there.

1736
Even though independent gardeners appeared in the province looking for work in the early 1730s, apparently there were not enough to meet the demand. In July, 1736, Robert Hume, a Charleston attorney, advertised in the South Carolina Gazette for an overseer “that understands Gardening to live at his Plantation near Charlestown.”

Robert Hume had been born in London and married Sophia Wiggington (1702-1774) in 1721, at St. Phillip's Church in Charleston. In 1726, Hume had bought 174 acres of Magnolia Umbra, north of "Exmouth lying East of the Broad Path," to which he added 110 acres; and the property became his residence and country seat. Robert died just a year after looking for an independent gardener for his property in Goose Creek Parish.

1738
In South Carolina, just as in more northern colonies, landowners commonly rented the unused time of their white indentured gardeners to others. The practice of renting out servants & slaves with special skills allowed those who could not afford to buy their indenture or the slave to have an opportunity to use their expertise in the planning & installation of their gardens or to undertake special projects without a large capital outlay.

In May 1738, Sarah Blakeway advertised in the South Carolina Gazette that she had a gardener to hire out. Blakeway was apparently a planter of some importance in her own right. She often advertised in the newspaper for slaves to hire out, houses for rent, Indian corn and land for sale. In 1741, she announced her intention to leave the province selling her land, slaves, piano, mahogany chairs, beds, and books.


1740s
In the 1740s, several runaway notices mentioned gardeners, both enslaved and serving under an indenture. RUN away, an old Negro Man...is a Gardener (South Carolina Gazette, May 26, 1746). Run away... a servant man... a Gardener by trade (South Carolina Gazette, January 8, 1750).

1752
In several notices in the South Carolina Gazette during November 1752, John Barnes advertised “This is to give Notice, to such Gentlemen and others, as have a taste in pleasure and kitchen gardens, that they may depend on having them laid out, leveled, and drained, in the most compleat manner, and politest taste, by the subscriber; who perfectly understands the contriving of all kinds of new works, and erecting wa(ter) works, &c. as fountains, cascades, grottos, &c. Planting)) vineyards and making of wines. As his stay in the province) will be but short (if he does not meet with sufficient en(cou)ragement) he desires those who ware inclined to employ (him) will signify their pleasures as early as possible to him, at Thomas Doughty’s, and they shall be wafted on by JOHN BARNES, Garden Archite(ct). He continued to advertise in Charleston as a garden architect through 1764.

1757
In the South Carolina Gazette of May 12, 1757, Henry Middleton placed a notice to settle the estate of his deceased gardener, George Newman.

1755-1789
John Watson was an immigrant gardener from England who advertised in the June 12, 1755 South Carolina Gazette, “JUST come from England, a Man that is a good gardener. Any gentleman that has occasion for one, or any planter that would employ him as an overseer, may hear of him by enquiring of the Printer.”

Watson was to become a long-lasting figure in the South Carolina gardening scene. He imported plants and gardening tools for sale. He was still advertising in the Gazette of December 10, 1763, “GARDENING in all its various branches will be done by him, either by the day or year.” He placed a similar ad in the same paper on September 16, 1765, and on February and November 10, 1766.

On April 27, 1767, he placed a notice in the Gazette of his moving. ‘THE Subscriber returns his most hearty thanks to all his friends who have been pleased to favour him with their custom, and hopes for a continuance thereof, and begs leave to acquaint them that he has removed to the hose known by the name of the Brew House, where he still continues gardening, selling of seeds, tools, fruit-trees, American plants, etc. as formerly.”

Watson was Henry Lauren’s gardener among others. He was the son of James and Jan Watson. Watson’s wife Catherine was buried in St. Phillip’s Parish on June 8, 1782, and he died, in the spring of 1789.

His sons James Mark and John carried on his nursery business until 1802, when John left South Carolina for health reasons. The Charleston Times ran the following notice on April 30, 1802. “The Subscriber BEING obliged to leave the country on account of his bad state of health, offers his handsome retreat for sale-There is on the premises a small Dwelling House, Stable and Fowl House, known to be a part of the Watson’s Gardens. Lot No. 3; in the vicinity of Hampstead. It is well worth the attention of any gentleman wishing a situation of the kind, as there is not for miles equal to it; the land is in the highest state of cultivation, both with vegetables and as complete a Nursery as Carolina can produce. He likewise offers his valuable NEGRO FELLOW, complete gardener and understands perfectly the management of raising, grafting, budding, and pruning of trees-it is unnecessary to mention any particulars about him, as he is well known in this city, JOHN WATSON.”

1753
When the elder Watson had arrived in South Carolina in the middle of the 18th century, much gardening work was being carried on the slave artisans. Caesar was the slave gardener of Joseph Wragg who died in Charleston County in 1753. Caesar was valued at 400 pounds, when his ownership transferred to Elizabeth Manigault, wife of Peter Manigault. Quash was the slave gardener of Joseph Wragg as well. He was valued at 120 pounds, and his ownership fell to Charlotte Wragg.

1765
During this period notices appeared in the South Carolina Gazette searching for gardeners. On March 16, 1765, “A GARDENER, who understands laying out and executing work in the- present taste, and skilful in a Kitchen-Garden” could hear of a good place by applying to the printer of the Gazette.

In April 1765, professional gardener and marketman Christopher Gadsden advertised for an assistant in the local newspaper, “Person that understands the managing of a garden and orchard (particularly a kitchen garden) and is willing to tend the markets constantly,” and in that June, he continued to search for a gardener “that understands the management of a garden, orchard, marketing” was would be offered “employment on a pleasant place within two miles of Charles-Town.”

1760-1771
Another professional English gardener immigrating to Charleston, was William Bennett. The May 13 and June 11, 1771 issues of the South Carolina Gazette and Country Journal, carried the following ad. GARDENING. The Subscriber takes this Method to acquaint the Public, That he will undertake to MAKE, or put in COMPLEAT ORDER, the GARDEN of any Gentleman or Lady in or within Two or three Miles of Charles-Town, at an easy Expence, either by the Day, Year or Quarter, as may best suit them; and can be well recommended by the Gentleman he came out of England with. Enquire at Mr. Harper’s, Taylor, in Church-Street, opposite Thomas Laughton Smith, Esq. WILLIAM BENNETT. Bennet also sold seeds in Charleston during this period.

1767
Just as the colonies to the north, South Carolina had its share of white servant gardeners. Some indentured gardeners did not choose to serve their sea service and fled for terra firma, as evidence by this as in the Gazette on September 28, 1767, ABSENTED on the 25th of Sept. 1767, from the ship Two Friends, Samuel Ball, master, indented servant, JAMES FOSTER, aged about 22 years, well set, about 5 feet 6 inches high, his complexion ruddy, but a good deal sun-burnt , with short brown hair, inclined to curl; born in Norwich, and a gardener by trade, had on when he went away a brown coat, but may have changed his dress.

1767
The only knowledge of gardener Robert Hunter comes from his June 15, 1767 notice in the Gazette, NOTICE IS HEREBY GIVEN THAT frequent and repeated trespasses have been committed, at Mr. Daniel Cannon’s garden, up-the-Path, This is therefore to inform and forwarn all persons whatsoever, for the future, as they must expect to answer the consequences by a gun, or dog, or both. ROBERT HUNTER, Gardener.


1768-1798
Alexander Petrie, who advertised with much the same concern as Hunter, appears to have moved throughout several Southern states offering his services. He made his first appearance in three South Carolina periodicals in the spring of 1768, with the following notice, “ALEXANDER PETRIE, gardener, having hired the land of Mr. Pike, lately belonging to Mr. Marshall, on the neck; gives this public notice, that the same is now accupied for a Garden, and as such, hopes no person will attempt to break down his fences, under the pretence of shooting, etc. etc. as he is compelled from the damages lately received by persons running over his plants, to prosecute the first offender to the utmost rigeur of the law.”

By the fall of the same year Petrie was advertising in the Savannah Georgia Gazette that, “GENTLEMEN in town or country may have their Gardens made in the neatest manner, or looked after by the year, by their humble servant, ALEXANDER PETRIE, at Mr. O’Connor’s. N.B. Work to be done by the day or piece.”

After the Revolution, professional gardens in both the northern and southern states began to actively seek apprentice gardeners.

On December 13, 1783 Petrie placed the following ad in the Richmond Virginia Gazette and Weekly Advertiser, “Alexander Petrie, Gardiner (sic) and Ground-Workman, INTENDS living near this city, to carry on the different branches of his BUSINESS. He will take two or three boys as apprentices, if affable; their masters hay have them taught to any particular branch, as may be agreed on, such as ditching, ground-work, &c necessary to every Gentleman’s plantation, who wishes to improve it. He would be obliged to those Gentlemen who may choose to employ him, to acquaint him of it before the last of this month, that he may procure a number of hands to discharge what work he may undertake with punctuality and satisfaction.”

His name was listed as having an unclaimed letter as the Richmond Virginia Post Office in the Virginia Independent Chronicle of April 16, 1788. But, in October 8, 1796, he was advertising in The Norfolk Herald, Virginia, ALEXANDER PETRIE, GARDENER, HAS FOR SALE, Asparragras Plants, of the best quality, N.E. Old beds replanted, where the ground is high and dry it is proper to plant this fall; if low and wet to plant in the spring, when the sap is rising.

By March 31, 1798, he had returned to Charleston and was involved in the 1798 Fire. His wife Eliza died in Charleston in 1801, after which nothing more appears about gardener Petrie.

1768
In 1768 “James Callahan, lately from Philadelphia perfectly acquainted with all branches of gardening” advertised for work in the Gazette on December 22.


1769
In 1769, William Bethune, identified as a gardener of Charleston sells two slaves to Daniel Cannon, a carpenter.

After the Revolution, growing numbers of immigrant European, Caribbean, & British independent gardeners, assisted by white apprentices & free & slave blacks, took over much of the work of planning, planting, and maintaining both ornamental and kitchen gardens. The American Revolution was the turning point in the development of independent gardening in the newly emerging capitalist nation.

1774
In 1774, John Bert is identified as a gardener in a land transaction.

1782-1790
George Reynolds is listed in the 1790 Charleston City Directory as a gardener at 42 George Street. He also appears as a gardener in sureties and administrative settlements.

1782
Quomina was a slave gardener at the Snee Plantation of Charles Pickney, when Pickney died in 1782.


1776-1783
Peter Boutiton was a fiesty French gardener who also signed his name Pierre. He was active in the Charleston area from 1776, until his death in 1783. He married he widow Mary Air on January 9, 1777 at St. Philip’s. Mary Air was the granddaughter and heir of Charleston merchant, Peter Benoist. On July 21 of that year he placed the following notice in the Gazette of the State of South Carolina in Charleston, PETER BOUTITON, Gardener, near and wit in the town gate, having suffered…frequent robberies of the produce of his hard labour, and greatly also by loss of rest, is watching by himself and two negroes, and frequent firing of guns, with no other intent than to deter the thieves-which not having answered his purpose-He now gives public notice and warning. That whoeverhereafter shall presume to enter his inclusures in the night, must do it at the risk of their lives.”

Boutiton was identified as having been a gardener in Charleston during the settlement of his estate in 1783 ,and in South Carolina court records for several years thereafter.

1776-1785
Anthony Farasteau was another French gardener. His was alternately listed as a gardener and a weaver in several land transactions and at the settlement of his estate, in the Charleston papers. He was active in Charleston records from 1776, until his death in 1785. Weavers often were also gardeners who grew their own dye plants.
1786
William Kirkpatrick appeared in 1786 in the will of a friend mentioned as a gardener to the estate of the late Colonel Maurice Simons.

1786
John Champney’s purchased his property from William Williamson’s estate in 1786. Williamson’s plantation, known as “The Garden”, was on the Stono River near Wallace’s Ferry. He died in November 1783 and his property was advertised for sale in the State Gazette of South Carolina (Charleston) for February 23, 1786. Twenty acres were set aside as a pleasure garden and seven or eight acres, including three canals of fishponds, were “laid out and improved in a taste no where excelled in this State…. The most curious Botanists may here be entertained…In short, nature and art are happily united: nature is improved but no where violated in this delightful spot. A plat was made by Joseph Purcell in 1786 and appears in John McCrudy Plat Book No. 4- p. 48 showing the layout of the garden.

1788
Philip Hartz was also mentioned as a gardener in a will in 1788.


1790-1802
Charles Gross was listed as a gardener in the 1790 Charleston City Directory at 152 King Street. He moved to Hampstead in 1792-1793 and began to garden and sell seed from there, until he died in 1802.

1794
Englishman James Sommers appears in the settlement of his estate after his death in 1794 as having been a gardener in Charleston. In his will he mentions being from Ilfondcombe in the County of Devon in England.

Also in 1794, the following ad appeared in the Charleston City Gazette, "Wants a place, a French Gardener, from Paris, having been in this Country three or four years, during which time he was greatly improved under the skillful Mr. Michaux, a French botanist...at length, he knows every line of his profession and to conclude he is very well recommended."


André Michaux (1746-1802) established a botanical garden that could supply French garden and collect specimens for Le Nôtre’s work at Versailles. His garden was actually a nursery for these and the other plants, that he was collecting from around the region. Established about 10 miles north of St. Michael’s, in the Goose Creek area, he was forced to return to France in 1796. His son, Francois, returned to Charleston in 1801, and wrote, "I found in this garden a superb collection of trees and plants that had survived almost total neglect for nearly the space of four years."

1795-1810
Another Englishman, John Bryant, advertised as a gardener in the City Gazette and the Daily Advertiser in Charleston on June 6, 1795. “GARDENING. THE subscriber, well acquainted with the European method of gardening, being a native of England, and likewise well acquainted with it in this state, having been in constant practice for some years, takes this method of informing his friends and the public in general that he proposes superintending ladies and gentlemen's gardens in or near the city, whether intended for pleasure or profit. He also plans and lays out gardens in the European taste on moderate terms.”

Bryant also sold seeds, trees and shrubs. On October 4, 1794, he married Jane Thornton in St. Philip’s Parish in Charleston. In 1796 he advertised for an apprentice to help him. “An Apprentice is wanted to the above business, either white or colored. A Lad that is honest and industrious will meet with every encouragement.”

Bryant continued in the gardening and seed business until the fall of 1809, when he died. Jane Bryant, his wife, kept the business going into 1810. The inventory taken at his death included a greenhouse in the garden and pots, shrubs, and trees in the garden valued, at $675.


1795
The will of gardener Robert Johnston noted that he came from Greenwill Street, Newtownards, Ireland, where he owned a house and land.
1795
Morris Conner was a gardener from St. Bartholomew’s Parish who died in testate in 1795.

1795
Andrew Smith was a gardener in 1795 who advertised to train apprentices in the “art of gardening” in the March 12 edition of the City Gazette and The Daily Advertiser, THE Subscriber has taken a lease of Widderburn Lodge, formerly called the Grove; he will take in apprentices for three years, to be instructed in the art of gardening and farming in general, to the best advantage; as great improvement will be made on the farm, in the garden, orchard, and in the common field, the sooner they were to enter to work the better. He does not wish any gentleman to send any negro unless of good principles, obedient to orders, and of a good genius. There is good accommodations on the farm for negros of every size and description. Andrew Smith.


1780s-1806
Robert Squibb flourished as a botanist, seedsman, writer and gardener in Charleston and other parts of the South from the 1780’s until his death in 1806 at Silk Hope Plantation near Savannah, Georgia where he was buried.

After several years as a gardener Squibb placed the following notice in the June 29, 1786 issue of the Columbian Herald in Charleston. “FROM the frequent solicitations of a number of gentlemen of this and the adjoining states, the subscriber has been induced to undertake a work, entitled, THE SOUTH CAROLINA, GEORGIA, AND NORTH CAROLINA Gardeners Calender; Which, from its general utility, he flatters himself will meet the approbation of the public at large. The English publications hitherto made use of to point out and direct the best methods of Gardening, by no means answer the purpose, as they tend to mislead instead of instruct, and suit only the European parts for which they were designed. -This work is deduced from practice and experience in this climate, wherein the most certain and simple methods are clearly pointed out, so as to render the art of gardening easy and familiar to every capacity.”

When Squibb’s work was published in 1787 it stated that Squibb’s garden was located at the upper end of Tradd Street and this his nursery was near “Rumney Bridge”. Squibb called his garden “the Botanic Garden.”

Michael O’Brien was another gardener advertising for work in the City Gazette and Daily Advertiser on September 8, 1796. "MICHAEL O’BRIEN RESPECTFULLY acquaints the Citizens of Charleston, and its environs, that he proposes to undertake the LAYING OUT OF GARDENS, in all the different branches, comprizing taste and utility. He has been regularly brought up to the above undertaking, and practiced in Europe for many years with great success.”

1796
William Aitkin advertised in the same periodical on December 7, 1796. “A Gardener. WANTS A PLACE, a regular-bred Gardener. He can be well recommended. A line left for him with the Printers will be duly attended to.”

1798
Robert Day advertised as a projector and gardener in the January 9, 1798 issue of the Charleston City Gazette and Daily Advertiser.

1797
Elisha Diven was a gardener in Charleston in the same era. He is identified as a gardener in a 1797 estate proceeding and at his own death in 1798.

1800
John Hope was listed as a gardener of Charleston at the administration of his estate upon his death in 1800.

1803
Edward Otter was a gardener who arrived in Charleston from England in 1803. He brought seeds and trees with him and advertised in the Charleston Courier on December 28, 1803 that “He may be found in the Market on the Bay all the forepart of the season, or at the City Hotel. He would contract with any person to lay out ground and plant it.”


1806
John Renauld was a gardener who immigrated from Rambouillet, France to Charleston some years after his birth in 1772. His only newspaper notice occurred in the Charleston City Gazette and Daily Advertiser when he lost his young garden apprentice on July 7. 1806. "Strayed, From the subscriber, a small new Negro Boy named JIM; about four feet 5 or 6 inches high; slender make and this vissage; has a scar on the right side of his face- above his eye; had on an oznaburgs shirt and blue cassimere trowsers. Whoever will deliver the said Boy at No. 34 Tradd-street, shall receive a reward of Five Dollars. JOHN RENAULD."

1806
Unfortunately the ad appearing in the March 19, 1806 edition of the Charleston Courier does not identify the English gardeners mentioned. “The subscriber offers for Sale…his PLANTATION, adjoining Wallace’s Bridge, containing 160 acres, 120 of which are very fine marsh land, above 30 of which are under bank, with good trunks and drains. On this trace is the handsomest Garden in the state, and laid out when belonging to the late Mr. Williamson, by English Gardeners, and which cost him about 4,000-sterling, and has since been much improved and additions made also by another English Gardener. It contains in sheets of water, handsomely made, and Garden, about 21 acres…John Champneys.”

1809
Neal McGregor was a gardener who was born in Perthshire, North Britain in 1773 and immigrated to Charleston, sometime before his December 1802 marriage to Mrs. Jane Phipps. He was listed as a gardener in the 1809 Charleston City Directory and when he was naturalized in 1813. He and his wife lived on Vanderhorst Street in Charleston until his death in 1819.

1765
Thomas Horsey was a Charleston tinsmith and gardener who placed notices in Charleston newspapers in 1765 and 1766 “acquainting his friends and customers” that he had moved from his house on Broad Street and opened a shop on Meeting Street opposite Dr. Alexander Gardens." Horsey was a native of London. Dr. Alexander Garden was one of Charleston’s physicians and botanists before the Revolutionary War. Unlike his neighbor, however, Horsey was sympathetic with the Revolution and served in the Charleston Militia, after which he returned to live at 4 Guigrand Street. Horsey and his wife Elizabeth had two children, Thomas J., born in 1795 and Samuel J., born in 1798. Thomas Horsey died in 1803.

1815
In her will proven on November 21, 1815, Rebecca Motte of Elderado Plantation in the parish of St. James Santee left to her son-in-law, Major Thomas Pickney and his wife, her daughter Frances, a slave gardener named Adam from that plantation.

1810
George Smith was a Charleston gardener who was born in Wicklow, Ireland in 1784. He immigrated sometime before his 1810 Charleston marriage to Margaret Morgan in 1810.


1801-1809
James Mair was a gardener who was born in Scotland in 1772. He immigrated to Charleston and went into partnership with Robert Brown of Beaufort until 1801. He owned 779 acres of land on John’s Island and was listed in the 1809 Charleston City Directory as a gardener operating on King Street. He married Martha Graham, the youngest daughter of the then deceased Rev. William Graham in January of 1805, and he died in September of 1809. He was in partnership until his death with James Fraser, son of John Fraser, seedsman, nurseryman, and botanist of London.

1809-1817
Samuel Anderson was also listed as a gardener of Hampstead in the Charleston City Directory and appeared in several Charleston County land transactions from that time on.

James Neswitt was noted to be a gardener of Charleston Neck in the administration of his estate in 1813.

Sebastian Spencer was identified as a gardener of Hampstead at the time of his death in 1817. He was married to Elizabeth Spidel in December of 1783 in South Carolina. In his will, he emancipated several of his gardening slaves, leaving them money as well.

1805-1818
John Jarman is another gardener of Charleston identified through estate matters between 1805 and 1818.


1819
And Daniel A. Stark was a gardener with wanderlust who preferred not to walk, according to a notice in the Charleston Times on April 19, 1819. Caution. A MAN, who said his name was DANIEL A. STARK, and had been working as a Gardener for Mrs. Kennedy, at Gordon & Spring’s Ferry, absconded on Wednesday week last, taking with him a Gun, Shot-Bag and Powder-Flask; and on the next day a Horse belonging to Mrs. K. was missing.

1818
In the same period, a French gardener advertised in the December 12, 1818 Courier in Charleston. “Mr. MENANT, Gardener, A PUPIL of Mr. THGUIN, one of the Brothers of Mr. THOUIN, Professor of Culture of the Museum of Natural History of Paris, has the honor to inform the public, that he undertakes to construct all kinds of Terraces, lay out Ornamental Gardens, and attend to the Planting of Fruit Trees and Ornamental Shrubberies. He also arranges the Decorations for Entertainments; and request those persons that wish to employ him, to have the goodness to address themselves to MR. FRANCIS CARMAND, No. 96 Queen-Street, or to Mr. NOISETTE, Botanical Agriculturist, King-street Road.”

1809-1824
Philip S. Noisette was a gardener who was very active in Charleston at this time. He was listed as a gardener in Hampstead in the 1809 Charleston City Directory. In the November 14, 1814 Charleston Courier, he placed an ad to sell plants stating that he had been operating his garden “for some years past” at Romney Village, opposite Mr. Turpin’s farm. He said that he was growing sugar cane there as well as other plants, and Menant’s advertisement to Noisette as a “Botanical Agriculturist.”

Noisette appeared as a witness to the 1824 will of Robert DuBois who was also listed as a gardener in the 1809 Charleston City Directory, working out of King Street. At the time of his will, he was living at Charleston Neck in the forks of the road of King Street.

1783-1823
James Waddell was another gardener and weaver originally from Ireland. He and his wife Ann, the widow of Benjamin Wood, appear in 1783 and 1785 estate matters. In 1798 and 1799, they appear in land records as residents of Charleston Neck and members of Christ Church parish. In 1804 Waddell conveyed 1,082 acres he owned on John’s Island. The City Gazette in Charleston on June 5, 1823 reported his death.

1782-1821
Marmaduke Jenny was identified as a gardener “late of Charleston and the village of Washington” when he died in 1821.


1809-1823
Joseph Parsons was also listed as a gardener on Hampstead in the 1089 and 1813 Charleston City Directory. Joseph Parsons first appeared in the records in 1807 as the husband of Esther, the widow of Conrad Hook, a carpenter.

They appeared in land records; until his death in 1823, when his will mentions his first wife, Jane, and his two children, William S. Parsons and Eleanor Elizabeth Parsons. Before his death, Parsons had established a 2nd home on Mud Creek in Alabama.

Parsons moved his family there from South Carolina, before he died in 1823. His sons included Samuel, Joseph Jr., William, Isaiah, James, John and Littleton Parsons. The Parsons Family settled first in Mud Creek and migrated toward the ridge that became Hueytown. Parsons still has many descendants living in Hueytown, Alabama.

His obituary in the City Gazette in Charleston on April 23, 1823 read, “Died, in the city on Monday, the 7th inst. after a long illness, Mr. Joseph Parsons, aged 40 years, formerly of Wiscasset, but for the last 20 years a resident of this state.” When he died, they were living in Hampstead “near Mr. Nell’s Rope-Walk.”


In South Carolina, most of the ornamental and kitchen garden maintenance continued to be the work of slaves until the Civil War. As visiting English agriculturalist Richard Parkinson declared at the end of the 18th-century, “where the livelihood is got out of the poor soil--it is pinched & screwed out of the negro.”
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Eliza Lucas Pinckney (1722-1793) of South Carolina

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It is difficult to decide whether this essay on South Carolina's Eliza Lucas Pinckney should be posted in the Early American Gardens blog or in the 18th-Century Women blog, so I have decided to post it in both. I simply could not chose, for her observations of & contributions to gardening & agriculture in South Carolina were immense. And the insights from her letters & memoranda into the life of an educated colonial woman in 18th century America are unparalled.

Eliza Lucas Pinckney (c 1722-1793) was born into a family of privilege on the Caribbean island of Antigua, where her British military officer father was stationed. She was sent back to England for a proper education & then she sailed with her family to South Carolina. Ironically, as a teen-ager she would manage her father's Carolina plantations, while he was away in the military; and, years later, she would manage her husband's plantation after his death.

When Eliza was 16, her father, seeking a healthier situation for his ailing wife, brought her & their two daughters to a plantation, which he had inherited on Wappoo Creek in South Carolina, near Charleston, in 1738.

As the conflict between England & Spain, called the War of Jenkins’ Ear, heated up, forcing him to return to his military assignment in Antigua in 1739, the management of Wappoo, and of her father's 2 other plantations in the Carolina low country, fell to Eliza.

At age 16, Eliza Lucas Pinckney was managing her father’s 3 plantations, while taking care of her younger sister & her dying mother. We have many details of Eliza's life & hopes; because when she was 18, Eliza began keeping her letters & memoranda from 1740 until 1762. Her letterbook is one of the largest surviving collections of letters of a colonial woman. Her rich letters reveal her quick-witted perseverance & grit, as she forged an unique life for herself & plotted a new path for agriculture in South Carolina.

When she was 18, Eliza wrote of her new situation to a friend in England, on May 2, 1740. "I like this part of the world, as my lott has fallen here... I prefer England to it, ’tis true, but think Carolina greatly preferable to the West Indias, and was my Papa here I should be very happy...

Charles Town, the principal one in this province, is a polite, agreeable place. The people live very Gentile and very much in the English taste. The Country is in General fertile and abounds with Venison and wild fowl...

My Papa and Mama’s great indulgence to me leaves it to me to chose our place of residence either in town or Country, but I think it more prudent as well as most agreeable to my Mama and self to be in the Country during my Father’s absence. We are 17 mile by land and 6 by water from Charles Town where we have about 6 agreeable families around us with whom we live in great harmony.

I have a little library well furnished (for my papa has left me most of his books) in which I spend part of my time. My Musick and the Garden, which I am very fond of, take up the rest of my time that is not imployed in business, of which my father has left me a pretty good share and indeed, ’twas inavoidable as my Mama’s bad state of health prevents her going through any fatigue.

I have the business of 3 plantations to transact, which requires much writing and more business and fatigue of other sorts than you can imagine. But least you should imagine it too burthensom to a girl at my early time of life, give me leave to answer you: I assure you I think myself happy that I can be useful to so good a father, and by rising very early I find I can go through much business.

The teenager brought her infectuous love of learning with her to Wappoo. She reveled in music & could “tumble over one little tune” on the flute. She quoted Milton, read Richardson’s Pamela, & spoke French. She actually enjoyed reading John Locke, Virgil's Plutarch, & Thomas Wood. But, her favorite subject was botany.

She tutored her sister Polly & “two black girls,” whom she envisioned making “school mistress’s for the rest of the Negroe children,” if her father approved. In 1741, she recorded sighting a comet whose appearance Sir Isaac Newton had predicted. Eliza enjoyed brief soical visits in Charleston, but devoted most of her energy to her family & to plotting the success of her father's business in Carolina.

In July of 1740, she wrote a memorandum, "Wrote my Father a very long letter on his plantation affairs and... On the pains I had taken to bring the Indigo, Ginger, Cotton and Lucerne and Casada to perfection, and had greater hopes from the Indigo (if I could have the seed earlier next year from the West India’s) than any of the rest of the things I had tryd."

Eliza recognized that the growing textile manufacturing industry was creating a worldwide market for good dyes. In 1739, she began cultivating & creating new strains of the indigo plant from which blue dye could be made. She introduced the successful cultivation of the plant indigo used in making dye to the American colonies.

While she was forging ahead in her agricultural experiments, she worried about her father, who was her only support system. Her letters let him know that she believed he cared about his country & career more than his family. She wrote in 1740, to him in Antigua, where he remained on military duty, "I want of words to Express the concern we are under at not hearing from you. The dangerous situation you are in terrifies us beyond expression and is increased by the fearful apprehensions of your being ordered to some place of immediate danger. . . I know how ready you are to fight in a just cause as well as the love you bear your Country in preference to every other regard..."

She continued to look for ways to make a profit from the family's plantations. On April 23, 1741, she wrote a memorandum, "Wrote to my Father informing him of the loss of a Negroe man, also the boat being overset in Santilina Sound and 20 barrels of Rice lost. Told him of our making a new garden and all conveniences we can to receive him when we are so happy to see him. Also about Starrat and pitch and Tarr."

In June of 1741, she finally heard from her father after 6 months without any letters, and she wrote him in return, "Never were letters more welcome than yours...We expect the boat dayly from Garden Hill [one of their other plantations] when I shall be able to give you an account of affairs there. The Cotton, Guiney corn, and most of the Ginger planted here was cutt off by a frost.

I wrote you in a former letter we had a fine Crop of Indigo Seed upon the ground, and since informed you the frost took it before it was dry. I picked out the best of it and had it planted but there is not more than a hundred bushes of is come up - which proves the more unluckey as you have sent a man to make it. I make no doubt Indigo will prove a very valuable Commodity in time if we could have the seed from the west Indias in time enough to plant the latter end of March, that the seed might be dry enough to gather before our frost. I am sorry we lost this season. We can do nothing towards it now but make the works ready for next year."

Eliza hoped a fine grade of blue indigo grown in Carolina could be prepared into dye cakes for cloth manufacturers in England. The market for South Carolina rice had dwindled with the war, and indigo could be bought from South Carolina to supply British markets instead of from the French Carribean islands, if she was successful at introducing a 2nd staple crop to the colony. Indigo accounted for over one-third of the value of the colonies’ exports before the Revolutionary War.

“I was ignorant both at the proper season for sowing it [indigo] and the soil best adapted to it”, Eliza wrote, but she perservered. Her determination brought to success experiments in growing this crop which had been tried & discarded near Charleston some 70 years earlier.

Knowing how complex was the process of producing the dye from the fresh-cut plants, Colonel Lucas sent her an experienced indigo maker from the French island on Montserrat in the summer of 1741. Optimistically, Eliza wrote her father that October “informing him we made 20 weight of Indigo….’Tis not quite dry or I should have sent him some. Now desire he will send us a hundred weight of seed to plant in the spring.”

She was also experimenting with other crops. In April of 1742, Eliza wrote, "I have planted a large figg orchard with desighn to dry and export them. I have reckoned my expense and the prophets to arise from these figgs."

At the age of 19 in September of 1741, was fully immersed in the business of the colony. She noted, "Wrote to my father on plantation business and concerning a planter’s importing Negroes for his own use. Colo. Pinckney thinks not, but thinks it was proposed in the Assembly and rejected. He promised to look over the Act and let me know. Also informed my father of the alteration ’tis soposed there will be in the value of our money- occasioned by a late Act of Parliament that Extends to all America - which is to dissolve all private banks, I think by the 30th of last month, or be liable to lose their Estates, and put themselves out of the King’s protection. Informed him of the Tyranical Government at Georgia."

A month later, she recorded, October 14, 1741, "Wrote to my father informing him we made 20 w[eight] of Indigo and expected 10 more. ’Tis not quite dry or I should have sent him some. Now desire he will send us a hundred weight of seed to plant in the spring."

In April of the next year, she wrote to her friend in England, about her daily routine, "In general then I rise at five o’Clock in the morning, read till Seven, then take a walk in the garden or field, see that the Servants [slaves] are at their respective business, then to breakfast. The first hour after breakfast is spent at my musick, the next is constantly employed in recolecting something I have learned least for want of practise it should be quite lost, such as French and short hand. After that I devote the rest of the time till I dress for dinner to our little Polly and two black girls who I teach to read...

The first hour after dinner as the first after breakfast at musick, the rest of the afternoon in Needle work till candle light, and from that time to bed time read or write. . . . Mondays my musick Master is here. Tuesdays my friend Mrs. Chardon (about 3 miles distant) and I are constantly engaged to each other, she at our house one Tuesday⎯ I at hers the next and this is one of the happiest days I spend at Woppoe. Thursday the whole day except what the necessary affairs of the family take up is spent in writing, either on the business of the plantations, or letters to my friends. Every other Fryday, if no company, we go a vizeting so that I go abroad once a week and no oftener..."

She wrote to her friend again in May of 1742, "Wont you laugh at me if I tell you I am so busey in providing for Posterity I hardly allow my self time to Eat or sleep and can but just snatch a minnet to write you and a friend or two now. I am making a large plantation of Oaks which I look upon as my own property, whether my father gives me the land or not; and therefore I design many years hence when oaks are more valueable than they are now -- which you know they will be when we come to build fleets.13 I intend, I say 2 thirds of the produce of my oaks for a charity (I'll let you know my scheme another time) and the other 3rd for those that shall have the trouble of putting my design in Execution. I sopose according to custom you will show this to your Uncle and Aunt. 'She is [a] good girl,' says Mrs. Pinckney. 'She is never Idle and always means well.' 'Tell the little Visionary,' says your Uncle, 'come to town and partake of some of the amusements suitable to her time of life.' Pray tell him I think these so, and what he may now think whims and projects may turn out well by and by. Out of many surely one may hitt...

The 1744 indigo crop did, indeed, "hitt" & was a success. Six pounds from Wappoo were sent to England and “found better than the French Indigo.” Seed from this crop was immediately distributed to many Carolina planters, who soon were profiting from Carolina's new staple export product.

While she was busy with plantation affairs, she also took time to survey the gardening efforts of her neighbors. South Carolinian Eliza Lucas Pinckney described her neighbor William Middleton's mount at his estate Crowfields in 1743, “to the bottom of this charming spot where is a large fish pond with a mount rising out of the middle-the top of which is level with the dwelling house and upon it is a roman temple.”

At Crowfields, she noted, the amazing fishponds, "...a large fish pond with a mount rising out of the middle-- the top of which is level with the dwelling house and upon it is a roman temple. On each side of this are other large fish ponds properly disposed which form a fine prospect of water from the house."

She surveyed the use of ornamental plants at Middleton's, "The house stands a mile from, but in sight of the road...as you draw nearer new beauties discover themselves, first the fruitful Vine mantleing up the wall loaded with delicious Clusters." Of the formal garden, she noted, "From the back door is a spacious walk a thousand foot long; each side of which nearest the house is a grass plat ennamiled in a Serpentine manner with flowers."

At Crowfields, she noted the mounts & bird-friendly area of wilderness, "Next to that on the right hand is what immediately struck my rural taste, a thicket of young tall live oaks where a variety of Airry Chorristers pour forth their melody."

Eliza described, in May, 1743, "I...cant say one word on the other seats I saw in this ramble, except the Count's large double row of Oaks on each side of the Avenue that leads to the house--which seemed designed by nature for pious meditation and friendly converse."

She also paid attention to the ornamental aspects of her own garden and grounds. She wrote in a letter in 1742, "You may wonder how I could in this gay season think of planting a Cedar grove, which rather reflects an Autumnal gloom and solemnity than the freshness and gayty of spring. But so it is...I intend then to connect in my grove the solemnity (not the solidity) of summer or autumn with the cheerfulness and pleasures of spring, for it shall be filled with all kind of flowers, as well wild as Garden flowers, with seats of Camomoil and here and there a fruit tree--oranges, nectrons, Plumbs."

On May 27, 1744, Eliza Lucas married attorney Charles Pinckney, a childless widower more than 20 years her senior. Pinckney built a house on Charleston’s waterfront for his bride, but as usual, she chose to spend most of her time in the country. At his plantation on the Cooper River, Eliza initialized the culture of silkworms to establish a “silk manufacture.” While in England in 1753, during an audience with the Princess of Wales, Eliza Lucas Pinckney presented her with a dress made of silk produced from her plantations.

By 1746, Carolina planters shipped almost 40,000 pounds of indigo to England; the next year the total exported was almost 100,000 pounds. Indigo sales sustained the Carolina economy for 3 decades, until the Revolution cut off trade with England.

Eliza & Charles Pinckney had 4 children within 5 years. Eliza vowed “to be a good Mother to my children…to instill piety, Virtue and true religion into them; to correct their Errors whatever uneasiness it may give myself….”

Charles Pinckney's appointment as commissioner for the colony in London took the family in April of 1753, to England. They had hoped to live there with their family, until their sons finished their education. When war with France broke out, Eliza & her husband returned in May of 1758, to Carolina, leaving the boys at school in England.

Pinckney contracted malaria & died in July of that year. Again Eliza turned to plantation business as she directed her husband’s seven separate land holdings in the Carolina lo country.

Eliza wrote this letter to the headmaster of her son's school in England, "This informs you of the greatest misfortune that could have happened to me and my dear children on this side Eternity! I am to tell you, hard as the task is, that my dear, dear Mr. Pinckney, the best of men, of husbands, and of fathers, is no more!

"Comfort, good Sir, Comfort the tender hearts of my dear children. God Almighty bless them, and if he has any more blessings for me in this world may He give it me in them and their sister.

"The inclosed letter for the dear boys be so good to give them when you think it a proper time. What anguish do I and shall I feel for my poor Infants when they hear the most afflicting sound that could ever reach them!"

By 1760, Eliza was once again fully immersed in managing a plantation and her husband's business affairs in South Carolina. "I find it requires great care, attention and activity to attend properly to a Carolina Estate, tho’ but a moderate one, to do ones duty and make it turn to account, that I find I have as much business as I can go through of one sort or other. Perhaps ’tis better for me, and I believe it is. Had there not been a necessity for it, I might have sunk to the grave by this time in that Lethargy of stupidity which had seized me after my mind had been violently agitated by the greatest shock it ever felt. But a variety of imployment gives my thoughts a relief from melloncholy subjects, tho’ ’tis but a temporary one, and gives me air and exercise, which I believe I should not have had resolution enough to take if I had not been roused to it by motives of duty and parental affection."

Eliza recorded her last letter in her letterbook in 1762. She wrote, "I love a Garden and a book; and they are all my amusement except I include one of the greatest Businesses of my life (my attention to my dear little girl) under that article. For a pleasure it certainly is &c. especially to a mind so tractable and a temper so sweet as hers. For, I thank God, I have an excellent soil to work upon, and by the Divine Grace hope the fruit will be answerable to my indeavours in the cultivation."

Pinckney spent 30 years, after her husband's death, overseeing their plantations & helping her family. She invested monies she earned from exporting indigo into her children’s education. Both of her sons became involved with the new nation. Charles Cotesworth Pinckney (1746-1852) signed the United States Constitution, and Thomas Pinckney (1750-1828) served as South Carolina Governor & as Minister to Spain & Great Britain.

Hampton Plantation near Georgetown, South Carolina.

Eliza lived with her widowed daughter Harriet at Daniel Huger Horry's estate, Hampton. There, they continued to improve the grounds. In 1790, they added a portico to the land side of the house. When George Washington visited during his Southern Tour in 1791, they asked him whether a certain oak tree should be cut down to create a better view from their new portico. He replied that he liked the tree, and it was saved.

Eliza died of cancer on May 26, 1793, in Philadelphia, where she had gone for medical treatment. At her funeral, President George Washington, then presiding over the United States government in Philadelphia, served as one of her pallbearers.
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Seed Dealers & Nursery Owners of South Carolina

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After my earlier posting on seed dealers & nursery owners from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to Williamsburg, Virginia, some readers complained, that I did not include enough of the specific plants that dealers had for sale.

It is difficult to strike just the right balance for a diverse audience of readers. Some are plant historians, who want to know precisely what plants are being sold when. Others are interested in the development of an industry & its marketing tactics of appealing to & even influencing the changing needs & desires of the buyers. Those readers usually don't care exactly what is being sold, except as it changes from utilitarian to ornamental. It is perplexing to know which way to lean, so in this posting, I will include more specific plant listings & images. (I will also let you return to that earlier posting for the basics of seed saving, one of the most important ways of having seeds to plant the following year for all 18th century gardeners.)

South Carolina was a world of its own in the early 18th century, and it might be interesting to compare & contrast the marketing of plants & the growth of professional seed & plant dealers there with the more northern colonies.

Trading seeds & plants with other gardeners

In warm, nearly tropical South Carolina, naturalists Mark Catesby (1682-1749) & John Bartram (1699-1777) both visited the intriguing colony, increasing botanical awareness in the area. Catesby & Bartram took samples of new plants they found and traded them with others, on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

John Bartram, the Philadelphia gardener, explorer, & botanist, regularly sent plants to English merchant & botanist Peter Collinson (1649-1768). His famous garden at Mill Hill contained many American plants.

South Carolina gardener Martha Logan ((1701-1779) carried on a lively correspondence with Philadelphia botanist John Bartram. Bartram wrote to his English mentor Peter Collinson in May of 1761, that she was “an elderly widow lady who spares no pains on cost to oblige me: her garden is her delight and she has a fine one; I was with her about 4 minutes in her company yet we contracted such a mutual correspondence that one silk bag of seed bath repast several times.”

Dr. Alexander Garden (1746-1802), who practiced medicine in Charleston, made important contributions to plant identification later in the 18th century. Garden also traded seeds & plants with others interested in botany on both sides of the Atlantic. He is most remembered for the gardenia named in his honor by Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist who established the modern system of plant classification.

Everyday gardeners, gentry & common folk, traded both useful & ornamental seeds & plants with each other regularly throughout the 18th century in South Carolina.


Ordering seeds & plants from English factors

Whether planting their lands for necessity or pleasure, early South Carolina gardeners were initially bound to write back to England for gardening manuals and for many of the specific plants and seeds they were familiar with from their mother country. But soon commercial seed dealers and nursery owners began importing plants to sell directly to South Carolina gardeners.

Many South Carolina gardeners ordered their seeds directly from England. In the December 19, 1754, issue of the South Carolina Gazette, Captain Thomas Arnott noted that he brought a box of “Tulip, Narcissus, and other Flower Roots” from England “supposed to have been ordered by some person of this province” and that the “person that can properly claim them, may have them.”

Newspaper advertisements, broadsides, & estate inventories give a fairly accurate reflection of the seeds & plants early South Carolina gardeners purchased in the marketplace before 1820. The South Carolina Gazette was Charleston’s first newspaper commencing publication in January 1732. Most early seed dealers used this newspaper as a vehicle for marketing their wares.


Buying seeds from ships arriving in South Carolina

The earliest seed dealer advertising there was Samuel Everleigh, although his ads weren’t specific. In the December of 1732 issue, he offered for sale “divers sorts of best Garden seeds,” and 3 years later in December of 1736/7, Everleigh again advertised, “Garden seeds fresh and good.” On March 29-April 6, 1739, he offered “Grass and Garden Seeds.”

When young Charles Pinckney opened his “new store on the Bay” in the 1740s, he advertised “garden seeds Just imported from London” in the South Carolina Gazette. His competitor, Robert Pringle, whose store was also “on the Bay” advertised garden seeds imported from London.

In 1748, Frederick Merckley & Thomas Shute advertised for sale “sundry sorts of Garden Seeds” which were imported from Philadelphia rather than London. However, England remained the dominant source for plant stuffs.

Samuel Came fist appeared in the February 12, 1753 issue of the South Carolina Gazette declaring that he had “Imported from London, an assortment of useful garden seed, some flower roots and seeds, Windsor and kidney beans, dwarf, marrow-fat and Ormond Hotspur Peas.” Came advertised again in the January 1764 issue that he had “a assortment of Garden Seeds, flower roots, etc.”

The domestic commercial sale of plants continued to grow in popularity. In January 1764, Thomas Young advertised in the South Carolina Gazette that he had imported, “A greet Variety of kitchen-garden and flower Seeds, which are very fresh, having had a short passage; which, with some flower roots, eta. he will salt reasonably, at his house at the west-end of Broad-street.”

In the December issue of the same year, Young was about to move from his house, and he advertised “a parcel of seeds to dispose of cheap; also some shrubs, trees, roots, etc. among which are a great number of Cork, walnut, with some chestnut and almond trees, with squill and other medical roots and seeds.”

John Edwards came to South Carolina, from New York, in 1764. He advertised in the March 3, 1764, South Carolina Gazette that he brought with him “a large collection of English garden and flower seed” which he had raised himself.

In January of 1765, Lloyd & Neyle advertised that they had just imported from London and Bristol “garden seeds and flower roots, amongst which are the best orange carrots Turkey renunculas roots, Dutch tulips, fine anemones, double poppies, double larkspur.”

In March of 1791, Charles McDonald at 186 Meeting Street advertised “Fresh Garden Seed, a SMALL assortment of Flower and other GARDEN SEED, Just imported from London.”

In the 1803 Charleston Courier, Tait, Wilson & Co advertised: "Early Chariton Peas, London Cauliflower, Dwarf Marrowfat do., Early Cabbage Lettuce Coss, Early Frame do.,Cabbegge of all sorts, Crown, Transparent, and White and Black Mustard, Tail Sugar do., Solid Celery, Dwarf White Kidney Beans, Curled Parsley, Canary and Rape Seeds, Green Curled Endive, Early ad Imperial York, Long Prickley Cucumber, Cabbage, Red Beet, Early Sugar-loaf do., Large Norfolk Turnip, Drumhead do., Round Spinnage, Green Glazed do., Portugal Onion, Battersea do., Garden Cress, Cornish York do., Salmon Reddish, Early Penton Cabbage, Scarlet Salmon Reddish, Red Pickling do., Short Top do., Early Purple Brocoll, Turnips do., Late do., Naples do., Siberian do., London Leek, White do., Choux de Milan, Large Green Savoy, Brussels Sprouts, Dwarf do, White Scariat Runners, Yellow do."

In the next year, Simmons & Sweeny, at the corner of East Bay & Broad Streets, advertised in the January of 1804, issue of the Charleston Courier, “JUST received and for sale by the subscribers a few bundles FRUIT TREES, of the best quality; each containing twenty-four TREES, 1 Honey CHERRY, 1 Amber do., 1 Early White Nutmeg Peach, 1 Green do., 1 Early red, or rare ripe do., 2 large yellow Lemon clingstone do., 1 White Blossom do., 1 English Swalsh, (or Nectarine), 1 Green Catherine do., 1 Late October Clingstone do., 1 Red Pine Apple do., 1 Early black Damask Plumbs, 1 Magnum Bonum, or Yellow Egg Apple, 1 large Early Harvest do., 1 large Red Spitzenburgh do., 1 Fall Pippin do., 1 Newton do., 1 Early Sugar Pear, 1 Jergonel, or large flavored Summer do., 1 Vergeline or fine Melting Fell do, 1 Almond, 1 Nectarine, 1 Apricot."

J. F. Gennerick, who was selling seeds at 150 King Street advertised in the Charleston Courier on June 18, 1807: “ELEGANT FLOWER ROOTS, RANUNCULUS, Antimonies, Imperical Manager, Blue unbellated Crechum, The Striped Lilly, Scarlet Caledonian do., Double Scarlet do., Dotted Arcadian do., The Two Stage Martagon, Variegated Colechicums, Double do., Broad leafed Poncratium, Purple Fiemanthus, Geurnsey Lilly.”


Buying directly from local plantation & nursery owners in South Carolina

In the September, 1745 issue of the South Carolina Gazette, Richard Lake advertised for sale at his plantation on the Ashley River, “Lemon Trees with Lemons on them, in boxes, Lime Trees and Orange Trees in Boxes, and several curious Plants in Pots, also variety of young Fruit Trees, particularly white Mulberry and Orange Trees.”

In January of 1749, Lake advertised his entire plantation for sale in the South Carolina Gazette. He used his large & diverse orchard & kitchen gardens as an advertising enticement. He stated that it had a very large garden both for pleasure and profit. It contained all sorts of fruit trees consisting of many thousands, a great deal of fine asparagus, and all kinds of kitchen-garden stuff, a young nursery with a great number of grafted pear and apple trees, thousands of orange trees, and several lemon and lime trees in tubs and boxes, with fruit on them.


Importing experimental plants into South Carolina

During the 1770s-1780s grapes were becoming a popular item in both South Carolina & Georgia, where a friendly competition was growing between the neighbors.

The March 1772, issue of the South Carolina Gazette announced, “Yesterday also arrive here, with Captain John Turner, the ship Carolina Packet, from London…30,000 plants of Vines producing true Champagne and Burgundy Grapes, procured by the Assiduity of Mr. Masnil de St. Pierre (from the French settlement at Longcanes, called now New-Bourdeaux) who has received great encouragement in London, to perfect his scheme of making wines in the province, and obtained from the Society of Arts a Gold Medal.”

By the 1750s Benjamin Franklin had his hand in potential domestic wine production. The May 1, 1783 issue of the Gazette in Savannah noted, “Sometime ago Dr. Franklin sent to South Carolina nine vine dressers from Burgundy, and 1,200,000 sets of plants of vines, to try whether those plants would thrive there. Our merchants do not wish they may.”

On September 29, 1774 the South Carolina Gazette was carrying news of another experimental plant. Aaron Loocock was promoting & selling the dying root madder. “Those Gentlemen who chose to make Trial of this valuable and profitable article may depend on not being disappointed of Plants, if they order them in Time, either delivered at my Plantation at Goose Creek, or to any of their friends at Charles-Town, at Five Pounds a Thousand. Printed directions, from experiences in this Province, will be given.”

Evidently Looncook’s were successful, for almost 20 years later in the June 21, 1794 issue of the Augusta Chronicle and Gazette his “printed directions” appeared under this introduction “As the soil and climate of this country is said to be well adapted to the cultivation of that valuable dying-root, Madder, and as the planting, mercantile, and manufacturing interest of the United States may be very much benefited by its cultivation: I make no doubt but that a publication of the following observations on it will be very acceptable…written twenty years ago, by a gentleman in South Carolina…”

On January 9, 1796 in the City Gazette and the Daily Advertiser, Robert Day offered for sale “To Lovers of Improvement Five to Six Hundred LOMBARDY POPLAR TREES, one year old, from ten to sixteen feet high they are the first in America of their age or kind. Also, Two Hundred PLANTS of the large purple sweet WATER GRAPE, One Box, containing Two or Three Hundred PLANTS of the large Cork ASPARAGUS, two years old."


Emerging professional gardeners, seed dealers & nursery owners in South Carolina

Just as it had in the Mid-Atlantic & Upper South, the method of selling seeds & plants changed dramatically in South Carolina at the end of the century. However, in South Carolina, the change began well before the American Revolution. The growth of urban economies gave rise to new commercial gardening ventures, nurseries & seed stores, operated by professional gardeners who initially imported & then grew their own seed & plant stock.

Plant Dealer & Garden Writer Martha Logan

Martha Logan (1701-1779) first advertised her gardening wares in November 1753 in the South Carolina Gazette. She offered for sale “seeds, flower roots, and fruit stones at her house” on the Green, near Trotts Point. Martha Logan was the daughter of Robert Daniell, Landgrove and Deputy Governor of South Carolina. She was born December 29, 1704, and married George Logan, Jr. on July 30, 1719. Widowed by 1741, she was keeping a boarding school for children where they would be “carefully taught to read, write, dance and work several kinds of needle-work” in a “pleasant, airy situation” on the green near Mrs. Trott’s point. But her first love was gardening.

Martha Logan wrote a “Gardener’s Kalendar” that appeared until well past the turn of the 19th century in various almanacs. In the March 14, 1768, South Carolina Gazette she advertised seed imported from London: “A Fresh assortment of very good garden seeds and flower roots, with flowering shrubs and box edging beds, now growing in her garden.” Her notice establishes that box was used for edging in pre-Revolutionary gardens.


Gardener & Plant Dealer John Watson

One of the most important working gardeners & seed dealers of the last half of the 18th-century in South Carolina was John Watson. He came to the province seeking work as a gardener from London in 1755. By December 10, 1763 he advertised in the South Carolina Gazette that he had imported from London, “a proper assortment of garden seed, flower roots, me, which he will sell reasonably.”

In 1764, when John Laurens built his "large, elegant brick house of sixty feet by thirty-eight," with piazzas on the south & east sides overlooking the marshes & Cooper River. He & Martha Laurens created a 600' by 450' brick-walled botanical garden, containing such exotics as orange, olive, lime, capers, ginger and guinea grass, with the aid of John Watson.

By September of 1765, Watson advertised an expanded line of garden wares advertised in the South Carolina Gazette. Beside garden seeds and flower roots, he offered “…a great collection of fruit trees, Of all kinds, which have been grafted and budded from the best fonts in the province, with a great variety of English grape vines.”

On February 4, 1778, Watson added clover seeds to his offerings. By the November issue of the South Carolina Gazette for the same year, he noted for sale “a great variety of Tulips, hyacinths, lilies, anemanies, ranuculuses, double jonquils” as well as asparagus roots.

His wares became more exotic by his November 28, 1776, notice in the South Carolina Gazette, Watson offered for sale “Sweet Almonds, Filberts, English Quinces, Olives, China double flowering Peaches, Almonds and Pomegranates.”

On January 1, 1778 his ad in the South Carolina and American General Gazette offered “Hazel Nuts Nutmeg, Myrtle flowering Trees….Magnolia or Laurels fit for Avenues, etc. any height from three to twenty, Artichoke.”

John Watson’s last notice appeared in February of 1789, when he offered “seedling cassenas for hedges, tallow trees for exportation.” In March 1789, John Watson died. His sons James Mark and John ran the nursery, until young John left South Carolina in 1802, finally selling “Watson’s Gardens.”


Gardener William Bennet

Another gardener who came from England to South Carolina seeking work was William Bennet. In his initial ad for public work in the South Carolina and American General Gazette on May 13, 1771, he also noted “Seed to be sold,” which he had apparently brought with him from England. In the October 1, 1778, issue of the same publication he was still offering unspecified garden seeds for sale.

In in 1786 & 1787, someone claiming to represent Peter Crouwells, a well-known Philadelphia florist, who had immigrated from Holland, advertised in the South Carolina Gazette on December 11, 1786, “for sale, an extensive variety of the most rare and curious Bulbous Flowers, Roots & Seeds, which have never appeared in this country before they are just imported from Amsterdam…the most choice sorts of Hyacinths, double Jonquillea, Polyanthos, Narcissusses, Tarcetts, Tulips, double Tuberoses, Pasetouts, Carnations, with a great variety of double Ranunculas and Anemonies, a sort of Rose Bushes, etc.” Ladies and Gentlemen could get a catalogue giving the names and colors of all the Bulbous Flowers.

In February of 1790, “John Chalvin & Co. Florists and Gardeners, from France” announced that they had brought “from France a great variety of Seed and Plants or flowering trees, lilly roots, jacinths, and crow feet of the scarcest and prettiest qualities; rose bushes of different colours; es also a great variety of pot and herbs seeds” which they had for sale at a very moderate price at No. 8 Elliott-street.


Gardener & Plant Dealer John Bryant

John Bryant was an English gardener who arrived in South Carolina, sometime before his 1794 marriage to Jane Thornton in St. Phillip’s Parish in Charleston. He first advertised in the City Gazette and the Daily Advertiser on June 6, 1795 as a gardener for hire, but also noted that, “like wise imports, on commission, all kinds of trees, shrubs and seeds, either useful or ornamental, from England, Philadelphia and New York.”

By his April 15, 1796 notice in the City Gazette and the Daily Advertiser, Bryant was importing seed for speculation rather than commission, “just Imported, a small assortment of seeds.” Bryant gained confidence in his buying public as the years passed, and by the December 15, 1807 issue of the Charleston Courier, he was advertising, “A QUANTITY of FRUIT TREES, FLOWERING SHRUBS and PLANTS, of the most esteemed for quality and beauty. The Fruit Trees consist of Peaches, Nectarines, Pears, Cherries, Plumbs and Quinces, of the largest size ever imported, for their age, into this state.”

In 1807, Bryant eventually became the Clerk of Market Hall, where many plants & seeds were sold & exchanged; but in the fall of 1808, Bryant died. His wife Jane kept the garden operating into the spring of the next year. She advertised in the February 13 issue of the Charleston Times “For sale at the late John Bryant’s Garden, upper end of King Street - grafted Peach, Nectarine, Apricot, Plum and Apple Trees; Pride of India…Pine Apple plants…Geranium, and other Green House Plants.” She did not advertise again.

But it seems that someone bought Bryant's store & stock. The Charleston Times of January 16, 1811, announced the opening of a new seed store King Street. The unidentified proprietor advertised: “New Seed and Plant Store, Wholesale and retail 200...220 KING STREET RECEIVED from London an extensive assortment of choice Garden, Field, Flower and Bird Seeds, the growth of 1810. Also, by the ship Minerva, from New York, a large supply of fresh American SEEDS, together with the former Stock of fresh Seeds on hand, making the most complete and extensive assortment of Seeds ever offered for sale in this city. On hand, a large assortment of inoculated FRUIT TREES, among which are all the most approved kinds of Peach, Pear, Apple, Cherry, Plum, soft shelled Almond, Dwarf Pear, Dwarf Apple; Fruit and Flowering Shrubs, Red and White Antwerp Raspberry, that gives remarkable large Fruit, Red and White Currant, English yellow Jesamine, Lilach, with a large assortment of Plants, Garden Tools, Flower Pots, Hyacinth Glasses, Bulbous Roots, Split Pease, Oat Meal, Flour or Mustard, Etc.”


Botanist, Nusreryman, Gardener, & Writer Robert Squibb

Robert Squibb, botanist, nurseryman, gardener, and writer, had published his catlogue-style book, The gardener's calendar, for South-Carolina, Georgia, and North-Carolina: Containing an account of work necessary to be done in the kitchen and fruit gardens every month in the year, with instructions for performing the same. Also particular directions relative to soil and situation, adapted to the different kinds of plants and trees most proper for cultivation in these states. He called himself a nursery and seedsman of Charleston, South-Carolina. The book was printed by Samuel Wright and Co. for R. Squibb, and recorded in the secretary of state's office, agreeable to the act of Assembly. (Price six shillings.), in 1787.

Squibb had announced his upcoming book with no undue modesty in the Charleston Evening Gazette of July 4, 1786. He declared that his patrons needed a gardening book to fit their particular coastal climate, and English books only mislead them with their instructions.

Squibb offered seeds for sale in the newspaper on August 19, 1795 in an issue of the City Gazette and Daily Advertiser, “THE Subscriber, after many years practice in this state, is fully convinced that garden seeds saved here are much better than those imported and does hereby forewarn his friends and customers against depending on foreign seeds, in particular such as onion, leek, carrot, parsnips, parsley, celery, lettuce, endive and spinage.”

In 1801 Squibb advertised using much the same technique in the Augusta Chronicle and Gazette of the State of Georgia on March 14: “GARDEN SEEDS. THE Subscriber having taken up his residence in Augusta, as Market Gardener, and the saving of Seeds being a branch of his profession, intends from time to time, both to import and save seeds of the very best kinds."

Squibb declared that he was offering his services & plants out of a sense of public responsibility, "He considers it a duty he owes to himself and fellow citizens, to remind them of the numberless impositions that for some years past have taken place in this city, by sale of garden seeds, which from their age of the inexperience of the collectors, have either not vegetated or else produced a degenerated offspring, by which the public have been much discouraged in the cultivation of gardens. To remedy this evil he offers for sale a small assortment of SEEDS collected from his own plants."

However, in 1802, Squibb was back in Charleston at his old garden. Squibb called his garden and nursery, “The Botanic Garden.” In the June 8 1802, issue of the Charleston Times, he advertised, “that he has imported from London, a small assortment of GARDEN SEEDS, in excellent order. Also a few kinds of Seeds on his own saving, equal to any ever saved in this state. Market Gardeners may be supplied with London Salmon Redish Seed, at one dollar per pound.”

Robert Squibb died on April 22, 1806 at Silk Hope Plantation near Savannah, Georgia, and was buried there. However, an ad for the “Botanic Garden” appeared in the Charleston Courier on November 2, 1812, “At the Botanic Garden. A variety of Elegant PLANTS, Such as Liqusiriniums, Geraniums, Cleroaedrems, Rosa Multifloras, double and white Oleanders, Flowering Heaths, Laurustkius.”


Gardener & Seed Dealer Charles Gross

Charles Gross was a gardener on King Street in the 1790 Charleston City Directory, who bought a lot for his garden in Hampstead in 1792. From there he continued to work as a gardener and sold seeds until his death in 1802.

Gardener & Seedsman Edward Otter

Edward Otter was another gardener & seedsman from England who brought garden seeds, peach trees, and Lombardy poplars with him when he came to Charleston In 1803.


John Foy's Seed Store

John Foy’s Seed Store at 184 Meeting Street was especially active in 1810. In the November 14, 1810 issue of the Charleston Times he placed this notice: "A General Assortment of Choice Garden Flower, and Bird SEEDS FLOWER POTS, and some excellent APPLE TREES: ASPARAGIS-Gravesend; BEANS-Long Pod, Mangan, Windsor; BEET-Green, Blood Pled; BROCOLO-Purple, White; BURNET; CABBAGE-Early York, Heart Shaped, Sugar Loaf, early and later Battersea, Drum Head, Red Dutch, Green Glazed, Bergin, Green Savoy; CARROT-Early Mom, Orange, Yellow; CAULIFLOWER-Early and Late; CELERY-Solid, Italian, Chardoon, Chervil: CUCUMBER-Early Frame, Shod Prickly, Long Green roman: ENDIVE-Green Curled, White Curled, Broad Leaf or Bataivian; BEANS-Bush, China, Liver, Yellow, Refugee, RUNNERS-Scarlet, White; LEIUCE-Impoerial, Grand Admirable, Tennis Ball; ONIONS-Silver Skin, Large White. Red; LEEKS; PARSLEY-Double and single; PARSNIPS:PEASE- Early Frame, Golden Hospur, Early Charlton, Dwarf Marrowfat, Pearl and Prusian; Radish-Early Frame Salmon; White and Red do., White and Red Turnip, Saisafy, Sanzonara, Sorrel; SPINACH-assorted; TURNIP-assorted; BIRD SEEDS-Canary, Hopp, Maw, Rape; HERB SEEDS-assorted; FLOWER SEEDS-assorted; a few TULIPS and HYACINTHS; Assortment of most approved PEAR and APPLE TREES. JOHN FOY expects some PEACH and PEAR TREES, and also some APPLE TREES from the Botanic Garden, New-York."

By his December 24, 1810 ad in the same paper Foy added, “A HANDSOME assortment of FRUIT TREES."


Gardeners, Plant Dealers, & Botanists John Fraser & Sons

John Fraser & his son James were gardeners, botanists, & seed dealers active in Charleston from the 1780s, until James’ death in 1819. James remained in South Carolina during his father’s various returns to England.

In the Columbian Herald of December 17, 1795, James Placed the following advertisement. "GARDEN Seeds, JAMES FRASER, UP THE PATH. Has received 21 John Praiser, Nursery and Seedsman of Sloan Square, Chelsea, near London, per the ship Roebuck, A GENERAL ASSORTMENT OF CULINARY SEEDS."

In the December 6, 1808, Charleston Times, the following notice appeared, “FRASER & SON HAVE received by the schooner Blazing-Star from New-York, several hundred handsome PEACH, NECTARINE and APRICOT TREES a few handsome FLOWERS, SHRUBS, AND PLANTS.”

The June 1, 1806, issue of the Times carried a notice that, “Fraser & Son, Have imported from London, A GENERAL assortment of GARDEN and FLOWER SEEDS, which will be warranted as genuine, and all of the crop of 1808."

In 1810, they advertised, "A variety of English Garden & Flower Seeds; Flowers; Flower Pots; and a few rare Plants, the proper of Mr. John Fraser, botanist, having finished his collection of American plants. The seeds will be put up in convenient lots, for the accommodation of the purchaser. Any Ladies or Gentlemen who wish to be supplied annually with warranted Garden, Agricultural or Flower Seeds, and Roots, or choice Fruit Trees, will please send their orders to the said office, or address them to Messrs. MASERS & SONS Sloan Square, Chelsea, London."


William Dobbs Seed & Plant Store

William Dobbs operated a Seed & Plant Store at 315 King street. He advertised in the December 2, 1811 edition of the Charleston Times: "For sale at wholesale and retail, an extensive assortment of Choice Garden Flowers and Bird seeds, the growth of 1811. Also, a great variety of Double Flowering Hyacinths; double, single, parrot and sweet scented Tulips; Renunculus’s: Ixia Crocata; Persian Iris, white and yellow Narcissus; Gladiolius, Garden Tools, Flower Pors, Hyacinth Glasses. Upwards of 4000 Inoculated Fruit Trees, among which are all the most approved kinds of Apple; Pear, cherry, Plum, Peach, Apricot, Nectarine, Hughe’s Crab, Chinese, and Syberian Apple, soft shelled Almond. Quince, Goosebery, red white and black Currant, Filbert Nut, Antwerp Rapsberry. Ornamental Trees and Shrubs - doable flowering Peach, Cherry, and Almond, spired Fruitrix, Mountain Ash, English yellow Jessamine, dwarf variegated Althed, Venetian Shumach, Guilder Rose, Burgundy and Moss do. Balm of Gilead Fir."

Unfortunately, Dobbs died in the fall of 1812. His inventory of December 3, 1812, gives a glimpse of the property owned by the seeds: “Rose Apple Trees, Rosemary, Squills, Double Tube Roses, Amaryths, Peach Trees, 40 Canary Birds, Seeds, Bird Seed, shovels, spades, bird cages, pees, 2 green Houses and glasses, garden tools, Glasses for Roots, Shelves of Jars with Seeds in them Double Seeds Box”

In October 1812, Dobbs property was put up at auction through ads in the October 13 and 22 editions of the Charleston Courier. “All the Personal Estate and Stock in Trade of WM. DOBBS, late of Charleston, Seedsman, deceased; consisting of a variety of elegant and choice Plants and Shrubs, in boxes and pots, various kinds of Seeds and Roots; Gardening Utensils; a variety of empty Flower Pots; an assorting of Crockery Ware: together with his elegant collection of Singing Birds; consisting of Canary and Mocking Birds; a Glass Case, containing stuffed Birds; empty Bird Cages; a few Botanical Books; Also, his two Green Houses with sashes. ALSO Several hundred choice Fruit Trees, now in the ground.”


Philippe Stanislaus Noisette (1772-1835) Nurseryman & Seed Dealer

Another gardener & seedsman active in Charleston in the same period was Philippe S. Noisette. Philippe was a member of a distinguished family of nursery owners who had been gardeners to French nobles. He first moved from Paris to Haiti, when he was a young man and fell in love with a dark-skinned Haitian woman whose name was Celestine. In 1794, because of the Haitian slave revolution, he & Celestine relocated to Charleston, where he was offered a position as Superintendent of the South Carolina Medical Society Botanical Gardens.

He was especially interested in the production of sugar cane & ran this ad in the November 14, 1814 edition of the Courier. "P.S.NOISETTE begs leave to inform the Planters of south Carolina that he has successfully cultivated, for some pears past, in his garden at Romney Village, opposite Mr. Turpires farm, the Sugar Cane; and that he has at this moment canes form which Sugar may be extracted. In consequence of this great advantages likely to be drived to this state, from this valuable plant, he offers cuttings for sale, to such as which to increase their wealth, and that of their country, et the rate of Five Dollars for a hundred buds, or eyes."

"He has also in his garden, a great quantity of FRUIT TREES, grafted by himself of the best kinds from Europe; such as different kinds of Peaches, Nectarines, Apricots, Plumbs, Pears, Apples, Figs and Grapes; as well as many foreign, Ornamental Trees, Shrubs and Plants. Also for sale, a collection of garden SEEDS, FLOWER SEEDS & FLOWER."

Philip Noisette's personal life was as interesting as his professional accomplishments. Because of the miscegenation laws of South Carolina, Philippe was forced to declare his wife, Celestine, his slave. They had 6 children who also became his slaves. The 1830 Federal Census recorded him as a single white man owning eight slaves, who are believed to be his wife & at least five of his six children.

In 1821 Charleston, records show that Phillipe Stanislaus Noisette, "Botanist of Charleston," stated that "under peculiar circumstances" he became "the Father of Six children, begotten upon his faithful Slave named Celestine." For many years it had been his intention to free his family, but the "passage of the late Law upon this subject" prompted him to seek their freedom now by the passage of a legislative act.

Shortly before his death, in 1835, Philippe petitioned the state of South Carolina for the emancipation of his faithful wife, now his slave, Celestine & their six children. Philippe died without knowing the results of his petition. Philippe’s family was in fact later emancipated and allowed to secure their inheritance & remain in the state of South Carolina.

In 1859, the South Carolina House of Representatives was petitioned to let the "mulatto" children of Philip Stanislas Noisette remain in South Carolina, as free persons of color. By his will Noisette had directed that the children, born of his enslaved wife, Celeste, be removed to some other country, where they would be free. The children, however, were "attached to the laws of the County, and very unwilling to remove."

Intrigue also followed Noisette's botanical accomplishments. An 1889 journal on botany reported the following information, "The Noisette Rose is a daughter of America. She was born one day in the garden of a brave citizen of Charleston, South Carolina, Mr. John Champney. It was obtained by fertilizing a Musk Rose, Rosa Moschata, by pollen from the China or Bengal Rose. Botanists called the new creation Rosa Moschata hybrida, and Rosa champneyana indifferently. But after awhile the name was superseded by that of Rosa Noisettiana in this way: At Charleston there lived a gardener named Philip Noisette, who was of French origin. This man fertilized one of Champney's hybrids, Champney's Pink Cluster, and getting from it another variety sent it in 1814 to Louis Freres, of Paris. The Rose became rapidly famous, and the name of Noisette replaced the first name of Champney, for the new race... The flowers of the Noisette are highly fragrant; they are numerous, double, and charm by the variety and delicacy of their colors." John Champneys, who lived southwest of Charleston, was an import-export merchant, whose trade was so successful, that he had his own wharves on Johns Island.


Comparison of seed dealers & nursery owners in South Carolina & the Mid-Atlantic & Upper South

The pattern established by the growing South Carolina seed & nursery trade is similar to that of the Mid-Atlantic & Upper South, but there are some significant differences. In the extended Chesapeake region, gardeners & plant dealers dedicated to promoting & selling plants found their most secure footing after the Revolution.

Female Pennsylvania & South Carolina nursery owners & seed merchants successfully began selling both useful & ornamental plants decades before the Revolution. In South Carolina, much seed & plant material was imported from England, both before & after the Revolution.

In the Chesapeake, the earliest seed merchants & nursery owners, appearing after the Revolution, were from France & Germany. After the war, Dutch bulbs & roots found their way into South Carolina as well; and itinerant French seed merchants also peddled their wares in Charleston, but English nursery proprietors continued to own the majority of Carolina businesses.

In both regions, English gardeners & nursery owners came to dominate the local seed & nursery trade by the turn of the century. Both Chesapeake & Carolina garden entrepreneurs offered a full range of stock from greenhouse plants to seeds for field crops, from traditional medicinal herbs to fragrant shrubs by the beginning of the first decade of the 19th-century.

Seed merchants & nursery owners in both areas aggressively advertised their services & stock (at both retail and wholesale prices) in regional newspapers, & sometimes offered free printed catalogues to prospective clients. Gardeners in both regions sold seeds & plants at their nurseries & stores; at local farmers’ markets; and through agents at various locations throughout their regions.

Gardeners from both regions sold seeds & plants imported from Philadelphia & New York, as well as those from their local suppliers. A new nationwide network of capitalistic nursery & seed business was nipping at the heels of traditional garden barter exchanges in the Mid-Atlantic, Upper South, & South Carolina as the 19th-century dawned over the horizon.


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Garden Larborers in the Mid-Atlantic & Upper South

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Surprisingly, landed gentry & small town merchants & artisans employed the same kinds of help in the garden during the latter half of the 18th century in the Mid-Atlantic & Upper South. (That region usually includes Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Washington DC, & Virginia; but my research seldom is all-inclusive for the entire area.)

Hard-working Annapolis craftsman William Faris used apprenticed & indentured white servants, free & slave blacks, & his own family to maintain his Annapolis garden. At the homes of the gentry, the family seldom helped with garden tasks, except that the wives usually managed the daily activities of the kitchen garden, as well as the house staff.


Before the Revolution, most wealthy landowners also employed indentured whites & free & slave black as their primary garden staff. Later, they began to hire independent professional gardeners.

Independent professional gardeners plied their trade much earlier in publicly-owned gardens than in the gardens of the gentry. While laborers in one form of bondage or another maintained most privately-owned Mid-Atlantic & Upper South pleasure gardens, the church & state often used independent professionals to supervise their planting efforts well before the War for Independence.

Gardeners at Publicly-owned Gardens

In Virginia early in the century, a succession of professional gardeners, who were not serving under an indenture, worked at institutions of the royal government in Williamsburg, including the Governor’s Palace & the College of William & Mary.

Some of these professional gardeners held pristine credentials. James Road, an assistant to George London, Royal Gardener to King William & Queen Mary, came to Virginia in 1694 to collect plants for shipment back to Hampton Court Palace & probably to lay out the earliest gardens at the college.

He was followed by Englishman Thomas Crease, who supervised the gardens at both the college & the Governor’s Palace from 1726 until he died in 1756. James Nicholson, who was born in Inverness, Scotland, sailed to the colony in 1756, to garden at the college, remaining in the position until his death in 1773, at which point he was earning the unusually high salary of 50 pounds a year. James Wilson began as college gardener in 1773, after a politically unsuccessful tenure as palace gardener from 1769 through 1771, & he managed to serve as head gardener until 1780.

The royal government appointed its first native-born Virginian, Christopher Ayscough, to the post of head gardener at the palace in 1758. When he left the post in 1768 he was earning only 20 pounds annually for his labors. Immigrant English gardener James Simpson briefly replaced Ayscough at the palace for 16 pounds a year, but either the low wages or the high humidity caused him to beg to return home a scant year later.


John Farquharson, served as the palace’s head gardener, supervising the slaves, who did the daily labor, from 1771 until 1781, when the palace, by then a military hospital, was destroyed by fire.

Many members of the colonial clergy were interested in both the ornamental & the practical aspects of gardening. Between 1739 & 1765, Father Arnold Livers, a Jesuit priest who was raised in Maryland, kept lists of both his kitchen garden plants & the flowers grown in the parish gardens, as part of his official church records. Sometimes the church employed professional gardeners.

The Society of Jesus occasionally paid independent garden contractors to maintain their kitchen & medicinal botanical gardens. In May 1741, Father James Whitgrave, at Newtown, Maryland , hired William Hues as gardener, his payment to be partially in cash & partially in tobacco.

Gardeners at Privately-owned Gardens

Private Mid-Atlantic & Upper South landowners, who did not have the benefit of public or church monies, usually relied on the cheaper labor of indentured servants & slaves to install & maintain their gardens.

In 1765, eight years after moving to Annapolis, craftsman William Faris began in earnest to plan his small city property, just as his gentlemen neighbors were turning their attention to ornamenting theirs. On August 8, Faris contracted gardener William Jennings from England to work under an indenture, to assist him in transforming the town lots that sat beside & behind his house into gardens for both use & beauty.

After 4 years, Faris apparently had developed his town property to such a point that it could be maintained by less skilled labor, so on Marcy 3, 1769, he placed a notice in the Maryland Gazette offering to sell the remaining time of his servant gardener.

Rented Servant Gardeners

Mid-Atlantic & Upper South landowners commonly rented the unused time of their indentured gardeners to others. The practice of renting out servants & slaves with special skills allowed those who could not afford to buy their indenture or the slave to have an opportunity to use their expertise in the planning & installation of their gardens or to undertake special projects without a large capital outlay.

Occasionally, landowners simply lent idle or unfriendly garden servants to family & friends. In the spring of 1751, in Williamsburg, John Blair Sr. (1687-1771) lent to Peyton Randolph (1722-75) his gardener, of whom “Mrs. Randolph gave a fine account.” The servant had a history of picking fights with Blair’s slaves, & in the end, apparently Blair valued his slaves more that his feisty gardener. Shortly after the servant’s return, Blair “ordered the gardener to go, for I couldn’t bear him.”


Even the wealthy rented the services of others’ skilled workers, when they undertook extraordinary projects. Charles Carroll of Annapolis rented two servant gardeners in 1770. He wrote to his son, “I will give Colonel Sharpes Gardener 3 pounds per month computing 26 Working days to the Month & I will allow the Man who Works with Him 40/ per month if He b a good Spadesman.” When these particular rented servant gardeners arrived in Annapolis, Carroll was less that enthusiastic, “Mr. Sharpes…Gardener…I do not like His looks as they are very Scottish, He may buy Rum.”

Indentured & Convict Servant Gardeners

By the time the younger Carroll returned to Annapolis after completing his education in Europe, in 1765, the grounds has already been set in some order. The Carrolls had begun working on their gardens in 1730, with the assistance of a servant gardener. Later, when planning the extensive renovations of their property, the Carrolls decided to buy the indenture of a 22-year-old Welsh convict gardener, in addition to renting the two gardeners from Colonel Sharpes.

Over the next few years they directly employed several indentured servant gardeners as slaves to dig drainage ditches. (The gentlemen themselves were busy ordering seeds, grasses, & clover from their English factors.) In 1772, various laborers built garden gates & a washhouse, & by 1774 brick masons had laid the brick wall surrounding the gardens.

Stonemasons & slaves completed a sea wall at the bottom of the garden terraces in 1775, & the next year laborers were erecting the two octagonal pavilions that would sit 400 feet apart at either end of the sea wall. The servants’ & slaves’ final addition to the grounds, a bathhouse, was up & working in 1778. The artisans & gardeners who achieved these complicated additions to the Carroll grounds at Annapolis worked side by side with Carroll slaves regularly assigned to garden work.

By the 1780s, the Carroll garden was established & only needed to be maintained, so after that date the Carrolls employed few new white garden indentured servants, using for the maintenance work the slaves who had been trained during the renovation.

Similarly, young Annapolis attorney William Paca had traveled to England in 1761 to further his legal training. Shortly after his return, he married wealthy Ann Mary Chew, on May 26,1763, & began to plan his Annapolis home & gardens, which he began building in 1765. Paca employed at least one indentured garden servant, who doubled as a shoemaker, to help plan & construct his brick-walled pleasure grounds. His garden was dominated by geometric terraces that fell to a small naturalized wilderness garden boasting a pond, a Chinese-style bridge, & a classical pavilion.

The vast majority of pre-Revolutionary Mid-Atlantic & Upper South gardeners of whom there are records were indentured & convict servants from Scotland, Wakes, Ireland & England. Although slaves often assisted in the gardens during this period, their tasks or trades were usually not recorded, so it is difficult to verify their numbers.

Originally, most indentured servants imported into the Mid-Atlantic & Upper South worked in the labor-intensive task of raising of tobacco. The second half of the 18th century, especially in Maryland, witnessed growing urbanization & manufacturing as well as a steady diversification in agriculture away from tobacco & toward less labor-demanding crops, such as wheat. White indentured & convict servants increasingly became employed in a variety of trades.

Of the 30 gardeners identified in Maryland documents before the Revolution, all but four were white indentured servants. Many were seasoned gardeners. The first Maryland servant gardener appeared in Anne Arundel County records in 1720.

Mid-Atlantic & Upper South colonists looked for specific experience in their indentured servant gardeners. Charles Carroll of Annapolis asked each prospective gardener “How long he served, in what Place, in what places & Gardens He has Worked Since He was out of his apprenticesh[ip], in What Branch He has been Chiefly employed, the Kitchen or Flower Garden of Nursery, whether He understands Grafting Inoculating & Trimming.”

The Revolutionary War disrupted the flow of indentured & convict servants from Britain to the colonies, & between the end of the war & the turn of the century only five additional white indentured gardeners appeared in Maryland records.

During the 1770s, these indentured servants were usually paid between 6 pounds & 32 pounds per year plus their meat, drink, washing, & lodging. Garden servants often supplemented their regular duties in the winter by doubling as shoemakers, dyers, & weavers. Familiarity with the dyes produced by various plants led gardeners naturally into textile trades. The combination of crafts flourished outside the Mid-Atlantic & Upper South as well. Slaves who served as summer gardeners also sometimes doubled as shoemakers during the winter months.

Before the Revolution, at least nine convict gardeners arrived in Maryland. A few convict servants were sent to the Mid-Atlantic & Upper South to fill a special request, because they possessed as special skill of trade; but most were transported to Maryland docks, & then their labor was sold, much like other imported goods of the period.

Some of Maryland’s convict gardeners had practiced the gardening trade before arriving in the colonies, & one possessed an unusual knowledge of sophisticated gardening techniques. In January of 1768, Charles Carroll the Barrister, cousin to the Carrolls of Annapolis & Carrolton, wrote to his English agents, “I am in want of a Gardener that understands a Kitchen Garden…Grafting, Budding, Inoculating & the Management of an orchard & Fruit Trees…under Indenture for four or five years…There come in Gardeners in every Branch from Scotland at Six pounds a year.”


The requested servant arrived at Mount Clare later that year & was apparently well respected by the Barrister & his fellow gentry, even though he was a convict. When Carroll of Carrollton bought a gardener for his father at the docks in Baltimore, he asked the Barrister’s convict gardener to interview the new immigrant & then wrote his father, “I have bought a new gardiner from Captain Frost. I gave 23 pounds currency for him; he is not about 21 years of age, appears to be healthy & stout & orderly; he says he understands a kitchen garden pretty well; Mr. Carroll’s gardener examined him: he has 4 years to serve.”

Carroll Barrister’s convict gardener may have been a good judge of men, but he did have a few negative qualities. Five years into the man’s indenture, the exasperated Carroll placed & advertisement in the Maryland Gazette on May 6,1773: “TEN POUNDS REWARD…Ran away…a convict servant man, names John Adam Smith…by trade a gardener; has with him…a treatise of raising the pineapple, which he pretends is of his own writing, talks much of his trade & loves liquor.”

The issue of the treatise is an interesting one. In October 1770, Mary Ambler of Jamestown, Virginia, had visited Mount Clare & noted in her diary, “at the Garden…he is now building a Pinery where the Gardr expects to raise about an 100 Pine Apples a Year He expects to Ripen some next Sumer.”

It is remarkable that convict gardener Smith talked with Mary Ambler about pineapples in 1770 & had a treatise on the fruit with him in Maryland. The pineapple’s popularity had grown in England during the mid-1750, creating a demand for publications giving directions for its culture. John Giles (1726-97) published the first monograph on the plant in England in 1767. Since the Barrister’s convict gardener arrived in the colonies in 1768, his claim to have written his own treatise is an intriguing possibility.

Most gardeners who ran away during the pre-Revolutionary years were indentured servants, not slaves, & most records of them that survive are fugitive notices in contemporary newspapers. The advertisements placed to apprehend runaway gardeners described these servants ---their clothing, mannerisms, & bad habits---in hope of speedy identification & capture.

Many garden servants bore the scars of health problems such as smallpox, frostbite, cataracts, & past violence. Some convict gardeners wore double-riveted steel collars as a mark of their status especially if they had a history of “stealth of self.”

Occasionally masters placed a spiked iron collar around the necks of their white indentured servants for other offenses. In 1770, one of the servant gardeners of Charles Carroll of Annapolis got drunk & insulted several women in the Carroll family. Carroll threatened to have the man whipped, but the women begged for leniency on his behalf.

Carroll wrote to his son, “Squires was not whipt, He wears a collar in terrorem to others, & as a Punishment which He justly deserves, but I think to take it off soon. “ Carroll felt fully justified in often whipping his favorite servant gardener, John Turnbull, for drinking too much & was surprised when the man chose to work for Carroll no more when his indenture expired in 1772.


Apparently some indentured servant gardeners were unwittingly impressed into naval service at European ports during the last half of the 18th century. At least 3 men who ended up as gardeners in the Chesapake had jumped ship; when they arrived in the ports of the bay, in order to get back to terra firma. One of them was 30-year-old white sailor Pierre LaFitte, who fled a French privateer in Baltimore, hoping to return to his original trade as a gardener, further inland, at Frederick, Maryland.

LaFitte quickly came to enjoy some of the benefits of life on land but disliked others. He soon ran away from his gardening chores at Frederick as well; however, he did carry with him several silver spools & a 22-year-old French-speaking black girl wearing a green petticoat.

None of the white indentured servant gardeners who appear in escape notices of other pre-Revolutionary Maryland records were women, but one free white woman is known to have been working as a gardener in the Baltimore area at the turn of the century.


The average age of servant gardeners was between 20 & 30. When Charles Carroll Barrister was making his request to his English factor in January 1768, he wrote, “If the above servants are Turned thirty years of age I shall like them better as they are more Likely to be Riotous & Troublesome if young.”

There is no record of Annapolis craftsman William Faris contracting any white indentured gardeners after 1769. By this period, the clockmaker’s family was growing, & his youngsters worked as garden helpers from an early age. Even during the last fifteen years of his life, Faris occasionally called on his grown children for a little help in his garden.

Family Garden Helpers

All of the Faris children who were living close to home between 1792 & 1804 (when Faris was recording daily in his diary) helped in the garden, usually assisting a slave or hired help. Faris’s unmarried sons still living in Annapolis, who had apprenticed under their father before going out on their own as professional clockmakers & silversmiths, continued to serve as garden labor for their aging father, who was 64 years old in 1792. One son was 27 & the other was 23 in 1792.

The craftsman’s unmarried daughters all helped in the garden, until they left home. Faris first mentioned his youngest daughter’s helping in the garden in 1794, when she was fifteen. His two oldest daughters, unmarried & heavily into the Annapolis social scene, also assisted in Faris’s garden in 1799, when the eldest was 25 & her sister was 24.


Notation of garden work by Faris’s wife, Priscilla, appears only once. In his diary Faris noted that she was usually employed at “woman’s work.” She fed & sewed clothing for her family & helped Faris with his need for extra hands by raising a large family.

British agriculturalist Richard Parkinson & his family rented a farm in Baltimore County for several years at the end of the century before returning to England, where he wrote of his American experiences. Parkinson also noted that his children helped with gardening & farming chores but that his wife did not.

Slave Gardeners

Parkinson insisted that, of the help he had to hire outside of his immediate family, white agricultural & garden labor was inferior to black labor, “for all the white men I employed there ate much & worked little…the black man or slave is both clothed & fed at less expense than a white man…they bear the heat of the sun much better than any white man, and are more dexterous with the hoe.”

William Faris owned several slaves over the period of his residence in Annapolis, & his most constant gardening companion during the 1790s was his slave Sylva. Parkinson wrote of the advantages of buying female slaves, less expensive than males, to assist in Mid-Atlantic & Upper South agricultural pursuits. He noted that they could perform gardening tasks as well as male slaves, & “the women will be a saving…in the first place, & they will wash & milk.” Faris did indeed use Sylva to cook & help with general housework as well as to work regularly as his primary gardener.

In Virginia, George Washington employed both male & female slaves in creating his garden. A 1799 visitor to Mount Vernon wrote, “Here many male & female negroes were at work digging & carrying away ground to make a level grass plot with a gravel walk around it.”

Both Faris & Parkinson also rented the male slaves of others to assist with garden labor. Records show Stephen Bordley spending 3 hours each day during the growing season with his slave head gardener on his Wye Island plantation. Annapolitan Charles Carroll kept slaves at his Doughoregan Manor plantation to tend the gardens including Jack & Harry who appear in Carroll inventories as gardeners. Parkinson’s writings give a glimpse into the lives of the slaves he rented in Baltimore in the late 1790s: “Though you have them slaves all the day, they are not so in the night. All the black men I employed used to be out all night & return in the morning.”

No matter how the rented slaves spent their nights, they were expected to begin working vigorously the following morning. Shortly after Faris employed his neighbor Mrs. Brewer’s slave Harry, the craftsman wrote in his diary, “Man Harry crawled Home this morning between 6 & 7. Went to Working Dung on the older bed by the Walnut Tree.”

As Edward Lloyd IV designed & planted his Annapolis gardens in the 1770s, he, too, supplemented his indentured garden staff with slave gardeners, as had Dr. Henry Stevenson; when he installed the terraced falls & geometric flat garden at his Baltimore County seat, Parnassus, in the 1760s. Pennsylvanians also used slaves as garden help.

In Virginia, the Williamsburg gentry vied for the service of James, the slave of Nathaniel Burwell. He served under four head gardeners at the Governor’s Palace. Governors Botetourt (Norbonne Berkeley) & Francis Fauquier paid the Burwell family 12 pounds per year for his services, & Governors Dunmore (John Murray) & Patrick Henry each paid 14 pounds a year for his expertise. James was a master at pruning fruit trees, transplanting native seedlings, & forcing plants in hot beds & bell glasses.

Black slaves were often purchased by the professional white gardeners & plant merchants who appeared in growing numbers throughout the Mid-Atlantic & Upper South after the Revolution, to tend their nursery gardens, sell their stock at market, & maintain the gardens of their regular clients. Slaveowners knew they could learn from their enslaved servants.

By the end of the 18th century, Maryland slaveowner James Moss wrote in his journal, that his slaves raised thousands of watermelons on his plantation. His slave Mingo took them to market to sell in Baltimore after each harvest.

Professional gardener James Wilkes offered an unusually high $100 reward for his 25-year-old runaway slave gardener, John, in Baltimore in 1801. Two other independent Baltimore gardeners, Philip Walter & John Mycroft, also used slaves to assist to their gardens.

In November of 1803, Rosalie Steir Calvert of Riversdale in Prince George County, Maryland, wrote her mother, “My gardener John works as hard as four people—he is a good man.” John was one of the slaves from her husband George Calvert’s plantation, Mount Albion. However, in early 1805, Rosalie Calvert was unable to control her slave gardener and wrote, “I had to dismiss my gardener John because he had become so insolent. He has been back three times since, begging me to take him back.”

Free Black Gardeners

Free blacks also hired on to assist with garden chores. Between 1792 & 1804 a total of 16 free black men helped William Faris with his Annapolis garden tasks. Most were permanent free black residents of the town, but some were passing through & hiring themselves out as garden laborers for a season.

In the spring of 1792, Faris hired a black garden helper, Peter Shorter. Two days later the craftsman learned that Shorter was a runaway slave, & he immediately discharged the man. Faris usually paid 12 pounds per annum to his free black helpers. He did not specify in his diary the amount of work expected from the workers for pounds per month.

By 1790 blacks composed a third of Maryland’s population. In the city of Annapolis at the time of the 1800 census, out of a total population of 2,212 persons, there were 646 slaves & 273 free blacks. Between 1790 & 1800, the population of free blacks in Maryland increased about 144 percent. Slavery grew at a much slower rate.

One dramatic increase in the number of free blacks occurred as a result of the slave uprising in the French colony of Saint Dominique led by Toussaint L’ Ouverture. About 2,000 French-speaking refugees, including well over 500 of black or mixed racial ancestry, arrived in Maryland during the summer of 1793. Faris noted in his diary, “July 10, 1793. Yesterday & too Day there has been between 30 & 40 Vessels went to Baltimore, the most of the full of French people…one Vessel had near 1200 on board.”

After this French settlement, free black & white French gardeners-for-hire began searching for work in Maryland. These gardeners had a significant influence on Mid-Atlantic & Upper South pleasure gardening, as they introduced tropical varieties of plants & new garden designs into the region.

French-speaking gardeners became so numerous that Maryland seedsmen Sinclair & Moors published their 1825 trade catalogue in French as well as English. The contributions of the French refugee gardeners from Saint Dominique were extolled by orator John Pendleton Kennedy at the first exhibition of the Horticultural Society of Maryland: “They brought with the….the knowledge of plants & garden stuffs. After their arrival…Baltimore became distinguished for the profusion & excellence of fruits & vegetables.”

Throughout most of the 18th century, indentured white servants & free & slave blacks were the backbone of the garden labor force in the Mid-Atlantic & Upper South. White free white professional gardeners & nurserymen began to appear after the Revolution in the urban areas, such as Baltimore, it is likely that, until the Civil War, most rural Mid-Atlantic & Upper South pleasure gardens in Maryland were maintained by black gardeners, some of the free & some slaves, often ill treated.

On April 5, 1777, Virginia plantation owner Landon Carter, having surveyed his newly green fields & budding trees & just about able to taste the strawberries setting flower in his garden, wrote in his diary, “My gardiner now 5 days weeding his Strawberry beds & not yet half done them. They must be well whipt.”

Free White Gardeners

When independent white gardeners started proliferating after the Revolution, they hired out by the day, month, or year. Parkinson reported that he hired a white man in Baltimore in 1799 to mow at “a dollar a day, with meat & a pint of whisky.”

He also recorded the costs of labor of various agricultural & gardening tasks at different seasons of the year around 1800 near Baltimore. “Bartering in town costs one dollar & a half per day; at harvest-work, one dollar per day & a pint of whiskey.”

Several gardeners worked at four shillings per day in the 1700s in the Annapolis & Eastern Shore gardens of Edward Lloyd IV. One of these gardeners (with a highly improbable name), James Lilleycrap, worked as a contract gardener at the Lloyds’ Annapolis garden on a daily basis during 1778 & 1779. In February 1780, he contracted to work for a full year at 300 pounds.

Apparently Lilleycrap was a trained gardener hired to undertake major garden redesign & installation. He probably employed others to assist him & paid them out of the 300 pounds. Lilleycrap’s arrangement illustrates just one of the new approaches to pleasure gardening in Maryland after the Revolution.


Free gardeners had been searching for work in the Mid-Atlantic & Upper South well before the Revolution. As early as 1749, a notice in the Maryland Gazette announced, “James Cook, Gardener, from England…performs all Sorts of Gardener’s Work….by the Year.”

Cook initially had come to Annapolis to garden for Provincial Secretary Edmund Jennings four years earlier, as an indentured servant. Cook advertised for independent work as a gardener in 1749 & 1750, but evidently he was less than successful at finding steady employment.

On November 3, 1751, Cook reindentured himself as a gardener, this time to Edmund Jennings’ wife, Catherine. In 1752 the Jenningses attempted to sell the time of the indentured gardener, noting that he was “an extraordinary good Gardener… understands the laying out of new work or anything belonging to a Garden.”

Virginia also saw independent gardeners searching for work before the war . In 1766, an immigrant placed the following notice in the local paper, “Lately arrived in this colony a young man who professes himself a GARDENER, understanding both flower & kitchen garden…grafting & budding.”

Three years later, George Renney, an English gardener, advertised in the Virginia Gazette in Williamsburg “to undertake by the year to keep in order a few gardens at a reasonable price.”

Before the Revolution, a professional English gardener named Joseph Thompson also lived & worked in Williamsburg, but he sided with the Loyalists & was denounced by his neighbors. He left the area shortly after the war.

Ads in search of independent gardeners were not frequent in Maryland & Virginia before the Revolution (they were more common in Pennsylvania). Most gardeners ordered their garden servants from British factors or contracted for them, after their ship docked in port.

After the Revolution, gentlemen seldom sent to England for their gardeners but began to place advertisements for professional gardeners in local newspapers. Harry Dorsey Gough advertised in 1788, “I want to employ a complete gardener at Perry Hall…to undertake the management of a spacious, elegant Garden & Orchard.” A similar Baltimore notice in 1795 pleaded for a gardener who was specifically adept at managing strictly ornamental flower gardens.


In Richmond, Adam Hunter placed a notice in the local paper searching for a “Complete Gardener, with or without a family (the latter would be preferred)” for his land near Fredericksburg in Stafford County.

Towns such as Philadelphia, Baltimore, Annapolis, Richmond & Williamsburg did not hold a monopoly on pleasure gardening in the Mid-Atlantic & Upper South after the Revolution. In the 1790s & early 1800s, gardeners placed notices in the Maryland Herald & Elizabethtown Weekly Advertiser advertising a full range of services to prospective clients in Washington County & Frederick. These gardeners offered to lay out & manage greenhouses, hothouses, kitchen gardens, flower gardens, orchards, nurseries, & pleasure grounds.

After the Revolution, most professional gardeners began to sell their services aggressively, through newspaper advertisements & personal promotion. One independent gardener searching for work, Luke O‘Dio, wrote to President Thomas Jefferson on June 23, 1801. As proof to Jefferson that he has gardened for notable men, O’Dio stated that he had “done 2 pices of work on the Eastern shore of Marylan & one for a Wm Paca Esqr. Who was once Governor of this state & one for Mr. Chew near the same place.”

Other gardeners & nurserymen publicized themselves & their wares more subtly, by writing books on gardening. Two gardeners who lived in Anne Arundel County at the turn of the century were David Hepburn & John Gardiner. David Hepburn had been gardener at General John Mason’s estate on Analostan Island in the Potomac River, & at Cedar Park, the seat of Governor Mercer in Anne Arundel County. Cedar Park boasted a deer park, a rare feature on Maryland estates. Hepburn & Gardiner combined their knowledge with information lifted from English gardening books to write an early American gardening book, The American Gardener, which was published in Washington D.C. in 1804.


After the Revolution, white gardeners working in port towns such as Philadelphia, Annapolis, & Baltimore, were as likely to be European as the were to be British. Europeans were favored by some in the postwar years. One gentleman searching for a gardener in Baltimore in the 1790s wrote, “A Dutch or Frenchman speaking English would be preferred.”

In 1805, Rosalie Stier Calvert turned to Philadelphia artist William Russell Birch to draw up a landscape plan for Riversdale. She wrote that he was “busy making plans for the grounds of the house. I think he is very good at it and he is doing them with an eye to economy.” Her father wasn't so sure about the economy of Birch and wrote back, “glad to learn that you are using the architect Birch. You must not concern yourself about the cost of the plans. Copy them and send them to me. I’ll give you my observations.”

Occasionally foreign-born gardeners speaking little or no English confused their hopeful employers. In October 1816, Rosalie Calvert wrote her sister, “We have a German who seems to be knowledgeable and this greatly relieves me. One small inconvenience, however, is that he doesn’t understand a single word of English.” By March 1819, the frustrated gardener wrote her father, “I recently discharged my German gardener...He knew nothing at all and couldn’t tell a carrot from a turnip.”

Of the gardeners appearing in various Maryland records before the turn of the century, more than sixty appeared to be freemen working as professional gardeners, seed merchants, & nurserymen. Many were listed in the Baltimore city directories published with some regularity after 1796. These directories did not list slaves & only occasionally listed “free persons of colour” (the first of whom appeared in 1809). They did not distinguish between free & servant whites, & they were not a complete listing of all persons working in the town. Between 1796 & 1804, 33 independent gardeners were listed in the Baltimore city directories.

Apprentice Gardeners


The growth of professional gardening trades spawned a need for apprentices to assist the craftsmen in their daily chores while training to become the professional gardeners of the future. Young men who had apprenticed to other trades were sometimes called into garden service during the growing season. In Annapolis, William Faris used his clockmaking apprentice as garden help on several occasions.


At least three young apprentice gardeners appeared in Maryland records by the end of the century. Theses boys were employed by both professional gardeners & directly by owners of private gardens. In 1788, at age 8, William Lucas was bound out to Joseph Bignall, a professional gardener. Another 8-year-old, William Martin, was apprenticed to Jacob Eichelberger at his private residence in Baltimore County in 1786, to learn the art of gardening.


A lad named Cornelius Lary was bound out by his sister at the age of 10, as a gardening apprentice to John Toon, who operated Toon’s Garden in Baltimore County. Toon’s Garden was one of several commercial pleasure gardens operating in the Baltimore area at the turn of the century. In the 1800-1801 Baltimore City directory, the 10-acre Toon’s Gardens was described as being “situated about two miles down the [Patapsco] river…on an elevated situation,” & was said to “command a view of the city & bay...During the summer months,” the directory recounted, “a great concourse of citizens make excursions by land & water to these Gardens…with all kinds of refreshments.”


Occasionally gardeners advertised their need for apprentices through help-wanted notices in local newspapers. When the enterprising William Booth was establishing his nursery, he advertised, on March 2 1795 in the Federal Intelligence & Baltimore Daily Gazette, that he was looking for one or two boys between the ages of 10 & 12 to serve as apprentice gardeners. As ad inducement, Booth noted that in several years such trainees would be capable of managing the gardens of gentlemen’s county seats around Baltimore, which, he declared, were “going to ruin, for the want of a skillful gardener.”

Booth’s ad reflected the post-Revolutionary trends in professional gardening in the 18th-century Mid-Atlantic & Upper South. White indentured & convict servants from the British Isles & black slaves had toiled side by side to design & maintain Mid-Atlantic & Upper South gardens before the war with England.

After the Revolution, growing numbers of immigrant European, Caribbean, & British independent gardeners, assisted by white apprentices & free & slave blacks, took over the work. The American Revolution was the turning point in the development of independent gardening in the newly emerging capitalist nation, However, some aspects of Mid-Atlantic & Upper South gardening did not change until the Civil War. As visiting English agriculturalist Richard Parkinson pointed out at the end of the 18th-century, “where the livelihood is got out of the poor soil--it is pinched & screwed out of the negro.”
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Seed Dealers & Nursery Owners from Philadelphia to Williamsburg

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Hard to believe, but we are entering the 2nd decade of the 21st century. Soon nursery catalogues will be filling up the mail box for us to pore over, while the snow covers & melts & then recovers our gardens. A warm fire, a few trips to the grocery store, & those brightly colored catalogues with their glorious depictions of flowers, fruits, & vegetables guaranteed to emerge from those tiny, little seed packets will keep us occupied indoors for hours on end. There were no grocery stores or mail boxes filled with seed catalogues in early America.

In the 17th & 18th century British American colonies, families planned, planted, & maintained garden seeds in a kitchen garden in order to produce the food that sustained their lives from day to day.

When the colonial family finally could produce enough to support & maintain their everyday lives, they turned to the seeds of flowering plants to ornament their surroundings & to impress their neighbors. This essay will follow the story of their seed suppliers from purveyors of basic survival to saavy promoters of luxury & status.

Seeds of Chives

Garden seed basics (very, very basic)

Garden seeds are living plants in a resting embryonic state carrying on metabolic activitity. Some seeds rely on wind or insects for pollination, while others are self-pollinating.

Annuals are plants which grow from seed to maturity in a season. Kitchen garden plants such as corn, cucumber, melons, pumpkins, and squash are annuals. Pole beans were favored for the ease of drying the pods.

Biennials are plants that need to be stored over a winter season, before they flower & go to seed the following season. Cauliflower, beets, cabbage, carrots, onions celery, & turnips are among these biennials. Some plants, such as some varieties of cabbage, may need to be grown to eating size before wintering over. If they are not sufficiently mature, they may not flower in the spring or seed reliably.

Perennials are plants that return each year such as rhubarb & asparagus. If planted from seed, they begin producing seed a year or two later.

Fennel seeds

Saving delicate seeds from season to season

Seeds were one of the colonists' most precious possessions. They saved each fall's seeds to plant the coming spring. Seeds were often saved in bags & nailed to a rafters to keep them high enough to protect them from hungry rodent interlopers.

The process of saving seeds was never the same from year to year, as it depended on the weather; & there was always an element of risk involved. Excessive warmth & moisture could destroy seeds that had been dried to save overwinter. Heat & high humidity encourage fungi, molds, & bacteria which destroy the seeds' viability.


Colonial families grew most of their vegetables & herbs in the kitchen garden. In the spring & again in the fall, they planted the seeds of their cool weather crops such as broad beans, cabbages, kale, lettuce, mustard greens, onions, parsnips, peas, radishes, spinach & turnips. As the warmer months approached, they set out seeds for their summer crops such as pole beans, beets, carrots, cucumbers, okra, potatoes, muskmelons & watermelons, as well as seeds for their fall crops of squash & pumpkins. Seeds of perennial herbs were tucked here & there in the garden for flavoring food & fighting disease.

The period from the end of January until the middle of March was sometimes referred to as the Six Weeks of Want. Some years this precarious span of time lasted much longer than 6 weeks. By this time, most stored vegetables had been eaten, but planting had not yet begun.

Early spring greens, both cultivated & wild, could satisfy the family's craving for something fresh after months of pickled & salted foods. Throughout the entire growing season, the family preserved vegetables for the winter hoping they would last until the new plants began to appear.

Almost any vegetable could be pickled in a vinegar or salt brine with spices. They preserved some vegetables, like peas & beans, simply by drying them. Most root crops like carrots, beets & parsnips could last for months buried in damp sand in a cellar or yard, if squirrels & rodents did not discover their existance. Pumpkins, squash & onions could be stored in a clean, dry place such as the loft in the farm house, where next year's seeds might also hang in bags waiting for the spring season.

Because seeds from this period were not hybridized, but reproduced naturally through pollination, colonial gardeners attempted to keep their seeds pure & prevent cross-pollination with other species.


Ordering seeds & plants from English factors

Before the Revolution, many well-to-do colonial gardeners depended on England for much of their seed & plant materials, which the gentry often ordered through British agents in trade for tobacco or other goods, which they had produced & sent to England.

Buying seeds from arriving British ships

Although the process was never predictable, farmers, shopkeepers, & craftsmen could buy seed, when it arrived in a general cargo shipment from England from local merchants.

Trading seeds & plants with other colonial gardeners

Gardeners interested in botany exchanged seeds & plants early within the colonies & acrossed the Atlantic. John Custis (1678-1749) lived & gardened Williamsburg. John Bartram (1699-1777), the Philadelphia gardener, explorer, & botanist, wrote to English merchant & botanist Peter Collinson (1649-1768) that Custis’ Virginia garden was second only to that of John Clayton (1694–1773), the English-born Virginia naturalist of Gloucester County. Collinson corresponded & exchanged plants with several American naturalists. His famous garden at Mill Hill contained many American plants, obtained from both Bartram & Custis.

Both gentry & middling gardeners depended on trading plants & seeds with others to keep their gardens growing. Even the wealthy Virginian William Byrd (1674-1744) wrote in 1721, “I went to see the Governor to beg that he spare me some bulbs for my garden.”

William Byrd II, like his father, Colonel William Byrd, Byrd was a wealthy planter on his inherited plantation Westover, on the James River in Charles City County. He served as president, of Virginia's Governor's Council, as did his father. He recorded his observations on natural history as well as life in colonial Virginia.

Wealthy gentleman gardener Byrd was looking to decorate his grounds, but most gardeners of this period were still simply trying to plant enough edible stock to survive.

Seed trading went on throughout the 18th-century & well into the 19-th century. Rosalie Steir Calvert (1778–1821) of Riversdale in Prince George's County, Maryland, exchange seeds & plants with her father who had returned to Europe.

In 1806, Rosalie Calvert asked for “some offshoots of your tulips, and above all, some rose bushes.” In 1807, she wrote for, “the double violet, the white and the blue...You have a superb collection of double poppies at the Mick—would you send me some seed? It is such a small grain that you could slip it in a letter.”

The following year, she desired, “the double yellow wall-flower and some little double pinks, too...they make a very fine display.” Of the yellow & puce mallows growing from seeds her father sent, she wrote they were “extremely beautiful and admired by all.” In 1803, Rosalie Calvert also planted a hydrangea from her uncle Joseph, which had not “bloomed yet, but I think I am going to have three small ones.” She also mentioned importing some hyacinths herself directly from Haarlem in 1807.

Seeds went both ways across the ocean, as Mr. Stier requested some American varieties. In 1803, Rosalie Calvert sent her father “some seeds of the tulip-poplar and red cedar trees,”; and in 1807, she sent additional tulip-poplar seeds and acorns, and “a few seeds of the fragrant white azalea...the most beautiful wild shrub in Maryland.”

In 1809, she was not able to send tulip-poplar seeds, because of the American government’s embargo on trade with Europe. Somewhat disparagingly she wrote, "Do you still admire this tree more than any other? We don’t find it worthwhile to plant here. For wood for carpentry, it is only good when it is in large forests; trees that have been exposed to the wind are worthless, and they are not beautiful when they are old, having few branches and fewer leaves."

She also offered to “Try to get you the catalogue of Bartram of Philadelphia, who every year gathers seeds of different plants and trees of this country for sale.” She traded bulbs or seeds with her neighbors & friends as well.

In 1806, she wrote that Richard Tasket Lowndes of Blenheim, Bladensburg, & of Bostock House, also in Prince George's County, Maryland , had a “fine collection” of hyacinths and “each year we exchange some.” She noted in 1809, that Benjamin Ogle II, of Belair, in Bowie, Maryland, “always has a nice collection and we frequently exchange.” She also gave her father’s old friend, Dr. Upton Scott of Annapolis, one of her favorite tulip bulbs, the Marshal of France, in 1806. Scott also traded seeds & bulbs & plants with his watchmaker neighbor William Faris.

Collecting specimens from the surrounding countryside

Shopkeepers & gentry alike also collected alluring specimens for their gardens from the surrounding woods & meadows. Gentlemen gardeners would send their slaves & servants out to collect new plant species for their gardens. They might be sent out to collect raspberries & other edible wild fruit in the proper season.


Emerging Seed Dealers & Nursery Owners

The method of selling seeds & plants changed dramatically in the Mid-Atlantic & Upper South after the Revolutionary war. The growth of urban economies gave rise to new commercial gardening ventures, nurseries & seed stores, operated by professional gardeners who initially imported & then grew their own seed & plant stock. (The Middle Atlantic & Upper South usually includes Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington D.C., & Virginia, but I am seldom able to be all-inclusive of the region in my research.) See a companion posting on South Carolina seedsmen, nursery owners, & gardeners.

Americans, who had traditionally lived on farms & plantations, were moving to the towns & opening up shops to take part in the growing urban economies. They had smaller properties on which to grow their food, but now they also had access to the public farmers markets which sprouted in most urban areas. They were acqiring enough money & stability to plant pleasure gardens on their grounds.

Some of the new professional shopkeepers & artisans also retained staffs to lay out & maintain the gardens of others under contractual agreements. Even rural gardeners, who had traditionally saved seeds & traded seeds & plants with neighbors & friends on both sides of the Atlantic, began to patronize capitalistic seed merchants & nursery owners.

These garden businessmen aggressively advertised their wares to a public increasingly concerned with the status of the ornamental, in addition to utilitarian aspects of their gardens. Leisure time was growing in the new nation, & both the gentry & their less wealthy neighbors could now find the time to indulge in an avocation such as pleasure gardening.

Dealers in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

From the middle of the 18th century on, gardeners close to Philadelphia could take advantage of local seed & nursery businesses. Although many believe that David Landreth (1752-1836)(who opened his nursery & seed business in 1784) was the first dealer in the area, he was not. John (1699-1777) & William (1739-1823) Bartram had been selling & exporting seeds & plants since the middle of the century from their 1728 botanic garden at Kingsessing just outside Philadelphia. Another early gardener in Philadelphia was James Alexander, who sold vegetable & herb seeds imported from London in Philadelphia in 1751.

From the 1750s through the 1770s, the most successful Philadelphia seed merchant was a Welsh woman, Hannah Davis Dubre (1723-1776) (sometimes spelled Duberry), of the Northern Liberties area two miles from the Philadelphia city limit, on the Wissahickon Road. She & her husband, Jacob Dubre (1719-1768), married in Philadelphia in 1758, & owned 33 acres, which later increased to 50 acres, with a bearing orchard of grafted fruit trees, some meadow land, a large brick house & detached brick kitchen with a pump just outside the door, a barn & several other outbuildings, & a large kitchen garden that included many asparagus beds.


Even after her husband’s death in 1768, “the widow Dubre” kept her garden & business going. From 1754 through 1775 she offered locally grown seed & fruit trees on both a retail & a wholesale basis. She warranted her seeds as “fresh & good: & sold large quantities to local shopkeepers for resale to their clients & to exporters for trade out of the country."

Before 1770, she kept agents in town, including John & Samuel Bissell, John Lownes, & Ann Powell near the Work House on Third Street, to supply both retail & wholesale customers who did not want to travel the 2 miles out of town to visit her plantation. After 1770, she used James Truman, a butcher & meat curer in Elbow Lane near the Harp & Crown Tavern, as her city agent.

By 1766, she was advertising that she could fill large orders for “Captains of Vessels” for exportation to the West Indies “on the shortest Notice.” Over a twenty-year period, Hannah Davis Dubre expanded her operation from a small local seed concern to a large-quantity supply business catering to merchants & international traders.

Peter Crouwells & Co., Gardeners and Florists, in Philadelphia, advertised seeds, bulbs, & roots for sale as far away as the Viginia Gazette in 1786.


In 1780, David Landreth & his family left England for Montreal, Canada, where he intended to establish a seed business. Fairly quickly, the harsh Canadian climate forced him to reconsider; and he relocated to Philadelphia. On January 7, 1784, Landreth started his first garden center on High Street, which is now 1210 Market Street. He chose Pennsylvania; because people appeared to have more free time there, & he believed Philadelphia was the center of wealth & sophistication in the United States. David Landreth was joined in Philadelphia seedstore by his brother Cuthbert Landreth (1746-1828) in 1789.

Initially, he sold seeds in the City of Philadelphia & to several nearby estates; but his business and his reputation grew steadily and soon he numbered George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Joseph Bonaparte (Napoleon’s brother who married a Baltimore belle) among his customers.


The independent seed dealers & nursery owners converging on the mid-Atlantic area immediately after the Revolution usually were immigrants rather than native-born & European rather than English. A Frenchman, Peter Bellet, was one of the first commercial seedsman & nurseryman appearing in Maryland’s written records specifically offering garden plants & seeds directly to the public.

Bellet’s evolution from itinerant seed peddler to economically successful nursery owner typified the general trend of commercial seed & plant marketing during this period. Beginning as a traveling seedsman based in Philadelphia, where he operated a seed store, Bellet eventually settled in Williamsburg. He continued to advertise throughout the mid-Atlantic after his relocation to the old Virginia capital & sold plants to Maryland & Virginia gardeners for twenty years.

As a traveling seed salesman, Philadelphia-based Peter Bellet advertised in Baltimore in December of 1785, that he was visiting the French section of the town for a brief period & had for sale an extensive variety of flowers & seeds “not know before in this country.” Bellet was lodging in the hear of the town, at The Sign of the Lamb tavern on Charles Street, where he offered prospective customers a printed catalogue listing the names & colors of his bulbs, which were imported from Amsterdam. He carried more practical kitchen garden seeds with him as well.


Bellet’s first Maryland advertisement reflected the preference for Dutch flowers among the middle & upper economic groups in the early republic. Bellet also brought with him “elegant artificial flowers & feathers suitable for the Ladies.” Bellet called himself a “florist & seedsman” on this trip & advertised his flowers as “rare & curious.”

Seedsman Bellet’s plant stock became more expansive during successive selling trips. On a journey through the mid-Atlantic almost ten years later, in early 1793, Bellet advertised roots & seeds “collected from Europe,” & he offered to send orders to Europe as well. At this point, Bellet was still based in Philadelphia & had entered into partnership with another European seedsman, M. Kroonem.

They were also promoting stock that was more difficult to move from place to place than seeds & bulbs, such as trees & shrubbery, & had begun cultivating their imported European seed in Philadelphia soil. Bellet was offering a surprising number of varieties of flowers, especially roses, for sale. Bellet & Kroonem called themselves “florists, seedsmen, botanists, & gardeners” &, as Bellet had done earlier, advertised their extensive plant varieties as “curious.”

On this selling trip, his first taken as a partner, Bellet traveled his usual loop from Philadelphia to Baltimore to Richmond & back. In Richmond he took lodging at Hyland’s Tavern, where he again had on hand a free printed catalogue of his stock for prospective clients. To earn enough to support himself, Bellet also hired out to graft & inoculate trees & lay out flower gardens as reasonable rates. His partner, Kroonem, remained in Philadelphia to mind the store & tend to the nursery garden.

Dealers near Richmond, Virginia

In this bustling new capitol, Richmond, Peter Bellet had competition for the gardening business. In the spring of 1791, Southgate’s General Store advertised fresh, imported garden seeds. Twenty years earlier, garden seeds were being offered at Campbell's Store in Richmond, and also at Miles Taylor's Store in 1775. Taylor was selling seeds imported from Italy.

In the 1760s, William Wills of Richmond & his asscociate John Donley in Petersburg, offered imported garden seeds for sale at their stores. Also in Petersburg, A. Adams advertised seeds that he had for sale in the Virginia Gazette and Petersburg Intelligencer on February 24, 1797. In 1798, Stratchan & Maury of Spotsylvania County were offering grafted apple trees for sale in the same publication. Joseph Davenport offered seeds for sale in his Petersburg store in 1803. By 1803, Samuel Bailey was selling grafted apple trees in New Kent County.


The spring of 1792, a seed dealer named Minton Collins was importing flower roots and seeds from London & offering them for sale at the Shot Factory, at Richards Denny’s store near the market house, & at James Dove’s on the main street. In the fall of 1792, Collins consolidated his stock at Denny’s store & had imported new seeds & flower roots to sell to his growing clientele. By the next spring, he had collected enough capital to open his own shop, devoted solely to garden stock. In 1793, Collins introduced the West India Burr Gherkin (Cucumis anguria), a pickling cucumber plant, originally brought from Angola to the Caribbean by slaves.

Collins’ Seed & Flower Store sat on the north side of Main Street between the post office & the bridge over the James River. He sold retail to the general public & wholesale, or at least “upon moderate terms,” to country shopkeepers from surrounding Virginia communities. By the turn of the century, Collins was also receiving seed from the northern states & had customers in Richmond, Norfolk & Portsmouth.

West India Burr Gherkin, a pickling cucumber

Dealers in Fredericksburg, Virginia

Another businessman, George French, appeared on the scene in 1798, importing seeds from London for sale in nearby Fredericksburg. The competition in the Richmond & Fredericksburg area may have nudged Peter Bellet to look for a more permanent & lucrative base of operation.

Apparently, on one of his trips to Richmond, Bellet ventured east to Williamsburg & found the quiet of its ordered streets & gardens a great relief from the mud & hassle of Philadelphia & Baltimore. In late 1793, he dissolved his partnership in Philadelphia & moved to a 5-acre plot in Williamsburg.

Dealers in Williamsburg, Virginia

Bellet was not the town’s first seed merchant or seed trader. John Custis (1678-1749) was a prominent citizen of Williamsburg with an impressive garden. He sent seed to John Bartram, the Philadelphia naturalist & botanist. Bartram told Peter Collinson that Custis’ garden was 2nd only to that of John Clayton, the English born Virginia naturalist of Gloucester County. Custis also sent seeds across the Atlantic to Peter Collinson (1694-1768), who was a wealthy English Quaker woolen merchant & botanist.

Williamsburg gardeners Thomas Crease & James Nicholson, who worked consecutively at the college of William & Mary from 1726 until 1773, supplemented their income by selling seeds & plants grown in the college’s botanical & kitchen gardens, as did James Wilson after 1779.

Terraced Kitchen Garden at the Governor's Palace in Williamsburg

William Smith advertised trees he was growing in his nursery in Surry County in the 1755 Williamsburg newspaper, as did Thomas Sorsby of Surry County in 1763.

Orchardist William Smith offered, "Hughs’s Crab, Bray’s White Apple, Newton Pippin, Golden Pippin, French Pippin, Dutch Pippin, Clark’s Pearmain, Royal Pearmain, Baker’s Pearmain, Lone’s Pearmain, Father Abraham, Harrison’s Red, Ruffin’s large Cheese Apple, Baker’s Nonsuch, Ludwell’s Seedling, Golden Russet, Nonpareil, May Apple, Summer Codling, Winter Codling, Gillefe’s Cyder Apple, Green Gage Plumb, Bonum Magnum Plumb, Orleans Plumb, Imperial Plumb, Damascene Plumb, May Pear, Holt’s Sugar Pear, Autumn Bergamot Pear, Summer Pear, Winter Bergamot, Orange Bergamot, Mount Sir John, Pound Pear, Burr de Roy, Black Heart Cherry, May Duke Cherry, John Edmond’s Nonsuch Cherry, White Heart Cherry, Carnation Cherry, Kentish Cherry, Marrello Cherry, Double Blossom Cherry, Double Blossom Peaches, Filberts Red & White."

Nurseryman Thomas Sorsby had available, "Best cheese apple, long stems, Pamunkey, Eppes, Newtown pippins, Bray’s white apples, Clark’s pearmains, Lightfoot’s Father Abrahams, Sorsby’s Father Abrahams, Lightfoot’s Hughes, Sorsby’s Hughes, Ellis’s Hughes, New-York Yellow apples, Golden russeteens, Westbrook’s Sammons’s, horse apples, royal pearmains, a choice red apple, best May apples, Sally Gray’s apple, Old .England apple, green apple, Harvey’s apple, peach trees [Prunus persica], and cherry trees."

In 1759, the Governor's Palace gardener placed the following ad in the Virginia Gazette, "Just imported in the Good-Intent, Capt. Reddick, and to be sold Cheap, for ready Money, by the Subscriber, living at the Palace, in Williamsburg; where Gentlemen may depend on being well served, with the following Garden-Seeds, by - Their humble Servant, Christopher Ayscough.

"Six-week Peas, Charlton Hotspur Peas, Marrowfat Peas, Nonpareil Peas, Spanish Morrotto Peas, Sugar Dwarf Peas, Windsor Beans, Long-poded Beans, White Blossom Beans, Green Beans, Nonpareil Beans, large English Turnip, early Dutch Turnip, early Dutch Cabbage, Sugar-Loaf Cabbage, Battersea Cabbage, large Winter Cabbage, Red Cabbage, Yellow Savoy Cabbage, Green Savoy Cabbage, early Colliflower, late Colliflower, Colliflower Brocoli, Purple Brocoli, curled Colewort, Scarlet Raddish, short-topped Raddish, white Turnip Raddish, black Turnip Raddish, white gass Lettuce, black Gass Lettuce, brown Dutch Lettuce, Nonpareil Lettuce, Silesia Lettuce, white curled Endive, white Spanish Onion, English Onion, Leek, Chardoon, Italian Celery, white Mustard, Garden Cresses, Winter Cresses, Charvel, Clary &c."

In Williamsburg, shipments of seeds arriving from England were also sold in local shops. In 1773, a Virginia Gazette notice announced, "JUST arrived, in the Unity, Captain Goosley, and to be sold at John Carter's store, for ready Money, a Variety of fresh GARDEN SEEDS, namely, Early Golden Hotspur Peas, Early Charlton Peas, Ledman's Dwarf Peas, short Sugar Peas, Dwarf Marrow Peas, Long Pod Beans, Windsor Beans, Canterbury Dwarf Kidney Beans, Silver Skin Onion Seed, Carrot Seed, white round Turnip Seed, Salmon Radish Seed, Spinnage, solid Celery, curled Parsley, curled Cress, Early Dwarf Sugar Loaf Cabbage, large ditto, large English Ditto, best Colliflower Seed, purple and green Brocoli, white Coss Lettuce, Silensia."

When early peas became the rage in the 1770s, 2 stores in Williamsburg, Greenhow Store & the Robert Nicolson Shop, which did not often sell seeds, offer peas for sale among their general merchandise lines.

James Wilson was the gardener at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg. In 1774, he placed an ad in the local paper, "Just Imported, and to be SOLD by JAMES WILSON, Gardener at the College, the following SEEDS, which are all fresh and the best of their Kinds,

PEASE - Earliest, best Charlton, Golden Hotspur, Nonpareil, Marrowfat, Green Rouncival, Spanish Moratto, and Glory of England.

BEANS - Mazagon, Long Pod, Windsor, Early Hotspur, and White Blossom.

CABBAGE - Early Yorkshire, Early Bottersea, Early Sugar Loaf, White Dutch, Red, and Large Hollow.

TURNIP - Early Dutch, Norfolk Early Green, and Round Red.

RADISH - Salmon, Short Topped, White Spanish, and Black-

Green and Yellow Savoy, White and Purple Brocoli, Early and Late Cauliflower, Red and White Beet, White Mustard, Round Leaf and Common Cresses, Solid Celery, London Leek, Early Carrot Skiret, Lettuce Seed of all Sorts, fine Spinage Seed, Cucumber Seed of Different Kinds, and a great Variety of other Seeds, too tedious to mention."

When gardener James Stewart, who was also a dyer & weaver, returned in 1775 from several months in England, he offered seeds & roots of dye plants for sale to his fellow Virginians with instructions on their cultivation & the manufacture of dyes for linen, cotton, & woolen fabrics.

After Peter Bellet settled in Williamsburg, he immediately expanded his stock & began referring to himself as a nurseryman, & from that point on, he ceased proposing to lay out & tend the gardens of others. In the winter of 1799, he advertised from his property on Gallows Street, now known as Capitol Landing Road, that he was still selling imported flower bulbs.

Bellet quickly fit into the Williamsburg community. Local gardener Joseph Prentis was one of his early customers. Prentis’s brother-in-law, Peter Bowdoin wrote from his plantation, Hungars, asking him to purchase plants for a friend at Bellets nursery & offering to expedite the transaction: “My boat will go to the Capital Landing for the purpose of bringing a number of Trees from Bellets.” Bowdoin also asked Prentis to give him plants from his personal garden but added, “if you have not as many to spare as will make fine beds, supply the deficiency from Bellets.”

Joseph Hornsby, who lived in Williamsburg in the Peyton Randolph house from 1783 until 1796, purchased from Bellet just before moving to Kentucky. When he decided to move West, Hornsby began gathering up seeds & small plants from his own garden & sorting them into labeled bags. Those plants that he could not easily remove, he purchased from Bellet to plant in his new garden in Kentucky. In his Diary of Planting & Gardening, in March 1798, he reported that he had sown the seeds from Bellet, & “the Plants were very fine.”

Throughout the mid-Atlantic, private gardeners were also selling bulb stock directly out of their gardens to meet the growing appetite for flowers among their neighbors. Henri Stier, a well-to-do neighbor of William Faris, like Faris, sold tulips & other bulb plants to fellow Annapolitans by opening his garden at full bloom in the spring, so that buyers could mark with notched sticks the varieties they wanted dug from the ground after the blossoms & leaves had faded away in the heat of summer.

Bellet used the same technique to sell his flower stock. He appealed to the immediacy of the senses rather than the memories of his prospective customers, in the days before color-illustrated advertising. Bellet also offered flowering shrubs & ornamental trees as well as more practical fruit trees & vegetable seeds.


In the fall of 1799, Bellet’s newspaper advertisements listed prices for the first time, & they noted that he was still importing seeds & plants from London. The ad promised that he would prepare a new catalogue for potential clients in the coming spring. By 1799, Bellet has also added grafted fruit trees to his stock.

Bellet’s next public notice appeared in October 1800. Now permanently settled in Williamsburg, his business was developing into a regional nursery & seed distributorship. How seeds, trees, & shrubs were shipped to mid-Atlantic gardeners who placed orders was not specified in the newspaper notices. By 1800, Bellet was collecting & saving seed from his own Virginia beds & offering them for sale to the public in addition to his usual imported seed stock. He offered to sell seed by the pound or by the box.

Nurseryman Bellet expanded his base of operations southwards to Norfolk. He completed his 1801 catalogue during the slow winter months of 1800, & offered it to prospective buyers at the store of a French merchant named Bonnard, at the Norfolk Market. Bellet advertised in the fall of 1801, that he had 8,000 growing trees for sale plus his usual supply of flower & vegetable roots & seeds. His nursery stock consisted os 1-4 year old varieties of grafted trees including 46 apples, 44 pears, 30 peaches, 18 plums, 10 nectarines, 10 apricots, 20 cherries, 4 almonds, 5 mulberries, and 5 walnuts. He had imported 80 varieties from Normandy alone.

By 1803, Bellet’s stock of fruit trees at this Williamsburg nursery had grown to 20,000; and he had regular sales agents in both Petersburg & Richmond who would accept orders for seed & plant stock. His agents in nearby towns were given their own supply of free printed catalogues. In an 1803 advertisement Bellet offered to sell his trees wholesale, retail & on credit. So large was his stock that he was proposing to supply “country stores” with seeds & plants for resale “on the most moderate terms.” Store owners intrigued by the idea could apply to Bellet directly at this nursery in Williamsburg or to his Richmond agent, said the ad.

Bellet had increased the size of his 5 acre nursery in 804, by buying 15 acres of adjoining land. Here he planted even more trees, but apparently his health & energy were beginning to fail. After 10 years in Williamsburg, Bellet decided to return north. In the winter of 1804, he offered for sale his 20-acre nursery of “well-manuered” land plus his gardening tools, eight slave gardeners, & livestock.


By now his stock of fruit trees had grown to 100,000, but he had allowed his seed supply to dwindle to only “a small quantity,” & he had bought no new perishable stock. Bellet’s intention was to sell his stock, slaves, & tools before May 1, 1805, or put them all up for sale at public auction on that date, after which he planned to sell any remaining plant stock “on lower terms than usual” & then more to New York State. Orders for any part of the property or the whole could be left with Bellet’s agents in Richmond or Petersburg. Bellet had sold 5 acres of his nursery & was attempting to dispose of his last two slave gardeners, when he placed his final newspaper notice two winters later, just before he died in Williamsburg.

Itinerant seed huckster Peter Bellet’s astute marketing tactics had expanded his mid-Atlantic business from a nursery of a few seedlings to 100,000 trees in little more than a decade of residence in Williamsburg.

Dealers in Baltimore, Maryland

A second professional nurseryman from Europe, a German immigrant named Philip Walter, arrived in Maryland in 1786, a little over a year after Bellet’s first advertisement appeared. Walter wanted no part of the traveling life. He was a serious gardener who yearned to ten the land all year round.

Walter was determined to begin his American business venture as a settled commercial nurseryman specializing in orchard plants. He decided to sell his products near the busy Market House at the foot of Belvedere, the elegant estate of then-colonel John Eager Howard. Townspeople came to shop at the market on Wednesdays & Saturdays, when neighboring farmers would load up their wagons with produce to sell & journey to Howard’s Hill.

With an establishment at the market, Walter figured, clientele would be drawn continually to his location, & they would be inspired to new heights in gardening by the awesome example of Colonel Howard’s park like gardens & grounds. Walter first advertised in the spring of 1787, calling himself a seedsman & a nurseryman, but he concentrated on selling primarily orchard stock. Twenty years after arriving in the busting port town, Walter was robbed & murdered at his nursery, on Hookstown Road.

Crops maturing in Thomas Jefferson's Kitchen Garden at Monticello

While some European seed merchants & nursery owners such as Walter & Bellet decided to settle down & grow their stock in mid-Atlantic soil, others continued to import & travel. In the spring of 1790, John Lieutaud, a gardener & florist from France, passed through Maryland selling seeds, roots, & bulbs imported from France & Holland. Lieutaud used much of the same method of operation as his fellow Frenchman Bellet did on his mid-Atlantic selling rounds.

Lieutaud, who was from the province of Dauphiny, also offered the “curious” a printed catalogue. He boarded at the home of Captain Gould, on busy Charles Street in Baltimore, where potential customers could come to pick up a catalogue & , he hoped, buy seeds. To supplement his income Lietaud proposed to prune, graft, & inoculate trees “at a moderate price.”


The next European seedsman & nursery owner to appear in Maryland records was Maximillian Heuisler, in immigrant from Munich, Bavaria. While Heuisler settled permanently in Baltimore, he often made day trips to neighboring towns, such as Annapolis, to meet local gardening enthusiasts & to hawk his wares. He was a regular seed supplies to William Faris.

Heuisler personally delivered both plants & seeds to his mid-Atlantic customers. His wife never knew whether her husband would return from these trips with cash, new plants, or baskets of food: Heuisler traded for new seeds & plants to expand his varieties & stock, he sold for cash, & he accepted produce in trade.

Plant dealer Heuisler’s first advertisement as a commercial seed vendor appeared in 1791. Aggressive in advertising his wares, he was always looking for new ways to attract potential customers. He paid to have his advertising notice in the February 1795 issue of a Baltimore newspaper illustrated with a woodcut of potted plants. His nursery situated on 40 acres about 1 ¼ miles north of Baltimore on the Philadelphia Road, was depicted on an 1801 map of the town. He regularly advertised an extensive assortment of trees & shrubberies, both useful & ornamental, for mid-Atlantic “plantation,” orchard, kitchen, & flower gardens, plus fresh garden seeds of every description.

Heuisler was thought by one contemporary to be the best professional gardener in Baltimore at the end of the 18th century. In 1803, Heuisler sold his Philadelphia Road nursery & established one closer to his Annapolis market, on the Portland-Ferry-Branch, near the southwest corner of Baltimore. Maximillian Heuisler died in 1816, but his son, Joseph A. Heuisler, carried on his father’s determination to build & maintain a well-respected seed & nursery business throughout much of the 19th century.


At least two immigrants to Baltimore who became professional nursery owners near the turn of the century began their careers in America as gardeners under contract to busy gentlemen who had planted elaborate gardens for both food & status. Each of these gardeners saved enough capital to become successful nursery owners as the new century dawned.

One was a French immigrant, John Bastian, who had come to Baltimore to supervise the elaborate gardens at Harlem, owned by Adrian Valeck. The other was James Wilkes, who had been apprenticed as a gardener in England then immigrated to oversee the gardens of George Grundy at his country house Bolton in Baltimore, where Wilkes worked for 3 years.

When Wilkes went into business for himself in 1798, he continued to offer his services as an independent gardener, available by the day, month, or year. To further supplement his income, he worked as a part-time nursery gardener for Heuisler. By 1803, he had amassed enough capital to buy Heuisler’s Philadelphia Road nursery, when the Heuislers opened the nursery in southwest Baltimore. Wilkes sold fruit trees & a large variety of ornamental shrubbery, greenhouse plants, & seeds imported from London, the same stock that had been the basis for Heuisler’s business at that location. From 1803 until the 1820s, Wilkes sold vegetables, flowers, & exotic hothouse & greenhouse plants from his nursery.

John Bastian arrived in Maryland before 1790, & was still working as gardener for the estate of Harlem in 1802. By 1808, he had begun his own independent seed & nursery business near Baltimore, & it continued until 1839. Even when his contract to tend Harlem had ended, Bastian augmented his income by tending gentlemen’s grounds & gardens. Just as many of his European colleagues did, Bastian offered a full range of services to the mid-Atlantic gardening public, from designing to planting to “repairing.”


The most successful nursery business in the late 18th century Maryland was operated by an Englishman William Booth and, after his death, his wife, Margaret. They began the business around 1793, with the sale of imported seed at two locations. Booth advertised in a Baltimore newspaper in April of 1793, that he was lodging at the home of Thorowgood Smith, Esq., in downtown Baltimore, & offering garden seeds imported from London. His second location was at Bowley’s Wharf, at the harbor, where local shopkeepers acted as his agent.

By May of 1794, Booth had accumulated enough capital to lease a house, & he moved next to one of the town’s best-known citizens, Dr. James McHenry. Although Booth did not locate near one of the town’s busy farmers’ markets, the house was just a half-mile west of Baltimore town, & his choice of location was a clever one. The popular McHenry had been George Washington’s surgeon during the Revolution & was instrumental in developing the Constitution afterwards, so travelers & neighbors often stopped to pay their respects to him. In fact, the sociable McHenry organized regular fox hunts from his grounds into the surrounding countryside.

Initially Booth sold only seeds, which he imported from London. He worked tirelessly on the grounds & his stick during the summer, fall, & winter of 1794 & by spring of 1795, was ready for broader ventures. He placed a large notice in a local newspaper informing the public of his intention to establish a permanent nursery & seed shop on his premises adjoining the property of McHenry, with whom he had negotiated a long-term lease.


McHenry’s land & now Booth’s new shop & home were located on the road leading to the “Federal City” & to busy Frederick town. Also, access by road to the traditional Annapolis market was easier from the south side of Baltimore than from the north of the water-bound east side.

Booth had leased not only the land but also McHenry’s greenhouse & had bought all of McHenry’s hothouse plants, which he decided to offer for sale in pots. The surgeon had raised plants for medicinal use as well as botanical interest.
Nurseryman Booth had a grand design for these potted plants, & he advertised it in a Baltimore newspaper. He proposed that he ladies of the town & its environs ornament their interiors with these & other potted plants during the summer months, return them to Booth for care over the winter (for a slight fee), & receive them the following spring in “full perfection.” He had not only come up with an ingenious method for continuing to gain income from the pants after selling them, he planned to expand his clientele by appealing to the ladies & suggesting that they use plants to decorate the interiors of their homes, traditionally the real of women.

During this same period, Grant Thorburn, a New York grocer who would become a famous Atlantic coast seed dealer, was drawn less intentionally into the world of ladies & plants. Until 1801, he had operated a grocery store, where he also sold flower pots. “About this time,” he later wrote, “the ladies…were beginning to shrew their taste for flowers.” To make his pots more attractive, he painted some green & set them in a window. They were so popular that the following spring he added geraniums to his green pots, & from that point on he gave up the grocery business to become a seed & plant merchant.


Serendipity played less of a role in William Booth’s promotion of garden enterprises. Booth’s capitalistic brain had been working relentlessly during the winter of 1794-95. That spring he simultaneously announced a plan to carry on a kitchen garden business that would supply specific customers with fresh vegetables of their choice by the week, month, or year. The concept of planting pre-chosen vegetables to supply produce on a contractual basis to his clients was an inspired version of the traditional truck farming of the region. It was Booth’s clever attempt to control both his supply & demand. Booth continued his original line of business, selling seeds he imported from London, as he launched his nursery, greenhouse, & kitchen garden ventures in 1795.

Booth was soon the most successful professional gardener in Maryland. His training in Britain had been sound. The visiting English agriculturalist, Richard Parkinson, reported that booth had been a gardener for the Duke of Leeds before his arrival in America.

In addition to his many other gardening pursuits, William Booth designed & planted some of Baltimore’s most famous gardens, including the terraced falls at Hampton & those at Solomon Birckhead’s Mount Royal.

Booth’s 1801 seed & plant catalogue is the earliest one remaining from the period in Maryland & lists hundreds of plants for the kitchen garden, sweet herbs, medicinal (“physical”) plants, “seeds to improve the lands,” fruit trees, annual flowers, biennial & perennial flowers, “herbaceous plants,” bulbous roots, forest trees, flower shrubs, evergreens, greenhouse, & “stove plants,” including “a great variety of new & elegant sorts.”

Nineteenth-century Maryland historians claimed that William Booth was among “the earliest botanists, florists, & seedsmen in the United States” & that “his own grounds. . . Were celebrated for the care & exquisite cultivation with which they were kept.” Booth’s nursery was depicted on the 1801 Warner and Hanna Map of Baltimore. When Booth died in 1818, his inventory recorded a diverse stock, which were being made available to the Baltimore public at his seed store & at his 5-acre nursery. His widow, Margaret Booth, continued to operate the seed store & nursery through the 1820s.

English immigrant Booth’s attempts to appeal to a broader market were apparently successful. In September of 1799 he advertised to the public a huge collection of “rare exotic” plants, raised in a greenhouse in cooperation with other seed & plant dealers in Philadelphia & New York. The advertisement also linked the name of William Booth with some of his well-known Atlantic seaboard colleagues, David & Cuthbert Landreth in Philadelphia & David Williamson in New York, who were acting cooperatively as agents for the sale of this large collection. Also arriving in Philadelphia at the turn of the century was Bernard M’Mahon, the most important of the early 19th century seed & plant dealers and garden authors.

Back to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

The most important of the new garden entrepreneurs was Bernard M'Mahon (1775-1816), who came to Philadelphia from Ireland in 1796, to establish a seed and nursery business. "He enjoyed the friendship of Thomas Jefferson...the Lewis and Clark expedition was planned at his house...(he was) instrumental in distributing the seeds which those explorers collected."

In 1806, M'Mahon wrote The American Gardener's Calendar, which was printed in 11 editions between 1806-1857. A Philadelphia newspaper called the book "a precious treasure" that "ought to occupy a place in every house in this country."

M'Mahon's main motive in writing was to expand his profitable nursery enterprise. Almost all of America's earliest indigenours gardening books served as the liason between the nurseryman & an emerging middle-income group of home gardeners. An increasing leisure time & interest in the craft grew, there were not enough trained professional gardeners to go around nor the funds to employ them.

By 1806, M'Mahon understood the proud new country well enough to appeal to guilt and national hubris in his efforts to sell his readers on the concept of pleasure gardening. In his introduction, M'Mahon lamented that America had "not yet made that rapid progress in Gardening...which might naturally be expected from an intelligent, happy and independent people, possessed so universally of landed property, unoppressed by taxation or tithes, and blest with consequent comfort and affluence."

M'Mahon concluded that one reason for this neglect was the lack of a proper reference book on American gardening, a situation which he volunteered to rectify. In 1804, his catalogue of seeds included 1,000 "species."

By the end of the 18th century, enterprising plant & seed dealers were successfully spurring on ever-widening circles of clients to new heights of interest in plant collecting & in emerging botanical class & order delineations. They also persuaded their customers that greenhouses & stovehouses were status symbols. Their sales pitch was definitely aimed at those who would see plant collection as a reflection of their superior taste & knowledge.


Mid-Atlantic gardeners at the end of the 18th century did not depend solely on seed merchants & nursery owners for their seeds & plants. In fact the gentry & the middling sorts alike were still using traditional techniques of exchanging plants. Wealthy Charles Carroll of Carrollton wrote from Annapolis to friends in England for seeds he remembered from his years of British schooling. While the Carrolls continued to buy seeds from London & the colonies, the elder Carroll instructed his son as to which neighbors would give him seeds & starts from plants he admired.

During the same period, Annapolis craftsman William Faris both bought & traded seeds & plants. On March 3, 1792, he noted in his diary, “Planted Carrots & parsnips that Mr. Wallace sent me for Seed;” & on May 5 of that year he wrote, “Doct Scott sent Me Some Carnation or rather pink plants & I sent him some Evening primrose plants.” Faris traded for or received as gifts most of his garden plants & seeds, as did the majority of gardeners at the turn of the century.

When craftsman Faris did buy seeds & plants from Baltimore, he sometimes sent cash for the garden stock by way of ship Captain John Barber, who ran an regular shuttle between Annapolis & Baltimore. Faris recorded in his fiscal accounts on March 7, 1798, “Cash sent by Capt. John Barber to Mr. C. Robinson for garden seeds-7/6.” Usually, however, Faris bough his Baltimore seeds from Maximillian Heuisler, who personally delivered them to Annapolis. The capitalistic nursery & seed business was nipping at the heels of traditional garden barter exchanges.

Some gardeners still ordered their stock directly from England, especially the gentry, like the Carrolls, who had been ordering goods from Britain through their factors for decades. Faris’s neighbor, Dr. Upton Scott made a list of flowers from the English garden periodical Curtis’s Botanical Magazine & recommended to the Edward Lloyd family, at Wye plantation on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, that “if cultivated at Wye, (they) would add greatly to the beauty & elegance of that delightful Place.” Scott advised the English dealer, “It is hoped the Nurseryman employ’d will endeavour to execute this Commission with fidelity & dispatch …under an assurance that, if he transacts the Business satisfactorily, he will have more calls upon him from this quarter of the Globe.”

But direct orders to England diminished as early mid-Atlantic seed merchants & nursery owners began to offer a wide variety of seeds & plants, both imported & locally grown, to the public. They could appeal directly to potential customers’ senses, by selling flowers at the height of their bloom, & to status seekers who were amassing plant collections, by offering unusual stock.

They also tailored their sales promotions to the changing gardening market in the region, as it expanded beyond traditional gardeners, who planted principally for sustenance, to those who planted for pleasure & status during their growing leisure time, decorating both house & grounds with plants.

Gardening for pleasure was no longer just the province of a few wealthy planters but increasingly an avocation of the expanding of artisans & merchants, who were amassing capital that they could exchange for ornamental luxuries that would proclaim their status to their neighbors. In the early years after the Revolution, these emerging groups were continually coaxed by clever entrepreneurs to dispose of their extra capital on ornamental gardening.
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