Gardeners also used smaller alleys of trees, to help define their gardens. Consisting of single or double rows of trees or hedges, these alleys usually bordered walkways. Alleys through the center of a garden were wider than intersecting ones. Occasionally the designers also manipulated the perspective of these alleys, so that their apparent size was lengthened, by gradually narrowing the width toward the far end. Often, colonial gentry used the term alley to refer to the walkways that ran between beds of plants & were bordered by low-growing shrubs.
Gentlemen garden planners designed their garden alleys to offer cooling shade & exercise, direct the line of sight, define garden compartments, & add ornament to their grounds. More often than not, they planted fruit-bearing plants as their alleys. George Washington planted “Apricots and Peach Trees which stood in the borders of the grass plats.”
Deborah Norris Logan reported that in 1767, the garden at the home of Charles Norris in Philadelphia was, "...laid out in square parterres and beds, regularly intersected by graveled and grasswalks and alleys."
When Manasseh Cutler visited the public pleasure garden called Gray's Garden, near Philadelphia, in 1787, he noted that, "...gardens seemed to be in a number of detached areas, all different in size and form. The alleys were none of them straight, nor were there any two alike. 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, each of which was formed in a different taste."
Lewis Beebe recorded in his journal viewing Henry Pratt's The Hills\Lemon Hill near Philadelphia, in 1800, "Mr. Pratts garden for beauty and elegance exceeds all that I ever saw--It is 20 rods long--and 18 wide An alley of 13 feet wide runs the length of the garden thro' the centre--Two others of 10 feet wide equally distant run parallel with the main alley. These are intersected at right angles by 4 other alleys of 8 feet wide--Another alley of 5 feet wide goes around the whole garden, leaving a border around it of 3 feet wide next the pales--this lays the garden into 20 squares each square has a border around it 3 feet wide--Likewise the border of every square is decorated with pinks and a thousand other flowers."
Irishman Bernard M'Mahon came to Philadelphia in the last decade of the 18th century to apprentice at the David Landreth nursery before establishing his own seed business on Philadelphia's Second Street. He soon bought 20 acres of land on the Schuylkill River on Germantown Pike to build greenhouses and a botanic garden, which he named Upsal in commemoration of Linnaaeus' connection with Uppsala University. M'Mahon wrote about the gardens in 18th century Great Britain and America after a few years in Philadelphia, "Straight rows of the most beautiful trees, forming long avenues and grand walks, were in great estimation, considered as great ornaments, and no condsiderable estate and eminent pleasure ground were without several of them."
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