"Promised fruites of well ordered Towns" - Gardens in early 18th-century Williamsburg

• Autores: Peter Martin
• Localización: Studies in the history of gardens and designed landscape, ISSN 1460-1176, Vol. 2, Nº 4, 1982, págs. 309-324
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Compared to colonial towns like Annapolis, Philadelphia and Charleston, Williamsburg got off to a slow start as a gardening town. This was because unlike these other colonial capitals, it was not the first capital in its colony. Virginia was the oldest British colony in America, settled in 1607, but Jamestown was its first capital and held that distinction for almost a century. Jamestown itself in the 17th century offered Virginians little in the way of a venue for creative gardening. Hostile forces in one way or another suppressed its growth and made life there more a matter of survival than civilized pleasure. It therefore endowed Virginia with scarcely any gardening tradition, so far as we know, though some romantic historians in decades past have imagined pleasure-gardens there within the pale of a supposedly civilizing influence exerted by the State House, Thomas Gates's original Governor's mansion with its "many forward apple and peare trees", and a few of the more industrious and wealthy settlers like the Amblers and Pierces. Swampy land, an impossibly confined island setting, and the constant threat posed by Indians deterred the would-be ornamental gardener there, though we know the average settler was compelled by law in 1624 to fence and cultivate a vegetable-garden.