Overview:
Garden travels, day outings, lengthy trips or virtual excursions begin with home-based exploration and research. The ten articles selected here describe historic garden landscapes in North America. They make an easy task of deciding which gardens to visit. Emphasis in each article is on design characteristics pertinent to each garden and the garden’s historical significance.
Garden landscape styles change slowly, and often remain as foundations for later garden styles. American garden and rural landscapes on the east coast rely upon styles of 17th and 18th century English-based garden traditions. Garden landscapes on the west coast and in Florida borrow heavily from Spanish, and to a smaller extent, Italian ideas. Midwest gardens borrow ideas from idealized Native American cultures and European styles.
New gardens of interest can be found close to your doorstep. A garden visit presents an opportunity to study the outline and bones of someone else's garden. There is also the prospect of absorbing the enduring atmosphere of the gardens, and also the mindset of the garden's makers and the moment in time in which they worked.
Historic Garden Articles:
- Historic Gardens and Landscapes: Historic and traditional garden landscapes in New England range from colonial times to modern times. This article is a survey of selected 17th to18th century landscape styles in New England. These early New England garden landscapes evolved from traditional English garden styles.
- Historic Landscapes and Gardens: This article surveys selected 19th century garden landscape styles in New England. Gardeners in the 1800s continued to rely upon styles of 17th and 18th century English-based garden traditions. However, an increase of books and pamphlets, many promoting new farm and garden ideas, slowly changed garden and rural landscapes in New England.
- Historic Landscapes: Historic Landscapes discusses four twentieth century New England garden landscapes. The power and diversity of these historic designs demonstrate society's expanding financial and social bases during this time of great social and economic change.
- The Gardener's Gift of Travel: Enchantment and delight may be found at any bend of a gardener's pleasure trip. Here are a series of gardens in North America that possess something to enlighten each of us. With each one, there is a little explanation of why it is important to garden history and style.
- The Gardener's Gift of Travel - Part 2: This group of gardens contains examples of well structured informal gardens - those that characterize one of the garden design concepts written about in Tradition and Styles of Garden Design.
- Hollister House Gardens: Rural CT: This garden tucked away in Washington (rural Litchfield County CT, is named for colonial-era CT builder Samuel Hollister. It demonstrates how garden designs, adapted from elsewhere but furnished with plants well matched to regional- and micro-climates, allow garden design ideas to thrive.
- Hidden Gardens of Beacon Hill (MA): Beacon Hill residents fashion hidden backyard gardens from small pieces of degraded urban soil in shaded settings. Hidden behind brick walls and wooden enclosures, contemporary garden sanctuaries were originally service and laundry yards, and servants' entrances where privies stood.
- Beacon Hill (MA): Public Garden Spaces: Residents of Beacon Hill's North Slope (Boston, MA) and civic and government groups successfully work to transform derelict spaces and passageways into neighborhood garden spaces.
- Chateau Country Landscapes: Landscape gardeners can find examples of significant European and American landscape styles in The Brandywine Valley (PA and DE). The four Du Pont country estates and gardens demonstrate 19th and early 20th century examples of landscape garden history.
- The House of the Seven Gables: The Turner House (House of the Seven Gables - Salem, MA) made famous by Nathaniel Hawthorne overlooks an early 20th century Colonial Revival Garden designed by Joseph Everett Chander, leading Colonial Revival / Restoration advocate
©Text and photograph by Georgene A. Bramlage. 2007. Reproduction without permission prohibited.
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