Gardens Recreated

by Bee Mohn

Tom Gable, owner of Sunrise Farms, a landscape company in Hope, New Jersey, digs recreating historic gardens.

Gable lives in Hope, where he first became intrigued about history. He delved into learning about the Moravian missionaries who built the town in 1769. Some of their buildings still stand. His interest grew deeper and he joined historic organizations, researching documents to learn what the early settlers grew.

“The more interest I gained, I started doing more research. I went to Williamsburg and Sturnbridge, Massachusettes,Ć¢ā‚¬Ā¯ he says. He studied records of the gardens in both historic villages.

Ever since, Gable has been reconstructing historic gardens. Although the exact plants that existed in a certain garden may not fill the current garden beds, designs are authentic. One garden in Stanton, NJ, is at a 1730 house that is on the National Register of Historic Places. He restored its gardens and built a pergola, picket fences and planted a small cottage garden.

To gain an understanding of garden plants from specific eras, Gable reads diaries of people, like Jefferson and Washington, who had extensive gardens. Jefferson, he says, was big on keeping records of fruit trees. He also checks out deeds and any other records he can find.

Gable finds there is a distinct difference in gardens before and after 1860. “Anything later than 1860 is considered to be Victorian," he says.

Before 1860, gardens were relegated to the back of the house and the front yard was kept as an open grass area. Backyard kitchen gardens, lilacs and fruit trees were common. The town green typically allowed free-roaming animals to graze on the grass there, but the animals were on the move and meandered in the front yards of homes to to eat their grass too. “That's why gardens were fenced in," says Gable.“ And all were in the back of the house."

In 1860, with the advent of Victorian culture, foundation plantings came into existance. During the Victorian era, there is documented proof of foundation plantings, says Gable.

At the 1750 Four Chimney Farm in Oxford, NJ, Gable built stone walls, a courtyard enclosed by a picket fence, and an herb garden hidden from view.

A client will often want Gable to plant what once grew on their site, but Gable says that's a tough task and prefers to plant something that might have been there.

Through researching old homesteads, Gable discovered that affluence dictated the type of gardens they had. “If someone wasn't wealthy, they probably only had a kitchen garden," he says. That was a problem at Williamsburg where, in the 1900s, a landscape architect redesigned expansive gardens that did not match the means of the former owners.

“In a typical kitchen garden in the early 1700s, the owners just walked out the back door and threw seeds out. They weren't interested in design," says Gable. “People only bathed once a month, so they were interested in scent. Women of the house scraped bed linens over lavender beds. Today my wife uses Bounce to pick up fragrance."

In addition to fruits and vegetables, herbs like lavender and yarrow were grown for potpourri and medicinal purposes. They didn't grow ornamental plants because their interest lay in functionality. Raised beds were typical, except in areas with rich, well-drained soil with compost and manure.

Where an alignment of trees still stands, such as the horse chestnuts at Princeton's 1701 Morven, Gable is able to determine where walkways once existed. Then he can rebuild them.

Victorian gardens, planted out front after 1860, became more elaborate and ornamental with wrought iron fences, ferns and then yarrow for aesthetics. Native evergreens were used for wind protection.

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published March 11, 2004