From under the shade of a sweet gum allee, a visitor sees pasture beyond stone stables on the right and peacocks sitting on low slung roofs. Enter the visitor center and on to the Manor House with inkberry hedges and benches to rest on. The servants’ house is on the left. Hedges enclose a backyard with fountain and sundial.

Through a white picket fence beyond the house, enter a topiary garden of which even the White Rabbit would be jealous. Grass beds with evergreen topiary and gravel paths and borders with smallish, old-fashioned flowers fill the courtyard. Beyond the white picket fence, a tulip poplar allee leads down to the Delaware River.

“This is typical 1700s estate gardening,” says Thomforde. “Having a series of terraces in front of a Manor House was very typical of garden construction in the mid-to-late 17th century.”

Sears had crammed the beds with 1942’s cultivated varieties of native plants. For years after that, gardeners planted what they felt like. “Now it is our interpretation of what we think is more likely to have existed in Penn’s time,” says Thomforde.

The grass is documented evidence, he says. In 1942, only about 20 percent of the garden was lawn, the rest flower beds and hollies. It was meticulously maintained until the '50s when the state went through lean times and gardener and staff retired and were not replaced. The landscape was unattended for about 15 years. Sears’ red cedar and holly, never clipped, grew enormous.

In the late ‘70s a new director, committed to making Pennsbury look the way Penn had it, removed most plantings and by 1990 it became close to how it appears today. Large-blossomed plants were uncommon in Penn’s day, but to remove all flowering plants in the borders would disappoint visitors, Thomforde says, but they do try to use plants that were of Penn’s day.

Many paintings of 17th-century courtyard gardens portray only grass and gravel. Some have a perimeter bed with topiary or flowering shrubs against walls or perennials treated like specimens: one. one. one. In a letter to his gardener Penn said, “Grass and gravel are all I expect or desire from you” – perhaps in empathy for the gardener’s unending maintenance of kitchen garden, field crops and orchard.

“Some late 17th century gardens did include topiary,” says Thomforde. “In the interest of making the garden a little less bleak, we planted the topiaries in the late 1980s. Whether or not Penn's gardener had time to do those, he would have liked them.”

Pennsbury’s staff is dedicated to keeping this representative work of Thomas Sears and also dedicated to bringing in more plants that would have existed there in Penn’s time. They have received funding to recreate the 17-acre apple orchards with 17th-century varieties of trees for cider-making.

The landscape approach:
1) continue Colonial Revival of Sears’ design,
2) make the rest as accurate as possible with what we think existed in Penn’s time.

Colonial Revival means landscaping done from late 1800s - late 1900s that mimics colonial landscaping of 1600-1775. So in a way, they plan to revive the revival. The targeted area is from the visitor’s center toward the river where Sears’ plantings were primarily shrubs. “We will take his planting plan and compare it to photographs of what was actually planted in the 1940s. Unless there’s some compelling, pragmatic reason not to replant these plants, we will plant them,” says Thomforde.

Accuracy will occur in the kitchen garden, courtyards, and pastures. They’ll keep some pasture, plant some orchard, and plow fields for grains.

Pennsbury Manor: www.pennsburymanor.org