COV ER
Story
How Do Our Gardens Grow?
VVITI I PLENTY OF HARD WORK, MORE THAN A LITTLE CREATIVITY AND, ALWAYS, AN EYE TOWARD
HISTORY, THAT'S I IOW
J3v Carl I lerko
Here’s the sunt total of everything
known to have been growing way
back in 1 770 at the site where
William Tryon, the British royal governor
of North Carolina, had his new Palace
built on the banks of the Trent River:
1 ) Chinaberry trees
2) Cabbage.
Now fast-forward 2 30 years or so, to the
Tryon Palace of today, with its seven
surrounding historical gardens ofvarying
types, its neighboring historic homes with
even more garden spaces, and its staff of
five full-time gardeners and cadre of
volunteers who work year-round to keep
them all in shape, and you begin to get
some idea ol just how far these gardens
have come from their ifyouTl pardon the
expression - humble roots.
Today the gardening effort at Tryon
Pilace Historic Sites & Gardens
encompasses 14acresand fully two
centuries of English and American
Julie Craig is one of five staff gardeners.
gardening history. Its scope ranges from a
vegetable garden that specializes in historic
crop species to an 18th-century flower
garden, from a wilderness area that focuses
on native plants of the Carolina Coastal
Plain to the formal parterres of an English
estate. Its goal is to lv historically accurate.
Its mission is to teach future generations
about the past. Its aim is to look good
doing so.
“People come here and think they're
Stepping back in time, but they’re not;
they're steppingon a time line, on a
conveyor belt going through time,”
explains Perry Mathews, who, as curator
of gardens, heads the Palace’s gardening
operation.
So let’s hop aboard that conveyor belt to
see if we can catch a glimpse of just how
complex an effort it is.
♦
First stop, the Kitchen Garden. The
fact that Try< >n Palace even has a
Kitchen Garden today reveals a lot
about how historians do their job of
figuring our, often from meager evidence,
what life in the past was like. The formula
involves a little hard evidence and an awful
к
it of educated guesswt >rk.
"The kitchen garden is a nod to the tact
that most houses had a kitchen garden,”
Mathewes explains.
And remember thatchinaberry-and-
cabbage reference in some old historical
document.'
“The reference to cabbage does imply
that a kitchen garden of some sort was on
site,” he adds.
So, voila, when a reconstructed Tryon
Palace was rising Phoenix-like in the 1 9.50s,
a Kitchen Garden was a natural. But today’s
Kitchen Garden also shows how things can
change when historians refine their thinking.
What started ( wt as a demonstration
garden - with rows of corn, tobacco and
cotton, the major money crops of the era -
has been redesigned in recent years to more
closely resemble what an actual 1 8tlvcentury
kitchen garden might have looked like.
A visit to Tryon Palace's gardens is like stepping onto
“a conveyer belt going through time,” says Curator of
Gardens Perry Mathewes.
“Corn and tobacco and cotton were all
field crops, and they wouldn’t be grown in
an enclosed urban space like this,
particularly for Governor Tryon,” says
Mathewes. If Tryon did grow them, it
would have been on a farm he owned
outside of town.
“What you grow in a kitchen garden are
plants that are unusual anil rare, or difficult
to grow, or expensive, or difficult to
transport. Things like cucumbers and
strawberries you're not going to grow 1 0
miles outside of town, because by the time
they ride the wagon in here they’ll bruise
to death."
But finding old varieties of those fruits
and vegetables is another challenge for
Mathewes, because as new and better
hybrids are developed, older varieties
disappear much the way endangered
WlNTt.R 2001
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