The Pleasure Gardens of Virginia.

Nelson, Paul David

By Peter Martin. Colonial Williamsburg Studies in Cheasepeake History and Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. xxiv, 240 pp. $29.95.

As Peter Martin points out in the preface to this fine book, the field of early American garden history is not fully developed, and as of yet its history is not evenly balanced or complete. Hence, the author is filling a gap in historical knowledge by writing this study. His efforts result in this splendid volume on the early pleasure gardens of Virginia, covering the period from the founding of gardens at Jamestown and Williamsburg to more substantial creations near the end of the eighteenth century by Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Joseph Prentis and St. George Tucker. Combining a valuable scholarly text, complete with footnotes and other scholarly paraphernalia, with splendid illustrations and sketches of early Virginia gardens, Martin documents "the reciprocity between town and plantation in eighteenth-century Virginia" and explains how early Virginians used gardens "to cultivate a sense, of civilized living and grace" (p. xix).

Martin also tells the story of how colonial gardening enthusiasts molded the beautiful virgin land in which they settled into tame examples of cultivated elegance. Reflecting at first their origins and their desire to recreate the English world from which they sprang, early Virginians quickly learned to modify what they had known to suit the needs of new climate and soil. Thus, they subtly molded a new gardening tradition for colonial Virginia, just as they were molding other institutions and customs to fit their new world. In a word, they were creating an American pleasure-garden art form, combining aesthetic, scientific, and cultural factors in ways different from their colleagues in England. As Martin notes in the conclusion of his book, Virginians such as Washington, Jefferson, Prentis, and Tucker were allowing themselves near the end of the eighteenth century "to be possessed by the native landscape." They no longer yearned, as had their predecessors of the previous century, Governor Alexander Spotswood, John Custis, and William Byrd II "to be possessed by European culture" (p. 183). Paradoxically, they found in their surrender an independence in gardening that echoed their growing independence in other areas of life. By 1775, Horace Walpole was imagining an American "declaration of gardening independence" and according to Martin would have been pleased with Monticello's and Mount Vernon's "distant prospects of uncultivated or |unimproved' countryside that seemed never to end" (p. 184).

Nevertheless, Martin points out, Virginia's eighteenth-century pleasure gardens were not the wave of the future in America. Democratic impulses were largely responsible in the nineteenth century for the demise of the private-landscape gardening tradition. In a republic where every person had equal rights, but more importantly owned his own house and garden, it was likely that large gardens would be communal efforts for everyone's enjoyment. Hence, America's important landscape gardeners in the 1800s were Andrew Jackson Downing and Frederick Law Olmsted, who "put their energies chiefly into public gardens and parks." Thus, the eighteenth-century promise of "a private [gardening] world to some extent inspired by English examples and ideas, symbolic of hopes in the New World, tempered by economics and the climate," never bore fruit (p. 185).

Martin's well-written, path-breaking study of the development of pleasure gardening in Virginia will have a large audience. Historians of material culture and archaeologists will make use of its splendid scholarship and illustrations, as will both amateur and professional gardeners. This is a beautiful, sophisticated book.