Overview

In Gardens and gardening in the Chesapeake , Barbara Wells Sarudy recovers this lost world using a remarkable variety of sources - historic maps, travellers' accounts, diaries, paintings (some on the backs of baltimore painted chairs), account ledgers, catalogues, and newspaper advertisements. She offers an engaging account of the region's earliest gardens, introducing us to the people who designed and tended these often elaborate landscapes and explaining the forces and finances behind their creating. Many of Sarudy's stories concern the gentry and their great estates. she tells of Charles Carroll of Annapolis, who spent the 1770s fretting about revolutionary politics and designing geometric landscapes for his home and who died in 1783, the result of a fall in his beloved garden. She recalls Rosalie Steir Calvert's quest for beauty and utility in her garden at Riversdale, where at great expense she ordered the installation of an ornamental lake to improve the view while also providing ice for the kitchen and fish for the table. Beyond the gentry, sarudy tells the less familiar stories of the gardeners, labourers, nurserymen, and seed dealers whose skills and efforts transformed the Chesapeake landscape. Throughout, she relates gardens and gardening to the larger forces that lay behind them. During the Revolution, for example, attempts to demonstrate republican simplicity and independence helped to create a distinctly American garden style. William Faris, an Annapolis watchmaker and innkeeper, went so far as to describe his improved varieties of tulips as symbols of new nation - and took particular pride in naming them to honour national heroes as President Washington. From the favourite books of early gardeners to the republican balance between table and ornamental gardens, Sarudy includes details that give us an unprecedented understanding of Chesapeake gardening from settlement through the early national period. Her postscript describes the ultimate fate of the region's 18th century gardens - some of which survive (in more or less authentic form) and can still be visited and enjoyed).

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9780801858239

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Barbara Wells Sarudy is the executive director of the Maryland Humanities Council.

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