Celebrated Gardens of Salem

A while ago I scored the first volume of a classic text of early American gardens, Gardens of Colony and State, compiled and edited for the Garden Club of America by Alice G.B. Lockwood in 1931. I’ve seldom been without it since; I can’t say that “I can’t put it down” because it is a heavy tome, but I’ve been dipping into it whenever I have a free moment. It’s an absolutely amazing publication: scholarly, detailed, engaging, illustrated, comprehensive. I’ve planned all of my summer road trips around it, even though I suspect I might find myself on sites of former historic gardens more often than not.

Gardens of Colony and State is nothing less than an illustrated history of American gardens and gardening to 1840: the first volume covers New England and the Midwest, while the second volume presents the South and West (and garden enclosures from across the nation). It is remarkably well-sourced, but also as accessible as you would imagine a garden club publication to be, and its illustrations are nothing short of invaluable. While Salem trades on its darkness now, in 1931 it was still quite well known for its horticultural heritage, and so it rates an entire chapter in the first volume: there is Boston, Salem and Newburyport, and everywhere else in Massachusetts. Lockwood starts off with the Reverend Francis Higginson’s observations on “the bounty of the soil of Salem” in 1629 and shows us the Endicott pear tree and sundial (purchased by the Reverend William Bentley–is this still in the Crowninshield-Bentley House or up in the storage bunker/Collection Center in Rowley?) and then it’s all about Elias Hasket Derby, who employed one of the nation’s first professional gardeners, an Alsatian emigré named George Heussler (whom contemporaries referred to as “Dutch”) for both his town and country gardens. We get to see charming drawings by Samuel McIntire of the former’s grounds—from the Essex Institute/Peabody Essex Museum, of course.

We then proceed through the nineteenth century, and visit Salem’s most famous gardens, most of which were laid out or maintained by “Scotch gardeners” (How many gardens are due to the Scotch gardeners! proclaims Lockwood). The botanist John Robinson’s garden at 18 Summer Street was long ago paved over for a parking lot while elsewhere grass and more carefree perennials have replaced the very intensively-cultivated gardens of the Victorian era. An interesting connection: the “Scotch gardener” of Captain Charles Hoffman’s garden at 26 Chestnut, Hugh Wilson, came over from the old country with Peter Henderson, the so-called “father of horticulture and ornamental gardening” in the United States who operated several commercial market gardens and a successful seed company, and they maintained a close connection throughout their lives. Doubtless Henderson made some contributions to the three greenhouses Hoffman and Wilson maintained in the vicinity of 26 Chestnut–one at the rear of his property and two additional ones along Hamilton Street.

Across Chestnut Street were the renown gardens of two maiden ladies: Miss Huntington’s garden at #35 and Miss Laight’s garden at #41 Both gardens were featured in several periodicals at the turn of the twentieth century and Lockwood includes older photographs of each—one wonders if they were simplified in the 1930s when the Great Depression reigned and there were probably no more Scotch gardeners on the street. We then read about the botanical experiments of John Fiske Allen at # 31 (more greenhouses!), and enterprises of Robert Manning, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s uncle, in the pastoral paradise of North Salem. By far the most poignant photographs in the Salem chapter of Gardens of Colony and State are those of the Peirce-Nichols House on Federal Street, another PEM property and McIntire creation, if only because of the stark contrast of past and present.