Colonial Revival Garden Restoration and Preservation

Restoration of historic American gardens and landscapes began soon after campaigns to save the homes and buildings of the country’s past were initiated in the mid-nineteenth century. As such efforts came to be considered a necessary part of historic preservation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Colonial Revival became the dominant design approach. Such gardens most often included low walls, simple geometric boxwood parterres, utilitarian features, and a plant palette often limited to those available in America in the late 1700s. Much like the restoration of Colonial architecture to which they were most often attached, Colonial Revival gardens were based on an idealized understanding of Colonial life as practical and simple. As a response to growing nationalism in the wake of skyrocketing foreign immigration, urbanization, and the devastation of World War I, the Colonial Revival attitude was undoubtedly nostalgic and sometimes driven by xenophobic concerns for the protection of white, upper class “heritage.” Landscape architect Charles Eliot (1859-97) has been cited as one of the garden preservation movement’s founders; his 1890s articles in "Garden and Forest" magazine promoted the professional restoration of such landscapes as George Washington’s birthplace and Revolutionary War battlefields. The movement’s origins fit squarely within the early twentieth-century preservation movement’s focus on America’s Colonial and Revolutionary history and reflected trends in the private sector, including the work of Ellen Biddle Shipman (1869-1950).

Mount Vernon, the home of George and Martha Washington and the object of America’s first efforts in historic preservation, led the way for the historic garden and landscape restoration movement shortly after the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association of the Union (MVLA) formed in the 1850s and began restoring the mansion and its grounds. They became the first institution to consult a landscape professional in the early 1910s, when they hired Charles Sprague Sargent (1841-1927) to help them restore the grounds to look as they did during Washington’s time. Sargent not only attempted to save the property’s surviving historic trees, but also to use plants and designs authentic to the period; he relied on limited information mined from Washington’s diaries and other historic documents.

Colonial Williamsburg, including perhaps the best example of garden restoration done under the Colonial Revival, began in 1924 to reconstruct an idealized version of the historic town. Landscape architect Arthur A. Shurcliff (1879-1957) led the garden restorations based on ideas popular in late eighteenth-century England and the colonial South, as well as the potential appeal to contemporary visitors. Shurcliff’s “recreation” of the gardens at Williamsburg were therefore not based on specific historic documentation, but a general understanding of the past firmly rooted in the Colonial Revival of the 1930s. Because of the growing tourism industry (thanks to further advancements in automobile technology) and the visibility and cultural authority of the project in popular culture (such as in magazines like "House and Garden"), the boxwood parterres and neat and trim details of Williamsburg became the inspiration for many subsequent garden restorations.

Because both the preservation movement and amateur landscape design were often associated with domestic architecture and the historic and contemporary roles of women, women’s groups led the way for historic landscape and garden restoration. Their research of historic gardens revealed new information and reflected the desire to memorialize the lives of the founding fathers. Groundbreaking, female-driven publications such as the influential "Historic Gardens of Virginia" (1924) not only found romance in the gardens of America’s political and military heroes, but also advocated scholarly research and restoration. Most often based on the model of the MVLA, women’s garden clubs were among the first groups to restore historic gardens. The Garden Club of Virginia (GCVA, established 1920), one of the most active and ambitious of these organizations, hired professional landscape architects to recreate gardens associated with prominent Virginians such as George Mason, Woodrow Wilson, and Mary Washington. Morley Jeffers Williams (1886-1977) began rudimentary archaeological research for the GCVA at Stratford Hall, the Virginia plantation of Confederate General Robert E. Lee in 1930. Working with Arthur Shurcliff and architectural historian Fiske Kimball (1888-1955), Williams determined the placement of major landscape features and designed the plan for the gardens. In 1948, the GCVA began the restoration of the gardens at Thomas Jefferson’s University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Focusing mainly on restoring Jefferson’s famous serpentine walls, the gardens implemented between the project’s inception and eventual completion in 1964 were designed by Colonial Williamsburg landscape architects Alden Hopkins (1905-1960), Donald H. Parker and Ralph E. Griswold along with Fiske Kimball. Rather than attempting to recreate the gardens as they would have been in the 1820s – complete with smokehouses, chicken coops, and other utilitarian features – the gardens were completed according to the Colonial Revival “style” with parterres, terraces, and an occasional “privy” used as a garden shed. This interpretation was especially liberal, as Jefferson left no specific plans for any of UVA’s gardens and because the walled spaces were most certainly strictly utilitarian in their historic context. The Garden Club of America (GCA) also led the way for documenting and preserving historic gardens. Beginning in the 1920s, the GCA published many guidebooks and historic garden surveys with local garden clubs and also initiated the archival recording of important American gardens.

In more recent years, garden archeology, academic scholarship, and the scientific study of historic plants and flowers have become considerably more professional, advanced, and widely-accepted. Gardens such as those at Colonial Williamsburg are presently being re-restored using new technology and information or reinterpreted as products of the 1930s Colonial Revival, rather than as authentic recreations. The field has also widened dramatically from its early focus on historic gardens; landscape and cultural landscape preservation have emerged as fields distinct from architectural preservation.

Selected sources

*Axelrod, Alan, ed. "The Colonial Revival in America." New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1985.
*Birnbaum, Charles A. and Mary V. Hughes, eds. "Design with Culture: Claiming America's Landscape Heritage". Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005.
*Hosmer, Charles. "Preservation Comes of Age: from Williamsburg to the National Trust, 1926-1949". Volume 1. Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 1981.
*Kunst, Lisa A. and Patricia M. O’Donnell. “Historic Landscape Preservation Deserves a Broader Meaning.” "Landscape Architecture" 71, no. 1 (January 1981): 53+.
*Wilson, Richard Guy, Shaun Eyring, and Kenny Marotta. R"e-creating the American Past: Essays on the Colonial Revival". Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006.

See also

* Colonial Revival architecture