Historical Ways of Herb Gardening: Another European Perspective

While South Carolina's cottage gardens are more in the English tradition (like very much of South Carolina; the Charles Pinckney Historic Site's information pegs the English heritage of the Carolinas at the time of the Declaration of Independence at something like 86%), this very lovely post discusses another old-world herb-gardening tradition with sensitivity, historical context, and beautiful pictures: Creating your own jardin de cure.

There's an herb list, a discussion of the cohabitation of herbs and vegetables, and some talk about the role that knowledge of simple remedies plays in traditional education.  There's also a bit of discussion of the difficulty of preserving a garden as a historic landscape.  Most interesting reading!

I will later edit this post with a photo of Magnolia Plantation Gardens' Scriptural planting, so stay tuned.

A Perspective on Multi-Use Landscape Management

"I sometimes think it's not enough to be concerned with just the restoration of a building.  I also try to think about what needs it will serve.  So I become an advocate for these existing buildings, and instead of just restoring them, I create a program for them that makes them more valuable than they've ever been to their community."

-- Theaster Gates, Jr., who has turned abandoned homes in his downtrodden Chicago neighborhood, Greater Grand Crossing, into an art library, a set of historical music listening rooms, and an African-American cinema museum ... and plans more such re-purposings.

Source: Walser, L. (2012, Spring).  Theaster Gates, Jr. is restoring his community, one house at a time. Preservation, p. 8.

Rainy Days and Five-Point Stars

I've been desperately wanting to get into the garden and put the rest of the seeds in the ground -- yes, this is belated, but I'm hoping it'll still be okay, since in normal years plants do things like go dormant and die of frost in the beginning of April, not go limp from heat.  We've had a bizarre year where few things ever bothered to go dormant and the spring ephemerals all bloomed around Christmastime, so I'm telling myself the weirdness isn't my fault.  The seeds will come out of stratification and go in the ground when we get back from Charleston next week.

Anyway.  I've been wanting to garden, but yesterday there was a wedding and today it's raining in a steady drumming fall, so it's not happening.  Instead, I designed a new little graphic for the sidebar, which you can see over on the left.

I've never done design for an entire website and I wouldn't dare try (this blog has a free Blogger layout with some tweaking).  If I ever start an independent domain I'll hire a real designer; it makes a massive difference.  However, it's not actually hard to design your own small graphics for a blog or for a frame website like Etsy or Ebay, provided you have some free time, an eye for color, and a free program like GIMP. So I made the graphic with two hours of fiddling around in GIMP from a very nice photograph of an Anemone virginiana bloom with a bee on top, which I found on Wikimedia Commons.

This Anemone species -- tall thimbleweed -- is sort of Woodburn's herb garden mascot, so to speak.  Here's why:

1. It's an upstate native that thrives even in conditions of neglect -- just like the house itself.
2. It attracts native pollinators -- which is an important purpose of the garden.
3. It offers medicinal benefits that were historically important -- while many anemones are poisonous, this one is used in wound poultices and to treat that most Victorian of diseases, tuberculosis (consumption).

There's also a more personal or symbolic reason.  I wanted to include a plant in the landscape that had a clear five-petaled shape.  Five-pointed stars are important in Woodburn's architectural iconography (read more about this here).  The original moldings around the interior doors and windows feature an inverted Federal star at the corners, as you can see in this photo from the drawing room:

 Five-pointed stars or pentacles with the point downward (though they've been adopted as a symbol by Satanists today) are a semi-common good-luck symbol found in the architecture of Charleston-style plantation houses.  They're usually tipped downward, much as lucky horseshoes are placed with the curve down in order to "catch" good fortune.

However, Woodburn also sits at the center of a natural pentacle.  Its original documents describe it as being placed at the apex of five ridges, which are roughly shown in this pretty diagram I just made in MS Paint:

While the eastern ridge has been lost to industrial grading, I suspect the remaining ones may be even more obvious from the air now than they would have been in the 1830s, because untended woodland now fills the gaps between them pretty thoroughly.  I've walked three of the remaining four -- our compost pile is actually about where the "a" in "along" is, there at the top of the diagram -- and this feature of the landscape remains intact.

Superstitious, maybe, but I have a feeling that Woodburn, as a house conscious of its years of neglect, might be rather happy to have someone add this symbol back into its surroundings.  Who knows; maybe the stars will catch some luck for our garden project and the seeds will flourish despite being planted so late.

Herb Gardens for Wildlife

I've found a couple of reassuring (and purpose-affirming!) projects lately, and thought the links might be useful to other organic gardeners with similar numbers of landscape uses to balance.

First of all, the UK's Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) offers this article about the wildlife value that can be included in planned herb gardens with floral borders -- which is exactly what we want to cultivate at Woodburn.

Also, I was skimming through May's issue of Southern Living (since Megan and I are currently dog-sitting for one of our coworkers and she left us her garden magazines) when I was suddenly arrested by a gorgeous spread showing a formal garden yielding to a wild wetland yielding to an agricultural field.

The article was about Virginia's Kendale Farm, an 1830s-1880s farm house on the Rappahannock which boasts a splendid formal garden with a curving walkway based on Monticello's, and persists as a working farm growing three major crops, and is a National Wildlife Federation certified wildlife habitat (there was even a sidebar in the magazine about the four requirements of food, water, shelter, and places to raise young), and presents educational opportunities (the owners have an arrangement with local schools to allow student wetland exploration).

It's incredibly heartening to see a landscape that successfully incorporates a historical home, functional agriculture, pesticide-free gardening for wildlife, edible landscaping, formal gardening in the English Enlightenment mode, native grasses, a cut-flower garden, and educational space -- in such a heartstoppingly gorgeous and seamless way.

Pick up May's issue of Southern Living if you can, or I've found a few pictures you can browse online.  Here is a writeup in the county's historical home listing with a gorgeous sketch of the home; here is a post on the landscape designer's company blog; here is a photo album on the landscape designer's Facebook page.

And as for me, I'm going to keep those links in my Firefox toolbar to remind myself that what we're attempting on such a small scale at Woodburn is not only possible, but incredibly beautiful when done right.

A Short History of the Garden Hoe

Hoeing the garden is both wonderful and awful for me.  On the one hand, it clears a lot of space in a short time without compacting the soil too much.  On the other hand, it makes me feel like a pathetic weakling: I have short arms, so it's difficult for me to position myself to use it without quickly becoming exhausted.  This is ridiculous, because hoeing is apparently one of the things that Jane Edna Hunter was doing for thirty cents a day on this very property in the 1890s, when she was in her early teens.

Nonetheless, the hoe is awesome.

 Sorry, plow, but at this scale, you just don't compare.

The invention of the hoe, a simple but highly efficient tool, is said to have taken place in the fifth century BC, but the kings of the Chinese Zhou dynasty were issuing coins in the shape of miniature bronze hoes (since bronze tools were a common medium of exchange) a century earlier (source).  They're also mentioned in the Book of Isaiah in about 8000 BCE, but this may be an artifact of translation.  The oldest one I can find photographs of is a Roman sarculum from 2000 BCE (see photos in the collection of Smith College here).

If you don't have a hoe, you have to do it like this.  And yes, that's me (Chelsea).

The simple hoe, with a flat edge and a wide blade, is called a Dego hoe, but no one seems to know why (if you do, please leave me a comment to let me know!).  The long handle of the typical hoe is a necessity; in fact, a 1975 decision by the California Supreme Court banned short-handled hoes from use in agriculture because of the crippling back injuries they can cause laborers (source).  Those involved in that decision saw short hoes as a way to keep Mexican field workers living humble, stooped-over lives.  I have the urge to sort through our collection of period photos of Woodburn to see what length of hoe the sharecroppers there were using, but I don't think we have any agricultural photos.  I'll check.

The hoe is also responsible for one of those quintessential colonial American dishes: the hoecake.  Hoecakes are made from cornmeal and were a staple food of early American colonizers "from Newfoundland to Jamaica" (Wikipedia).  Supposedly they're called johnny cakes if you go a bit further Yankee-ward, but I'm not sure I believe this, since the term "johnny cake" was recorded in 1739 as the name that South Carolinian African-Americans used to refer to a Native American baked cornmeal cake -- and the Haw Branch Plantation cookbook records it as being called a hoe cake in Virginia.  These were probably eaten by the tenant farmers at Woodburn; you can achieve the same effect with this recipe from Hillbilly Housewife.

Happy hoeing!