Garden accessories - Williamsburg, Virginia, history - Brief Article

Magazine Antiques, July, 2000 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

Much of what is accomplished in the garden today owes a debt to modern technology. Where would we be without weed wackers, chain saws, and electric hedge clippers? We would be gardening with hoe and spade like our colonial forebears, whose ways are the preoccupation of the staff at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation in Williamsburg, Virginia. They continually strive for historical accuracy in order to make a visit to this living history museum not only enjoyable, but supremely educational too.

The costumed guides and other workers go about their business without modem conveniences, and when tending gardens they use tools based on eighteenth-century models. Coincidentally, they have discovered that many of these tools work just as well as those made today, and so they have made them available to the public through their catalogue.

When Williamsburg was established as Virginia's capital in 1699 the town plan called for large, open house lots. Spacious yards were essential for growing comestibles, and colonists planted vegetable gardens and raised chickens and other livestock within the confines of their lots. Pleasure gardens in the rather formal Anglo-Dutch style were also planted. Needless to say, gardening tools were fashioned in the capital from the outset.

As we know from manuscript illuminations, the rake dates to at least the Middle Ages, and a charming poetic signboard posted by an early fifteenth-century turner in Hailsham, England, proclaims in part: "As other people have a sigu/I say just stop and look at mine,/Here Wratten, cooper, lives and makes/Ox 'bows, trug baskets and hay rakes." Williamsburg offers two sizes of wooden hay rakes and hay-forks reproduced from originals in their collection. They are made by local artisans, as are the trowel, dibble (used for punching holes in the soil in order to plant seeds), and line reel, which enables one to plant in neat, straight rows.

Colonial gardeners also used cloches, or bell glasses, to nurture fragile seedlings and extend the growing season. These are, in essence, miniature portable greenhouses. They came to England by way of France, and John Claudius Loudon refers to them in his 1822 publication Encyclopoedia of Gardening as being particularly useful for starting cauliflower. Williamsburg's reproductions are available in three sizes.

The pleasures of summer include the enjoyment of birds, which can be coaxed to stay by providing them with a home. The bird bottle illustrated above was used in Williamsburg in the early 1700s. The reproduction is based on an example excavated in the yard of the James Geddy House. The bottles attract small birds best when they are installed under the eaves of a building.