Apologies to my readers and fellow writers for the tardiness of this article originally begun for February and Black History Month. As you will soon see I finally divided this interesting and educational material into three articles. It was hard work, but fun. I hope you enjoy reading these articles as much as I enjoyed researching and writing them.
Civil War Photograph Collection,(Library of Congress)
...Almost all the gardeners (interviewed) denied that their African ancestry had any effect whatever on their garden or gardening practices. Ellen Bolton (Georgia) said 'I don't know nothing about Africa, no kind of way.' Edith Windom (South Carolina) knew more about her ancestry than most. Her grandfather had been a slave and lived to be 108, but she did not think there was any African influence in her garden. African-American Gardens and Yards in the Rural South by Richard Westmacott, The University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville, TN., 3rd printing, 1998.
Design is a manipulation of space. This garden and landscape principle is probably the easiest for us to see and try to understand. Unfortunately, restorations and recreations of gardens and gardening activities by African-Americans from pre-Revolutionary days until relatively recent times are often distorted.
These misrepresentations are a lot like Colonial Revival gardens, period gardens which present a 1930s and 1940s view of America's past, created in spite of mounting evidence that most colonial gardens were simple, functional, and even somewhat bare. Gardens in the early days of house restoration and living history museums often assumed designs based on desires to make the past appealing and attractive. Moreover, all too often, these designs focused on established affluent European styles instead of a realistic interpretation of who designed and used the garden.
Garden archaeology, in its beginnings, studied formal gardens to find information necessary for restoration. In addition, until recently, the center of most attention in the U. S. South has been formal antebellum (before the American Civil War) gardens of the elite and wealthy. During the later half of the 20th century, however, garden visitors and observers in the U.S. began to see a shift in garden archaeology as well as in reports about the lives of ordinary people. There has also been a shift away from garden design as fine art originating in Europe and Asia to an interpretation of folk garden traditions and colloquial gardens.
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