Gardens in 17th Century New England
From a design point of view, Gardens in 17th Century New England were direct descendants of Medieval gardens. Like Medieval gardens, they were composed of square and rectangular beds retained by boards. During this period, each board had to be shaped by hand, so it seems strange that boards were used, I would have used logs. I suppose that they used boards because that was the tradition, they had done it that way for centuries. Even roughly built houses were constructed using boards, the log cabin was introduced by Swedish colonists in Delaware. Log cabins were traditional in Sweden and Finland.
The beds in dooryard gardens were filled with herbs, flowers and vegetables grown together in a cottage garden muddle. This was a different practice from Medieval monasteries, where each herb was usually given it's own bed. Herbs were medicine and it was important to not use the wrong herb. Flowers often served a practical purpose, for example, rose hips were used to make jelly and dianthus (pinks) were used as a spice. Calendulas are called "pot marigolds" because the leaves were eaten as vegetables and the flowers were used to add color to soups.
Herbs were actually more important to the colonists than vegetables were. In medieval England most people only grew cooking herbs in their gardens; the monasteries supplied them with herbs for medicine when needed. After the Monasteries were closed under Henry VIII, herbs for medicine were more often grown in private gardens. This was good for the colonists, because by the 17th century knowledge about medicinal herbs was more wide-spread than it had been during the Middle Ages.
Renaissance England was not very fond of vegetables. This may have been connected with the dissolution of the monasteries. Monasteries had been the centers for growing vegetables because the religious would abstain from meat when fasting. When the monasteries were closed, the local communities lost both a source for knowledge about growing vegetables and a source for seeds. By the early 17th century, some books were being printed about growing vegetables, but the need for books is an indication that local knowledge had been lost. It isn't very likely that these books had much of an impact on 17th Century New England.
The main way that vegetables were introduced into New England gardens seems to have been through the influence of the other North American colonies. The Dutch introduced cabbages, lettuce, turnips, onions,
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