One of the staff members was hand-building a cold frame with native wicker and vine material . I was told that this was the way such frames were made in the 18th century. Glass was a rare commodity in those days, so it was costly both in time and money to make them . Today, CW imports the glass for the frames from an English factory which supplied the Colonies in the 1700s', in order to keep the historic accuracy as complete as possible.
The supports for the frames looked like baskets, each section carefully woven to hold the wavy hand-made panes in place. The finished product had a casually elegant appearance, belying the labor intensive effforts of its' maker.
I asked the gardener how effective these frames were in the area of critter control, and he sighed, "Not very. Colonial gardeners used snares or shooting lead to put rabbit meat on the table, but we can't do that these days. We can't distress the native animal popualtion, so we've learned that overplanting is our best hope for good crop results." ( He said nothing about road-kill attrition, and I didn't ask.)
Sure enough, there seemed to be more baby greens under the frame than I would have otherwise expected. This was not simply due to the ravages of hungry varmints. The Colonial gardener lacked access to the sturdier hybrids we grow today, and again, the CW staff grows as many authentic species ( or their nearest relatives) as they can find.
This is true with their annual flowers and perennials as well. I walked through a dormant ornamental plot and found another working gardener shaking out various dry seed heads for collection. "We've lost virtually all of the first Sweet Peas which were used in the original gardens," she told me. "The seed was lost, and the strains died out...but we keep researching and hunting for them!"
Fortunately for all of us who love to get our hands dirty, not all the good things were lost. Many medicinal herbs and ornamental plants remain with us, and are enjoying the renewed popularity they deserve. I recognized several semi-evergreen plants in the gardens which are backbone plants for me here in the northern suburbs of Atlanta-- Powis Castle Artemesia, pulmonaria, stokesia, scabiosa and lavender, to name just a few. Heirloom tomatoes taste just as good today as they did in Thomas Jefferson's garden (where they languished uneaten, alas.)
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