Earliest formal garden found

Press, 3 February 1986, Page 37

Earliest formal garden found

NZPA Virginia Archeologists working at Bacon’s Castle have discovered an English-style Renaissance garden dating from 1680 with a central broad walk of sand, the earliest documented formal garden in the United States. Last June, in the excavation of what was assumed to be a nineteenth century garden, test holes turned up a concentration of seventeenth century pottery shards, wine bottle fragments, and seals. The distribution pattern of artefacts under the sand paths was uninterrupted, and the archeologists realised that the fragments could have been deposited only at the time of construction.

“What we found is the largest, earliest, best preserved, most sophisticated garden that has come to light in North America,” said Mr Nicholas Luccketti, state archeologist for the Commonwealth of Virginia’s

division of historic landmarks, who has been involved in the project since its inception. The garden, an arrangement of six rectangular planting beds and outlying brick garden pavilions, covers an area larger than a football field. It is adjacent to Bacon’s Castle, a 1665 high-Jacobean manor house that is itself the oldest datable brick house in the United States. Ms Deborah Nevins, a landscape historian and assistant professor at Barnard College, said the remains of the garden might prove to be one of the most significant recent discoveries in garden history. Mr Luccketti compared the garden’s configuration to that of an early seventeenth century English garden, such as the one once at Wilton near Salisbury, England, designed by Isaac de Caiis in 1615 for the Earl of Pembroke.