HISTORY: Early S.C. gardens

S.C. Encyclopedia | Both home and commercial gardening were essential to the survival of colonial settlements in South Carolina. Early commercial growing was limited to fruit and vegetable crops grown near towns, and consisted mostly of small plots surrounded by wattle or split rail “worm” fences. Home gardening included mostly food crops that could be pickled or stored dry, as the winter climate was too warm for root cellars. Few vegetables were eaten raw, and being more fibrous than today’s varieties, were usually overcooked. To this day, the term sallet or sallet greens is applied by some rural South Carolinians to greens grown to be cooked: mustard, turnip, and rape, for example.

Colonists from the Caribbean brought tropical food crops that thrived in South Carolina, as well as slaves who knew how to grow and prepare them. Sweet potatoes, okra, southern peas, sweet and hot peppers soon augmented cole crops such as cabbage and collards, and root crops that British settlers knew so well. Indian traders helped to introduce the food crops of Native Americans to colonists, most importantly the “Three Sisters”: maize (corn), beans, and squash. The corn was of kinds later known as “field corn” and was grown principally to be dried, stored, and shelled for winter use. Beans were grown mostly to be dried, shelled, and stored, sometimes with hot pepper pods to repel weevils. Squash varieties were mostly hard-shelled, winter-keeper types, not the early maturing “summer squash” that are so popular today. Settlers from France had a long history of eating fresh vegetables, especially salad greens, and they brought seeds with them. However, they had to learn the seasons in the Lowcountry before they could grow greens successfully.

Magnolia Gardens; photo provided.

Ornamentals came into colonial gardens more slowly than food crops. Curiously, during the period when early plant explorers such as André and François Michaux, John and William Bartram, Mark Catesby, and others were gathering seeds and starts of native American ornamental species to ship to England and the Continent, settlers were slow in introducing the same species into their landscapes. The Michaux garden grew for sale more than 450 varieties of mostly native species. Perhaps native ornamentals caught on slowly because only the landed elite among the settlers had much experience with ornamental crops or the leisure time to grow them. Some of the commoners had grown food crops in the “old country,” but others from large towns in England and from Ulster knew little or nothing about cultivating plants of any sort.

Seed production was difficult in the Southeast because of plant diseases and seed-eating insects that infested crops. Therefore even the colonists who had the foresight to bring seeds with them soon had to turn to seed and bulb companies in Europe for supplies. Bulbs reproduced somewhat better than seeds but kinds that could not adapt to the hot, humid summers soon disappeared.

Indigo, rice, and cotton soon produced wealth sufficient to fund the construction of fine homes and gardens, on plantations and in towns. The brick-walled Charleston garden of Henry Laurens, for example, measured 600 by 450 feet. Plantation gardens were much larger, especially those along the Ashley and Cooper Rivers, such as [Magnolia Plantation,] Drayton Hall and Middleton Place. DuBose Heyward described the Lowcountry gardens of South Carolina succinctly: “formal gardens blended from their very creation ordered lines with natural beauty, for even the most formal intentions failed to achieve the same results here amid wistful live oaks and Spanish moss, where forests were fragrant with magnolia and jessamine, as in the more sedate landscapes of northern Europe. So the English-planned gardens of Carolina grew and mellowed into gardens unlike any others in the whole world.”

– Excerpted from the entry by Jim Wilson. To read more about this or 2,000 other entries about South Carolina, check out The South Carolina Encyclopedia by USC Press. (Information used by permission.)