Kitchen Gardens in Colonial Virginia

Photo: Williamsburg
By Wesley Greene, garden historian in the Landscape Department at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.
Most plantation accounts refer to kitchen gardens, but it is far more difficult to determine how common kitchen gardens were in an urban setting and, in particular, in eighteenth-century Williamsburg. The 1782 Desandrouins map of Williamsburg does show garden areas on several properties, particularly on the fringes of town where the larger estates were located. Thomas Jefferson, in a 1776 letter to John Page, compares Annapolis, Maryland, to Williamsburg and concedes that the buildings in Annapolis were “in general better than those at Williamsburg, but the gardens are more indifferent.” All of the stores in eighteenth-century Williamsburg offered vegetable seeds for sale, so there were certainly a number of fine gardens in town that were most likely vegetable gardens.

A survey of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century York County [Virginia] probate inventories for urban properties reveals that only slightly more than seven percent of all of those households listed garden tools in the estates. While these lists cannot be construed as consistently inclusive of all articles owned by the household, they do indicate that urban gardens were perhaps the exception rather than the rule. For Williamsburg properties offered for sale in the Virginia Gazette during the eighteenth century, approximately twenty percent mention a garden.
Link to ‘Kitchen Gardens in Colonial Virginia’ web page here.