Growing the Gardens at 

 Strawbery Banke Museum 



S, 



Ann Duncan 



trawbery Banke Museum, located on a ten- 

 acre site in the South End of Portsmouth, New 

 Hampshire, examines 350 years of changes in the 

 Puddle Dock neighborhood: changes in architec- 

 ture, material goods, economics, politics, demo- 

 graphics, and — for our purposes — landscape. 



Gardens have been recreated at several of the 

 restored houses, often using a combination of ar- 

 cheology, document and deed resources, family 

 correspondence, and in some cases, photographs, 

 garden plans, and even oral history sources. The 

 challenge for the horticulture staff, then, is to 

 grow plant material specific to the particular time 

 period represented by the restoration 



O, 



'ne of the first gardens restored and the earli- 

 est represented is the 1720s garden of the Joseph 

 Sherburne house Based extensively on archeol- 

 ogy, the garden is composed of fenced, symmetri- 

 cally arranged raised beds and pea-stone gravel 

 walks Growing here are plants necessary to an 

 early 18th-century household that had relatively 

 limited markets from which to draw. The garden 

 supplied not only fruits and vegetables, but also 

 many of the medicinal needs of the family. Seed 

 and pollen analysis of the 18th-century soil layers 

 reveals evidence of both native and cultivated 

 plants: oak, birch, juniper, pine, hemlock, rose, 



dogwood, ragweed, bindweed, portulaca, dande- 

 lion, primrose, mustard, cucumber, sorrel, sun- 

 flower, raspberry, and a legume were all growing 

 in — or in the vicinity of — the Sherburne garden. 



Today's interest in heirloom seed varieties has 

 made the horticulture staff's job of obtaining ap- 

 propriate seeds for the Sherburne garden much 

 easier. Some seeds and plants, such as sorrel, 

 elecampagne, horseradish, and rue, have changed 

 little since 1730. On the other hand, many of the 

 vegetables growing at the Sherburne site are 

 much different than their 20th-century descen- 

 dants. You may see English Broad Bean, Scarlet 

 Runner Bean, Long Orange Carrot, Premium Late 

 Flat Dutch Cabbage, Pepper Grass, and Early 

 Blood Turnip An apothecary rose would be used 

 for rose water and its hips as the source of vita- 

 min C. The apples growing in the Sherburne or- 

 chard, planted last spring, are Roxbury Russets — a 

 good cider apple 



l\ century later, in the 1830s, the widow Mary 

 Ryder had a much larger number of sources 

 (among them, the Canterbury Shakers) and a 

 greater variety of seeds and plants from which to 

 choose. The seed industry had expanded, making 

 available prepackaged seeds. A survey of local 

 newspapers indicates an active nursery and seed 



The Planlsman 

 18 



