A HISTORIAN'S 



COAST 



Whenever I visit Tryon Palace in New Bern, I head straight to the kitchen garden. 

 As an avid backyard gardener, I can't wait to see what new heirloom vegetables or 

 now-forgotten herbs grow in this garden modeled after the kind popular when 

 Governor William Tryon occupied the palace in 1 770-71. I'm sure many visitors 

 prefer to see how English colonists dressed for high tea, but garden buffs like me 

 want to see how they fertilized their turnips. 



As re-created by landscape 

 architect Morley Williams in the 1950s, 

 Tryon Palace's kitchen garden is an 

 expansive, 16,200-square-foot plot 

 surrounded by an 8-foot-high brick wall. 

 Resplendent with vegetables, herbs and 

 fruit trees, the garden beds are divided 

 into quadrants separated by walkways, 

 with two dipping wells in the middle. 

 Adorning the garden walls is a wide 

 array of espaliers, fruit trees pruned into 

 formal patterns against a wall or fence. 



Judging from his surviving letters, 

 Tryon never paid much notice to the 

 kitchen garden. He had his hands full 

 ruling a colony on the verge of revolu- 

 tion against England, and he is best 

 remembered for putting down the 

 Regulators, piedmont farmers who 

 revolted in 1771. Tryon may have left 

 the garden's care to his cook. Unfortu- 

 nately, we don't know who prepared the 

 meals for his family in New Bern — 

 knowing that would possibly tell us 

 much about the kitchen garden. Tryon 

 employed a French chef named Pierre 

 LeBlanc when he was governor at 

 Brunswick (the colonial capital was 

 moved from Brunswick to New Bern 

 when the palace was built in 1769). The 

 next royal governor, Josiah Martin, had 

 an African- American cook whose name 

 we don't know. 



Historical records say almost 

 nothing about what actually grew in 

 Tryon 's kitchen garden. Only because 

 Martin was accused of hiding a barrel of 

 gunpowder for use against the American 

 revolutionaries "under a fine bed of 



cabbage" in 1775 do we know with 

 certainty that any vegetable was ever 

 grown at the colonial capitol. Even the 

 kitchen garden's original design was a 

 mystery until just a few years ago. In 

 1991, Tryon Palace researchers discov- 

 ered the original garden plan at the 

 Academica Nacional de la Historia in 

 Venezuela. The building's architect, John 

 Hawks, had given it to a Venezuelan 

 traveler named Francisco de Miranda 

 when he passed through New Bern in 

 1783. 



Even without the kind of detailed 

 journals that Thomas Jefferson left of his 

 kitchen garden at Monticello. the Tryon 

 Palace gardeners try admirably to capture 

 the soul of the original kitchen garden. In 

 addition to scavenging every mention of 

 garden and cookery from 1 8th-century 

 travel accounts, they draw on the classic 

 texts such as Philip Miller's The 

 Gardener s Dictionaiy (1754) and 

 ingredients listed in early American 

 cookbooks such as Amelia Simmons' 

 American Cookery (1796) and Mary 

 Randolph's The Virginia House-wife 

 (1802). 



They also realize that the original 

 kitchen garden would have reflected an 

 extraordinary mixing of American, 

 European and African crops. The garden 

 would have combined sweet potatoes, 

 peppers, green beans and squash 

 cultivated by Native Americans; cab- 

 bages, peas, turnips and other vegetables 

 found in any English garden; and okra, 

 watermelons and eggplant, whose seeds 

 had probably arrived in America aboard 



slave ships from Africa. All can be 

 found in the kitchen garden today. 



Several features distinguish Tryon 

 Palace's kitchen garden from modern 

 vegetable gardens like mine. Perhaps 

 most importantly, the palace's garden 

 holds many vegetables rarely grown or 

 eaten in the United States today. Since 

 the 1 8th century, for example, new 

 lettuce hybrids have displaced many 

 other leafy greens in American diets. 

 But at Tryon Palace visitors can still 

 find dandelions, sorrel (which adds a 

 lemony flavor to a salad) and creasy 

 greens grown for the dinner table as well 

 as many small shrubs like hyssop 

 (Hyssopus officinalis), a pungently 

 aromatic plant used to flavor salads, 

 soups and meat dishes. 



A far greater variety of root crops 

 would also have grown in Tryon 's 

 kitchen garden. The Irish potato, 

 actually cultivated by ancestors of the 

 Incas at least 6,000 years before it was 

 grown in Ireland, later overshadowed 

 other root crops in American gardens, 

 but that was not yet the case in the 

 1770s. At Tryon Palace, visitors find 

 still-common roots such as radishes, 

 carrots, beets, sweet potatoes, turnips 

 and onions. Turnips, in fact, were wildly 

 popular vegetables in colonial gardens, 

 far more so than today. The garden also 

 includes root crops not very common 

 now, such as parsnips, skirrits and 

 salsify. Stewed, baked or used in a 

 cream sauce, salsify (Tragopogon 

 porrifolius) is known as the "oyster 



Continued 



COASTWATCH 19 



