Few historic sites have SGHS ties matching Mount Vernon’s, largely because few garden professionals have tighter Society bonds than recently retired fifty-five-year Mount Vernon employee, Dean Norton. Now titled “Director of Horticulture and Livestock Emeritus,” this charter member, long-time SGHS board member, and past president hosted four decade-marking annual meetings at Mount Vernon, the first in 1990 and the most recent in 2022 (delayed from 2020 by Covid). As well, he piloted the 2012 Richmond meeting. (At his moment, current Society board member Leslie Bird serves as curator of historic gardens and landscapes.)
During these meetings much was learned about the overall property, the gardens, and, for sure, George Washington. Speakers delivered a clear message that the story of Mount Vernon’s landscape and its distinct garden areas has been one of fixity and flux, both during the Washington period and through later decades of restoration and interpretation.
East of the mansion, the rolling terrain and Potomac vista give Mount Vernon a near-sublime gravitas matched by few settings. To the west, however, the grounds have witnessed substantial changes. Here, just prior to the Revolution the Washingtons began modifications that involved reconfiguring the existing dominant straight lines and right angles of the garden walls and drives into an area characterized by curving and undulating patterns reminiscent of English picturesque landscapes. As various scholars have noted, much inspiration came from Batty Langley’s 1728 New Principles of Gardening ordered by Washington in 1759. Per Mount Vernon’s website, Langley stated “Nor is there Anything more shocking than a stiff regular Garden.”
Readers can see the result in a 1787 Samuel Vaughan plan.* The Washingtons’ “ferme ornée” can also be experienced in person at Mount Vernon, especially while walking around the large central bowling green. Restored by the Garden Club of Virginia in 2001 (a project by landscape architect Rudy Favretti), the lawn is bordered by wide serpentine shrub-edged walkways and shaded by a variety of trees beloved by our first president, including tulip poplars, oaks, lindens, and ash, all available in nearby forests.
Growing practices, however, echoed those noted at other colonial-era sites, namely being a mix of vegetables, fruits, shrubs, and ornamentals, with kitchen needs predominating. Exemplifying this is the long evolving and extensively-studied Upper Garden set next to the restored massive brick greenhouse. Eighteenth-century guests and Society members walked about the general’s “pleasure garden” taking in vegetable and fruit tree beds bordered by bands of flowering color, all edged with boxwood. As well, several parterres honor the French role in the Revolution with elaborate fleurs-de-lis patterned in boxwood, while on the east is Washington’s “little garden” which allowed him to try out a wide number of plants that might prove useful in his gardens or on his plantations.
Annual meetings have also offered time to explore the Lower Garden plus the Fruit Garden and Nursery. Devoted to vegetables and espaliered fruit, the former was and is a highly ordered and carefully managed space long under the direction of Martha Washington who ensured a steady flow of produce to the table. At the nearby Fruit Garden and Nursery one can not only make a deeper study of the various fruits that were important to the Washingtons but also have a moment to breathe and relax in the more open spaces found there.
Though the Washington family centers Mount Vernon’s story, the overall picture is rich with other details. Here too, for example, one sees women taking the lead in preservation efforts, in this instance prior to the Civil War. With the property in great decline, a newly formed Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association of the Union, led by South Carolina native Ann Pamela Cunningham, raised an amazing $200,000 to buy the house and two-hundred acres in 1857. The organization still governs Mount Vernon, their pioneering efforts and all-women leadership having inspired other important properties such as Stratford Hall.
Visitors here (and to the website) should also explore the story of the enslaved families who made it all happen and who numbered over three-hundred children, women, and men in 1799. No “slavery times” site can capture the full meaning and magnitude of such a presence, and this is also true at the Washingtons’ homeplace. Specific markers of their cultural landscape are found, however, at such spots as the quarters near the Upper Garden, at a recreated cabin near the Pioneer Farm site, and at the Memorial to the Enslaved and slave cemetery. Yet, one can imagine their labors and social interaction at every nook and corner of the site, including the nearby working mill and distillery.
Summing up Mount Vernon challenges a writer with only space enough for a Gardens post. The reader is thus highly encouraged to devote extra time to the excellent MV website, which also includes Dean Norton’s garden description videos.**
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*For the Vaughan plan and an expanded discussion of the Upper Garden, see: https://southerngardenhistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Magnolia_Spring2010.pdf#page=1
**For greater detail, visit:
https://www.mountvernon.org/the-estate-gardens/gardens-landscapes
Recommended reading: Margaret Page Bemiss, Historic Virginia Gardens: Preservation Work of the Garden Club of Virginia, 1975-2007, “Mount Vernon, 142-151.
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