Credit: Gibbes Museum of Art/Carolina Art Association
Dating to the 1730s, the gardens at Crowfield north of Charleston once ranked among the finest in colonial South Carolina. Aided by period documents, twentieth-century studies, and archaeological evidence, what remains at the site can still tell the story of a spot that inspired the awe of eighteenth-century guests and can have the same effect today… if a bit of imagination is applied.
Society members were able to challenge their own fantasy skills when we visited Crowfield during the 1992 annual meeting in Charleston. Our organizers were ASLA landscape architects Hugh and Mary Palmer Dargan, and we were fortunate to get detailed accounts of efforts to protect the Crowfield garden ruins from golf course development.
At this point, for background, readers may wish to revisit the earlier Gardens post on Henry and Mary Williams Middleton’s home, Middleton Place. Like that famed Cooper River site, Crowfield existed chiefly on profits from rice production, and later indigo; the planter in this case was Henry Middleton’s older brother William, the land being a 1727 gift from his father, Arthur.
In her article for the Spring 2000 Magnolia, Elise Pinckney, descendant of Eliza Lucas Pinckney, recalls that during his 1720s studies and explorations in England an impressionable young William visited several fashionable gardens.* These included those at Mortlake near Kew and the Middleton family’s Suffolk home, Crowfield Hall. It seems likely that he also would have known Alexander Pope’s famed Thames-front villa at Twickenham. In England, he thus saw mounts, canals, and fishponds along with other features that would reappear at his soon-to-be Low Country home place. While lacking a grand riverfront site (such as Pope’s villa or Middleton Place a decade later), William would have surely learned the importance of vistas and water to any proper garden. Mounts and aquatic elements therefore would be key to the Crowfield gardens.
No direct evidence links the work to a professional garden designer, yet the final results suggest such a possibility. As well, he may have turned to Dezallier d’Argenville’s The Theory and Practice of Gardening for inspiration, as did brother Henry in the 1740s. Whatever the various influences, the final design for Crowfield centered on the brick mansion and its flankers. In turn, the principal north-south axis ran through the center of the main dwelling starting from a public roadway on the south. We are fortunate that Eliza Lucas left a 1743 description of the gardens, this being quoted verbatim by Mary Palmer Dargan in the Fall 1991 issue of Magnolia.**
The landscape Eliza Lucas wrote about married long-established symmetrical garden designs with newer landscape components a la mode in early-eighteenth-century England. We learn of a home first seen from a mile’s distance and visited via a tree-lined drive which curved around a “spacious Basin (pond) in the midst of a large Green.” Walking north from the house, Eliza followed a wide path “a thousand feet” long, discovering first a “grass plat ornamented in a Serpentine manner with flowers.” Here can be imagined some of d’Argenville’s parterre designs which echo French Rococo garden fashions. Further along she enjoyed a “thicket” of young live oaks filled with song birds. Pleasing to Eliza’s “rural taste,” this seems a clear nod to a current English fashion for bosquets, a feature that was also popular in France. Opposite the thicket was a bowling green bordered by southern magnolias and catalpas. An excellent place for social gatherings, such open lawns were de rigueur in important designed landscapes, such as the Williamsburg Governor’s Palace gardens recently discussed on this page.
Crowfield’s gardens terminated on the north with a water enclosure visible from the main house, described as “a large fish pond.” Apparently, a rectangular lake, this centered “other large fish ponds properly disposed,” which may have included the canal shown on a 1938 A.T.S. Stoney garden map.*** Attention-grabbing, too, were Crowfield’s mounts, most especially one that rose from the lake and was topped with a “roman temple.”
Though the lake mount is lost to modern construction, archaeologists found evidence of extensive soil moving at Crowfield. As discussed in the Chicora Foundation report cited below, this produced earthen berms and another mount northwest of the mansion, all materials being transported in baskets and carefully packed down.**** It was clearly a massive undertaking, with due credit again going to the many enslaved workers charged with the manual labor.
William Middleton enjoyed these remarkable gardens for only a few decades, selling his property and relocating to Crowfield Hall in England in 1754. Passing out of and then back into Middleton hands, the South Carolina Crowfield story is one of slow decline, the final blow given to the house by the earthquake of 1886.
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*For Elise Pinckney’s article, see: https://southerngardenhistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Magnolia_Spring_2000-1.pdf#page=1
**https://southerngardenhistory.org/wp-content/uploads/1991-Fall-Vol.-VIII-no.-2.pdf#page=1. Eliza Lucas (married Charles Pinckney in 1744) is particularly well known for her leading role in introducing indigo as cash crop in colonial South Carolina
***A 1930s drawing of the site can be seen at the site below. It can best be seen in S.G Stoney, et al, Plantations of the Carolina Low Country. https://inlandrice.charlestoncounty.org/studying-c.html
****https://chicora.org/pdfs/RC102%20-%20Crowfield%20Landscape.pdf
For a Crowfield chronology, see: https://south-carolina-plantations.com/berkeley/crowfield.html
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