In early May 1994, Society members gathered in Williamsburg for our twelfth annual meeting, the first such event held there. Now a second Williamsburg meeting is being planned for spring 2026 under the leadership of past president, Gordon Chappell and board member, Judy Perry. Williamsburg-related Gardens page posts thus seem especially timely.
Among the sites visited in 1994, the Governor’s Palace Gardens stand out for historic landscape significance. As we learned then, the initial installation dates to the 1710s, with colonial Lieutenant Governor Alexander Spotswood getting credit for project oversight. Knowing the importance of an imposing residence as a symbol of royal power, Spotswood wasted little time after his 1710 arrival in beginning to shape the Palace grounds. Not surprisingly this ultimately resulted in a highly-controlled and strictly geometrical garden installation of the sort popular during the Tudor-Stuart period and lingering into William and Mary’s reign.
Despite this taste for formal patterns, however, Spotswood and his successors were aware of changing landscape fashion in England. As Peter Martin discusses in Pleasure Gardens of Virginia* there was more to the Palace grounds than the parterres and the rigid squares, rectangles, triangles, straight lines, and cylindrical shrubberies that were to be brought back in the 1930s. Crucial to his overall design fancies, Spotswood set up vistas north and south, the latter being the broad, character-defining “palace green” leading from the town and long known for its bordering rows of catalpa trees.
North of the immediate grounds, moreover, the governor’s lands then included sixty-three acres (the term “deer park” appears in early Palace-related documents) that allowed for pasturage plus a large orchard and kitchen gardens. These spots, however, found protection from livestock by vista-friendly ha-ha ditches instead of visually intrusive rail fences. The use of the ha-ha was a clear nod by Spotswood to a growing taste in England for naturalistic settings, this later evolving into the ferme ornée style. The result was pre-Revolutionary views from the Palace’s roof walk and tall cupola that we can only imagine today.
Two centuries later, a massive task faced Boston-based Arthur Shurcliff when he took on restoration of the palace gardens as a crucial component of the newly reborn “Colonial Williamsburg.” While accepting sweeping Williamsburg responsibilities in the spring of 1928, it was only in 1930 that he could begin work on the ten acres allotted for the Governor’s grounds.
Guidance came from surviving site features, archeology, written documents, early drawings, and eighteenth-century sites in Great Britain. Of especial help was the ca. 1740 Bodleian Plate (discovered in 1929 at Oxford University’s Bodleian Library) which depicted not only the main dwelling but also its walled forecourt, parterres, dependencies, gates. A walled formal garden was also depicted adjacent to the Palace on the north. Crucial, too, was strong surviving physical evidence of a terraced area northwest of the palace. This “falling garden” had led down to a canal and fishpond, thus revealing a lingering Dutch influence on English and colonial garden design.
Not surprisingly, these features reappeared in Shurcliff’s restoration scheme. Joined to them in his layout was a fruit garden, a boxwood garden (Shurcliff dearly loved boxwood of all types), a pre-existing Revolutionary War solder graveyard, a bowling green, and a mount. In addition, a kitchen garden positioned west of the forecourt and kitchen building recalled larger eighteenth-century spaces devoted to feeding enslaved workers, family, and guests.
Largely completed by 1935, the Palace gardens also reveal a conflict in Shurcliff’s approach to his work. While typically insisting that restoration principles absolutely adhere to solid facts, he could also yield to personal intuitions when he thought a garden element ought to be there. Such was the story with the Palace maze. It was a feature he had much admired at English sites but for which the early Palace gardens provided no evidence. It nonetheless became an idée fixe for the strong-willed Shurcliff, and the (enduringly popular) maze was installed despite opposition from colleagues and especially from Williamsburg’s new director of research and record, Harold Shurtleff.** All in all, however, the final result was a major feather in Shurcliff’s cap, as it had been for Alexander Spotswood in the days when Williamsburg was truly a “colonial” town.
Resources below offer the greater detail and images this topic truly demands. Future posts, moreover, will explore other Colonial Williamsburg area gardens and landscapes in anticipation of the 2026 annual meeting.
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For more details and site views, visit:
https://www.colonialwilliamsburg.org/events/governors-palace/governors-palace-gardens/
*For a wonderfully detailed Governor’s gardens account, see Peter Martin, The Pleasure Gardens of Virginia: From Jamestown to Jefferson.
On Shurcliff and Williamsburg, see Elizabeth Hope Cushing, Arthur A. Shurcliff: Design, Preservation, and the Creation of the Colonial Williamsburg Landscape.
For excellent overall reading on the Williamsburg landscape, see Gordon W. Chappell and M. Kent Brinkley, The Gardens of Colonial Williamsburg.
**Personal disagreements and communications confusion involving Harold Shurtleff may have led to a 1930 change from the original Arthur Shurtleff to Arthur Shurcliff. See Cushing, 197. This author has yet to find a family connection between Harold Shurtleff and Arthur Shurcliff, although Harold also hailed from Boston and was a Harvard alumnus like Arthur.
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