Gardens of Mount Vernon
By Helen Von Salzen for the Garden Club of the Sandhills

Dean Norton has been working at Mount Vernon for the past forty years.
He started out as a teenaged costumed historical interpreter and proceeded to become Director of Horticulture at George Washington’s home.

Today, he is a much acclaimed horticulturist who has been granted an honorary membership in our fellow organization, the Garden Club of Virginia, and who currently serves as president of the Southern Garden History Society, which is headquartered in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

On October 28, 2010, Mr. Norton was the featured speaker at the George Washington exhibition at the North Carolina Museum of History in Raleigh.
Our GCS president, Thea Pitassy, had mentioned Mr. Norton’s upcoming lecture at our last meeting and I, Helen Von Salzen, went to Raleigh to hear Mr. Norton speak about George Washington as horticulturist and about the landscape he created.

Historical horticulture is one of my own great areas of interest and experience and my husband and I belong to the organization called Friends of Mount Vernon and visited Washington’s home and gardens throughout our three decades of residence in the nation’s capital. We are also members of the Southern Garden History Society and of the North Carolina Museum of History’s Associates.

George Washington is best understood by those who share his interests in agriculture and in horticulture. He served in many roles but none satisfied him more than that of a farmer and a gardener. And there was no place he’d prefer to be than his home at Mount Vernon on the Potomac River outside of the city of Alexandria, Virginia.

Washington’s grandfather had acquired the site in 1674 and George inherited it, in 1757 after the death of his older half-brother, Lawrence Washington, who had been its squire. It was a countryseat for the Washingtons who also maintained a modest townhouse in Alexandria.

There was a small house at Mount Vernon until after George inherited the property and expanded the house into its current configuration and he would also spend years developing and redeveloping the landscape.

Colonial and Federal era gardens depended on English landscape principles of design and gradually evolved from the formal gardens of the era of William and Mary to the naturalistic gardens that were popular in the late 18th C.

George Washington was strongly influenced by the British garden writer, Batty Langley, who wrote a book called NEW PRINCIPLES OF GARDENING, which Washington acquired in 1759. In it, Mr. Langley proclaimed that the landscape of a proper countryseat should include parterres, groves, wilderness areas, labyrinths, avenues and vistas and Washington introduced all of these features at Mount Vernon.

Additionally, the Washingtons enjoyed the “borrowed landscape” views of the Potomac River and of the Maryland countryside across the river. And Martha Washington, whom Mr. Norton called a “knowledgeable plants woman,” supervised the kitchen garden from whence came vegetables and herbs for the household and which was also described as a “garden of necessity.”

Mr. Norton said that “the forest was his nursery,” when asked the source of the trees planted by George Washington at Mount Vernon, and he told the audience that twelve trees remain from Washington’s era and they are nurtured by resident arborists.

Mount Vernon continues to feature the varying gardens of Washington’s era:
¢ the Lower Garden or Kitchen Garden
¢ the Upper Garden or Pleasure Garden and Greenhouse
¢ the Botanical Garden
¢ the Vineyard Enclosure.

At this time, the Pleasure Garden has been stripped bare for a joint restoration project between the Archaeological and Horticultural Departments of Mount Vernon. A new planting will be instituted which Dean Norton says “will be more like a garden of the 18th C. than any other previously done at Mount Vernon.” I look forward to seeing it next Spring and Summer.

For further information, read the book called WASHINGTON’S GARDENS AT MOUNT VERNON: LANDSCAPE OF THE INNER MAN by Mac Griswold, Houghton Mifflin Company, NY: 1999.

Also, see the exhibit at the NC Museum of History through January 21, 2011,
www.ncmuseumofhistory.org

Join:
North Carolina Museum of History Associates, www.ncmuseumassoc.com
Friends of Mount Vernon,  www.mountvernon.org
Southern Garden History Society, www.southerngardenhistory.org