The Old Household Garden: When the Garden Supplied More Than Flowers

  

There was a time when the garden was not merely a pleasant place surrounding the house. It was, in a very real sense, part of the household economy.

A well-kept garden might provide flowers for the parlor table, certainly, but flowers were only the beginning. Beyond the back door grew vegetables for dinner, herbs for cooking, plants for teas and home remedies, fruits for preserves, gourds for useful vessels, and fragrant leaves and blossoms for scenting rooms and linens. The garden supplied the kitchen, pantry, medicine cupboard, workroom, and sometimes even the dye pot.

Our ancestors expected a surprising amount from a patch of earth.

The Garden as an Extension of the House

Before supermarkets, pharmacies, garden centers, and overnight delivery, a household had good reason to produce what it could at home. This was especially true in rural America and throughout the South, where farms and household gardens might lie considerable distances from town.

The garden nearest the house was often different from the larger fields devoted to corn, cotton, wheat, or other crops. It was intimate ground—frequently tended with the daily needs of the family in mind.

Here might be beans climbing poles, cabbages standing in neat rows, onions and garlic tucked into convenient corners, and tomatoes sprawling wherever they could be accommodated. There might be collards, turnips, mustard greens, peas, squash, cucumbers, okra, peppers, and sweet potatoes.

What grew depended upon the region, the season, family custom, and whatever seed had been saved or obtained.

The garden was not simply a hobby. It was a working part of the household.

A Pantry Growing Just Outside the Door

The old household garden supplied food when it was fresh, but its usefulness extended far beyond harvest day.

Beans could be dried. Cucumbers became pickles. Cabbage might be made into kraut. Fruits were dried, canned, preserved, or turned into jams and jellies. Peppers could be dried and stored. Herbs hung in bundles from rafters or were kept in jars for winter use.

Even the garden's abundance had a calendar.

Spring brought tender greens and early vegetables. Summer produced beans, squash, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, and melons. Autumn brought roots, pumpkins, winter squash, and the last great gathering before frost. In mild Southern climates, collards, turnips, mustard, and other hardy crops might continue producing well into the colder months.

The pantry was, in a sense, the garden preserved in jars, crocks, sacks, and strings.

The Household Herb Garden

Herbs once occupied a more important place in everyday life than they generally do now.

Sage flavored meat and dressing. Thyme, parsley, rosemary, mint, dill, fennel, and other herbs served the kitchen according to local custom and family taste. Mint might find its way into beverages and sauces. Dill accompanied pickling. Lavender and rosemary could serve purposes both practical and ornamental.

Then there were plants grown because generations believed them useful for common household complaints.

Chamomile, horehound, peppermint, catnip, lemon balm, comfrey, feverfew, and many others appeared in traditional household gardens at various times and places. Some old remedies had genuine medicinal properties; others owed more to folklore than pharmacology. Our ancestors possessed considerable practical plant knowledge, but they also occasionally prescribed things that make a modern bottle of aspirin seem a blessing indeed.

Still, the important point is that the garden was expected to provide more than food.

It was the household apothecary as well.

Flowers Had Work to Do

Even ornamental plants were not always purely ornamental.

Roses provided petals for potpourri and scented preparations. Lavender could perfume linens. Certain flowers supplied dyes. Others attracted bees necessary for pollination. Some edible flowers found their way into the kitchen.

And, of course, flowers served one purpose that cannot be measured in pounds or bushels: they made ordinary life more beautiful.

That mattered.

A family might have little money to spare, yet still grow roses beside the porch, hollyhocks by the fence, daffodils along a path, or chrysanthemums near the door. Beauty was not considered incompatible with usefulness.

Indeed, the finest old household gardens often mixed the two so thoroughly that the distinction almost disappeared.

Plants for Cleaning, Scenting, and Making Things

The usefulness of plants extended into less obvious corners of domestic life.

Gourds could become dippers, containers, birdhouses, and utensils. Plants rich in natural pigments could provide color for cloth and yarn. Fragrant herbs and flowers were placed among stored linens or made into sachets and potpourri.

Wood ash from the household and garden fires had uses of its own. Plant material became compost or was returned to the soil. Corn shucks, straw, pine needles, leaves, and other materials were put to work rather than immediately thrown away.

The old household was remarkably good at finding a second life for things.

Not because everyone had adopted an environmental philosophy, but because waste cost something.

When goods required considerable labor or money to obtain, throwing useful material away made little sense.

Seeds Were Part of the Household Wealth

One of the most important products of the old garden was something we seldom think of as a harvest: seed.

Gardeners saved seed from beans, peas, tomatoes, peppers, melons, flowers, and countless other plants. Some varieties passed through families and communities for generations.

Seeds were traded across fences, carried when families moved westward, mailed to relatives, and shared among neighbors.

A particular bean might have been grown because someone's grandmother always grew it. A rose might have come from a cutting taken at an old homeplace. A fig tree might descend from one planted decades earlier.

These plants carried stories along with their genes.

Modern gardeners call many of them heirlooms, which is appropriate. They were inheritances in the truest sense.

Nothing Stood Entirely Alone

Perhaps the greatest difference between the traditional household garden and many modern gardens is that the old garden belonged to a larger cycle.

Kitchen scraps returned to the compost pile or fed animals. Manure returned to the garden. Fallen leaves became mulch or leaf mold. Seeds were gathered for another year. Surplus vegetables were preserved or shared. Prunings might become kindling. Rain was watched carefully because there was no automatic irrigation system waiting to correct a dry week.

The gardener understood, whether scientifically or simply through experience, that one season prepared the ground for another.

Nothing was entirely separate.

The kitchen depended upon the garden. The garden depended upon the household. Both depended upon the seasons.

What We Lost When Gardens Became Decorative

During the twentieth century, the American home landscape gradually became more specialized.

The front yard became lawn and shrubbery. Vegetables were relegated to a rectangular plot somewhere out back, if they were grown at all. Herbs came dried in bottles. Fruit came from the grocery store. Medicines came from the pharmacy. Compostable material went into the trash.

We gained tremendous convenience.

But we also lost something.

We lost some of the intimacy between household and landscape—the habit of looking at a piece of ground and asking not merely, What would look pretty here? but also, What might this provide?

Those questions need not be enemies.

A blueberry bush can be handsome and productive. Rosemary can be ornamental and useful. A fig tree provides shade, character, and fruit. Muscadines can cover an arbor while filling baskets in late summer. Herbs can edge a path. Strawberries can serve as groundcovers. Flowers can feed pollinators while furnishing bouquets for the house.

The useful garden need not be ugly.

Our ancestors certainly did not think so.

Bringing the Household Garden Back

Few of us need to recreate a nineteenth-century farmstead, and probably fewer still would enjoy doing all the work that such a household demanded.

But we can recover some of its wisdom.

Start with one small thing.

Grow parsley outside the kitchen door. Plant a rosemary bush beside the walk. Put a few lettuce plants in a container. Grow strawberries beneath taller plants. Compost vegetable scraps and autumn leaves. Plant a fig, blueberry, or muscadine if your climate allows it. Save seed from an heirloom flower that has done particularly well.

Then add another useful plant.

Before long, the garden begins to change character. It becomes more than scenery.

You begin walking outside because you need rosemary for supper. You notice that the lettuce is ready. You gather mint for tea. You turn the compost. You pick a handful of berries before the birds discover them. You save seed because that particular bean performed exceptionally well.

The garden quietly becomes part of the household again.

A Garden That Earns Its Keep

There is much to admire in a beautiful ornamental garden. Flowers, shade trees, lawns, and handsome shrubs have their rightful place.

But there is something deeply satisfying about a garden that earns its keep.

The old household garden was beautiful precisely because it was alive with purpose. It fed people. It seasoned their meals. It supplied remedies and fragrances. It provided materials for household tasks. It preserved favorite plants from one generation to another.

And among all those useful things, our ancestors still found room for roses.

Perhaps that is the lesson worth recovering.

A garden need not choose between usefulness and beauty. At its best, it can provide both—a place where flowers bloom beside vegetables, herbs scent the path, fruit ripens overhead, yesterday's leaves become tomorrow's soil, and the ground around the house once again becomes a small but productive part of everyday life.

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