Garden Tour

Introduction

In 1804, Noah Webster offered to Connecticut Courant readers his thoughts on American agriculture. He stated: "I possess not a farm on which to indulge my inclination for experiments; my experience is limited to a small garden; but even this experience may have offered a few useful truths." Although the garden Noah referred to is the one he and his family grew in New Haven in 1804, one cannot help but think that his fascination with American agriculture and gardening may well have begun here, in the garden of his childhood home. You may view the garden on this tour by clicking on the small images to the left to reveal larger images of the same pictures.

The Noah Webster House maintains a raised-bed parlor garden which contains herbs, flowers, and vegetables available to the Websters during the middle of the eighteenth century. The garden is planted to represent the year 1774, the last year Noah lived at home. Parlor gardens such as this were very popular in the 17th and 18th centuries. They were typically placed near the house where it would be easily accessible. The garden gate here next to the kitchen door allows for easy access to the plants while cooking.

If you enter the garden, you will find that the colonists had a variety of plants available to them. They harvested, saved, and traded their seeds, occasionally purchasing them from some of the local merchants that carried seeds in their shops.

Herbs and plants played a vital role in the daily life of the colonists. They were used as medicines, flavorings in foods, dyes for wool and flax, and as disinfectants and insecticides. Herbs could be used fresh or dried, and became ingredients in a variety of teas, potpourris, poultices, and ointments. Herbals of the period, or how-to books, were available to instruct the colonial housewife in the medicinal and culinary uses of herbs and plants. Today we use these same herbals to help us learn how the colonists incorporated herbs into their daily lives.

Re-creating colonial gardens, such as the one at the Noah Webster House, helps us to better understand how people lived in the colonial period. According to Ann Leighton, in her book Early American Gardens: For Meate or Medicine, the plants of colonial gardens "bear direct testimony to the tastes and needs, the whims and joys, even the most secret hopes and fears, of the people themselves. In recreating gardens of other times we come as close as is possible to those who worked and walked in them." You are welcome to walk through the garden at the Noah Webster House any time you would like. Labels at the base of the plants help guide you through the garden. We hope you will enjoy the opportunity to explore the variety of colonial plants at the Noah Webster House, and envision life in a colonial garden.

Explore online the colonial uses for some of the plants in the Noah Webster House garden!

[Note: The following describes uses of herbs in the colonial period only, and should not be interpreted as a recommendation of how herbs can be used today.]

Sources:

Colonial Dames of America, Herbs and Herb Lore of Colonial America (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1995).

Culpeper's Color Herbal, ed. David Potterton (New York: Sterling Publishing Co., Inc., 1983).

Ann Leighton, Early American Gardens: For Meate or Medicine (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1970).

Martha White, "Strewing Herbs For Home and Hearth," Early American Life (August 1995): 4-5.

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