Today, we take for granted
the ability to stop by the supermarket and pick up vegetables, fruit, and
citrus at any time of the year. If
it is out of season, it might cost a little more, but it is available. This has not always been the case. Gardeners began tackling this problem
in the days of the Roman Emperors.
One of the first
interesting tidbits that Wesley Greene, Garden Historian for the Colonial
Williamsburg Foundation, relates this week in his Gardening Under Cover is the way in
which gardeners first were able to supply a vegetable out of season.
Kitchen-gardeners for
the Roman Emperor Tiberius raised his favorite vegetable, cucumber (or was it
melon?), year-round by mounting the cucumber beds on wheels. In this way, they were able to bring
the plants outdoors on sunny days and move them into a protected area during
nights and cold days.
I have taken to doing
this myself, to get a jump-start on the season with seedlings started
indoors. I put them on a garden
cart when they are ready to be hardened for outdoor planting. In this way, I can move them outdoors
on sunny days and then back into the garage during nights and cold spells. I don' take credit for this idea,
however. A friend started using
his pickup truck in the same way, years ago, to follow the sun with his plants
in his driveway.
Journey along with
Greene as he traces the history of orangery', greenhouses, and other ways of
growing 'under cover'. What' old
is new again as history repeats itself.
--- Anne K Moore March 27, 2009 ---
Photos by Anne K Moore ---
GARDENING UNDER COVER
by Wesley Greene
Garden Historian, Colonial
Williamsburg Foundation
The early history of
agriculture is largely a history of grain and legumes; wheat and peas in
Mesopotamia, rice and soybeans in ancient China, corn and kidney beans in
Mesoamerica. It was a reliable
food source gave all three major centers of civilization the leisure to pursue
the advancement of society and the human condition.
Meat, grain and legumes
were still the greatest part of the 18th century diet in colonial
America and many of the vegetables that crowd the produce isles at the market
today were considered luxury items then.
A gentleman in 18th century Williamsburg who could serve a
perfectly blanched cauliflower or a well-formed artichoke from the produce of
his own garden was a generous host indeed.
It was the even rarer
host who could serve fruits or vegetables out of their natural season or
natural climate. The first person
I can find to eat a vegetable out of its natural season was the Roman emperor
Tiberius who ruled between 14 and 37 CE**. Pliny records in the Natural History (circa 72 CE), that the cucumber was, 'a delicacy for which the
emperor Tiberius had a remarkable partiality; in fact there was never a day on
which he was not supplied with it, as his kitchen-gardeners had cucumber beds
mounted on wheels which they moved out into the sun and then on wintry days
withdrew under the cover of frames glazed with transparent stone.'
All of the methods
developed for growing fruits and vegetables out of season seem to revolve
around four fruits: the orange, cucumber, melon and pineapple. We will look first at the orange, which
is responsible for the development or the orangery, stove house and eventually,
the greenhouse that we are familiar with today.
The first
orange in Europe was the bitter orange (Citrus aurantium). This appears to be a native of India,
which was acquired by Arabic people at a very early date. This is not the sweet orange we know
today. Only the rind is used for
perfume, seasoning and medicine. A
variety of the sour orange known as the Seville Orange is best known for its
use in marmalade and the Bergamot variety of sour Orange is what gives Earl
Grey tea its distinctive flavor.
The Romans apparently did not grow the orange themselves but acquired it
from the Arabs and it was the Arabs who first brought orange culture to Europe
in Moorish Spain where it is first recorded by Caliph al-Mansur in 976 CE at
Cordoba.
Legend has it that the
first sweet orange (Citrus sinensis) was brought from India by Portuguese
traders in the 15th century and the culture of the sweet orange
quickly replaced the sour orange in southern Europe. It was not long after this that northern nobility began
devising methods of growing this luscious tropical fruit at their own
estates. The first Englishman to
raise, successfully, an orange tree was Lord Carew who accomplished the feat at
his estate at Beddington sometime in the middle of the 16th
century. John Evelyn visited
Beddington, then in decline, in 1700 and recorded that it was, Theretofore
adorned with ample gardens, and the first orange-trees that had been seen in
England, planted in the open ground, and secured in winter only by a tabernacle
of boards and stoves. In a 1561
letter written by Lord Burghley via his son to Lord Carew, who was staying in France,
he requests, I have already an orange tree, and if the price be not
much, I pray you procure for me a lemon.
It was probably in France that Carew saw his first orangery and
apparently constructed a crude form of an orangery at Beddington. By the 17th century, the largest
orangery in Europe was found at Versailles where, by 1685, gardeners to Louis
XIV were housing 1200 orange trees and 300 specimens of other tropical fruit.
The orangery
was not a greenhouse as we think of one today. They were long narrow structures with tall south facing
windows that were meant to house exotic fruit for the winter, which were then
brought back outside for the summer months. The containers developed to grow the orange trees in were
fashioned with handles that accepted poles allowing two men to move them
about.
Originally,
orangery' relied exclusively on insulation to keep out the winter cold but it
was not long before experiments in providing artificial heat were
attempted. The first attempts were
made with charcoal braziers that were set around the floors or hung from the
ceilings. The problem with these
braziers was that the fumes from the charcoal could do as much damage as the
cold, as well as creating a hazardous environment for the gardener. By the 17th century, wood or
coal burning stoves were added to the orangery but they created their own set
of problems. As anyone who has
heated with a wood stove knows, these devices severely dry out the environment
which provides an ideal habitat for spider mites, one of the most serious pests
on citrus. John Evelyn wrote of
this problem in 1668: stoves absolutely destroy our
conservatories, but if they could be lined with cork I believe it would better
secure them from the cold and moisture of the walls, than either mattresses or
reeds with which we commonly cover them.
The solution
came in the next century with the development of the stove house. These structures employed a thick
central wall that contained one or more fireboxes and a flue that doubled back
on itself several times. In this
manner, the wall itself was heated and provided an indirect heat to the room
housing the oranges. These
structures also employed a glass roof and sides and looked much more like the
modern greenhouse. The potted
plants within the stove house were plunged into beds filled with tanbark. This not only provided warmth from the
composting tanbark but also moisture from the evaporation of the composting of
the bark beds. Stove houses were
built at nearly all of the grand estates of England but they were much more
uncommon in the colonies. Perhaps
the first was built by William Byrd II at Westover, his estate on the James
River in Virginia. On a visit to
Westover in 1738, John Bartram observes 'a little greenhouse with two or three
orange trees with fruit on them.'
While never numerous, several greenhouses were built on 18th
century Virginia estates such as Mt. Airy and Mt. Vernon.
At the same
time that gardeners were devising methods for growing tropical fruits in northern
climates, advances were being made in the kitchen garden that allowed the
preservation of tender vegetables or the production of vegetables out of
season. The simplest method is
using straw as mulch or a cover.
It is possible that strawberries get their name from this practice but
is more likely that strawberry is a corruption of the medieval name of
strewberries, from their sprawling growth habit. In either case, straw is an excellent insulation material. Thomas Tusser recommends a more
elaborate straw cover that we build each fall at the Colonial Garden at
Colonial Williamsburg to cover our broad beans. This table like structure, made from sticks, comes from
Tusser' Five Hundreth Pointes of Good Husbandrie
(1573):
If frost should
continue, take this for a law
The strawberries look to be covered with straw
Layed over trim, on crotches and boughs
And after uncovered as weather allows
A little more protection is offered by
paper frames. John Randolph, the
last royal Attorney General of the colony of Virginia writes in the Treatise on Gardening, likely
written in the 1760', that for melons, 'The early sowing should be covered
with oil paper' and tells us 'Many use lathes in imitation of covered
wagons.' Randolph' Treatise is a
very close plagiarism of Philip Miller' The
Gardeners Dictionary. The
1757 edition of The Gardeners Dictionary has
an illustration of two sorts of melon frames, one of them constructed of hoops
'in imitation of covered wagons.'
The paper is glued to the frame with hide glue and then painted with
linseed oil. The frames prove to
be remarkably durable and we typically get six months use from them.
These paper frames were often used over
hotbeds, piles of fermenting manure, which generates a bottom heat for young
seedlings. The first record of
hotbeds comes in 1085 from Ibn Bassal, gardener to the Sultan of Toledo 'we
use soft, slightly dried out mule or horse-dung free of all foreign bodies. '
He is using the hotbeds for starting melons and eggplants; and in
the evening or in cold weather, he covers the bed with cabbage
leaves. The first English
reference to hotbeds is found in Thomas Hill' The Gardeners
Labyrinth (1577) but he does not give instructions for their use. Gerard' Herball (1597) contains the first detailed
instructions for hotbeds used for growing cucumbers: 'In the middle of April or somewhat sooner...you shall cause
to be made a bed or banke of hot and new horse dung taken forth of the
stable...which bank you shall cover with hoops or poles, that you may the more
conveniently cover the whole bed or bank with mats, old painted cloth, straw or
such like, to keep it from the injury of the cold frostie nights.'
Cucumbers are native to India where it
has been cultivated since at least 2000 BCE**. All of the ancient Roman writers on agriculture mention the
cucumber. Marcus Terentius Varro
(116-27 BCE) gives the Latin name of Curvimur
for the cucumber, referring to the curvature of the fruit. The Greek name for cucumber is sikys, meaning the plant has no
aphrodisiac qualities, hence the Greek proverb, Let a woman weaving a cloak eat a cucumber; because female weavers, if
we believe Aristotle, are unchaste, and eager for love making. It was introduced to England during the
reign of Edward III but was lost during the mayhem of the Hundreds Year War and
reintroduced during the reign of Henry VIII in the 16th
century.
The next innovation comes in the
material used to cover the hotbed and in this case is used for the culture of
melons. Melons have a
confusing history because they went by the same name as the cucumber in Roman
writings. This confusion lasts for
hundreds of years. Thomas Hill
writes in The Gardeners Labyrinth (1577): 'The ancient, both of the
Greek and Latine writers of Husbandrie, attributed the Pompons and Mellons, to
a kinde of Cucumbers which they confessed, very neer to agree with them, in
that the Cucumbers, in their growth have been seene, to be changed into
Pompons, and Mellon Pompons.'
Pompons or Pumpkins was the term used by the Romans for the largest
kinds of Cucumbers. However, Pliny
does describes a new type of 'cucumber' in the Natural
History (73 CE): 'Curious to say, just recently a new form of cucumber
has been produced in Campania�Cucumbers of this kind do not hang from the plant
but grow of a round shape lying on the ground; they have a golden color. A remarkable thing about them, besides
their color, shape and smell, is that when they have ripened�they at once
separate from the stalk.' A characteristic
of muskmelons is that once they are ripe the stem 'slips' from the fruit so
this new cucumber Pliny speaks of is almost certainly a melon.
This newest innovation in hotbed
coverings for melons is found in Parkinson'
Paradisi in
Sol (1629):
'then having prepared a hot bed of dung in April, set your seeds therein to
raise them up, and cover them, and order them with as great care or greater
then Cowcumbers� some use great hollow glasses like unto bell heads.' This becomes known as the bell jar,
bell glass or simply glasses after this time. The use of bell glasses for plants seems to originate in
France in the middle of the 16th century. They call them cloches.
For larger plants, frames were used
over plants covered with glass sashes known as 'lights.' Busoni, who was the Chaplain to
the Venetian Ambassador in London records in 1618 that market gardeners were
growing artichokes on hotbeds ten months out of the year. Artichokes are large plants and would
require much larger coverings than bell glasses afford. Most hotbeds were built on piles of
manure above ground. At the
Colonial Garden we use below ground hotbeds such as those described by John Reid
in the Scots Gard'er (1683). 'As for making the hotbed for
raising early and tender plants, dig a pit (4 foot deep, and of length and
breadth, as you have occasion) in a convenient and warme place, lying well to
the Sun and sheltered from the winds�this pit will be so much more excellent,
if lyn' round at the sides with brick.'
In early January, we gather fresh dung
from the pastures, throw it into a pile in the orchard, and cover it with a
tarp. Generally within three of
four days it begins to heat up and then we turn it and load it into the hotbeds,
'beating it down close with a fork,' as recommended by Philip Miller (The Gardeners Dictionary,
1754). About a week later, we will
have a temperature anywhere between 120 and 140 degrees on top of the
pile. At this time, we cover it
over with about four inches of a very fine soil and about three days after
this, we will have a 70-degree soil temperature. On this, we sow our spring crops, most of which are moved to
the garden in March. We also sow a
crop of peas that we harvest from the frame, generally the second week of
April!
The final innovation in hotbed
technology enables the growing of the pineapple. The pineapple is a New World crop, probably originating in
coastal Venezuela but it was being grown throughout the West Indies by the time
of European contact. The first Spanish
description comes in 1535, it was known in France by 1570 and Johnson' edition
of Gerards Herbal (1633) lists the 'pine thistle' in the appendix. It was first successfully grown in
northern Europe in Holland by one Agnes Block around 1687. Who the first Englishman to grow the
pineapple was is the subject of much debate. A painting, which shows John Rose, gardener to Charles II,
presenting the king with a pineapple, has been taken by some to be the first
proof of pineapple culture in England.
However, scholars have pointed out that one of the buildings pictured in
the background of this painting was not constructed until after Charles'death
and he would have had very little use for a pineapple at that time! Some point to the stove house at
Hampton Court constructed around 1693 as the site of the first pineapple grown
in England. Richard Bradley, in Dictionarium
Botanicum (1728) gives 1721 as the date; 'Henry Tellende, who was
the first that brought it to rejoice in our climate, in Sir Matthew Decker'
fine gardens at Richmond.'
The innovation that Tellende brings to
the hotbed is that he replaces the manure with tanbark. Tanbark, the waste product of tanning
leather, has the advantage over manure in that it will maintain its heat for a
much longer time; some records say up to five months.
The various devices for protecting
plants in the kitchen seem to be fairly common in colonial Virginia. Bell glass fragments have been found at
many sites in Williamsburg and most of the Virginia gentry write of various
glasses, lights or frames. All of
these devices were luxuries found almost exclusively at the homes of the
wealthy. The rest of us have to wait
for the development of the market gardens that grew up around the major cities
in the next century to enjoy the luxury of consuming vegetables and fruits out
of season and far from their natural climate.
** (Note: CE stands for Common Era, taking the
place of AD. BCE stands for Before
Common Era, taking the place of
BC.)
