Late Nineteenth Century Gardens Included Perennials

Late nineteenth century gardens included perennials –

Last week I visited the Moffatt-Ladd House and Garden on Market Street in the seacoast city of Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

Portsmouth is home to several historic gardens in the downtown area. Because of its long tradition as an important early American seacoast city Portsmouth includes Colonial, Georgian, and Victorian styles of architecture and landscape.

In 1912 the National Society of the Colonial Dames acquired the Moffatt-Ladd House. Built in the late 1700s, the house once belonged to William Whipple, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.

The landscape includes an elaborate garden which, in its present form dates to the second half of the nineteenth century when Alexander Hamilton Ladd (1815-1900) owned the property.

Ladd kept a journal of what he planted in the garden. The journal, simply called Alexander H. Ladd Garden Book 1888-1895: A 19th Century View of Portsmouth was discovered only a few years ago and is now available for anyone to read. It provides a wonferful glimpse of American garden history.

In the book Ladd carefully lays out his work in the garden. At one point he planted 60,000 tulips.  Plants were his true love.

He also wrote about his beds and borders of perennials, which, by the late nineteenth century, had become a popular form of gardening, replacing the use of annuals. By the 1870s English garden celebrities writer William Robinson and landscape gardener Gertrude Jekyll were encouraging perennial borders.

Rochester, New York nurseryman George Ellwanger (1816-1906) wrote a book called The Garden’s Story in 1889. He  argued against both the stiff formal garden and carpet, or ribbon, beds. He noted that “the objectionable forms of gardening are being superseded by a more natural style–a revival of the old-fashioned hardy flower borders, masses of stately perennials.”

Today you can still see that garden fashion in the garden at the Moffatt-Ladd House in Portsmouth. Beds of stately perennials instead of the dreaded carpet beds and ribbon beds of annuals fill the garden. [below]

Though it was a very hot day when I visited, I enjoyed this reveal of garden history.

Thanks to all the volunteers who work in the garden to keep it in the style Ladd first laid out in the late nineteenth century.

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