Seventeenth century front garden restored –

The north shore Massachusetts town of Ipswich claims more First Period houses than any other community in America.

First Period refers to those houses built between 1625 and 1725.

The style of the Whipple House, built in 1677, represents that period.

At the end of the nineteenth century the Whipple House was moved to its current location in Ipswich.

Though it had suffered much disrepair over the years, several historically minded citizens of the time thought it worth saving.  In its day the Whipple House was the grandest of examples of early American homes.

At the end of the nineteenth century the Reverend Thomas Franklin Waters became a leading member of the Historical Preservation group in Ipswich.

He said at the time that the Whipple House was “a link that binds us to the remote Past and to a solemn and earnest manner of living, quite in contrast with much of our modern life.”

The Whipple House still stands, thanks to the initiative of this group and its successors. [below]

Garden

An extensive kitchen garden at the front of the house greets a visitor to the Whipple house.

The location and design of the kitchen garden continues the English garden tradition of early Plimouth Plantation as well.

In the  early 1960s garden historian Isadore Smith (AKA Ann Leighton) and landscape architect Arthur Shurcliff designed and installed the raised beds of the kitchen garden.

Smith and Shurcliff set out to recreate what would have been a typical wife’s kitchen garden of the seventeenth century. They designed a garden with mostly herbs since the wife was responsible for both the food and the medical needs of the family.

There was not much time for a pleasure garden of decorative flowers so the plant choices of the kitchen garden were based on the cooking and health needs of the family.

The English style of an enclosed kitchen garden with raised beds lined up in a certain symmetry was also the style at the restored gardens of Colonial Williamsburg.

Mr. Shurcliff provides a link between the Whipple House and the Williamsburg garden restoration.

In the 1930s Boston landscape architect Shurcliff, who previously had worked with American landscape pioneer Frederick Law Olmsted, also recreated the garden of the Governor’s Palace at Williamsburg.

According to landscape architect and garden writer Rudi Favretti, the Whipple garden style, centered on the practical needs for plants, continued as the predominant form of gardening well into mid-nineteenth century America.

Thus today the Whipple House illustrates the early influence of English garden design on American home landscape.

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