Among other contributions, landscape archaeology has helped redirect archaeological focus to the ideological, physical, and cultural importance of some in-between spaces that had been traditionally ignored. In addition to reporting on roads, water bodies, and other features already cited, garden studies offer notable illustration of this point. Although traditionally associated with historical archaeology and art history, such studies provide a unique means with which to explore materialized discourse on social hierarchy. Appreciation of formal gardens as archaeological landscapes has grown as preservationists have enlisted archaeologists’ aid, to understand and conserve historical settings of recent centuries. Except in the Classical world, application of garden archaeology to societies deeper in antiquity is still underdeveloped, although important studies are underway at places such as Petra and have been part of the understanding of space and social identity of ancient life in Egypt.
More than any other kinds of landscape, gardens are purely human constructions, bounded and cultivated. While garden studies include barnyards, social forecourts, pathways, kitchen gardens, and work-yards, the majority of research has focused on formal ‘pleasure’ gardens. These are typically much more than an array of plants, trees, and flowers. Rather, their spatial organization depends on the intimate relationship between the house and the garden, linked by proximity, design, proportions, and access.
During the Renaissance, gardens were a means to display social status and a resource for enhancing social mobility. By the mid-seventeenth century, manufactured pastoral landscapes also provided respite from stresses of urban life for many among the bourgeoisie. Nobles, on the other hand, viewed emulation of their gardens, dress, or custom as conspicuous and ostentatious consumption, a display of poor taste by men aspiring above their station.
Florescence of formal gardens reflected upper-class interests in classical history: Greek and Roman art, science, and esthetics became the ultimate expressions of refinement and taste. Expressed materially by inclusion of urns, statues, and terraces, garden spaces became overt commentaries on morality and social legitimization. For example, construction of terraces and creation of visual focal points used geometry and principles of optics to manipulate perceived space, exaggerating the grandeur and scale of gardens in relation to adjoining homes. As public vistas to be awed and admired, formal gardens created spaces of exclusion and inclusion. These contrived idyllic scenes also blurred distinctions between artifice and nature, thereby naturalizing (and legitimating) the authority of landowners - while simultaneously rendering invisible those responsible for the physical acts of landscape construction. Application of Renaissance principles and artistic styles also associated the landowners with a revered past, using innuendo to strengthen claims of property and social rights. Royalty was not immune from such declarative ostentation, as in the seventeenth-century garden landscape of Versailles. Leone’s work reveals similar principles - and goals - in action at the eighteenth-century William Paca Garden and others in Annapolis.
Within colonial America, work gardens and vegetable patches also became a common feature of the urban and domestic landscape, across social classes. While relatively small in scale and hidden from view, these gardens, too, reflected particular worldviews. Just as formal gardens were the ultimate expression of polite society and social virtue, so too did kitchen gardens symbolize the importance of family life and domesticity. Kitchen gardens were also integral to the economic success of urban families. In Lexington, Virginia, for example, the lack of commercial markets made families dependent on the productivity of these small plots of land. The vegetables and goods produced sustained the family and any excess was used in trade for goods and services needed in town. The creation and success of the domestic garden was not simply economic or utilitarian in plan and effect, but was also seen as a way to attract men to their homes and make them content within the domestic realm. Indeed, Kealhofer identifies spatially nested landscapes of seventeenth - and early eighteenth-century tidewater Virginia that collectively solidified colonial landowners’ identities, both in contrast to Native American neighbors and along rungs of a social ladder within the colonist community.
While some formal gardens were focal points of social knowledge within communities, direct experience of the gardens themselves was commonly restricted. Archaeological evidence restores the shade trees and fencerows that once shielded gardens from prying eyes, limiting access to a privileged few. On slave-holding plantations of eighteenth-century America, the house yard, work gardens, and common grounds of enslaved and free laborers were pointedly excluded from the more luxuriant spaces. This allowed planters to hide slaves from sight, establishing instead an atmosphere of ‘natural’ tranquility. At the same time, however, slaves could develop a landscape of resistance effectively hidden from the eyes of the overseers and owners. Slave-held house-yard gardens thus embodied independence, control, and pride of ownership, materializing resistance within the spatial confines of the plantation. Many slaves also planted gardens removed from plantation space and control, embodying freedom within a remote landscape that excluded whites.
World History
