Whipple House “Housewife’s Garden”

When the Whipple House was renovated by the Ipswich Historical Society in the 1950s, the renowned garden designer Arthur Shurcliff planned an extensive recreation of a First Period village to fill the surrounding landscape. His vision called for additional houses, barns and barn yards, farm animals, and period gardens – similar to what he had created at Colonial Williamsburg. However, only a small part of Shurcliff’s plan was implemented by the Society: a traditional 17th century “Housewife’s Garden.”

Completed in 1957, the garden’s plantings were meticulously researched by Isadore Smith of the Ipswich Garden Club, to present as accurate a representation as possible. She also oversaw the actual planting of the garden, serving, in her words, as “planner and planter.” As she wrote, 17th-century gardens were designed to be “relevant…they existed to feed, clothe, clean, cure and comfort the settlers.” A working knowledge of herbs and their uses was essential for every 17th century woman; the care of the family and household was in her hands.

Despite the fact that a real 17th century housewife's garden would have been located behind the house, near the kitchen “ell” or outbuilding, the Whipple House garden was placed in front of the house and serves as an example of Colonial Revival idealism. It was placed there to make the entrance visually appealing to visitors, and not for historically accurate reasons.

Nevertheless, the Whipple House Housewife’s Garden is held up by historians and garden experts alike as among the finest examples of historic gardens of this period. Isadore Smith, writing under the pen name Ann Leighton, went on to publish three important books on historic gardens: Early American Gardens: For Meate or Medicine, American Gardens of the Eighteenth Century: For Use or for Delight, and American Gardens of the Nineteenth Century: For Comfort and Affluence. These books may be ordered from the Ipswich Historical Society.

To review articles and other related materials on the Housewife's Garden, including Arthur Shurcliff’s original Colonial Williamsburg-like design, please make an appointment to visit the Society’s archives.

Sources:
Ipswich Historical Society Archives.
Ann Leighton, American Gardens in the Eighteenth Century (Houghton Mifflin, 1976).

Heard House Gardens

The earliest known record of landscaping and gardens surrounding the Heard House dates to 1856, when brothers George Washington Heard and Augustine Heard were variously in residence. Information compiled after 1939 and published by the Historic American Buildings Survey shows expansive lawns filled with dozens of trees – elm, sugar maple, horse chestnut, copper beech, and apple – but the source of this information is unclear.

Ann Leighton’s book, American Gardens in the Eighteenth Century, probably best describes what the grounds of this high style mansion might have looked like when John Heard, the first owner, built his home from 1795-1800. Unlike 17th-century gardens which were strictly utilitarian, Leighton wrote, 18th-century gardens “began to acquire the interest and style, the variety and charm, that can come with a relaxed society, one that feels sure of holding its own and more, too.”

Leighton’s book seems to describe the Heard mansion to a “tee”:

“A two-or three-story house with a central hall and two or four chimneys would stand clear on its foundations with no embellishments other than, often, some terracing, which lent dignity and increased a sense of privacy when the house stood high on a town street. On one side or on both, generous lawns would be broken by large ornamental trees, framed by square paths, bordered, perhaps, by roses in narrow beds, centered, possibly, by a raised bed on which seasonal features were displayed – tulips in the spring, gay-leaved plants in the summer and fall. Behind the house, beyond a modestly proportioned lawn or on one side, with terracing to supplement the front “falls,” would be a formally patterned flower garden in oblongs or squares, with a wide path, often bordered by flower beds, which led down through a small orchard to the vegetable and small fruits gardens….

Arbors, trellises, places to sit in vine-encased privacy could be encountered at well-spaced intervals. A stable with carriage houses and a paddock or cow yard would be behind the house and to one side with its own access. Various paths would lead to it from the garden and the house where ells attached, sometimes one after the other and at different dates, housed a summer kitchen, and a “cool room,” a well, a woodshed, and an ample earth-closet…the vegetable garden was laid out in its own formal style with borders of currants and with grass or gravel walks down past the squared-off onion and asparagus beds to the inevitable quince in one of the far corners. There would be a garden seat there, too, as a well-cared-for vegetable garden was something for the owner to show to friends aspiring to rival or excel him in new varieties of peas or beans or salad stuffs” all together exuding a “sense of individual orderly independence” that was “wholly American.”

The 1856 Grounds

Just over 50 years later, George Washington Heard’s plans show small front yards sloping down from the house to the street, framing a (probably gravel) walkway. To the right of the house, an “Outside Yard” with one large ornamental tree, flanked by an “Open Pathway” between the yard and the house and a “Carriage Way” from the “Yard” to the road. To the right of the outside yard stood the “Garden,” 122 feet long by almost 72 feet wide, but it is not clear what plantings the garden contained. The Yard was placed behind the Outside Yard and behind the original part of the house, ringed by one corner of the Garden, woodsheds, a barn (and pig-sty), carriage barn, and the new wing of the house that included a billiard room and upstairs servants chambers.

A piazza spanned most of the left side of the house, with one exit from the kitchen to the “Kitchen Pathway” which led to the street, and a second exit from the dining room to a separate pathway. A row of trees separated the two. Beyond the pathways, the grounds appear to be open grassland, dotted with trees.

The Grounds Today

Today, the Heard House is surrounded by lawns with only a few ornamental trees remaining. Of these, the most spectacular is a copper beech, easily dating to the mid 19th century. To the left of the house, off the piazza, Isadore Smith designed and planted a 19th century garden filled with Iberis, Heuchera, Boxwood, Peony, Phlox, and Delphinium. Grass walkways surrounding the garden enable visitors to enjoy its regular bounty of flowers.

In the late 1950s, a shade garden was created on the right side of the house in honor of Roxana Cowles, a donor to the Historical Society.

Sources:
Ipswich Historical Society Archives.

A Plan of the Houses and Buildings Belonging to Mr. Augutine Heard: Situated on South Main Street, Ipswich, Mass. (George W. Heard, 23 March 1856).

John Heard Estate (Historic American Buildings Survey/Historic American Engineering Record, Library of Congress, 1940).