New World Plants Make Small Splash in 16th Century Europe
About 127 new plants came across the Atlantic from the Americas during the first hundred years after Columbus. These plants diffused through the Old World at different rates, mostly from the port city of Seville, where the plants initially arrived. Maize had been established in Spain and North Africa within 20 years of Columbus’s final … Continue reading
Turf Benches
This German woodcut depicts a domestic servant building a common feature of medieval pleasure gardens – the turf bench. These benches varied in size and shape. Some were simple rectangular designs, like this one here. Others were U-shaped, L-Shaped, or multilevel, while some ran the perimeter of the entire garden. The frames were usually constructed … Continue reading
What are we growing?
I have really been enjoying the books I’ve been reading as well as everyone’s posts. I’m learning a great deal about the lives of the various classes and their diets. What I keep coming across, and find very fascinating, is that for the most part, garden produce was considered the food of the lower class. … Continue reading
Nitre: For the Garden and the Queen’s Army
Nitre, potassium nitrate, was an exceptionally important product to the renaissance gardener. It was produced mostly by horses and cattle, and could be found in their stables. The nitrogenous organic compounds present, proteins and urea, were fed upon by bacteria in the soil. This combined with the potassium present, derived from wood ash, resulted in … Continue reading
Barton’s End: The cottage garden of a farm family in the mid-late 1500s
Before our first meeting last week I had requested a number of books from the C/W MARS library system. Most of what I came across was focused on large formal decorative gardens of the elite, but a couple proved to be helpful and listed some books and artwork from the period that I plan to … Continue reading
