Orchard

History

The definitions of orchard found in both English and American garden treatises describe an enclosed space devoted to the growth of fruit trees.1 Noah Webster, in his 1828 definition of the term, differentiated between British usage—as a department of the garden appropriated to fruit trees (chiefly apple)—and American usage—as any piece of land set with only apple trees. Webster’s focus on one species reflected the popularity of this fruit in early nineteenth-century America.2

Some British treatises distinguished between a fruit garden and an orchard. For example, according to Jean de La Quintinie (translated by John Evelyn in 1693), fruit gardens (like kitchen gardens) were generally walled and thus could sustain espaliered fruit trees. In contrast, orchards typically were enclosed with natural barriers, such as hedges and ditches, and were planted with standard fruit trees. Thomas Jefferson, for example, indicated the use of thorn hedges surrounding his orchard [Fig. 1]. In American garden literature, the term “fruit garden” occurs in a few instances, as when George Washington referred to the space behind his stables laid out with closely set fruit trees.3 The term also appeared in Thomas Green Fessenden’s New American Gardener (1833), but this may have been due more to the practice of emulation in treatise writing than to the circulation of the term in America. (Fessenden, in fact, borrowed heavily from his British predecessors.) More common to American culture was the term “orchard,” which appeared very early in accounts of the American designed landscape.

Although the American orchard was not considered a subgroup of a larger garden complex to the same degree as it was in the British flower garden, it was nevertheless recognized as part of the broader designed landscape associated with a residence or plantation. Like many other features of the American design landscape, such as canal, meadow, or wood, the orchard was both utilitarian and aesthetic. It united, in the words of Loudon, “[t]he agreeable with the useful” (1826). The primary function of orchards was growing fruit, and apples and peaches seem to have been the fruit of choice for many colonial and federalist landowners in New England and in the mid-Atlantic states. he orchard ground, as a cultivated area of land, also could be used for growing grass or hay under the trees. This practice was somewhat controversial, as indicated by the lengthy commentary on the subject by treatise writers. John Abercrombie (1817) suggested trimming the lower branches of trees to prevent damage by cattle.

Like the planting of grasses in orchards, the arrangement of trees was disputed by treatise writers. John Smith’s 1629 account mentions the arrangement of fruit trees into rows, a practice recommended by numerous treatise writers. Another possibility, found in several treatises, was to arrange trees in a quincunx formation, where trees would be planted in a manner resembling the plan of a five-face on a die [Fig. 2]. Debate also focused on the spaces between trees that were aligned in rows and also on the distance between rows.

Images reveal much information about the arrangement of trees in American orchards. Orchards typically were represented as square or rectangular plots placed adjacent to or situated near houses, and they often were bounded by fences, ditches, or hedges [Fig. 3]. Most plots contained regularly arranged trees, as in Clarissa Deming’s orchard plan, after 1798 [Fig. 4]. The frequency, however, with which regularized arrangements of trees appear in images suggests that many images may have been governed by a visual convention dictating that orchards be represented with straight rows of trees. This convention is apparent in a 1757 view of Bethlehem, Pa. [Fig. 5]. Nonetheless, a few plans imply that orchard trees could be arranged in patterns other than linear rows. A 1778 sketch by Thomas Jefferson of the orchard at Monticello depicts a pinwheel-like arrangement of fruit trees that included apple, peach, quince, pear, apricot, and plum [Fig. 6].

With the development of the so-called “natural” style in America in the early nineteenth century, orchards became more varied in character. The 1847 plan of Point Breeze in Bordentown, N.J., represents the orchard as an irregularly shaped piece of land located at a distance from the mansion and sited within woodlands [Fig. 7]. In Downing’s 1849 plan for a “picturesque orchard,” he broke with the convention of rigidly arranging trees in straight lines and presented them loosely clumped in groups “for the sake of effect.”

In travelers’ accounts of America, the term “orchard” figures prominently in descriptions of the settled countryside. In these texts, as well as in treatises and descriptions of specific estates, orchards were imbued with both utilitarian and aesthetic values. (The practical associations of husbandry with orchards distinguished them from groves, which except for citrus groves, were generally discussed in only aesthetic terms; see Grove.) Orchards signaled planning for the needs of the future, since trees took many years to mature. William Penn, in his 1685 advertisement for potential colonialists, characterized an orchard as a property improvement and investment. Orchards also exemplified the careful grooming of the countryside by American settlers, who transformed uncultivated woods and fields into ordered plantations of fruit trees. Timothy Dwight, in particular, offered a myriad of orchard descriptions in order to conjure up his early nineteenth-century vision of America as a highly cultivated, prosperous nation. That very prosperity, however, eventually seemed to threaten the existence of orchards. According to Edward Sayers (1835), the expansion of America’s transportation network of railroads, canals, and roads promised to eradicate orchards as trees were cut down and not replaced. Yet sixteen years later, Downing claimed that railroads and steamboats had, in fact, brought about a boom in orchards as farmers could then easily transport their produce by rail and thus capitalize upon such markets.

-- Anne L. Helmreich