Mound

History

The term mound connoted raised features in both the natural and designed landscape, but in landscape-design vocabulary it usually signified an artificial hill. Both Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia (1741–43) and Noah Webster’s An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) defined a mound as a bank of earth. In common usage it usually denoted a rounded or conical elevation of earth. Native Americans in the eastern half of the United States had built mounds for millennia [Fig. 1]. While the similarity in form links these prehistoric conical and platform mounds to the mounds created in American gardens, differences in their scale and use suggest various meanings in each context. Native American mounds were used for burials and, in the case of larger platform mounds, for elite residences and sacred areas. In European and American gardens, mounds were used as observation places or as an ornamental variety of surface. Garden mounds or mounts, which appear to have been built mainly in the late eighteenth through mid-nineteenth centuries, were planted with grass, ground cover, shrubs, trees, or a combination of these materials. 1 For example, the mound at the Elias Hasket Derby Farm in Peabody, Mass., was turfed, while at Mount Vernon in Fairfax Country, Va., willow trees and at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Mass., evergreens were planted. Periwinkle was recommended by the New England Farmer in 1841 as a ground cover for mounds; and grass, altheas, gelder roses, lilacs, calycanthus, weeping willows, and aspens were planted on the mounds at Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest in Bedford County, Va.

The relatively simple form of a mound of earth or earth and stone was used as a design element in American gardens to achieve a variety of purposes or effects. Mounds were sometimes used for the base of a garden house, such as the brick study or chapel described in 1801 at John Burgwin’s Hermitage, in Wilmington, N.C. Not only did the mound’s elevated position enhance the structure as a viewing platform, but it also served as a focal point within the garden. Furthermore, symmetrically placed mounds could be used to frame distant views, as at Mount Vernon, or to frame a house, as at Poplar Forest. The mounds at Poplar Forest were connected to the house with double rows of poplars, which functioned visually like hyphens. Mounds may also have been added to provide sculptural relief and visual interest to relatively flat areas, as in the yard at the State House Yard in Philadelphia, which Rev. Manasseh Cutler described in 1787. This use of mounds was occasionally controversial; C. M. Hovey described the much-criticized mounds on the grounds of the White House in Washington, D.C., in an 1842 issue of the Magazine of Horticulture. A mound offered a slope against which to plant, creating much the same effect as plants of successive height arrayed in a shrubbery. In this way, a mound allowed the viewer at ground level to see the pattern of the plantings in much the same way an elevated view allowed one to appreciate the intricacies of a flat parterre.2

Several extant and archaeological examples also indicate that small mounds were often created in the construction of domestic icehouses, as Thomas Moore advised in his 1803 treatise.3 Mounds provided insulation and were also a convenient way to use fill that had been excavated for the ice pit (see Icehouse). While not using the term “mound,” George Washington noted in his diary in December of 1785 that he had “[f]inished covering my Ice House with dirt and [the] sodding of it.”4 Several images, from about that time, show what appear to be mounds, particularly those near a main house; these may have been icehouse mounds [Fig. 2]. Mounds were also associated with burials, as seen in James Smillie’s engraving of the “Indian Mound” at Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, N.Y. [Fig. 3], or the mound at Mount Auburn Cemetery, which, according to H.A.S. Dearborn (1832), harkened back to the ancient tumuli of Troy.