Thicket
History
Although thicket is not mentioned as frequently as other planting terms in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century garden literature, it is nonetheless significant as a description for naturally occurring and designed features [Fig. 1]. According to Thomas Whately, whose 1770 definition was quoted or paraphrased by garden writers for the next century, a thicket was a dense planting of woods underplanted with shrubs, akin to a closed clump or copse. British treatise author Charles Marshall (1799) used “coppice” synonymously with “thicket.” American writers such as Bernard M’Mahon (1806) offered similar definitions, describing a thicket as closely planted trees with shrubs. It was distinguished from a clump, copse, or wood by its compactness and smaller scale (see Clump, Copse, and Wood).
This connotation was found in American accounts written by Eliza Lucas Pinckney (1743), Rev. Manasseh Cutler (1787 and 1802), and Thomas Jefferson (1806). A more detailed portrayal of thicket was provided by Jefferson in a letter of 1804. In this document, he indicated which plants to include in the thicket, such as azaleas and rhododendrons, and also noted how a thicket might be planted in a spiral or labyrinth formation with walks between rows of plants. Such forms and materials were quite close to those formed in wilderness hedges or graduated shrubberies (see Hedge and Shrubbery).
The plants used to compose thickets varied widely. Pinckney, for example, described a thicket of young oaks at William Middleton’s plantation, Crowfield, near Charleston. Jefferson, in addition to suggesting a variety of flowering shrubs, envisioned thickets made entirely of evergreens and other nonflowering plants in his 1806 letter to William Hamilton. The array of plants recommended by Jefferson was consistent with the advice given by contemporary treatise authors, such as M’Mahon, who promoted combinations of hardy deciduous or evergreen trees and shrubs.
As design elements, thickets were used in many ways. They marked boundaries, directed one’s gaze toward preferred views, and screened out undesirable views. Such functions depended upon the density of thicket plantings, and garden literature suggests that thickets were considered akin to impenetrable hedges or dense shrubberies and other boundary markers. For example, c. 1800 the designer of the Elias Hasket Derby House in Salem, Mass., noted that a thicket could be replaced by a ha-ha or sunk fence to mark the perimeter of the garden (see Ha-Ha). Jefferson, in 1806, described how at Monticello thickets could be used to circumscribe views. By 1850, A. J. Downing, in his article “How to Arrange Country Places,” stated that thickets should be planted to keep out “unbidden guests.” Downing also recommended the use of tall, dense thickets to screen the sides of walks in order to re-create the romantic experience of walking undisturbed in an uncultivated wood.
Thickets, as M’Mahon noted, were also placed along the outer edges of lawns in order to break up the formality of a smooth lawn and to create a setting consistent with the natural or picturesque style. Not only was this strategy in accord with the theories of landscape gardening, it also suited the American gardener’s challenge to carve out a garden from what was often heavily wooded land. Jefferson, for example, described cutting away existing vegetation at Monticello to create a series of ordered woods, clumps, and hemispherical thickets. Ironically, less than fifty years later, George Jaques (1851) suggested the reverse of this process, recommending that thickets be planted in the midst of commons in order to recall the primeval forests that once covered North America.
-- Anne L. Helmreich
