invited rich and poor, black and white, outside. (The mountains’ longer
and colder winters were much less encouraging, but lower piedmonts and
especially coastal plains were delightful places to be outside nine or more
months of the year.) Poorer people, having lesser shelter, were logically
more likely to expand their houses outdoors. Vegetable gardens, including
winter crops of greens and a few roots, needed tending practically year-
round. Laundry, the slaughter of farm animals, and the cleaning of fish
catches and dead game were better done outside, as was maintenance and
repair of household and farm equipment. Shade from mature trees was
prized for such chore-doing sections of yard, then, and Afro- and Euro-
southerners generally kept the bare ground swept clean. Nearby, very likely,
would be chairs for resting and benches or tables for holding work projects,
drinks, and plates. Such spaces as these would also be decorated—with
flowering shrubs, small fruit trees, climbing vines, and perennial flowers
sometimes set (particularly in the twentieth century) inside found objects
such as old tires from cars, trucks, or tractors.
By the s, some home demonstration agents, all middle-class women
themselves, promoted grassy lawns and other suburban bourgeois notions
of homestead landscaping among poor farm women, but their attempts
usually failed. Other agents, however, caught on not only to the poverty
of their clients but to their decorative sensibilities. Such agents, usually
led by country women, began to scour nearby woods for natural, indige-
nous flowering plants. These served more than well enough to define and
beautify outdoor spaces, even those rented by tenants and sharecroppers.
Nearby, preferably close to the kitchen and its overlooking window, would
be the garden room, in full sun. ‘‘Garden,’’ indeed, has ever meant vege-
tables rather than flowers, self-provisioning rather than ornamentation—
among the multitudes of ordinary folks, anyway.
Members of the elite established ambitiously decorative ‘‘pleasure gar-
dens’’ early in the Europeanized South—witness the restored formal
(‘‘French’’) exhibits before the governor’s palace in Williamsburg and Tryon
Palace in New Bern. The wealthiest of eighteenth-century Chesapeake
planters also indulged themselves in enormous private gardens, all in the
symmetrically perfect mode. Townsmen such as George Wythe, law profes-
sor at the College of William and Mary, laid out more practical versions in
the deep lots behind their big homes. On either side of Wythe’s graveled
central garden walk were borders of ornamentals, and beyond them there
were rectangular sections of currants, vegetables, gooseberries, figs, and
raspberries, plus a large grassy lawn with a square seat under one spread-