History

History of the Elizabethan Gardens

In 1950, Mrs. Charles Cannon, wife of the North Carolina philanthropist; Mrs. Inglis Fletcher, a North Carolinian and noted historian and author; and Sir Evelyn Wrench, Founder of the English Speaking Union, and Lady Wrench, were visiting Fort Raleigh National Historic Site and The Lost Colony outdoor drama on Roanoke Island. The idea came to them to ask The Garden Club of North Carolina, a non-profit organization of 17,000 women, to sponsor a two-acre garden on a ten-acre tract adjoining Fort Raleigh National Park. It was their thinking that the creation of a cultural attraction such as a garden would enhance the value of this area as a permanent memorial to Sir Walter Raleigh’s lost colonists.

The matter was presented to The Garden Club at its annual meeting in 1951, at which time the organization voted to build such a garden on property leased for ninety-nine years from the Roanoke Island Historical Association. The original goal was modest…a two-acre garden which was to typify the kind of garden a successful colonist might have built on Roanoke Island had the colonization succeeded. In the meantime, a contractor in Fayetteville, Mr. E. W. Reinecke, told The Garden Club about some valuable garden statuary he was dismantling on the Greenwood Estate of The Honorable John Hay Whitney, Ambassador to The Court of St. James, and Mrs. Whitney in Thomasville, Georgia. He suggested to The Garden Club that Innocenti & Webel, landscape architects of New York, be contacted about this statuary which Mr. Whitney was considering giving to the Metropolitan Museum. The Chairman did contact the architects who became enthusiastic about the proposed garden at the historic site of the first English settlement in the New World. Through the intervention of Mr. Webel, the fantastic gift of an ancient Italian fountain and pool with balustrade, wellhead, sundial, birdbaths, stone steps and benches, dating back beyond the time of Queen Elizabeth I, came to Roanoke Island and The Garden Club of North Carolina. This rich “find” completely altered the original concept of the garden and a more elaborate design had to be adopted.

The internationally renowned landscape firm of Innocenti & Webel was retained by The Garden Club to plan and erect the garden. With the Whitney statuary as his inspiration, Mr. Webel set out to create a garden Elizabethan in spirit and style but adapted to the present. Built on ten acres of indigenous growth, the gardens are the imaginative concept of an Elizabethan pleasure garden. Construction actually began on the historic date of June 2, 1953, the date Queen Elizabeth II was crowned Queen of England. The Gardens were formally opened August 18, 1960, on the 373rd anniversary of the birth of Virginia Dare, the first child born in America of English parentage. Thus The Elizabethan gardens came into being.

As the years passed, The Gardens have progressed to become one of the most unique and beautiful gardens in America for here, and nowhere else, were made the initial attempts of England under Queen Elizabeth I to colonize America. While the colonies planted on Roanoke Island by Sir Walter Raleigh two decades before Jamestown and Plymouth Rock were not permanent, their work was for the interest created by the “Men of Roanoke” did not vanish but led to the making of the permanent English settlements in America.

Since this auspicious beginning of The Gardens, no single event has contributed to its vigorous growth, but history reflects that The Gardens owe their progress to a mingling of little dreams and big vision through a high caliber of leadership, the dedication of thousands of garden club members, an untiring and loyal garden staff and individual donations of furnishings, garden accessories and plants which would fill a book!

The impressive entrance wall of old handmade brick holds great iron gates which once hung at the French Embassy in Washington and were a gift of The Honorable C. Douglas Dillon, Undersecretary of State and later United States Treasurer and Mrs. Dillon.

The Gate House, made of the same old warmly-colored handmade brick from the Silas Lucas kiln in Wilson, North Carolina, before the turn of the century, is modeled after the architecture of a 16th century orangerie with a flagstone floor, hand-hewn beams and a wide door with cross design. Above the entrance is set a sculptural stone coat-of-arms of Elizabeth I.

Originally housed inside the Gate House are rare antique furnishings acquired through years of searching obtained through individual donations. Perhaps the finest is the Jacobean table, with typical Tudor rose carvings, circa early 1500’s and a corner cupboard in the first foyer called a “gem” by connoisseurs, made in England of oak, circa 1600’s. An English chest, its homemade hardware suggesting it could have belonged to an Elizabethan colonist because of its rich carving and its foreshortening to fit into allotted space (perhaps a ship), is hardly the most outstanding, but presumably one of the oldest pieces in the Gate House, circa 1560-1625.

Adorning the walls are a fine portrait in oil on panel, circa 1592, of Queen Elizabeth I; a 1663 map of Devonshire (home of many of the first colonist who came to Roanoke Island); a panel which lists the names of 91 men, 17 women and 9 children who arrived on three vessels July 22, 1587, with John White as Governor and stayed there to live in the twenty-ninth year of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and became known in history as the “Lost Colony”; and the coats-of-arms of Queen Elizabeth I and Sir Walter Raleigh, painted on vellum and signed by Sir Anthony Wager, King of Arms. These were especially prepared by the College of Arms in London in 1975 for The Elizabethan Gardens’ celebration of the bicentennial year, 1976.

Of special interest is a steel engraving of Compton Castle in Devon where Sir Walter Raleigh may have visited as a child with his mother who was the widow of Otho Gilbert of Compton when she married Walter Raleigh of Fardell, Devon. She was the mother of Sir John, Sir Humphrey and Adrian Gilbert as well as Sir Walter and Sir Carew Raleigh.

Compton Castle (dates from 13th century) where the adolescent Sir Walter Raleigh often visited his half brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, and where is 20th century namesake, Commander Walter Raleigh Gilbert and Mrs. Gilbert lived until his death in January 1977.

The Gilberts were honorary members of the Board of Governors of The Elizabethan Garden and made return trips to Roanoke Island and The Gardens.

Today, Commander Gilbert’s second son, Geoffrey, and his wife, Angela, visit at Compton with their family of three children and an honorary member of our Board. Geoffrey and Angela came to The Gardens in 1976 to dedicate our portrait of Sir Walter Raleigh and again in 1984 when H.R.H. princess Anne visited The Gardens.

As one enters The Gardens from the Gate House, the fragrance of herbs and the handsome white Carrara marble fountain suggests the Elizabethan world. Herbalists can study some forty-five varieties of herbs found here, twenty-three of which are documented in a booklet, Shakespeare’s Herbs in the Elizabethan Gardens, written by Huntington Cairns, former secretary of the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

Pine needles carpet the winding walks to the different areas of the Gardens from the courtyard of the Gate House, named for their various plantings – Rhododendron Walk, Uppowoc Walk (Indian name for tobacco), and Presidents’ Walk, a 155-foot meandering path so named for past presidents of The Garden Club of North Carolina.

The Mount, centered with the carved Porphyry marble wellhead, which is part of the Whitney collection, is ascended on four sides by stone steps and serves as an axis from which four paths radiate to vistas that form the dominant interests of the Gardens.

To the north is a path lined with yucca, century plants and rare sea holly indigenous to the area, which winds down to a water gate on the shores of Roanoke Sound.

Down the steps to the east is a Carrara marble statue of Virginia Dare, which is the sculptor’s idealized version of what Virginia Dare would have looked like had she grown to womanhood. An American sculptor Maria Louise Lander, in Rome in 1859, carved it. After an incredibly hectic existence, including two years at the bottom of the Atlantic ocean due to shipwreck off the coast of Spain, a tenure in the State Hall of History in Raleigh in the early twenties where it become a controversial work of art, a short stay with the Pulitzer prize-winning Paul Green at his estate, “The Oaks”, near Chapel Hill who decided to give it to The Gardens, the statue of Virginia Dare finally came to rest about one hundred years after its creation by Miss. Lander. Today Virginia Dare stands at the place of her birth in her own niche at the foot of an ancient live oak, gazing dreamily beyond the trees toward the softened surge of nearby Roanoke Sound. Instead of schoolbooks, she holds a fishnet draped about her waist. About her neck and arms she wears the Indian laces of an Indian princess. Instead of a royal greyhound, a royal heron accompanies her. An Indian legend persists that Virginia did grow up among the Indians and that her spirit roams Roanoke in the form of a white doe. Whatever one elects to believe, Maria Louise Lander’s sculpture, Virginia Dare, stands serenely fixed in The Elizabethan Gardens, a figure of quiet hope, wide-browed and intelligent, the first child of the first colony of Elizabethan England, gazing toward the future despite the odds of the history, mystery and fantasy that surround her.

West of the Mount a series of three flights of steps descend to the Sunken Garden – the supreme feature of The Gardens. This square area, consisting of 32 identical parterres outlined in clipped dwarf yaupon, is like a continuing parade of color with its ever-changing displays of ornamental plants. Spring loving pansies in blue, white and yellow are followed in the summer by blue ageratum, white vinca and pink begonias which compliment crepe myrtle standards that bloom for 101 days with their small tufts of watermelon pink crepe flowers. Enclosed by a low, perforated wall of old, handmade brick, the entire area is a centerpiece of The Gardens. The central focal point is the ancient Italian fountain and pool with carved balustrade from the Whitney collection. The coat-of-arms in the fretted stonework is that of the Farnesi family of 16th century Italy.

Statues, also from the Whitney collection, representing Apollo, Diana, Venus and Jupiter, center each of the four quadrants of parterres. An eleven-foot high pleached allee of meticulously groomed yaupon holly with arched openings surrounds the Sunken Garden wall.

Leaving the Sunken Garden to the north is the overlook terrace and a path leading to the overlook of Roanoke Sound. Here in April of 1981, an authentic 16th century gazebo was constructed with period tools, using period techniques.

The octagonal structure of the gazebo is situated at a site overlooking the Roanoke and Currituck Sounds, very possibly the spot were Sir Richard Grenville, Walter Raleigh’s cousin, first set foot in 1585 upon his arrival with a fleet of seven ships and 108 men.

Because this site is on Roanoke Island where Sir Walter Raleigh sought to colonize the New World under Elizabeth I, it was the desire of the Board of Governors, according to Mrs. W. Marion Odom, Chairman, to erect as authentic a garden structure of the period as possible. “The museum-going public is becoming increasing discerning and even critical when restorations sometimes take the form of a move set approach to reconstructed buildings,” she said. Therefore, it was the desire and intent of the Board to reproduce what the first settlers might have built had the colony succeeded.

Erik Eckholm and Jim Maron, formerly director of exhibits and interpretation manager, respectively, for Plimoth Plantation in Massachusetts, contracted with the Board of Governors of The Elizabethan Gardens, as consultants in period buildings, to erect the garden structure. Massive hand-hewn oak posts and beams were locked together without the modern nail. Wattle and daub was applied on the exterior of the five bays, leaving three bays open to the wide expanse of waters for visitors to view in the distance the Wright Memorial at Kitty hawk which stands upon the site of man’s first flight and also Jockey’s Ridge, one of the highest sand dunes east of the Mississippi River.

A thatched roof was absolutely necessary for the finishing touch to the period structure. There were initially two problems – how to obtain thatching material and where to obtain a master thatcher.

Upon reading about Peter Slevin from Donegal, Ireland, who thatched the Ann Hathaway cottage in Stratford in the late fifties and also did many of the roofs in the Public Broadcasting System’s “Scarlett Letter” in 1980, Mrs. Odom contacted Mr. Slevin at Plimoth Plantation, were he resided and worked, to advise the Board about the old world craft of thatching with straw. He stated many thatchers still regard Norfolk reed as Britain’s finest native grass for thatching. “This reed, Phrangmites communis, grows in the area of Norfolk, England,” he said, “and is in great demand. Roofs thatched with it by an expert will last sixty to seventy years, with the ridge being replaced every ten to fifteen years.”