THE GARDEN DIARY OF MARTHA TURNBULL, MISTRESS OF ROSEDOWN PLANTATION

摘要

The Garden Diary of Martha Turnbull, Mistress of Rosedown Plantation records 59 years of garden life in the parish of West Feliciana near St. Francisville, in the southeast corner of Louisiana. The diary's author, "born and married into wealthy circumstances" (1), was educated in Philadelphia during its prime as a center of horticultural and scientific inquiry. Well-traveled and well-read in aesthetics and the hands-on methods found in horticultural publications, her ability, hard-work and steely perseverance resulted in a remarkable landscape filled with jasmine, camellias, and osman-thus, descendants of which remain at the site today. The entries of "the book," as it's mistress calls it, are recorded over decades of change beginning in 1836 with the setting up of housekeeping at Rosedown-a 3,455 acre plantation with a Greek Revival house and the garden as its hub-through the Civil War and the years of recovery that followed until 1895, the year before Martha's death at the age of 84. Throughout, we are engaged in the multitude of jobs and activities, made possible by slave labor, that made a plantation both self-sufficient and pleasurable. For Turnbull, gardening was the glue, the constant thread, that saw her through the deaths of her husband, Daniel, and two sons, the transition from flush years of ornamental gardening and summering in Saratoga Springs to dependence on truck farming and hired help to survive. The garden was, ultimately, "the measure of her worth" (14) that left two documents-one written and one rooted in the earth.