The Long Story of Tea in America Have you ever wondered where your tea comes from? Tea is one of those everyday things that we can always find at the grocery or convenience store. You may remember that tea was imported to Boston in the Colonial era. Maybe you also remember the story of how colonists, dressed as Native Americans, dumped the British East India Company’s cargo of tea into the Boston Harbor in December 1773 to protest unfairly high...
A Mystery and A Memory We found several large evergreen shrubs in our new yard that we couldn’t immediately identify, when we moved here over a decade ago. We could pick out the boxwood and Camellias, but we were especially curious about the very tall, open shrubs that the birds loved the most. It was August, and tiny bluish gray drupes were ripening along this shrub’s woody stems. Its leaves were fragrant. Birds gathered in its dense and twiggy...
“Power rests on the kind of knowledge one holds. What is the sense of knowing things that are useless?” Dr. Carlos Castaneda When a young graduate student in anthropology wanted to learn more about the medicinal uses of plants for his academic research in the early 1960s, so the legend goes, he sought out an old Mexican native, a brujero, known simply as don Juan, who lived in the Sonoran Desert. Carlos asked to interview him about...
The former Colonial Williamsburg Garden Historian, Wesley Greene, had a discussion with Scott Hemler, Colonial Williamsburg’s nurseryman this year in August, about the origin of our famous Compton Oak. In this exchange, Greene raised questions about the “legend” of this tree and how it came to be planted on Nicholson Street in historic Williamsburg. So, at Green’s suggestion, I began an investigation to see if the Archives at the Rockefeller Library could provide any additional information about the time...
Colonial Williamsburg welcomes visitors to the natural beauty of one of the wilder, quieter portions of the historic area. The Bassett Trace is named after Burwell Bassett, Martha Washington’s nephew and a Virginia legislator and congressman. In 1800, he purchased a white farmhouse near the trailhead. In 1936, that farmhouse, now known as Bassett Hall, became the favorite home of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and his wife Abby Aldrich Rockefeller. During the restoration of Colonial Williamsburg, an...
There is a special beauty in the form and structure of a bare tree after it has dropped its annual crop of leaves. Like the beauty of a classical statue, one can see the truth of its bones. Leaves, for all of their movement and color, veil the beauty of branches and buds. Looking at a bare tree is a study in pure potential. All of the tree’s life draws inwards to the wood and roots as...
Our contemporary Christmas celebration is an amalgamation of many diverse strands of meaning, custom, and tradition. The first English colonists who ventured to Virginia on behalf of the Virginia Company of London brought their traditions and customs with them. And those customs were already an odd mix drawing bits from the ancient world of the Neolithic Celts, the Greeks and the Romans; all molded into the contemporary post-Reformation culture of urban England. Keep in mind that the earliest Virginia...
If fragrance is the gate of memory, the spicy aroma of Eastern red cedar takes me back to childhood holidays. My parents would load us in the car, about a week before Christmas, for a drive out to a friend’s farm where we could walk through the meadows in search of our Christmas tree. After a lively debate about the trees we found, Dad would pull out an old handsaw and begin cutting the tree. We would all help...
A recent old photo that appeared on Facebook triggered a search through the Colonial Williamsburg Archives that led to the discovery of what may be the oldest living tree in this historic city. The photo, shown above, shows a group of workers standing in a very deep hole with the caption “Moving Cedar Tree 1933.” A comparison with that photo and an Eastern redcedar (Juniperus virginiana) standing behind Bassett Hall at the Northern entrance to the Rockefeller Vista, led...
Enthusiastic gardeners begin planning, planting, and preparing for the season to come at the first hint of spring. Some of us may still be planting daffodils in December or January and watch for the first snowdrops to appear as the last bulbs go into the ground. There is very little break during winter. We are always watching the progress of our gardens and exploring sustainable gardening practices. And our hearts remain filled with hope for the seasons to come....