Puritan colonists were motivated gardeners whose survival depended on the productivity of their plots. The practical role of seventeenth century gardens was to provide food and herbs for household use; the earliest New World gardens planted by European immigrants were not the grounds surrounding villas or great houses, although some pleasure was probably derived from a pleasing layout and successful husbandry. In 1639 Colonel George Fenwick, second governor of the Saybrook Colony in Connecticut, wrote to colonist John Winthrop: "We both desire and delight much in that primitive imployment of dressing a garden." Winthrop later sent saplings to George and Alice Fenwick, whose correspondence reveals that they cultivated cherries, peaches, and apples as well as thriving garden plots.
Early settlers were direct descendants of the British gardening tradition and carried familiar garden plants and traditional tools and techniques to their New World gardens. Old World practices combined with botanical and cultural information gleaned from Native American farmers, and colonial American gardens reflected these melded traditions. Field crops provided Indian corn as well as European grains such as wheat, rye, and oats. The various colored cultivars of "Turkey Wheate" became a staple in the diet of Europeans arriving in the New World, although many regarded corn as a food more suitable for cattle than people. Colonists also carried seed stock from home, including some grains that are no longer commonly grown. Josselyn described silpee, or naked oats, cultivated in New England; this was most likely Avena nuda, a close relative of common oats (A. sativa), in which the grains fell away from their coverings with ease. Housewives probably favored naked oats because of the simplicity of preparing them without a mill, and Josselyn mentioned them as an ingredient in one of the "standing dishes" of New England. He described a meal of oatmeal simmered in milk and flavored with sugar and spice, similar to "white-pot," a traditional Devonshire pudding compounded of cream, flour, eggs, and spices.
Vegetables and herbs were grown in rectangular beds that were enriched with all available household, human, and animal wastes. The reconstructed gardens at Plimoth Plantation reflect the strategies for growing plants in small, intensive plots, with an emphasis on reliable crops that would fill the gaps in a diet of grains, meat, and fish. Cabbages, cauliflower, and leafy coleworts (all cultivars of Brassica oleracea) are members of the mustard family (Cruciferae or Brassicaceae) that were grown both as food and medicine; cauliflower in particular was considered suitable for gentlemen's tables, but acceptable dishes were also prepared by boiling cabbages and coleworts in meat broth. Coleworts are leafy wildtype forms, similar to modern kale, while cabbage develops with its leaves wrapped tightly around a giant terminal bud. Cabbages are biennials, grown for their massive buds, which unfurl and produce a flowering stalk in the second year of growth. In The Herball, Gerard described the leafy coleworts and cabbages that were commonly grown in England during the sixteenth century, including leafy forms such as garden and curled forms of colewort and red and white cabbages with closed heads.
Cauliflower was recognized as a cluster of flower buds and known as "Brassica florida, Cole-florie." Cauliflowers function as precocious annuals, producing a large terminal cluster of immature flowers during the first growing season. They are the result of horticultural selection during ancient times; invading Romans brought cabbages, coleworts, and cauliflower to England, and as Mediterranean plants, they were well known to Greek physician and herbalist Pedanius Dioscorides during the first century A.D. In De Materia Medica, the herbal that served as a medical reference for the next fifteen centuries, Dioscorides recommended cabbages for those with poor eyesight, palsy, and spleen troubles. Ancient Europeans also used the leaves as skin poultices on "hot swellings," and once cabbage arrived in the New World, the Cherokee adopted it as a food and also used the leaves to treat skin afflictions such as boils. For all who cultivated them, cabbages and coleworts provided reliable crops that could be consumed raw, cooked, or preserved.
In her 1796 cookbook, Simmons commented on the need to grow cabbages in "new unmanured ground," believing that cabbages grown in old garden soil developed rank odors. She also knew about the practical chemistry of the red anthocyanin pigments produced by many cultivated varieties, recommending that the "red and redest small tight heads, are best for slaw," since the water-soluble anthocyanins will tint purple any foods boiled with them in their juices. Furthermore, since anthocyanins are sensitive to changes in acidity, color changes will occur if they are cooked in reactive metals pots or seasoned with vinegar. Glasse (1805) described methods for pickling cauliflower and red cabbage in salt and vinegar, flavoring the vegetables with nutmeg, mace, cloves, and allspice.
Early root crops introduced from England included radishes, turnips, beets, carrots, parsnips, and skirret (Sium sisarum), a forgotten carrot relative and member of the parsley family (Umbelliferae or Apiaceae). All of these plants produce large taproots that are suitable for storage; these crops were harvested, stored in root cellars (often in moist sand where they would continue to live), and then used months later. Like coleworts, radishes and turnips are members of the mustard family (Cruciferae or Brassicaceae), and the seeds of both were used medicinally against intestinal worms. Radishes (Raphanus sativus) are annuals that produce edible siliques, the characteristic dry fruit of the mustard family that cracks along vertical lines of weakness in the fruit wall. They contain the mustard oils typical of the family and were used to flavor sallets. In Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets (1699), diarist John Evelyn recommended "young Seedling Leaves and Roots, raised on the monthly hotbed almost the all year round." He also mentioned horseradish (Armoracia rusticana), a different species despite sharing the name radish; he noted that thin shavings of horseradish roots could be eaten with "our cold Herbs or mixed with sugar and vinegar" to make a "sauce supplying mustard to the Sallet."
Josselyn (1672) mentioned radishes "as big as a man's arm" cultivated in New England gardens; these were most likely horseradish roots, which were cultivated as much for their medicinal properties as for their culinary use. Not a root crop in the strict sense, horseradish was used traditionally in plasters and poultices to treat sciatica and gout, in which its mustard oils functioned as a counter-irritant. Children with intestinal worms were given the juice of fresh roots or powdered dry roots, or a horseradish ointment was applied to their abdomens, where it sometimes caused blisters. William Coles, a seventeenth century herbalist, also recommended horseradish to treat scurvy or malaria, which he called "The Quartan Ague." Horseradish was an early escapee from colonial gardens and soon naturalized in damp waste areas and along banks and road sides. Native Americans also adopted it as a new medicinal plant; the Iroquois treated blood disorders and diabetes with horseradish, and the Cherokee used the roots for colds, sore throats, asthma, oral diseases, and as a diuretic.
Turnips (Brassica rapa) are biennials that were grown primarily for their roots, but their edible leaves were also used as a green vegetable. As early as 1609, colonists in Virginia cultivated turnips, as did French Jesuit missionaries along the Saint Lawrence River. Cold weather improved their flavor, so it may not be coincidental that a November 1637 letter from John Winthrop to his wife instructed her to harvest their crop while he was away. Native Americans also adopted turnips and used both their large roots and leaves as food; fields of turnips cultivated near Geneva, New York, were destroyed in the punitive raids against Native Americans in 1779. Turnip roots were baked in their skins and were regarded as far superior to the edible wild roots that Native Americans had gathered for many years.
Beets (Beta vulgaris) are members of the goosefoot family (Chenopodiaceae) that were also grown for both their taproots and leaves. The red pigment that appears in the edible leaves and roots of many beets is a nitrogen-containing betacyanin (betalain), which differs chemically from the more common red, blue, and violet anthocyanin pigments. Betacyanins are aromatic compounds that characterize only a small cluster of families, including the goosefoot family, cactus family (Cactaceae), and portulaca family (Portulacaceae). Nicholas Culpepper, another seventeenth century English herbalist, recommended beets for jaundice, phlegm, and "the bloody flux," which suggests that the red betacyanins may have suggested the Doctrine of Signatures; early colonists may have had both medicinal and edible properties in mind when they introduced beets to their New World plots. Wild beets are salt-tolerant, seaside biennials that were cultivated and selected by ancient Romans into the familiar red beets characterized by internal rings of cambium tissue. These are cylindrical growth zones that increase the taproot diameter and may produce some woody conducting tissue as the plant matures, particularly characteristic of the massive beets known as mangels, or mangelwurzel, that were grown for fodder. Because of their tendency to grow woody tissue, young beets have always been favored for table use, and beets seemed to grow particularly well in the New World. In her 1805 supplement on American cookery, Glasse included a method for pickling beets in vinegar flavored with pepper, allspice, ginger, and garlic.
Carrots are cultivated forms of the familiar wildflower Queen Anne's lace (Daucus carota), which have also been horticulturally selected for their large, edible taproots. The plants are biennials that are harvested after the first growth season. If they are not harvested, during their second year of growth carrots produce the characteristic flower clusters and small aromatic fruits known as schizocarps ("seeds") typical of the parsley family (Umbelliferae or Apiaceae). The taproot pigmentation of early cultivated varieties was variable; carrots cultivated in northwestern Europe during the sixteenth century had roots that were pale yellow or purple due to the presence of anthocyanin pigments. Yellow carrots were favored for cooking because they did not release pigments into the soup or stew, and these were the forms that were first introduced to American gardens; they were probably pigment-free genetic mutants of the original purple carrots that migrated from Afghanistan into Europe. During the seventeenth century, Dutch growers produced orange carrots by selection from the natural variation in carrot populations; these were carrots with very high concentrations of carotenes, the orange pigments that frequently occur in fruits or in leaves, where they help to absorb the sunlight that powers photosynthesis. The same species in the wild form known as Queen Anne's lace was introduced to American gardens for its medicinal properties. English herbalists such as Gerard knew it as a herb that would "helpeth conception," quite different from its ancient use for contraception and abortion, which was recommended by Hippocrates (ca. 460 to ca. 377 B.C.). In laboratory rodents, the small fruits of Queen Anne's lace block the production of progesterone, the hormone needed for completion of a successful pregnancy. Queen Anne's lace escaped herb plots and easily naturalized as a widespread weed, and Mohegan and Delaware Native Americans later used the flowers to prepare infusions that they used to treat diabetes.