Garden Tour: Governor's Palace Kitchen Garden

After exploring Great Hopes Plantation, we continued on into Colonial Williamsburg proper to the Governor's Palace. After the tour of the inside of the building (which has been recently redecorated, by the way, to reflect what it would have been like with a family living there instead of just a bachelor governor), we went out to the grounds. In the South, colonial kitchens were housed in an outbuilding. Below you can see the (quite large) kitchen for the Palace:

The brick kitchen buildings stand at the top of a terraced kitchen garden that extends quite a distance down the slope to a pond. It is hidden from passersby on the street by the brick wall. The Palace itself is behind what we see of the kitchen here. Not surprisingly, we see kale and collards in these beds, as well as some fruit trees on the ends that are going dormant (my guess was figs and peaches, but it's hard to tell when they are almost bare).

This view of the kitchen is from the bottom of the garden. In the foreground is the ferny asparagus bed. This view makes the garden look smaller than it actually is, but you can get a sense of the height of that steep slope.

This is another view of the terraces taken from the top of the garden, right outside the kitchen buildings. You can see that the main path by the kitchen in the foreground is brick, and that the long path down into the garden is less formal, of gravel. Our garden design was heavily influenced by Colonial era southern gardens, so this was a nice reinforcement of our choice.

This photo also gives an idea of the geometric garden arrangement. Each terrace has a long bed in the center, and the planting row within each bed are neatly arranged in either parallel or perpendicular lines. In the lawn along either side of the planting beds are rows of fruit trees. I also love the white fence and fall colors beyond.

Here is a detail of a terraced bed. This gives you an idea of all the fall brassica growing in the kitchen garden. This makes sense because it's November, but also because brassica is an Old World plant family that colonists would have brought from England.

This final photo is in a separate area of the Palace garden. This area seems to be designated for fruit. At first glance, you might assume that those rails are supporting grape vines, but if you click on the photo for a closer look, you can see that these are actually espaliered pears. There was nothing on the trellis in the background, so I'm not exactly sure what that is for. In the summer I imagine whatever grows there makes a nice green screen to soften the view of the brick wall. That brick wall separates the pleasure gardens of the Palace from the utilitarian vegetable gardens and fruit orchards, but I find the food every bit as decorative and interesting as hedges and flowers!