Organizing Nature (Historical Marker)

Here follows the inscription written on this trailside historical marker:

Organizing Nature
George Mason designed a formal, symmetrical garden south of the house. A tall wooden fence separated the garden from the surrounding buildings, roads, fields, and forest. Visitors entered the garden from the mansion or through a gate off of the Landing Road, which curved up the hill from the river and dock below.

Mason's son John described this “extensive garden touching the house [as] … a perfect level platform” of ground neatly smoothed by Mason's enslaved workforce. This “flatte” extended one acre. Side and cross paths intersected the wide, central promenade leading from the porch towards the river. Small boxwood shrubs bordered gravel walkways. A variety of fruit trees, vegetables, flowers, and grasses flourished in each of the four quadrants, or garden rooms. At the end opposite the house, John noted “a spacious walk” and “some falls on the brow of the hill looking towards the river.” Mason's enslaved workers further sculpted the rugged terrain into three gently sloping terraces, a popular design in 18th-century Chesapeake gardens.

Boxwood Borders

Colonial Chesapeake gardeners followed the English tradition of using boxwood.

Gardeners valued their hardy branches, strong roots, long life, and the ease by which boxwood can be grown and pruned. These ornamental plants required regular, seasonal care by Mason and his knowledgeable enslaved gardeners. Some of the Masons' boxwood survived more than 250 years. The botanist Philip Miller recommended that small boxwood shrubs be planted “for bordering Flower-beds … for which Purpose it far exceeds any other Plant.” His Gardener's Dictionary (1735) became a valuable and standard reference for many. Following the boxwood's natural decline, we re-planted the garden with new, healthy boxwood in the manner Mason most likely used. This practice of using boxwood, Miller explained, kept “the Borders from washing into the Gravel-walks more effectively than any Plant whatever.”

Precision In All Things

George Mason's design for the garden helps us learn about his way of thinking.

Mason must have been a man who liked order. Every dimension in the garden fits with mathematical precision into his plan for the area around the mansion. For example, the main pathway of the garden is 12 feet wide. It aligns perfectly with the 12 foot wide central hallway of the mansion and the 12 foot wide lane that continues on the other side of the house.

He used 60 foot square grids as the basis for his arrangement of the garden, kitchen yard, schoolhouse, and mansion. Mason's careful attention to detail demonstrated to his visitors his good taste and fine education.

View of the Fishing Shore:
Benjamin Henry Latrobe, “View of the Fishing Shore on York River at Airy Plains, looking to the East,” 1797.

John Mason explained the “Landing Road” was “where all persons or things water borne, were landed or taken off, and where were kept the boats…and canoes…for business transportation, fishing and hunting.”
Close-up of image on marker

The Box Tree:
From A Curious Herbal, Containing Five Hundred Cuts, of the most useful Plants, which are now used in the Practice of Physick, 1737, by Elizabeth Blackwell, John Nourse and Samuel Harding.

Diagram of Gunston Hall's Garden Restoration, 2017:
by Robert McGinnis Landscape Architect.