Vanished Gardens: Finding Nature in Philadelphia

33. Auricula

161 & 33. Auricula my father is buried in a pasture. Across the road from the pasture is the cold stone crypt where they used to keep the bodies in the winter until the ground thawed enough for burial in the spring. His pasture is at the top of a hill that looks out over the rolling pastures below and wood lots and the little streams flowing into the Brownsville Brook. The mountain he loved, Ascutney, is a blue triangle against the milky sky. Stone walls line the perimeter of the graveyard. Farmers built them in moonlight, too busy to clear the fields during the day. I suppose this is a garden of sorts, the kind of landscape that’s been called into creation by its usefulness. Cows and horses once pastured here. An old orchard provides deer with frozen apples and pears in the winter, a farmer still grows corn on that patch to the right, and, until Mrs. Hilt’s death, horses cropped the sweet cold grass on the other side of the wall. The room where I write in the tall narrow house was once bordered by pastures too. Large farms on rolling land going north, wedged between the wide Delaware and the smaller rush of the Schuylkill. TheQuakerfarmsthatsurroundedmewereadmiredbytheirowners for their usefulness.They could provide their families with fruits and vegetables,pasture for sheep and horses,milk from the cow,herbs for medicine, even citrus for the winter months from trees wintered in greenhouses. Sometimes they sent their produce to Philadelphia, to sons and daughters with small yards behind narrow houses. Isaac Norris built a country house in 1712–17 not far from William Penn’s land at Springettsbury, northeast toward the Delaware River. A successful merchant, friend and executor of William Penn, he had a house in Philadelphia but eventually sold it and moved to 162 gladwyne Fairhill. Not long after he bought the land for his plantation and built his house,he wrote to a friend in England,“We are now moved a great way from the temperate climate & delightful isle. Instead of the beautiful prospects of enclosure & gay improvements we are surrounded with woods & all nature in its rough dress.” His place was a working farm with several buildings. By 1726 he had a stable, a brew house, a barn, springhouse, wash house, stone kitchen, granary, corn house, cider house, milk house, smokehouse, shop shed, greenhouse—one of the earliest in Philadelphia—and a “garden closet,”a room connected to the greenhouse,“an inner chamber .” He added a cow house, barrack, hen house, brick kiln, coach house,boat house,and coach stable.He was able to provide his large family with food, fuel, and clothing from his farm. His daughter Deborah writes to her brother Isaac Jr., an apprentice in England, in 1733:“We bake our own bread but brew not our own beer, because thou sold all our molasses, & stock’s low, and make our candles . . . Father has promised all the wood we burn this winter.I value myself that I can so readily conform to a change. I think I promise fair for frugality, but whether I shall perform in all I’ll not say.” Some of the details of the Norris family’s life at Fairhill are noted in tiny script in almanacs at the Library Company,a library founded by Benjamin Franklin. I looked at the small books about the size of my hand.They were leather and worn.The librarian brought me several from the years 1713 to 1738. Isaac Norris had written his name on the first page of each almanac.Two were his son’s, dated after Isaac’s death in 1735. He wrote in 1713 that he was beginning to plant the orchard.Eventually , it contained espaliered and standard fruit trees bordered by a stone wall.He grafted his own varieties and ordered twelve different kinds of pear trees,seven cherry,nine apricot,and nine plum from an English nursery. One year he planted“Indian Corne” in the“Young Orchard.” By 1720 he had“sett quick privatt hedge al along front of young orchard.” auricula 163 In the fall he sold livestock and had seventy-five sheep and fortyfour lambs. He kept track of how much money he got for each part of an animal he slaughtered—the meat, the tallow, and the “hyde.” Norris planted wheat, oats, Indian corn, rye, winter barely, turnips, and tobacco. His lists...