The Garden Diary of Martha Turnbull, Mistress of Rosedown Plantation by Suzanne Turner (review)

The Garden Diary of Martha Turnbull, Mistress of Rosedown Plantation records 59 years of garden life in the parish of West Feliciana near St. Francisville, in the southeast corner of Louisiana. The diary’s author, “born and married into wealthy circumstances” (1), was educated in Philadelphia during its prime as a center of horticultural and scientific inquiry. Well-traveled and well-read in aesthetics and the hands-on methods found in horticultural publications, her ability, hardwork and steely perseverance resulted in a remarkable landscape filled with jasmine, camellias, and osman-thus, descendants of which remain at the site today. The entries of “the book,” as it’s mistress calls it, are recorded over decades of change beginning in 1836 with the setting up of housekeeping at Rosedown—a 3,455 acre plantation with a Greek Revival house and the garden as its hub—through the Civil War and the years of recovery that followed until 1895, the year before Martha’s death at the age of 84. Throughout, we are engaged in the multitude of jobs and activities, made possible by slave labor, that made a plantation both self-sufficient and pleasurable. For Turnbull, gardening was the glue, the constant thread, that saw her through the deaths of her husband, Daniel, and two sons, the transition from flush years of ornamental gardening and summering in Saratoga Springs to dependence on truck farming and hired help to survive. The garden was, ultimately, “the measure of her worth” (14) that left two documents—one written and one rooted in the earth.

“Lost,” then rediscovered in a descendant’s attic after 15 years, editor Suzanne Turner spent another 15 years transcribing this rare first-hand account of plantation life in the Deep South. Beyond making it accessible, she has done much work for the reader by interpreting and placing it’s entries into the broader context of the 19th century. The book begins with a foreword by historian William Seale who, years ago on a fieldtrip to Rosedown, suggested (or dared) Turner pursue transcribing the diary for a wider audience. In her introduction she explains her process in putting “flesh” on these entries—rock-hard observations and facts—that contrast so greatly with romantic “moonlight and magnolias” mythologies of the South. She questions how to frame this information, what lens to use to examine it, as Turnbull’s diary could alternately be read as a contribution to women’s studies, plantation studies, as a history of the enslaved who provided the labor. But foremost for Turner, a professor emerita of landscape architecture, owner of a landscape architecture and preservation firm and historian of the subject, it is garden history and the “story of the gardening life of a plantation mistress” (1).

In her introduction Turner first provides context for this life and its ritual of recording by viewing it within the framework of American horticulture specific to the Deep South. She discusses the education (formal and self-taught) that informed Turnbull and the horticultural books and publications in the Rose-down library she used as sources—the works of John Claudius Loudon and wife, Jane Webb Loudon, A. J. Downing and DeBow’s Review. She addresses how diary keeping served as a planning tool (and in the rare instance, a means of communication to be referred to when she was away) and what inspired her—neighboring gardeners, the local landscape and a Grand Tour of Europe in 1851. Throughout, Turner is our translator, explaining obscure 19th century vocabulary and methods (and those used much less often today) such as hilling up celery, forking asparagus, inarching as a means of propagation, manure and lime recipes for rose fertilizer, the harvesting Spanish moss and making mats to protect the greenhouse from frost, planting by phases of the moon.

In a short chapter on “how to read the diary” we are introduced to the book itself and the editor’s method of...