Read in text form below or click on the arrow above to listen to the audio recording.
NARRATED BY CRYSTAL HAYNES COPITHORNE
INTERVIEW WITH RUSS COHEN, EXPERT FORAGER
Welcome to the Kitchen Garden banner, which shows a colonial person carrying a basket through their small fenced garden, sowing seeds as they go. Root vegetables decorate the background, a vision of what is to come.
Almost every home in the 1770s had a kitchen garden – a large practical planted area convenient to the kitchen door. The useful plants in these gardens had crucial jobs to do: feed the family, season or preserve meat, pickle vegetables, prepare or dye textiles, help with cleaning or laundry, sooth a lingering cough.
Although there are fine examples of 18th century architecture preserved in the Arlington landscape of today, Menotomy’s colonial gardens have not survived. Arlington’s Garden Club has recreated a colonial kitchen garden with 36 useful herbs and flowers at the Jason Russell House. For vegetables, we can look to the records of Boston’s pioneering nursery men and women as well as importers of seed and stock. According to one study: “London dominated every aspect of Boston’s horticultural life throughout the 18th century as did the overwhelming English character of food tastes and ornamental gardening.” For successful merchants, such as rebel leader John Hancock, this London taste translated to enclosed formal gardens with geometric beds and espaliered trees adjoining a showy mansion.
But for average people, English vegetables, salad greens and herbs prevailed, with peas leading the way! In addition to an astonishing 20 varieties of peas, other staples – each with its own subvarieties maturing at different times -- were beans, cabbage, and lettuce. Next in popularity came carrots, cauliflower, parsley, spinach, onions, radishes and turnips. Celery, asparagus and melon were also given space in raised rectangular beds, along with a selection of herbs. A skillful gardener living in a rural community like Menotomy could also bring plants foraged from the wild into their fenced backyard. Why not tame a sweet strawberry or bitter green and have it ready to hand?
Women and children tended the kitchen garden while men focused on larger planting fields. Some Menotomy families had extra hands to help – including enslaved and free people of African descent. Information about Menotomy’s enslaved residents is scarce and fragmentary, but local historian Beverly Douhan has uncovered records of 11 women who lived there around the time of the Revolution. It is likely that these women helped to tend kitchen gardens along with other household work. All we really know is their names, so we say them here as a way to remember them: Kate, who lived with the Jason Russell family, Rose and her daughter Venus, Dinah, Flora, Pegg, Dinah, Flora, Nancy, Violet and Hannah.
For a complementary perspective on wild plants that colonists could have foraged to augment their kitchen gardens, let’s hear from Russ Cohen, an Arlington-based wild foods educator and enthusiast and author of “Wild plants I have known…and eaten.” You can still forage for many of these plants today if you know where to look.