Dooryards

As the summer is winding down, we are preserving the harvests and beginning to transition our gardens to their slower autumn pace. I have been thinking about the people who came before, what it took to survive here in northern New England, and in particular, about their dooryard gardens. They brought their culture with them to America and also their language. For instance, the term “dooryard” which refers to the fenced-in space directly outside the most utilized door of a home. In New England, this area would contain herbs, vegetables, and flowers. The dooryard was typically chosen for the warmth of southern sun exposure and some structural protection from the north and/or northwest weather. The term itself is a distinctly New England one for a kitchen garden.

The word yard is from a medieval English term “yerd” which means an enclosure. The “yerd” had a successor which was the English “forecourt.” Forecourts were fenced-in front yard gardens that could be seen in England through the mid-1700s, in all levels of society. The New England dooryard was both a focal point of the house visually, as it was often directly in front or on the side entrance of the house, and also in terms of what went on within it in addition to gardening - such as washing, drying, repetitive chores, and neighborly visits or chats; a vital space for life as they knew it.

These earliest colonial kitchen gardens were executed in challenging terrain. Martha Ballard, a Maine midwife (her working diary spans 1785-1812), wrote about the demands of her hardscrabble existence “digging grass roots [and] raking them off” to clear the plot for her garden - after it had been plowed. Nineteenth-century historian Alice Morse Earl notes that “three old farm boundaries were of necessity garden boundaries in early days - our stone walls, rail fences, and hedge-rows…Throughout New England the great boulders were blasted to clear rocky fields; and these, with smaller loose stones were gathered into vast stone walls.”

“If the land, where you like to have a garden has rocks, great or small, they, of course, are carried off…” -William Cobbett on garden creation, 1856. Rocks would become the paths, garden bed borders, and boundary demarcations of colonial Americans.

It makes one think that the colonial Americans were onto something - perhaps obstacles in the way are opportunities that just need a little reconsideration.

[1] Gregory LeFever, “Little Enclosures Hard Won from the Forest: Front Dooryards Were Where Women Traditionally Tended Their Most Precious Gardens.” Early American Life and A Simple Life (2023), 42. https://www.gregorylefever.com/pdfs/Dooryard%20gardens.pdf [2] Alice Morse Earle, Old Time Gardens (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2005), 40. *Originally published in 1901. [3]Rhonda Haavisto & Jane O’Sullivan, “Dooryard Gardens: Colonial Herbs.” The Herb Society of America, New England Unit (1995): 1 www.neuhsa.org/dooryard.html [4]Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary 1785-1812. (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 129. [5] Alice Morse Earle and Intro by Virginia Lopez Begg, Old Time Gardens (New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 2005), 399. [6] William Cobbett, The American Gardener ( New York: The Modern Library, 2003), 6.