But a relatively new field in the old study is landscape archaeology, the study and often the restoration of historic gardens.
Kate Meatyard, research fellow and documentation consultant for the Department of Archaeological Research at Colonial Williamsburg, Va., has been in town for a family visit. On Wednesday she explained her work to a group of gardening enthusiasts at Kapolei.
Meatyard's current interest is in the documentation and research of St. George Tucker's garden. Tucker's home was one of the few large houses in Colonial Williamsburg, suitable for a judge and the second professor of law at the College of William and Mary.
The restoration of Williamsburg, she said, is frozen in a period of time just prior to the American Revolution when it was the political and social capital of Virginia. In 1780, during a critical stage of the war, the capital was moved to Richmond which was deemed safer and more central.
The historic importance of Williamsburg then declined until a massive restoration program began in 1927, with John D. Rockefeller Jr., as the major benefactor. Architects were hired to plan the development and structure of the buildings and roads. Arthur A. Shurcliff was chosen to direct the landscape restoration.
Most of the original colonial gardens had disappeared before the restoration began 70 years ago, but portions of old walks and walls and records of the planting still exist, Meatyard said.
"In the 18th century, people were interested in science, and the old gardens were laid out in a geometric pattern," she said. "Gardens were first planted for sustenance - food for the family, and herbs for medicine. Horticulture was important to the men of the colony, who experimented with growing trees sent from England. The women grew the flowers."
In 1609, one of the earliest export ships bringing plants to Virginia went aground off Bermuda, and the event was the basis of William Shakespeare's play, "The Tempest."
While some of Williamsburg's trees were native to Virginia, the gentry enjoyed trying to grow plants from cold, damp England in Williamsburg's milder climate. They had failures, but they also had successes.
Their greatest success, Meatyard said, was with boxwood. When Shurcliff planned the restoration, his co-workers said that he had "boxwood on the brain."
It had the double advantage of being able to be uprooted every year and broken into three separate plants, and of being relatively slow-growing so it did not require frequent pruning. It was used for hedges and topiary.
At the Governor's Palace, the most elaborate residence in Williamsburg, 12 tall cylindrical boxwood features were called "The Apostles." Low hedges formed parterres, formal garden areas in which flower beds and paths formed geometric patterns.
"By 1750 in England, such landscapers as Capability Brown were beginning a trend toward more natural gardens, but the Williamsburg gardens continued in their geometrical patterns of circles and straight lines. If you split them down the middle, everything matched," Meatyard said.
"Then Thomas Jefferson, who designed Monticello and was an avid horticulturist, went to Europe with John Adams and studied European gardens. Jefferson kept a garden book, a record of what he saw, and he put what he learned into practice when he got home. Planting was less symmetrical, more relaxed. This is why gardens in America became uniquely American, with smaller houselots using the same plantings as the elegant plantations."
The botanical traffic between London and Virginia went both ways. "The colonists collected seeds and plants which they sent to Chelsea Garden to see if they would stand the rigors of an English winter, and someone sent a turtle, which was a huge hit," Meatyard said. "One diligent horticulturist sent an unknown green vine, which later was recorded as poison ivy."
Until recently, she added, landscape archaeology was the practice of digging for old walls and paths, and researching diaries and other period documents.
But lately, such developments as infra-red photography and the microscopic study of phytoliths, the tiny opaline rocks that contain fossil plant remains, make new finds possible. From these, archaeologists can determine the plants that grew on the site, making garden restoration accurate.
"We don't find artifacts as archaeologists do on house sites," Meatyard said, "but it's very exciting to find records of seed purchases that are 200 years old, and to try to figure out where they planted them."
