Tryon Palace - Gardens

Gardens

The 16 acres (65,000 m2) of gardens offer three centuries of gardening history. From the 18th-century Wilderness Garden with its native plants that greeted the first European settlers in this area, through the lush displays favored by the Victorians, to 20th-century colonial revival interpretations of earlier periods, our gardens offer almost endless variety.

The gardens at Tryon Palace are carefully maintained year-round, so regardless of when you visit, beauty abounds. What were the Palace gardens really like?

We can only make intelligent guesses about what kind of gardens there might have been surrounding the 18th-century Palace. Governor Tryon seems to have had little interest in horticulture. Two maps of New Bern drawn in 1769, when the Palace was still under construction, reveal two different garden plans.

More than two centuries later, in 1991, Palace researchers discovered yet another plan. In the collections of the Academia Nacional de la Historia in Venezuela they found a garden plan that came from Palace architect, John Hawks. Hawks gave the plan to Venezuelan traveler Francisco de Miranda, who admired the Palace greatly when he visited New Bern in 1783. The Miranda plan suggests a strong French influence instead of the more-to-be-expected English garden style.

Most likely Claude Sauthier drew up the plan given to Miranda. Sauthier was born in France in 1736, and trained as a draftsman. In 1763 he wrote a Treatis on Public Architecture and Garden Planning that reflects a strong influence of two 18th-century French master gardeners, one of whom trained with the designer of Versailles.

Sauthier came to America before the Revolution to work as a mapmaker. In 1768, Governor Tryon employed him to draw a series of North Carolina town maps, including one of New Bern. Similarities of style between the town maps and the garden plan discovered in Venezuela suggest that Sauthier created them all.

None of the historic garden plans has ever been implemented at the Palace. The current gardens were designed by Morley Williams at the time of the Palace Restoration. Before undertaking the Palace project, Williams had served on the faculties of Harvard and North Carolina State Universities and assisted in the restoration of the gardens at Mount Vernon and Stratford Hall. His designs are in the colonial revival style that was widely employed in the mid-20th century.

And with the opening of the North Carolina History Center in 2010, the gardens now include a garden filled with a diversity of plants which are native to the river edges of coastal North Carolina. These plants survive both being flooded and dry soil, and provide food and shelter for a variety of wildlife