Heirloom Vegetable & Herb Garden

Heirloom Vegetable and Herb Garden. 500 years of history and growing. , The Heirloom Garden highlights plants that sustained the lives of indigenous people, enslaved and free Africans, white Europeans, and descendants who resided in the Cheseapeake region from the 1600s to the present. These communities cultivated herbs, vegetables, and grains for subsistence, medicinal, cultural, and economic purposes., Long before "gentleman farmers" like Thomas Jefferson consulted treatises on vegetable and fruit cultivation in the 1700s, indigenous people in the Chesapeake grew tobacco for ritual purposes, and foods like corn, beans, squash, known as the Three Sisters. Agriculture, along with hunting, fishing, and gathering, contributed to the Native American diet., By the 1800s, nurserymen and seedsmen gathered, promoted, and sold a wide variety of seeds and plants for family gardens. Enslaved people often supplemented their limited rations by growing vegetables, fruits, and herbs, developing rich culinary traditions. Today, cultivating heirloom plants in kitchen gardens help maintain vital connections to the foodways and cultural traditions of the past., [Captions:] , John White's illustration of the Native American town of Secotan in present day North Carolina documents indigenous dwellings, activities, and fields of corn., In the mid-1850s, Captain Daniel Hayman sailed to Elizabeth City, North Carolina with an unusual white sweet potato he picked up in a Caribbean port. A Methodist minister from Virginia acquired some Hayman plants, which other "circuit riders" transported and shared across the Delmarva Peninsula. Unsuccessful commercially, Hayman sweet potatoes are now grown primarily on the Eastern Shore of Virginia for their candy-sweet taste and flavorful white skin.