Allan Appel photo
Monica Loomis sampling the Lamb's Ear.
“It feels like flannel,” said Monica Loomis of the Lamb’s Ear that Giulia Gambale had distributed to her.
And that’s because the soft but durable leaves of that plant, along with others, were kept in pouches on the belts of colonial-era American soldiers — as bandages to staunch wounds. It was part of the Revolutionary War’s version of a first aid kit.
Beneath a white tent on a hot Sunday afternoon that fine tidbit of local colonial and gardening history emerged in a fascinating talk at the New Haven Museum’s Pardee-Morris House.
The talker was soon-to-be certified master gardener Giulia Gambale, one of the volunteer creators, along with Rachel Heerema, of the colonial garden in the corner of the sprawling back lawn at the Pardee Morris House on Lighthouse Point Road in Morris Cove.
Thirty-five gardening and local history enthusiasts – the majority from the East Shore neighborhood – spent an hour sniffing, among many aromatic and useful herbs, Feverfew (heals insect bites and stimulates digestion); oregano (good for both saucing up meats and assuaging a headache; and catmint (keeps the vermin away and then will help you get to sleep).
In 2017, with the emergency repairs and restoration of the house itself well in hand, and an archeological project (whose finds are now on display in the house) also advanced, Gambale, who lives down the street from the house and had been a long time volunteer, decided to offer her specific gardening skills and enthusiasm in the service of the Pardee-Morris House.
“We decided to make it [what a colonial garden at the house might have looked like] easy to understand,” said Gambale, who in October will be graduating from UConn’s master gardening program.
To that end, Gambale and Heerema, created four large beds, each containing plants that colonial-era local folks would have recognized and used. In effect, a mini household garden, a medicinal garden, one for tea and aromatics, and, the most familiar, a culinary garden bed.
“The site [of the garden, for example, in the original Morris House built in 1750] likely may have been near the kitchen,” she said; indeed right outside it, “so you could [easily] go out and pick the herbs you need.”
She and Heerema used a range of sources to create the garden space including information on the National Park Service Site website on what the gardens of George Washington at Mount Vernon and Thomas Jefferson at Monticello contained.
Feverfew and Yarrow
Deploying a fun, low-keyed question and answer style, full of anecdotes about her own herb gardening, and stories of her nonna’s tomato garden in Italy, Gambale asked her interlocutors to use their noses to identify the various herbs and, then, once identified, discussion followed.
Here are some highlights of what this reporter-and-aspiring-gardener learned:
Lavender has not only a wonderful scent you pick up outdoors from the beds edging your garden, but it was highly prized during colonial times, which was, as Gambale delicately explained, an odiferous era.
The dried lavender would be tucked in the seams of clothing to cut down on odors.
Distributing oregano, thyme, and savory from the culinary garden, she said savory was used extensively (then, and also now, of course) in flavoring meats, and it was seen as similar to oregano but less overpowering.
“What’s the difference between winter savory and summer savory?” an audience member asked.
“Above my pay grade,” Gambale gamely answered.
Running, however, with the teaching moment, she asked what kitchen feature do we have that was decidedly lacking in colonial times, as related to savory?
Answer: Refrigeration.
So summer savory, Gambale continued, “was used a little to hide the flavor of meat” when the colonial sell-by date may have long passed.
In fact scenting, of the bad and good kinds, was a through-line in the sessions’ discussion of the herbs. “How many times did people bathe in colonial times?” she asked.
The answer being, of course, not too many, Gambale distributed petals of the rose bushes from the Pardee-Morris household garden (derived originally from rosa rugosa): “These could be used for scenting on the person or in the home.”
And, also, for rose hips, as in tea.
Speaking of tea, we briefly time-traveled to the Boston Tea Party back on Dec. 16, 1773. That would be six years before the British dropped anchor on the East Shore and burned down the Morris House on their way to raiding arms stores in New Haven.
Michael and Suzanne Stringer, with the house and kitchen, likely location of colonial garden, at the center rear
So, what were all those tea-drinking American rebels sipping since they no longer were able to import their staple black tea from England? Why a tea substitute from, of course, the perennial bee balm growing right near us in the Pardee-Morris aromatics/tea garden.
Bee balm, Gambale elaborated, also offers antibacterial, antimicrobial benefits and, of course, bees and other pollinators love it.
Taking all this in were Michael and Suzanne Stringer, from North Haven, who are regulars at New Haven Museum and Pardee-Morris House programs. They’re both gardeners but have really amped up their interest since retirement.
To do it right, said Michael Stringer (btw, one of only three men in the audience of three dozen), “it takes time and patience.”
Like many of the audience members, the Stringers were measuring their own herb-growing experience against what Gambale was saying. After she sniffed the oregano branches that were distributed, Suzanne Stringer wondered how the Pardee-Morris samples remained so strong and aromatic over the years; theirs seemed to be losing scent.
Two audience members finished up the session with more than new information. Recently retired New Haven history and English teacher Toni Criscuolo and a neighbor (a vegetarian with an interest in herbal combinations) Owen Bernard both asked Gambale how they might also volunteer and help her tend the colonial garden in the future.
For all those interested in future tours of the garden and other programming at the museum and Pardee-Morris House, best approach is to start at the site, newhavenmuseum.org.
Have a favorite garden around town that you’d like this vegetable-flower correspondent to check out and write about? Send an email to [email protected] or leave a comment below with details.
And see below for other recent Independent articles about New Haven’s many gardens and gardeners.
• Barnard’s Classroom Garden Springs to Life
• A Dream Grows In An Armory Garden
• On Service Day, Albertus Tends Its Garden
• Farmer Savage Preps For Mushroom Season
• Kid Gardeners Grow On Clinton Ave
• Whitney Gardeners Dig In On Leek Landfall
