French garden displays Indiana village life around 1800

VINCENNES, Ind. (AP) - Local naturalist Terri Talarek King knelt down near a row of lush oak leaf lettuce in Father Rivet's Garden at the Vincennes State Historic Sites, removing a few unwelcome sticks and reciting the rest of the nearby plants as the Friday morning breeze gently shook the tree leaves.

"This is kind of a small representation of what a French priest would have on the frontier, or what would be in a French colonial-type garden," she said, wiping her brow beneath her straw hat. "We've got squash, three kinds of lettuce, borage, and a lot of onions.

"The French just loved their onions."

Historical records show that Father Jean Francois Rivet did, indeed, grow produce, and the plot behind Jefferson Academy at the historic sites, 1 W. Harrison St., gives visitors a glimpse back in time to show what his garden and the gardens of other Vincennes residents might have looked like around 1800.

The gardens would have been within a fenced area, though the fences would have been much taller to keep all the critters out, and comprised raised beds.

Another major factor about the French gardens, King said, is that they would inter-plant things.

"It was a blend, it wasn't like vegetables in one area, flowers in another," she said, gesturing to the layout. "So you'll see them mixed up in here in different ways. They considered color, texture, shape and height and all that, so even if it's a utilitarian-type garden, they also considered the beauty of it."

The garden was established in 2003 thanks to a grant from the Vincennes Garden Club and designed by King with plant varieties that were as historically accurate as possible.

The scale of Rivet's garden, though, and other gardens at the time would have been much larger.

"His garden was a lot bigger because it fed him and also the Frenchmen who were hired to work it. They were paid in produce," King said. "A lot of people had gardens. They brought over whatever they had back in Europe, seeds or plants they were familiar with, that they knew worked for their family, and then they would start some kind of garden when they got here.

"It was very common to have gardens here, because doctors were sometimes few and far between. But everybody knew their herbs back then."

Father Rivet's Garden includes thyme, tennis ball lettuce (a favorite of Thomas Jefferson), sunflowers, pumpkins, radishes and raspberries.

There's also French sorrel, French carrots, garlic, chives, a beautiful bunch of garden sage topped with pretty purple blooms, and more - all sorts of plants that 19th century French residents would have cultivated in their own gardens.

Right now, most of that produce is just a small flash of green leaves. It will look drastically different, King noted, in about a month.

But nearby is another plot that's already overrun with green.

On the far-right side of the historic sites beside the smallest white building, just in the shadow of Grouseland, is the Thompson Family Herb Garden and the Kathleen Redfern Memorial Homestead Garden.

They look like one garden, King said, but there are two different areas. The spot closest to the wood pergola is the herb garden, established in the 1990s and named after "Alice of Old Vincennes" author Maurice Thompson.

The white building is his birthplace - it was moved from the eastern part of the state - but now it serves as a gift shop.

The garden was initially cultivated by LeeAnn Luce, then by Sherry Preusz. Now, King looks after the plot, which offers a different historical perspective.

"This has examples of herbs that were typically used by a family in approximately 1840," she said. "There are a lot of things here that they would use for culinary, medicinal, personal care, all different purposes."

Valerian, for example, is an herb that can help aid in sleep, yarrow leaves can be used as a poultice to heal wounds, horehound is great for sore throats, and lemon balm, King said, is a "wonder plant."

"It's good for just about anything, from headaches to stomach aches. It's very soothing and it smells great," she said, plucking off a leaf and crunching it to release a fragrant lemon smell. "But it does go crazy. I recommend it, but as long as you can plant it somewhere out of the way."

The other half of the garden, the Kathleen Redfern Memorial portion, was planted in 2013. Redfern was a member of the Natural Gardeners Club and was very involved in the historical community.

She liked to demonstrate the way everyday French people would do different household things, King said.

After Redfern passed away and with the permission of her son, King and other volunteers dug out some of the plants she had at her home, because they were the kinds of things that people grew around their homesteads, and re-planted them at the historic sites.

"So it's in her memory, but it's also representative of what people commonly had," King said.

Redfern's memorial garden is particularly lush because everything that Redfern touched, King said, just flourished.

This plot includes irises with pretty purple petals, rhubarb with leaves the size of platters, plenty of plump still-green gooseberries, and yucca, a pointy plant that almost looks cactus-like.

"Sometimes you can identify where a home site was because there's yucca there, just growing out of nowhere," King said.

King volunteers her time here, tending to all the historic sites gardens, and talking to visitors who might stop by. But she'd like to help educate more people about what's there, and to that end she's working to start a volunteer group.

Not only would the volunteers care for the gardens, but they could also help King do more events with the historic gardens in mind, like a plant sale, or help with seed-cleaning and put those seeds up for sale in the gift shop for folks who want to start their own plots.

"We could also do some different demonstrations and programs, doing things with the food that comes out of the garden," she said. "If we have a good volunteer corps, there's just so much more we could do."

__

Source: Vincennes Sun-Commercial

___

Information from: Vincennes Sun-Commercial, http://www.vincennes.com