Celebrate America 250 with a journey into one of colonial America’s most extraordinary gardens. Created by John Custis IV of Williamsburg, Virginia, Custis Square was a lavish early-18th-century pleasure garden filled with gravel paths, topiary, rare plants, and grand vistas inspired by global influences. Long lost to history, this remarkable landscape has been rediscovered through a five-year archaeological excavation by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. Explore how new evidence reveals the garden’s baroque design and shows how elite Americans adapted European landscape traditions into a distinctly American setting.
Celebrate America 250 with an exploration of sophisticated garden that is globally influenced but American in execution. John Custis IV is one of Williamsburg, Virginia’s more colorful historic residents. In addition to being an influential member of the political elite, a wealthy plantation owner, and eventually the first father-in-law of Martha Washington, Custis was the creator of one of the most renowned colonial gardens of the early 18th century. Custis’ indulgence in ornamental garden design resulted in the creation of a pleasure garden said to rival that of the Royal Governor. Known as Custis Square, the four-acre garden was said to contain gravel paths, topiary, hundreds of native and imported plant varieties, and even statues. Friendships with gardening luminaries such as John Bartram and Peter Collinson opened up Custis to a global palette of plants and the correspondence between these “brothers of the spade” has revealed much about the plants within the garden. However, the actual appearance and layout has remained a mystery… until now. The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation has just concluded a five-year archaeological excavation to uncover this important lost landscape. We will explore the evidence gathered through excavation and specialized environmental analysis to discover the design for the garden, revealing a truly baroque layout. From the locations of individual fruit trees to the evidence for large-scale earthmoving to create vistas, the results of this research have provided details recorded nowhere else. Developed at a time of transformation in European garden fashions, studying Custis’ garden provides an opportunity to better understand how elite Americans translated new landscape conventions into a different cultural and environmental setting. The result is a sophisticated garden that is globally influenced but American in execution.