Florida
Gardens - An Historical Vignette
Fifty years before the
famous arrival of the Puritans on the Massachusetts shores,
Florida had already established gardens bursting with
foreign plants, including Citrus fruits. In 1565, after
Ponce de Leon's discovery of Florida in 1513, Spain founded
the first permanent settlement at St. Augustine, a lively
garrison city. With the arrival of the fiirst soldiers
at St. Augustine, orchards, and gardens soon followed.
The expansion of these Spanish gardens is of particular
historical significance as they were the foundation of
American horticultural growth. Citrus fruits were regarded
by the Spaniards as an important barrier against scurvy
and this foreign fruit was well established in Florida
by 1579.
From these early Spanish gardens, the Florida natives
gathered seeds and plants, and carried these foreign plants
far to the north and southwest. British explorers in the
early seventeenth century reported that peaches, which
made their first appearance into the United States through
the Spanish in Florida, were growing wild many hundreds
of miles to the north of Florida.
Spain ceded Florida
to England in 1763, the English described the gardens
left by the Spanish as being "well stocked with fruit
trees: figs, guavas, pomegranates, lemons, limes, shaddock,
bergamot, China and Seville oranges, and potherbs."
One of great botanist's
John Bartram's
most important finds was in Florida, the Franklinia alatamaha
tree, named after his friend, Benjamin Franklin. This
tree has been extinct in the wild since 1803 and all the
trees found today are descendants of Bartram's original
collection.
Bibliography
and Acknowledgments
Shown: Orange Blossom (Citrus
sinensis)
