The article below is directly related to my lecture on designing gardens around old buildings for The New Hampshire Preservation Trust on March 21 in Manchester, NH. CLICK HERE for more details.
Old Houses and The Stories They Can Tell
Old houses have stories to tell, and our 1790 Vermont farmhouse and 1840 garden shed are no exception. But sometimes it takes years before you’re able to read those stories. It turns out a tape-measure and two 40’ chestnut beams were the keys I needed to read these buildings and the implications they would have for our developing garden. The story I pieced together taught me how carpenters all over New England in the 18th Century thought. They used proportion in general and the 16’6” dimension called the “rod” in particular to design and build these simply elegant farmhouses and their elegant fenestration. What I discovered about the rod put me in touch with the carpenters who built this house for the Ranney family, Scottish immigrants, 220 years ago. (Philip Ranney, 7th generation, lives just up the road from us today.)
I also knew that 18th century builders here in New England used pattern books to design classic New England farmhouses among many other types of Colonial buildings. One of the most important pattern books was The Practical Builder by William Pain, first published in London in 1774 but reprinted in Philadelphia in 1797. It used the rod and parts thereof to design houses. This is a term of measurement that reaches deep into English (and New England) history. A rod is 16’ 6”, the ideal width of a barn doorway so as to accommodate attendant farmers leading a team of horses or oxen pulling a loaded hay-wagon into the barn. That’s where my tape measure came in.
There were two extraordinary 40’ long, 12” square horizontal Chestnut beams running north-south in our attic to support the roof/eaves. Then I realized a 40’ dimension was 2 ½ rods long. Next I discovered both the sitting and dining rooms were 16’ square and the hall between them was 8’ wide and 16’ long, all with 8’ high ceilings. The rod (rounded off to 16’), the half-rod and quarter-rod drove the proportions and layout of the interior of our 32’ wide, 40’ long house.
I surmised this use of proportion was limited to the architecture but I was later proven very wrong. A few years ago a relative of the Ranney family sent us a photo of what is now our house and it showed a series of granite fenceposts running parallel with and out some distance from the west wall of the house. None of the posts remained in place but I did find a broken off base of one of them hidden under a Physocarpus shrub off the northwest corner of the house. I knew from old photographs that there had been a row of perhaps 18 or so granite fenceposts 4’ high (one-quarter of a rod) running parallel with McKinnon Road – a dirt road – and the west side of our house. I knew that McKinnon Road, like virtually every dirt road in New England, was one rod wide.
Photo ©Gordon Hayward
I got out my tape-measure and went out to the west side of the house that you see in the above photo to take measurements to determine how the position of that post related to the house. A cascade of discoveries followed:
· Distance between the edge of the road and the broken off granite fencepost – 8’ (half a rod)
· Distance between that same post and the NW corner of the house – 12’ (3/4 of a rod)
· Distance from the row of 4’ high granite fenceposts 12’ feet apart and the front wall of the house – 16’
· Height of the west wall of the house – 12’
· Length of the west wall of the house – 43’ (this allows for 2 -18” thick walls at the SW and NW corners of the house.)
The rod and parts thereof informed virtually every decision the builders made in the 1790’s both inside and out. It is these proportions that lend unity and elegance to their designs.
Photo ©Joseph Valentine
The Garden Shed and Herb Garden
I was standing off the SW corner of the house pondering this discovery when I looked at our garden shed 50’ or so into what is now our garden. It was in fact a 150 year old tobacco drying shed that a local historian once told us was the size building that the farmer’s children and a team of oxen could have moved on a Sunday afternoon. The building, he said, was likely moved about six miles from the flat land by the Connecticut River (where tobacco was being grown) in Westminster Town and up over the ridge to the Ranney Farm in Westminster West.
The siding of this little building was made of 12” wide boards set vertically in pairs and hinged so that the sides of the building could open when better ventilation was needed to dry tobacco leaves.
With the proportions and dimensions of our old house in mind, I took measurements of this shed to see if any similarities of proportion would reveal themselves: Height of walls – 8’
Length of walls – 16’
Width of building – 12’
Dimensions of doorway into the shed – 3’6” x 7’6”
Photo ©Joseph Valentine
I felt as though I were channeling a carpenter from 150 years ago. His thinking was right there in front of me. We wanted to design the new herb garden off the east side of the shed in light of the proportions of the shed itself so the two – garden and building – would be in harmony with one another. We wanted a grape arbor centered on the 16’ long east wall of the shed and four boxwood edged planting beds along with enclosing hedges along the north, south and east edges of the garden.
Photo ©Joseph Valentine
Here are some dimensions from the final design, now 30 years on:
The arbor: Length of the upper deck to support grape vines – 14’ x 8’
Deck 8’ above ground level
Posts to support the upper deck – 8’ high and set 12’ apart
Hedges: Set 8’ out from the north and south ends of the shed
North and South Viburnum prunifolium hedges 12’ high, 4’ thick
East Arbor Vitae hedge 20’ east of shed and around 20’ high
Four Buxus microphylla-edged beds: Height of hedges – 12”
Outer dimensions of hedges – 6’x8’
Inner dimensions of beds – 4’6”x6’6”
Width of peastone paths between hedges: 4’
The inner dimensions of the four herb gardens is virtually the same as those of the north door into the shed. My book SMALL BUILDINGS, SMALL GARDENS came right out of these discoveries I made with a tapemeasure about the role proportion plays in visually harmonizing buildings to related gardens.