Getting Our Hands Dirty
From the smell of lilacs to the wind gently blowing the rye fields, GCV&M’s historic gardens add richness, beauty, and magic to the Historic Village.
Village gardens and fields are an integral – and beautiful – addition to your museum experience. Eye-catching blossoms, fragrant herbs, luscious fruits, and rows upon rows of colorful vegetables all vie for your attention. They are also used regularly by Historic Village interpreters for preparing meals in historic kitchens, dyeing fibers, medicinal preparations, decorations, and workshops.
Hyde House Garden
The curvilinear gardens and bricks paths surrounding the octagon-shaped house are derived from plans for romantic landscapes appearing in landscape architect Andrew Jackson Downing’s Cottage Residences, published in 1842. The lilac-rimmed garden features a profusion of colors provided by bearded iris, day lilies, peonies, dianthus, hosta, germander, amaranth, cleome, nicotiana, and petunias.
Livingston-Backus House Garden
The Livingston-Backus garden is laid out in a classical style compatible with the architecture it surrounds: a Federal-style garden house, built in 1826 in Cortland, NY, and the main residence, built in Rochester’s Third Ward c. 1827-40. A wisteria-covered pergola stands at one edge of the garden and boxwood-trimmed beds of fruit trees (pear), tulips, bearded iris, tree peonies, phlox, roses, Rose of Sharon (seventeen varieties!), columbine. and hosta provide a display of color throughout the growing season.
MacKay Dooryard Garden
The MacKay House Dooryard Garden reflects an early garden style, usually fenced to keep out livestock. Dooryard gardens in early Western NY were a copy of their English or European-style counterparts, intended to look orderly against the wilderness.
Shaker Trustees' Garden
Shakers were well known for the medicines they produced and their exemplary seed production and sales. A medicinal garden is featured in the yard next to the Shaker Trustees’ Building. Bayberry, feverfew, lavender, pot marigold (calendula), rue, and sage are but a few of the plants often grown there.
Hetchler Garden
The Hetchler House Garden is an example of an early vegetable and practical garden. Vegetables grown here are appropriate for an early 19th-century time period, including pumpkins, squash, dryables like peas and beans, garlic, onions, or easily cooked-up options like cabbage or lettuce.
Jones Farm Kitchen Garden
The heirloom garden at Jones Farm contains hardy crops commonly grown in the 19th-century kitchen garden. This garden features vegetables grown and saved for their flavor and storage capacity and herbs used for practical and culinary uses: lovage, tarragon, dill, and mint. The garden is surrounded by fruit trees (peach, cherry, and quince.)
Berry Garden and Vineyard at MacArthur
Grapes grown in the vineyard portion of the garden are heirloom table, juice, and wine grapes. Gooseberry, currant (red and black), and raspberries were used fresh and dried for baking, making jams and jellies, and creating syrups.
The Hop Yard
Grown vertically on poles, hops are a perennial vine that is grown as a flavoring and a preservative/stabilizing agent in the brewing process. When harvest time came, the whole community would have a picnic, perhaps bring in a band, and make a social event of the harvest.
The Orchards
A number of orchards can be found around the grounds at Genesee Country Village & Museum. New York State was renowned for its apples, with many varieties being produced in this region. Apple trees were often seen as the cheapest crop a farmer could grow – you could plant once, and harvest for years.