A conversation with Joanne Chapman, head of Landscaping and Horticulture at Colonial Williamsburg.

The gardens and greenery of Colonial Williamsburg hold a special place in the hearts of the College of William and Mary’s students, offering respite from their academic and social commitments. Only a few steps from campus, Colonial Williamsburg — lovingly referred to as “CW” by students — enchants visitors new and old with its lush, manicured green spaces, dotted with pinks, purples, yellows, and blues. Few will pause to wonder at how it all comes together — how the bushes seem to stay perfect through all four seasons, or why the grass always looks so green. For Joanne Chapman, she spends every day thinking about it. 

Drawing on over 30 years in the gardening industry, Chapman leads the Landscape and Horticulture Department at Colonial Williamsburg. She has been with the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation for 9 years, following a career with York County as grounds superintendent. Her prior experiences in horticulture, including time at a golf course and garden center, offer further testimony to Chapman’s lifelong dedication to the beautification and tending of greenspaces. In her current position with Colonial Williamsburg, she oversees a team of roughly 35 people, including four landscaping crews, a team of arborists, an irrigation technician, and even a bee specialist. “We really are responsible for everything — all of the property that the foundation owns, with the exception of the pastures, coach and livestock sites, and the historic farm,” Chapman said, describing the responsibilities of her department.

 For anyone who has ever visited the Governor’s Palace, it comes as no shock that an entire team is dedicated solely to the care and keeping of those grounds. “There’s 10 acres at just the Palace, so they stay there all day and that’s what they do,” Chapman said. Meanwhile, “the other three crews have split up the historic area from the West end of town to the East end of town.” 

With thousands of plants estimated to be in their care, the department has little time to waste. For this reason, the crews blend both modern tools and historically accurate techniques to maintain the property. “Unlike the colonial gardens, where ... they’re spending a lot of time in that one garden, as they should because they’re demonstrating the 18th-century tools and techniques, we’re not historic gardeners,” Chapman said. “We have such a large area to take care of that we have to use more modern tools.” 

 “However, we also still do use hand tools,” she said. “We still prune the topiaries the same way as they would have, we follow the authentic, correct techniques. We may be using a modern tool to do it, but it is still done by hand.” The crews at Colonial Williamsburg perform some of the skills that are lost to fine gardening, Chapman says. “They use string lines to get those nice, crisp edges on the shrubs...to make sure that they’re all the same height, and they’re at a 90-degree angle.” According to Chapman, despite making use of modern technology, the landscaping of Colonial Williamsburg still manages to fulfill the museum’s “living history” mission, practicing and preserving traditional gardening techniques.

 Not only do they utilize older techniques, but the Landscape and Horticulture Department also deliberately uses as few chemicals as possible on their plants. “There are some times where we are treating the boxwoods for leaf miner, and we have also used some other pesticides, specifically fungicides, on the boxwoods for boxwood blight,” she said. “We do use herbicides to control weeds, but that’s really about it.” In limiting pesticides on their flora, Colonial Williamsburg stays true to its roots, keeping with what colonists would have had access to, while also ensuring greater safety for the local bee population.

The crisis of dwindling honeybee colonies is a major concern for horticulturists, whose work depends on bees’ ability to effectively pollinate. The museum has taken an active role in promoting the health of the local bee population and recently hired a bee specialist onto the Landscape and Horticulture team. “We are very excited that we have a new employee that is very experienced with bee hives and managing beehives, so we purchased, and will be setting up, bee hives that we will have at our Great Hopes site,” Chapman said. She added that the majority of Colonial Williamsburg’s greenery is classified as “pollinator supporting plants” and that the staff remains conscientious of the issue in their management. 

Planting flower beds and lining walkways with the plants that one might have seen in 18th century Williamsburg requires extensive research, ranging from examining what remains of landscaping records to finding the best people from whom to source the seeds. Colonial Williamsburg has “a pretty thorough list of plants that are appropriate to use for the time period, and that is what we go by,” Chapman said. “On that list, there are some plants that, in the last 20 years, have not been used, so we are trialing some of them.” Given the changing climate, these trials are necessary to establish whether the plants will grow as well today as they might have a few decades, or even centuries, ago. In discussing the impact of climate change on her job, Chapman provided insight on how the early colonists encountered a similar issue. “No doubt, the climate is very different. It’s not just different now, it was different for the colonists here, because many of the plants that they were using were sent over from England, and the climate in England is very different than the climate here in Tidewater Virginia. So even they were dealing with that [climate change] back then to some extent.” 

The colonists brought their seeds from overseas, and Colonial Williamsburg has taken a similar approach to flower bulbs. Many of the beautiful blossoms present throughout the museum hail from the Netherlands. “Even the bulbs that we grow, we get them through a bulb distributor that deals with growers in Holland that are growing these older varieties of bulbs,” Chapman said. However, colonial farmers eventually adapted to sourcing their seeds more locally, and Colonial Williamsburg likewise relies on “several different companies that specialize in heirloom seeds” for their vegetable and annual seeds. 

Though bright blossoms in the spring may more easily catch the eyes of passersby, the oft overlooked trees and shrubs that stand guard year-round are a source of great pride for the CWF. In 2019 the museum achieved Level II arboretum accreditation, though Colonial Williamsburg has been a certified arboretum since 2018. In order to achieve Level II status, landscape staff teamed up with volunteers to label more than 100 varieties of woody plants, and the museum had to invest in additional public educational programming. Currently, a team of four arborists manage the care of trees and woody shrubs across the CWF properties. Given the amount of effort required to achieve and maintain the arboretum status, it is no wonder Chapman “wish[es] more folks knew about the fact that [they] are a certified arboretum.” 

Her other wish? “That [the public] understood that our gardens are more accessible than I think they realize. I think, you know, we only really have three gardens that are not public access, they’re managed access — and that’s the Palace, and the Wythe, and the Colonial Garden. The others really are public access.” For college students and tourists alike, this is cause for celebration. On a routine walk through Colonial Williamsburg, one might see a gaggle of onlookers leaning against a gate to snap the best shot of a flower they have never seen before. Grumbles of “I wish I could get closer” are expected, and hopefully you, dear reader, will tell them that they can. “Because they appear to be closed — maybe they’re behind a house or there’s a gate there — it tends to give the message that they’re not allowed to go and view the garden, but they actually are,” Chapman reveals. Due to regulations around signage in the living history museum, her department cannot label the gardens as much as they would like. “I wish we were able to tell the story of some of these properties, and why the garden is there, and why it was designed the way it was, how it relates to the house...” Chapman said. “If we could find a way to share the information about why it’s there and why it was designed the way it was, I’d love that.”

Despite the challenges inherent in managing a property of this magnitude, Chapman appears to do it all without breaking a sweat. “I’ve worked a number of places, and for a good length of time, ...I just love the people that I work with here, in all capacities. And it is an amazing place, where I, with no exaggeration, I learn something new here every single day.” Her passion for her work, and for Colonial Williamsburg, is clear. “It’s an exciting place to be, and I feel very honored to work here, honestly,” she said. Next time you stroll down Duke of Gloucester Street, or admire a row of blooming buds behind the Palace, take a moment to reflect on the effort it took to create the moment that you are in. In other words, stop and smell the roses (or tulips, or hydrangeas) this spring in Colonial Williamsburg. Who knows, you might just change your career path.