The gardens were so fundamental to life here, just, as for subsistence and the
Moravians were lovers of plants. There were a lot of botanists that lived here;
Salem had one of the first foresters in the United States. There was a sort of
deep history in connection with plants and the Moravians and folks that lived here
in Salem. We have 200 varieties at all that we steward here in the seed lab. We
want them to be old enough to fit into our time period, sometime between 1760
and 1850. We also want them to be kind of a southern providence of some sort, and
tied to the Moravian story, ideally, or tied to this area the northwest Piedmont
of North Carolina. This used to be all behind the scenes up until a couple
months ago really. We moved into the space earlier this year, and we have our
horticultural offices here and the seed saving work
space that we've always had we made public facing. One of the challenges is
how to how to impress that the story in the history of these plants to just
the casual visitor, so they know that it's not just a orange carrot, that
there's many varieties of carrots, and this is one that has a particular
history that goes back and may have passed through Salem it at one point. The
seed lab is one strategy for that, because people can come here and just
visit and we can talk about the seeds and therefore the varieties and maybe
show images and and direct people to go and see these these plants out in the
gardens. There's three main gardens; the Single Brothers is our largest garden,
which is really six individual gardens within a large garden, and those are
themed. We have a flower garden, the seed garden, a tree nursery and perennial
vegetable garden and we have agricultural crops from Africa,
agricultural crops from the Americas and agricultural crops from Europe.
the Miksch garden is behind the Miksch House, and it's sort of a seed-to-table garden
that is used in daily interpretation of the kitchen the Miksch
kitchen and then the Triebel garden is sort of in between the two. It's also
a kitchen garden that is used a lot in the in the Miksch House.
These are varieties that are known to have to be old enough to they possibly
could have been here in Salem. Some varieties we know we do have some seed
ads from that were sold here in the 1830s. Some things do have a tie to the
Moravian story. We have a rutabaga that was brought over by a Moravian to Broad Bay,
Maine and the short-lived settlement Moravian settlement in Broad Bay, Maine
dissolved and they all moved down to Forsyth County. We don't know that they
brought that rutabaga with them but we have the Charles Huebner rutabaga here and we
grow that. We have a garlic that according to William Woys Weaver was
brought by the Moravians to the Pennsylvania area, the Muxatawny
garlic, we grow that. And we have a Columbine, a double-flowered European
Columbine that supposedly the Moravians brought over. Just the fact that we have
this, you know, there's a sort of a genetic link to the past. You know it's
also a way to experience what it would have been in the past.