 Hello everybody. Welcome to the Ethan Allen Homestead Museum. So thank you for joining us today. I am the Ethan Allen Homestead Museum's executive director Angie Grove and if you are new to the Homestead welcome and let me give you a little bit of background. The Ethan Allen Homestead is a special place that is the site of some of the oldest known indigenous farming in the state of Vermont, one of the oldest surviving homes in our state. Also the site of a dramatic 19th century smuggling shootout and a working farm until the 1970s. In the present day there are many partner organizations sharing the homestead including the Buddhist Valley Crop District whose own and caretaker is the site and its hiking trails. The Alma Wiley who used this site for traditional Abenaki ceremonies and educational workshops. The Burlington Wildways Viking trails and many community garden programs including the new farms for new Americans hosted by the Association of Africans Living in Vermont. The Ethan Allen Homestead Museum which is hosting today's program works to preserve and educate the public about the history of this site. Part of our preservation and education efforts revolve around a beautifully recreated 18th century herb produce and flower garden called Fannie's Garden which will be the focus of today's program. Today's program is part of the museum's monthly lecture series usually occurring during the third Sunday of the month and free to the public. We host guest speakers on a variety of topics related to the homestead early American history and all of Vermont history and I would like to take a moment and make the sponsors of this program AARP Vermont, Vermont Humanities and Homeland. I would also like to thank CCTV who usually who usually graciously records these and I'm reading off the script and I probably should have not read it up for you but we still make them for being one of our partner organizations who help sponsor these lectures as well. We are recording this program ourselves in the back corner there and it will be aired on YouTube on our YouTube channel after this event. It usually takes a week or so for that to get posted. If you enjoyed today's program and would like to get involved more at the Homestead Museum we would love to have your support. Please consider purchasing a membership at our front desk or on our website and if you are local please consider volunteering. We have volunteer projects ranging from scanning documents and vending costumes to doing inventory cleaning research and giving tours to the public. We also have an all volunteer board of directors who are also looking for new members so please spread the word and tell others about this special place and if you have the means please visit our donation table on the way out the door after today's presentation or you can visit our website to make a donation online and you can also help us sell off the last of our gift shop inventory by visiting the stocking stuffers table on your way out as well. So thank you for joining us at our special place and for joining us in preserving it for tomorrow. Now I would like to introduce um I would like to give the podium over to one of Ethan Allen Homestead Museum's board of directors who will then be introducing our speaker so please welcome one of our board of directors members, Angela Moody. Just please throw money inside of the name of it. So yes I'm Angela Moody. I'm on the board of directors. I've been on the board since this man right here, Dan O'Neill who got me involved. But before I introduce Tom who's our speaker today I want to talk a little bit about Frances Montresour-Brush who can Allen Pennington lovingly know here as Fanny. She was the first white matriarch of the Ethan Allen Homestead and in addition to being a Frontier Homestead, can you all hear me okay? Okay in addition to being a Frontier Homesteader, an orphan, a mother, a yorker, a loyalist, a widow, an acclaimed educated and witty beauty, and a wife, Fanny was an avid gardener and she's Vermont's first known native botanist who collected dried herbs and flowers. She wrote all of that stuff in her own handwriting. She made all the drawings, she did all that stuff and it's all down at the University of Vermont Supreme Court, Herbarium. And her collection has been the inspiration for decades of historic gardening at the Homestead, the most recent of which has been directed by Tom. Tom has researched Fanny's garden, Fanny's collection and each year he does, he changes the garden up to bring her story more to life and he has a great team of volunteers and in addition to serving the volunteer position as our head gardener, he was also a member of our board of directors for a while and he also works as a front desk manager and he's been doing that since 2019. Tom told me today that he's been involved with the Homestead since 1911. I told you I was going to do that too. Between all of these positions serving as a volunteer tour guide and the greeter and the volunteer coordinator, Tom has given actually 12 years of service to the Ethan Island Homestead and in addition to that time he is a dedicated cat daddy to these two wonderful felines, Buster and Nidge. And he loves old books and old movies and we talk forever on old books and old movies and he enjoys wandering around Vermont both by car and by the foot. He's also told me that he was a tour guide in Boston on the Freedom Trail and he talks a lot, he has some great stories about that so I'm actually asking because they're great stories. Anyway, Tom Sharply. Thank you. I have a handout, I have 20 copies of this. So take one and pass one if you want one but if you don't want one, don't take one. What is that handout? Fanny Ellen Penman has 200 species of plants, 90 species, 200 species of plants that Fanny and her daughter Adelia mounted on paper and saved and they have them at the University of Vermont today. That's Fanny Ellen Penman, her buried and if you go there in 2019 I went to the University of Vermont and looked at Fanny's plant specimen and they had a typewritten list of 60 of the 90 species and I took a photograph of that list and then re-typed the list onto that onto my computer and printed that out and started researching and making notes and so that's what those 60 plants are and that handout is the 60 plants that Fanny and her daughter Adelia saved and pressed in circa 1815. All right and I'm going to talk about the different plants from Fanny's herbarium on this list that we're growing in Fanny's garden today but first I'm going to talk about myself and this may seem egocentric to you but really myself is the only frame of reference I have and I'm pretty interesting so if I do say so myself you know Patrick who's a board member or be talking to myself in the garden he said Tom you talk to yourself in the garden all the time I say yeah and I'm really very interesting so it's pretty rewarding all right in 2011 I had recently moved to Vermont and I looked around for a volunteer opportunity so I went to the United Way and they have a big notebook full of volunteer opportunities and they needed a tour guide at the Ethan Allen Homestead Museum and I said well I've been a tour guide in my past and that sounds like something I would be here so I came here and I took three tours with three different tour guides and they were all really good I realized you know the Ethan Allen Homestead Museum there's not a lot in the way of grandiose exhibits or anything but the three tour guides each in their own way were excellent and personable and interesting so I realized this is the perfect gig for a tour guide because they really needed to be good tour guide at this museum to tell Ethan Allen's story since you know it's just one little house and one little big tower uh you need a good tour guide so I said this is for me and the thing that pleased me the most about taking the tourist was when we went into the the little keeping room we called where they have a display about flags and they said this is where you ret the flags and I've done crossword puzzles all my life and a three letter word for soak flags I knew that was ret R-E-T but I never knew what it meant I just knew the answer to the crossword puzzle was ret and I saw them telling me about soaking the flags and they showed me some flags and I thought this is the most interesting thing I've ever seen so I became a volunteer here I came a couple of times a week and guided tours till 2016 in 2016 or 2016 the long-term gardeners that we had uh stopped gardening here and there was nobody gardening in Fanny's garden all during 2016 and I complained to Phyllis Drury who was the president of the board of directors at the time every time I saw her which was frequently because we would work together on Wednesdays I would say Phyllis it's impossible for me to give a house and garden tour if there's nothing growing in the garden but some pansy and some rhubarb you've got to get somebody in here to to to fix up this garden so we can have a house and garden tour at the Nathan Allen Home State Museum so at the end of the season Phyllis got so sick of hearing that she said Tom in 2017 you're gonna run the garden I'm pointing to the board of directors and you're gonna do the garden with with my friend Amy who's also on and I said okay I don't know anything about gardening well that's not no problem Amy knows all about it so then Amy got a job in Rhode Island in the spring of 2017 and she was don't have it all so it was all myself had to it was like this big garden it's this big piece of ground with nothing growing on it because it's the end of April and it was just a big piece of ground and I said what am I gonna do with this I was a little intimidated all right I never garden much at all and certainly never an 18th century garden now with all due respect to our executive director uh she kind of gave you a bomb steer when she said here at the Nathan Allen Home State we have a recreated 18th century garden like they would have an 18th century Vermont and Canyon but it would have worked and uh boy we do not have that at all we've never tried to have that we never will have that because we don't even know what that is how do you recreate an 18th century garden if pretty much impossible I mean I read I read books I took classes at garden supplies I hired a consultant and what I realized in the 18th century the soil was different the climate was different the plants were different the purpose of the garden was different the size of the garden was different everything was different and if I wanted to recreate an 18th century garden I really wouldn't be able to do that because I don't have any idea what they grew in the 18th century so what am I gonna do uh well what did I do well the one thing I wanted to do I knew I wanted to grow the flax so I found out about flax and I and I got in touch with the two brothers in Pennsylvania who have a farm and they lived on the farm they they took over this farm these in the 1980s and they lived like it was the 18th century and they became the flax experts they lived like it was the 18th century with no modern conveniences or anything for three years and then they got sick of that and said well this is we want to have ice cubes in our drink in the summer we want to have electric lights so we can read our book and then read our books and and so the 18th century thing only lasted for three years but then they became the flax experts and now they shoot youtube videos they're all gone modern they shoot youtube videos about growing flax they wrote the big book of flax so I got in touch with them and they sold me some flax and I planted the flax so what are we gonna put in uh in Fannie's garden what am I gonna plant there uh all right well someone suggested you should plant all native plants all right so that's a good idea except do you think in the 18th century they cared if the plant was a native roman plant or it came over on even the seeds came over in a boat from your yard they didn't care at all so I decided native versus non-native that's not important so what am I going to grow in this plant oh you know they have heirloom seeds you can get fancy heirloom seeds and heirloom plants that are like the kind of plant the exact same species of plants that they grew years and years ago hundreds of years ago all right so I've got a very limited amount of time I've got a very limited amount of money I've got a very small budget and I've got to find heirloom seeds am I going to go around for every species of plant that I want to grow am I going to go around and call up all the different strange nurseries all over the country and try to find heirloom seeds no I'm not I'm going to go to garden supply and see with what do you have here and you know the high mowing seeds that come in the green envelope that's a brand new seeds and they make them in Vermont and they're really great because they like the Vermont plant and things from high mowing are much more likely to survive than anything else I realized right away uh I'm a tour guide a professional tour guide in Boston area for many years and my whole frame of reference for in my relationship with the even Allen Homestead Museum and Fannie's garden has been as a tour guide so what does a tour guide want if he's taken a few people a bunch of people on a garden tour he wants to have a lot of pretty plants that he can talk about and say something about he wants them to be healthy and happy uh so I don't know anything about gardening and I want to do everything I constantly can to make sure that the plants I'm going to grow survive so I'm going to use the high mowing seeds I'm not going to use some fancy expensive heirloom seeds that I don't even know where to find them I'm just going to use regular seeds and I'm going to use all the modern communities someone on the board suggested oh you should have Fannie's garden and use all the gardening techniques that they used in the 18th century and I said well that's ridiculous they didn't have hoses in the 18th century you know what am I going to do spit on spit on the plants go out and have a bucket brigade come up and if it's if it's for argument forget it so anyway my goal was to have a garden where a lot of plants grow that I can show the visitors so what kind of plants all right well ideally it should be things that grew in New England in the 18th century so we're not going to grow tomatoes because they didn't grow tomatoes reports we're not going to grow potatoes because potatoes didn't really start till the till the irish invasion the irish potato family we didn't grow a lot of potatoes in the new world um so I tried to find species from the from the 18th century now if I go to garden supply and buy some echinacea some comb flower is it going to be the same comb flower a comb flower is a native plant of Vermont is it going to be the same comb flower that Fannie owns no it's not that they're going to be they've all been cultivated to make pretty to make pretty petals on the flowers and like that but it's the same plant so okay we're going to put in some we're going to put in some echinacea that's from the 18th century but it's not going to be exactly like it was when Fannie because it's a it's a modern cultivar oh so now that being all that being said we're trying to make it look like an 18th century garden so I don't don't go out of my way to put in things from the 21st century for example we don't want a plastic fence or the mulch you get at the supermarket that is all you can tell it's been put in a wood chipper but they didn't have an 18th century we don't use mulch like that we don't have um and of course so like that I'm trying to do you know minimal minimal so it looked like it could possibly be in the 18th century things like that are so oh oh I'm going to start showing slots boy what's that oh I should I should have started with this these are our volunteers I'm in all the glory I've been running Fannie's garden for six seasons and I get all the glory because I'm the garden here at the Ethan Allen homestead museum and I shouldn't get all the glory because I do none of the work I'm old and fat and tired and have a right to my head and I make these five people do all the hard work and I owe everything to them and I dedicate this this talk to Shannon and Dylan and Dave and Hannah and Eliza and uh we and nor shall we forget Leslie Hunt uh who was a volunteer in the garden for the first three seasons since passed away Leslie Hunt uh I loved her very much and her uh taught me everything I know about that garden absolutely everything and uh it was with her grandchild she made the scarer for the fanny scarer pro that is still I haven't put the fanny scarer pro away yet as she's still out there out in the uh out in the back and uh six six seasons hanging out she's fanny's a little more all right so my first season in Fannie's garden was my best season that was 2017 and I really was not employed at the time frankly and I had nothing to do all day I'd never been a gardener before so I did everything strictly by the book plus the weather was just perfect the spring was warm and wet and everything oh that's the wrong direction there we go everything worked out beautiful this is the garden of 2017 this is the best garden we ever had we've never had a garden since that was good and that was as good as 2017 because 2017 was the irregularity care of the most but we can see this is this is July 14 2017 and we can see all the things that are coming up look at that all right I think there's a red point I'm not going to use that it gives me a headache this is uh this is the flax coming look at that the flowers turning into seed and look the corn oh look at the corn coming up we did a three sister's garden Fred Weissman told me the abenakis didn't really do the three sisters that's really in the uroquois and you know the abenakis in the uroquois they're invited to the same dinner party uh but we did a three sisters garden which is corn beans and squash growing together in the three plants supporting each other and that all worked look at the corn coming up and the squash coming up and the beans you can't hardly see it but the beans are starting to crawl off the corn so there are more beans back there those red flowers are the beebond the beebond every year since then terrible powdery mildew on the beebond for some reason in 2017 the beebond was just fried and these are the these are the zinnias in the cosmos that are coming up we planted them together oh let me tell you about the zinnias I stood up in quaker meeting and said I have to I have to design the garden even now in homestead museum and I don't know what I'm going to do what do you suggest I do in a quicker way do you go up you know came and said well I don't know if they haven't been in the 18th century but you should plant zinnias in your garden because they will attract pollinators and they will attract people to your garden and I said well that's the smartest thing I've ever heard so we planted zinnias in candy garden even though I since learned zinnias were introduced to be united to to bermont in the 20th century so they're not supposed to be in the 18th century garden but as I like to say here's a dolly and go call somebody who cares all right so that oh what's that stuff that's a tansy that's a tansy is the only thing tansy comes up no matter what you do you can't kill it they put that in in the 1980s from the museum first of and every year it's really big it's bigger and bigger every year it can't kill it just loves being merriest tansy we used to use it as an insect to keep the flies off the meat anyways so that was 2017 that was a big hit all right what's the next slide what is that oh the flax 2017 was also the best year for flax we got the best best fly word for any year we've grown we've grown flax five out of the six past seasons we've uh we've grown flax and 2017 was the best season you plant the flax in early in the spring and it takes three months to mature in two months after germination you get the blue flowers on the flax and the flowers close in the afternoon they only open once and they only open in the morning so if you want to see the blue flowers on the flax you have to be here before and then the blue flax flowers turn into seed and then we harvest the flax we wreck the flax when we uh break the clutch and comb the flax and we get the fiber look at that fiber it looks like long hair how beautiful that looks like linda evans on the big valley remember it looks like we've never had flax that this this year the flies was already it wasn't it wasn't tall enough but this was the best flax we ever did this was 2017 look at that red lettuce oh my gosh every single year dylan and chammy you've retried lettuce a couple of times have we ever gotten any lettuce no the animals always eat it because they're the mustard they don't eat the mustard they like them out of their the meat the mustard alone but look at that we got beautiful lettuce in 2017 it's the only time we ever got lettuce look at that red lettuce look how pretty it is and it was delicious it was good in a salad it was good on a sandwich and you know 2017 everything worked i had not a single plant that i put in fail in 2017 and uh so i thought well garden's easy look how easy and then little did i know i would never see lettuce like that ever the animals just what do you eat just eat a bunch of lettuce what is that corn i sure i've given up growing the corn i cannot grow corn but in 2017 we actually got corn look at the corn and the corn in the squash i i grew a little small kind of corn because i thought i'd have a shorter maturity it would i would uh i would have a better chance for some reason but look at that corn never saw corn like that again oh and the pumpkins oh my gosh we grew pumpkins and you know the pumpkins and the b-bomb and and the squash in general get the powdery mildew and for some reason i got a lot of pumpkins this year and the powdery and they not powdery mildew toward the end of the season the the fully started to get the powdery mildew but with the squash and the powdery mildew it's like a race you know the plant gets older and the squash or the pumpkins or whatever get bigger and bigger and bigger but then you get the powdery mildew and the powdery mildew gets worse and worse and worse and it goes down the vines and kills the vines off and the pumpkins and the squash stop growing because they can't get nutrition through the vines because the powdery mildew has has killed all the vines so whenever i've grown squash since 2017 it's always been a race between the powdery mildew and the squash and the squash or the pumpkin and this was the only year where where the pumpkins won i think a few years well the first year we grew we grew some some pumpkins but it got terrible powdery and they were and they turned they didn't turn orange they were mostly green yeah yeah they were mostly green before the powdery mildew got so that's why that's why i decided that cucumbers if you i always grow cucumbers because cucumbers are squash but they have a very short maturity compared to pumpkins which take you know weeks and weeks and weeks to get a pumpkin that day the cucumbers only that big so you can always if you plant if you plant cucumbers you can always get cucumbers no matter what all right so then oh this stuff the b-bomb this breaks my heart b-bomb was from the 18th century they used to make tea out of it because you couldn't get tea from England because there were so many tax on it so you'd make tea out of anything you could get and you'd make tea out of b-bomb b-bomb's a a member of the mint family and i like that the space age the the space age flowers they look like they're aliens don't they they look like they're from those things walk around in the war of the world the b-bomb but the b-bomb gets the powdery mildew it gets powdery mildew terror and this year it got the powdery mildew but it got the beautiful flowers first i mean that beautiful flowers and pictures of the b-bomb against the wall of the house and all that but in future years every year the powdery mildew got worse and worse because the b-bomb's a perennial it comes up every year it got it just got worse and worse and eventually the b-bomb stopped stopped growing last year so we put a new b-bomb this year because it was i loved it so much in 2017 i said we're gonna try the b-bomb you know what happened this year the same thing happened with the powdery mildew before even the flowers came out the powdery mildew got on all the leaves and it didn't spread to anything else it just the powdery mildew loved the b-bomb so we cut it all back and the new foliage came out and the powdery mildew got on there so we just dug up the b-bomb we're giving up on b-bomb no more b-bomb ever again oh so the tea tastes well you know it's a modern cultivar uh they made tea out of the b-bomb and this is a modern cultivar and they made tea out of it because that's what we're doing and it tastes like it tastes like oregano which oregano's are new too so that may happen oh and these are the zinnias in the cosmos part of the time aren't they pretty i love the zinnias i'm all about the flowers man forget the 18th century i love i love the zinnias all right so all right what's that oh here comes the villain of the piece it's the it's the black locust trees look at them there's even an ounce house that tree is a black locust tree and if you walk from here you can now in the house you'll walk down a road black locust trees the black locust trees soon it became obvious to me that the black locust trees were my energy because they shade tannins garden they get bigger and bigger every year and tannins garden gets shadier and shadier and shady all right and then they get these stinky white flowers the flowers i don't like the smell of the flowers it's sort of a chlorine smell people do like the smell of the flower but they drop the white petals in tannins garden the white petals get on all all the plants and leave kind of white stains on the plants boy those ones those black locust trees and worst of all they're invasive they send the suckers up out of the ground and they form whole new trees and um we have a whole bunch of them we think i think they were planted probably in the early 20th century all those black locust trees but their roots go underground and form suckers and the trees all become like one organ like um aspen and bamboo or like that the roots join together and they become all one big organism so all out there that's one big that's one big black locust tree that you're seeing out there it's really one organism and their roots come up their roots fix oxygen in the soil i was fix nitrogen in the soil and their roots come up like suckers all in tannins garden so as the years go by in 2018 2019 2020 oh you know it's it's looking to me as if we're never going to have the success we had in 2017 in tannins garden look at all the things the corn isn't coming up the animals are eating this what's happening well one of the things it is tannins garden doesn't get full sun no no place in tannins garden it gets full sun uh because of the because of the black locust trees so we're all cut down the black locust trees well that's easier said than done you can't really come you can cut them down but can you uproot them no you can't because their roots are all connected to each other and you cut them down and they're still going to send up suckers for all eternity so what am i going to do about these black locust trees uh i'm just don't know that's the wrong direction there we go oh there's a close-up of them uh they're pretty the black locust trees also when they first come up when the suckers first come up they have spines or thorns on them like that so you say oh i'm going to get rid of that and go and put a hole in your finger all right those are the beautiful smelling blossoms of the black locust trees and then oh what is that oh dylan and shannon know what that is that is we have next to panties garden we have a jungle i call it the jungle and it's just all kinds of miscellaneous crap comes up but there were there were two uh there were two black locust trees in in the jungle we cut them down a few years ago just because of the shade and we realized it was senseless because the suckers just keep coming up from the jungle it's coming up higher and higher and you just you have to go in there that's a that's a just a a real barrel full of full of suckers that we have to cut down and you just have to gun gonna have to do it again in another month because they just keep coming up you can't ever get rid of those black locust trees black locust trees i have some notes here about the black locust trees i looked looked up some facts about the black locust trees um oh you know i used to say they're invasive but they're also native you know native plants and invasive plants are usually not the same thing but black locust trees are native to certain parts of the united states we don't think we want but they are but they are invasive they are considered invasive and um uh and they are there are plants the range the the they don't really know exactly where they're native to because now there are black locust trees in all 48 of the lower states and the bark and woods and leaves are toxic but the flowers can be battered and fried and the flowers can be made into a sweet jam it's one of the hardest woods in north america and it burns very slowly they used to use the reason they planted black locust here uh the black locust we see in vermont were mostly brought over from york and uh there was good hardwood that they used for shipbuilding and for building cabins and for building fences uh and like that uh is why they is why they brought the uh is why they brought the black locust over uh but as i said they send up the suckers they shave panties garden and they fix nitrogen in the soil so uh that makes some some plants unhappy so what am i going to do about the black one you know the black locust this is going to be a digression into uh it's a colonial colonial american history the black locust trees in old julienland if you didn't have a gallows and you needed to hang someone the black locust tree was the hanging tree and in uh in salem when they had the salem which cracked the stare those 21 witches were executed they don't know if they hang them hung them for a gallows or from a locust tree and on the 300th anniversary of the salem which cracked the stare in 1992 they created a uh a salem which cracked a stereo hysteria memorial in salem and they planted black locust trees to commemorate the fact that uh the the victims of the witchcraft hysteria were hanging from locust trees and now i'm going to recite this i was the tour guided salem so now i'm going to get get the gallows for you home in its entirety uh gallows for it was one of it was one of the witches he's the only one that wasn't hanged during the salem witchcraft trials he was pressed to death in stones but there's a babel of gallows quarry which mentions the locust tree gallows quarry was a wizard strong as stubborn wretch was he and fit was he to hang on high upon the locust tree so when before the magistrates for trial he did come he would no true confession make but was completely done gallows quarry said the magistrates would cast out here to plead to those who now accuse thy soul of crime and hard at deed gallows quarry he said not a word no single word spoke he gallows quarry said the magistrates will press it out of thee they got them then a heavy beam and laid it on his breast they loaded it with heavy stones and hard upon him pressed more weight now said this wretched man more weight again he cried and he did no confession make and wickedly he died i love it and i just mentioned that and i can get away with it because it mentions the black locust tree all right so what am i going to do about these black locust trees they're just wrecking fanny's garden who's going to come and save me fanny herself there she is look at that fanny this is a this is a the this original painting of fanny allen was done in 1771 we don't believe we know who the artist is and the original is in is that four-tie condor over and this is just a colored copy mounted on some phone board that we have in uh in even allen's living room if anyone here is hanging and wanting to make a rustic frame for fanny's picture for that we would love that but there she is she was 11 years old at the time and people say this is the john singleton compley painting and it's not um this is a john singleton compley painting you know who that is that is captain john montresor who was fanny's father and fanny was illegitimate captain john montresor of the british colonial forces he was a military engineer and he never recognized he never recognized fanny's existence uh but he was painted by john singleton compley and uh fanny was not but they this both these paintings happened in 1771 if you go to go to boston compley's where i was named there was john singleton compley he was a he was a Tory and uh he went back to england when the revolution his father-in-law was one of the owners of the ships that they dumped off the tee off so he ended he had to go back to london when the revolution came john singleton compley but i'm digressing fanny fanny alan pantheon i admire her you know that ethan alan this is the ethan alan homestay and it's easy to underestimate ethan alan he was a bit of a loud not drunken vulgar but don't underestimate him he was deep but as much as i like ethan alan fanny's really my hero and the reason fanny's my hero is later in her life she created this for barely they have it's a university and uh so i wanted to see the herbarium at the university of a month here's an example of one of the things she said it's a piece and uh and look at that they didn't have such tape right and so how did she attach the stamps to the paper she cut little slits in the paper and put the specimens of the plant in the bowl this the stems through this what slips in the paper all right fanny and adelia collected 90 species of plants 200 definitely specimens and of course there is some controversy did fanny alan pendant did she really make make the that herbarium that they have at the university of a month is it really hers there's it's not signed anywhere saying fanny alan pendant did this uh so i think there is some dispute around it but of course she did it so fanny alan's herbarium is going to come to my rescue oh there's in the 20th century they made a typewritten list of uh the different from the from the different specimens that were she'd written on hand on the hand and uh 60 different plants and that is what you can have here as well as the handwriting so i said oh fanny's garden well it's going to become a shade garden because we're never going to get rid of the black locals trees so there's going to be a shade garden we're going to let's put in some perennials that like the shade and that way we won't have to go through all this every year with the annuals with the corn breaking our heart over the corn a strong wind comes down and knocks down all the corn and i want to kill myself let's forget that let's just put in perennials you put in perennials you plant them once and if you do it right they come back here after a year you don't have to do anything sometimes they spread they come back too much so let's go through fanny's list of plants and see what kind of perennials are available today that we could put in fanny's garden so fanny saved me from the black locust trees and another thing black locust trees are in the list of fanny's herbarium she took cuttings from that that's one of the 60 plants is the black locust trees because there are black locust trees growing during romana so we can cut down the black locust trees i've got to stop hating on the black locust trees because they're in fanny's herbarium also this past season i live in colchester i got the spongy want caterpillars terrible they got inside my screened import and the season before and laid eggs and all these categories all inside the screened import just it was like harmony it's gross i'm those wedgy spidery things you just walk out back there it was horrible the the black locust trees are resistant to the spongy want caterpillars you've come here to work not a spongy want caterpillar to be seen because they don't like the black locusts so this is the year i said all right i made peace with the black locusts because fanny liked them well enough to include them in herbarium and the black locusts the spongy wants don't like them so here are the plants here are some of the plants in fanny's herbarium and now oh i'm writing a little behind schedule i thought i wasn't gonna have enough information all right there are there were plants when i saw that list in 2019 of plants in fanny's herbarium i realized a lot of the plants on that list were already growing there not even not even an ion plant that they've been growing there forever like these what are these you know these lily of the valley deadly poison but it's not really nice i looked up lily of the valley on on the cupid and i found out christin d york was christin d york's favorite flower and in the 1950s he had some lily of the valley perfume it's the national flower view of slavia and finland and uh it it has it is used in both medicine but there's no scientific evidence of effective in this language it is highly toxic but it smells so sweet and we have a big patch of it that comes up what's that oh that's flocks p h l o s flocks there are 67 species of flocks and there's a perennial farm in hardware for month that sells good that they specialize in flocks and a lot of different species of flocks flocks can be a ground cover it can be it can be a longer taller plant and we've got flocks growing in fanny's garden and let's see let's see oh these these don't grow in fanny's garden but they grow in my front yard and they are the that was in that was in fanny's herbarium and they are bluettes also known as quaker ladies which i which i find very which i find very amusing because of uh and uh they are a little tiny thing and if you were to go to see them in fanny's in fanny's herbarium and at the university of ron you'd think there would be specimens of bluettes left but they grow up in my front yard and they're so pretty it looks like snow when frost on the ground when they come up and i i don't cut i don't have the mold uh till they're over oh what is that oh this was a fanny's herbarium the rhubarb oh we love the rhubarb look at that look it comes out of the ground the rhubarb has been growing in the same spot in fanny's garden since long before i was here i probably planted it in the 1980s and look when it comes up out of the ground it comes up in April April early night it looks like from outer space doesn't and there's the red delicious stalks of the rhubarb oh we love the rhubarb look at that just want to eat that you can dip it in sugar and eat it or you can just eat down on it i like it really sound i make here's and here's my rhubarb i make rhubarb uh jam out of it it's very easy you just cut up the stalks make a little water a little sugar and i don't use much sugar because i like it really sound and some lemon peel chomp up some lemon peel he does for the pectin because there's pectin and lemon peel to make it make it all hold together so that's my rhubarb jam i love the rhubarb we don't have much rhubarb in fanny's garden every year don't i say every year i say in the spring remind me we're going to transplant we're going to divine up the rhubarb and split it up but you know what happens is this year i wanted to do that early in the spring and then they didn't turn our hose on okay what is that this is possible also known as digitalis look at that this has been growing in fanny's garden forever and uh you know dr penne fanny every now and then fanny married a third husband uh penne dr penne and he we always called him a doctor he was a judge though right he was also a judge and a lawyer he was a little bit of a very man anyway he was a doctor and he would have had he would have had fox weapons and a medicine bag he was also known as jj tell us it's just your pulse just your heart but it is highly toxic and the story is they were given uh digitalist to Vincent van Gogh the artist and one of the side effects of digitalism makes you hallucinate like you're seeing everything three yellow filter and they think that's why Vincent van Gogh had a yellow hearing there's a Vincent van Gogh from this yellow here all right and i was reading about this on the Wikipedia and Vincent van Gogh said i don't they don't know for a fact that they actually gave Vincent van Gogh digitalis and Vincent van Gogh wrote in a letter at the time that oh i just like yellow so that may be you know i was a professional tour guide for many years so everything i say when i give it to her and everything i say in this lecture today you want to take it all with a grain of salt because i don't want to say i'm a liar but let's say if it's a good story if it's a good story i'll i'll use it even if i know it's not and of course i think i make the conversations all the time the the conversation between fanny after either was dead between fanny and iran and about the 1400 the 1400 acres and bro even intended to be in a hundred fourteen hundred acres and bro no fanny i'm sorry uh the 1400 acres belongs to the unumerable land company and i'm the unumerable land company i'm the last surviving part uh so the land is mine my mind but you can stake her as long as you need to here with the children and she said uh well that's not fair i'm going to sue you iran well then you can't sue me because you're a single woman and a single woman can't bring a case in court and i should know i wrote the constitution of the republic so i know all the laws and fanny said fine i'll get married again and she got married again she looked like she went down to southern german and put back dr pennon within two years and penniless you know and what a red for fanny that i don't know what her key was i say that was black that's true uh here we go what is it the sorrel this is my this is my biggest success of all the plants i put in in 2017 um these are plants that started into the plants that i put in we put in the sorrel and this is um they use this in french cooking we don't use it here too much anymore uh this is english or garden sorrel and it's a salad green it's a perennial green it's the first thing that comes up it comes up in april like april fourth it'll start coming out of the browns there's not stone and uh you just the baby leaves are just really delicious they taste like they taste like lemon you know a sour flavor like lemon and you can just use it like a spinach you cook it and make cream of sorrel soup like that and the french cooked fish in it it's highly acidic it's got oxalic acid in it so you can't eat too much of it because it makes you sick but uh the acid in it they cook the french we cook it with fish if the fish have little mild little thin bones the the the sorrel will dissolve the bones because there's so much acid in it it's what i read in wikipedia last night i don't know so sorrel but sorrel as we go in the garden we that's when we when you take the tour of the homestead we always go in some of the sorrel and you have to cut it back it loves being where it is it must like the nitrogen because it's right under a black a black locus here and uh it gets really big and it gets the flowers you have to take the flowers off to send the energy back into the leaves for the for the flavor but when you guess how you just cut it down we give up we give a dramatic crew cut a couple of times a year and that encourages the new the new shoes to come up because they're so delicious all right sorrel i love that and that was in page and what's that oh the elderberry look at that that is 2017 we just put an elderberry bush in fanny had elderberry had elderberries on her uh uh there's some elderberries and look at the next one those are the elderberry blossoms look at that how pretty and then what is that these are the elderberries themselves the i got i got elderberries the first couple of seasons and i made jelly i made a elderberry and elderberries are slightly toxic so you have to juice them you have to maybe squish them and make juice and then cook the juice for 20 minutes at least they thought they're select they contain some trace them after cyanide and the elderberries you have to cook on them and you make the elderberry jelly look at that on a ritz cracker that's delicious the elderberry jelly didn't turn out as well as as well as the rhubarb jam but uh we got we got elderberries for let me see how many seasons three seasons the last the last two seasons the birds just eat the elderberries we put net around the elderberries to keep the birds away and that didn't work the birds just eat the elderberries we didn't get our birds i don't know i don't know why uh all right on fanny's list of plant four beans so i mean just ordinary beans these are the scarlet runner beans we grow every year they're the they're called scarlet runner beans because the flowers are scarlet and those are the beans they don't have what's that that's caramel and in 2017 we planted some caramel seeds a little tiny seed just threw it on the ground it comes up and made tea out of that and that was in the that was in beans that was in beans her bearing all right what is that oh that's safe you make some Thanksgiving stuffing out of that and of course we have some that we we draw i mean i always i always tell the suckers of the the uh the visories but so we draw we make a smudge stick out of the sage and uh and birdie and it even ounce house to cleanse the house of evil spirit you know my my luck i burn a house man all right what is that that is red clover what why why do we love red clover in Vermont it's the state plumber we're home all right and that grows that grows in Fanny's garden i threw some red clover seed and sometimes it comes up sometimes it does oh now these are things i put in in 2022 which was this year was the yard said okay we're going to add some plants we're going to add some perennials to Fanny's garden to uh that that we're in Fanny's list of plants and so we're going to talk about four or five plants that i've added this year to Fanny's garden this is the barren strawberry and it is a it is a ground cover and it's really sort of a pointless plant it makes strawberries like a regular strawberry but you can't know they're dry it's called drier barren strawberries they don't taste like it but it was in Fanny's for barren and they had it at horse rich nursery so i said we'll put some of that and he said oh it spreads like crazy and sends out those you know those things that go all over the garden spreads like crazy don't put that i wanted to do that i wanted to spread like crazy oh what is this oh this is the flowering raspberry man the flowering talk about strawberries you can't eat well flowering raspberries or raspberries you can't eat it and that was in Fanny's list of perverium and they had it they had them at uh they had my horse so i got one and said oh that's not enough punishment let's get three of them so we've got two more and we only have three of them and do you think they look it looks like no it doesn't look look look look look at that the end of the season was so beautiful good you look them quickly well and you can't eat it you can't even eat the raspberry it's and it's good for nothing i mean they don't use them at distly for anything it's just it's just an ornamental shrug and this year it didn't even make the name one flower three plants made one flower and so our garden volunteer dave uh who knows more about garden so much more than i did said well you know your raspberry is taking back the first company is you don't get any raspberry so so don't pull the don't pull the flowering raspberry up yet although i'd love to pull it up because it's so hideous and it just spread like crazy you know it was in a pot this big and he had planted them it's just like huge oh man and then no flowers and at least it doesn't have sponge or thorns like most raspberries have thorn in them and this one doesn't all right what is this oh this is the spider work spider work this is how stupid i am all right so i so we go to orchard's garden and nursery and it's you know it's in april and nothing's coming up yet much in the garden it's mostly dirt so i said well here are plants that are on fanny's list for preparing let's see what they have at orchard's garden spider work well that's on the list so let's get some of this so we got five spider works and we planted them in fanny's garden and then i you know i'm bending over planning i turn around and i look in the jungle and all this spider work is coming the whole like acres and acres of spider work and this is it this is not the stuff i bought and planted uh this is the stuff that comes up and then it comes up in the jungle the spider work spider work it is native to the americas from canada argentina and uh the natural range of the genus is the entire length of north america that's all i have it's it got 85 it's a genus with 85 species all right so we have this spider work all right oh this is the one this is solemn seal you all have this growing in your in the spring this all it looks sort of like a little valley uh as uh it is called solemn seal and this is the same deal i got five of these at the uh at mortuary's garden nursery and we planted them and then we look out in front of the uh park district office there's like a jungle and then i go home and there's like a jungle of it on the side of my house i said oh no there's there's more where's more money's what's going on the solemn seal all right polygon atom polygon atom by florid is the scientific name and there are 63 species of it uh mostly in asia and uh it is used in herbal medicine you make sad or tonic out of it it's supposed to be good for joints and ligaments and tendons to have phosphorethritis the starchy roots contain sugars which which feed healthy bacteria in your intestines uh and the starchy roots were used like potatoes and we made flour out of them out of the roots and in europe they would use it they would only eat it when they were starving and the green shoots coming up out of the ground taste like it's bad so when they when they come up let's pull it let's pull some out of the ground and then all right oh dear my time's almost up this is our last plan and this is the coming a lot of foliage or the mountain laurel i'm from new jersey uh and these things grew up everywhere in new jersey it's the state plumber of canadian and pennsylvania and they grew everywhere i live in a town in new jersey called mount law and was in southern new jersey so it was flat but it had a hill about this home covered in in mount moral with how many a lot of homes you don't see it in here much in from on i think it's a little too cold but it was on fanny's list of things so i found a couple of those i grew up in supply and i planted one in the middle of anise garden and uh it went into shock and the leaves turned yellow and got brown spots on them and it's not going to happen uh and i planted one in my house and pretty much the same story but but we'll see we'll see if it's or whether they come back over the winter all right well i didn't have it i thought i was going to be done in 20 minutes and and be really embarrassed because i ran out of material but gee i went 55 minutes i'm sorry i kept you here for so long if you have any questions i'll be happy to answer any questions you may have what do you got cooking for next year on the garden next year i don't know anything new dylan and shannon you know they don't agree to it yet i was it was all my decision and they haven't said anything about i'm i'm sick of it you know this spring i wake up in the morning and thinking about oh were they gonna turn on my clothes oh my god i'm planting irises oh i can't have this you know i'm still doing this in the long term i'm not gonna pay for this i'm gonna hand over management of the garden to dylan and shannon dylan and shannon having seven things they're just looking like that but they're they're gonna they're gonna take it over next year i think we want to plant the the flax in the full sun because we've been making we've been making new beds in the full sun because we can't get full sun again so we're gonna grow the flax in the full sun that's the main thing so we can get real tall flax like we've never patted since twenty seven yes how much textile anime was the flax the flax every year we grow a hundred square feet of flax and if this were the 18th century you would grow a quarter acre of flax that's a hundred square feet times a hundred and eight so that's when i say farming gardening in the in the 21st century is nothing like it wasn't easy there's there's an example okay a hundred square feet of flax makes uh makes probably enough linen fabric to make half a man's handkerchief it's just a guess that's a guess we don't we don't get as far as making the family we get we only get as far as um uh spinning spinning the fiber making and we have a big fancy but not much is mine would be the answer of course flax seed now is very valued in the 18th century do you know if it had value for nutrition or flax seed the flax seed that you buy in the supermarket because it's a trendy additive to things is the same plant it's a different variety and it's the flax seed that they take that they the flax you make linen out of is one stem mostly um but the flax seed uh each plant that they they're going to use for food has a lot more branches so you have a lot more seeds per plant but other than that i don't know if it is the flax seed for for uh to do anything you need linen out of it and linseed oil and flax seed yeah because when linseed or linen linen line fibers the long smooth fiber inside the plant and that's where the word linen comes from and linseed oil any evidence as to what what uh any knowledge regarding what life here what what what how big it was or how big it was no there's what i say or journals no there's nothing there's uh there's what i say and what i get what i get to me and i say you know when i'm getting into the garden what does nanny draw in her well first of all nanny had a servant named the one who probably did a lot of work and uh so uh uh but what would she have drawn in her garden we don't know but food we assumed she would have grown food because there were 10 people living in the house during the long cold winter in the eight mostly game so it was nice to have some kind of vegetables or three vegetables put up for for variety in their diet so we assumed she would have grown strictly food for the consumption of the people in the house and it would have been a lot bigger it would have been a lot bigger than that little garden i would have covered the whole a whole meadow because you need 10 people you need a lot of food and then later she married pennamon and moved back and moved back in this house while she was still in ire and uh would have had an additional garden and that would have been separate from the food garden uh and it would have been more more perennials and what she what she grew and she wouldn't have grown corn because eating her corn even hey uh that was his those were his main problems so i doubt she moved on corn you're in answer to your question wouldn't we have no idea you know no food all right uh just one thing you mentioned the pringle herbarium at the university of ramon yes i don't think they do guided tours officially there but if you call them i you went yeah but i forget but i think i went up there a few years ago they were very accommodating very hospitable and they have fanny and one of her daughters pressed flowers and great collection but they also it's a depository for seeds from all over the world all over the world there are one or several sites all over the world that where they they preserve these seeds in case there's some kind of a major holocaust they would have seen that they could regenerate some of these species so it's a very very professional very great place to visit and the people there were very accommodating when we went up so we're going to plug our booklet out there about and start yeah it's very good looking pictures of pictures of the cars because one day the cars were here the summer when you were filming that documentary they weren't yeah and they were beautiful they are they're really good that booklet in addition to having some bioquity of fanny i would love to know if you take a fanny and billy name because we don't know the dispute is fanny wrote the scientific name for the different plans on on all the papers and people are skeptical that she would have been able to find that information because it's only in a few books that were published in europe that she would find the scientific name for the different species that were written on the paper but fanny was an avid reader and she we know she ordered books from europe from england uh all the time so i don't think that's a i don't think that's about it i don't think that's about it like she didn't have the access to the book all right around to answer the other question oh sure i have nothing to do i know where to go like to once again thank the sponsors of this program aarp vermont vermont humanities and and um but also like to briefly mention upcoming programming that we have offered here at the homestead museum uh first up is the next meeting of the homestead book clubs one of our newer programs that was started um 2022 so it meets four times a year it's a quarterly book club and the first meeting of 2023 will be on sunday february 7th at 3 p.m here in the tavern um this is the book that we'll be reading it's called seven years of grace it's a novel that was published by the vermont historical society based on a true story steeped in primary source research about asia w sprague of plymouth vermont who was one of america's best known spiritualists in the 19th century um in addition to spiritualism sprague was also active in the abolition of slavery women's rights and prison reform as well and she credited her inspiration to her love of a married man um all are welcome to join the book club meeting even if you don't end up reading or finishing the book you can still join into the conversation and we also serve tea and cookies at the meeting as well you can purchase this book today on your way out the door we have some books right there on the table um and solicit that the register um you could also purchase it later through our online gift store uh as far as uh other books in the bookshop betsey one of our volunteers mentioned our pamphlet on fanny's flowers written by a local historian and one of our longtime volunteers and board members glenn fey um and one of the neat things at the back of this book if you purchase it you get the link to um glenn fey personally digitized all of the images in their variant and so the link will get you access to his personal website for all of those flowers as well and if you're interested in um not european but traditional avanaki cooking and farming as well we also have this in the gift shop seven sisters um about other native arby as far as our monthly program our monthly lecture series we do have a hiatus in december so there will not be a lecture next month but we will return in january we are still waiting on a final yes from potential speakers for january and february so keep an eye on our website to confirm the date time and uh who our speakers will be for 2023 um and with that one more reminder to do some um maybe holiday shopping or gift shop help us clear out our inventory from 2022 um and another big thank you to tom for presenting