The View from Champlain’s Gardens

      In the fall of 1608, Samuel de Champlain began to cultivate a New France at Québec. “On the first of October I had some wheat sown and on the fifteenth some rye,” he wrote, before continuing and explaining that “on the third of the month there was a white frost and on the fifteenth the leaves of the trees began to fall. On the twenty-fourth of the month I had some native vines planted and they prospered extremely well.”¹ That he focused his account on his efforts to sow grains and transplant vines is not surprising; these were symbolically laden plants that occupied a central place in France’s sense of its own past and its colonial future. With roots in both biblical history and the classical colonialism of Rome, the presence of these plants provided both evidence of France’s moral authority to claim indigenous lands and an augur for the ultimate success of colonialism on a continent that had thus far proven resistant to French ambitions.² As the horticulturalist Olivier de Serres had recently written in his innovative and influential Théâtre d’agriculture et mesnage des champs, “After bread comes wine, second food given by the creator for the maintenance of life, & the first celebrated for its excellence.”³ Although unified in symbolism, the act of planting grains and grapes was also the staging of an encounter between introduced European seeds and indigenous American vines that Champlain had had transplanted in the colony’s gardens. Orchestrating this encounter and celebrating this proximity became a founding act that set French roots into a new not-so-New World.

      In the preceding five years, Champlain (and French colonial efforts more generally) had focused on settlements in Acadia. At St. Croix Island (1604) and Port Royal (1605) in what are now, respectively, Maine and Nova Scotia, Champlain had similarly laid out gardens as he studied landscapes and prepared for shelter and defense. When the settlement that he called the habitation was established at Québec on July 3, Champlain continued these practices. He began to cultivate his new settlement during a challenging summer and fall. He had only recently survived an attempted mutiny, and bitter experience in recent winters had impressed the urgent need to prepare supplies and support for harsh winters.⁴ It is likely, as well, that more than concerns about survival weighed on Champlain as Québec took shape in front of him. Only the year before, he had returned to France with the settlers of Port Royal as the crown withdrew its support for the Acadian colony and demanded that its leaders justify further investments in the settlement of French colonies in the region.⁵ For both Champlain and the broader colonial effort in which he was an integral part, the stakes were high as the first frost fell and winter threatened its arrival.

      Gardens were an essential element of the expanding footprint of French colonialism in northeastern North America. “While the carpenters, sawyers and other laborers worked at our lodgings,” Champlain wrote, “I put all the rest to clearing around the habitation, so as to make gardens in which to sow seeds to see how they would all succeed, for the soil appeared quite good.”⁶ The grape-bearing vines that the explorer had transplanted into colonial