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Engraving from John Parkinson, Paridisi in Sole Paradisus Terrestris . .
. (London: Humfrey Lownes and Robert Young, 1629), p. 505. From the collections
of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.
This engraving is one of many that appear in John Parkinson's 1629 Paridisi in Sole Paradisus Terrestris, a work describing the proper cultivation of plants in flower, orchard, and kitchen gardens. The engraving illustrates eight varieties of cabbage, cauliflower, colewort, and turnip. Such plants have one of the longest histories of all European vegetables.
Cabbages were introduced to Virginia by the first settlers at Jamestown. Alexander Whitaker in his treatise titled Good Newes from Virginia, (1612), wrote, "Our English seeds thrive very well heare, as Peas, Onions, Turnips, Cabbages, Coleflowers [etc.]." By the eighteenth century, there was a wide variety of cabbages known in Williamsburg. Alexander Byrdie advertised in the Virginia Gazette that he had "just received by the Latona from London and the Peace from Bristol a well chosen variety of Garden seeds which are warrented to be of the latest crop, including, Cabbages -- 22 kinds."
As the list of eighteenth-century references to cabbage and other Brassica
(a large genus of Old World plants including broccoli, cauliflower, colewort,
kale, and turnip) demonstrate, they were very important plants to colonial Virginians.
There are more varieties of Brassicas listed by local sources than any
other garden vegetable. They were used for both animal and human food and were
planted on a large scale on eighteenth-century plantations. Most eighteenth-century
varieties of Brassica, however, have disappeared.
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