The Ker Place Herb and Kitchen Garden project was to design and implement a Jeffersonian-style garden.

The design is based on the Adam Thoroughgood House in Virginia Beach – a house built at the same time as Ker Place.

One of the goals for the project was to use historically accurate herbs and plants for the year 1799. Herbs in colonial times would have been plentiful and inexpensive; spices had to be imported, making them quite expensive. Therefore, the use of spices in the early colonial home would have been limited.

The colonial woman's back-door gardens, along with her larger vegetable gardens, were expected to provide many of the foods, flavorings, medicines and chemicals necessary for a largely self-sufficient household with little cash.

Since most households were isolated from medical care, herbs such as those listed below were used to treat medical ailments:

• Yarrow
• Angelica
• Feverfew
• Valerian

Garden Herbs in 1799  

Below you can see the beauty of the garden when photographed in the summer of 2007. We have provided a list of but a few of the herbs that would have been grown in gardens during John Ker’s time. Several of them are represented in our garden. A brochure is available to show the past and present uses of the plants.