Middleton Place, a former rice plantation west of Charleston, South Carolina, contains gardens that are exceptional in US garden history. They are among the oldest extant designed gardens in the United States, and the plantation is one of very few properties in continuous family ownership since the era of the royal land grant. While time, natural disaster, and war all took their toll on the plantation, the bones of the eighteenth-century gardens are intact, and they are the only colonial Baroque gardens in the United States that were never substantially altered (figure 1). The 20-acre gardens were part of a regional landscape of rice production that included Middleton Place itself and the Middleton family’s dozens of rice plantations, and that comprised the South Carolina lowcountry region. Middleton Place is an unusual intact example of a lowcountry plantation where garden and rice fields were two sides of the same coin: landscapes carefully organized, formed, and regulated to guide human activity in the production and display of wealth and prestige. The seat of the Middleton family’s rice enterprise for over a century, the 6,500-acre plantation was renowned for its formal gardens and terraced site, now a National Historic Landmark. Yet despite its significance, Middleton Place has not been studied as an integrated garden and agricultural landscape. Mentions of the plantation in garden histories discuss the extraordinary terraces stepping down to the Ashley River, and the Le Nôtre-inspired gardens that use a nearlymile-long reach of the river to create a water axis at the scale of Vaux-leVicomte. The gardens, altered by war, earthquake, and natural processes, have been interpreted based on their partial reconstruction in the twentieth-century, and problematically, they have never been fully analyzed or critiqued as embedded within an agricultural landscape. Geometric gardens and geomorphic rice fields mirrored each other, as earthworks and water flow organized the two landscapes and structured the daily and seasonal movements of two groups of people, the black enslaved workers and the white planters. The domestic core of the plantation is at the eastern edge of the property, overlooking the Ashley River and organized along a 1,980-foot (30-chain) east–west axis. Within the core, geometrically organized leisure and display areas are located to the north and east, with the productive landscapes located to the south and west where they are organized functionally by topography, hydrology and solar access. A 6-acre parterre garden overlooks the river, flowing down over beveled terraces influenced by Versailles’ Triton Fountain to two oblong reflecting pools and then to the river. An 11-acre pleasure garden sits to the north, and to the south were vegetable gardens and an orchard, along with farm buildings, the work yard, and ‘the street’ containing the homes and gardens of the enslaved workers (figure 2).

中文翻译：

---

农业基础设施和米德尔顿广场的花园

米德尔顿广场是南卡罗来纳州查尔斯顿以西的前水稻种植园，拥有美国花园历史上独一无二的花园。它们是美国现存最古老的设计花园之一，自皇家土地授予时代以来，该种植园是为数不多的连续家族拥有的财产之一。虽然时间、自然灾害和战争都对种植园造成了损失，但 18 世纪花园的骨骼完好无损，它们是美国唯一从未有过实质性改变的殖民时期巴洛克式花园（图 1）。占地 20 英亩的花园是水稻生产区域景观的一部分，其中包括米德尔顿广场本身和米德尔顿家族的数十个水稻种植园，其中包括南卡罗来纳州低地地区。米德尔顿广场是一个不寻常的完整的低地种植园的例子，在那里花园和稻田是同一枚硬币的两个方面：精心组织、形成和调节的景观，以指导人类生产和展示财富和声望的活动。一个多世纪以来，米德尔顿家族的水稻企业所在地，占地 6,500 英亩的种植园以其正式的花园和梯田而闻名，现在是国家历史地标。然而，尽管具有重要意义，米德尔顿广场还没有被研究为综合花园和农业景观。花园历史中提到的种植园讨论了通往阿什利河的非凡梯田，以及以 Le Nôtre 为灵感的花园，这些花园使用近一英里长的河流来创建 Vaux-leVicomte 规模的水轴。因战争而改变的花园，地震和自然过程是根据 20 世纪的部分重建来解释的，但问题是，它们从未被完全分析或批评为嵌入农业景观中。几何花园和地貌稻田相互映衬，土方工程和水流组织了两种景观，并构建了两组人的日常和季节性活动，即黑人奴隶工人和白人种植者。种植园的国内核心位于该物业的东部边缘，俯瞰阿什利河，并沿 1,980 英尺（30 链）的东西轴线排列。在核心内，几何组织的休闲和展示区位于北部和东部，富有成效的景观位于南部和西部，它们在功能上按地形、水文和太阳能接入进行组织。占地 6 英亩的花坛花园俯瞰河流，流经受凡尔赛海神喷泉影响的斜面梯田，流向两个椭圆形反射池，然后流向河流。北面是一个占地 11 英亩的游乐花园，南面是菜园和果园，还有农舍、工场和“街道”，其中包括被奴役工人的家园和花园（图 2）。