Agenda 02-03-2026; 8-i - National Register Recommendation for Moorefields

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48 United States Department of the Interior National Park Service/National Register of Historic Places Registration Form NPS Form 10-900 OMB Control No.1024-0018 Moorefields (Additional Documentation) Orange County, N.C. Name of Property County and State the center of a garden room or at the termination of a long vista.143 The greenhouse gardens of Reynolda, the home of Richard Joshua and Katharine Smith Reynolds in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, are an example of this landscape architectural style in the Piedmont. Landscape architect Thomas Sears created the four-acre gardens from 1915 to 1924. The sunken greenhouse garden comprised four adjacent parterre gardens, geometrically arranged in a cross plan. The parterre gardens were largely planted with roses and perennials and lined with shaped conifers and single all6es. A small brick-and-flagstone plaza was built with a small water feature directly across from the greenhouse, terminating the vista across a broad greensward.144 Contemporaneous with the Beaux-Arts style in landscape architecture was the Colonial Revival. Following the 1876 Centennial Exhibition and the 1893 Columbian Exposition, the nation experienced a new fascination with America's colonial history that also "sparked an interest in early American landscapes."145 The popularity and widespread adoption of the Colonial Revival style in landscape design owes much to Arthur A. Shurcliff, who served as the chief landscape architect supervising the restoration and recreation of Williamsburg,Virginia's colonial town plan between 1928 and 1941. Shurcliff s designs for formal gardens within Colonial Williamsburg were inspired by the Anglo-Dutch gardens typical of the 17th and 18th centuries, but as revivals, Shurcliff s gardens were more formal and embellished than the originals. Shurcliff employed a palette of evergreen shrubs—especially-boxwood—to define spaces rectilinearly and symmetrically.146 Not dissimilar from the Beaux-Arts style,the Colonial Revival in garden design manifested as "compact, well-ordered, symmetrical gardens of perennial plants, herbs, and flowering trees...located in close proximity to homes [that blended] formal elements including parterres, all6es, and cruciform plans with informal kitchen gardens."147 Geometric planting beds, often enclosed by low walls, and axial pathways are also hallmarks of the style, as are flowering shrubs or canopy trees used to frame views. Colonial Revival gardens commonly feature clipped boxwood hedges and decorative objects, such as sundials, arbors, pergolas, and fountains, many of which are built of rusticated materials.148 Press coverage of Colonial Williamsburg was broad: "Academic publications and popular magazines featured Colonial Williamsburg's gardens and influenced gardeners and landscape designers across the country, despite the inaccuracies of the restoration and the tendency of the supervising landscape architects to create idealized versions of the past. ,149 In 1953, the Garden Club of North Carolina undertook similar garden designs on Roanoke Island, where the United States' first Anglo-European colonizers settled in 1584,otherwise known as the Lost Colony.What began as an imagining of what 16ffi-century colonists would have planted had the colony survived morphed into an elaborate memorial, a garden much more intricate, formal, and embellished than any lost colonist would have had. Richard Webel of Innocenti & Webel designed the ten-acre Elizabethan Gardens in Manteo in 1954. Formulated as sequential spaces in an ordered spatial hierarchy that ranges from naturalistic to formal designs,the main parterre garden room is enclosed by clipped hedges and bordered by a pebbled walkway. Perpendicular pebbled walks meet in a rond-pont, at the center of which is a large circular fountain. The four, chamfered greenswards formed by the intersecting walks feature shaped flower beds creating a flowered pattern, formed by low-lying, clipped hedges. The garden was planted with flowering shrubs as well as perennial flowers, all surrounded by large canopy trees.151 Section 8 page 46