Image: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation
Colonial Williamsburg’s John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library will open The Garden Detective: Arthur Shurcliff’s Restoration of the Governor’s Palace Landscape on 12 November 2026. The exhibition is scheduled to remain on view into 2027.
The show follows Shurcliff’s research, design and restoration work on the gardens of the Governor’s Palace, drawing on landscape drawings and plans, photographs, documents and ephemera from the Foundation’s holdings.
Shurcliff served as the principal landscape architect for the restoration of Williamsburg from 1929. According to a research report published by the Foundation, he combined historical study with archaeology, working from old maps, written descriptions, excavations and evidence found on the ground, and carried out measured surveys of more than one hundred Southern properties to establish period precedents. The same report notes his long collaboration in the 1930s and 1940s with John D. Rockefeller Jr. and the architects Perry, Shaw & Hepburn.
The library’s digital collections give a sense of the result. A 1935 lantern slide by F. S. Lincoln shows the Palace garden from above, with boxwood parterres and twelve large cylindrical shrubs known as the Twelve Apostles, a feature the library associates with eighteenth-century English gardens, along with a pleached hornbeam arbor and a mound marking the site of the Palace’s original ice house.
The exhibition opens with an open house from 3 to 6 pm, at which visitors can also see items from the library’s collections spanning the 18th century to the present, including 18th-century botanical texts and material relating to the Foundation’s founding, and meet collection specialists.
