Historical commentaries and imagery distinguish three types of plantation food fields. The plots slaveholders allocated for the cultivation of subsistence foods were known as provision or yam grounds. Those directly managed by the enslaved were generally referred to as slave food gardens. These were of two types. The enslaved planted fruit trees, food favorites, and medicinal plants in the small yards surrounding their dwellings. This image shows papaya and plantain trees near the hut, with the castor plant and pineapple next to the two standing figures to the right (Figure 3).* A drawing of a sugar plantation in the French West Indies illustrates the second type of slave food gardens. These were typically developed on soils unsuited to the commodity crop or on erosive hillslopes. In these distant sites the enslaved established food plots they entirely managed with crops of their choice that demanded little oversight to cultivate. The image shows the flat land of the plantation wholly devoted to cane cultivation, with a section reserved for cattle pasturage. Slave food gardens are identified in the distance on remote slopes, which required considerable time
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figure 3. Slave Houses, Brazil, 1830s.
Source: Johann Moritz Rugendas, Voyage Pittoresque dans le Bresil. Translated from German (Paris, 1835; also published in same year in German). Reprinted in Viagem Pitoresca Através do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, 1972; images shown on website), and in color from original watercolors, in Viagem Pitoresca Atravé do Brasil (Editora Itatiaia Limitada, Editora da Universidade de Sao Paulo, 1989) [NOTE: both 1835 French and German original editions were published in black and white].  
to reach and farm (Figure 4, 13). The image incarnates the comments of sugar planter Johan Carstens on St. Thomas, who claimed food plots were located at the plantation's outermost extremities.