54 OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING 



and did not ever resort to the square precision of the 

 foregoing age. He enlarged his plans, disdained to 

 make every division tally to its opposite, and though 

 he still adhered much to straight walks with high dipt 

 hedges, they were only his great lines; the rest he 

 diversified with wilderness and with loose groves of 

 oak, though still within surrounding hedges." 



This broader influence was greatly felt by the 

 middle of the eighteenth century; the period, in 

 America, when "the time of infancy had passed: the 

 struggle for existence was happily over" and "America 

 . . . turned with the eagerness of new desire to the 

 comforts and elegances of social life . . . the arts 

 grew in strength as though born upon the soil." Un- 

 der this influence, overlying all the earlier ideals and 

 traditions and yet not obscuring them nor blotting 

 them out, the work of Washington in the gardens at 

 Mount Vernon was begun ; and of Jefferson at Monti- 

 cello. And the first, a semi-public memorial, remains 

 to us to-day as it was designed by the first and greatest 

 of the land, while the second has been restored and 

 splendidly preserved under private care. 



Finally, it is particularly interesting to note, by a 

 comparison of the plans of these Virginia gardens with 

 those of the earlier Spanish settlement of St. Augus- 

 tine, and with the gardens of the Dutch, the great 

 difference in their makers. The gardens of the old 



