162 OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING 



own country, in its different sections. The gardens 

 of Rome were old when the Roman gardens, which 

 taught the art to the barbarian in England, were being 

 planted; these in turn were old when the darkling 

 of that long interval between the ancients and later 

 man, settled upon the earth that thousand years dur- 

 ing which art of every kind was treasured and kept 

 faintly alive only because there were monasteries, and 

 good monks, to guard it. Their work had less to do 

 with the esthetic than with the practical side of garden- 

 ing, however; they preserved the ancient craft of the 

 vineyard, and they raised the few coarse vegetables of 

 that age: there they stopped. So the gardens which 

 were growing as the murk lifted, towards the end of 

 the fourteenth century, were what may be called the 

 first new gardens new in every sense since reckon- 

 ing and records began. It is a matter of little more 

 than two centuries from this time to the planting of 

 the first white men's gardens on this continent; and 

 that is just three hundred and twenty-nine years ago, 

 reckoning from Drake's mention of the gardens de- 

 stroyed by him at St. Augustine. 



Beyond three hundred years back then, it is an abso- 

 lute certainty that there is nothing for the term "old- 

 fashioned" to unearth, so far as our own land is con- 

 cerned. And the first actual mention of a garden 

 passing by those just referred to is not until eighteen 



