4 Old Time Gardens 



marvels of scent, lavish of bloom, bearing such ge- 

 nial faces, growing so readily and hardily, spreading 

 so quickly, responding so gratefully to such little 

 care: what pure refreshment they bore in their blos- 

 soms, what comfort in their seeds ; they must have 

 seemed an emblem of hope, a promise of a new and 

 happy home. I rejoice over every one that I know 

 was in those little colonial gardens, for each one 

 added just so much measure of solace to what seems 

 to me, as I think upon it, one of the loneliest, most 

 fearsome things that gentlewomen ever had to do, 

 all the harder because neither by poverty nor by un- 

 avoidable stress were they forced to it ; they came 

 across-seas willingly, for conscience' sake. These 

 women were not accustomed to the thought of emi- 

 gration, as are European folk to-day ; they had no 

 friends to greet them in the new land ; they were 

 to encounter wild animals and wild men; sea and 

 country were unknown they could scarce expect 

 ever to return : they left everything, and took 

 nothing of comfort but their Bibles and their flower 

 seeds. So when I see one of the old English 

 flowers, grown of those days, blooming now in my 

 garden, from the unbroken chain of blossom to seed 

 of nearly three centuries, I thank the flower for all 

 that its forbears did to comfort my forbears, and 

 I cherish it with added tenderness. 



We should have scant notion of the gardens of 

 these New England colonists in the seventeenth 

 century were it not for a cheerful traveller named 

 John josselyn, a man of everyday tastes and much 

 inquisitiveness, and the pleasing literary style which 



