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Introductory 



Club, mothers this volume. Again to women is owed garden 

 pleasure — the whiff of box, of mignonette, of clove pinks and 

 damask roses; the sense of sunny brick walls, of butterflies and 

 bees and lovers and children in a world of blossom; an old, sweet 

 wind of garden romance, garden poetry. 



Gardens began early in Virginia. At Varina, in 1614, lived 

 that wedded pair, John Rolfe and Pocahontas, daughter of Pow- 

 hatan. Rolfe experimented with tobacco, and who shall say that in 

 turn he did not show the young, wonderful Indian woman how 

 they set flowering bushes, how they made beds of flowers, in Nor- 

 folk, in England? In 1625, on the banks of the James, George 

 Sandys translated Ovid's Metamorphoses. Surely he had some 

 planting of flowers about his door! In 1642, at Greenspring, Sir 

 William Berkeley had a garden of extent and colour. When, a 

 little later, the King's men, the cavaliers, fled with their families 

 to Virginia from an England, no longer Stuart, there came with 

 them garden ideas and garden seeds and slips and cuttings. Wash- 

 ington, Mason and Lee, Pendleton, Randolph, Gary, Madison, 

 Monroe, Brodnax, Skipwith, and many others — these men and 

 their wives and sisters and daughters soon had their sunlighted, 

 their moonlighted gardens in Virginia. English squires, English 

 and Scots merchants turned Virginia planters — near their houses 

 of wood or of brick rise gardens with fruit trees, with old, fair 

 shrubs, with low, formal beds of blossom, with paths winding or 

 straight, with arbors and summer-houses. Jamestown is burned and 

 Williamsburg arises, and there are gardens still in Williamsburg, 

 gardens of lilac and daffodils, violets and roses. 



In 1732, leaving his own garden at Westover, William Byrd 

 travels to Germanna and with Governor Spotswood takes "a turn 

 in the Garden. . . . Three terrace walks that fall in slopes one 

 below another." The valley is settled, and gardens arise about the 

 homes of Lewises and Campbells and McDowells and Gays and 

 Prestons and Wilsons and Alexanders, and many another. And 

 there is Greenway Court where the young surveyor, George Wash- 



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