Richmond and Vicinity 



There were snowdrops, followed by the grape hyacinths and a varied 

 assemblage of old favorites. The roses were notable, even in those 

 days, when there were so many to "tend" these old gardens that 

 they flourished like the proverbial green bay tree; the yellow 

 jasmine twining in among the microphylla roses, the thousand leaf, 

 the musk cluster, the Cherokee, the damask, and, above all, the 

 great favorite — the moss rose. Who that ever grew up in a Vir- 

 ginia garden but knows the prick of a moss rose? 



On her return from her residence in Paris, Mrs. Mason, whose 

 husband had died in his second term as Minister Plenipotentiary 

 and Envoy Extraordinary from the United States of America to 

 the Court of Napoleon III, would wander through her beloved 

 garden, gloved and veiled, giving orders and instructions to her 

 train of ebony gardeners, whose greatest joy was to carry out her 

 beautiful taste in the garden that had been planted by her great- 

 grandmother. 



The house and garden of General Anderson have been swept 

 away by the growth of Richmond, and on their site stands today 

 the Jefferson Hotel. I have always understood that it was the plan 

 of the designers of that hotel to leave some of the lawn and trees 

 on Franklin Street and the beautiful row of horse chestnuts which 

 bordered the pavement; but the engineer, not calculating on the 

 great drop of the land, drew the plans so that the hotel had to be 

 put on the line of the street. A pang shot through every child of 

 two generations when they saw not only their playground, the 

 garden, but even the horse chestnuts go, for General Anderson's 

 pavement was the roller-skating-rink for the neighborhood for 

 squares around. The delicious odor of the horse chestnut bloom 

 brings to many an adult mind of today the happy skating there in 

 the springtime of the long ago. And with the thought of the odor 

 of the horse chestnuts, mingled with the fragrance of the 

 paulownias in the garden, comes, too, the wafted fragrance of an- 

 other bit of the old South, for this home, its owner and the garden 

 were the truest exponents of the Virginia, the Richmond of those 



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