Historic Gardens of Virginia 



same shade as Newport Pink, with corresponding masses of helio- 

 trope. The English gardener and his greenhouses at the lower end 

 of the garden were both our fear and our delight. A lattice, 

 weighted down with clematis and Madeira vines, was between the 

 mansion and the servants' quarters, smokehouse, the kitchen, those 

 busy hives of industry, for the entertaining was unceasing. 



But let us speak of the real garden — the garden of my father's 

 childhood — "the enchanted garden," the garden that refreshed the 

 heroes of the Confederacy, from the generals to the privates, who 

 would come for a brief visit to the family, the recuperating officers 

 who were being restored to the Confederate Army by devoted care; 

 the garden that could tell of many a courtship and many a heart 

 pang at parting, with the insistent booming cannon of the Seven 

 Days' Battles around Richmond calling, calling through the sylvan 

 peace of this old-fashioned Virginia garden! In the happier days, 

 the children and grandchildren and all the neighborhood held here 

 their "Queen of May" and "Sleeping Beauty" and such old English 

 delights, while the garden for all time was the playground for 

 many generations of children and their friends. The plan of this 

 garden is given here. As I have already said, it adjoined the resi- 

 dence and garden of my great-grandfather, afterwards my father's. 

 It was, therefore, more than half of a city square. The garden 

 was in four divisions. First, you entered it from the back porch 

 by steps to a gravel walk running parallel with the house. The 

 main arteries of the garden were of gravel, the walks or paths 

 around the flower beds, bordered each side with box bushes, and 

 through the vegetable plots, were of grass. The upper part of 

 the garden was given over to grass. Here was the lawn dotted with 

 peach, apple, plum grafted with apricot, and cherry, holly and elm 

 trees, while a gravel walk cut out of this lawn a circle of grass 

 where the beautiful paulownias, whose purple blooms exhaling such 

 fragrance, one of the glories of the springtime, stood in sovereign 

 majesty. Then came the hedge, four feet wide, six feet high, of 

 coral honeysuckle and hawthorn (that "oped In the month of 



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