The Piedmont Section 



was taken in gardening, but, the proverbial Virginian hospitality 

 must have brought many visitors to admire beauty which the owner 

 of Oatlands was creating, not by the aid of landscape gardeners, 

 but from his own good taste modified by the study of English pat- 

 terns. He planted box — the American tree-box — seeing, with the 

 eye of a prophet, the time when those dark branches should meet 

 over a descending path, forming an archway of rare beauty. He 

 planted it, also, by the side of a steep staircase opposite brick 

 buildings used as tool and lumber-rooms, now long since crumbled 

 into soil and, surrounding the vault where he was to be laid. 

 But he did not neglect the English hedge-box, either; and his 

 grandchildren tell of places where the box edging set off, to their 

 best advantage, roses and other vari-colored flowers. These low 

 hedges have gone — remaining only as memories — with most of 

 the shrubs and the old-time blossoms. But enough stays, as a back- 

 ground and a setting to all the beauty which modern taste and 

 knowledge have brought to it. 



The Oatlands garden, especially in May or June, when the 

 spiraea and flags are in full bloom, when colour runs riot every- 

 where, has that indefinable flavour of the past wrapt around it 

 which marks it as a thing separate from the garden of today or 

 even of yesterday. For people walked in its alleys and paths, by 

 the shade of its walls, made love under the shadow of its trees, 

 when America was very young, when President Monroe was build- 

 ing his country home, some three miles away, beyond the creek; 

 before the years of strife and war, and when tragic memories still 

 hung low over the Virginia hills. Federal troops passed through 

 the grounds, cavalry trampled over lawns and flower beds, and in 

 the house, the daughter-in-law of the builder of Oatlands guarded 

 a secret hiding place for Confederate scouts when hard pressed by 

 Northern raiders. 



So that those walls and terraces have known of gay days and 

 sad; of romance and grief; and if spirits revisit their old haunts 

 on earth, many may flit about on moonlight nights, along the 



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