20 Old Time Gardens 



kitchen garden ceased to resemble the kraal of an 

 African chieftain ; to this day, in South Africa, na- 

 tives and Dutch Boers thus set up on gate posts the 

 skulls of cattle. 



Mrs. Grant writes of the Dutch in Albany : — 



" The care of plants, such as needed peculiar care or 

 skill to rear them, was the female province. Every one in 

 town or country had a garden. Into this garden no foot of 

 man intruded after it was dug in the Spring. I think I see 

 yet what I have so often beheld — a respectable mistress 

 of a family going out to her garden, on an April morning, 

 with her great calash, her little painted basket of seeds, and 

 her rake over her shoulder to her garden of labours. A 

 woman in very easy circumstances and abundantly gentle 

 in form and manners would sow and plant and rake in- 

 cessantly." 



We have happily a beautiful example of the old 

 Dutch manor garden, at Van Cortlandt Manor, at 

 Croton-on-Hudson, New York, still in the posses- 

 sion of the Van Cortlandt family. It is one of the 

 few gardens in America that date really to colonial 

 days. The manor house was built in 1 68 1 ; it is 

 one of those fine old Dutch homesteads of which 

 we still have many existing throughout New York, 

 in which dignity, comfort, and fitness are so hap- 

 pily combined. These homes are, in the words of 

 a traveller of colonial days, " so pleasant in their 

 building, and contrived so delightful." Above all, 

 they are so suited to their surroundings that they 

 seem an intrinsic part of the landscape, as they do 

 of the old life of this Hudson River Valley. 



