Colonial Garden-making 23 



background, its splendid trees, its turf, its beds of 

 bloom. Oh ! how beautiful a garden can be, when 

 for two hundred years it has been loved and cher- 

 ished, ever nurtured, ever guarded ; how plainly it 

 shows such care ! 



Another Dutch garden is pictured opposite page 

 32, the garden of the Bergen Homestead, at Bay 

 Ridge, Long Island. Let me quote part of its 

 description, written by Mrs. Tunis Bergen: — 



" Over the half-open Dutch door you look through the 

 vines that climb about the stoop, as into a vista of the 

 past. Beyond the garden is the great Quince orchard of 

 hundreds of trees in pink and white glory. This orchard 

 has a story which you must pause in the garden to hear. 

 In the Library at Washington is preserved, in quaint man- 

 uscript, ' The Battle of Brooklyn,' a farce written and said 

 to have been performed during the British occupation. 

 The scene is partly laid in ' the orchard of one Bergen,' 

 where the British hid their horses after the battle of Long 

 Island — this is the orchard ; but the blossoming Quince 

 trees tell no tale of past carnage. At one side of the 

 garden is a quaint little building with moss-grown root and 

 climbing hop-vine — the last slave kitchen left standing in 

 New York — on the other side are rows of homely bee- 

 hives. The old Locust tree overshadowing is an ancient 

 landmark — it was standing in 1690. For some years it 

 has worn a chain to bind its aged limbs together. All this 

 beauty of tree and flower lived till 1 890, when it was 

 swept away by the growing city. Though now but a 

 memory, it has the perfume of its past flowers about it." 



The Locust was so often a " home tree" and so 

 fitting a one, that 1 have grown to associate ever 



