f 



STTLES OF LANDSCAPE DESIGN 51 



Shingles took the place of thatch, wooden construction throughout, 

 since wood was so plenty, replaced the part stone construction of a 

 land where wood was dear ; but there are to-day a considerable number 

 of English wooden cottages which might almost stand as models of the 

 houses of the Pilgrims. Within a very few years, there were gardens 

 around these houses in the new land ; but although here there was 

 ground enough, necessity for defense and economy of labor in cultiva- 

 tion of the none too fertile soil still kept the garden small and near the 

 house and restricted the flowers to a few hardy plants, mostly serving 

 also some medicinal or household use, in a border along the paths in a 

 garden otherwise devoted to vegetables and fruit, or as a decoration of 

 the front dooryard, — a bit of fragrance and color and a reminder of 

 the old gardens whence their seed had been brought. 



In later times when the prosperous merchants of Salem and New- 

 buryport and Portsmouth and Boston built their houses which are 

 still the much-copied examples of New England colonial architecture, 

 their gardens did not depart far from the style of those their great 

 grandfathers had built. (See Plate 5.) The white-painted wooden 

 picket fence and the latticed vine arbors found their prototypes in 

 the English gardens, though rarely were the English structures so 

 refined in detail ; the pear-tree bordered walks and the area of lawn 

 and box-bordered flower beds and vegetable garden lying close to- 

 gether, or often indeed forming part of one simple design, were all 

 what their owners still could see when they returned to the mother 

 country ; and the flowers, the trees, the box bushes had probably most 

 of them come directly from England as did in the early days the bricks 

 of the houses themselves. The colonial gardens of New England are 

 different in style from the cottage gardens of England not because the 

 owners had different ideals of design, but because their surroundings 

 in the new world forced upon them a different choice of material and 

 eventually a different method of life.* 



Previous to the very modern national consciousness of the German The Modern 

 empire, there has been in Germany nothing which could fairly be called r^''^^ 



* Cf. Grace Tabor's Old-fashioned Gardening, a History and a Reconstruction^ in ^^y'^ 

 which Chapter V, Austere Puritan Gardens, treats this one of the five styles of American 

 colonial gardens which she differentiates. (See References.) 



