AMERICAN ESTATES AND GARDENS 



The old-tiine garden was an individual garden. It would be a mistake to su]:.pose that 

 the gardener, the specialist in garden making, is a new-fashioned adjunct to the country house. 

 The modern gardener differs from the old gardener exactly as the modern garden differs from 

 the old garden. But ever and always the old-time garden was an individual garden, a garden 

 in which the master and mistress took a definite personal interest, a garden in which the 

 mistress often labored with her own hands, and which she regarded as her very own, not 

 alone by right of ownership, but by right of actual labor. 



The old-time garden is a modest garden, alive with the "common" plants. But every 

 one of these lovely old plants— and many others— has a real inherent beauty of its own, 

 and as inherently present in the single plant as in a whole border. If they are "common," 

 it surely can not be because they are coarse and ugly, but because they can be so readily 

 grown, because so many grow 

 them, and because of their 

 easy culture, that they seem 

 scarcely of the same class as 

 the more difficulth' grown 

 plants of the costly modern 

 garden. 



The old-time garden was 

 planned on the simple idea of 

 using plants that grew easily 

 and naturally, with perhaps the 

 slightest effort, and certainly 

 with the utmost flowering. It 

 was not splendor that was 

 sought, but charm, the charm 

 of foliage and of color, per- 

 haps chiefly the charm of color. 

 Plants that gave these results 

 were eagerly sought after and 

 industriously cultivated. It is 

 highly significant that, beatx- 

 tiful as these old gardens must 

 have been in the days of their 

 first blooming, they are beau- 

 tiful to-day, and do not suffer 

 in interest in comparison with 

 the more pretentious efforts of 

 the modern gardener. 



THE GARDEN OF " WELD "—THE GAZEBO. 



[-'73] 



