The Old-Fashioned Garden 47 



that were made for the parson's coming to tea, must have been 

 grown in every garden patch. Dried bunches of herbs for kitchen 

 use as well as for dosing the family or an ailing neighbour, hung 

 from the rafters in every well regulated attic during the long 

 New England winters. It was considered not indecorous to chew 

 medicinal herbs in church. 



But we like to remember that the beautiful as well as the 

 utilitarian had a place in the gardens of those hard times that tried 

 men's souls: that hollyhocks stood like cheerful sentinels beside 

 the cabin door in the Plymouth Plantation and Massachusetts 

 Bay Colony; that roses looked in at the windows probably 

 the sweet brier or eglantine and the striped York and Lancaster 

 roses brought from England; that gilly flowers, "fetherfew" and 

 honesty, with its mother-of-pearl seed vessels for the winter bou- 

 quet, grew freely among the comfortable variety of simples, vege- 

 tables and pot herbs which the gossiping Josselyn found about 

 the homes of the Puritans in 1672 when he published "New England 

 Rarities Discovered." Doubtless most of the "pleasant flowers 

 which English ayre will permit to be noursed up/' as Parkinson 

 quaintly puts it, were tested in American gardens: his favourite 

 "daffodils, fertillaries, jacinthes, saffron flowers, lilies, flower- 

 deluces, tulipas, anemones, French cowslips or bearseares, and 

 such other flowers, very beautifull, delightfull and pleasant." 



Not until considerable wealth had accumulated in the Northern 

 Colonies and life had become a less severe struggle, were the New 

 England gardens formally laid out in keeping with the modified 

 classic architecture of the finer houses a style we speak of as 

 Colonial, but which is known in England only as Georgian. Such 

 gardens followed the fashion then in vogue in England, France, 

 and Holland, which was but a modification, in each country, of 



