OF BEGINNINGS 



FOUR paths lead back, through time-dimmed 

 reaches, in four directions, to the first gardens of 

 this western world. Overgrown and choked they are, 

 and all but obliterated, for battles have raged over 

 them, blood has soaked them, and the wilderness has 

 very nearly claimed them for its own, again and again. 

 Yet they are not quite lost; the very fact that we, as a 

 nation, are here, is the strongest assurance that they 

 too remain. For a history of a people's gardens is 

 very nearly a history of the people themselves; and 

 where civilization has maintained itself, there gardens 

 have been made. 



The longest of these paths — ^longest yet in some re- 

 spects the least obscure — ends at that old city which 

 Spain built, upon the site seized from the Huguenots 

 whom Menendez massacred in 1565 — St. Augustine, 

 in Florida. But this one trail is foreign-seeming all 

 its length, and nowhere upon it does the pilgrim of 

 the western world feel at home. It is as if the spirit 



