202 OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING 



elected to consider. It is a long time — almost two 

 centuries — even in the garden where time moves 

 slowly ; and there were many changes, as well as many 

 entirely new things brought from the new lands west, 

 during this time. So it will be well to divide it into 

 two sections, in order to put things where they belong 

 and eliminate complications. 



Happily it divides itself, though somewhat un- 

 equally to be sure. The end of the seventeenth cen- 

 tury marks a very definite break, at the time when 

 formalism was giving way to naturalism ; and if we take 

 the year 1700 as the dividing period, a little more 

 than one-third of our old-fashioned gardens will be 

 on its farther side while a little less than two- thirds 

 of them are in front of it. This we shall find a very 

 convenient natural division, I think — and one which 

 will simplify reconstruction considerably. 



Nothing at all was written in America about gar- 

 dens, or gardening, or flowers until 1748 — ^nearly half 

 a century after the dividing line is passed. In this 

 year, Jared Eliot, grandson of the great "apostle to 

 the Indians," John Eliot, began a series of "Essays on 

 Field Husbandry" which were kept up until 1759. 

 But these are agricultural rather than horticultural, as 

 their name implies; and it was eleven years later still 

 before anyone here wrote anything devoted to the 

 flower garden. So it is to English writers and records 



