THE DEAR OLD-FASHIONED GARDEN! 



GRACE TABOR 



With Its Clustering Truths That Are Falsely Inter- 

 preted and Falsehoods Usurping the Place of Facts 



Title decorations from designs of the early seventeenth century for garden "knots," to he executed in Boxwood or similar material — the type on which Mt. Vernon 



and other old geometrical gardens were modelled 



IVEN as the ancients lived unaware that they were 

 ancients it is true beyond all question that the old- 

 fashioned garden never dreamed it was old-fashioned! 

 Nor was it old-fashioned! On the contrary, it 

 was most modern — le dernier cri indeed in garden design, 

 in horticultural methods, and in its assemblage of plants. 

 Do we not therefore approach the consideration of it from an 

 altogether mistaken angle when we overlook this? And is it 

 possible, with so fundamental a concept unrecognized, to 

 arrive at any true understanding of what the gardens of the 

 fashion of a hundred years or more ago, may have been? 



There is every evidence that 

 no gardeners were ever keener 

 for "outlandish flowers" than 

 the fastidious and often ex- 

 travagant gentry of our Colo- 

 nial days. Travelers and mis- 

 sionary priests were forever 

 picking up in the far "outlands" 

 which they visited, everything 

 in the way of plants or seeds 

 that they could lay their hands 

 upon, and sending these back 

 home to eager patrons. One 

 of General Washington's most 

 delightful letters expresses his 

 thanks for a gift of plants of 

 this sort, and adds: " I feel my- 

 self particularly obliged by 

 the offer to supply me with 

 other plants from the Botani- 

 cal Garden in Jamaica. . . and 

 I shall certainly avail myself 

 of the liberty you have author- 

 ized me to take, in requesting 

 a small supply of such exotics, 

 as, with a little aid may be 

 reconciled to the climate of 

 my garden." 



Thus , the gardens of then 

 were unquestionably richly 

 stocked in new and rare plants; 

 and the gardeners were busy 

 with the difficult job of ac- 

 climatizing them — and not in- 

 t frequently distraught at los- 

 ing choice specimens, we may 

 be very sure. 



So, though we know that 

 there were not the great number 



I of varieties and hybrid crea- 



AN INTIMATE BOX-EDGED GARDEN AT COLUMBIA, S. C. 

 So famed in the days of its youth for its strange and rare plants that Le 

 Conte, Audubon and Agassiz, the great American naturalists of their gen- 

 eration, were among those who visited it and its creator Mrs. Hampton, 

 the mother of the Wade Hampton who became a governor of the state 



tions that there are to-day, we have no warrant for limiting 

 the number of collected plants; and the fact that an old gar- 

 den shows us only Peonies, Bleeding-heart, Daffodils, and 

 Snowdrops, for example, is no proof at all that it did not 

 harbor fifty other things in the days of the fulness thereof. 

 Everything indeed points to this being exactly the case — 

 but very little remains as a clue to their identity! 



IN ALL frankness let us acknowledge that we do not know, 

 and cannot hope to discover, certain horticultural details 

 (not in themselves important) about the old gardens. And 



then let us proceed to analyze 

 the old-fashioned garden from 

 a point paralleling our atti- 

 tude to-day to the present day 

 garden — that is, contempora- 

 neously. Thus only may we 

 hope to come at its true inward- 

 ness, since after all the old- 

 fashioned garden is not an actual 

 entity but rather the embodiment 

 of a set of principles: And 

 these principles were the prod- 

 uct of their age — of the bus- 

 iness, political, social, and do- 

 mestic life of men, women, and 

 children busy with living, just 

 as we of to-day are busy 

 about the same enterprise. 

 The facts of the old-fashioned 

 garden, in other words, are 

 historical rather than horticul- 

 tural. And the charm of these 

 old gardens remaining to us — 

 or the bits of old gardens re- 

 maining — lies in their manner 

 rather than in their matter. 

 Catch the manner, and the 

 flowers of to-day will furnish 

 the matter quite as well as did 

 the flowers of a century ago. 



First of all they were from 

 within out, above everything 

 else and regardless of whether 

 they were great or humble, 

 huge or tiny. So we must set 

 ourselves in motion in this 

 same way — from within out — 

 and demand inexorably that 

 the garden which we are about, 

 to make shall be honest and 



171 



tLSV.d, 



