American Gardening 



Zbe amencan ©arOen— popular ©arOening 



JULY, 1892 



No. 7 



FLOWERS OF THE OLD GARDENS. 



SOME SWEET AND STATELY BEAUTIES. 



Turkey carpet. 



A brave old house, a garden full of bees, 



Large drooping poppies and green hollyhocks. 

 With butterflies' for crowns, tree-peonies, 

 And pinks and goldilocks." 



LD-FASHIONED gardens were wide 

 and roomy, sweet, restful and natural. 

 In these days a garden is an artificial 

 production with which nature has as 

 much to do as with the weaving of a 

 The art of carpet-bedding has been car- 

 ried to perfection, and, in consequence, we all know what 

 to expect when we enter a flower-garden in the summer 

 months. There are patches of scarlet, purple and white, 

 as smooth and even as the emerald turf in which they 

 are embedded. There is not a withered leaf nor a strag- 

 gling spray to be s^en, for it is the gardener's first object 

 to repress the luxuriance of nature. What stately plants 

 are these, and what dignified names they bear ! Our 

 grandmothers would scarcely recognize any of them, nor 

 would they see many of their own favorites. 



It was not so in the gardens of our youth. There was 

 the stamp of character and all the charm of a surprise in 

 the distinctive peculiarities of the old-fashioned walled 

 gardens. One was famous for its peaches, sheltered from 

 early frosts by the mossy roof of an old shed ; another 

 for its wealth of golden-drop plums. In one was a 

 shady corner for lilies-of-the-valley ; in another a sunny 

 exposure where the autumn violets were the first to bloom. 

 In all these were grass alleys, crooked and hoary old 

 apple trees valued as much for their age as for their 

 fruit, and a wealth and variety of pot-herbs. One 

 wall was crowned by a patch of Aaron's-rod ; another 

 was fringed with wallflowers ; and the old bricks were 

 often covered with a network of delicate and beautiful 

 creepers. There was the delightful smell of newly- 

 turned mold mingled with the fragrance of a hedge of 

 sweet-peas or that of a bed of clove-gillyflowers. Sweet- 

 william and mignonette filled the vacant places, and the 



bees from a row of yellow-painted hives were humming 

 over all. 



Once in a while, in the country, you will stumble upon 

 a garden where some of these old-fashioned flowers thrive 

 in their glory. Peonies, poppies, hollyhocks, colum- 

 bines, sweet-sultan, clove-pinks and the like, were the 

 delight of our grandmothers ; and they are beautiful in 

 color and form, but they are not fashionable. Generally 

 the housewife has some excuse for their existence — "My 

 husband dotes on pinks," or "The phlox was mother's 

 favorite flower." In one garden that I know of there 

 is in one corner a bed where, every year for more 

 than a hundred years, English forget-me-nots have blos- 

 somed. The seed sows itself, comes up in time to bloom, 

 and the flowers are as blue and star-like as when pretty 

 Dolly Rutherford plucked a handful of them to wear on 

 the breast of her dress the night she danced with Lafay- 

 ette and Rochambeau. 



In some of the old gardens one could find beds of 

 Easter lilies mingled with clumps of spider-lilies, sweet- 

 williams and columbines of every hue. Intermixed with 

 them are such annuals as mignonette and sweet-alyssum, 

 and the beds are edged with bluebells as sweet as a baby's 

 breath. Not a few of the plants were set out perhaps 

 by the first settlers or their wives, who brought the roots 

 or slips from their older homes. If all these plants only 

 bloomed at the same time, what an array of sweet, old- 

 fashioned beauty there would be. 



All along the banks of Kittery and the Piscataqua one 

 will see a blaze of roses through the months of June and 

 July, and the bushes are more than a century old. 



In the old gardens around the Wentworth house, in 

 Portsmouth — the same grand mansion that Longfellow 

 called 



" Baronial and colonial in its style" — 

 are many hedges of lilacs. They border the grounds, 

 and even shut in one end of the mansion, with which 

 they seem to hold sweet communion. When they are 



