20 
Old Time Gardens 
kitchen garden ceased to resemble the kraal of an 
African chieftain ; to this day, in South Africa, na- 
tives and Dutch Boers thus set up on gate posts the 
skulls of cattle. 
Mrs. Grant writes of the Dutch in Albany : — 
u The care of plants, such as needed peculiar care or 
skill to rear them, was the female province. Every one in 
town or country had a garden. Into this garden no foot of 
man intruded after it was dug in the Spring. I think I see 
yet what I have so often beheld — a respectable mistress 
of a family going out to her garden, on an April morning, 
with her great calash, her little painted basket of seeds, and 
her rake over her shoulder to her garden of labours. A 
woman in very easy circumstances and abundantly gentle 
in form and manners would sow and plant and rake in- 
cessantly/’ 
We have happily a beautiful example of the old 
Dutch manor garden, at Van Cortlandt Manor, at 
Croton-on-Hudson, New York, still in the posses- 
sion of the Van Cortlandt family. It is one of the 
few gardens in America that date really to colonial 
days. The manor house was built in 1 68 1 ; it is 
one of those fine old Dutch homesteads of which 
we still have many existing throughout New York, 
in which dignity, comfort, and fitness are so hap- 
pily combined. These homes are, in the words of 
a traveller of colonial days, “ so pleasant in their 
building, and contrived so delightful.” Above all, 
they are so suited to their surroundings that they 
seem an intrinsic part of the landscape, as they do 
of the old life of this Hudson River Valley. 
