Colonial Garden-making 
*3 
shrub, and tree for his home at Mount Vernon. 
A beautiful tribute to his good taste and that of 
his wife still exists in the Mount Vernon flower 
garden, which in shape. Box edgings, and many 
details is precisely as it was in their day. A view 
of its well-ordered charms is shown opposite page 
12. Whenever I walk in this garden I am deeply 
grateful to the devoted women who keep it in such 
perfection, as an object-lesson to us of the dignity, 
comeliness, and beauty of a garden of the olden 
times. 
There is little evidence that a general love and 
cultivation of flowers was as common in humble 
homes in the Southern colonies as in New England 
and the Middle provinces. The teeming abun- 
dance near the tropics rendered any special garden- 
ing unnecessary for poor folk ; flowers grew and 
blossomed lavishly everywhere without any coaxing 
or care. On splendid estates there were splendid 
gardens, which have nearly all suffered by the devas- 
tations of war — in some towns they were thrice 
thus scourged. So great was the beauty of these 
Southern gardens and so vast the love they pro- 
voked in their owners, that in more than one case 
the life of the garden’s master was merged in that 
of the garden. The British soldiers during the 
War of the Revolution wantonly destroyed the ex- 
quisite flowers at “ The Grove,” just outside the 
city of Charleston, and their owner, Mr. Gibbes, 
dropped dead in grief at the sight of the waste. 
The great wealth of the Southern planters, their 
constant and extravagant following of English cus- 
