4 
Old Time Gardens 
marvels of scent, lavish of bloom, bearing such ge- 
nial faces, growing so readily and hardily, spreading 
so quickly, responding so gratefully to such little 
care: what pure refreshment they bore in their blos- 
soms, what comfort in their seeds ; they must have 
seemed an emblem of hope, a promise of a new and 
happy home. I rejoice over every one that I know 
was in those little colonial gardens, for each one 
added just so much measure of solace to what seems 
to me, as I think upon it, one of the loneliest, most 
fearsome things that gentlewomen ever had to do, 
all the harder because neither by poverty nor by un- 
avoidable stress were they forced to it ; they came 
across-seas willingly, for conscience’ sake. These 
women were not accustomed to the thought of emi- 
gration, as are European folk to-day ; they had no 
friends to greet them in the new land ; they were 
to encounter wild animals and wild men; sea and 
country were unknown — they could scarce expect 
ever to return : they left everything, and took 
nothing of comfort but their Bibles and their flower 
seeds. So when I see one of the old English 
flowers, grown of those days, blooming now in my 
garden, from the unbroken chain of blossom to seed 
of nearly three centuries, I thank the flower for all 
that its forbears did to comfort my forbears, and 
I cherish it with added tenderness. 
We should have scant notion of the gardens of 
these New England colonists in the seventeenth 
century were it not for a cheerful traveller named 
John Josselyn, a man of everyday tastes and much 
inquisitiveness, and the pleasing literary style which 
