I 
OF BEGINNINGS 
F OUR paths lead back, through time-dimmed 
reaches, in four directions, to the first gardens of 
this western world. Overgrown and choked they are, 
and all but obliterated, for battles have raged over 
them, blood has soaked them, and the wilderness has 
very nearly claimed them for its own, again and again. 
Yet they are not quite lost; the very fact that we, as a 
nation, are here, is the strongest assurance that they 
too remain. For a history of a people’s gardens is 
very nearly a history of the people themselves; and 
where civilization has maintained itself, there gardens 
have been made. 
The longest of these paths—longest yet in some re¬ 
spects the least obscure—ends at that old city which 
Spain built, upon the site seized from the Huguenots 
whom Menendez massacred in 1565—St. Augustine, 
in Florida. But this one trail is foreign-seeming all 
its length, and nowhere upon it does the pilgrim of 
the western world feel at home. It is as if the spirit 
