102 
OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING 
Thomas Hutchinson with an item for his diary more 
than a century later. He writes that when he was 
in Boston, “both fruit and vegetables were abundant; 
but the dried French haricot beans were much in de¬ 
mand, stewed soft with meat, and eaten as a Sunday 
dish between the services; and many is the dinner of 
it I there enjoyed.” He further retails the yarn of 
one popular preacher’s calculations of how many 
quarts of beans he preached to Sunday afternoons, 
and the gross value of his congregation, reckoned at 
the market price of beans per quart. 
By the middle of the eighteenth century Boston 
was the largest town on the continent. It contained 
about three thousand houses of which perhaps a thou¬ 
sand were brick, the rest wood, clapboarded. The 
earliest houses were built of the wood of the locust— 
Robinia pseudacacia —a tree which had driven the 
Englishmen wild with delight, and which was early 
carried to English gardens, where it was pronounced 
of all exotic trees the finest. One enthusiast says that 
the “nightingale loves to confide her nest to this new 
inhabitant of our climate”; and elsewhere, “The native 
Amercians make their bows of the wood, and point 
their arrows with one of its thorns.” 
Some of the dwellings were “very spacious Build¬ 
ings which togeather with their Gardens about them 
cover a Great deal Ground.” Those of brick were 
