140 OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING 
the soberer beds of salad and savory. Poppies, sweet 
peas, hollyhocks, sweet Williams, gillyflowers, stocks, 
mingle in the oldest garden fashion with the cabbages, 
lettuces, cucumbers, the sage, marjoram, lavender and 
thyme. Here verily is a garden that might be three 
centuries old instead of only a little above a third 
that age, so true is it to the earliest modes, before 
purely “pleasure gardens” of flowers alone, were made. 
Opposite, in the finer flower garden, are the old- 
fashioned flowers, too; but this is essentially modern 
when compared to the sweet south garden. For back¬ 
ing this are the great greenhouses where many rare 
exotics found a home. Gifts such as these came often 
to the idolized General, and of course continued to 
come to the President in even greater numbers. And 
he was never too busy to thank, personally, the giver. 
“With much sensibility I received your polite letter,” 
he writes to one from Philadelphia, in 1795, “I thank 
you, Sir, for the plants which are mentioned in the list 
which accompanied it.—Presuming they arrived at 
Norfolk with the letter, I have requested a gentleman 
of my acquaintance at that place to forward them to 
my garden at Mount Vernon on the Potomack River, 
near Alexandria, Virginia, and I feel myself particu¬ 
larly obliged by the offer to supply me with other plants 
from the Botanical Gardens in Jamaica. When my 
situation will allow me to pay more attention than I 
