144 OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING 
“Lawrence Lewis is appointed a Capt. in the corps of 
Light Dragoons,” he writes to a relative in January, 
1799, at the time France was threatening and he had 
been once more summoned to military duty at the 
head of the army, “but before he enters the camp of 
Mars, he is to engage in that of Venus with Nellie 
Custis on the 22nd. of next month; they having, while 
I was in Philadelphia, without my having the smallest 
suspicion that such an affair was in agitation, framed 
their Contract for this purpose.” 
Astonished he certainly was, but displeased he as 
certainly was not. So, at early candle light, on the 
sixty-seventh and last anniversary of his birth which 
he himself should see, he gave the hand of “our grand¬ 
daughter,” as he always called her, in marriage to his 
strapping nephew, who was enough like him to have 
been his own son instead. 
Of the flowers which adorned his gardens, General 
Washington himself left little in the form of notes 
or observations. The trees meant more to him, and 
his boxwood hedges, which he loved as a gentleman 
should and would. Within these boxwood beds the 
plants probably varied from year to year, for here 
would be only such annuals as were popular—although 
his garden doubtless kept well in advance of the 
“style,” owing to the constant gifts of plants, seeds 
and roots from all over the world. From Bartram 
