162 OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING 
own country, in its different sections. The gardens 
of Rome were old when the Roman gardens, which 
taught the art to the barbarian in England, were being 
planted; these in turn were old when the darkling 
of that long interval between the ancients and later 
man, settled upon the earth—that thousand years dur¬ 
ing which art of every kind was treasured and kept 
faintly alive only because there were monasteries, and 
good monks, to guard it. Their work had less to do 
with the esthetic than with the practical side of garden¬ 
ing, however; they preserved the ancient craft of the 
vineyard, and they raised the few coarse vegetables of 
that age: there they stopped. So the gardens which 
were growing as the murk lifted, towards the end of 
the fourteenth century, were what may be called the 
first new gardens—new in every sense—since reckon¬ 
ing and records began. It is a matter of little more 
than two centuries from this time to the planting of 
the first white men’s gardens on this continent; and 
that is just three hundred and twenty-nine years ago, 
reckoning from Drake’s mention of the gardens de¬ 
stroyed by him at St. Augustine. 
Beyond three hundred years back then, it is an abso¬ 
lute certainty that there is nothing for the term “old- 
fashioned” to unearth, so far as our own land is con¬ 
cerned. And the first actual mention of a garden— 
passing by those just referred to—is not until eighteen 
