202 OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING 
elected to consider. It is a long time—almost two 
centuries—even in the garden where time moves 
slowly; and there were many changes, as well as many 
entirely new things brought from the new lands west, 
during this time. So it will be well to divide it into 
two sections, in order to put things where they belong 
and eliminate complications. 
Happily it divides itself, though somewhat un¬ 
equally to be sure. The end of the seventeenth cen¬ 
tury marks a very definite break, at the time when 
formalism was giving way to naturalism; and if we take 
the year 1700 as the dividing period, a little more 
than one-third of our old-fashioned gardens will be 
on its farther side while a little less than two-thirds 
of them are in front of it. This we shall find a very 
convenient natural division, I think—and one which 
will simplify reconstruction considerably. 
Nothing at all was written in America about gar¬ 
dens, or gardening, or flowers until 1748—nearly half 
a century after the dividing line is passed. In this 
year, Jared Eliot, grandson of the great “apostle to 
the Indians,” John Eliot, began a series of “Essays on 
Field Husbandry” which were kept up until 1759. 
But these are agricultural rather than horticultural, as 
their name implies; and it was eleven years later still 
before anyone here wrote anything devoted to the 
flower garden. So it is to English writers and records 
