A VISTA IN A TIME-WORN YET LOVELY GARDEN WHICH EXPRESSES THE IDEALS AND MAGNIFICENCE OF THE CAVALIER OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING A HISTORY AND A RECONSTRUCTION BY GRACE TABOR AUTHOR OF The Garden Primer, The Landscape Gardening Book, etc. NEW YORK McBRIDE, NAST & COMPANY 1913 TO THE MEMORY OF ALL THOSE WHO—DISDAINING NOT TO CONSIDER SO SMALL A THING AS THE PLANTING OF A SEED OR THE OPENING OF A BUD—KEPT THE HOMELY RECORDS WHICH HAVE MADE IT POSSIBLE FOR ME TO WRITE THIS BOOK, I DEDICATE IT FOREWORD When the idea of this book first came to me, long ago, suggested by the question that has continually been asked me by a great many people, it shaped itself in my imagination as something very dif¬ ferent from what I now find the actuality to be. The sorcery of the phrase was upon me; and I never dreamed that “old-fashioned gardening” could lead me on other than a gentle, sweet and sentimental pilgrimage through flowery ways, along which fine, shadowy figures flitted to keep me goodly, if ghostly, company. For it has been a term to conjure with for many a day—to lead the fancy along paths of pleasant dalli¬ ance through whose dim distances the laughter of dainty dames in powder and patches echoed against the deeper tones of bewigged gallants with whom they coquetted. But to tell the story of gardening has been very different than to dream of it, I find. Peopled with these delightful shades the old nooks and corners are, to be sure: but of the truth about their flowery retreats they will tell nothing. They only laugh when urged to seriousness, and disappear with a flash of bright eyes, a twinkle of high heels and a clatter of vii viii FOREWORD side arms, where the path vanishes in a spicy tangle of cinnamon rose—gone back to their love making of course. So from them at last I parted company, uncon¬ sciously I must confess—for the interest in learning what they would not be persuaded to tell was very absorbing—and not indeed, until I had finished my task were they missed! Not until then did I know that here was not what I had expected to do, here was not what it had seemed must inevitably be done, in writing the book of my dream. They are not here: no lovely ladies nor courtly cavaliers cast so much as one quick glance out from behind a single page as it is turned. For here all is sober reality and no dream; here is the truth about old gardens, not select glimpses of a path, or a gate¬ way, or a time-stained dial, hung like pictures upon the silver cord of romance. Hence there is here a cer¬ tain measure of disillusion, perhaps, for some. Be warned, therefore, such of you as cherish the shadow and reject the substance. Put down the book; it is not the thing you are seeking. Yet let justification be mine; for I at the very first invited all those whom you expected to find here, to be present—indeed, I urged them with all the elo¬ quence at my command. But they knew better than I the places where they might linger; and they knew, FOREWORD IX before ever I suspected it, that among the things which would come clamoring to be told, they would be jostled perhaps, and sometimes thrust aside. So they declined. And I cannot offer you a book of old gardening dreams, but only of old gardening. Staten Island, New York, In the Indian Summer of 1912. CONTENTS Foreword .vii PART I. HISTORICAL CHAPTER PAGE I Of Beginnings .i II Spanish Gardens of the Semi-Tropics . . 14 III Gardens of the English Gentlemen Adven¬ turers .30 IV New Amsterdam Housewives’ Gardens . ,. 56 V Austere Puritan Gardens.80 VI Catholic and Quaker Along the Divide . 109 VII The Presidents’ Gardens.132 PART II. RECONSTRUCTION I The Old-Fashioned Garden . . . ., .159 II Design.168 III Inclosures.. 183 IV Old-Time Flowers.200 V “Anticke” Works.225 VI The Early Ideals.232 VII Reproducing the Old-Fashioned Garden . 240 Bibliography.255 Index.261 ILLUSTRATIONS “A vista . . . which expresses the ideals and magnificence of the Cavalier” . . Frontispiece FACING PAGE ‘ A characteristic riot of flowers and fruits jealously se¬ cluded behind house and walls is this old Spanish- American garden”. Plan of the Governor’s house and grounds, St. Augus¬ tine, from Stork’s map of 1763.24 A square of St. Augustine, from Stork’s map . . 28 “Arbors invite to loitering always in old gardens” . 38 Even in this glade . . . the vine preserves per¬ petual unity between poetry and utility ... 48 Somerndick’s bouwerie, from Holland’s plan ... 74 Nicholas Bayard’s bouwerie, from Holland’s plan . 78 Plan of a Nantucket garden, about 1800 .... 94 Plan of another Nantucket garden, with fruits in the large box-bordered beds.98 A path in the Nantucket garden shown in plan facing page 98. . Belmont Hall, an old Maryland garden . . . u/> A garden entrance of curious but restrained rustic con¬ struction .. ILLUSTRATIONS FACING PAGE Wyck, Germantown, a fine example of the Quaker’s well-loved long extended lines.124 The lawn and Mansion House at Mount Vernon . 132 In the boxwood garden at Mount Vernon . . . .136 Washington’s plan of Mount Vernon . . ... 138 Within the kitchen garden at Mount Vernon . . .140 Plan detail of the north garden, Mount Vernon . .142 The Mansion, Monticello.146 The main entrance to Monticello.148 “The Offices” beneath the terrace at Monticello . .152 Jefferson’s office, Monticello.154 “Seclusion for the garden as a whole and secluded bits within the garden were the old-time gardener’s hobby”.164 An old New England garden.170 Path in an old garden that has been over-planted in its old age.174 “Delightful arch arbors such as this abound in old gar¬ dens” .178 A variation of the New England picket fence . . . 188 “Plastered posts distinguish the inclosure of this old place”.196 Flower garden designs by John Rea.208 Design for a maze, by Jan van de Gro-en .... 228 A box-bordered kitchen garden of long ago . . . 236 ILLUSTRATIONS FACING PAGE Plan for a flower garden in the old style . . . . 242 “Dutch influence is felt here, though much modified by aggressive Puritan independence.246 Detail of the box garden, Hampton, Maryland . . 250 Plan of Hampton, marking the transition .... 252 I OF BEGINNINGS F OUR paths lead back, through time-dimmed reaches, in four directions, to the first gardens of this western world. Overgrown and choked they are, and all but obliterated, for battles have raged over them, blood has soaked them, and the wilderness has very nearly claimed them for its own, again and again. Yet they are not quite lost; the very fact that we, as a nation, are here, is the strongest assurance that they too remain. For a history of a people’s gardens is very nearly a history of the people themselves; and where civilization has maintained itself, there gardens have been made. The longest of these paths—longest yet in some re¬ spects the least obscure—ends at that old city which Spain built, upon the site seized from the Huguenots whom Menendez massacred in 1565—St. Augustine, in Florida. But this one trail is foreign-seeming all its length, and nowhere upon it does the pilgrim of the western world feel at home. It is as if the spirit 2 OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING of old-world man and the semi-tropical mood of Na¬ ture combined to hold aloof, to decline assimilation with the republic; and although it holds much of in¬ terest and delight, it is the interest of the strange and foreign rather than of homely familiarity. Here is no affection, no stir of that strange thrill which comes with the contemplation of the things common to our nativity, that wonderful exhilaration which we call patriotism. The old Spanish city in New Spain is with us, but not of us—nor we of it. Shorter by a score of years is the trail that began, back at its farther end, when Raleigh’s two barks, under the commanders Philip Amidas and Arthur Bar- low, reached the shoal water off the Virginia shore which indicated land not far distant, on the second day of July, 1584; where “we smelt so sweet and strong a smell, as if we had been in the midst of some delicate garden, abounding with all kinds of odorife¬ rous flowers,” wrote Barlow, in his immortal account of the voyage. Wonderful old Barlow! Bronzed, weathered, dauntless man of the sea, yet he wrote as a poet of the sweet promise borne on the wings of the wind; and what a picture he has made for us, just from words, of the land whereon they finally landed. “We viewed the land about us, being, whereas we first landed, very sandy and low toward the water’s side, but so full of grapes as the very beating and surge of OF BEGINNINGS 3 the sea overflowed them. Of which we found such plenty, as well there as in all places else, both on the sand and on the green soil of the hills as in the plains, as well on every little shrub as also climbing toward the top of high cedars, that I think in all the world the like abundance is not to be found: and myself having seen those parts of Europe that most abound, find such difference as were incredible to be written.” Knowing as we do now that North America is in¬ deed richer in native representatives of the genus Vitis than perhaps any other part of the world, it is possible to conceive something of the astonishment which must have filled this sailor, when he stepped upon virgin shores so richly clothed in a natural mantle of earth’s most anciently cultivated fruit. Small won¬ der that he went on, with bursting enthusiasm, “The woods were not such as you find in Bohemia, Mos- covia or Hercynia, barren and fruitless, but the high¬ est and reddest cedars of the world, far bettering the cedars of the Azores, of the Indies, of Libanus; pines, cypresses, sassafras, the lentisk or the tree that beareth the mastic; the tree that beareth the rind of black cinnamon, of which Master Winter brought from the Straits of Magellan; and many other of excellent smell and quality.” The third way winds back to the little fur trading posts set up by the Dutch in 1614, at the southern 4 OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING extremity of the island home of the Ma-na-ata tribe of Indians that island which lies at the mouth of the great river explored by, and named for, Henry Hudson. Tradition declares of Hudson’s voyage in 1609 that some of his men, leaving the Half Moon to go on a fishing expedition, visited what is now Coney Island; and this was described as sandy but covered with plum trees, over which the ever lux¬ uriant grape vines clambered. Others, sent to explore and make soundings before the Half Moon herself should venture from her anchorage within the shelter of the long bar of sand which we know now as Sandy Hook, came back from their journey up through the Narrows with accounts of a land covered with trees, grass and flowers and delightfully sweet smelling. This is supposed to have been Staten Island. And still other visitors to what is now, presumably, the Jersey shore, found the land clothed with large oaks. Some of the natives who came out to visit the Half Moon brought among their gifts dried currants; and others traded vegetables and corn for the trinkets which natives seem always eager to procure. Later on, returning slowly, by reason of head winds, down the great river which he had succeeded in ascending about one hundred and forty miles, the Captain sent parties ashore at intervals, who returned with descrip¬ tions of what they found: “good ground for corn and OF BEGINNINGS 5 other garden herbs, with a great store of goodly oaks and walnut-trees, and chestnut-trees, ewe-trees and trees of sweetwood in great abundance/ 5 (This from Juet’s Journal.) Faint and scarce discernible in many places is the fourth and last path—the one worn by Puritan feet from the landing place at Long Point, where the first group of men from the Mayflower , well armed, were set ashore to explore the country, immediately after the signing of the Compact on the eleventh of Novem¬ ber, 1620. From this excursion they returned at night with a boat-load of juniper which delighted them with its fragrance.” Is not this a delightful touch—that it should be with these stern, pleasure repudiating, unyielding men even as it was with Hudson’s Dutch sailors, and the Cavaliers who came with Barlow 1 ? The sweet smells of the land, filling their nostrils, entranced them— and the first thing which they brought off to their ship was as much of the delicious spicy boughs as their boat would hold! Wherever men came to set foot on the shores of the new world, it is notable that fragrance met them; and over all the beauties and wonders to which the earliest writers bear witness, each in his own way, sweet odors drift, of flowers and fragrant gums and spices. All this was a new world, however, only to these 6 OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING newcomers; to its aboriginal inhabitants it was as old as the oldest, and the gardens of the red men were al¬ ready old, in some places at least, when the white men came. For that the Indians made gardens in the true sense, there can be no doubt; they are mentioned first by Barlow, who speaks of them very definitely in his account of the friendship which they formed with “the King’s brother,” Granganimeo by name. “He sent us divers kinds of fruits, melons, walnuts, cucumbers, gourds, pease and divers roots, and fruits very ex¬ cellent good, and of their country corn which is very white, fair and well tasted, and groweth three times in five months: in May they sow, in July they reap; in June they sow, in August they reap; in July they sow, in September they reap.” (Wherefore it is evi¬ dent they understood succession of crops quite as well as we do now.) “Only they cast the corn into the ground, breaking a little of the soft turf with a wooden mattock or pick-axe. Ourselves proved the soil, and put some of our peas in the ground, and in ten days they were of fourteen inches high. They have also beans very fair, of divers colors, and wonderful plenty, some growing naturally and some in their gardens; and so have they both wheat and oats.” Thirty years went by and then another Englishman, telling of another portion of the coast six hundred miles or more away to the north, verifies this reference OF BEGINNINGS 7 of Barlow’s to gardens. In his “Description of New England” written in 1614, Captain John Smith tells of “sandy cliffes and cliffes of rock, both which we saw so planted with Gardens and Cornefields.” Fur¬ ther on, discoursing on the fertility of the soil, he says, “the winter is more colde in those parts wee have yet tryed nere the Sea side then we finde in the same height in Europe or Asia; Yet I made a Garden upon the top of a Rockie He in forty-three and a half, (latitude) foure leagues from the Main, in May, that grew so well, as it served us for sallets in June and July.” It is a fact universally to be noted that the cultiva¬ tion of fruit has first engaged the attention of every na¬ tion, as far back as any history of planting or working the soil, reaches. And of all fruits the grape has prob¬ ably been cultivated from the remotest time, for there is no literature in the world so old but proves, by its references to wine and the vineyard, the far greater age of these. Whether the Indian cultivated the grape, however, it is impossible to say. Probably not, for it grew in such abundance everywhere that there was no need to do more than gather the harvest. But they made a beverage of its juice; “while the grape lasteth they drink wine, and for want of casks to keep it, all the year after they drink water,” says Barlow: adding, with evident, naive pleasure in the recollection, “but it is sodden with ginger in it, and black cinnamon, 8 OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING and sometimes sassafras, and divers others wholesome and medicinable herbs and trees.” But the wild grape, however luxuriant its growth, could hardly be expected to satisfy the taste of men accustomed to the vintages of France and the valley of the Rhine; hence their greatest delight in its abun¬ dance lay in the appeal which it made to their hope of producing, with it, a better strain than the world had yet known. To this end the strictest injunctions with regard to planting vines were laid upon the first plant¬ ers of Virginia by the First Representative Assembly in America. This Assembly, “convented at James Citty in Virginia, July 30, 1619,” enacted first “about the plantation of Mulberry trees; . . . every man as he is seatted upon his division, doe for seven years together, every yeare plante and maintaine in growte six Mulberry trees at the least, and as many more as he shall thinke conveniente and as his virtue and Industry shall move him to plante, and that all such persons as shall neglecte the yearly planting and maintaining of that small proportion shalbe subjecte to the censure of the Governour and the Counsell of Estate.” Following this, each is ordered to plant one hundred plants each year of “Silke-flaxe”; and “hempe, English and Indian,” and English flax and “anniseeds” are each required and enjoined—“each that have any of those seeds to make tryal thereof the OF BEGINNINGS 9 nexte season.” And then comes the paragraph deal¬ ing with the grape, set apart and thus emphasized. “Moreover, be it enacted by this present Assembly that every householder do yearly plante and maintaine ten vines untill thay have attained to the art and ex¬ perience of dressing a Vineyard either by their own industry or by the Instruction of some Vigneron.” The penalty for failure to do this is left to the discre¬ tion of the Governour and Counsell of Estate, and is not limited therefore to the “censure” of these august gentlemen. Four years later the Defence of the Virginia Char¬ ter states that there are “divers vineyards planted in the country whereof some contain ten thousand plants.” And “for silk, the country is full of mulberry trees of the best kind, and general order taken for the plant¬ ing of them abundantly in all places inhabited.” Apropos of this enthusiasm for mulberries, I may say in passing that there are only two species of Mulberry native to this continent. The Mulberry introduced by these early colonists—referred to as “the best kind” —in the hope of developing the silk industry here, was probably the Mulberry of China —Morus alba. With everything in Nature favoring them, the Cav¬ aliers were thus well established on their broad plan¬ tations by the time the Puritans began their struggle for existence here, against the odds of a far less cordial io OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING clime and soil; of lack of knowledge and of numbers; of poverty, of sickness, and of hostile savages. Wil¬ liam Bradford describes the gathering in of “the small harvest they had” during the autumn of 1621, after their first summer in the new world, and tells of the precautions which they took for their second winter, mindful of the horrors of their first. The proposition to enclose the settlement was approved and “this was accomplished very cherfully and the towne Impayled round by the beginning of March, In which every fam¬ ily had a prety garden plott secured.” The next summer—their second—every family was assigned a parcel of land for planting of corn, every man for him¬ self that there might be abundance for another year. And “the women now wente willingly into the feild, and tooke their litle ones with them to set come.” Governor Winslow, writing to the mother country in the same year, says that corn proved well but “our pease not worth the gathering, for we feared they were too late sown. They came up very well and blos¬ somed; but the sun parched them in the blossom.” What discouragement! Yet he makes no complaint, and after describing the fruits with which Nature has supplied them—“all the spring time the earth sendeth naturally very good sallet herbs. Here are grapes, white and red, and very sweet and strong also; straw¬ berries, gooseberries, raspas, &c., plums of three sorts, OF BEGINNINGS n white black and red, being almost as good as a dam¬ son”—he closes the list gravely, in his matter-of-fact way, with the self-revealing phrase, “abundance of roses, white, red and damask; single, but very sweet indeed.” It is of course obvious that gardens, as we conceive and know them, could not exist until inroads had been made upon the wilderness. And it is equally obvious that until both wilderness and savage had been sub¬ dued to a considerable degree, little thought could be given to the cultivation of any plant that had no def¬ inite economic value. Here and there a single flower undoubtedly, brought across the many leagues of sea, was watched and tended carefully by a homesick woman, not for its own loveliness perhaps—the wil¬ derness offered beauty in abundance, new and strange —but for her homesickness, because it spake of home. And precious seeds of well loved favorites were com¬ mitted to the strange earth in little patches here and there; gilliflowers, probably, and carnations—these “the queen of delights and flowers” according to the great Parkinson—sweet Williams, sweet Johns, holly¬ hocks perhaps; and without doubt some bulbs, though there would not have been space to bring many at first. We may easily infer however that common wild flowers were not among the early comers; for it would not be until they had grown precious because they 12 OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING were not, that it would occur to the colonists to bring them here. The plants most prized at home would be the ones most likely to be transported; and it is rarely a native wild flower that occupies so exalted a position with any people, as we well know ourselves. The character of the people in the various sections under which we have undertaken to consider them in relation to their garden making, exercised a very de¬ cided influence on the character of the gardens which ultimately developed in the different locales. The planters of Virginia came from a stock altogether unlike that of the Puritans of Plymouth, while the thrifty Dutch of Manhattan possessed virtues which neither of the others knew, albeit they had vices quite as ob¬ jectionable, no doubt. And Virginia, as might have been expected, became a land of broad expanses, of great estates, of landed gentry with many servants and the pleasures and follies of their kind; while Plymouth and the Massachusetts Colony was a land of small possessions, of closer dwelling for safety’s sake, of stern industry on the part of every individual, with few to serve, and of little pleasure; and the New Neth¬ erlands was like neither, for it lacked the spaciousness of the first and the fanaticism of the second, yet here were farms, and industry unparalleled, common to masters and servants alike, thrift, a full measure of good times, and a decided indulgence in a certain taste OF BEGINNINGS 13 for the beautiful. And in their tight little fatherland the Dutch had long been masters of gardening. Yet what they gained in a superior knowledge of garden craft was perhaps offset by what they lacked in taste; so that, after all, the gardens of their making, though different, were no finer than the English gar¬ dens to the north and to the south of them. Nor were they by any means as lovely as the careless gardens of the Andalusians, away beyond. II SPANISH GARDENS OF THE SEMI¬ TROPICS IT seems almost prophetic that the land which was the scene of the earliest attempts at gardening made by the white race on the western side of the At¬ lantic, should have been named “flowery” by its dis¬ coverer long before. This has a pleasant and alluring sound, conjuring a picture of fair delights, of sunlight and fragrance, and never a hint of a work-a-day world. Wherein is the prophecy; for the gardens which came indolently into existence beside the early Spanish dwellings were gardens of sunlight and fragrance, of fair delight veiling what of the work-a-day and prac¬ tical was there—which was never a deal, at that. This much we are sure of because as late as 1712, almost a century and a half after the establishment of the settlement of St. Augustine, the failure of the usual supply vessels, which came annually from Spain—or from the Spanish base in the West Indies—reduced the settlers to such absolute famine that they spent the 14 _SPANISH GARDENS_15 winter on a diet of horses, dogs, cats, and the like, ac¬ cording to one historian! Which is convincing wit¬ ness to their lack of energy or skill—or perhaps both —-and of native resourcefulness as well. For the ‘‘cab¬ bage-tree palm ”—Sabal Palmetto —which grows in all the beauty of native abundance here, has an edible ter¬ minal bud—hence its vulgar name—while an arrow- root plant is common; and both the white potato, na¬ tive to South America and taken thence to Spain as early, probably, as the middle of the sixteenth century* and the sweet potato, cultivated here by the Indians from prehistoric times, could have been grown with certainly very little effort. But the Spaniards who had come to drive the hated French protestants from the new world, were warriors rather than workers, and townsmen rather than plant¬ ers ; and what gardening there was in the earliest days came as a result of the efforts of the mission priests and Jesuit fathers—those soldiers of the Church who were in their train—rather than from any domestic inclination on the part of the citizens themselves. Pedro Menendez de Aviles brought with him, when he came on his errand of terrible and bloody zeal for the faith in 1565—a zeal backed by what strange stories of treasure to be gotten in this mysterious land, with its legendary fountain of eternal youth, who shall guess ^—twelve priests and four fathers of the Jesuit 16 OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING Order, according to his compact with King Phillip II; and there is also mention of five hundred slaves, “the third part of which should be men, for his own service and that of those who went with him, to aid in culti¬ vating the land and building.” But it seems doubtful that he brought these, for there is no later mention of them. Landing in the fall of the year, as did the Puritans over half a century later, the first six months were fear¬ ful ones for the Spaniards; not so much from climatic rigors, however—although East Florida may be un¬ comfortably cool at times—as from the harassing In¬ dian warfare waged by the followers of Satourara, who had been the friend of the butchered French. This chief ruled the country west, between the Indian village of Selooe where the Spaniards lay, and the river now known as the St. John; and he was so re¬ lentless that more than six score men are said to have perished from the arrows of his braves during this first winter. The fort was strengthened, however, and a reinforce¬ ment of fifteen hundred men, in seventeen ships, ar¬ riving during the summer of 1566, saved the somewhat discouraged colony. Two years went by in peace; but then came De Gorgues to avenge the massacre of his countrymen under Ribault—and whatever in the way of buildings or gardens may have been started, was SPANISH GARDENS 17 effectually undone, for he persuaded the Indians to make his vengeance complete by destroying the forts of which the Spaniards had boasted greatly. It is hardly to be supposed that the Indians spared any¬ thing, even if there were anything worth sparing; for they hated the Spaniards as cordially as they liked the French. The town was not totally destroyed, how¬ ever, and seems to have recovered from this attack without much ado. A battle was so much a part of the day’s work that it did not alter the course of men’s lives for long—provided it left them their lives. But there is no hint of a garden or gardens in the annals of the settlement until Sir Francis Drake’s visit to it in 1583. Coming up from South America with a fleet, he spied the Spanish lookout on Anastasia Is¬ land, and being of an inquiring turn of mind, sent men ashore to learn what it was. Their intentions were probably peaceable enough, but the Spaniards appear to have been panic-stricken at the sight of the ships and the landing party, marching along the shores of the island across the bay; and they abandoned their fort with discreet promptness. One, however, hiding in the bushes near by—so tra¬ dition has it—slew the sergeant-major who was pre¬ sumably in charge of the squad: and thus Drake’s anger was kindled and he “burned their buildings and destroyed their gardens.” The place then possessed. 18 OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING according to Barcia, “a hall of justice, parochial church, and other buildings, together with gardens in the rear of the town.” And an engraving of this at¬ tack by Drake, published in England upon his return, shows gardens upon the west side of the little settle¬ ment; which corresponds to “the rear of the town,” as it faced the east and the sea. The Monastery of the Franciscan Order had been established at the south end a little time before this; so doubtless one of the gardens destroyed—perhaps the finest and the best— was that of the brotherhood. For where there is a Monastery, there is a garden—this has always been the rule. Monastery gardens, however, are, first of all, gardens intended to furnish the simple fare of fast days, or of the austere rule of the Order. Pleasure gardens as such are not within the monkish province, although flowers are grown for the chapel altars to be sure; and in course of time many wonderful gardens have grown up within the cloisters and courtyards of religious houses. But these have not come until war¬ fare has been ended and the days of peace and plenty have arrived. The first Menendez was now dead—Pedro Menen- dez de Aviles, Adelantado of the Province—and his nephew, Don Pedro Menendez, governed in his place. After the English raid he saw the need of a greater number of inhabitants, and of more permanent struc- SPANISH GARDENS 19 tures; and forthwith began his efforts to increase the city’s population and to induce the Indians to settle in its vicinity. Assistance was sent him from Havana and the work of rebuilding was earnestly advanced; and it was at this time presumably, that stone build¬ ings began to be the rule. One at least had been built before, however, for it is noted that at the time of the Spanish evacuation, in 1763, there stood an old stone house with the date 1571 upon its front. But notwithstanding the efforts of its governor, St. Augustine was sixty-five years in growing to a town of three hundred householders. At that time, how¬ ever,—1648—it had beside, “a flourishing Monastery of the Order of St. Francis, with fifty Franciscans: and in the city alone a vicar, a parochial curate, etc., at¬ tached to the Castle.” Thus was its prosperity gauged by pontifical measure. Sacked and plundered by a buccaneer, worried by the Indians, and harried by the English from their Colony on the north, successively from this date on, it yields nothing more about its gardens until nearly the end of the century. Then, from the pen of the devout and God-fearing Quaker, Jonathan Dickinson, who was shipwrecked on the coast below St. Augustine with his wife and small baby, as they were voyaging from Port Royal in Jamaica to “Pensilvania,” and with whom he reached the city after nearly three months 20 OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING of Indian captivity and most frightful experience in the wilderness, there comes this brief account under the date “the 16th of the ninth month, 1696”: “The Town we saw from one end to the other: it is about three-quarters of a Mile in Length, not regularly built, the Houses not very thick; they having large orchards in which are plenty of Oranges, Lemmons, Pome-Cit¬ rons, Limes, Figs and Peaches: The Houses most of them old Building; and not half of them inhab¬ ited.” There can be no question of the veracity of this pious man’s description; therefore it is very evident that the settlement had not advanced. He gives an interesting and grateful account of their reception by the Spanish Governor, however, and tells of the party being set down in his kitchen to warm them¬ selves. Which reminds us that the Spaniards made no provision for heating their dwellings; and one writer who seems to have held both them and their buildings in rather low estimate, says that the latter were “all without glass windows or chimnies.” Life there under the ancient regime was obviously not a ceremonial existence by any means, even for the Governor’s own entourage. Yet when we do at last find old garden plans, they bear unmistakable witness to a taste at once formal and ceremonious. And they hark back to the garden as it was then understood over SPANISH GARDENS 21 the seas; as it had always been understood by all races of men, up to the beginning of the eighteenth century, when Dufresnoy succeeded Le Notre as director of the royal gardens at Versailles. The changes that have been wrought by man in his advance over the earth mark corresponding changes in man himself; and in no particular is this more evi¬ dent than it is in garden making. When the world was a wilderness, ranged by wild beasts and men less tame than the gardeners, defensive boundaries were a necessity; and within these boundaries, upon this bit of earth which each thus claimed for himself, no hint of the wilderness could be tolerated. For it was a foe and harbored foes—and no honest husbandman could possibly have temporized with it for an instant. This I think explains the careful exclusion of any suggestion of Nature in the old designs; the love of artificial forms; the stiff lines; the unyielding repres¬ sion; the straight, clipped walls of sternly disciplined growth. And it is a perfectly natural taste, considered in this light. For it is only by contrast that we com¬ prehend, and comprehending, enjoy; thus the gardens that were made while the struggle against Nature and the wilderness was going on, were designed instinct¬ ively to afford the greatest possible contrast to Nature and the wilderness. While those that have come later, as earth has gradually grown to be more and more 22 OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING under man’s dominion, we shall see, have, little by little, become more artfully like Nature. The one place which St. Augustine boasted that might reasonably be expected to show real design was, of course, the Government House, the seat of the Ade- lantado; and sure enough, here was a garden of some pretense. But Major Ogilvie, the English officer who received the town from the Spanish at the time of its cession in 1763, behaved so abominably that “the Governor destroyed his gardens, which had been stocked with rare ornamental plants, trees and flow¬ ers.” And the Spaniards very generally left the country, unable to endure the indignities of the situa¬ tion; with which emotions and exodus I must confess a sympathy, although the Governor’s unrestrained ebul¬ lition of temper, taken out on his garden, of all things, was most lamentable! But human nature is human nature—and he was sorely tried, beyond a doubt. After all, it seems that his destructive efforts failed in a measure, however; for the design of the grounds remained, clear and definite enough for William Stork, the engineer, to trace them in his plan of the town, made just after it was ceded to England, for his de¬ scription of East Florida. Neither did he succeed al¬ together in throwing doubt on what had grown in his gardens, although here, to be sure, we have no direct statement but must accept tradition. The English SPANISH GARDENS 23 surveyor-general's description of the town says: “At the time the Spaniards left the town, all the gardens were well stocked with fruit trees, viz: figs, guavas, plantain (banana), pomegranate, lemons, limes, cit¬ rons, shaddock, bergamot, China and Seville oranges, the latter full of fruit throughout the whole winter season.” Natural inference would therefore indicate that tradition is correct when it names the “pomegra¬ nate, plantain, pineapple, pawpaw, olive and sugar cane, orange and lemon trees,” as being in the Gov¬ ernor’s garden. These are to be found in the old dooryards and indeed everywhere, to this day. Many of course are native, but even the exotics are so thor¬ oughly naturalized that they grow in the wild as freely as the natives. De Brahm further explains that “The Governour’s residence has on both sides piazzas, viz., a double one on the south and a single on to the north; also a Belve¬ dere and a grand portico decorated with Doric pillars and entablatures.” Stork’s plan (facing page 24) does not give us these details of the residence, but as he shows its width to be thirty-five feet, he doubtless includes within the lines he gives, the piazzas on both sides. And the wing at the rear corresponds to his written lo¬ cation of the Belvedere which De Brahm mentions but does not locate. Stork’s description says: “In the middle of the town is a spacious square called the 24 OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING Parade, open toward the harbour: at the bottom of this square is the governour’s house, the apartments of which are spacious and suited to the climate, with high windows, a balcony in front and galleries on both sides; to the back part of the house is joined a tower, called in America a look-out, from which there is an extensive prospect towards the sea as well as inland. ,, Shade had always been an important consideration to the Spaniard, at home, and it was here as well; for he had come into a land of as great heat as the land of his birth, and had planted his settlement so near to the sea that of natural growth high enough to afford shade there was none. The double line of trees extending from the Governor’s dwelling back to the fortifications against which the grounds end, were placed thus to give a shaded walk from which to view the parterres. Such an arrangement of trees is, of all, the wisest and most practical for limited space, for it disposes of the greatest number with the least waste of ground that is valuable for raising vegetables or other crops. And the number herein shown would be enough to assure an ample supply of fruit for the Governor’s household, when it is remembered that many would bear fruit and blossoms at the same time, and all the year through. This double row of trees on either side the parterres, and the similar single rows extending along the boun¬ daries on either side of the grounds, were probably THE GOVERNOR’S HOUSE AND GROUNDS FROM A MAP BY WM. STOCK, 1763, SHOWING THE CITY WALL, EARTHWORKS AND OUTER DEFENSIVE HEDGE SPANISH GARDENS 25 either shaddock (grape-fruit), fig, pawpaw or olive— or perhaps all four—judging from their height and distance apart. These trees all attain about the same size at maturity, although the shaddock has a slight ad¬ vantage, possibly; and all are larger than any of the other trees that were introduced. Figs also were in the garden, along with pomegranate “shrubs.” Pos¬ sibly it is these which are indicated by the smaller dozen of trees immediately south of the house, al¬ though it is more likely that these were oranges and lemons, and that the lower-growing, less tree-like spe¬ cies were omitted from the plan. The natural habit of the pomegranate is shrubby, but it is possible to train it into a tree from fifteen to twenty feet high. The plan does not show any of the distinctly trop¬ ical forms which are indigenous, such as the palmetto and the plantain, although such forms are as easily distinguished, on a semi-pictorial drawing such as this —which is the sort of thing the old surveyors and map makers nearly always produced—as the ones here in¬ dicated. Indeed the planting of palmetto along the ramparts is clearly differentiated. Hence the conclu- ison that the native growth was not used in the gar¬ dens; which is, of course, in direct line with what we should expect—with the instinctive aim at contrast before pointed out. Pioneers yearn ever for their old world in their new, and these early builders and early 26 OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING gardeners wanted old Spain and all that was of old Spain, here in New Spain; their hearts turned to the old world for trees and flowers and fruits, regardless of the generosity of Nature in the new. “All the fruit trees (an indifferent sort of plum and a small black cherry excepted)” wrote Stork, “have been im¬ ported from Europe and thrive exceedingly well. . . . The lemons, limes, citrons, pomegranates, figs, apricots, peach, etc., grow here in high perfec¬ tion.” It has been and will be, forever the same. When the Moors came into Spain they brought with them all that they were able to bring, transforming the land of the conquered with their arts and architecture. And remote though they seem to us, their touch is felt here on our shores, through all these centuries, in both the dwellings and the gardens which the Spaniards made for themselves. One plant particularly, which we have curiously enough associated almost if not quite exclusively with the Puritans, is used by the Moors; and is nowhere lovelier than in the gardens of Spain. This is boxwood; its use in Spanish gardens indicates plainly that the design of the parterre immediately ad¬ joining the Governor’s house, which Stork has repro¬ duced so faithfully, is not too fanciful to admit it here. For it is planted in the most splendid and intricate forms of heraldry in Spain; and here is a design which SPANISH GARDENS 27 crudely realizes the same ideal, although this design had probably suffered greatly when Stork recorded it, through lack of the precise care necessary to preserve such forms. The myrtle may have been used also, though no mention of it is made directly. Hedges in old Span¬ ish gardens are made of it, and it is hardy in the Flor¬ ida latitude. For its fragrance it doubtless was brought with the other things from home; but boxwood after all is the aristocrat, and if it was used here at all, it undoubtedly had the place of honor. I should not doubt its presence but for the fact that none remains to-day—but that is not proof that none was used in the earliest gardens, before native plants had become acceptable; and before the English came. For flowers there were roses, roses and more roses— and very little beside roses. Whatever else there may have been, there was never an end of roses; and these were of course the roses of France, and the Bengal rose, with doubtless the delicious musk rose and the Bourbon this supposedly a long-ago hybrid of the French and the Bengal—and the Damask. Carnations there were and heliotrope, blue and white violets, oleanders, rose¬ mary, lavender, honeysuckle, jessamine, iris, tulips, Narcissus, poppies—but the roses were by far the most wonderful, and the most plentiful. Although no one speaks of the stone wall surround- 28 OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING mg the Governor’s ground until a much later era, we may safely assume that this is because no one thought it necessary to mention what was as much a part of every man’s demesne as the roof of his house. The streets of St. Augustine were narrow, “for shade” they tell us; this shade came from the buildings and the walls, not from trees. And the walls were really ex¬ tensions of the house fronts, as the second plan will show. This gives the plot on the north side of the Parade, with two residences of evidently considerable importance on the inner or west side, nearest the Gov¬ ernor’s house, while the smaller divisions of the remain¬ ing portion are the homes of householders of less con¬ sequence, apparently. Yet each place shows the same taste for regularity, and for the privacy of the grounds. It is the same throughout the town. The houses stand with one wall on the street line, and the way to the garden invariably lies through the house, or through an arcade beneath the second story of the house, just as it does in the towns and cities of the old world. The streets were pleasant enough for their purpose, made so by glimpses here and there of a rose that climbed above the wall, or a tree whose branches reached across; but nowhere were they allowed to be¬ come a part of the household of any resident. The seclusion of the garden was always as complete as the seclusion of any room in the house itself, and it really SPANISH GARDENS 29 was simply an unroofed, unfloored part of the home. And pavements of shells in fancy mosaic forms kept garden walks and courtyards always dry and clean, and carried the suggestion of liveableness out-of-doors. English money, thrift and energy did much during the twenty-one years before the little city again re¬ verted to Spain, in 1784; and one writer observes that many persons who were there at that time, with whom he talked, spake “ highly of the beauty of the gardens, the neatness of the houses, and the air of cheerfulness and comfort that seemed during that preceding period to have been thrown over the town.” But all that is another story; and though it is a very great debt that the English have put me under for most of that which I have been able to learn, through the ac¬ counts which they were good enough to render, it is not with their flourishing gardens and neat houses that we have anything to do. A certain measure of careless indifference, in a land where it is always summer and flowers—in this “flowery,” fragrant, sunny New Spain —a certain disregard, an indolence that is tolerant of some disorder, once the planting which assures straight, shaded walks, and satisfaction to the love of fruit, is done; these are the things which characterized the Spanish gardens in the new world—a new world grown old enough since they were planted to make them al¬ most, if not quite, forgotten. Ill GARDENS OF THE ENGLISH GEN¬ TLEMEN ADVENTURERS ^ I TEMPEST-DRIVEN through all the last furious night of their long voyage, the three ships which, under Christopher Newport, were bringing the first actual colonists to Virginia shores, scudded into haven “within the capes” sometime after break of day on April 26, 1607. Dawn had shown them the broad Chesapeake inlet, flanked by the two great headlands, one on their left and the other away to the north. And even as they passed in they named the former for their crown prince, young Henry of Wales, the lad who died so well beloved before ever he had a chance to be the king; while the latter they called for his brother, the unfortunate Charles, second son of James—Charles I, who ultimately lost his head some two-and-forty years later. Weary of the ships and “desiring recreation,” thirty of the adventurers went ashore, soon after passing Cape Henry—a gay little group, in great starched ruffs and 30 GENTLEMEN ADVENTURERS 31 velvet breeches, these with “panes” or slashings of silk. The Spanish dagger which gentlemen of then were wont to carry must have been left behind, likewise the fine gilt-handled sword; for in explanation of the as¬ sault made by five “saulvages” upon the party, in which two of the English were severely wounded, it is stated that they were unarmed. Curiously significant of the carelessness with which these restless blades had come in search of change and adventure and riches, is just this simple statement—that they who habitually wore arms, landed thus without them, on a shore known to be teeming with aboriginal inhabitants, whose friendliness of one time was by now very doubtful. The experience of Raleigh’s lost colony of the decade previous seems not to have impressed them as one would suppose. The three small ships which Newport commanded brought a total number of one hundred and five pas¬ sengers. Of these, only eighteen were avowedly men of toil—laborers; more than fifty names on the list have “gentleman” standing opposite them, one was a clergyman, six were the nucleus of the Provincial Coun¬ cil—these “gentlemen” also, of course; the names of the remaining seven of the Council were not to be revealed until all were landed and the sealed box con¬ taining the king’s final instructions and these names, might be opened—and there was a barber to curl their 32 OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING wigs, a tailor to keep their clothes, and a drummer for why, who shall guess'? This was the debonair handful which came to found a tributary state, to lay, all unawares, the foundations of a new nation, to build homes and gardens in the deep reaches of the wilderness that they first must con¬ quer. Not what could be called a likely seeming crew for the task—dandies and gallants, fearless and daunt¬ less, to be sure, but gentlemen adventurers of a truth, unskilled in the use of any implements save those of fighting, men of activity and action, impetuous, im¬ patient and imperious. On across the great Chesapeake they sailed, and into the mouth of that loveliest of rivers the Powhatan by ancient right and savage kingship, but thenceforth to be the James, for their king, according to the invaders. And thus, up the water-way of the Indian, came the pale-face civilization. And they worked, of a surety, in those early days, every man doing a man’s share, vel¬ vet breeches or no; worked so well that within two weeks of their arrival, the first sowing of wheat at the Plantation of Jamestown had been made. Following this “a garden was laid off, and the seeds of fruits and vegetables not indigenous to the country, were planted. But the charter under which the London Company was permitted to colonize, stipulated that for five years GENTLEMEN ADVENTURERS 33 after the landing, the results of the colonists’ labors should be held in common, stored under careful super¬ intendence in public depots or houses of deposit. And this seems very nearly to have paralyzed effort; for in the fourth year, when Sir Thomas Dale arrived— May, 1611—to take charge of the Plantation, he found it in a sad state for want of industry. Even “those who were most energetic and honest by nature, were indolent and indifferent in the work of the field.” He went to work with the will that was characteris¬ tic of him, to find ways and means of overcoming this indifference; and it was to this activity on his part that the settlers owed their first real independent land hold¬ ings. These were separate gardens, assigned by con¬ sent and approval of the Council, to those men who had proven themselves of superior merit; and a large num¬ ber of these holdings, each amounting to three acres, were given out under what amounted to a lease—for there was a common garden for the cultivation of flax and hemp, wherein each was obliged to do his share of the labor in order to retain his three acres. Not until 1619, however, during the administration of Sir George Yeardley, did private and actual owner¬ ship in the land become general; at this time “one thousand acres were set apart for the maintenance of the clergy, three thousand for the support of the Gover¬ nor, ten thousand for the endowment of the University 34 OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING proposed for the Indians, and twelve thousand for the Company.” And each newly created office in the Col¬ ony had a similar reservation made to support it, great or little, according to its importance. The Governor was allowed one hundred tenants, and from this maxi¬ mum figure the number was scaled down for the other officials, proportionate to the holdings of each. Under this arrangement provision was made for the support of each office, with a proper number of servants, and in a manner to maintain its dignity. Tobacco was from the very first the obsession of every man of them, and their initial clearings were ever being enlarged and pressed further back upon the wil¬ derness, in order to secure the rich virgin soil necessary for its growth. For the demand of the rest of the world for this one plant alone, promised certain riches almost equal to the fabled treasures which had led the Spaniard Narvaez and his hapless followers to their deaths, nearly a century before. Supposed to be a native of South America, Nicotiana Tabacum was under aborginal cultivation for ages be¬ fore a white man ever set foot on Western shores; and like the corn, its origin in the wild state is, as a matter of fact, one of the mysteries of a lost past. A Spanish doctor is credited with taking the first tobacco to Eu¬ rope when he went home, from the West Indies prob¬ ably, somewhere about 1558; but its use as the Indians GENTLEMEN ADVENTURERS 35 use it did not become fashionable and general until a little boy of that date had grown to manhood, and to a position great enough to enable him to set the style. Tradition has it that Sir Walter Raleigh’s second at¬ tempt at colonizing Virginia resulted in this much at least: that gifts of the Indian’s “implements” for us¬ ing tobacco were brought home to him by Ralph Lane, the Governor, and Sir Francis Drake, when the latter, stopping to pay them a courtesy visit in 1586, on his way up from hectoring the Spaniards in the West In¬ dies, was persuaded to take every discouraged man aboard and back to England. And Sir Walter immediately learned to smoke, “pri¬ vately in his home,” they tell us—the house at Isling¬ ton which was long the Pied Bull Inn. Here his arms were emblazoned, topped with a picture of the tobacco plant; the same likeness perhaps that Nicolo Monardes, a Spaniard, made sometime between 1565 and 1571, and published in his Treatise, issued between those years in Seville. This is of unique interest, being the first picture known of any American plant. It is not botanically accurate, but it is nevertheless unmistakably our Nicotiana. Sir Walter’s tobacco box was cylindrical in form, seven inches in diameter and thirteen long, of gilt leather with a glass or metal container within, capable of holding a pound of the seductive weed. Where it 36 OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING is now I do not know, but it reposed in the Thoresby Museum at Leeds in 1719, and was added to the col¬ lection of smoking utensils of all nations, made around the middle of the last century by an English duke. In 1621 Sir Francis Wyat came over to take up the office of Governor made vacant by Yeardley’s retire¬ ment, bringing with him new governmental instructions calculated to regulate the mania for tobacco growing which afflicted the planters. Com, wine and silk were to be cultivated, apprentices were to be put to trades which they were not to forsake for “planting tobacco or any such useless commodity,” and the colonists were admonished to “make small quantity of tobacco, and that very good.” Six years before this there had been twelve various articles of export from Virginia, whereas now sassa¬ fras and tobacco were the only ones. Twenty thou¬ sand pounds of the latter had gone to England in 1619; seventy years later the annual import into England was above fifteen million pounds! And this in the face of the King’s “Counterblast to Tobacco,” issued in 1616; and of very great and general opposition by many, to its use. Yeardley had left the Colony in a most happy and prosperous condition, however, and as it was about this time that a second test of “West Indian fruits” was made, it would seem that the interest in tobacco rais- GENTLEMEN ADVENTURERS 37 ing had not left them quite indifferent to the possibili¬ ties of everything else. Figs, lemons, almonds, pome¬ granates, olives, ginger, sugar-cane, plantains and cassada or prickly pear are named as subjects of this testing; the first mentioned were an immediate success, evidently, for the garden of Mrs. Pierce at Jamestown, although only three or four acres in extent, yielded a hundred bushels in one year, not so many years later. A legal provision regarding the enclosure of land, adopted by the General Court in 1626, would seem to indicate that some of the grantees of the vast areas privately acquired, had undertaken to be exclusive with regard to their holdings. This provision stipulates that only those fields wherein crops grow, may be en¬ closed “with fence”; the rest, it declares, must be left as a range for cattle. And the instructions to Gov. Berkeley in 1641 provided that every colonist holding one hundred acres of land should establish a garden and orchard, carefully protected by a fence, ditch or hedge. Berkeley himself had fifteen hundred apple, peach, apricot, quince and other fruit trees, which must have been so protected. The fence probably most commonly used, is charac¬ teristic to-day of many parts of Virginia—the pictur¬ esque “rail fence,” most easily constructed and most readily taken down and moved to another place, when 38 OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING cultivation was abandoned in the first. There were other fences, to be sure; an order of the General Court in this same year required all living in that part of the Colony to ‘‘rail, pale or fence” their tilled lands— which shows a recognition of three distinct kinds of inclosure. But Mr. Whitaker, one of the leading planters, “railed in” one hundred acres in 1621, as a protection to the vines, grain and other crops which were growing, or to grow, there. And from the ease with which rails could be obtained, compared to the difficulty of se¬ curing the less primitive materials needed for palings or board fence, they would obviously be most often chosen. Inclosures of wonderful beauty they make, too, with garlands of the wild morning-glory, the honeysuckle, grape and Virginia creeper strewn every¬ where upon them; and each recess crowded with its clustering wild flowers. The first dwellings of even the most prominent and wealthy planters were simple and plain in the extreme, mostly built of wood and having only the necessary rooms. What bricks were used seem to have been altogether of local manufacture, yet, in spite of their excellent brick clay and the ability to make bricks, the first all-brick house, according to tradition, was Secre¬ tary Kemp’s, built at Jamestown in 1639. Governor Berkeley built himself a brick house at Green Spring GENTLEMEN ADVENTURERS 39 about two years later—a very small house, consider¬ ing whose it was, for it contained only six rooms. But the kitchens and various rooms devoted to the .service of the household were invariably located in detached outbuildings, in this sunny land; so this, after all, was a house of considerable dignity and size, in view of the youth of the Colony. But it is com¬ monly said and believed that it could boast no dwell¬ ing in the seventeenth century—or none until towards the end of that century—of any pretense to any beauty or elegance. And naturally while houses were still somewhat rude and unlovely, gardens would be also. Towards the end of that century a new era was dawning, however—the era that always comes when the fighting and stern effort of pioneer years are over. The cultivation of tobacco had gradually extended and widened the holdings of those who raised it, for almost no plant exhausts the soil as it does; hence every plantation continually expanded, as before men¬ tioned, for new fields had constantly to be cleared up for it. The old and worn out ones where it had been cropped were improvidently left to barrenness in that age of plenty. If it robbed the land, however, it brought riches to the planters; and for it their laborers were many, for the slaves had come early. Added to this, the planters themselves were, many of them, men 40 OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING of rank, the sons of gentlemen and squires, pleasure loving and accustomed to rule. And so, quite naturally on these vast domains, there grew up a system like, and yet not like, the feudalism of the Middle Ages, with its luxury, its independence, its freedom, and its serf¬ dom. Villages and towns were not, and indeed are not to this day, throughout the greater portion of the Cava¬ lier country. The plantation was the unit; each was a small barony, each planter an overlord. Hence, when the time of finer arts than rude necessity de¬ manded had arrived, these developed according to this somewhat magnificent conception of himself and his holdings which the planter cherished—a conception, which such men, under such conditions, could hardly avoid cherishing. Englishmen, born to a love of the great ancestral homes, to a passion for land, for sport, for horses, for rule as well as for independence and self-government, they brought to America certain traditions to which they clung tenaciously; and certain ideals, which amplified themselves spontaneously, as it were— under the congenial conditions which America at that time afforded—into a luxurious, half princely, yet withal simple mode of living, unlike any that has ever prevailed anywhere else in the world. Every¬ thing that was done, was done on a scale of lavish GENTLEMEN ADVENTURERS 41 plenty, of magnificence! There was room and to spare, and abundance; and their ideas and ideals took shape accordingly. There were no small grants, nor cottage homes, nor cottage gardens. Only manor lands and great park-like inclosures could satisfy the taste of people like these. It is well past the middle of the seventeenth cen¬ tury, however, before there appears any evidence of a general concern for the finer and nicer things of the garden. Undoubtedly the gardens, such as they were, had been there for many years; but these were the ruder gardens of vegetables as well as flowers. It is not likely that much attempt had been made as yet toward definite garden design. The plantation yard was just a partly shaded, irregular open field whereon the dwelling stood. The grass of this was the same as any meadow showed, and the live-stock grazing about it afforded the only restriction to its growth. Near the house and conveniently located, was the garden, always fenced or railed or paled to keep out the hogs and cattle—and here grew the vegetables for the family, and such flowers as there was room for. Of these there were “gillyflowers” (this meant carnation pinks rather than what we now know as gilliflowers), “holly hocks, sweet bryer, lavender cot¬ ton, white satten or honestie, English roses, fether few (feverfew), comferie (comfrey), celandine”; and 42 OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING these were all jumbled in with the “lettice and sor¬ rel, Marygold, parsley, chervel, burnet, savory, time (thyme), sage, spear mint, penny royal, smalledge, fennel,” and what-not of pot herbs and sweet herbs,, for kitchen, linen chest and still. Garden material was constantly being sent from the mother country. A letter of Col. William Byrd to his brother, in 1684, expresses his thanks for goose¬ berry and currant bushes just received. He writes to someone else, in the same year, his appreciation of seed and roots sent him, which had been planted and flowered. These were iris, crocus, tulips and anemone. Cabins for the negroes were near by the dwelling— the “quarters” of all plantations—and kitchen, milk- house, wash-house, barns, hen-house, carriage-house, the shop and the overseer’s office formed quite a group of little buildings, usually arranged to flank the big house on either side, in an orderly fashion. And many yards had a tall pole with a toy house atop it, for the bee martin to live in; for the bee martin hates the hawk and the crow, and gives battle to both these raiders upon the poultry yard. Hence his presence was highly desirable. Always there were honey bees, too—many of them—the hives standing under the eaves of the lesser buildings. And as time went on, some planters fenced in the entire area about GENTLEMEN ADVENTURERS 43 their dwelling, instead of allowing the live-stock to roam up to the very doors. Col. William Fitzhugh’s description of his planta¬ tion, written to a correspondent in the mother country sometime between 1681 and 1686, reflects the life, and the average planter’s circumstances, so truly, that I cannot do better than give it, just as it came from his pen. “As first,” writes he, “the Plantation where I now live contains a thousand acres, at least 700 acres of it being rich thicket, the remainder good hearty plantable land, without any waste either by marshes or great swamps the commodiousness, con- veniency and pleasantness yourself well knows, upon it there is three quarters well furnished with all neces¬ sary house; grounds and fencing, together with a choice crew of negroes at each plantation, most of them this Country born, the remainder as likely as most in Virginia, there being twenty-nine in all, with stocks of cattle and hogs at each quarter, upon the same land is my own Dwelling house furnished with all accommodations for a Comfortable and gentill living, as a very good dwelling house with rooms in it, four of the best of them hung and nine of them plentifully furnished with all things necessary and convenient, and all houses for use furnished with brick chimneys, four good Cellars, a Dairy, a Dove¬ cot, Stable, Barn, Henhouse, Kitchen and all other 44 OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING conveniencys, and all in a manner new, a large Orchard, of about 2500 Aple trees, most grafted, well fenced with a Locust fence, which is as desirable as most brick walls, a Garden, a hundred foot square, well pailed in, a Yeard wherein is most of the afore¬ said necessary houses, pallizado’d in with locust Puncheons, which is as good as if it were walled in and more lasting than any of our bricks, together with a good stock of cattle, hogs, horses, mares, sheep, &c & necessary servants belonging to it, for the supply and support thereof.” These “Aple” trees are elsewhere said to have been of many varieties—“mains, pippins, russentens, cos¬ tards, marigolds, kings, magitens and batchelors.” Then of pears he had, “bergamys and wardens”; and he had also quinces, apricots, plums, cherries and peaches. To him must be credited the statement that the colonists “purpose making Towns”; I doubt if any would consent to go and live in them, however, which is perhaps the reason they did not carry out the intent which he avowed. He declares at one time that he has a “mind to try if Olives would not thrive well in the Straights, as far in the Northern Latitude as we are here, some of which sort you might procure in London; Therefore I will desire you to procure for me some of them with directions how to manage them.” GENTLEMEN ADVENTURERS 45 Evidently the trials of “West Indian fruits,” back around 1620, had not proven altogether successful—or the results were not a matter of record—else he would have known whether or no olives would thrive. The taste in gardening which prevailed at the time when gardens may be said to have been first designed in Virginia, was of course a direct inheritance from England; therefore it is necessary to glimpse the Eng¬ lish gardens of the period in order to understand best what this was, making due allowance for the lapse of time which is always required for the passing of a fashion from one continent to another. What Eng¬ lishmen were doing with their gardens in England during any given decade would be more likely to serve as the pattern for Englishmen abroad in the succeed¬ ing decade, than for those whose work was contempo¬ rary. With this in mind, let us see what England’s gardens have to offer at the time of the first colonists. We must go away back to the Protestant refugees who poured into the Island from the Continent, while Elizabeth was queen, fleeing from the persecutions which assailed them there under the Inquisitorial methods. These brought with them the ideas of France and Holland, principally. Italy, too, may have influenced some, though not to a great degree, and that somewhat indirectly. Thus the gardens made during Elizabeth’s reign were something dis- 46 OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING tinctly different from any England had known before, and they left their impress upon all that came after. And our earliest American gardens were inspired by a modification of these cosmopolitan Elizabethan gardens; hence from the soil up, we have inherited a blend from all of the old world. The Elizabethan gardens were the first to be defi¬ nitely planned by the architect who designed the house; and they were held “to be no mean adjunct to a house, or a confusion of greenswards, paths and flower beds”; on the contrary, they required skill and a high degree of cultivated taste to compass them; they were parts of an elegant design, and as such were weighed and nicely balanced to the rest, represented by the house. The usual scheme was a terrace im¬ mediately against the dwelling, which by its elevation above the garden, overlooked it in its entirety. Steps led down, and generous walks—“broad straight walks called Torthrights’ connected the plots of the garden, as well as the garden with the house. Smaller walks ran parallel with the terrace, and the spaces between were filled with grass plots, mazes or knotted beds. The forthrights corresponded to the plan of the build¬ ing, while the patterns in the beds and mazes har¬ monized with the details of the architecture.” These gardens were almost always a perfect square; and Parkinson explains that the reason this form was GENTLEMEN ADVENTURERS 47 preferred rather than “an orbicular, or triangular or an oblong,” was “because it doth best agree with man’s dwelling.” Invariably they were enclosed, sometimes with brick or stone, sometimes with a paling, again with a hedge. Brick or stone walls were usually cov¬ ered with rosemary, which is one of the things that Josselyn, writing from New England, says “is no plant for this country.” This popular usage of it at home accounts for his special mention of it as unfit here. It quite possibly may have been in some Vir¬ ginia gardens, however. The terraces were sometimes retained by a stone wall; or again they were simply the grassed slope which we commonly see now. In either event they were broad and splendid, and afforded delightful loitering-spots where the garden’s beauties could be enjoyed. The open walks were made of gravel, sand or turf, usually, though some were planted with fra¬ grant herbs,” “burnet, wild thyme and water mint” being pronounced by Bacon the choicest of all when trodden on. “Shade alleys” also sometimes ran beside the gardens, and a walk between high clipped hedges, or between its wall and a hedge, was often introduced. These, being less open to sun and air, were always of gravel or sand. We have all, I think, fallen into the error of sup¬ posing that the designs executed in boxwood and com- 48 OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING monly regarded as bordered “beds,” which our fancy associates with old-time gardens, were always filled with flowers. This is not true. Some may have been, but the great gardeners and writers upon garden¬ ing of the age, are careful to express their condemna¬ tion of such treatment. Flowers were put into bor¬ ders along the walks and against the hedge, or into what they called “open knots.” These were of fanci¬ ful form similar to the bordered knots, perhaps just like them; but were without inclosure of any kind— open, and therefore better suited to flowers; what we to-day would call a bed. Boxwood borders, or bor¬ ders of thyme or rosemary or hyssop or thrift—all these were used in planting the intricate bordered knots and designs—left no room with their convolu¬ tions and often very narrow complexities, for flowers. And moreover, such designs needed no flowers; they were expressions of form and line alone; flowers fur¬ nished quite another motif, to be used in another place. Boxwood was highest in favor for a border to the simplest knots—that is, those whose design was not too intricate for its sturdiness. “French or Dutch box” Parkinson calls it, recommending it because it does not overgrow the beds and spoil their form, “as thrift, germander, marjerome, Savorie,” do. Laven¬ der cotton was used also; and here again Josselyn’s GENTLEMEN ADVENTURERS 49 mention of it proves its use in America—and why not for just this purpose of working out fanciful designs? Where living borders were not used, oak boards, tiles, the shank bones of sheep thrust into the ground, or “round whitish or blewish stones” took their place, these of course forming open beds or knots. There¬ fore it was within inclosures of this sort that flowers were usually set. Such were the gardens from which the earliest Cava¬ liers came to the new world—and such, in a measure, must have been the earliest ideals which they would labor here to realize. But the later immigrants, and travelers who came to visit, brought newer “fashions” than the gardeners of Elizabeth’s age had known; for during the exile of Charles II into France he had been inspired by the beauties of Versailles, and upon his return at the Restoration, he diligently set about re¬ producing them. The great Le Notre, designer and builder of these wonderful gardens, which the splendidest of the Louis, the “Grand Monarch,” caused to be planted on an arid plain at such tremendous cost, was invited to come to England and undertake work on the royal gardens there. It is not known that he ac¬ cepted, but certainly alterations were made in them that embodied his principles, and if they were not superintended by him personally, they were the work 50 OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING of his pupils. A celebrated English gardener, con¬ sidered indeed the best of his time in a practical way, one John Rose, was sent to study at Versailles, and became Royal Gardener to Charles upon his return. So the French ideas were thoroughly in evidence in the new fashions of the Restoration; but because of their magnificence they were not adapted to any but the estates of the nobility. Things had to be done on a tremendous scale, ac¬ cording to Le Notre’s conceptions; avenues were longer and larger, trees were doubled in number and planted at greater distance apart along them, walks and terraces were much more imposing, and archi¬ tectural adornments were everywhere. Statues, tem¬ ples, fountains, cascades, arbors, seats, trellises, sun¬ dials were met on every side. Naturally this was not the sort of thing in which a man of only moderate wealth might indulge; yet equally true it is that it was the particular thing towards which all would aspire in such measure as they were able, it being the latest fashion. So Beverly’s reference to summer¬ houses, grottoes and arbors, which he says were in the gardens here, is precisely what we might expect, these being an imitation of the elegancies of those mag¬ nificent gardens which the King and nobility were building. When Dutch William of Orange came to sit on the GENTLEMEN ADVENTURERS 51 English throne, still another continental influence was felt; and as whatever affected English taste affected it on both sides of the Atlantic, the mathematical pre¬ ciseness of this new school began to tell on the gardens that were being constructed here, at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Vegetable sculpturing or topiary work was a feature of Dutch gardening, like¬ wise the huge urns or vases set up in prominent parts of the garden; and open iron fences with very impos¬ ing gates began to take the place of impenetrable walls, in conformity to the growing desire to see abroad into the world. Thus we have curiously complex and mixed ante¬ cedents for the gardens which came into being around such places as Mt. Airy, the home of the Tayloe’s, built in 1650; Shirley, of the same year; Tuckahoe, 1700 or 1710; Chatham, 1720, with its ten-acre lawn before the house; Stratford Hall, 1725 to 30; and “Belvadera” at Westover, the great home which Col. Byrd built in 1726. Here there was a walled garden of two acres, with boxwood borders and box trees, and Byrd himself loved it so well that here he was buried, his monument marking the center of the garden. Col. Randolph’s house at Tuckahoe impressed one traveler as so remarkable that he described it minutely in 1729. It was “built on a rising ground, having a most beautiful prospect of James River. On one side 52 OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING is Tuckahoe, which being the Indian name of that creek, he named his plantation Tuckahoe after it: his house seems built solely to answer the purpose of hos¬ pitality, which being constructed in a different man¬ ner than most countries; I shall describe it to you: It is in the form of an H, and has the appearance of two houses joined by a large saloon; each wing has two stories and four large rooms on a floor; in one the family reside and the other is reserved solely for visitors: the saloon that unites them is of a considera¬ ble magnitude, and on each side are doors; the ceiling is lofty and to these they principally retire in summer, being but little incommoded by the sun and by the doors of each of the houses and those of the saloon being open, there is a constant circulation of air; they are furnished with four sophas, two on each side, and in the centre there is generally a chandelier; these saloons answer the two purposes of a cool retreat from the scorching and sultry heat of the climate, and of an occasional ballroom. The outhouses are detached at some distance, that the house may be open to the air on all sides.” In the gardens at Tuckahoe were box-bordered beds containing flowers, each bed being given up to one kind, notwithstanding the disapproval of this sort of planting by the great English gardeners before mentioned. Landscape gardening, in its broadest sense, owes its GENTLEMEN ADVENTURERS 53 inception probably to Dufresnoy, Le Notre’s successor as Director of the Royal Gardens. His work began to show an imitation of Nature that had never before been attempted, nor even considered desirable. But, as I have earlier pointed out, it was not to be expected that men should wish to duplicate in their gardens that from which they could wrest these same gardens only by the mightiest effort and vigilance. So it is not until the artificial has obscured Nature that Na¬ ture begins to seem admirable. Addison’s essay on “Imagination,” written in 1712, commended the new ideas seen in the gardens of France—and also Italy—for representing “an artifi¬ cial rudeness much more charming” than the cus¬ tomary precise and stiff design. Pope also became an ardent exponent of the naturalistic style, and ex¬ pressed himself with a pleasant piquancy which af¬ fords as good a rule as any ever laid down: “In all, let nature never be forgot, But treat the goddess like a modest fair, Nor overdress, nor leave her wholly bare.” And Horace Walpole, writing later of Bridgman, whose work became the rage about 1720—and who, by-the-way, is regarded as having possessed a more re¬ fined taste than any of his contemporaries—says he was “far more chaste, he banished verdant sculpture 54 OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING and did not ever resort to the square precision of the foregoing age. He enlarged his plans, disdained to make every division tally to its opposite, and though he still adhered much to straight walks with high dipt hedges, they were only his great lines; the rest he diversified with wilderness and with loose groves of oak, though still within surrounding hedges.” This broader influence was greatly felt by the middle of the eighteenth century; the period, in America, when “the time of infancy had passed: the struggle for existence was happily over” and “America . . . turned with the eagerness of new desire to the comforts and elegances of social life . . . the arts grew in strength as though born upon the soil.” Un¬ der this influence, overlying all the earlier ideals and traditions and yet not obscuring them nor blotting them out, the work of Washington in the gardens at Mount Vernon was begun; and of Jefferson at Monti- cello. And the first, a semi-public memorial, remains to us to-day as it was designed by the first and greatest of the land, while the second has been restored and splendidly preserved under private care. Finally, it is particularly interesting to note, by a comparison of the plans of these Virginia gardens with those of the earlier Spanish settlement of St. Augus¬ tine, and with the gardens of the Dutch, the great difference in their makers. The gardens of the old GENTLEMEN ADVENTURERS 55 Spanish town are on lines of primitive directness which quite clearly reveal sharply defined limitations. A directness which at first glance seems similar pre¬ vails in the Dutch, but this becomes neat restraint upon close study, rather than limitation, although there is a certain lack of imagination. But all the Dutch artful carefulness is simplicity itself when placed alongside the complex and very highly “or¬ ganized” design, showing great ingenuity in its every part, which is the development of the English-Ameri- can—or as we may by this time say, the American. Here, through these lines upon the paper—which are really the pictures of their creators’ minds, in a cer¬ tain sense—it is possible to trace broadly the racial characteristics and the complex qualities which lie far beneath them, that are peculiar to the races repre¬ sented. IV NEW AMSTERDAM HOUSEWIVES’ GARDENS I T was from a snug little land that they came, these solid Dutchmen who followed Hudson and his Half Moon some twenty years after the first voyage; a land whose every square foot was precious, redeemed from the waters as so much of it was by patient and untiring effort—and retained by ceaseless vigilance. So the habit of thrift in the use of land was strong upon them; indeed I doubt they could be lavish with it if they tried. And then, too, they were dwellers in town. Feu¬ dalism had never had the hold upon Holland that it had upon the rest of Europe; partly, no doubt, be¬ cause the country’s natural physical conditions were distinctly against the development of feudal holdings, and partly because the temper of the race would have none of it. In Friesland, the “cradle of the Anglo- Saxons,” it was never known; and elsewhere through¬ out the Netherlands the independent town life had 56 NEW AMSTERDAM GARDENS 57 formed a barrier against which it beat in vain, ulti¬ mately shattering itself. Hallam says “their self- government goes beyond any assignable date.” And another writes, “Here,” (in Holland) “art was first made the servant of the home, glorifying the things of common life, and the people rather than the kings and nobles.” The States-General of Holland seem not to have realized this spirit of the people, when they took the first definite steps towards establishing a permanent colony in New Netherland, in 1629; for to the mem¬ bers of the West India Company—the holders of the Charter of 1621—each of whom was already assigned a large grant, they gave the privilege of extending their limits sixteen English miles on one side of the river, or half that distance on both sides—exclusive of the island itself, which was reserved to the Com¬ pany—and “so far into the country as the situation of the occupiers will permit,” on condition of their planting, each of them—as “Patroon” or master—a colony of fifty souls, above fifteen years of age. These lands the Patroons were to hold as “a perpetual inheritance”; they were also allowed and instructed “to establish officers and magistrates in the cities,” and to dispose of the property by will. To others who should go to the Colony and settle independent of the Patroons, as much land was granted, under the ap- 5 8 OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING proval of the Company’s Director-General and Coun¬ cil, “as they shall be able to improve. These inde¬ pendent colonists were to be taxed, but no tax was to be paid for ten years by the tenants of the Patroons, who came bound to them for a term of years, and in addition to this the Patroons themselves were promised “blacks” by the Company. Emigration from Holland under this Charter, so little calculated to the taste of Dutch independence, was slow. A few came, to be sure, but not many; there was no stampede of eager Hollanders not by any means. Trust these wary people to take better heed than that. They staid obstinately at home, and went about their business, the rank and file of them, disdaining to notice the great West India Company at all—and obstinately the great West India Company waited, for eleven long years; waited while the few traders in furs who were already resident in the Colony, misbehaved among themselves more and more persistently, and wrangled and quarreled. These would not work, when they might, but spent most of their time in complaints and contentions against the Company and each other—and things got into a dreadful state. Then at last the Company and the States-General capitulated; and in 1640 a new Charter was granted, whereby any emigrant who should go to New Nether- NEW AMSTERDAM GARDENS 59 land, taking five souls above fifteen years of age, should be given the standing of master and the right to claim two hundred acres of land. Here was what they had been waiting for; and now the Colony began its first real growth, healthy and constant. True to their long acquired instinct of conserving every particle of the earth, however, the town which sprang up to meet the growing need for dwellings was compactness itself—this, too, for better protection against the savages—and the plots allotted to each settler were modest, indeed, when the vast area at their disposal is considered. Their dwellings were set on the line of the street—streets had been laid out in 1638—with their gable ends to the front and shoulder to shoulder, leaving no space between them for a passage to the rear, even, in most cases. Of course many came who did not fulfill the required stipulations to qualify for the standing of master; indeed these made up the majority of the inhabitants. But many who held large “bouweries” or farms lived in the town, for the protection it afforded, as well as for its neighbors. They were essentially neighborly folk, these. Pieter Cornellisen who came as house carpenter for the Company three years before the granting of the new Charter, found a strip of land which he bespoke that was fifty feet wide at one end, and only twenty- 6 o OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING six at the other. How long it was I do not know, but from the account of its neighboring plots, and its location, it could not have been more than a hun¬ dred or a hundred and fifty feet. Pieter did not build him a house on it—too busy building for others, perhaps—but he did set out cherry trees, and peaches and pears, and these were bearing there in 1651. Kip, the tailor, had his house An a garden which was sixty-five feet along its front; but this was excep¬ tional, and few houses did not occupy the entire front¬ age of the plots whereon they stood. Roelantsen, the schoolmaster, had a garden in one place about fifty by one hundred feet; his house was elsewhere, however. The earliest private deed recorded, dated 1643, gives the dimensions of the plot which it transferred as thirty by one hundred and ten feet. Under the extravagant, domineering Director-Gen¬ eral Kieft, who took it upon himself to make amends for flagrant offenses against the people—or to try to make amends for them, perhaps by indulging them, at the Company’s expense, in certain requests and per¬ haps only half framed wishes, a row of five houses was built, of stone or brick, facing the row of Com¬ pany offices and shops, and lying between these and the Fort. For some residents had grown timid after the Indian troubles of 1643—those troubles that had been occasioned by Kieft’s wanton cruelty and fero- NEW AMSTERDAM GARDENS 61 cious disregard alike of the settlers’ advice and en¬ treaty—and wished to live under the protecting wing of the Fort. These houses in particular must have had very tiny gardens indeed, for the Fort was close at hand, and there was very little space between its sides and their rear walls. But, however tiny the space, we may be sure it was well cultivated; and because order is essential in cramped quarters, whatever they are devoted to, we may infer that it was orderly: even if order were not almost a Dutch obsession—which it is—we should know that these plots must be orderly, if anything at all was to grow in them. And what did grow in them? What could they raise in these toy gardens? “A patch of cabbages, a bit of tulips,” one writer credits to every Dutch home— with accommodations for a horse, a cow, a couple of pigs and a flock of “barn door fowls,” in addition. But this is a flight of fancy rather than an authentic enumeration, for no garden was limited to cabbage, small though many were. All had their bed of tulips, however, no doubt—or border of them—and certain other flowers inseparable from the Dutch and their flat, toylike land. Extended lists, indeed, under carefully arranged heads, are given in that priceless “Description of New Netherland ”—Beschryvinge Van Nieuw-Nederlant — 62 OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING of Adrian Van der Donck’s, written in 1655; the book which is now the rarest and most valuable of any work dealing with the Dutch settlement. No other single volume, probably, is so coveted by the collector who has it not, as this. These lists of Van der Donck’s are headed, “Of Fruit Trees Brought Over from the Netherlands,” “Of the Flowers,” “Of the Healing Herbs,” and “Of the Products of the Kitchen Garden.” Many other things are included of course, for the book is a very complete “description,” but these are the ones which are of especial interest here. Very interesting are those which deal with native plants and trees too, but less important to us of course. Taking the list in the order named he says, “Various apple and pear which thrive well. Those also grow from the seed of which I have seen many, which with¬ out grafting, bore delicious fruit in six years. The English have brought over the first quinces, and we have also brought over stocks and seeds which thrive well. Orchard cherries thrive well and produce large fruit. Spanish cherries, forerunners, morellas, of every kind we have, as in the Netherlands and the trees bear better because the blossoms are not injured by the frosts. The peaches, which are sought after in the Netherlands, grow wonderfully well here. . . . We have also introduced morecotoons (a kind of peach), apricots, several of the best plums, almonds, NEW AMSTERDAM GARDENS 63 persimmons” (these may have been secured from Vir¬ ginia; they are native, but only to southern regions), “cornelian cherries, figs, several sorts of currants, gooseberries, calissiens, and thorn apples; and we do not doubt but the olive would thrive and be profitable, but we have them not.” Grapes were not yet estab¬ lished, however, as he felt they should be, evidently; for “Although the land is full of many kinds,” he writes, “we still want settings of the best kind from Germany for the purpose of enabling our wine plant¬ ers here to select the best kinds and propagate the same.” Every kind of fruit which has been intro¬ duced, however, he declares, thrives better than at home, “particularly such as require a warmer climate.” From the fruits he passes to the flowers. Of these there are “the white and red roses of different kinds, the cornelian roses and stock roses”; (may these last two not refer to Rosa canina —the dog rose—which has al¬ ways been much used as a “stock” for grafting upon? There is a possible connection in the term “cornelian,” this being the name applied to a cornel or dog wood— the cornelian cherry or Cornus Mas; possibly he used it in this sense to designate the dog rose) “and those of which were none before in the country, such as eglantine, several kinds of gilly-flowers, jenoffelins” (no one can even guess what these were), “different varieties of fine tulips, crown imperials, white lilies, 64 OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING the lily frutilaria, anemones, baredames” (another mystery), “violets, marigolds, summer sots” (possibly daisies, sometimes called “maudlin wort”), “&c. The clove tree has also been introduced; and there are various indigenous trees that bear handsome flowers which are unknown in the Netherland.” By “the clove tree” he must mean the real spice c l ove —Caryophyllus aromaticus. This is cultivated in the West Indies, where the Dutch had long traded, and doubtless they thought it possible that it would grow here. Certainly it was worth trying, for it is a valuable tree. There is another plant, sometimes called the clove tree, that is native to Australia, but that continent was little more than discovered at this time, hence it could hardly be this. He mentions some flowers of “native growth” of merit, from which it is obvious that these have risen to sufficient esteem to be welcomed in the gardens; “as for instance, sun flowers, red and yellow lilies, mountain lilies” (martagon lilies), “morning stars, and red, white and yellow maritoffles (a very sweet flower), several species of bell flower, etc.” “Morning stars” are a problem; so are the “mari¬ toffles.” The first may mean the common bind¬ weed or Convolvulus sepium , although an old Ameri¬ can writer describes under the name of “morning stars” a flowering tree or shrub growing in great abundance on NEW AMSTERDAM GARDENS 65 Long Island. The dogwood is the only tree answering his description, and this lacks two “petals” of filling it; for he says that the flowers have six petals, whereas the dogwood flowers have only four bracts. I fancy this a mistake in count, however, for the rest of what he says is so exactly the account of Cornus florida , and of nothing else, that he must have remembered wrong, or his printer played him false. One other possibility there is, though a very slight one; the “morning star” was a mediaeval weapon consisting of a ball, spiked hideously, hung on the end of a chain which depended from a great club. One kind of thistle has been known by this name, from its resemblance to this spiked ball. But this is not a flower of sufficient beauty to attract mention in a list like Van der Donck’s; and I am inclined to believe he meant the flowering dogwood, for this alone was really new to him, and is of course of striking beauty. “Maritoffies” are, to the best of my belief and ability to declare, lady-slippers, “Mary’s Slippers,” literally—the wild Cypripedium pubescens, C. specta- bile and C. acaule furnishing the yellow, the white and the red—not actually red to be sure, but a shade dif¬ ficult for the inexperienced to define, therefore called red by Van der Donck, that being as near it as he could come. The kitchen garden products are introduced with 66 OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING the declaration that they are “very numerous”—a patch of cabbages, indeed!—and the chronicler calls himself a poor one to remember them all. But in a general way he finds himself able to say: “They con¬ sist then of various kinds of sallads, cabbages, pars¬ nips, carrots, beets, endive, succory, finckel” (fennel) “sorrel, dill, spinage, radishes, Spanish radishes, pars¬ ley, chervil (or sweet Cicely) cresses, various leeks and besides whatever is commonly found in a kitchen garden. The herb garden is also tolerably well sup¬ plied with rosemary, lavender, hyssop, thyme, sage, marjoram, balm, holy onion, (ajuin helig') worm¬ wood, belury, chives and clary; also pimpernel, dra¬ gon’s blood, five finger, tarragon (or dragon’s wort) &c. together with laurel, artichokes and asparagus and various other things.” He agrees with Josselyn that the pumpkin is firmer, sweeter, drier and more palatable than when grown in Europe; and he explains at some length another vegetable, similar to it, which the Indians use: “The natives have another species of this vegetable peculiar to themselves, called ‘quassiens.’ ” This is a Dutch form of the aboriginal name for the squash—askuta- squash—which means “vine apple,” according to Roger Williams’ work of 1643. Melons there are too, in abundance, he says; and the citrull or water citron he describes with great detail, unmistakably NEW AMSTERDAM GARDENS 67 identifying the watermelon. This was known in the Netherlands through being brought from Portugal, whence West Indian traders had taken it, as they took the potato, sweet potato and tobacco. Of cucumbers and gourds there were plenty; the calabashes or gourds were raised for their hard shells, which were used to hold spices, seed and such things. The gourd indeed “is the common water pail of the natives and I have seen one so large it would contain more than a bushel”—that is, a Dutch bushel, which is a peck less than the English. Turnips, peas and beans he says are excellent, except the large Windsor bean; this never seemed to fill its pods, owing to the heat and dry climate, he reasons. Which was right; and even now this variety of bean is useful only in the northern sections, although it may do fairly well in a cool summer, if planted early. It is hardy enough to go into the ground about the time that peas are planted. A bit of practical information comes in here, in his account of the methods of planting adopted by the Colonists. Referring to the Indians he says: “They have a peculiar mode of planting them” (beans) “which our people have learned to practice:—when the Turkish wheat” (Indian corn) “or as it is called maize, is half a foot above the ground, they plant the beans around it, and let them gow together. The 68 OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING coarse stalk serves as a bean-prop and the beans run upon it. They increase together and thrive ex¬ tremely well, and thus two crops are gathered at the same time.” Thus we see how quick to adopt as their own the devices and methods of the red men, the Dutch were. And these, grafted upon their hereditary skill and knowledge, speedily developed a husbandry suited to the climate and conditions in which they were settled. It was not long before travelers who visited New Amsterdam and the outlying farmsteads which dotted the island of the Ma-na-atans—or the Manhates, or Manna-hatas; there is variety enough to choose from —exclaimed at the abundance on every side, and lamented the peaches lying in such quantities every¬ where upon the ground that even the hogs surfeited of them and could devour no more. As to the ancient name of the island, I must digress long enough to explain that I have adopted the form which appears to have the strongest claim to being correct, alhough it is the form least used. Many fanciful and far-fetched derivations for “Manhattan” have been advanced by scholars—and others—and re¬ pudiated by scholars. I must confess I cannot bring myself to agreement with the necessity which most of those who have studied the question seem to feel themselves under, of limiting their interpretation by NEW AMSTERDAM GARDENS 69 the orthography of the word as it appears on the early maps of the region. The spelling of even a mother- tongue was largely a matter of chance, individual pref¬ erence or peculiarity at the time these first maps were made; and what was one thing, at one time, under one man s pen, appeared in a slightly or very much altered dress, as the case might be, when another set it down. This being true of a familiar tongue, how is it to be expected that consistency should have marked the treatment of the strange sounds and gutturals which characterized the speech of the savage, whose phonetics even must have been largely guessed*? Juet, the journal keeper of Hudson’s first voyage, wrote the much disputed word the first time it was ever committed to paper; his rendering of it is Manna-hata.” He applies this very distinctly and unmistakably to the land, not to the men inhabiting i*- bert apparently to the mainland opposite the is¬ land; to what is now the New Jersey shore. The first English map seems to bear out this definite loca¬ tion of the name, for this has it written along the river s western bank—“Manahata”; but it confuses the question by presenting “Manahatin” along the eastern bank. Another map complicates it by show¬ ing “Manhattes” on the mainland to the north and no island at all, while still another confines the word to the island alone, and gives it as “Manhates”! 7° OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING Out of this confusion there seem to be at least two definite conclusions to be drawn. One is that the name referred to the land —to some peculiarity or feature, doubtless, which distinguished that particular portion of the continent—rather than to a tribe of the aborigines; the other is, that it was not confined to the island, as some insist, but embraced the entire section, including the mainland all about, and the island. This much the old maps and descrip¬ tions seem to prove, without question. With this as a starting point, and the knowledge which we now have that Indian names are commonly bestowed for a very definite reason—that they convey usually, in most poetic fashion, a description of the gen¬ eral appearance of the place designated, or of some geographical marvel which identifies the place, it seems that it should not be a very puzzling matter for the student of Indian lore and speech to decipher the meaning. That it is an Algonquin compound term descriptive of the region—a region of exceptional beauty even changed as it is by civilization—seems of all explana¬ tions the most logical. Geographically the place is one of the greatest distinction, differing from anything else the length of the entire seaboard; and the majesty and imposing strength of the great river slipping past its matchless palisades, out into the wonderful, land- NEW AMSTERDAM GARDENS 7i locked bay, presented to the imaginative savage a veritable summing up of all earthly beauty. So he called it just that—“Wonderful (or Majestic or Noble) Place of Surpassing Beauty”—which is the free rendering of the compound. Its spelling would be more nearly correct without the aspirate—that is, Ma-na-ata. It is quite possible, however, to under¬ stand the anxiety to emphasize that soft and elusive third syllable, which led to the inserting of the k. The discoverers, taking no chance of its being lost, put this rough letter before it, to drag it out of its gentle somnolence. The red men who lived in the region would of course be “Ma-na-atas” to the strangers; it is hardly probable that few ever knew or thought or cared whether the name was actually the name of the tribe or not. It served to identify the people as well as the place, to the whites; that was sufficient. As for the old map makers, they took pains to show that this was the term which the Indians applied to all the section round about—and one, more painstaking and conscientious than the rest, or less certain of his guess, possibly, spelled it in two ways on the op¬ posite sides of the river. Or possibly the Indians did make a distinction between the island and the main¬ land by a change in the termination of the word, so that “Ma-na-ata” referred to the latter, while “Ma- 72 OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING na-atan” was specifically the “Island of the Place of Surpassing Beauty.” The first poet of the colony, Jacob Steendam, sup¬ plements Van der Donck’s fruit and flower and vege¬ table lists with his “Praise of New Netherlands, a long poem written six years subsequent to the De¬ scription.” It is a rather nice poem, too; so for its own sake as well as for its corroboration of the plenty of garden and field to which Van der Donck had pre¬ viously testified, I shall quote that portion which is of definite interest here because it tells of these things: “Whatever skilful science more may know, And in your lap, from other countries, throw For culture: these, fresh strength on you bestow, Without consuming. You’ve most delicious hand-and kitchen fruits, Greens, salads, radishes and savory shoots, And turnips; and the cabbage you produce, In large heads poming. The biting herb—the strong tobacco plant; The carrot and the Maltese parsnip, and The melon, pumpkin, Spanish comfrey, grant The sweetest pleasure. Exotics which, from foreign climes, they bear Unto your bosom, need no special care; But reach, untended, in your genial air, Their proper measure. NEW AMSTERDAM GARDENS 73 There’s wheat and rye; and barley, pea, and bean; Spelt, maize and buckwheat; all these kinds of grain Do nobly grow: for horses to sustain, Oats are awarded.” This horse sustenance is surely the most gratifying touch of all! Spelt , by the way, is a wheat that was very common once upon a time and is still used in some European countries, especially where the soil is poor. One cannot but wonder when they slept, these in¬ dustrious, tireless, sturdy women, when the amount which they accomplished is all taken into account. “Everyone in town and country had a garden,” ac¬ cording to a reminiscence of the early eighteenth cen¬ tury, “but all the more hardy plants grew in the field, in rows, amidst the hills, as they were called, of In¬ dian corn. These lofty plants sheltered them from the sun, while the same hoeing served for both: there cabbages, potatoes and other esculent roots, with variety of gourds, grew to a great size and were of an excellent quality. Kidney beans, asparagus, celery, great variety of sallads and sweet herbs, cucumbers &c. were only admitted into the garden, into which no foot of man intruded, after it was dug in spring. Here were no trees, those grew in the orchard in high perfection; strawberries and many high-flavoured wild fruits of the shrub kind abounded so much in 74 OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING the woods, that they did not think of cultivating them in their gardens, which were extremely neat but small, and not by any means calculated for walking in. I think I yet see what I have so often beheld in both town and country, a respectable mistress of a family going out to her garden in an April morning, with her great calash, her little painted basket of seeds, and her robe over her shoulders, to her garden labours. These were by no means merely figura¬ tive. ... A woman, in very easy circumstances and abundantly gentle in form and manners, would sow and plant and rake incessantly. These fair gar¬ deners were also great florists: their emulation and solicitude in this pleasing employment did indeed pro¬ duce ‘flowers worthy of Paradise.’ Though not set in ‘curious knots’ they were arranged in beds, the varieties of each kind by themselves; this if not varied and elegant was at least rich and gay.” So the women were the gardeners; and they spun and wove and knit, also—and found time to take tea with a neighbor or to entertain one at home! How did they ever do it? The secret of it lies, of course, in their sense of order, and the methodical system arising from this sense. Nothing was ever neglected or postponed; everything was done as it should be, when it should be. And the result was fat larders, and fat linen- SOMERNDICK’S BOUWERIE FROM A “PLAN OF THE NORTH-EAST ENVIRONS OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK, PERFORMED BY THE ORDER OF HIS EXCELLENCY, THE EARL OF LOUDON, &C., &C., BY SAM’L HOLLAND, 17TH SEPT., 1757 ” NEW AMSTERDAM GARDENS 75 closets—and full gardens and fat. But what did they look like? What was their form? How were the things planted? Not in “curious knots”—yet in beds; what were these like? What was their arrange¬ ment? Or, to reduce all these questions to one, what were their garden designs? Garden making is a primitive art; nothing, indeed, antedates it as an occupation, whatever one’s favored authority may be. So we may confidently say that it was in making garden that man first gave expres¬ sion to himself. All must have hunted the Diplod- ocus and defended themselves from the Anoplothe- rium—which was not so very fierce, after all, they say —or from those frightful ancestors of the hyena that could grind up the bones of the ancestors of our bears and lions even as the bull pup chews a chicken wing to- day, in very much the same way. But when it came to clearing away the forest and shaping a field, here was chance for variation; and ever increasing opportunity for more and more variation, as the earth was grad¬ ually subdued. It is in the form of his garden, therefore, that man has always been, and is, and always will be, most self-revealing. He is utterly unable to be anything else. There is something within each one of us that shapes—actually, not figuratively—the work of our hands; a something that directs all the delicate forces 76 OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING which we designate as “individuality,” along definite lines. And these lines become the tracing of the form of our individuality, in whatever we do, visible in a thousand ways yet not discernible to any but the close observer perhaps. Handwriting is the simplest illus¬ tration of this truth; no two persons form a single let¬ ter of the alphabet identically the same, and though the letter may be perfectly legible in ten thousand thousand examples, each will possess a tracing of the individuality of the writer. What is true of the individual is true of races. So it is literally and actually true to say that a certain form of architecture, of speech, of art, of music, of dancing, of design, of what not, is characteristic of a race. It cannot be otherwise; whatever exists at all has form—even so elusive a thing as the individuality of man, and of men. So much for the theory; how does it prove, under a test? Almost absurdly true in the case in hand. Given a people of the Dutch type—a type that has not changed appreciably within the time we are con¬ sidering—strong, careful, patient, neat, exact, not par¬ ticularly imaginative but gifted with an infinite ca¬ pacity for taking pains, there is just one form within our ken that corresponds exactly with their character. That form is the square; four equal sides it has, and four right angles—the embodiment of exactness, neat- NEW AMSTERDAM GARDENS 77 ness, balance, strength; minus imagination. Indeed it is so true to them that it has even crept into speech. The idly spoken “square, sturdy Dutch type” embod¬ ies a profound truth, as many another easy slipping phrase does without our realizing it. This is not to say, however, that only the square form is to be found or expected in Dutch garden de¬ sign. Indeed no; many graceful turns are given it, and varying forms are present. But the square is the underlying, construction basis; the work of these people is built upon this primarily. And it cannot be built upon any other, because this and this alone ex¬ presses them. Perfectly poised, it is the form of the race’s individuality; and the one other form com¬ monly seen in a Dutch garden is the circle at the cen¬ ter of this square, which serves to emphasize the exact¬ ness and the balance and the poise by emphasizing the center at which they rest. The New Netherland farms whose plans are given, show this prevailing characteristic even after almost a hundred years of English possession. Nicholas Bayard was the cousin of Governor Stuyvesant’s wife, hence a man of quality, undoubtedly. Here then is an instance of a place developed with some idea beyond the mere economic phase of getting the most out of a given space; yet here is the same form, setting a definite stamp upon the earth, as of a great signet imprinting 78 OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING the symbol of a people. The Kip farm, famed for its fruits and for its collection of rosacea, also had a garden of “Dutch regularity.” Here Washington was entertained while President, and presented with a Rosa Gallica , which tradition says was introduced to America here. Designs from the old Dutch work on gardening by Jan van der Gro-en, as well as old maps and plans generally, repeat again the square, with slight variations. We have seen how it was the form usually adopted when the Elizabethan gardens were made. Parkin¬ son accounts for this on the ground of its conforming more nearly than anything else to the shape of the house, but I am inclined to think the idea was intro¬ duced, in the first place, through the advent in Eng¬ land of the great numbers of Dutch refugees from Spain’s persecutions. England owes much to these fugitives. They drained and reclaimed the fens as they had drained and reclaimed their own low-lying Holland; and they taught people many things, so that an acre was “enabled to support double the number” that it had sustained. Scientific farming was un¬ known to the English prior to their arrival. In addi¬ tion to practicing and teaching this, they introduced many vegetables hitherto uncultivated, really revolu¬ tionizing agriculture. In view of which, it hardly seems likely that England would have had to wait £ < hj CL, V) O £ < i-J i-l O a s o psi tef a O CQ t/3 Q « < M < a o t-H £ NEW AMSTERDAM GARDENS 79 the arrival of William of Orange to feel the influence of Dutch design on her gardens. The “great tree, coeval with some beloved member of the family” which is spoken of as usually growing before the door of the house in other Dutch settle¬ ments, is nowhere mentioned in accounts of New Ams¬ terdam, neither is it indicated on either of the bouweries illustrated. Such a custom can hardly have been confined to one or two settlements, how¬ ever; but very probably such patriarchal specimens had disappeared from the fast-growing little village when the survey for His Excellency the Earl of Loudon, was made. This tree was planted by the head of the family, presumably when his house was finished and he, with his, went to dwell therein. The antiquarian will find in the practice, some correspond¬ ence with ancient tribal rites and beliefs; with the lar familiaris of the Roman household, perhaps, even with the symbols which served early men in the place of speech. Certainly it was a pleasant custom; and the tree itself must have been the subject of ever- increasing veneration as the years went by, and the sire passed and the son came into his place, to pass as sire in his turn, and yield to his son. V AUSTERE PURITAN GARDENS “For Mrs. Winthrop at Boston—” “My sweet wife—I prayse God I am in good health, peace be to thee and o r familye, so I kisse thee, and hope shortly to see thee: farewell. Hasten the sending away Scarlett, and gather¬ ing the Turnips. J. W ” BSENT from home on the affairs of the Col- 1 x. ony, great and good John Winthrop com¬ passes, in this short and tender little letter to his wife, practically the whole range of life as it was lived in New England in Puritan days. The “prayse” of God first, always; then the conscious and deep, real thankfulness for bodily vigor and health in this new, rude land where these were so frequently impaired; and finally practical directions concerning practical, homely things—for even the Governor, busy with his duties of state, could not afford to neglect his tur¬ nips. Turnips in those days occupied about the same place that potatoes do now, furnishing the main root 80 AUSTERE PURITAN GARDENS 81 crop and a very essential food. Not until 1800 did the “Spanish potatoes” take the place generally of turnips, although these had been planted as early as 1761. And only for the failure of the corn would they have been used at that time. One account says of the years 1762 and 1763 that they “were years of scarcity, that would have been years of famine had not this despised root been providentially brought among us.” Although much that is popularly cherished with re¬ gard to gardening in the New World centers around the section which is now under consideration, this sec¬ tion, as a matter of fact, is more barren, in some re¬ spects, than any other. Nor is the reason far to seek. The Independents or Separatists who withdrew them¬ selves from the ancient Church of England to make up the little congregation which began, under Parson Robinson, to worship God in its own way at Scrooby, in Nottinghamshire, in the year 1606, were simple country folk of little consequence in the land—mostly farmers presumably, very like the farmers of to-day, or workingmen perhaps, who earned honest, frugal livings by their trades; all common, rural, unpolished and uncultivated. William Brewster—the Elder Brewster of later Plymouth days—was the village postmaster; William Bradford, then a lad of seven¬ teen—Governor and historian in his maturity—was 82 OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING a fustian maker; which means that he was a maker of cotton cloth—probably, in other words, a weaver. And there were wool carders, silk makers, printers, brewers’ men, a hatter and so on, among those who set out from Holland some fourteen years later. Some of these trades may have been acquired dur¬ ing the eleven years that the congregation abode in Holland, to be sure; but the men who, even in exile, took up trades, were not scholars nor men of high posi¬ tion; that is certain. They were the simple rustics of a little English village, most of them, no doubt, tillers of the soil, all of them strangers to the finer arts and graces of living. That there were a few of gentle breeding may not with certainty be denied; but even this is open to some question. All were refined, how¬ ever, by the common fire of high resolve which burned in every breast, and by the strict introspection and discipline to which they constantly subjected them¬ selves, for conscience’s sake. And much reading of their Bibles, with little reading of anything else, de¬ veloped a dignity and certain nobleness of manner, even in the rudest. But in the very nature of the rigid bands which bound them so close, one to another, lay the spirit which abjured beauty and grace, even were the con¬ ception of beauty and grace inherently possible in the minds of such people. With strange ideas of a bar- AUSTERE PURITAN GARDENS 83 ren holiness in the first place, they had been per¬ secuted at home until reduced to the necessity of flight into a strange land, or of yielding to the op¬ pression of ecclesiastical authority which they hated. Choosing the former, even those who had been reared in affluence, if there were such, had known only poverty and privation for a long term of years. Every one had to work and work hard, in the land of exile, for a bare living; and from the labor which was necessary to keep soul and body together, they took no time save for worship; they left not a minute for the cultivation of aught save the soil of their own souls. Here each was ever wrestling to establish, against the tares and in spite of often stony ground, the “perfect flower of true piety,” that they might en¬ joy abundance when fruit time and harvest arrived. Small interest could they feel and little energy could they have, for gardens of this world. Holland has been called the school wherein the Pilgrims were instructed and shaped for their great work, west of the waters of the Atlantic. While this is no doubt true in that Holland provided the instruc¬ tion, it seems to me only fair to her to acknowledge that her pupils accepted what she had to offer, with reservations. From her great treasuries of tolerance and generous wisdom they took absolutely nothing; and not one whit of the Hollander’s innocent delight 84 OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING in the neat, precise, thrifty beauty which, out of his orderly being, he could not help creating everywhere about him, did they acquire. Absolutely devoid of these attributes were the Pil¬ grims, first, last, and all the time. And though poverty naturally does rob those who suffer it of much that is gracious and good, poverty was not the reason for their attitude. It was rather the incessant lash¬ ing to which they subjected soul and brain; this bred a spirit which rejoiced in works of supererogation, im¬ molating itself upon cold altars of stony beauty-bar¬ renness. Pleasure of every kind was condemned, and pleasant things were fearful. John Barry, for ex¬ ample, gives as one of their reasons for desiring to leave Holland, “The corruption of the Dutch youth was pernicious in its influence”; a somewhat astonish¬ ing accusation to lay against the happy flaxen-haired, apple-cheeked Dutch boys and girls. It was a certain measure of good fortune for the Colonists, perhaps, that pestilence had almost de¬ populated the shores of the Bay of Masathuset some time before the arrival there of the first comers. It left them less exposed to danger from the few Indians who remained, as well as afforded them ready-made clearings in which to establish their settlements. But what was an advantage in one way—the lesser, pos¬ sibly—was a distinct disadvantage in another; where AUSTERE PURITAN GARDENS 85 the red man had long made his home and planted his corn, the ground was impoverished. So instead of the boundless abundance which rewarded the efforts of the Cavaliers in Virginia and the Dutch in New Netherland, these austere settlers met with an austere reserve in Nature, a niggardliness quite unlooked for in what had been regarded as virgin land: which was a great misfortune. Safe and splendid harbor the Pilgrims had found; but if Squanto had not been their friend and teacher in that first spring after their arrival, it is hardly likely that they would have had even the small crop of native corn which the autumn brought them. Bradford recounts the agricultural lessons which they learned from the Indian. “He tould them except they gott fish & set with it (in these old grounds) it would come to nothing, and he showed them yt in ye midle of April they should have store enough come up ye brooke, by which they began to build, and taught them how to take it and wher to get other provi¬ sions necessary for them; all of which they found true by triall and experience. Some English seed they sew, as wheat & Pease, but it came not to good, eather by ye badnes of ye seed or latenes of ye season, or both, or some other defecte.” This first planting was done in community; but the next year, “they begane to thinke how they might 86 OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING raise as much corne as they could, and obtain a beter crope than they had done, that they might not still thus languish in miserie. At length, after much de¬ bate of things, the Governour (with ye advise of ye chiefest among them) gave way that they should set corne, every man for his perticuler, and in that re¬ gard trust to themselves ... so assigned to every family a parcell of land, according to the pro¬ portion of their number for that end, only for pres¬ ent use. . . . This . . . made all hands very industrious, so as much more come was planted than other waise would have been by any means ye Governour or any other could use, and saved him a great deall of trouble and gave farr better contente.” Somewhat tartly he concludes the account with the mention of feminine help, saying, as earlier quoted, that they went willingly into the field, “which before would aledge weakness and inabilitie: whom to have compelled would have been thought great tiranie and oppression.” It is perhaps beside the question—but it is inter¬ esting—to note that Bradford comments on Plato’s projected communal life being proved impracticable by this experience. Great though the need and the stress of these God-fearing men and women was, in this wild land beset with the perils of wild men and untamed Nature, they yet quibbled when it came to AUSTERE PURITAN GARDENS 87 laboring in unity for a common store. Each was careful to do little, lest his labor be not fully recom¬ pensed; each lagged in order that none should under¬ work him; each kept an eye upon his neighbor, and burned within that he should share in the profits who, according to careful estimate, had not shared equally in the toil; each was absorbed in a mental calculation to determine whether the balance was not rising on his own side: in the face of all which, even the lash of self-preservation was insufficient to sting into an activity which should assure plenty. The assignment of a “parcell of land . . . only for present use,” became almost as unsatisfactory after trial as the community planting of the first year, for each man got a different tract each year—which led to unendurable injustice. So in 1624 £c they made suite to the Gov r to have some portion of land given them for continuance, and not by yearly lott, for by that means, that which ye more industrious had brought into good culture (by much pains) one year, came to leave it ye nexte, and often another might in- joye it which being well considered was granted. And to every person was given only one acere of land, to them and theirs, as nere ye towne as might be, and they had no more till ye seven years were expired.” This provision was a precaution for greater safety than they could have enjoyed if scat- 88 OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING tered, as well as a discouragement to any grasping tendency which might be latent in the breasts of the not altogether regenerate. “Which did make me often thinke,” says Bradford, “of what I had read in Plinie of ye Romans first beginnings in Romulus time. How every man contented himself with two aceres of land, and had no more assigned them . . . and long after the greatest present given to a Captaine that had gotte a victory. . . . was as much ground as they could till in one day. And he was not counted a good but a dangerous man that would not content himself with seven aceres of land.” Also it reminds him of “how they did pound their come in morters, as these people were forcte to doe many years before they could get a mille.” The characteristic stern disapproval of joy and gaiety and beauty for beauty’s sake that formed so great a portion of the creed of those who settled Ply¬ mouth Colony, was cherished by the later Puritans as well—those “new planters” who settled on the shores of Massachusetts Bay ten years after the found¬ ing of Plymouth. In many ways, indeed, these were greater fanatics than the little band of Independents who had found Holland and the Hollanders not al¬ together to be approved. They had not separated themselves from the Church of England, to be sure, as the Independents had; but they were in the throes AUSTERE PURITAN GARDENS 89 of even greater tribulation and strife, for they were resolved upon the “housecleaning,” as someone has termed it, of that powerful body. Separation was the farthest thing from their purpose; but they were determined upon reform, upon theological purification. Hence they were revolutionists of the most aggres¬ sive type, with the revolutionist’s severity of spirit; and the very fact that they were men of higher station than the simple Scrooby congregation, made them more intense, more extreme, more determined—and less likely to tolerate what they condemned. Men of posi¬ tion, education and culture, they were naturally more imperious in their attitude, and they cultivated their convictions with more intellectual force—cultivated them so assiduously that their ever narrowing zealotry reached a fearful climax in the witchcraft horrors which stain the history of Salem toward the end of that same century. Knowing the mental bias under which they lived, therefore, we should know that it was never with gardening for pleasure that these Puritans allowed themselves to be occupied, even if there were no ac¬ tual evidence to prove it. But there is such evidence, indirect in a way, yet positive and conclusive. It lies in the lack of all reference to gardens, other than economic gardens, in the diaries, travelers’ tales and letters of the period. Governor Winthrop’s concern 90 OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING for his turnips presents the entire spirit of Puritan gardening more comprehensively than volumes writ¬ ten about it could, albeit Winthrop himself was, gen¬ erally speaking, far more gracious and gentle than the holders of religious convictions of a similar nature seemed to know how to be. He was an exceptional man in every way, however; otherwise he would scarcely have been chosen Gover¬ nor by the twelve “gentlemen” who took the first step towards the actual freedom of this continent— though they may not have been aware of it—when they pledged themselves to each other to take up permanent residence in New England with their families, providing the charter of the “Governor & Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New Eng¬ land,” and the administration under it, were trans¬ ferred to the Colony. Two sons-in-law of Thomas, third Earl of Lincoln, were among the group—John Humphrey and Isaac Johnson—as well as the man¬ ager of his estates, Thomas Dudley; another, The- ophilus Eaton, who was a merchant in London, had been a Minister to Denmark; and every man of the group was of high standing and independent fortune. Poor Lady Arabella Johnson, daughter of the noble earl, came with her husband and the rest in the Arabella; but the “wilderness of wants” in which she found herself proved too much for her endurance, AUSTERE PURITAN GARDENS 9i after the “paradise of plenty” wherein she had been bred, and she died a month after landing. Her hus¬ band survived the grief of her death but a few weeks —and there followed, before the autumn of that year, upwards of two hundred of the thousand or so who came under Winthrop—“new planters” these were called, to distinguish them from those already settled on the Bay’s shore where beginnings had previously been made. These “beginnings” had been variously brought about. There was, for example, a group of fisher¬ men at Cape Ann; there were “some religious and well appointed persons,” grown weary of rigid Pil¬ grim ideas as they prevailed at Plymouth, who had shifted their abode; Nahumkeike or Naumkeag had become Salem—a definite little colony—under Endi- cott who, with three other “gentlemen” and two knights, had obtained a grant in 1628 for a large tract. An exploring party from this group had begun preparations for a settlement at Mishawum—now Charlestown—the same year; and there were here and there independent and solitary planters who pre¬ ferred to brave the wilderness alone rather than to live among their fellows. William Blackstone, a Church of England clergyman who had come with Gorges in 1626, was one of these. He had estab¬ lished himself in solitude at Shawmut—now Boston 92 OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING —and it was at his suggestion that this site, abound¬ ing in excellent water, was chosen for the large settle¬ ment, when it came to be made. Here he already had a garden plot and orchard when the immigrants of 1630 arrived. A letter written by the Rev. Francis Higginson in 1629, soon after his arrival in Salem, gives a gener¬ ous list of garden products as common everywhere. “Our governor hath store of green pease growing in his garden as good as ever I eat in England. This country aboundeth naturally with store of roots of great variety and good to eat. Our turnips, parsnips and carrots are here both bigger and sweeter than is ordinarily to be found in England. Here are also stores of pompions, cowcumbers and other things of that nature which I know not. Also divers excel¬ lent pot herbs grow among the grasses as strawberry leaves in all places of the country and plenty of straw¬ berries in their time, and penny-royal, winter-savoury, sorrel, brooklime, liverwort, carvel, and watercress; also leeks and onions are ordinary and divers phy¬ sical herbs. Here are also abundance of other sweet herbs, delightful to the smell, whose names we know not, and plenty of single damask roses; and two kinds of herbs that bear two kinds of flowers very sweet, which they say are as good to make cordage or cloth as any flax or hemp we AUSTERE PURITAN GARDENS 93 have. . . . Excellent vines are here up and down in the woods. Our Governor hath already planted a vineyard with great hope of increase. Also mulberries, plums, raspberries, currants, chestnuts, fil¬ berts, walnuts, small nuts, hurtleberries and haws of white-thorn, near as good as our cherries in England, they grow in plenty here.” Half a score of houses were all that “Naumkeag” could boast when Higginson arrived there, “and a fair house newly built for the Governour.” Each of these no doubt bore the noon sun-mark upon the ledge of a window of the great room—that room which was literally living-room, where food was prepared, cooked, and meals eaten, and where all the household tasks went on, moving in their orderly sequence through the hours of a day accurately divided—the better to marshal them into their proper places—into two parts, by this line. The houses faced the south usually—and one “primitive planter” of Salem, whose place was old and had fallen into ruins in the eighteenth century, had his garden “eastward of the house, higher upon the hill.” The “house newly built for the Governour” did not remain the official residence long after Winthrop’s ar¬ rival, for he at once looked about with a view to locating the seat of government to better advantage. Just what his objection to Salem was, is not clear. 94 OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING Charlestown, which was under consideration, proved undesirable because of lack of good water; and event¬ ually the choice fell on “the peninsula” recommended by Mr. Blackstone. The house built by Governor Winthrop here, which was torn down by the soldiers and used for firewood during the occupation of the town by the military in 1775-76, stood “under the shadow of the Old South,” the church itself having been built upon the site of his “garden.” That he raised in this garden the things needful for his table is of course a certainty; it is now most equally certain that not many plants which had only their blossoms to recommend them, were admitted. There is but a single reference to the garden, made some sixteen years after he had established his household. The occasion was the visit of two “Papists” who were passing through the town on their way to labors in the interior. They lingered over a Sunday and, fearful lest they break the ironclad rule of the town by unseemly gad¬ ding about, “The Lord’s Day they were here the Governour acquainting them with our manner that all men either come to our public meetings or keep them¬ selves quiet in their house, and finding that the place where they lodged would not be convenient for them that day, invited them home to his house, where they continued private all that day until sunset, and made GARDEN AT NANTUCKET, ABOUT 1800, UNUSUALLY ELABORATE FOR NEW ENGLAND, WITH A TREFOIL MOTIVE EXECUTED IN BOXWOOD AND PLANTED WITH ROSES. A VEGETABLE GARDEN PROBABLY OCCUPIED THE SPACE AT THE RIGHT AUSTERE PURITAN GARDENS 95 use of such books, Latin and French, as he had, and the liberty of a private walk in his garden, and so gave no offence.” But even a garden wherein nothing bloomed that did not serve a useful purpose, might contain many sweet and pleasant flowers. Marigolds for the stew- pot, feverfew to cool “agues that burn,” lavender to lay among the linens, barberries for preserves, com- frey to heal rasped throats, mallows (hollyhocks), winter savory, thyme, pennyroyal, rue, rosemary, fen¬ nel, anise, coriander—all these and more—and roses, roses, roses for distilling into waters and flavorings. With all its fragrant smells surely a very pleasant place to wander! That this garden of Governor Winthrop’s was not developed according to any fixed design is even more certain than the nature of the flowers within it. None of the Puritan gardens were, for the reasons al¬ ready named; and for the additional reason, to a man of Winthrop’s position, that they would have sug¬ gested, through association, the old ritual and the ones who practiced it. The formal and elegant in whatsoever branch were necessarily associated with the church of the State; so even if the stern asceticism of their religion had not forbidden indulgence in such unseemly fol-de-rols, prejudice would. Winthrop, who reprimands the Deputy-governor Dudley sharply 9 6 OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING for wainscoting the dining-room of his house, would hardly tolerate in the garden outside his own doors any hint of the worldliness which had been put reso¬ lutely behind as a menace to the soul. Pleasant to walk in, the space may have been, with white palings, or perhaps a high fence, protecting it from the outer world. But it was a chance pleasaunce rather than an intended one, with this and that and the other set in careless indifference to all save convenience, and the plants’ individual liking or necessity. Tradition has it that the earlier garden of Gover¬ nor Endicott, at his seat in Salem called “Orchard” and “Birchwood” variously, was the source of what is now perhaps the commonest field flower of all the United States—a flower that few ever suspect of being an exotic—the pestiferous white weed, the jubilant, smiling ox-eye daisy. From this old, old Salem dooryard garden it has danced to the music of the east wind straight across the land; up and down the meadows, through the long grass and the short grass, in along every highway and every byway, when¬ ever man has penetrated it has followed, gaily taking possession very often and driving him out completely. That Endicott valued the daisy enough to bring it with him to new England from old, marks him as a man of taste, for this flower had in ancient days AUSTERE PURITAN GARDENS 97 “found its way into the trimmest gardens; the green¬ swards and arbours were 'powdered’ with daises.” And Chaucer wrote of it in superlatives: “The daysie or elles the eye of day The emperise and flour of flowres alle.” It is not native to England either, however, but came from the Continent, or perhaps by way of the Con¬ tinent from an original home still further east, in northern Asia. The last “Will and Tes^m* of John Endecott Senior late of Salem now of Boston, made the second day of the third moneth called May 1659” gives to his wife, “all that my ffarme called Orchard lying wi th in the bound of Salem together with the Dwell¬ ing House, outhouses, Barnes, stables, Cowhouses, & all other building & appurtenances thereunto belong¬ ing & appertayning and all the Orchards, nurseries of fruit trees, gardens, fences, meadows and salt marsh.” Evidently the “ffarme called Orchard” was a very complete establishment, run on the highest efficiency basis. The nursery of fruit trees would prove this, if the other features enumerated left any room for doubt; but even to the salt marsh it is all just what it should be. The latter was an important part of the farm in the early days, the hay from it being: highly prized. 98 OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING Village plots granted to the Colonists in the begin¬ ning were small, as was usual in village communities in England. In 1637 the place belonging to Mr. Roger Conant which was bought by the town for “old Mr. Plase & wife” consisted of but half an acre. Yet Conant was director of the Colony prior to Endicott’s arrival, and continued always prominent and highly regarded. The size of his home lot may therefore very reasonably be assumed to be a maximum allot¬ ment. No one would be likely to have any more land than he; the greater number would probably have less. The requirements which regulated the size of the plot were that it should afford room for the dwelling and dooryard, the outbuildings, and the gar¬ den, with perhaps a space for corn. No one needed more than this—so none was allowed to have it. For broader agricultural purposes there were common fields, held by several together. In 1640 there were in Salem ten groups of these associated proprietors living in the town, who fenced their fields outside the settlement in common. Fence “viewers,” ap¬ pointed in town meeting, looked after these com¬ munity enclosures, each field having its special com¬ mittee. More generous ideas seem to have prevailed, how¬ ever, when Charlestown was under consideration by Governor Winthrop, as the site of the “great towne” AUSTERE PURITAN GARDENS 99 which it was proposed to build. Here it was jointly agreed that each of the inhabitants should have a two- acre lot. This more liberal allowance no doubt took into consideration the dignity which it was desirable a town of such proportions should have, as well as the likelihood of the residents having only their town plot, with no fields beyond the settlement. The gardens of all this period were what gar- dens commonly are to-day—kitchen gardens. Now and then a reference is thus specifically made, as in Wood’s “New England Prospect”: “The ground affords very good kitchen-gardens for turnips, pars¬ nips, carrots, radishes and pumpions, mush-melons, isquoukersquashes, cucumbers, onions: and whatever grows well in England grows as well there, many things being better and larger.” A writer of 1671 says that “the quinces, cherries, damsons set the dames awork. Marmalad and preserved damsons is to be met with in every house. Our fruit trees prosper abundantly, apple trees, pear trees, quince trees, cherry trees, plum trees, barberry trees, I have observed with admiration that the kernels sown or the succors planted produce as fair and good fruit without graft¬ ing as the tree from whence they were taken. The country is replenished with fair and good orchards.” Josselyn enumerates principally the kitchen garden products, interspersing them with grains and a few 100 OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING herbs. “Of such garden herbs (amongst us) as do thrive, and of such as do not: Cabbidge grows there exceeding well. Lettice. Sorrel. Parsley. Marygold. French Mallowes. Chervel. Burnet. Winter Savory. Summer Savory. Time. Sage. Carrots. Parsnips of a prodigious size. Red Beetes. Radishes. Turnips. Purs- laine. Wheat. Rye. Barley, which commonly degener¬ ates into Oats.” (This miraculous transformation was a popular notion of long ago.) “Oats. Pease of all sorts, the best in the World: I never heard of nor did see in eight years time, one Worm eaten Pea. Garden Beans. Naked Oats, there called Silpee, an excellent grain used instead of Oatmeal, they dry it in an oven, or in a Pan upon the fire, then beat it small in a Mortar. Spearmint. Rew will hardly grow. Fetherfew prospereth exceedingly. South¬ ernwood is no plant for this country. Nor, Rose¬ mary. Nor, Bayes. White Satten groweth pretty well, so doth Lavender Cotton. But Lavender is not for the climate. Penny Royal. Smalledge. Ground Ivy or Ale Hoof. Gilly Flowers will continue two years. Fennel must be taken up and kept in a warm cellar all winter. Houseleek prospereth notably. Hollyhocks. Enula Campana, in two years time the roots rot. Coriander, and Dill, and Annis thrive ex¬ ceedingly, but Annis Seed as also the Seed of Fennel seldom come to maturity; the Seed of Annis is com- AUSTERE PURITAN GARDENS 101 monly eaten with a fly. Clary never lasts but one summer, the Roots rot with the Frost. Sparagus thrives exceedingly, so does Garden Sorrel, and Sweet Rryer, or Eglantine. Bloodwort but sorrily, but Patience and English Roses very pleasantly. Celan¬ dine, by the West Country men called Kenning Wort, grows but slowly. Muschata as well as in England. Dittander or Pepper wort, flourished! notably, and so doth Tansie. Musk Mellons are better than our English, and Cucumbers, Pompions, there be of sev¬ eral kinds, some proper to the Country.” Here he disgresses long enough to give the formula for the “Ancient New England Standing Dish”— stewed pompions—still “standing,” though now in the form of fat New England pompion (pumpkin) pies. In the early days the vegetable was cut into dice and stewed all day: “the Housewives manner is a P°t with them of two or three gal¬ lons, and stew them upon a gentle fire a whole day, and as they sink they fill again with fresh Pompions,’ not putting any liquor to them: and when it is stewed enough it will look like bak’d apples: this they dish, putting Butter to it, and a little Vinegar (with some spices as Ginger, &c) which makes it tart like an Apple and so serve it up to be eaten with Fish or Flesh.” New England’s other “standing dish” furnishes 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 AUSTERE PURITAN GARDENS 103 the largest and best, “more after the modem Taste all Sashd and pretty well ornamented haveing yards and Gardens adjoyning also.” Outside the town, at Milton, was the country seat of Mr. Edmund Quincy; and a description of this affords almost the first ref¬ erence made to any other than the kitchen garden. The house was of brick; thirty feet distant from it was