Oldal 23 [23]
INTRODUCTORY
Club, mothers this volume. Again to women is owed garden
pleasure—the whiff of box, of mignonette, of clove pinks and
damask roses; the sense of sunny brick walls, of butterflies and
bees and lovers and children in a world of blossom; an old, sweet
wind of garden romance, garden poetry.
Gardens began early in Virginia. At Varina, in 1614, lived
that wedded pair, John Rolfe and Pocahontas, daughter of Pow¬
hatan. Rolfe experimented with tobacco, and who shall say that in
turn he did not show the young, wonderful Indian woman how
they set flowering bushes, how they made beds of flowers, in Nor¬
folk, in England? In 1625, on the banks of the James, George
Sandys translated Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Surely he had some
planting of flowers about his door! In 1642, at Greenspring, Sir
William Berkeley had a garden of extent and colour. When, a
little later, the King’s men, the cavaliers, fled with their families
to Virginia from an England, no longer Stuart, there came with
them garden ideas and garden seeds and slips and cuttings. Wash¬
ington, Mason and Lee, Pendleton, Randolph, Cary, Madison,
Monroe, Brodnax, Skipwith, and many others—these men and
their wives and sisters and daughters soon had their sunlighted,
their moonlighted gardens in Virginia. English squires, English
and Scots merchants turned Virginia planters—near their houses
of wood or of brick rise gardens with fruit trees, with old, fair
shrubs, with low, formal beds of blossom, with paths winding or
straight, with arbors and summer-houses. Jamestown is burned and
Williamsburg arises, and there are gardens still in Williamsburg,
gardens of lilac and daffodils, violets and roses.
In 1732, leaving his own garden at Westover, William Byrd
travels to Germanna and with Governor Spotswood takes “a turn
in the Garden. . . . Three terrace walks that fall in slopes one
below another." The valley is settled, and gardens arise about the
homes of Lewises and Campbells and McDowells and Gays and
Prestons and Wilsons and Alexanders, and many another. And
there is Greenway Court where the young surveyor, George Wash¬
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