Oldal 24 [24]
INTRODUCTORY
ington, walks and talks with Lord Fairfax. And in March, 1774,
in Northumberland County, young Mr. Philip Fithian, the tutor
at Nomini Hall, “has the honour of taking a walk with Mrs.
Carter through the Garden. . . . We gathered cowslips in full
bloom and as many violets. The English honeysuckle is all out
in green and tender leaves.’ Presently he rides to Mount Airy,
in Richmond County, and finds ‘‘a large, well-formed, beautiful
garden, as fine in every respect as any I have seen in Virginia.
In it stand four large, beautiful, marble statues.”’
Throughout the Revolutionary and the post-Revolutionary
periods come whifts of colour, song and perfume. There are flowers
at Mount Vernon, and flowers at Red Hill where lives Patrick
Henry, and John Marshall has his flowers in Richmond, and
Jefferson at Monticello. Of Jefferson his granddaughter says,
“Every day he rode through his plantation and walked in his
garden ....I1 remember the planting of the first hyacinths and
tulips. There was ‘Marcus Aurelius’ and “The King of the Gold
Mine,’ the ‘Roman Empress’ and the ‘Queen of the Amazons.’....
When the flowers were in bloom and we were in ecstacies over
the rich purple and crimson, or pure white, or delicate lilac, or
pale yellow of the blossoms, how he would sympathize with our
admiration, or discuss with my mother and elder sister new group¬
ings and combinations and contrasts. Oh, these were happy
moments for us and for him!"
The first sixty years of the nineteenth century was probably the
heyday of gardens in Virginia. Then long and dread war, and
houses burned and gardens trampled! Many old houses, many
old gardens, have disappeared from Virginia. But many are left.
And other gardens have been begun, are beginning, flourish now
and will flourish more and more.
Those that are written of in this book are major gardens, old,
well-known pleasaunces. But it were odd, thinking of Virginia, if
the thousand, if the fifty thousand, little gardens did not come into
mind, if the flowers in old towns, if the flowers in village yards,
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