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OCR
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 groupings 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, [15]
