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RICHMOND AND VICINITY
There were snowdrops, followed by the grape hyacinths and a varied
assemblage of old favorites. The roses were notable, even in those
days, when there were so many to “tend” these old gardens that
they flourished like the proverbial green bay tree; the yellow
jasmine twining in among the microphylla roses, the thousand leaf,
the musk cluster, the Cherokee, the damask, and, above all, the
great favorite—the moss rose. Who that ever grew up in a Vir¬
ginia garden but knows the prick of a moss rose?
On her return from her residence in Paris, Mrs. Mason, whose
husband had died in his second term as Minister Plenipotentiary
and Envoy Extraordinary from the United States of America to
the Court of Napoleon III, would wander through her beloved
garden, gloved and veiled, giving orders and instructions to her
train of ebony gardeners, whose greatest joy was to carry out her
beautiful taste in the garden that had been planted by her great¬
grandmother.
The house and garden of General Anderson have been swept
away by the growth of Richmond, and on their site stands today
the Jefferson Hotel. I have always understood that it was the plan
of the designers of that hotel to leave some of the lawn and trees
on Franklin Street and the beautiful row of horse chestnuts whicn
bordered the pavement; but the engineer, not calculating on the
great drop of the land, drew the plans so that the hotel had to be
put on the line of the street. A pang shot through every child of
two generations when they saw not only their playground, the
garden, but even the horse chestnuts go, for General Anderson's
pavement was the roller-skating-rink for the neighborhood for
squares around. The delicious odor of the horse chestnut bloom
brings to many an adult mind of today the happy skating there in
the springtime of the long ago. And with the thought of the odor
of the horse chestnuts, mingled with the fragrance of the
paulownias in the garden, comes, too, the wafted fragrance of an¬
other bit of the old South, for this home, its owner and the garden
were the truest exponents of the Virginia, the Richmond of those
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