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ale 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 Virginia 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 greatgrandmother. 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 another bit of the old South, for this home, its owner and the garden were the truest exponents of the Virginia, the Richmond of those [85 |
