Stranica 145 [145]
HrsTroric "GARDENS (OF “VIRGINIA
same shade as Newport Pink, with corresponding masses of helio¬
trope. The English gardener and his greenhouses at the lower end
of the garden were both our fear and our delight. A lattice,
weighted down with clematis and Madeira vines, was between the
mansion and the servants’ quarters, smokehouse, the kitchen, those
busy hives of industry, for the entertaining was unceasing.
But let us speak of the real garden—the garden of my father’s
childhood—‘‘the enchanted garden,” the garden that refreshed the
heroes of the Confederacy, from the generals to the privates, who
would come for a brief visit to the family, the recuperating officers
who were being restored to the Confederate Army by devoted care;
the garden that could tell of many a courtship and many a heart
pang at parting, with the insistent booming cannon of the Seven
Days’ Battles around Richmond calling, calling through the sylvan
peace of this old-fashioned Virginia garden! In the happier days,
the children and grandchildren and all the neighborhood held here
their “Queen of May" and "Sleeping Beauty" and such old English
delights, while the garden for all time was the playground for
many generations of children and their friends. ‘The plan of this
garden is given here. As I have already said, it adjoined the resi¬
dence and garden of my great-grandfather, afterwards my father’s.
It was, therefore, more than half of a city square. The garden
was in four divisions. First, you entered it from the back porch
by steps to a gravel walk running parallel with the house. The
main arteries of the garden were of gravel, the walks or paths
around the flower beds, bordered each side with box bushes, and
through the vegetable plots, were of grass. The upper part of’
the garden was given over to grass. Here was the lawn dotted with
peach, apple, plum grafted with apricot, and cherry, holly and elm
trees, while a gravel walk cut out of this lawn a circle of grass
where the beautiful paulownias, whose purple blooms exhaling such
fragrance, one of the glories of the springtime, stood in sovereign
majesty. Then came the hedge, four feet wide, six feet high, of
coral honeysuckle and hawthorn (that “oped in the month of
[88]