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HrsTroric "GARDENS (OF “VIRGINIA same shade as Newport Pink, with corresponding masses of heliotrope. 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 residence 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]
