Stranica 150 [150]
RICHMOND AND VICINITY
Behind the flowers stand grape trellises, and then the useful,
but not decorative, plots where grow beets, radishes, celery, aspa¬
ragus, and that celebrated tuber which has been so justly called
‘‘the unostentatious po-ta-to.”’
There was a day when damsons were in this garden; now only
the apricot, peach and pear trees survive. The apple trees of
fifty years ago no longer furnish even practice grounds for sap¬
suckers. But the intimate violet, in its ever-enlarging beds, has
thriven and multiplied, while the great trees died.
The garden itself is a rough oval traversed by two walks on
different levels, one of grass and the other, gravel. Across these
at right angles, under a rose arbor, runs a transverse allee. Around
the whole garden, just inside the hedge, is another walk that 1s
purely utilitarian. In this garden are "the new hothouses " as they
were called—sixty years ago—the old hothouses stand much nearer
to the house itself in the “Little Garden.”
- The date of the latter is unknown, but a colossal magnolia, glori¬
ous in its symmetry, has spread, from generation to generation, its
great trailing limbs, and speaks of an age that really surpasses
mere dates. The ‘little garden” is just for roses, and three great
magnolias; true, there are two immense willow oaks on its south
border, and flowering almonds, which look very modern in the
presence of the old trees, stand on the edge of the central grass
plot. This garden is a rough circle. On the side nearest the man¬
sion is an iron fence, now arbored with trailing roses; within the
fence are rosebeds, then comes a narrow walk that runs around the
whole. Within this walk stand two great magnolias, and one
magnolia grandiflora; there are rosebeds in this grass plot, too.
On the north side of the garden are three hothouses, one of
which has been there for seventy-five or eighty years; the other
two are forty years old.
Just east of the garden stands a group of magnificent ever¬
greens, under whose peaceful keeping lie the bodies of the ancestors
of the present owners of Brook Hill. The whole effect, in its
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