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RICHMOND AND VICINITY Behind the flowers stand grape trellises, and then the useful, but not decorative, plots where grow beets, radishes, celery, asparagus, 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 sapsuckers. 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, glorious 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 mansion 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 evergreens, under whose peaceful keeping lie the bodies of the ancestors of the present owners of Brook Hill. The whole effect, in its 91 |
