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MEL EGYET PB ERR | PAMES —_—_——_ ovals, covering about one acre, proves upon investigation to be perfectly symmetrical, with direct exits leading from a central bed. Bordering each of the fifty-seven beds, as well as enclosing the garden plot, are hedges of suffruticosa, which average in height from two to four feet, with a girth of sometimes five. Only tall flowers, like phlox and hollyhocks and larkspur, can lift their heads high enough to show to advantage, but, for the pleasure of such glorious box, one is willing to forego many flowers, which, after all, can be had elsewhere. There is probably more of the oldfashioned dwarf or suffruticosa boxwood at Tuckahoe than anywhere else in America. By actual measurement, if lined off, it would extend about eight thousand feet, or more than one and onehalf miles. The beauty of this box garden’s unlost configuration is retained with its early and remote contours. ‘The invincible green of the box, darkling amid and above the flowers, takes from and gives to them the cheer which neither could have found without the contrast. It 1s like some garden of sleep, and here one finds rest that seldom comes in this world of unfortunate change. The spot is lovely enough by day; but at night ! With evening there comes into the Virginia air a soft, intangible, poetical dreaminess—a dreaminess that, with the fragrant boxwood, lets the Tuckahoe garden smile, even in winter, without any abatement to the effects of summer that would lessen the total of a year of Joy. Roses grow in the central or key bed of this formal garden and again in the first four long beds around it. The center ovals, also four, show in sequence, tulips—slate blue and yellow; cornflowers in contrast to lilies; sweet rocket, and last—phlox drummondi. The ovals, which radiate from the central bed, begin with the Darwins, ranging from pale pink to purple. Larkspur follows— the old-fashioned kind—and, when it blooms, its purplish mist seems to envelop all the garden. Then come the asters. The general plan shows every plot of the same shape to contain the same flowers. Another group has iris, peonies and chrysanthemums, [119]
