Stranica 214 [214]
OCR
TTI Tred THE Upper’ JAmMeEs Se eee ON EN ALO i OE iia reaching magnolias and long-lived forest trees—some wrapped, trunk and bough, in ivy—are a wide variety of shrubs. The garden is approached over the serpentine brick walk which leads across the lawn from the south porch. Sempervirens boxwood, eighteen inches in height, follows the walk along both sides. It is noteworthy that the six hundred and eighty-five specimens hedging the bricks were propagated at Elk Hill by Mrs. Stokes. Her hand also planted many of the shrubs and flowering trees that in the spring make of the place a double garden—half hanging, almost, in the air—the other half under foot. She was the presiding spirit who, short-handed at times during our day, yet continued to add so much to the old-fashioned beauty of the place by skill, personal care and indefatigable zeal. In a paper read some years ago before the James River Garden Club, Mrs. Stokes told the secret of her success with box. “I am going to tell you very briefly just what I did in growing my boxwood,”’ she said. “I took a square in my vegetable garden, had it deeply plowed and laid off in rows three feet apart. I opened the rows, mixed the soil with thoroughly well-rotted cow-pen manure, leaving the surface flat. I then broke off pieces from four to five inches from a hedge box in my flower garden, being sure each piece was pronged instead of being straight, as a root puts out much quicker from a pronged slip. I set the slips four inches apart in the rows, covering them so that only two inches showed above ground. These slips were put out in November, I 9 I 3— four thousand of them. The first winter I cut just the tips from each slip, laying pine brush between the rows to break the wind, as nothing is so disastrous to slips rooting as being blown to and fro by the wind. By the rst of April, 1914, I could not tell from appearances whether rooting had taken place or the slips were dead, but, on pulling up several, I found the fine rootlets putting out. It was as though I had made a real discovery, for raising boxwood was with me a pure experiment. The weeds growing between the [131]
