Stranica 313 [313]
HISTORIC GARDENS OF VIRGINIA
well, where he kept meat, butter, and vegetables cool in summer,
for icehouses were unknown until later. Along the lower edges of
the lawn were old English haha walls to prevent the cattle from
approaching the house, but so arranged as not to break the view.
These same cattle, however, of which there were many hundred,
were driven over the lawns whenever cutting was necessary, as there
were no lawn mowers in those days.
Below the lawn was a deer paddock, and the irregular shores
of the river. On this southern lawn are beautiful old trees, almost
all of which were selected in the woods and brought to their present
situation by the young engineer himself. From the wharf a long
steep ascending foot-path and a long easier driveway both led to
the old burial-place of the family and to the newer tomb which now
is the mecca of all tourists. Here numerous memorial trees have
been planted by prominent visitors.
If George Washington had not been a great statesman and
patriot, he would at,least have been an eminent landscape artist,
for nowhere in America have we such a splendid plan of landscape
gardening carried out with such accuracy and beauty, and all this by
a young engineer in his twenties. “This makes one think more of
rod and chain and tripod, than of lace and powder and velvets!
In the rear of the mansion, now the main entrance, was laid out
a fine lawn upon a level surface comprising about two acres. Around
it he made a serpentine driveway, and he planted a great variety
of trees on each side. The list of trees mentioned in his diary
which he selected in the woods and had planted on the grounds ts
long—including elm, beech, maple, ash—the different varieties of
oak—gum, poplar, aspen, mulberry, dogwood, redbud, pine, cedar,
magnolia, hemlock, many holly, and laurel. These trees terminated,
by his own description, “By two mounds of earth, one on each
side, on which were growing weeping-willow trees, leaving an open
and full view of the distant hills. These trees were sixty yards
apart."
Directly before the western front was a round grass-plot, de¬
L192]