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OCR
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, deL192]
