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INTRODUCTORY Club, mothers this volume. Again to women is owed garden pleasure—the whiff of box, of mignonette, of clove pinks and damask roses; the sense of sunny brick walls, of butterflies and bees and lovers and children in a world of blossom; an old, sweet wind of garden romance, garden poetry. Gardens began early in Virginia. At Varina, in 1614, lived that wedded pair, John Rolfe and Pocahontas, daughter of Powhatan. Rolfe experimented with tobacco, and who shall say that in turn he did not show the young, wonderful Indian woman how they set flowering bushes, how they made beds of flowers, in Norfolk, in England? In 1625, on the banks of the James, George Sandys translated Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Surely he had some planting of flowers about his door! In 1642, at Greenspring, Sir William Berkeley had a garden of extent and colour. When, a little later, the King’s men, the cavaliers, fled with their families to Virginia from an England, no longer Stuart, there came with them garden ideas and garden seeds and slips and cuttings. Washington, Mason and Lee, Pendleton, Randolph, Cary, Madison, Monroe, Brodnax, Skipwith, and many others—these men and their wives and sisters and daughters soon had their sunlighted, their moonlighted gardens in Virginia. English squires, English and Scots merchants turned Virginia planters—near their houses of wood or of brick rise gardens with fruit trees, with old, fair shrubs, with low, formal beds of blossom, with paths winding or straight, with arbors and summer-houses. Jamestown is burned and Williamsburg arises, and there are gardens still in Williamsburg, gardens of lilac and daffodils, violets and roses. In 1732, leaving his own garden at Westover, William Byrd travels to Germanna and with Governor Spotswood takes “a turn in the Garden. . . . Three terrace walks that fall in slopes one below another." The valley is settled, and gardens arise about the homes of Lewises and Campbells and McDowells and Gays and Prestons and Wilsons and Alexanders, and many another. And there is Greenway Court where the young surveyor, George Wash[14]
