Stranica 485 [485]
OCR
HISTORIC: GARDENS: OF VIRGINIA the war vety keenly. When he heard the enemy was approaching, he left his home and ordered the butler to fire the house rather than have it fall into their hands. My father, Alexander Bruce, who was trained at the Virginia Military Institute under Thomas J. Jackson, afterwards General Stonewall Jackson, collected all the men at home on leave or unfit for service and held Staunton Bridge, which prevented the enemy from coming through. Needless to say, when my mother used to tell me about it when I was a child, I felt it was the most important battle of the war, just as I thought the Presbyterian Church in Lexington, Virginia, the largest in the world. My grandfather, James C. Bruce, died the day Lee surrendered, and said he took a grim satisfaction in leaving the world on the day that meant the death of his class. General Merritt, one of the youngest Federal generals, was stationed at Berry Hill after the surrender. — After the war, my father, Alexander Bruce, felt it would be impossible to keep the garden as it should be kept, so he had it removed, and trees set out matching the rest of the grounds, leaving only the box, crepe myrtle and other shrubs, removing all the walks and flower beds, though my mother and sister were in tears at the thought of having to give it up. But there still remain quantities of jonquils, hedges of box, and interesting flowering trees and shrubs. Many think the place was improved by removing the garden and the cedar hedges, which divided the flowers from the vegetables; these hedges also separated the vegetables from the park, and the park from the orchard. The pictures will-give some idea of the place as it now is, with the house in the center of the park. In the old garden were peonies, snowballs, smoke trees, magnolias, Japan apples, flowering apples, crab apples, jasmines, honeysuckles on frames, crepe myrtles, dogwoods, Roses of Sharon, fringe trees, red buds and many mimosas. Every tree had something planted beneath to come up in the spring, such as double and single jonquils, hyacinths, snowdrops, peonies, or narcissi. 1298 | ELLEN BRUCE CRANE.
