"It contains four acres and has a grand aisle in the middle. Near the middle is an oval surrounded with espaliers of fruit-trees, in the centre of which is a pedestal, on which is an armillary sphere with an equatorial dial. On one side of the front is a hot-house containing orange-trees, some ripe, some green, some blooms, and various other fruit-trees of the exotic kind and curious flowers. At the lower end of the aisle is a large summer-house, a long square containing three rooms, the middle paved with marble and hung with landscapes. On the right is a large private library adorned with curious carvings. There are espaliers of fruit-trees at each end of the garden and curious flowering shrubs. The room on the left is beautifully designed for music and contains a spinnet. But the whole garden discovered the desolations of war." In the Southern colonies men of wealth soon had beautiful gardens. In an early account of South Carolina, written in 1682, we find:-- "Their Gardens are supplied with such European Plants and Herbs as are necessary for the Kitchen, and they begin to be beautiful and adorned with such Flowers as to the Smell or Eye are pleasing or agreeable, viz.: the Rose, Tulip, Carnation, Lilly, etc." By the middle of the century many exquisite gardens could be seen in Charleston, and they were the pride of Southern colonial dames. Those of Mrs. Lamboll, Mrs. Hopton, and Mrs. Logan were the largest. The latter flower-lover in 1779, when seventy years old, wrote a treatise on flower-raising called _The Gardener's Kalendar_, which was read and used for many years. Mrs. Laurens had another splendid garden. Those Southern ladies and their gardeners constantly sent specimens to England, and received others in return. The letters of the day, especially those of Eliza Lucas Pinckney, ever interested in floriculture and arboriculture, show a constant exchange with English flower-lovers. Beverley wrote of Virginia, in 1720: "A garden is nowhere sooner made than there." William Byrd and other travellers, a few years later, saw many beautiful terraced gardens in Virginian homes. Mrs. Anne Grant writes at length of the love and care the Dutch women of the past century had for flowers:-- "The care of plants such as needed peculiar care or skill to rear them, was the female province. Every one in town or country had a garden. Into the garden no foot of man intruded after it was dug in the spring. I think I see yet what I have so often beheld--a respectable mistress of a family going out to her garden, in an April morning, with her great calash, her little painted basket of seeds, and her rake over her shoulders, to her garden of labours. A woman in very easy circumstances and abundantly gentle in form and manners would sow and plant and rake incessantly."