Old-Time Gardens, Newly Set ForthEarle, Alice Morse
History
Old-Time Gardens, Newly Set Forth
Earle, Alice Morse
Gardens; Landscape gardening
In Pennsylvania, from the first years of the settlement, William Penn
encouraged his Quaker followers to plant English flowers and fruit in
abundance, and to try the fruits of the new world. Father Pastorius, in
his Germantown settlement, assigned to each family a garden-plot of
three acres, as befitted a man who left behind him at his death a
manuscript poem of many thousand words on the pleasures of gardening,
the description of flowers, and keeping of bees. George Fox, the founder
of the Friends, or Quakers, died in 1690. He had travelled in the
colonies; and in his will he left sixteen acres of land to the Quaker
meeting in the city of Philadelphia. Of these sixteen acres, ten were
for "a close to put Friends' horses in when they came afar to the
Meeting, that they may not be Lost in the Woods," while the other six
were for a site for a meeting-house and school-house, and "for a
Playground for the Children of the town to Play on, and for a Garden to
plant with Physical Plants, for Lads and Lasses to know Simples, and to
learn to make Oils and Ointments." Few as are these words, they convey a
positive picture of Fox's intent, and a pleasing picture it is. He had
seen what interest had been awakened and what instruction conveyed
through the "Physick-Garden" at Chelsea, England; and he promised to
himself similar interest and information from the study of plants and
flowers by the Quaker "lads and lasses" of the new world. Though
nothing came from this bequest, there was a later fulfilment of Fox's
hopes in the establishment of a successful botanic garden in
Philadelphia, and, in the planting, growth, and flourishing in the
province of Pennsylvania of the loveliest gardens in the new world;
there floriculture reached by the time of the Revolution a very high
point; and many exquisite gardens bore ample testimony to the "pride of
life," as well as to the good taste and love of flowers of Philadelphia
Friends. The garden at Grumblethorp, the home of Charles J. Wister,
Esq., of Germantown, Pennsylvania, shown on page 7, dates to colonial
days and is still flourishing and beautiful.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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