Old-Time Gardens, Newly Set ForthEarle, Alice Morse
History
Old-Time Gardens, Newly Set Forth
Earle, Alice Morse
Gardens; Landscape gardening
Within the past five or six years there have been laid out in America,
at the country seats of men of wealth and culture, a great number of
formal gardens,--Italian gardens, some of them are worthily named, as
they have been shaped and planted in conformity with the best laws and
rules of Italian garden-making--that special art. On this page is shown
the finely proportioned terrace wall, and opposite the upper terrace and
formal garden of Drumthwacket, Princeton, New Jersey, the country seat
of M. Taylor Pyne, Esq. This garden affords a good example of the accord
which should ever exist between the garden and its surroundings. The
name, Drumthwacket--a wooded hill--is a most felicitous one; the place
is part of the original grant to William Penn, and has remained in the
possession of one family until late in the nineteenth century. From this
beautifully wooded hill the terrace-garden overlooks the farm buildings,
the linked ponds, the fertile fields and meadows; a serene pastoral
view, typical of the peaceful landscape of that vicinity--yet it was
once the scene of fiercest battle. For the Drumthwacket farm is the
battle-ground of that important encounter of 1777 between the British
and the Continental troops, known as the Battle of Princeton, the
turning point of the Revolution, in which Washington was victorious. To
this day, cannon ball and grape shot are dug up in the Drumthwacket
fields. The Lodge built in 1696 was, at Washington's request, the
shelter for the wounded British officers; and the Washington Spring in
front of the Lodge furnished water to Washington. The group of trees on
the left of the upper pond marks the sheltered and honored graves of the
British soldiers, where have slept for one hundred and twenty-four
years those killed at this memorable encounter. If anything could cement
still more closely the affections of the English and American peoples,
it would be the sight of the tenderly sheltered graves of British
soldiers in America, such as these at Drumthwacket and other historic
fields on our Eastern coast. At Concord how faithfully stand the
sentinel pines over the British dead of the Battle of Concord, who thus
repose, shut out from the tread of heedless feet yet ever present for
the care and thought of Concord people.
[Illustration: Garden at Avonwood Court, Haverford, Pennsylvania,
Country-seat of Charles E. Mather, Esq.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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