Old-Time Gardens, Newly Set ForthEarle, Alice Morse
History
Old-Time Gardens, Newly Set Forth
Earle, Alice Morse
Gardens; Landscape gardening
wrote one colonist of that arrival, in his _Good Newes from New
England_. I like to think that Sweet Fern, the characteristic wild
perfume of New England, was wafted out to greet them. And then all went
on shore in the sunshine of that ineffable time and season,--a New
England day in June,--and they "gathered store of fine strawberries,"
just as their Salem friends had on a June day on the preceding year
gathered strawberries and "sweet Single Roses" so resembling the English
Eglantine that the hearts of the women must have ached within them with
fresh homesickness. And ere long all had dwelling-places, were they but
humble log cabins; and pasture lands and commons were portioned out; and
in a short time all had garden-plots, and thus, with sheltering
roof-trees, and warm firesides, and with gardens, even in this lonely
new world, they had _homes_. The first entry in the Plymouth Records is
a significant one; it is the assignment of "Meresteads and
Garden-Plotes," not meresteads alone, which were farm lands, but home
gardens: the outlines of these can still be seen in Plymouth town. And
soon all sojourners who bore news back to England of the New-Englishmen
and New-Englishwomen, told of ample store of gardens. Ere a year had
passed hopeful John Winthrop wrote, "My Deare Wife, wee are here in a
Paradise." In four years the chronicler Wood said in his _New England's
Prospect_, "There is growing here all manner of herbs for meat and
medicine, and that not only in planted gardens, but in the woods,
without the act and help of man." Governor Endicott had by that time a
very creditable garden.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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