In his valuable “Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century”, Philip Bruce gives a graphic pen picture of the ordinary surroundings of the seventeenth-century Virginia planter’s house, a picture that may equally well apply to the generality of houses in the other Southern colonies at the same period. After noting the usual plainness and simplicity of the environment, he goes on to say:--“The yard, as it was called, consisted of open ground, overshadowed here and there by trees. In the immediate vicinity of the house was situated the garden, devoted partly to vegetables and partly to flowers, thyme, marjoram and phlox being as abundant there as in England. Many of the flowers and shrubs had only recently been brought from the mother country. Byrd is discovered in 1684 writing to his brother in England, and thanking him for the gooseberry and currant bushes which had just been received; in the same year he expresses to a second correspondent his appreciation of a gift of seeds and roots, which had been planted and had safely flowered [iris, tulip, crocus and anemone]. The summer houses, arbours and grottoes, which Beverley declares were to be found near the residences, were doubtless generally situated in the garden, and were erected to afford a cool place of retreat in the warmest hours of the summer day; the garden itself was always protected by a paling to keep out the hogs and cattle which were permitted to wander without restraint. In the immediate vicinity of the dwellings of the wealthy landowners, there were, as a rule, grouped the dovecot, stable, barn, henhouse, cabins for the servants, kitchen and milk-house, the object of this in the last instances being to remove from the mansion the operations of cooking, washing and dairying. In many yards, a tall pole with a toy house at the top was erected, in which the bee martin might build its nest, this bird bravely attacking the hawk and crow, and thus serving as a guardian of the poultry.” It would not be difficult to find the counterpart of these conditions in many a place in the South today, that is to say, in places patterned after the Colonial tradition, in which the formal Georgian element has never played an important part nor led to the laying out of great, symmetrically-planned gardens.