Our mothers and grandmothers came honestly by their love of gardens. They inherited this affection from their Puritan, Quaker, or Dutch forbears, perhaps from the days when the famous hanging gardens of Babylon were made for a woman. Bacon says: "A garden is the purest of human pleasures, it is the greatest refreshment to the spirits of man." A garden was certainly the greatest refreshment to the spirits of a woman in the early colonial days, and the purest of her pleasures—too often her only pleasure.
Quickly, in tender memory of her fair English home, the homesick goodwife, trying to create a semblance of the birthplace she still loved, planted the seeds and roots of homely English flowers and herbs that grew and blossomed under bleak New England skies, and on rocky New England shores, as sturdily and cheerfully as they had sprung up and bloomed by the green hedgerows and door-sides in the home beyond the sea.
In the year 1638, and again in 1663, an English gentleman named John Josselyn came to New England. He published, in 1672, an account of these two visits. He was a man of polite reading and of culture, and as was the high fashion for gentlemen of his day, had a taste for gardening and botany. He made interesting lists of plants which he noted in America under these heads:—
"1. Such plants as are common with us in England.
"2. Such plants as are proper to the country.
"3. Such plants as are proper to the country and have no names.
"4. Such plants as have sprung up since the English planted and kept cattle in New England.
"5. Such Garden-Herbs among us as do thrive there and of such as do not."
This last division is the one that specially interests us, since it is the earliest and the fullest account of the gardens of our forefathers, after they had tamed the rugged shores of the New World, and made them obey the rule of English husbandry. They had "good store of garden vegetables and herbs; lettuce, sorrel, parsley, mallows, chevril, burnet, summer savory, winter savory, thyme, sage, carrots, parsnips, beets, radishes, purslain, beans"; "cabbidge growing exceeding well; pease of all sorts and the best in the world; sparagus thrives exceedingly, musk mellons, cucumbers, and pompions." For grains there were wheat, rye, barley, and oats. There were other garden herbs and garden flowers: spearmint, pennyroyal, ground-ivy, coriander, dill, tansy; "feverfew prospereth exceedingly; white sattin groweth pretty well, and so doth lavender-cotton; gillyflowers will continue two years; horse-leek prospereth notably; hollyhocks; comferie with white flowers; clary lasts but one summer; sweet-bryer or eglantine; celandine but slowly; blood-wort but sorrily, but patience and English roses very pleasantly."
Patience and English roses very pleasantly in truth must have shown their fair English faces to English women in the strange land. Dearly loved had these brier-roses or dog-roses been in England, where, says the old herbalist, Gerard, "children with delight make chains and pretty gewgawes of the fruit; and cookes and gentlewomen make tarts and suchlike dishes for pleasure thereof." Hollyhocks, feverfew, and gillyflowers must have made a sunshine in the shady places in the new home. Many of these garden herbs are now common weeds or roadside blossoms. Celandine, even a century ago, was "common by fences and among rubbish." Tansy and elecampane grow everywhere. Sweet-brier is at home in New England pastures and roadsides. Spearmint edges our brooks. Ground-ivy is a naturalized citizen. It is easy to note that the flowers and herbs beloved in gardens and medicinal waters and kitchens "at home" were the ones transplanted here. "Clary-water" was a favorite tonic of Englishmen of that day.