Terrace Wall at Drumthwacket, Princeton, New Jersey.
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.
Garden at Avonwood Court, Haverford, Pennsylvania, Country-seat of Charles E. Mather, Esq.
We have older Italian gardens. Some of them are of great loveliness, among them the unique and dignified garden of Hollis H. Hunnewell, Esq., but many of the newer ones, even in their few summers, have become of surprising grace and beauty, and their exquisite promise causes a glow of delight to every garden lover. I have often tried to analyze and account for the great charm of a formal garden, to one who loves so well the unrestrained and lavished blossoming of a flower border crowded with nature-arranged and disarranged blooms. A chance sentence in the letter of a flower-loving friend, one whose refined taste is an inherent portion of her nature, runs thus:—
"I have the same love, the same sense of perfect satisfaction, in the old formal garden that I have in the sonnet in poetry, in the Greek drama as contrasted with the modern drama; something within me is ever drawn toward that which is restrained and classic."
In these few words, then, is defined the charm of the formal garden—a well-ordered, a classic restraint.
