By 1790 Charleston was a pretty place, as all travellers aver. The houses, many of them wood, were large and airy, and the fashion of piazzas was becoming general. People were adopting the peculiar style of house stretched long to catch the breeze with gable end to the street and long piazzas. It was not as handsome but cooler and better suited to the climate than the square colonial mansion. This manner of house presupposes a garden, for the door upon the street is in truth only a sort of gate, and the true front door opens from the piazza, and gives upon the garden opposite. The curious neglect of flowers, mentioned in the earlier part of this story, had long since passed away, and every residence had its shrubbery garden behind it.
The streets indeed were — and are — narrow, in spite of Lord Shaftesbury's admonitions to the contrary; there being an old-world belief that narrow streets were healthier than wide ones, because they excluded the sun; and everybody knew that the sun was a thing to be excluded, “maleficent and dangerous,” as they believe in Rome and in Spain to this day.
In the town, behind their high walls, grew oleanders and pomegranates, figs and grapes, and orange trees both sweet and bitter, and bulbs brought from Holland, jonquils and hyacinths. The air was fragrant with the sweet olive, myrtle, and gardenia. There were old-fashioned roses! The cinnamon, the York and Lancaster, the little while musk, and the sweet or Damascus. The glossy-leaved Cherokee clothed the walls with its great white disks, and was crowded by jasmine and hyacinths….
Memories of some flower-loving gentlemen of early America live in the gardens of Charleston. Michaux had one of our first Botanic Gardens and brought new plants — sweet olive, for instance; and he planted some large camellias at Middleton Place; he wrote a book on American oaks. Dr. Alexander Garden, a physician whom eighteenth-century Charlestonians wrote of as “our good Dr. Garden,” hunted wild flowers in the Carolina swamps; his love for plans was contagious and he talked of his pursuit glowingly to many an ailing patient; Linnaeus named the gardenia in honor of the gardening doctor. Joel Poinsett, the only son of a rich physician, studied medicine and then law, but his health failed and he devoted what energy he had to traveling and gardening; as Mrs. Ravenel recalls, he said once that, despite the doctors, he had managed comfortably with only one lung, for over sixty years! From Mexico Poinsett brought a red and yellow mimosa called Goat's-beard, the “Mexican Rose” — a species of hibiscus which was said to change from white to pink and red in a single day; and, of course, the poinsettia!
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