LADYBUG SAYS ... BLOOMING FLOWERS ADD TO COLONIAL DREAM TRIP

A favorite rhyme in Miss Gross' Kindergarten at Campus School was:

Ladybug, ladybug fly away home

Your house is on fire

And your children all gone

All but one and her name was

Ann

And she crept under the pudding'

pan.

Now, our Anne did not creep under the pudding pan, but instead after her school teaching year was over, she took me, her friend and her friend's mother from Dunedin, Florida, on a wonderful trip through the Carolinas and Virginia. This was the answer to a lifelong dream to visit this part of the country, especially Colonial Williamsburg.

On the first day we left the heavily traveled interstate to go through the mountains, en route to Brevard, N.C., to call upon Ed and Juanita Curtis, former Cape Girardeans. The mountains brought a great thrill as the mountain laurel was still in bloom, and the magnolias in the area were sweeping the ground and had blossoms as large as dinner plates. (Quite a contrast to the one we had cut down in our own yard where you could ride a horse under the lower limbs.)

Although the Curtis home and yard had only been in their talented hands since December, we knew instantly this was their place. It was bordered on either side by hemlocks for privacy (as they did in Cape) and the house was completely redecorated with Juanita's artistic ability. Ed's newly made garden was unique. It was built in the center of a sloping backyard, and lain out in a perfect plan with large land-scaping logs, with each patch of vegetables set off separately, a gravel pathway in the center, and a semicircular bed of flowers, centered by a statue at the end.

Green beans had been gathered and they had lettuce and onions, with many other veggies coming on. Not only was it most attractive from their home, but most productive as well.

Although previously we had all been to the Biltmore Estate at Asheville, it was still a thrill to visit such elegance, where it takes 40 persons to guide tours inside the house. The entire estate employees 400, we learned.

To create the gardens and grounds for the Biltmore Estate, George Vanderbilt commissioned Frederick Law Olmstead, who also landscaped New York's Central Park. Here we visited the Italian Garden, with its three formal pools, the Shrub Garden with Chinese holly and the Azalea Garden which must have been breathtaking a month or so earlier.

In spite of the upper 90 degree temperature we walked through the four-acre English Walled Garden where every annual and perennial was blooming. Apple trees were bearing fruit on the espaliered trees on the stone wall, where peaches, pears, apricots and plums would come into fruit soon.

In spite of the lack of rainfall there the past month, the 3,000 roses were magnificent. Spent blooms are removed each week, and the gardener told us this had been an unusually good rose year with black spot being completely under control. This, he said had been a severe problem the past two years.

Williamsburg's gardens and landscaped greens totaled nearly 100 acres and displayed 500 kinds of 18th century plants. Colonial Williamsburg is host to more than one million visitors each year, including 100,000 school children. Our two teachers had been here with their school groups.

The Governor's Palace now is just one of the countless attractions in the historic area preserved and restored by the Rockefellers in 1926. Today the Palace and other major edifices stand on their original foundations and have been rebuilt and refurbished inside and out. Now, these complete restorations include 88 original 18th century shops, taverns and public buildings.

Probably the largest ongoing program of diversified 18th century crafts in the world can be found in these busy places, such as the blacksmith, bootmaker, gunsmith, printer, wigmaker, harnessmaker, silversmith, wheelwright, and milliner.

Williamsburg gardeners have been restored to their former glory-sumptuous, formal and elegant, characteristic of the 18th century.

The gardens have distinctive characteristics, with service outbuildings, such as the kitchen, smokehouse or dairy established well apart from the main house as separate features of the overall house and garden plan. Arbors and shaded walks served as cool outdoor retreats in summer, with large, closely spaced trees, the native elm, sycamore and tulip trees planted around the house to form canopies.

Some gardens are laid out along a central path with crosswalks. Other are planted in rectangular oval or square shapes. Each is different. The trees, shrubs, flowers, vines and herbs planted in the gardens are equally as unusual.

Just as the houses are furnished in only period furniture, so the gardens are planted only with flora known either to the colonists or European gardeners.

Necessarily some of the flowers are present day varieties of original plants. The only modern varieties chosen are those that have a colonial lineage and most nearly resemble their ancestors. We saw many old fashioned hollyhocks, monarda (bee-balm), yarrow. Many of the bouquets in the homes used Queen Anne's lace. My travel companion from Florida, who is also "a flower doer" and I were most impressed with the lovely arrangements of fresh flowers used in Williamsburg in contrast to the large artificial arrangements used at the Biltmore, where the admission price is now $20 per person. The impressive city of Williamsburg, Jamestown, Yorktown, Busch Gardens, the trip across the James River by the Jamestown Scotland Ferry, established in 1925, and the Surrey House's fried ham biscuits put the icing on the cake of this wonderful trip.

Cape Girardeau has some spectacular gardens, too. To name a few The All-America display garden on SEMO Campus, the May Greene Garden and flower and vegetable garden of Mr. and Mrs. Jerome Seyer, both on Themis Street near Fountain, and the daylily garden of Mrs. Wesley Nagel and her daughter, Janet, 1926 North Kingshighway, where more than 1000 varieties of daylilies are now blooming.