The Ultimate Victorian Garden: Sarah Eva Howe Recalls the Trees, Vines, and Flowers at Her Childhood Home in 1891

Today we "stroll" with Sarah Eva Howe through the gardens of her family home at 4th and High (now Highland) in Carrollton, Kentucky.The Howe's yard provides a perfect example of Victorian-era

Columbine, popular in Victorian gardens

residential landscaping. Sarah's details about the lilacs, the columbine, the snapdragons, and other plants could be a guide to creating today's Victorian-style garden.

In the preceding books, I have told of our life in Cincinnati ... and described Carrollton as it was when we arrived, so now I can take up the Reminiscences where I left off and begin with the fall of 1891, when we really became Carrollton citizens and moved to the low brick house at the corner of 4th and High Streets — in our own home at last and one Papa was never to leave in his lifetime. Of course all was excitement to me at the thought of moving and of seeing the furniture that had been in storage brought out and placed in the square, rambling, low-ceiling rooms of the 75-year-old house in whose parlor, it was told us, Mrs. Benjamin Harrison had attended school as a girl.
The yard was so beautiful too, with trees and flowers. Mr. And Mrs. Fishback were flower lovers and had planted a number of flower beds; each was surrounded by a wooden contraption, a little fence, painted dark red; they had been in place a long time and were rotting next to the ground, so it didn’t take Papa long to pull them all out and make the flower beds more natural looking. 

The only fruit tree of any consequence was a big, gnarled crabapple tree on the side of the yard next to the church; ... and a healthy grape arbor which to

Sarah drew this plat of her childhood home as she recalled it in the mid-1940s.

Mama’s disappointment had catawba, or red, grapes — she being a city girl had always eaten Concords, mostly from a basket. For shrubs we had a wealth of unpruned, tangled syringa, which to my childish delight formed a natural green grotto close to the churchyard fence. Then there was a Rose of Sharon bush, and most lovely of all (in poor condition, tho, because of not being trimmed) a coral honeysuckle in a sort of wooden frame. And under the grape arbor were quantities of orange-colored July lilies.

There were some old rose bushes, but the prize one was at the corner of the yard — the 4th & High corner — and it had deep red, lovely roses all through the summer. Up against the house on the 4th St. or chimney side of the big front room (which stood by itself on the left side of the double wooden front door) was a yellow rose bush, which bloomed just in May and June, whose fragrance Leonora and I can remember yet — not single roses, nor really very full, but a lovely color. 

In the corner where the big room joined the rest of the house at the back was a very large single or nearly single “common” red-pink rose bush, very profuse in its spring bloom but soon over. Over the door which led from the front room to the side brick path (which went from the back door to the front, past the cistern, and clear around the big room to the front door) was an arbor covered with a huge honeysuckle vine, which I always think of when I hear “the woodbine whose fragrance shall cheer me no more.” For indeed the morn could be “gazed on” from that door, and it was an unforgettable sight. 

Part of the previous paragraph, in Sarah's handwriting

From the big front doors a sloping brick path led to very old (partly cracked) front steps and a big iron gate which shut with a satisfactory clang (unless you had your fingers in it as Leonora did once). On each side of this walk, semi-wild flowers sprang from narrow beds — columbine, verbenas, mostly a purplish crimson — they were so prolific they even spread at times across the brick walk — and a lovely slender sweetbrier rosebush, you hardly ever see them now, with tiny flowers like apple blossoms (being of course of the same family) and leaves that were more fragrant than the flowers. Violets grew in clumps all over the yard, in some places very large, but wild ones still; on the sunny, or southwest side was a broken down violet bed for sweet violets, which Mama hastened to have built back into shape and covered with a “sash,” and the plants once started there gave us sweet violets for at least four years of our stay there.

In the middle of the back yard was “the pit,” a luxury not at all uncommon in self-respecting homes (where there was of course no central heating), [for] plants and a great many house plants. These large trenches, built up with wood and fitted with shelf steps, could accommodate the largest oleander trees at the bottom, and tiny begonias at the top. On a pulley, the large glass sashes were opened and shut and over these were heavy wooden doors also on pulleys. As far as I ever heard, nothing was ever known to freeze in them.

When Leonora remembers the house, the glory of the place was the lilac bushes — but when we went there, I believe there was just one clump of rather aged bushes by the side

Lilacs similar to Sarah's description of those in the Howe's yard

of the house by the cellar door; almost all of the later bushes came from the shoots growing on the ground around this big old one. They (the flowers) were of a very light purple, and an indescribable fragrance. But I think it was probably 1892 before Papa and Mama began to make this yard a really notable garden and to begin accumulating lovely large plants with which the “pit” could be fitted in winter. In a bed in the back yard (on the side of the crabapple tree), in a too-shady place, were some spindling plants that Mama pulled up. She said those common old zinnias I don’t want them in my yard! It was many years and many transformations later before she changed her mind. There were cox combs in the big square bed in the front yard, red geraniums and loveliest of all, sweet Williams and a few snapdragons. But as the Fishbacks knew they were moving, they neglected the flowers in the summer, so when we moved in (on Sept. 8th), the yard was rather sad looking.

The most prominent features of the place I have left till last: two enormous cedar trees, very dark & gloomy looking, on each side of the front walk, with limbs growing clear down to the ground. Also in the front yard next to the courtyard fence was a locust tree — either the same one or its descendant was the one who received into its arms the top of the steeple when it was blown off in 1943. This locust, temperamental in the extreme, alternately leaving great bunches of fragrant blossoms in locust winter and littering up the yard with its early shedding leaves, and being either struck by lightning or having its limbs torn off in high winds, was continually in our conversation. We were always going to cut it down but never did. 

The churchyard fence, small enough to be climbed easily where it ran into our iron one, became higher as it ran back in the yard and on down the garden hill. Generally meticulously whitewashed by some . . . servitor, it was no whiter than the top of Grandpa Howe’s [word undecipherable; probably referring to a structure on her grandfather's lot which was in the next block], which was plainly visible above it from our side in the yard (we could see more of them from the bedroom window).

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