“On the other side of the house, to a little distance, was a garden of old-fashioned roses and sweet shrubs that filled the air with fragrance when they were abloom. And there were beds of tulips and daffodillies, and there were graveled walks edged with box, and a greenhouse of shining glass at the lower end of the garden. And there was a wooden summer house at the end of one of the gravel walks, and together it was such a garden as you will hardly find outside of a story book. It seems to me that when I think of that garden, I cannot remember anything but bloom and beauty, air filled with the odor of growing things, and birds singing in the shady trees in such a fashion as they do not sing nowadays.”
– Howard Pyle (1853-1911) describing his childhood at Goodstay
A walk through the Goodstay Gardens (now the property of the University of Delaware) yesterday was made in hopes that the peonies and the famous iris would be in bloom, as indeed they were. In the heart of Wilmington's Western edge, we had the garden to ourselves as Covid has removed all students and associated activities from the property. So like Pyle, we had the Goodstay grounds as our private kingdom.
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