d proceeded to plant
forty-eight mahogany tree seeds brought by his nephew, George A.
Washington, from the West Indies. He also set out a "Palmetto Royal" in
the garden and sowed or planted sandbox trees, palmettos, physic nuts,
pride of Chinas, live oaks, accacias, bird peppers, "Caya pepper,"
privet, guinea grass, and a great variety of Chinese grasses, the names
of which, such as _"In che fa," "all san fa" "se lon fa,"_ he gravely
set down in his diary.

The dry weather continued and presently he notes that all the poplars,
black gums and pines, most of the mulberries, all of the crab apples
and papaws, most of the hemlock and sassafras, and several of the cedars
are dead, while the tops of the live oaks are dead but shoots are coming
up from the trunks and roots. The Chinese grasses are in a bad way, and
those that have come up are almost entirely destroyed either by insects
or drought. None of this grass survived the winter, though he took the
trouble to cover it with straw.

During the fall of 1785 and spring of 1786 he sowed the lawn with
English grass seeds, replaced the dead trees in the serpentine walks and
shrubberies, and sent two hundred and fifteen apple trees to his River
Plantation. He made the two low mounds already mentioned and planted
thereon weeping willows. He set out stocks of imported hawthorns, four
yellow jessamines, twenty-five of the Palinurus for hedges, forty-six
pistacia nuts and seventy-five pyramidical cypress, which last were
brought to him by the botanist Michaux from the King of France. As 1786
was one of the wettest summers ever known, his plants and trees lived
better than they had done the preceding year.

During this period and until the end of his life he was constantly
receiving trees and shrubs from various parts of the world. Thus in
1794 he sent to Alexandria by Thomas Jefferson a bundle of "Poccon
[pecan] or Illinois nut," which in some way had come to him at
Philadelphia. He instructed the gardener to set these out at Mount
Vernon, also to sow some seeds of the East India hemp that had been left
in his care. The same year thirty-nine varieties of tropical plants,
including the bread fruit tree, came to him from a well wisher in
Jamaica. At other times he sowed seeds of the cucumber tree, chickory
and "colliflower" and planted ivy and wild honeysuckle. Again he once
more planted pecans and hickory nuts. It can hardly be that at his
advanced age he expected to derive any p