Every once in a while, as we strolled, we caught a glimpse of the wild and shimmering James River in the distance. We tiptoed on stone steps across the pond. Small bands of our banshees made loud, furious off-road forays to ogle a fox or a bison or a black bear. Several lovely gardens are near the mansion, which sits on a hill in the middle of the spread. The Japanese garden was fashioned by a man named Muto around 1911.
Water flows among rocks.
The plants and trees foster an air of meditation, calm, peace. The ribbed shells of the vessel lay half-covered with dirt like a downed dinosaur. We later learned that George Washington apparently tried to link several canals to the James River as thoroughfares and that Maj. James H. Dooley, who built Maymont in the 1890s, may have used the old tub as a dam to create a lake from one of the canals. In the arboretum, some 200 different native and imported trees grow every which way.