Enchanted Garden

There were daffy doings last week in an old colonial garden in Virginia. The garden belonged to Hampton Manor, 486-acre estate near Bowling Green, Va. The estate, with a brick mansion, built in 1838 by Virginia Legislator Daniel de Jarnette from plans by his friend Thomas Jefferson, is now owned by Mrs. Caresse Crosby, late of literary Paris. Her house guests were Arch-Surrealist Salvador Dali & wife. Hence the dilly-Dali-ing.

Surrealist Dali suggested to his hostess that it would be fun to "enchant" Hampton Manor into a surrealist paradise. Mrs. Crosby was enchanted with the idea. Together they set to work. Their plans called for gigantic statues of daddy longlegs with the faces of Greek goddesses and medieval heroines, "a headless woman from the recipe of a surrealist magician of the Middle Ages," perfumed fountains, loudspeakers making moans from the bushes, corpselike manikins with flowing hair trailing in the waters of a pond. Said Mrs. Crosby: "I am doing this enchanted garden as an experiment with the white magic of the Middle Ages. I will use all the modern means of mystification--loud-speakers, electric lights and wires and mechanisms." By last week Sponsor Crosby had had a grand piano hauled into the middle of the lake, where it was expected shortly to sprout water lilies, and Painter Dali had dunked a manikin near the shore and was trying to ornament her face with a fork.

When their surrealist garden is finished (probably some time in May), Dali and Mrs. Crosby expect to charge admission ($1 in the daytime, $1.50 at night).

One prosaic note threatened to put the kibosh on this study in sylvan psychopathology. The Second Army Corps announced plans last week to take over 110,000 acres of Caroline County as a field for maneuvers. The area might include Hampton Manor's Freudian fairyland.

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