A. R. Hope Moncrieff

“ One side of the Green, turning from the Bridge to the main gate, is a row of houses and gardens of entertainment, at the doors of which, on a Sunday afternoon, clamorous touts strive to draw in the coming and going streams of sightseers, thus admitted to dwellings where celebrities of the past may once have been at home. ”

“ Here are billeted the delicate orchids, living on moist warm air, which in our day have been brought to flower in succession all through the year, even by electric light under the smoky glass of Birmingham, sought out for our hothouses so diligently that in their tropical wilds some of the richest sorts begin to grow rare, while of a thousand specimens gained perhaps at the cost of felling as many trunks, but a few may survive the trying journey, at the end of which is worth more than its weight in gold what ran wild as a parasite weed in the tree-tops of the Magdalena or the Orinoco. ”

“ But, to be fair to the tropical woods, so often drowned in the exuberance of their own greenery, it should be remembered how river banks and other open edges may show bright with hanging clusters of bloom and radiant festoons climbing to the tree-tops, while the ground, parched and swamped by turns, will lack that carpet of sweet and humble flowers, springing among soft turf, that is the special charm of an English spring. ”

“ At that time a puppet would have been more welcome than a patriot king, but not a puppet whose wires were pulled by Bute.
One thing cannot be denied by his worst enemies, that this king made an honest effort to rule himself, to lead a clean, simple and wholesome life, which did so much in the end to win back respect for royalty among the respectable classes. At the outset of his reign he seems ready to have married for love of the bewitching siren, Lady Sarah Lennox, who took care to be seen making hay on the lawn of Holland House, as the young king rode by on the road to Kew. ”

“ The branches of apple and pear trees will there break down under their teeming crop; the thistles rashly imported into Australia by some patriotic Scot have thriven to the rank of a nuisance, like the rabbits; the sturdy British gorse and sweet-brier outshoot their native modesty and the design of colonists who thought to make them serve as hedges; and our weeds and hedge plants take so kindly to New Zealand soil as to have overlaid the native flora in some districts, where the coarse indigenous grass soon gives place to succulent meadows spangled with daisies and primroses. ”

“ But whatever else at Kew be done or left undone, the stranger must be pointed to what is almost the latest and not least attractive of its spectacles—the North Gallery, that stands on the Richmond road side, beyond the mound on which a Douglas pine rears what boasts itself the tallest flagstaff in the world, and near where the walk is crossed by an imitation ruined arch, overgrown with greenery, which in Sir W. Chambers’s time seemed an ornamental manner of carrying a roadway out of the grounds. The pretty building itself will at once invite attention ”

“ Sydney, besides its rich Botanic Gardens, can afford to keep stretches of wild scenery preserved in all their unkempt luxuriance; and behind Melbourne Nature itself has a giant grove of gum-trees, rising from the undergrowth of ferns that with us would rank as tall trees. And, of course, in many other parts of the world, comparatively [165] little expense can bring together a collection of our rare and delicate blooms, there ranking as weeds.
We are better off for money and skill, that at Kew have done so much to acclimatise or safeguard the productions of more favoured climes. ”

“ It might be more truly said that only they who know the world know how much England has to be thankful for in the climate we are so ready to abuse. Their eyes are opened to see how Nature in our island has all the loveliest tints on her palette, to paint ever-changing pictures that owe their chief charm to the supposed defect of uncertainty, even as your Didos and Cleopatras—varium et mutabile—would less surely enchant in the form of stereotyped models of the most admired virtues. ”

“ Noyes contemplates, was familiar with a phenomenon often seen at Kew, of visitors going in couples, all eyes for one another, with no more regard to their leafy and flowery surroundings than may suffice to give a vague sense of treading primrose paths. Such pairs are observed to seek out retired nooks, where perhaps they light on a wonderland hidden from more curious survey. I can tell of a blind man every day taking a walk in those spacious gardens. ”

“ What may be called the heart of the Gardens, on the side towards the Richmond road, is the Great Palm House, hardly great enough, as from time to time some of its pushing guests have to be turned out or snuffed down for fear of their prising off the roof. This huge hothouse enshrines a medley collection of tropical forms, grand and graceful, brought together from Africa, Asia, America and Polynesia, getting their fill of heat and moisture, if not of sunshine. ”

“ Even the gloomy stillness of noon, broken by the fall of some big fruit thudding to the ground like a cannon-ball, or by some seed-capsule exploding with a report like a shot, even this heavy siesta of Nature is not altogether voiceless, for beneath it, as Humboldt [178] says, one can catch a faint stifled undertone, a buzz and hum of insects that crowd the earth and the lowest strata of air, a confused vibrating murmur, which from every bush, from the cracked bark of trees, from the soil burrowed by creeping things, proclaims life audibly manifest to him who listens. ”

“ Family parties stroll through the chambers of the “Palace,” empty but for a sprinkling of pictures and relics of royalty. Certain visitors, on hot days, one observes to spend much time in and about the refreshment pavilion, towards which Tommy Merton’s eyes will be observed to wander, while Harry Sandford listens attentively to a lecture on the adjacent cedars, whose seeds may have been brought home by Bute’s adventurous mother-in-law, and their branches to-day wear no air of “sighing for Lebanon.” ”

“ And weeds and thistles overspread the field;
Till royal George, and heav’nly Caroline
Bid Nature in harmonious lustre shine;
The sacred fiat thro’ the chaos rung
And symmetry from wild disorder sprung.
But Nature might not be trusted to shine here by her own unvarnished charms; and the Richmond Gardens were bedecked with “follies” in the taste of the time: “Merlin’s Cave,” that appears to have housed a waxwork collection as well as the library of which Stephen Duck was keeper; a hermitage, inhabited by busts of distinguished men ”

“ There are some who seek out first the richest flower-beds; others who love the chequered shade of melodious groves, or the avenues of cedar, larch, and cypress at the less cleared end towards Richmond; others will ask for famous old trees like that horse-chestnut whose gouty limbs are railed in near the river bank, a little [197] below the Syon Vista opening across the ferry from the Palm House, beside the artificial lake that might be mistaken for a river. Open-eyed youngsters hang by the pond with its colony of wild-fowl, on the other side of the Palm House. ”

“ Before coming to the Gardens that are its present fame, we should understand how Kew, even in its days of obscurity, had all along to do with great folk. Almost every line of our kings has had a home in this Thames-side neighbourhood, a distinction dating from before the Conquest. Both Kew and Richmond began parochial life as dependencies of Kingston, the King’s town that once made a chief seat of Saxon princes, whose coronation stone bears record in its market-place. The manor, included with that of Sheen—the modern Richmond—was held by the Crown at Doomsday. ”

“ Our most tenderly nursed enclosures might cut a poor figure in a climate that does its own gardening. With all the money spent at Kew, one can imagine what results might be produced, where, outside of the Gardens, Miss North could draw a picture far more highly coloured than anything fairly to be said for Kew Green, or for the Thames bank at Brentford. ”

“ New Zealand, too, has magnificent and beautiful trees—its kauri, king of conifers, its forests of tree-fern, its jungles of flowering shrubs, its glowing rata parasite, strangling the trunk that nursed it by sucking the sap into its own masses of crimson bloom, like a cuckoo of the vegetable world. ”

“ And yet those representatives of another climate, so carefully gathered and preserved, give but a poor idea of the teeming wildernesses that know no change of season but from baking heat to swamping rain, their rank vegetation always glowing under the breath of a fierce spring, while decaying in everlasting autumn beneath the richest mantles, and if there be any winter it is the daily frost of paralysing heat. ”

“ This indeed is not the same plant as the American aloe, better distinguished as the agave, whose flowering stem may rise to the height of half a dozen men, so here we must be content with miniature specimens to fit the Succulent House. Beside this collection stands a greenhouse glowing with bloom inside panes dimmed by frosty fog; then beyond open smaller nurseries of tropical and filmy ferns. Outside, here, is supported a huge wistaria, once wreathing the walls of a conservatory now removed. ”

“ But it is the evening, our emblem of peace, the welcome twilight through which the ploughboy goes whistling home, that wakes tropical shades to an untuned concert of croaking, screaming, chattering, wailing, howling, and humming, when the darkness seems alive with invisible cracklings, patterings, scratchings, skippings and rustlings, silenced for the moment by the blood-curdling growl and crashing spring of some beast of prey, and the piercing death-screech of its victim echoing far where every foot of ground is scene for nightly tragedies. ”

“ For the old folk, the aged men and countrywomen, have for the most part forgotten, if they ever knew, the plants and herbs in the hedges they had frequented from their childhood. Some few, of course, they can tell you; but the majority are as unknown to them, except by sight, as the ferns of New Zealand or the heaths of the Cape. Since books came about, since the railways and science destroyed superstition, the lore of herbs has in great measure decayed and been lost. The names of many of the commonest herbs are quite forgotten—they are weeds, and nothing more. ”

“ One can see spectacled gentlemen peering into the hothouses and museums, who may be suspected of [160] a studious intent. But by far the majority of holiday visitors come clearly in a true holiday spirit, roaming here and there like butterflies from clump to clump of bloom or greenery, to carry away a general impression of something bearing the same relation to their own familiar back gardens as Windsor Castle or Chatsworth to a semi-detached suburban villa.
The visitors make as miscellaneous a collection as the plants. ”

“ The isolated specimens of Australian vegetation cabined and cribbed at Kew, give no fair sample of the eucalyptus forests in which leagues upon leagues of bare straight stems, standing sullenly apart, will rise from a hundred to two hundred feet before throwing out their scraggy crown of dull and drooping foliage, that casts a thin unchanging shade upon the ground littered with peeling bark rather than with fallen leaves. ”

“ A rushing river running deep down between high banks, covered with a tangle of huge bamboos, palms, tree-ferns, bread-fruit, bananas, and papaw trees, matted together with creepers, every individual plant seeming finer and fresher than other specimens of the same sort, and the larger such plants were, the grander their curves. ”

“ The green hath two pleasures: the one, because nothing is more pleasant to the eye than green grass kept finely shorn; the other, because it will give you a fair alley in the midst, by which you may go in front upon a stately hedge, which is to enclose the garden: but because the alley will be long, and, in great heat of the year, or day, you ought not to buy the shade in the garden by going in the sun through the green, therefore you are, of either side the green, to plant a covert alley, upon carpenters’ [86] work, about twelve feet in height, by which you may go in shade into the garden. ”

“ The wastes of Northern Cuba are jungles of closely twining plants, gay with the myriad hues of strange, magnificent flowers, and overtopped by gigantic trees, whose trunks are not less gay with fantastic embroideries, and from whose Briarean arms hang countless veils and fringes of creeping plants, the names of which cause upon the ear the same indefinite impression of savage magnificence that is made by their blended, indistinguishable forms upon the eye. ”

“ In later life, the doughty demagogue became something of a nursery gardener himself, carrying on near Kensington, by the Kew road, a seed-farm from which he was zealous to propagate a kind of acacia he introduced, and also, with less success, the cultivation of maize under the name of “Cobbett’s corn.” All through life he kept up his interest in gardening, as shown by more than one of the works whose style has been happily compared to a kitchen-garden’s relation with a flower-garden. ”

“ It is difficult, indeed, to draw the line between these neighbour villages that have now grown into each other. The Old Deer Park of Richmond ran into the parish of Kew. They had a common excitement in 1795, making a more than local sensation, when one John Little, said to have been a favourite attendant of George III. in his walks through the Gardens, came to a bad end. He is described as keeper or porter of the Observatory, who passed for being a quiet, worthy, and even religious man till he committed a most brutal murder under circumstances that suggest insanity. ”

“ As the Kew Gardens flourished, those of Richmond had withered away. The royal pleasure-grounds on that side were turned into George III.’s model farm, then into a park, which has become a golf-course and a recreation-ground, though it was only the other day that its quasi-public character came to be fully recognised by a foot-bridge thrown over the muddy moat cutting off this enclosure from the river-bank. ”

“ Rose in the King’s name, tells that his own quarters are on Kew Green, “a few doors below the Rose and Crown,” a tavern still standing in less transmogrified state than its neighbour, the King’s Arms, also mentioned in books of that period. Kings reign and pass away; kingdoms flourish and fade, mansions rise and fall, while public-house signs often seem to have more permanence in them than most human institutions. ”

“ The cactus no longer struggles for existence in the feeble sunshine of a three-pair back window with a southern exposure, but, swollen to the size of a scrub oak, impedes your way with its dull, hideous, prickly leaves, and flaunts its great flowers in your face. You may cure your thirst by day with the sweet clear waters of the cocoa-nut. ”

“ The Kew mansion of Queen Elizabeth’s keeper was furnished with a garden, in which Her Majesty had delivered to her a nosegay, enriched with a valuable jewel and pendants of diamonds, worth four hundred pounds. This offering was only part of a series of handsome gifts that suggest how a visit from royalty in those days must have been indeed a visitation. In Bacon’s Essay, Of Gardens, we get some hint what a garden ought to be that seemed worthy of entertaining a queen; and after this model is said to have been laid out the garden of Moor Park in Hertfordshire. ”

“ Also, I understand that this square of the garden should not be the whole breadth of the ground, but to leave on either side ground enough for diversity of side alleys, unto which the two covert alleys of the green may deliver you; but there must be no alleys with hedges at either end of this great enclosure—not at the hither end, for letting your prospect upon this fair hedge from the green—nor at the further end, for letting [2] your prospect from the hedge through the arches upon the heath. ”