Kew Gardens

Gardens appear to be an old story in this neighbourhood. The Monastery of Sheen, that stood on the flats somewhere about the present Observatory, was equipped with its orchard, vineyard, and other enclosures, through which the holy fathers, like those of Melrose, would be able to make “good kail, on Fridays when they fasted”; and let us trust that suppressed spite never drove them, as in a certain Spanish cloister, to keep a brother’s pet flowers “close-nipped on the sly.” Kew’s connection with botany is as old as the Tudor time, when Dr. William Turner had a garden here. Of this physician, our first scientific botanist, Chaucer could not have said, “His study was but little on the Bible.” He was a disciple of Latimer, and a hot-gospeller, among whose works figure titles like _The Spiritual Nosegay_, _The Hunting of the Romish Wolf_, _A Preservative or Treacle against the Poison of Pelagius_. Under Henry VIII. such a writer found the air of the Continent more wholesome than that of Hampton Court or Smithfield; and he spent some time in Germany, whence, along with Protestant theology, he brought home a collection of foreign plants. When it was safe for him to be back in England, he doubled the parts of chaplain and physician to the Protector Somerset, who built Syon House on the site of the convent that for him proved unlucky church plunder; this may account for his chaplain’s garden across the river. But Turner did not fall with his patron, rising to be Dean of Wells, though again for a time, under Mary, he had to extend his knowledge of foreign gardens. He is best remembered as author of a herbal which marks the planting in England of scientific botany; nor would this study seem so far aloof from his theological interests, if we consider a commonplace of our forefathers, thus versified by Cowley-- God the first garden made, and the first city, Cain. 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. The contents ought not well to be under thirty acres of ground, and to be divided into three parts; a green in the entrance, a heath or desert in the going forth, and the main garden in the midst, besides alleys on both sides; and I like well that four acres of ground be assigned to the green, six to the heath, four and four to either side, and twelve to the main garden. 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’ work, about twelve feet in height, by which you may go in shade into the garden. As for the making of knots, or figures, with divers-coloured earths, that they may lie under the windows of the house on that side on which the garden stands, they be but toys: you may see as good sights many times in tarts. The garden is best to be square, encompassed on all the whole four sides with a stately arched hedge; the arches to be upon pillars of carpenters’ work, of some ten feet high, and six feet broad; and the spaces between of the same dimensions with the breadth of the arch. Over the arches let there be an entire hedge of some four feet high, framed also upon carpenters’ work; and upon the upper hedge, over every arch, a little turret, with a belly enough to receive a cage of birds: and over every space between the arches some other little figure, with broad plates of round-coloured glass gilt, for the sun to play upon: but this hedge I intend to be raised upon a bank, not steep, but gently slope, of some six feet, set all with flowers. 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. In the next century Capel’s seat at Kew had a garden which, more than once, won high praise from that connoisseur, Evelyn. “The orangery and myrtetum are most beautiful and perfectly kept.” Other gardens in this neighbourhood called forth Evelyn’s admiration--the Duke of Lauderdale’s at Ham House, “inferior to few of the best villas in Italy itself”; and Sir William Temple’s, “lately ambassador to Holland,” whose East Sheen villa, Temple Grove, has long been a boys’ school--taken for the select establishment figuring in _Coningsby_--where his _Essay on Gardening_ might be read with more advantage than _The Battle of the Books_. Stephen Switzer, one of our first writers on gardening, mentions Lord Capel as distinguished in this pursuit, especially for “bringing over several sorts of fruit from France.” Molyneux, heir of the Capels, had an interest in science, leading him to set up in his grounds a telescope, by means of which the Astronomer Royal Bradley began observations that led to his great discoveries of the aberration of light and the nutation of the earth’s axis. The site of that instrument is now marked by the sun-dial, some way off in front of Kew Palace, erected by William IV. as a memorial, which serves also to show whereabouts stood the vanished Kew House, often confused with its neighbour. The Observatory, in what used to be the Richmond Gardens, may be considered as another monument to the scientific work so early carried on at Kew. When Frederick, Prince of Wales, came to occupy Kew, curbed in his martial and political ambitions, he took to improving these grounds, for which purpose he employed William Kent, a bad painter, better esteemed as an architect, and best remembered by his ideas of what he called landscape gardening. Inigo Jones had not disdained to design gardens; and the “improvers” who, throughout the Georgian age, came to be busy about English country-houses, were more often than not architects by occupation as well as professed artists in landscape, who had to design groves and flower-beds, but also temples, grottos, terraces, steps, statues, fountains, and other ornaments in the taste of their time. Such pretentious gardeners now found plenty of employment at lordly seats like Stowe, Badminton, Wanstead, Canons Park, and others aspiring to the celebrity of elaborate pleasure-grounds. The art of gardening, like architecture, has had two main schools, that might be styled the Classic and the Gothic. The ancient model, flourishing longer on the Continent, dealt in straight lines and formal shapes, in parallel rows, accurate vistas and such trim patterns as the star and the quincunx. This prospered in England while our mediæval buildings were being replaced by Palladian structures. Our first great gardens of that period seem to have copied the conceits of the Italian style, with its terraces, balustrades, stairways, arcades, and stiff arbours among walls of clipped hedge. Le Nôtre in the seventeenth century headed in France a school of geometric gardening on a large scale, which spread across the Channel. William III. patronised among us the Dutch ideas of quaint formalism, especially shown in thickets of box and yew. Now came into great favour the Topiarian monstrosities of “verdant sculpture” still kept up here and there, notably in the Lakeland gardens of Levens Hall. So, in the age of Queen Anne, English gardens had fallen into the conventional affectation satirised by Pope. No pleasing intricacies intervene, No artful wildness to perplex the scene; Grove nods at grove, each alley has a brother, And half the platform just reflects the other. The suffering eye inverted nature sees, Trees cut to statues, statues thick as trees; With here a fountain, never to be played, And there a summer-house that knows no shade. About the same time the _Spectator_ complains: “Our trees rise in cones, globes, and pyramids. We see the marks of the scissors upon every plant and bush. I do not know whether I am singular in my opinion, but for my own part, I would rather look upon a tree in all its luxuriancy and diffusion of boughs and branches, than when it is thus cut and trimmed into a mathematical figure; and cannot but fancy that an orchard in flower looks infinitely more delightful than all the little labyrinths of the most finished parterre.” But Addison rather surprises us by pointing abroad for better models “in an agreeable mixture of garden and forest, which represent everywhere an artificial rudeness, much more charming than that neatness and elegancy which we meet with in those of our own country.” [Illustration: IN THE ITALIAN GARDEN] At all events, the revolt against that formal orthodoxy was raised under the standard of what came to be called the English school, whose principles suggest those of Gothic architecture. At first it was rather a Strawberry Hill Gothic which improvers practised in imitation of natural effects, heightened by art that clung to tawdry decorations. The cradle of this school was not far from Kew, at Twickenham, where Pope and Horace Walpole, “prince of cockle-shells,” set copies in a “more grand and rural manner,” advocated by a local author, Batty Langley, in his _New Principles of Gardening_. The rank of leader of the revolution has been claimed also for Stephen Switzer, who, though of foreign origin perhaps, was born in England, and from a working gardener became a nurseryman, then in 1715 published the _Gardener’s Recreation_, a work showing better education than might be expected from such a career, unless the writer got some literary craftsman to graft flowery tropes and classical tags upon his practical knowledge. Another gardener named Bridgeman is mentioned in connection with Kent, who designed ornamentation both outside and inside the Prince’s villa at Kew. Kent is commonly called the father of the English or natural school of landscape gardening, and seems at least to have been its first exponent on a large scale. He was followed by rival doctors of the picturesque, very apt to differ, to accuse one another of quackery and of malpractice in the exhibition of clumps, belts, vistas and sheets of water. The _Picturesque_ and the _Gardenesque_ became watch-words like Allopathy and Homœopathy. One practitioner was judged to starve Nature, another to use the knife too freely. To improve, adorn, and polish they profess, But shave the goddess whom they came to dress. These artists in scenery, one of them insists, on a foundation of painting and gardening “must possess a competent knowledge of _surveying_, _mechanics_, _hydraulics_, _agriculture_, _botany_, and the general principles of _architecture_,” besides professing themselves _cognoscenti_ and _virtuosi_. They dealt with gardens mainly as one feature in a larger field of operations, the laying-out of parks, pleasure-ground, _fermes ornées_, and such fanciful paradises as Shenstone made famous at the Leasowes. Into the park, of course, the garden proper passes by transition over the lawn turf that is the special beauty of English culture, often separated from less trim outskirts by the invisible barrier of a sunk fence, said to have been Kent’s invention, but this statement seems dubious, as may be Horace Walpole’s story that the name _Ha-ha_ expressed a rustic’s astonishment at being brought to an unexpected stand. But for poets like Cowley and Marvell, who courted “a green thought in a green shade,” it was left for writers of our time to dwell lovingly on the garden they love, however small; the tasteful authorities of that century hardly condescend to notice anything below the pleasure-grounds that ran into lordly demesnes. Humphry Repton, doyen of a later generation of improvers smiled at by Jane Austen, in his proposals for Woburn Abbey, distinguishes the gardens about a country-seat under the following heads:--- The terrace and parterre near the house. The private garden, only used by the family. The rosary, or dressed flower garden, in front of the greenhouse. The American garden, for plants of that country only. The Chinese garden, surrounding a pool in front of the great Chinese pavilion, to be decorated with plants from China. The botanic garden, for scientific classing of plants. The animated garden, or menagerie. And lastly, the English garden or shrubbery walk, connecting the whole; sometimes commanding views into each of these distinct objects and sometimes into the park and distant country. This plan was much on the model of what had grown up at Kew, to which let us return, after recalling that before its grounds came into note, Queen Caroline had begun or enlarged the gardens about Richmond Lodge, extending them over an unkempt flat, as we understand from her private laureate, Stephen Duck. To poets of his school there was no beauty in heath and wild copses, like the rough patch of Sheen Common still left to the gratitude of our Bank-Holiday age. Not so attractive lately shone the plain, A gloomy waste, not worth the Muse’s strain; Where thorny brakes the traveller repell’d, 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; a menagerie, a maze, and, of course, a grotto, to gratify “heav’nly Caroline’s” admiration for what “royal George” bluntly denounced as “childish silly stuff.” Rival poets celebrated “the much sung grotto of the Queen,” one under the sly pseudonym of “Peter Drake, a fisherman of Brentford,” making fun of Stephen Duck, the so-called thresher-poet. The widowed Princess of Wales, prompted by her friend Bute, showed a warm interest in horticulture; and under her was nursed the Botanic Garden of exotic plants that became the special feature of the Kew grounds. They were laid out by Lancelot Brown, a self-taught gardener, so celebrated in his day as to be known by the name of “Capability” Brown. He, indeed, rather than Kent, is sometimes styled the father of landscape improvers, among whom Repton, for one, speaks of him as his master or forerunner. Brown appears to have insisted masterfully on the carrying out of his own ideas, if we are to believe the story of George III. chuckling over his death to an under-gardener: “Now you and I can do as we please here!” In Mason’s _Heroic Epistle_, Brown is said to have had a free hand over the Richmond Garden also, where he destroyed Queen Caroline’s fanciful structures, so as to be accused of having “transformed to lawn what late was Fairyland.” Under Bute’s patronage the post of superintendent of the Botanic Garden was given, but seems not to have been made _pukka_, to Sir John Hill, as he styled himself on the credit of a Swedish decoration, that humbug physician and author, best remembered now by Garrick’s epigram:--- For physic and farces, his equal there scarce is: His farces are physic, his physic a farce is. [Illustration: THE RUINED ARCH] Another questionable authority in taste, introduced by Bute to the Princess and her son, was William Chambers, an architect who built himself into no small note. In his youth, as supercargo of a vessel he had travelled as far as China, then a land of fresh wonder, to bring back extravagant notions, set forth in his _Dissertation on Oriental Gardening_, and in a mania for _Chinoiseries_, which was let loose at Kew. Hence the building of the Pagoda in 1762, of a House of Confucius, and of a mosque, with temples, grottos, and other outlandish erections, most of which have long disappeared. He also built the Observatory where Richmond Lodge came to be demolished. His innovations were not confined to buildings, as appears in Mason’s satire:-- Now to our lawns of dalliance and delight, Join we the groves of horror and affright. The architect-gardener declared himself very complacent about the dealings with Nature here carried out. “Originally the ground was one continued dead flat, the soil was in general barren, without either wood or water. With so many disadvantages it was not easy to produce anything even tolerable in gardening; but princely munificence overcame all difficulties. What was once a desert is now an Eden!” As controller of the works actively pushed on at Kew, Chambers prospered so much as to be knighted, and to buy Whitton Place, near Hounslow, where the third Duke of Argyll, brother and heir of Jeanie Deans’s protector, himself better known as Lord Islay, had established a nursery of exotic trees, which it was his hobby to naturalise in England. On the death of this duke the cream of his collection seems to have been transplanted to Kew, now become a truly royal botanic garden, unsurpassed in England, with a fame that went on growing till Erasmus Darwin was bound to note it in his herbarium of verse. So sits enthron’d in vegetable pride Imperial _Kew_ by Thames’s glittering side; Obedient sails from realms unfurrow’d bring For her the unnam’d progeny of spring; Attendant nymphs her dulcet mandates hear, And nurse in fostering arms the tender year, Plant the young bulb, inhume the living seed, Prop the weak stem, the erring tendril lead; Or fan in glass-built fanes the stranger flowers With milder gales, and steep with warmer showers. Etc. etc. A much forgotten bard, named Henry Jones, who had been an Irish bricklayer, sought to win patronage, like Stephen Duck, by a whole poem in two cantos on _Kew Gardens_, a versified catalogue of their contents, with a high-pitched description of the Pagoda, and flowing flattery of their master, as to all which the less said the better. The same title was given to one of poor Chatterton’s effusions; but he, reduced in his garret to ape _Junius_ by “patriotic” letters signed _Decimus_, lets the garden run under his pen to weeds of spite and scandal. Hail Kew! thou darling of the sacred Nine, Thou eating-house of verse, where poets dine! It has already been told how George III. enlarged the demesne at Kew, buying up some fields about the site of the Pagoda, and eventually getting the lane closed that separated it from the Richmond grounds. The Botanic Garden proper was enclosed and managed apart from the general pleasure-grounds, within which seem to have been dioceses or spheres of influence looked after by different _employés_. It is not quite clear to me how these gardeners were ranked or related; perhaps, as in the case of higher officials, their functions may sometimes have clashed, or been complicated by royal favour. Mrs. Papendiek records that in her time Haverfield was the King’s gardener, who lived at Kew, his second son acting as his assistant there, as did an elder son in the more remote Richmond garden; and that after him the sons succeeded to these appointments. She also mentions the Queen’s flower garden up Richmond Lane, where one Green was the gardener, who had nursed some orange trees to be the pride of his life, but was heart-broken when they dwindled for want of means to enlarge his hothouses, though he offered to pay half the cost out of his own pocket. This diarist, not always to be depended on in matters outside her own observation, intimates that the Board of Works declined undertaking any improvement in the Queen’s private garden; from which we should understand that the Botanic Garden was partly carried on at the public cost, where Chambers had already built an orangery, now turned into the Timber Museum. One thing appears plain, that even the subordinate gardeners had good places, when Green could offer £250 as his contribution towards those denied hothouses, and Haverfield brought up his youngest son to be a clergyman. In all, the Gardens came to cover some 120 acres, about half their present extent, as might have seemed a small matter to Tamerlane, who boasted of his garden measuring 120 miles round Samarcand. The chief name among Kew gardeners of this reign was William Aiton’s, who, if he had spelt himself Aytoun, like others of the family, would at once be recognised as coming from the North. Waiving the question as to whether Adam, the first gardener, were not a Scot and a Presbyterian, one finds it notorious that Scotsmen have renowned themselves in planting the richer plots of the South, a fact explained by philosophers of Dr. Johnson’s school in the sneer that a man who has coaxed flowers and fruit to grow beyond the Tweed has an easy task elsewhere. Of course this is ignorant prejudice, as many a demesne might show in Caledonia stern and wild, where nothing is needed for exuberance but the “fertilizer” we have seen running short even in the Queen’s garden at Kew.