Chapter V: Visiting the Gardens

Kew has grown out to run into Richmond by blocks of commonplace suburban houses, some of which boast to stand on a dozen feet of gravel. The quaint Georgian mansions have mostly sunk in relative importance; and the homely cottages that once neighboured them have gone, or are like to go, though some of them still do a trade in refreshments, notably in sixpenny and ninepenny teas served to holiday parties. 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. This is a sign how as Kew waned in aristocratic favour, it waxed as a scene of popular resort, through the attractions of its oasis in Greater London’s desert of brick and mortar.

From all parts of London it is easy to get to Kew, by railways from north and south to either side of the river, by tramways to the Brentford end of the Bridge, by omnibuses, of which specimens may soon be worth preserving in museums along with fossil trees and Ichthyosaurus skeletons; and by steamboats plying in summer time up the devious reaches of the river. The Gardens are open at all reasonable hours of daylight, and their hot-houses after midday. It is on Sunday and holiday afternoons, naturally, that His Majesty’s subjects take most advantage of their privileges, and, of course, fine weather will help to waft abroad the poet’s invitation to “Come down to Kew in lilac-time”--

And you shall wander hand in hand with love in summer’s wonderland.

…

The nightingale is rather rare and yet they say you’ll hear him there,
At Kew, at Kew in lilac-time (and oh, so near to London!)
The linnet and the throstle, too, and after dark the long halloo,
And golden-eyed _tu-whit, tu-whoo_ of owls that ogle London.

For Noah hardly knew a bird of any kind that isn’t heard
At Kew, at Kew in lilac-time (and oh, so near to London!)
And when the rose begins to pout and all the chestnut spires are out
You’ll hear the rest without a doubt, all chorusing for London.

This minstrel, as is the way with his order, has an eye upon one sweetest season and upon one frequent class of visitors, who, when they get to Kew, might almost as well, it seems, be anywhere else. Noah, whose ornithological experience should have been larger than Mr. 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. One can see spectacled gentlemen peering into the hothouses and museums, who may be suspected of 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. Exotic promenaders will be common on Sundays, when our foreign guests are apt to complain of a want of public amusements. All classes are represented, from disguised millionaires perhaps seeking a hint for their own newly laid out grounds, to servant girls fondly persuaded that the lilies of the field can show nothing to match the glories of their holiday array. Family parties are much in evidence. There is always a large proportion of youngsters, whose parents and guardians may be tempted to improve the occasion with useful information, more or less correct. Here would be a chance for Mr. Barlow to open the minds of Masters Sandford and Merton, or for the tutor of _Evenings at Home_ to lecture his inquisitive pupils. But the reader need not be afraid of me as likely to abuse an opportunity of being dull and dry, if I were qualified to play the botanic pedagogue. I shall not even attempt to be a guide to the Gardens, which have their own official hand-books sold at the entrance; I only invite the visitor to stroll about with me in a desultory manner, while together we make a few observations and reflections on this great national collection.

Kew Gardens have been boasted the finest and most complete botanical collection in the world, as they certainly are if a handicap be allowed for a climate suggesting the antipodes of Eden. Their chief rival is perhaps the Buitenzorg Gardens of Java, where the Dutch turn for horticulture has full play upon the glories of tropical vegetation brought as it were to a focus. A thousand feet above the sea, amid magnificent volcanic forest-clad scenery, Buitenzorg, _Sans Souci_, the Richmond of Batavia, basks under a sunny sky that yet is by no means parching, for Miss North was interrupted at her easel here by rain coming down regularly each afternoon in such sheets and torrents that five minutes would turn the roads into streams a foot deep. The gardeners need be at little trouble or expense for watering this exuberant greenery, through which runs an avenue of foliage arched a hundred feet above the ground, each tree wreathed with a different creeper, “sending down sheets of greenery and lovely flowers.” Here, amid a court of “all the gorgeous water-lilies of the world,” the Victoria Regia flourishes in the open air, as at Kew only in its hothouse shelter. Here grows the _Rafflesia_, named after Sir Stamford Raffles--founder of our Zoological Gardens, as of Singapore--called the largest flower in the world, at Kew represented only by a wax model, which seems just as well, since this vegetable monster, measuring some yards across, soon becomes foully infested by insects, so as to putrefy with a disgusting smell. Here, too, a palm like a gigantic primrose is said to have the largest fruit and the largest leaves of any tree in the world, the former two, and the latter ten feet in diameter. For Javan curators, indeed, the trouble is to provide in _cool_-houses such shelter as artificially heated conservatories are under our scrimped sunshine; and a separate Garden, some thousands of feet higher up, makes an asylum for our familiar plants carefully cultivated as a pigmy show of exotics in the East. 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.

The view from the bridge in the very High Street of Buitenzorg
was the richest scene I ever saw. 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. Then they
had the most exquisite little basket-work dwellings hidden away
amongst them, and in the distance was a bamboo bridge--a sort
of magnified human spider’s web. Looking straight along the
street from the bridge was another pretty view--little shops
full of gaily coloured things, such as scarlet jamboa fruit,
yellow bananas, pomelas, melons, pines, and hot peppers of the
brightest reds and greens. Pretty birds in bamboo cages, people
in every shade of purple, scarlet, pink, turquoise blue, emerald
green, and lemon yellow; small copper-coloured children carrying
all their garments on the tops of their heads, grass-cutters
carrying inverted cones of green fastened to their bamboos and
almost hiding them. Long avenues of huge banyan trees bordered
the principal drive to the palace, with large bird’s-nest ferns
growing on their branches, each tree forming a small plantation
of itself, with its hanging roots and offsets from the branches.
Herds of spotted deer used to rest in the shade under these
trees, and parties of the great crested ground pigeon, as big as
turkeys, were always to be found there.

The Botanic Garden near Rio de Janeiro, also, has tropical features we can hardly match, such as its colonnade of palms, a living temple overtopping the suburban avenues in which tram lines have been planted by foreign capital. Then the Gardens of Peradenia in Ceylon gather such a bouquet of choice flora as an enraptured traveller compares to “the paradise of some Eastern tale, designed and inhabited by invisible genii.” Our Australian colonies, so well off for sun, if not for water, are undertaking to show the Old Country what can be done in this way by children freed from some of her disadvantages. 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 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. 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. One guide-book says that almost every variety of palms is represented in the exotic jumble, which is rather too much to say, as their species are counted by hundreds, about a hundred in the woods of the Amazon alone. The most striking trees here, looking ill at ease in the confinement of their tubs, are specimens of the pandanus or screw-pine, with its sword-like leaves and its stilt-like roots, propping the top in the air “with its trunk hid for repairs, as it were, among an enclosure of scaffolding.” Young and eupeptic visitors will inquire for the coco-nut, whose fruit reaches them only in a dry, curdled, shrunken state, poorly representing its fibrous green globes filled with soft butter and refreshing milk. The double coco-nut of the Seychelles to be seen here is only a distant relation, whose nuts, like a pair of giant’s boxing-gloves joined together, grow “full of white jelly, enough to fill the largest soup-tureen.” It was one of General Gordon’s crotchets to regard this as the forbidden fruit of Eden; but at Kew, Eve could surely have found apples more tempting of aspect--for example, the Japanese date-plum in the Succulent House. One must not, however, attempt a catalogue of all the vegetable strangers coaxed and coddled to grow in an asylum, which might have taken a larger scale had a proposal been carried out to transfer the Crystal Palace to Kew rather than to Norwood.

Near the Palm House stands the Tropical Lily House, where now the Victoria Regia should open in July its huge white flowers tinged with royal red. This queen of water-lilies, that first flowered in Britain at Chatsworth, has to content itself here with a tank, as an exiled sovereign may have to come down to hotel lodgings; but in its native Guiana, it blocks up canals and spangles lake swamps opening in the flowery woods. The leaves are often as broad as a man’s height, with upturned rims, so that Indian women can cradle their children upon them safely while the mother does her washing in the river fringed with such weeds of truly “glorious feature.” In the same conservatory, among other water-plants, are the papyrus reeds among which Moses was set floating, in our day crowded out of fertile Egypt, but they are found growing lustily so near as Sicily; while their old economic importance, that naturalised the name in our language, has dwindled now that we can turn wood-pulp into cheap paper.

I lately found the Victoria Regia enthroned in this, its original nursery; but a guide-book locates it in what, I understand, was its quarters for a time, the group of hot-houses numbered from seven to thirteen, which stand not far from the Cumberland Gate entrance. They have a show of other aquatic plants, and freaks of Nature like the pitcher-plants and living fly-traps, able to feed themselves on insects lured to their intoxicating cups that act upon the drugged victim like the digestive organs of an animal. 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.

This group of hot-houses cools off into a conservatory of South African plants, containing potted heaths such as bloom over vast stretches of Karroo, along with specimens of the curious Japanese art of dwarfing trees. For a contrast to these nurseries of tender exotics, one might turn to the Rock Garden beside them, towards the Cumberland Gate, where Alpine and other hardy growths thrive in a hollow set with rockery supplied by the destruction of one or more of those fanciful structures of the Georgian age that still dot the grounds here and there--Temple of Æolus, Temple of the Sun, and so forth. Beyond the Rock Garden lies the Herbaceous Ground’s gathering of homely plants; and at its entrance, overshadowed by Museum II., a little Alpine House accommodates Nature’s hardy dwarfs, needing no such costly shelter as her tropical Brobdignagians.

But we have not yet done with the hothouses. Just beyond the egress of the South African _annexe_, another group begins with the Succulent House, holding a store of fleshy, scaly, spiky and prickly forms of the cactus and aloe tribes, having so many odd uses, as the “vegetable cows” milked three times a day in Mexico, that their juice may be fermented into the national thin tipple _pulque_, tasting like buttermilk with a dash of sulphur, while the root of another aloe yields _mezcal_ as a stronger drink. One American cactus is not so carefully cultivated as it once was to rear the cochineal insect that dyed “England’s cruel red,” now procured more cheaply from aniline dyes first made under the group of tall chimneys below Harrow Hill. In South Africa aloes grow almost as tall as chimney stacks, so it would take the British Museum dome to house them. 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.

Last comes, what may be visited first, as its Grecian front almost faces the main entrance, the Aroid House, describable as a chapel of ease to the Palm House, close packed with a smaller congregation of swollen greenery, sucking in the edifying moisture that congeals on the glassy walls, and blinds for a minute or two one’s spectacled eyes, suddenly brought from the atmosphere of our zone to that of the Equator.

From such artificial snuggeries it seems doubly dismal to turn out into the raw air of a truly British November, in which a few forlorn roses may still be struggling to hold up their faded heads, and dank evergreens wear hardly a more cheerful aspect than the sere leaves, “last of their clan,” that flutter down to be swept off the glistening grass. 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. The tropics come more truly before us in descriptions such as one might quote from a score of eloquent travellers, for example this by an American writer, W. H. Hurlbut:--

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. All things which to us of the temperate zones
are creatures of boxes and bales, creations, we might perhaps as
truly say, of the merchant and the grocer, meet us here at every
turn, wild and bold in the woods; the fan-like cacao tree, the
spreading vanilla, the parasite tamarind, the gaunt and desolate
guava. 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. You may cool your heated eyes by
night with such floods of golden moonlight as would have driven
Shelley mad. The moon, which gives expression to the most tedious
landscape and the most unmeaning face, and converts the delight
of gazing upon beauty into a kind of frenzy, the moon makes all
men Endymions in Cuba.

But if, amid hints and samples of such luxuriance, the well-clad visitor feels his spirit “falter in the mist” and be inclined to “languish for the purple seas” of the South, let him consider how with a certain relief he escapes from the damp, dripping, sticky heat of these glass-houses into our untempered breezes, a little exercise soon setting his blood in tune with a climate that from the cradle goads one to be always doing something, if only throwing stones, that here would be a most objectionable pastime for our versatile youth. It is the sons of a temperate zone who are stirred into building palm houses or setting out to hunt for treasures of the tropics, when tired of hunting in play wild animals kept for the purpose at home. As further comfort, let a stay-at-home study the reports of travellers to note how soon they grow sick of tropical glare and glow, of the crude and garish tints of rank evergreenery, of the “chromo-lithograph midsummer” that wants tenderness, sweetness, variety, and contrast, of the endless monotonies of shade and the blinding dazzle of perpetual sunshine chequered by a “scorched darkness” that brings no rest--how they sigh for refreshing showers that come in their season as a devastating deluge, for weeks and months together turning into feverish mud the choking dust and the soil cracked as if gasping for breath, where masterful Nature, if at least she knows her own mind, is always in violent extremes. I was once in a desert oasis when it had the prodigious experience of a wet day, not in bursts of storm but in gently dropping rain, and I shall never forget the satisfaction with which the natives turned out to bask in weather so familiar to us as to be hardly worth grumbling at.

I, too, have peeped into those stifling Arcadias, and have known what it is to hail a “mango shower” or a sea breeze. But I quote for high and wide authority a Ulysses indeed, Dr. A. R. Wallace, who after years spent in the richest regions on both sides of the world, can tell us that the luscious shows picked into a nosegay in our hot-houses ill counterfeit those natural jungles where blossoms are drowned in a flood of sombre green, and the brightest flowers, climbing upwards in the universal struggle for light, waste their full blown beauty on the parching sky, invisible to the wanderer, unless in an airship he could surmount the lofty roof of foliage beneath which he may have to push and hew his tunnelled way through obstruction of dense underwood. This explorer declares that he has wandered for days in tropical forests without coming on any bloom so gay as a hawthorn or a honeysuckle; and he has never seen in Brazil or Malaysia “such brilliant masses of colour as even England can show in her furze-clad commons, her heathery mountain-sides, her glades of wild hyacinth, her fields of poppies, her meadows of buttercups and daisies.”

Sir E. Im Thurn bears out Wallace’s view with some qualification: “At no time is the Guiana leafage as splendid as in an ordinary English wood either in the early spring or in the glorious golden autumn time. But on the other hand, the tropical forest throughout the year is more variously coloured … due partly to the fact that without special season for the bursting or the fall of the leaves, throughout the year it has trees both putting out new leaves, white, or brilliantly tinted with green, pink, or red, and others from which drop leaves with red, yellow, and bronze colours burned deeply into them by the blazing sun; and partly to the fact that in it trees of innumerable kinds, each with foliage slightly distinct in colour, grow intermingled.… The whole amount of colour afforded by flowers is probably not very different in tropical and in temperate trees, but is differently distributed.” 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.

“What can they know of England who only England know,” seems at present the favourite tag of imperially minded journalists. 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.

Then a drawback to tropical scenes on which travellers are emphatically in one tale, is the innumerable plagues bred in such hot air as we imitate at Kew--here filtered from its hostile engenderings--the maddening mosquitoes that swarm in equatorial forests as on Arctic tundras; the legions of ants, white, red, and black, that prey upon the traveller’s kit and torture his skin like a shirt of Nessus; harpy moths that have to be driven from one’s food; swarms of earwigs which some African adventurers have found the hatefulest enemy of their march. Kew breeds no serpent or vampire like those haunting natural paradises where the blaze that scares away lions or leopards only attracts darting spiders and scurrying scorpions to a couch already made restless by buzzing and biting pests; where the ground hides flesh-burrowing ticks and fleas, and the air is thick with invisible stings, and the trees bear venomous caterpillars; where one durst not smell a flower for fear of inhaling some noxious parasite, and our loathsomest bugs would seem hardly worth noticing among bloated cockroaches and hideous centipedes; where countless flies lay seeds of death in man and beast, not to speak of clouds of locusts that sometimes darken the sky like a snow-storm, and if they could cross the Channel, might fall on this Thames-side garden to eat up its greenery in an hour.

And the noises of those sweltering thickets, which at night a new-comer in South America compares to some factory worked by whirling, whistling and hissing demons! 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 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. 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. One need be no Macbeth to have one’s sleep murdered by alarms and excursions for which heated imagination acts as a megaphone. “The clamour of the jackals over a carcass suggests a band of hungry wolves. A mongoose having it out with a rat beneath the floor is like an animal Armageddon. Does your faithful dog growl in the verandah, you make sure a leopard is about to pounce upon him. A restless horse seems to be trampling like a _must_ elephant. And perhaps over all comes the roar of the tiger, nothing indeed to be afraid of, as he would go silent enough if attending to his bad business. Such are the torments of a sweltering Indian night, that give an Englishman cause to thank the goodness and the grace that made his birthplace in a land where a caterwauling puss or a scratching mouse would be the worst of nocturnal bugbears.”

We Britons, lulled to sleep by the tramp of the policeman and the watch-dog’s honest bark, have some reason for calling “sour grapes” to the products of those giant greenhouse regions, East and South, where Nature appears to exhaust herself in labyrinths of swelling beauty and grandeur. But if the tropical trees had tongues, they might tell us that we do not judge them fairly in this cramped setting, fettered beneath roofs of glass, condemned to unnatural silence and restraint; imprisoned along with strange companions; stinted from full meals of equatorial storm to the trickling of a rubber hose that can no longer clasp their trunks in creeping embraces; robbed of the sunshine that floods their native air with fiery gold, and given in exchange the dull comfort of hot-water pipes; deserted by the radiant birds, the shining insects, and the glittering reptiles that should people their drooping branches, among which the stir of missing monkey-troops seems feebly aped by the murmurs and movements of workmen hidden in the galleries.

For another kind of more or less unfamiliar vegetation we must seek the Temperate House, further up the central walks towards the Pagoda. In this, boasting itself the largest winter garden in the world, are collected specimens of sun-loving plants, from the acacias of Australia to the cacti of Mexico. The most venerable growth here seems a shoot of that now crumbled dragon-tree at Orotava, which Humboldt renowned as the oldest tree in the world. The most imposing are the araucarias in the central aisles, one of them the famous Norfolk Island pine, that in its own home will reach a height of two hundred feet. Some of these Antipodean strangers can be won to grow in British soil; some would flourish under its sky, but for their rooted habit of being most active in our nipping winter. For to their native soil, the seasons, of course, come reversed from ours, where colonial children must be puzzled by our poets’ view of January and of July, as we are by allusions seasonable at the other end of the world:--

Perspiring round our Christmas fare,
In vain we long for snow:
Midsummer day, we fain would sit
Around the Yule-tide’s glow.

The characteristic growth of Australia is the eucalyptus or gum-tree, in its many varieties, among which the blue gum is best known as widely transplanted to thrive in Europe and other parts of the globe. One species seems entitled to the distinction of being the tallest of trees, growing to a height of four hundred and fifty feet and more, so as perhaps to look down even upon the mammoth sequoia of California, which we have so impertinently renamed the Wellingtonia. The question of aerial precedence between these two, indeed, depending upon doubtful measurements, may be taken as not quite settled, and Uncle Sam is loth to admit anything of his as less than the greatest in the world; but he should know how Sir J. D. Hooker is quoted by Grant Duff as setting down his boastful mammoths for ugly trees, which is what no one can say of John Bull’s oaks.

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. In this monotonous scenery one might be grateful for our vernal woods and autumnal hedgerows; and still more so when lost in one of the “scrubs,” packed close with malicious dwarf trees, thorny bushes, spear-like grasses, and tangled heaths, that are the dry jungles of Australia’s inland plains.

Australia, besides her tree-like flowers, has trees rich in bright blooms: the “fire-tree” and the “flame-tree” that make a blaze of red and orange upon hill-sides miles away, the crooked “honeysuckle” with its yellow “bottle brushes,” the odd “grass-tree” bearing up a tuft of sharp leaves from which springs several feet of flowery stalk, the “miall-tree” with its streaming foliage and scent of violets, and the other innumerable acacias, here known as “wattles,” that can light up even the gloom of the scrub with their gay blossoms. These growths are apt to run to flowers rather than to fruit, the native berries being sweeter to the eye than to the tooth; and, while the flowers lack perfume, it is the leaves that are often fragrant, sometimes loading the air with an aroma wafted leagues out to sea. Then there are fine timber-trees, magnificent cedars, the umbrageous blackwood, the funereal casuarina or she-oak, whose dark branches droop willow-like over the fitful streams; the jarrah and the karri belonging to the eucalyptus order, the latter voted its most noble form. 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. But our first Antipodean colonists would exchange a wilderness of such glories for a patch of English turf; and their sons still love to surround themselves with the humble garden flowers and hardy blossoms of “home,” yielding to no land in fresh and tender tints, however it may be surpassed in gorgeous and gigantic growths. Many of our familiar plants, indeed, have been introduced at the Antipodes with sometimes too much success. 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. Water-cress, transplanted to New Zealand, has grown as troublesome as the American weed in our canals, to the point of causing floods by damming up the streams upon which it takes a new exuberant life.

As measles or influenza fastens upon fresh blood like a plague, so do many of our downtrodden plants become bumptious and aggressive in the stimulating air of a new world, wherever they find a not forbidding environment, and a fair chance to elbow a place for themselves in the struggle for existence. In a less degree, the same conquest is to be noted in America, the old-settled Eastern States having been largely colonised by imported growths, while the indigenous flora retreated with the Red Man to the inland woods and prairies. From the more southerly regions of America, we Europeans have got more than we give, in Indian corn, the tomato, the pineapple, and the hardy potato, that for our damp Western islands has come to be the staff of life as it was on the dry sunny heights of its native Bolivia, though in Britain, as in some parts of the Continent, it had at first to live down most pig-headed prejudices. Besides naturalising the productions of other climates, Kew has the less noted function of exporting our seeds to try their luck abroad, as, for instance, barrels of acorns hence sent to take prosperous root in South Africa.

For the timbers, huge, rich, rare, beautiful and useful, of these exotic trees, and for their products, we turn to the Museums and Economic Houses that are the most instructive part of this exhibition. Here Masters Sandford and Merton might spend many days in enlarging their mental prospects. The cane, for instance, chiefly familiar to them on the seat of chairs, or perhaps by a use that renders sitting a property of uneasiness, they will learn from Mr. Barlow to belong to a great race of arborescent grasses, among which the young gentlemen may perhaps be most interested in the raw and manufactured products of the sugar-cane. Here their well-instructed tutor can point out to them how the bamboo, prince of this race, is beneficent to many peoples, supplying them with paper, ropes, hats, weapons, fans, baskets, umbrellas, tents, mats, boxes, also houses, bridges, masts, sails, ladders, fences, flutes, and other tools, weapons and utensils, amply illustrated in the cases of Museums II. and III.

Off the Rhododendron Walk there is a garden of feathery bamboos that can make shift to stand our open air. In the same quarter, a division labelled _Betula_ is also calculated to throw a shade over the spirit of Master Merton, if not of the blameless Harry Sandford, this in the vernacular being a tree of knowledge too well known to British youngsters of past generations for its base use, frowned on by latter day humanitarians, but a smiling jest to the poets from Shakespeare to Swinburne--

With all its blithe, lithe bounty of buds and sprays,
For hapless boys to wince at and grow red,
And feel a tingling memory prick their skins.

Now that “the rod becomes more mocked than used,” birch sprays are most familiar to us in the humble usefulness of a broom. Yet on the other side of the world there were nations that would have been hard put to it to do without this tree, used for many offices, but not for that above-mentioned, since your cruel Mohawk and thick-skinned Huron had a strangely sentimental abhorrence of chastising their impish youngsters, which, notes a Jesuit missionary, “will hinder our design to instruct their youth.” But manifold were other services of birch in the wigwam life of the backwoods--for walls, roof, furniture, clothes, torches, powders, poultices, and what not; bark was the Red Man’s cradle and his coffin, and the material for his masterpiece of skill, the canoe; it even at a pinch filled empty stomachs, that could hold out for days on the inner scrapings of bark, when moss, roots, and berries failed his improvident hardihood.

In other parts of the world, the coco-nut tree is of still more general utility, since it not only “bears at once the cup and milk and fruit,” but supplies salad from the young shoots and toddy from the quickly fermented juice; bowls and lamps from its shells, and from its pulp, oil to fill them; cordage, mats, ornamental wreaths and plaited armour from its fibre; fans, baskets, thatch from its leaves; torches from the ribs, and countless other articles of daily use. The Malays, who train monkeys to run up the trees and bring down nuts for their master, have contrived an ingenious clock which Dr. Wallace saw used by sailors: in a bucket floats a scraped half-shell with a small hole bored in the bottom to let in a thread of water at a rate so exactly calculated that the shell sinks at the end of an hour. There are South Sea islands where brackish water makes the people wholly dependent on this tree for drink. Then modern trade has given coconuts a new value, dried in the form of copra and shipped to Marseilles and elsewhere, to have the oil pressed out for making soap and candles, not to mention the “best olive oil” of commerce, while the refuse goes as fattening food for cattle. That is the main thing we get from Polynesia and Micronesia in exchange for trousers, sewing-machines, concertinas, and spelling-books. In Museums I. and II. our young friends may see what delicate and finely tinted cloth those islanders could beat out of bark before they learned to depend too much on our manufactures, being often more healthy and moral without the encumbering garments which the early missionaries considered essential to godliness.

For some islands of the South Seas, the pandanus, rather, fills the part of universal provider. The same thing might be said of other trees in their different regions; but perhaps enough has been said on this head, when one mentions the Brazilian wax-palm (_Copernicia cerifera_), which, though it makes no great show here, according to Mr. J. W. Wells, seems to be as much of a tree-of-all-work as any other in the world.

It resists intense and protracted droughts, and is always green
and vigorous; it produces an equivalent to sarsaparilla; a
nutritious vegetable like cabbage; wine; vinegar; a saccharine
substance; a starch, resembling and equivalent to sago; other
substances resemble, or by processes are made to substitute
maizena, coffee, cork, wax, salt, alkali, and coco-nut milk; and
from its various materials are manufactured wax-candles, soap,
mats, hats, musical instruments, water-tubes, pumps, ropes, and
cords, stakes for fences, timber for joists, rafters, and other
materials for building purposes, strong and light fibres which
acquire a beautiful lustre; and in times of great drought it has
supplied food for the starving inhabitants.

Specimens of those products will be found chiefly in Museum No. II., illustrating the economic uses of endogenous or monocotyledonous plants, hard words which Mr. Barlow might fancifully explain as denoting the gentler sex of vegetable Nature, its members, from palms to grasses, being inclined to softness, slenderness and grace rather than strength. But perhaps Sandford and Merton might, for once, do well not to listen to their much-informed preceptor, as he would probably be imbued with the Linnean system of classification, now set aside for a more natural one. The robust timber, better supplied by sturdily growing exogens, is exhibited in Museum III., the original “Orangery” built by Sir W. Chambers, that now makes a world-fetched show of huge sections of forest giants; polished slabs of ornamental wood; specimens of native ingenuity in workmanship, from bamboo toys to an appalling totem post carved upon a Queen Charlotte Islands cedar. Another feature here is views and plans of the Gardens at different periods, the localities often hardly to be identified after successive alterations that have brought them to their present state.

The largest, and, on the whole, the most attractive of the Museums is No. I., whose red face looks across the Pond to the Palm House. Its staircase is adorned with a window that reminds one of the _rebus_ designs with which mediæval builders recorded their names in a material pun, for this, removed from the Guildhall and presented to the Gardens by Alderman Cotton, displays on stained glass the stages in the growth and manufacture of cotton. The catalogue contains over five hundred entries and thousands of specimens, most of them capable of instructing even Macaulay’s schoolboy. A large part of the collection was transferred here from the India Museum at South Kensington; but all quarters of the world are represented. Here we may see in various states, tea, coffee, cocoa, wine, tobacco, hops, nutmegs, cloves and other more or less familiar friends, with some not so well known in Britain, such as _maté_, the Paraguayan tea, which begins to be introduced among us, while it goes out of fashion in Argentine cities, still drunk all day long on the _campos_, where also the half-savage Gaucho takes too kindly to “square face” gin and to the gramophone that drowns the notes of his native guitar. Here we may indulge due disgust over outlandish intoxicants: the hemp-plants yielding “bang” and “hashish,” which are in the East what gin and absinthe are in the West; the poppy, that is a drug to us but elsewhere a ruinous dissipation; the coca leaves, the chewing of which gives a Bolivian Indian strength to go on for leagues without food, “but thereof comes in the end despondency and madness”; the kava root of the South Seas, which, first well chewed by strong-jawed young men or girls, then steeped in water, gives an infusion like soapsuds flavoured with Gregory’s powder, a luxury not much appreciated by white men, especially after seeing its preparation, and usually denied to women and youngsters, but ceremoniously presented in coco-nut shells to the grave and reverend seniors, whom a skinful of it affects with a peculiar drunkenness, in the legs rather than the head.

Many medicinal plants here will give us new ideas or old qualms: the liquorice root, yielding what is still in our country districts known as “Spanish juice”; the senna shrubs, that flourish hardily in deserts to furnish black draughts once too much imported into British nurseries; the castor-oil plant, that bears such big clumps of flowers blooming under a tropical sun “too fairly for so foul effect”; the precious quinine, which by bold adventurers was stolen from Peruvian monopoly to thrive on Indian hills and elsewhere. Passing by such exhibits with a shudder, Masters Sandford and Merton will be glad to learn how many doctors nowadays do not much dissent from O. W. Holmes’s dictum that if all drugs, except quinine and a few other specifics, were at the bottom of the sea, it would be so much the better for human health.

Young monkeys, still strong in jaw and gastric juice, will pay more attention to the different kinds of nuts, too reckless dealings with which has often caused nauseous draughts to be “exhibited”; and they may be surprised to learn how the triangular Brazil nuts of our shops are not independent growths, but neatly packed in parcels of two dozen or so in a shell like a cannon ball, so hard and heavy as to crack a man’s skull on which it should fall. The youth of this generation will not be so much interested as an old fogey is in carob pods, believed to be the locusts that fed St. John, and that still feed men and cattle in some parts of the world. The other day I had a shock of mild surprise in seeing dried locusts for sale in a back street shop-window, from which I had supposed them long vanished; but in my period of unpampered stomachs and scrimp pocket-money they had a great sale among schoolboys, as giving for a minimum of expenditure a maximum of sweet, stiff chewing, with this additional recommendation, that the seeds, scrunched under one’s mischievous heel, made a squeaking noise subversive of discipline--a trick, let us trust, never tried on Mr. Barlow. He will here find a cue to explain how some fruits that are to us mere luxuries more or less digestible, such as chestnuts and dates, make the staple food of certain regions, not only raw but dried, ground into flour and baked into bread; the stones of dates also being crushed as fodder for North African cattle. Then here we have the cassava, which in its native state is deadly poison, but can be prepared to feed wholesomely many tribes of Africans and South Americans, and to supply us with our toothsome tapioca. Here indeed are poisonous preparations enough to kill all Kew, including the juice of that upas tree of whose deadly shade a cock-and-bull story took such deep root in our language that it still affords a fictitious trope for orators.

Mr. Barlow might find much to say on the many useful or curious plants here represented, notably the various trees and creepers whose juice, once oozing to waste in leafy wildernesses, now becomes more and more important through the increasing demand for india-rubber in our greedy manufactures. But his hearers might begin to yawn before he had got through one-tenth of over a hundred cases here laid out for inspection; so, as soon as the shower be over that has driven us into this instructive refuge, let us go forth into the open air, only pausing to look respectfully on the portraits of botanists and explorers, among which the tutor may point to Sir Joseph Banks, or Baron von Humboldt, while the pupils will want rather to identify Captain Cook; the general public may be most concerned to see Charles Darwin or Marianne North; and those who have had the patience to read through the foregoing chapters can pick out George III., Lord Bute, the Aitons, the Hookers, and other worthies there touched upon in connection with Kew’s history.

It would take one, indeed, from opening to closing time to go through even the salient features of these spacious Gardens. What one turns to by choice will partly depend on taste, and partly on the season. Early in the year, as the official guide reminds us, we can look out for the snowdrops, crocuses and daffodils that “take the winds of March with beauty.” Then open the tulips about the Palm House, the bluebells in the remote corner marked by the Queen’s Cottage, the wild hyacinths beneath the budding beech-trees; and horse-chestnut flowers strew the way to the blooming rhododendron walks; and next comes the turn of the azaleas and roses, till the whole area is overspread by vari-coloured blooms, in autumn dying with a pale sunset of chrysanthemums.

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 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. 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.” The official restaurant, not quite so “popular” as those outside, stands beyond the Palm House, in an open glade leading up to where the Pagoda’s towering intrusiveness marks the way to the Lion Gate at the further corner on the Richmond road. Perhaps fewest visitors show the preference of Richard Jefferies, so true a lover of Nature, who casts his vote for what might strike some of us as the most commonplace show of the Gardens, by the Cumberland Gate--that old story of “Eyes and no Eyes!”

Within this enclosure, called the Herbaceous Ground, heedlessly
passed and perhaps never heard of by the thousands who go to
see the Palm Houses, lies to me the real and truest interest of
Kew. For here is a living dictionary of English wild-flowers.
The meadow and the cornfield, the river, the mountain, and the
woodland, the seashore, the very waste place by the roadside,
each has sent its peculiar representatives, and glancing for
the moment, at large, over the beds, noting their number and
extent, remembering that the specimens are not in the mass but
individual, the first conclusion is that our own country is the
true Flowery Land. But the immediate value of this wonderful
garden is in the clue it gives to the most ignorant, enabling
any one, no matter how unlearned, to identify the flower that
delighted him or her, it may be, years ago in far-away field or
copse. Walking up and down the green paths between the beds, you
are sure to come upon it presently, with its scientific name duly
attached and its natural order labelled at the end of the patch.
Had I only known of this place in former days, how gladly I would
have walked the hundred miles hither. 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. But here these things are preserved;
in London, the centre of civilisation and science, is a garden
which restores the ancient knowledge of the monks and the witches
of the villages.

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; then hours may be spent in examining its contents, the gift and handiwork of Miss Marianne North, who well deserved to stand godmother to several plants brought to knowledge by her researches.

This lover of flowers, a descendant from the Roger North remembered by his biography of three notable brothers, was born at Hastings, for which her father sat in Parliament. Her desire to see and to paint the tropics was awakened at Kew when Sir William Hooker gave her a glorious bunch from the first _Amherstia nobilis_ to bloom in England. With her father she travelled much in Europe, and as far as Syria and Egypt. Thrown on her own guidance after his death and the marriage of her sister to J. A. Symonds, she launched out for America and the West Indies; then took a tour round the world and made some stay in India, bringing back from time to time several hundred paintings to be exhibited at South Kensington. When she found her work appreciated, Miss North resolved on presenting the whole collection to the public, and at her own expense set about the building of a gallery for it at Kew. Before this was opened in 1882, she had been to Australasia for fresh subjects; then again set off to enrich its contents from South Africa and the islands of the Indian Ocean. The gallery had soon to be enlarged, while its indefatigable founder made her last expedition, this time to Chili. The story of those peregrinations is told in her _Recollections of a Happy Life_, that pass over lightly the many hardships she braved in procuring so much pleasure for her stay-at-home countryfolk. But perilous climates and trying exertions had told on her nerves; and after a year spent in finally arranging the Kew collection, she was fain to seek the repose of a Gloucestershire garden, which many friends contributed to adorn with such beauties as she had followed far and near. Here, a few years later, she died in 1890.

The North collection is unique, not only in its scope and interest, but in its being the work of one woman, whom Queen Victoria regretted that she could distinguish by no mark of public honour: in the next reign she might have been rewarded by the new Order of Merit bestowed on Florence Nightingale. Her legacy to the nation, catalogued in more than a hundred pages, pictures some thousand species of flowers and plants, from nearly all parts of the world, for the most part executed on the spot within little over a dozen years. This is the sight no visitor should miss; and from whatever clime he comes, he is almost sure to find some _souvenir_ of it blooming here under the dullest sky and the chilliest influences, against which Kew Gardens strive to carry out their aim of epitomising the earth’s vegetable life.

FOOTNOTES

[1] _The Dictionary of National Biography_’s article on Francis Willis, written, I understand, by a descendant of his, hardly does justice to this one of his sons. The writer mentions John and Robert as concerned with treating the King at different times, but does not bring forward Thomas, who, so far as I can make out, was closely in charge during the attack of 1801.

[2] _Letting_ in Elizabethan English, of course, bore the opposite meaning to ours, as in “let and hinder.”

INDEX

Abel, musician, 125

Acorns exported from Kew, 185

Addison, quoted, 90

Æolus, Temple of, 169

Aiton, John, 102

Aiton, William, 100

Aiton, William Townsend, 102

Albert, Prince, 110

Amelia, Princess, 64, 79

Amelia’s House, Princess, 30

Arch, the ruined, 199

Argyll, Duke of, 9

Aroid House, 170

Assassination, George III.’s escape from, 36

Augusta, Princess of Saxe-Gotha, 13

Australian vegetation, 182

Ayrton, Mr., 109

Azaleas, 196

Bach, J. C., 40, 125

Bacon’s Essay, _Of Gardens_, 85

Bamboos, 186

Bauer, Francis, 146

Birch, uses of, 187

Bluebells, 196

Bohemia, Anne of, 2

Boswell, 70

Botanic Garden at Kew, 95, 101, 107, 112

Botanists, portraits of explorers and, 195

Bradley, Astronomer-Royal, 87

Brazil nuts, 193

Brentford, 8, 77, 113, 119, 132

Bridgeman, gardener, 91

Brown, “Capability,” 95

Buckingham Palace, 27, 32, 78

Buitenzorg Gardens, Java, 161

Burney, Miss, quoted, 46, 59, 66, 67

Burton, Decimus, 108

Bushey Park, 149

Bute, Earl of, 19, 23, 95, 123

“Buttonmaker,” nickname of George III., 31

Byam, Rev. R. B., 145

Cactus aloe, 169

Cambridge Cottage, 46, 123, 153, 156

Cambridge, Duke Adolphus of, 45, 81, 116, 153

Cambridge, Duke George of, 154

Cambridge, Princess Mary of, 155

Capel, Lord, 11, 87

Carleton House, 77

Carob pods, 193

Caroline, Queen, 9, 10, 94, 116

Cassava, 194

Castor-oil plant, the, 193

Cedars of Lebanon, 197

Chambers, Sir William, 96

Character of George III., 22

Charles I., 7

Charlotte, Princess, 80, 81

Charlotte, Queen, 24, 47, 52 68, 80

Chatterton, quoted, 98

Chelsea, Physic Garden of, 101

Chestnuts, 194

Chrysanthemums, 196

Church House, 123

City State Barge, 143

Clarence, Duke of, 45, 70, 81

Cobbett, William, 136

Coca leaves, 192

Coco-nut of Seychelles, 166

Coco-nut trees, uses of, 188

Colton, Charles Caleb, 143

Confucius, House of, 96

Cook’s Voyages, 105

_Copernicia cerifera_, a tree-of-all-work, 189

Cotton window, the, 191

Cowley, quoted, 84

Crocuses, 196

Cuba jungles, 171

Cumberland, Ernest, Duke of, 45, 81, 116, 150, 151

Cumberland, William of, 12, 18

Daffodils, 196

“Dairy House,” the, 11

D’Arblay, General, 71

Darwin, Erasmus, quoted, 98

Darwins, the, 102

Dates, 194

Deans, Jeanie, 9

De Candolles, the, 102

De Jussieus, the, 102

_Diary_, George Rose’s, 74

_Dictionary of National Biography_, quoted, 75

Digby, Colonel, 67

_Dissertation on Oriental Gardening_, 96

_Diversions of Purley_, the, 134

Doddington, Bubb, 20

Dowager Princess of Wales, 20, 95

Dragon-tree at Orotava, 180

“Drake, Peter,” 95

Drawing-rooms at St. James’s, 50

Duck, Misses, 116

Duck, Stephen, 94, 116, 117

Dutch House, the, 11, 29, 74

Edinburgh Botanical Garden, 103

Edward III., 2

Elizabeth, Queen, 5

“Elizabeth’s house, Princess,” 46

Engleharts, the, 126

Ernest, King of Hanover, 107 150, 151

Ernst, the page, 126

Eucalyptus, 181

Evelyn, John, 86

Explorers, portraits of botanists and, 195

“Farmer George,” 31

Finch, Lady Charlotte, 46

Fischer, musician, 40, 125

Fitzherbert, Mrs., 45

Fortnum, 125

Frederick, Duke of York, 37, 43, 46

Frederick, Prince of Wales, 11, 15, 88

Gainsborough, Thomas, 129

Gardening, art of, 88

Gardens, celebrated, 87, 88

GARDENS, THE STORY OF THE, 82

Garrick, quoted, 96

George, Duke of Cambridge, 154

“George, Farmer,” 31

George I., 8

George II., 8, 10, 24

George III., 13, 74, 76, 78, 95, 120

George III., accession of, 24

George III.’s character, 22

George III.’s escape from assassination, 36

George III.’s illness, 51

George III. meets Miss Burney, 47

George III.’s tutors, 17

George IV., 77, 106

George IV., Prince of Wales, 37, 40, 53, 55

George IV.’s intrigue with “Perdita” Robinson, 41

Giant gum trees at Melbourne, 164

Gordon, General, 166

Great Palm House, 165

Green, the gardener, 99

Greenhouse, the, 170

Greville, Charles, quoted, 150

Grey, Lady Jane, 4

Gwyn, Mrs., the “Jessamy Bride,” 145

Ha-ha fence, 93

Ham House, 87, 114

Hampton Court, 3, 8, 10

Hanover, Ernest, King of, 107

Hanover, George of, 152

Haverfield, John, 99

Hawkins, the brothers, 123

Helps, Sir Arthur, 147

Hemp plants, 192

Henry, Prince, 6

Herbaceous ground, 169, 198

Herbarium library, 152

_Heroic Epistle_, Mason’s, 95

Hervey, Lord, quoted, 12, 14

Highwaymen, 121

Hill, Sir John, 96

Hofland, Barbara, 146

Hollow Walk, the, 123

“Honour, Maids of,” 8

Hooker, Sir J. D., 109, 181

Hooker, Sir W. J., 108, 109

Horne Tooke, John, 132

Horse-chestnut, old, 196

Horticultural Society’s Garden, 107

Huntingdon, William, S.S., 138

Hurlbut, W. H., quoted, 171

“Improvers,” 88

India-rubber plants, 195

Islay, Lord, 97

Italian Gardens, 89

Jacobi, Mdlle., 69, 72

James I., 5

Jefferies, Richard, quoted, 198

Jones, Henry, 98

Jones, Inigo, 88

Juniper Hill, 71

“Junius,” 134

Kava root, 192

Kent, Duke of, 45, 81

Kent, William, 88

Kew Bridge, 118

Kew Castle, 77

Kew Church, 115

Kew Churchyard, 129

Kew Cottage, 147

Kew Green, 75, 157

Kew House, 10, 29, 32, 46, 51, 54, 64, 76

KEW IN FAVOUR, 31

“Kew in lilac-time,” 158

Kew Observatory, 9, 88, 97, 111

Kew, origin of name, 1

Kew Palace, 10, 78, 80, 112, 197

Kew Priory, 143

Kew Volunteers, 149

Kingston, 2

Kirby, Joshua, 129

Kit-Cat Club, 114

Kneller, Sir Godfrey, 114

Kneller Hall, 114

Knight, Charles, 79

Knight, Miss Cornelia, 73

_Lacon_, quoted, 144

Lake, the, 197

Langley, Batty, 91

Lauderdale, Duke of, at Ham House, 87

Lebanon, cedars of, 197

Lely, Sir Peter, 113

Lennox, Lady Sarah, 26

Le Nôtre, 89

Levens Hall, 89

Linnean classification, the, 190

Linnés, the, 102

Lion Gate, the, 197

Liquorice root, 192

Little, John, story of, 141

“Love Lane,” 33

Macaulay, quoted, 47

Macnab, James, 103

Macnab, William, 102

Macnab, William Ramsay, 103

“Maids of Honour,” 8

Mammoth sequoia, 181

Marvell, A., quoted, 93

Mary of Cambridge, Princess, 155

Mason’s _Heroic Epistle_, 95

Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Dowager Grand-Duchess of, 155

Melbourne, giant gum-trees at, 164

“Merlin’s Cave,” 94

Meyer, Jeremiah, 126

Molyneux, Samuel, 11, 87

Monastery of Sheen, the, 83

Montague, Lady Mary Wortley, 123

Moor Park, Hertfordshire, 85

Murray, Miss Amelia, quoted, 124

Museums and Economic Houses, 185

New Zealand Vegetation, 183

Niepce, J. N. de, 146

“No Popery” riots, 34

North Gallery, 199

North, Miss Marianne, 161, 163, 199

Nôtre, Le, 89

Noyes, Mr. A., quoted, 158

Observatory, the, 9, 88, 97, 111

Old Brentford, 132

Old Deer Park, 36, 111, 141

Opium, 192

“Orangery,” the, 190

Orotava, dragon-tree at, 180

Pagoda, the, 1, 96, 197

Palace at Richmond, proposed new, 28

Palm House, 108

Papendiek, Mrs., Memoirs of, 34, 40, 43, 56, 72, 99, 120, 121, 123, 125

Papyrus reeds, 167

Pavilion, the Brighton, 77

Peradenia, Gardens of, 164

Petersham, 114

Phillips’s _Morning’s walk from London to Kew_, 142

Physic Garden, Chelsea, 101

Pond, the, 197

Pope, quoted, 15, 89

Portraits of botanists and explorers, 195

Potato, the, 185

Prain, Colonel, 109

Prince Albert, 110

Prince Frederick of Wales, 11, 15, 88

Prince George of Hanover, 152

Prince Henry, 6

Princess Amelia, 30, 64, 79

Princess Charlotte, 80, 81

“Princess Elizabeth’s House,” 46

Princess Marie’s wedding, 155

Princess Victoria, 81

Pringle, Sir John, 123

Proctor, Richard, 147

Queen Caroline, 9, 10, 116

Queen Charlotte, 27, 68, 80

Queen Elizabeth, 5

Queen Victoria, 112, 149

“Queen’s Cottage,” the, 29, 196

“Queen’s Lodge” at Windsor, 32

Quinine, 193

_Rafflesia_, 162

_Recollections of a Happy Life_, 200

Regency Bill, 53, 62

Regency, the Prince’s, 79

Repton, Humphrey, 93

Richmond, 3, 5, 113, 140

Richmond Gardens, 94, 110

Richmond Lodge, 8, 10, 28, 32, 97, 110

Richmond Palace, 3

Richmond Park, 7, 30

Richmond, proposal of new palace at, 28

Rio de Janeiro, Botanic Garden, near, 164

Riots, “No Popery,” 34

Robinson, “Perdita,” 41

Rock Garden, the, 168

Rogers, John, Reminiscences, 34, 101

Rose, George, _Diary_ of, 74

Roses, 196

St. James’s Drawing-rooms, 50

St. James’s Palace, 27

Saxe-Gotha, Princess Augusta of, 13

Scholarship, George IV.’s, 37

Schwellenberg, Mrs., 49, 68

Scotsmen as gardeners, 100, 105

Senna, 192

Seychelles, coco-nut of, 166

Sharp, Granville, 122

Sheen, 2

Sheen Common, 94

Sheen, the Monastery of, 83

Snowdrops, 196

Somerset, Protector, 84

South African plants, 168

_Spectator_, the, quoted, 90

Spencer, Lady Elizabeth, 27

STORY OF THE GARDENS, THE, 82

Strand-on-the-Green, 113, 126

Strawberry Hill, 90, 91

Succulent House, 169

Sudbrook Park, 114

Suffolk House, 4

Sun, Temple of the, 169

Sunday opening, 110

Sussex, Duke of, 45

Swift, quoted, 114

Switzer, Stephen, 87, 91

Sydney, Botanic Gardens at, 164

Syon House, 4, 84

Syon Vista, the, 197

Tamerlane’s garden, 100

Teck, Duke of, 155

Temple, Sir William, 87

Temple of Æolus, 169

Temple of the Sun, 169

Temple Grove, 87

Thackeray, quoted, 34

Theobald’s Park, Enfield, 5

Thiselton-Dyer, Sir W. T., 109

Thomson, James, 140

“Thresher-poet,” the, 116

_Thresher’s Labour, The_, quoted, 117

Thurlow, Lord Chancellor, 62

Timber Museum, No. III., 190

Tooke, John Horne, 132

Topiarian art, the, 89

Trimmer, Mrs., 129

Tropical Lily House, 166

Tropics, plagues of the, 176

Tulips, 196

Turner, Dr. William, 83

Tutors of George III., 17

Twickenham, 21

“Two Kings of Brentford,” the, 132

Upas tree, 195

Victoria Gate, 112

Victoria, Princess, 81

Victoria, Queen, 112, 149

Victoria Regia, the, 162, 167

VISITING THE GARDENS, 157

Wales, Dowager Princess of, 20, 95

Wales, Prince Frederick of, 11, 88

Wallace, Dr. A. R., quoted, 174

Walpole, Horace, 9, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 21, 28, 45, 63

Wedding of Princess Marie, 155

Wells, Mr. J. W., quoted, 189

West, Sir Algernon, quoted, 109

Weymouth, 65, 76

White House, the, 46

White Lodge, 155

Whitton Place, 97

Wild hyacinths, 196

Wilkes, John, 26, 131

Wilkes’s head, 76

“Wilkes and Liberty,” 89, 133

Wilkinson, Mr., _Reminiscences_, 154

William of Cumberland, 12, 18

William III., 8, 89

William IV., 87

Willis, Rev. Dr., 56, 68

Willises, the, 75

Windsor Castle, 32, 50, 78

Wolsey, 3

Wyatt, Sir Thomas, 118

York, Frederick, Duke of, 37, 42, 64

Zoffany, John, 127

THE END

_Printed by R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, Edinburgh._