Gardens of celebrities and celebrated gardens in and around London

Front matter

3 9424 05047 121 5 f l9 i

:elebrities

AND teLEBRATED

Contents

CHAP.

I. — Introductory . . . . . .

II. — Lambeth Palace and Gardens. .....

Preface

For kind permission to make the drawings reproduced in the following pages, and for the facilities so freely given me in doing so. my thanks are due

To Her Gracious Majesty Queen Alexandra.

His Grace the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury.

His Grace the late Duke of Northumberland.

The Right Honourable Mary Countess of Ilchester.

The Right Reverend the Lord Bishop of London.

Major Goldman, M.P., of Walpole House, The Mall, Chiswick.

The late Dr. Tuke and Charles Tuke, Esq.

Charles Grant Church, Esq., of 3, The Grove, Highgate.

Warwick Draper, Esq., formerly of Kelmscott House, Upper Mall,

Hammersmith.

The Trustees of Hogarth House, Chiswick ; The " Physicke Garden,"

Chelsea ; Carlyle House, Chelsea, and Leighton House, Kensington.

I also cordially acknowledge the valuable aid I have received, through information not otherwise obtainable, from Mary Countess of Ilchester, The Lady Frances Balfour, The Hon. Charlotte Knollys and Lady Thornycroft.

And there are two others to whom — though I do not name them — I am deeply grateful, for without their sympathy and steady, kindly encouragement I am inclined to think the book would never have been -wTitten — or, at least, completed.

With regard to the work itself, I should like to say in explanation of a certain want of continuity that may be felt in its pages, the manner of its genesis should be known.

Pictures in a picture gallery are regarded as distinct entities, but the chapters of a book (unless it be frankly a collection of short stories) ought to have some logical connection. I have dealt chronologically with the various histories related in the following pages, as far as it has been possible to do so. Also, if the Reader will look for it, there is a well-defined chain of circumstance linking together many of the chapters in " Gardens of Celebrities " — but since its existence is accidental, and it is broken in places —the book, I fear, must plead guilty to a lack of cohesion.

This is largely because the illustrations earliest in point of time— those of Kelmscott House, Hogarth House and Holland House, which were executed

PREFACE

as long ago as 1911 and 1912 — were originally intended solely for an exhibition of garden pictures. The exhibition was inevitably deferred, when it was decided that they should first appear in book form, because the drawings had to be held over for reproduction in colour.

In its first inception, the raison d'etre of the book was purely a pictorial one, and the text accompanying the pictures would therefore have been merely elucidatory and descriptive. The text, in short, was to have illustrated the drawings, not, as now, vice versa.

But alas ! in six months there followed the cosmic upheaval of the last four years — with the inevitable postponement or destruction of all human plans and projects. In August, 1914, when I was in the full swing and enjoyment of my outdoor work — like a bolt from the blue — the measureless calamity of the Great War was upon us ! At the moment when all eyes were turned to the stricken fields of France and Flanders, when, there, and elsewhere in the wide area of strife, husbands, sons, brothers and nephews — heroes all, in their readiness and steadfastness, martyrs in their faith — were, voluntarily, paying so heavy a price for the ultimate freedom of mankind — none at home would have had heart or time to consider the beauty and the peace of gardens — and therefore the book itself was — more than once — postponed.

But my own small bit of work went on. The drawings themselves were ready in 1915 — and in working at the text I came unexpectedly upon a mine so rich that, since the unhappy prolongation of the war allowed it — I seized the chance to treat my subject — or rather subjects — for thirteen different ones are dealt with — much more fully. To treat it exhaustively, even without reference to many interesting or beautiful metropolitan gardens existing, which I have not so much as mentioned — would be impossible within the limits of one volume.

And the book, even so far as it goes, is incomplete. I had purposed, as a matter of course, to include a drawing of " Strawberry " — the famous garden of Horace Walpole, and to make more than a passing allusion to his place in the history of gardening ; but much to my regret I was not permitted to do so. And though facilities were kindly given me to draw in the gardens of Gray's Inn, laid out, it is said, by Bacon himself, I found that they had been so sorely cut up and worn by the perpetual drilling of thousands of troops, that on aesthetic grounds I was compelled to leave them out.

Jessie Macgregor.

Swallowfield,

October 15th, 1918.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

WATER COLOUR DRAWINGS

Marlborough House ......

Lambeth :

The Palace from the Gardens

The Tudor Gateway .....

FULHAM :

The Courtyard ......

The Flower Walk in the Walled Garden

Gateway between Walled Garden and Grounds SiON :

Looking toward Parterres and Fountain

Looking toward the River Thames Physicke Garden, Chelsea :

View of Garden .....

The Obelisk in the Pool ....

The Inigo Jones Gateway ....

The Conservatory .....

Walpole House, The Mall, Chiswick :

View of House and Garden Holland House :

The Dutch or West Garden Hogarth House :

View of House and Garden No. 3, The Grove, Highgate :

View of Garden and House Carlyle House, Chelsea :

View of Garden and House Kelmscott House, Upper Mall, Hammersmith :

The Garden, looking from the River

View of House and Garden, looking riverwards Leighton House, Kensington :

The Studio Balcony, from Garden

xi

Frontispiece

Facing p. 32 46

,. 90

98 110

194 218 232 250 260

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PENCIL DRAWINGS

Lambeth :

The Finf-trcc. in Greater ('ovirtyard FULHAM :

The Entrance to the Palace SiON :

Ancient Cedar in Grounds .

Physicke Garden :

The Gateway in Swan Walk Chiswick House :

Sketch of Temple in Grounds

South Front and Cedar Avenue , acing p.

GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES AND CELEBRATED GARDENS

Chapter I

AFTER the Romans left Britain, about a.d. :3()(), the art of landscape gardening, in which they had instructed the islanders, died out, and under the Saxons the garden was merely a yard; the word "yard" — etymologically derived from the Anglo-Saxon geard, i.e., hedges, enclosure^signifying the small, enclosed space in which those plants intended for domestic use were sheltered. But though neglected in England, the art had advanced in France ; and when, in 1066, the Normans came over, they reintroduced it, bringing with them many plants and fruits hitherto unknown in Britain, and an appreciation of flowers for their own sake. The author of " Gardens Old and New " lells an anecdote that attests this : Christina, Abbess of the famous Abbey of Romney, in Hampshire, who was closely allied to the former royal house of England, had under her care her yoimg niece, Matilda, afterwards Queen of Henry I. She must ha\e been considered beautiful, for William Rufus desired to see her, and when (his reputation being dubious) the Abbess demurred, he pretended that he had only come to see the flowers in the convent garden, reported to be wortli a visit.

Henry of Huntingdon, an early authority, tells us that Henry II. made a " Parke," or chase, at Woodstock, in Oxfordshire. In a bower in its leafy groves, approached b}^ a labyrinthine path, accessible only to one who had the clew, the King concealed his love, fair Rosamund Clifford. It was there his Queen discovered her, and offered her the choice of death by the poison bowl or the dagger. Tradition has it that she chose the former.

Speaking of Blenlieim in his " Observations on Modern Gardens," Wheatley says : " The sides are open lawn. On that farthest from the house formerly stood the palace of Henry II., celebrated in many an ancient ditty as ' Fair Rosamund's Bower.' " A little clear stream, which rises there, is by the country people still called *'Fair Rosamund's Well." Since at Blenheim the remains of a Roman Villa were found, it is possible that the trees in Henry's " Parke " were survivors of those that had been in the garden of that Villa ; and if so, Blenheim may claim to be the most ancient, as it is one of the finest examples of landscape gardening, in the country.

The first English writer on Gardens was one Alexander Markham, foster-brother of Richard Coeur de Lion — who became a professor in the University of Paris, and towards the end of his life, Abbot of the Augustinian convent of Cirencester.

In the library of Trinity College, Cambridge, there is a poem entitled, " John the Gardener," composed in the fourteenth century, that gives practical advice upon sowing and grafting ; and a fifteenth century manuscript still extant, contains a treatise bearing the wordy title :

" For a man to know in which time of the year it is best for a man to plant trees, also to make a tree bear all manner of fruit of divers colours and odours, with many other things." The reader is advised to give due attention to the signs of the Zodiac, for in that age astrology — the forerunner of astronomy — concerned with the supposed influence of the stars on terrestrial affairs, determined the times to sow and to graft ; and the efforts of the alchemist to transmute inferior metal into gold were rivalled by the attempt of the horticulturist to produce hybrid varieties of flowers and fruit — peaches with the kernels of nuts, stoneless cherries, pomegranates from peaches, and so forth.

Chaucer is a rich mine in which to dig for information on the subject of medieval gardens. He took many of his plots from Boccaccio. " The Black Death," the most devastating of the five visitations of the plague in the fourteenth century, of which the Italian poet, in the introduction to the " Decameron " gives a vivid and terrible description, swept through Europe — reaching Florence, where sixty thousand persons are said to have died, in 1348, when Chaucer was eight years old. Boccaccio's lavish praises of the garden wherein Fiametto and her companions took refuge, and which he hkened to a Paradise on earth — have ahnost their counterpart in Chaucer's " Romaunt of the Rose," in which he describes :

A " garden fair to see," bounded by a high, embattled wall, and entered only by " a wicked smal. ..."

" So fair it was, that trusteth wel It seemed a place esperitual For certes ! as at my devys There is no place in Paradys So good in for to dwelle or be As in that garden thoughte me."

He describes the concert of the birds— the nightingale, the finch, the laverock (sky lark), the throstle, the mavis, and the turtle, each one seeking to eclipse the other in the sweetness of its song — truly a chorus known to few foreign lands. He tells us also of another garden :

" A garden saw I, full of bloomy bowes Upon a river in a grene mede ...

The poet of the " Canterbury Tales " died in 1400, and thirty-seven years later another British singer, James I. of Scotland, fell by the hands of assassins at Perth. His poetic genius was of no mean order, but I fear Scotland may scarcely claim him exclusively, since it was nurtured in England, where he was a captive for nineteen years. From his prison at Windsor he beheld the fair young daughter of the Earl of Sussex walking in the garden below, and fell in love with her. She ultimately became his Queen.

In his beautiful poem, " The King's Quhair," he describes the garden :

" So thick the boughis and the leavis greene

Beshaded all the alleys that there were,

And mids of every arbour might be seen

The sharp greene sweete juniper,

Growing so fair with branches here and there.

" And on the smalle greene twistie sat The little nightingale and sung So loud and clear, the hymis consecrat Of lovis use, now soft, now loud, the wallis rimg Right of their song."

Then, walking bcneatli his tower, he espies the maiden and thus apostrophizes her :

" Ah sweet ! are ye a worldly ercature Or heavenly thing in hkeness of nature ?

" Or are ye God Cupidcs oAvn princess And comin are to loose me out of band ?

Or are ye veiy Nature the goddess That have depainted with yr heavenly hand This garden full of flowers as they stand ? "

The mediaeval " arbour " here referred to, according to W. C. Hazlitt, was not a summer-house as we understand it, but a garden within a garden, sufficiently large to enclose great trees. He quotes in support of this statement the ancient rhyme :

" And in the garden, as I weene Was an arbour fair and greene ; And in the arbour was a tree, A fairer in the world might never be."

In the King's poem before quoted, however, the word '* arbour " is so used as to convey much of its present meaning — a meaning which it had indisputably acquired at the beginning of the sixteenth century.

So early as the first century after Christ the English climate had been eulogized by Tacitus as favourable to the cultivation of all vegetables and fruits except the vine and the olive. Therefore, it is not surprising to find that melons, cucumbers, and many of the more expensive products of the kitchen garden were common in England as early as the reign of Edward III. But the Wars of the Roses interrupted agriculture, and these vegetables afterwards were unknown, until the reign of Henry VIII., when the art of gardening came to a new birth.

There was for some time a curious prejudice against hops, and in the reign of Henry VI. Parliament was petitioned against tiie " wicked weed." But in 1576 Reginald Scott published a pamphlet entitled, '' The Perfect Platform of a Hoppe Garden."

Potatoes were not in common use before the middle of the seventeenth century. A writer in the " Topographical Antiquities of Great Britain and Ireland " in 1753, though himself of opinion that Sir Walter Raleigh brought them over, remarks that " the public is much obliged for the cultivation of them to the anonymous author of ' England's Happiness increased, or a Remedy against succeeding Dear Years, by a Plantation of Potatoes'" (1664). And he further tells us that " sallads," carrots, and turnips, and cabbages, were brought over from Holland. And we read of pumpkins, garlic, onions and peas.

" Rassins " (raisins) are said to have formed part of the second course of the institution feast of Archbishop Nevil in 1464 ; if this be tiiic, they nmst have come from abroad. Pippins were introduced in 1514, and the " pale gooseberry " about the same time ; and so well have we succeeded with the gooseberry, that we have come almost to regard it as indigenous. On the other hand, though both oranges and figs were certainly known in England in the reign of Henry VIII., orange trees have never flourished here in the open, nor have fig trees done much better. The two famous fig trees mentioned in the account of Lambeth Palace, are descended from those planted in the Archiepiscopal garden by Cardinal Pole, and were then regarded as " trees of curiosity " and very carefully nurtured.

It is said that the first mulberry trees were those in the Protector Somerset's garden at Sion, Middlesex, and were doubtless planted under the auspices of Dr. Turner, physician to Edward VI., of whom I shall have more to say. However, according to others, the mulberry was first planted in the gardens at Hatfield.

It seems to have been James I., and not Queen Elizabeth as sometimes supposed, who, with a view to the establishment of the silk industry in this country, caused the mulberry tree to be planted freely in the South of England.

That strawberries were common in England in the sixteenth century we have Shakespearean authority for stating, for Gloucester says in Richard III. : ''When I was last in Holborn I saw good strawberries in your garden there. I do beseech you send for some of them." But whether Shakespeare was guilty of an anachronism in mentioning the fruit as having been grown in this country a hundred years earlier, I do not pretend to know. We read of ])eaches, and even citrons, and attempts ^vere made to cultivate the i.n'ape, but without success.

An essay on gardening by a certain Thomas Hills, which appeared about 1560, shows a distinct advance both in the theory and practice of horticulture. He recommends the planting of hedges of briars and thorns, and dwells much on the maze, or labyrinth, an example of which we see at Hampton Court. Indeed, in Hills' time no self-respecting horticulturist would have laid out a garden of any importance, without one of these curious places in which to " sport at times." Such treatises, and the various herbals, were written avowedly to advance the science of horticulture ; but there are many accidental allusions to gardening and flower-growing in the general literature of the age, which throw valuable . and illuminating sidelights on the history of gardening in England in the Middle Ages.

In the chapter on Sion reference is made to Turner — and his herbal. Following his lead, in Elizabeth's reign, appeared a notable work, the " Herbal or Historic of Plantes,"by John Gerarde, who, as we shall find when we come to the Chelsea" Physicke Garden," owned the first herb garden in this country. The earliest on the Continent was that established at Padua. Gerarde's garden was attached to his house in Holborn, and must have been of considerable size, since he was able to raise eleven hundred different plants and trees. He w^as a citizen and surgeon-apothecary of London, and head gardener to Lord Burleigh.

Nor were medicinal plants and herbs forgotten. They were cultivated by the thrifty dames of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in every farm-house, manor house, and baronial hall. Dwelling for the most part, as they did, in country districts where intercommunication between towns, and villages, and outlying hamlets, was painfully slow and difficult, and in an age when the science of medicine was in its infancy, in default of the presence of well-equipped disciples of Esculapius, they were content, to a great extent, to practise the healing art themselves ; and if many of their nostrums, as we find from the herbal literature, were extravagant and absurd, and calculated, according to modern ideas, to do their patients more harm than good, they themselves brought often to the service of humanity— if not science and learning— at any rate, skill, initiative, and common sense, as well as the wisdom which may be derived from practical experience, and handed down from mother to daughter. But there can be but little doubt that, up to the sixteenth century, we owe the preservation, if not positively the new^ birth of the science, after the Wars of the Roses, largely to the monks. They were able and industrious gardeners, and often skilled in the application of the herbs and simples they so assiduously cultivated ; and in remote neighbourhoods, in the absence of the leech or apothecary, must frequently have been called upon to undertake, not only the cure of souls, but the cure of bodies also. We owe a good deal to the " monks of old " ; their place knows them no more, though such names as " Grey Friars " and " Covent " — or Convent — " Garden " are suggestive of the old Romish times.

It would seem from the illuminated manuscripts in the British Museum and elsewhere, that the English mediaeval gardens were, for the most part, square in shape, and had grass plots, sanded walks, and little alleys and borders. Box played a great part in the outlining of these borders, and there was generally in each domain a " Privy Garden," or playing place. A little later there was invariably a bowling-green. Among the characteristic features of the Tudor garden may also be cited the "Mount," by means of which in a flat country a view of the landscape could be obtained.

It was ascended by a winding path, described by an old writer as being " like a cockle-shell, to come to the top without paign." Mounts did not go out of fashion until the boundary wall was superseded in the eighteenth century by the sunk fence, or " Ha ha." In large Tudor establishments there was often a gallery leading from the great house to the pleasure-grounds, by which they could be reached under cover ; and even in the time of Erasmus these and other garden buildings were sometimes frescoed inside, a fashion which came from Italy. Erasmus speaks of a garden with such galleries, the doors painted in imitation of grass and flowers, and the walls representing woods. At a later period Evelyn describes one which he had seen at Rucil, (that he has the bad taste to commend) in which " the arch of Constantine was painted on a wall in oyle as large as the real one at Rome, so well done that even a man skilled in painting may mistake it for stone and sculpture ; " and so cleverly was the sky painted in the opening of the arch, that birds dashed themselves against it, thinking to fly through.

The old game of bowls is comparatively little pfeyed nowadays, except by rustics in remote country villages ; but at the time of

M'hieli I am writino a ))anked-iip bowling-green was attached to almost every considerable residence, and answered the same j)urpose as the modern tennis-ground : or perhaps it would be more correct to say of the golf links ; for though more limited in area, it provided suitable recreation groimd for men of mature years ; and it is said that Drake was playing bowls when the Armada ^^as sighted. At any rate, it was the favourite pastime of the sturdy squires and yeomen of England, just as the maypole dance was that of her youths and maidens.

It was under the Tudors that English gardens first assumed a national character. The Tudors were richer than the Plantagenets, and more secure in possession, and had also the advantage of the n(;w learning of the Renaissance that, ere long reaching our shores and providing a stimulus to every form of intellectual activity, inspired fresh ideas and undertakings in horticulture, scarcely less than in literature and art. Henry VIII. had done much to encourage gardening and garden-planning, and justly celebrated aj)pear to have been the royal gardens of Nonsuch, near Ewell, in Surrey ; but these, together with the palace, have since been entirely destroyed. Although greatly altered, some portions of those at Hampton Court yet testify to the care which Henry VIII. spent on their embellishment when the Palace and Grounds passed into his hands. Not always commendable, however, were his schemes, if it be true that " Beasts and the columns they stood upon " were a prominent feature of the Hampton Court Gardens during the period of his ownership.

At the time of Elizabeth's accession, English gardens had probably arrived at their highest beauty, and since as yet they were but little affected by French and Dutch notions of garden-planning, they had acquired that peculiar, indefinable charm that we have learnt to associate with the words, " an old English garden."

In Elizabeth's reign a passion for travel and discovery awoke, with large results ; one of which was the advance of horticulture as a science. For a new impulse was given to its study when men of the type of Cavendish and Raleigh, animated by a keen spirit of adventure and a desire for wider horizons, set forth to navigate summer seas in the far Indies, and, ere long, to explore the newlydiscovei'cd continent of America.

s

AND CELEBRATED GARDEIVS

These travellers brought back with them to this country the seeds and roots of foreign plants and herbs, which quickly adapted themselves to our climate : and as Elizabeth, who is said to have loved flowers, like her father encouraged gardening, when once the fame of Raleigh's collections had spread abroad — it will be seen — when we come to the Chelsea " Physicke Garden" — that more than one distinguished botanist and horticulturalist was attracted to this country from the Continent.

The orchard, in Elizabethan times, is frequently mentioned, and would almost appear to be synonymous with the garden. In Much Ado About Nothitig, Hero, standing with Margaret in Leonato's garden, in which the scene is laid, bids her go seek out Beatrice, and

" Whisper her ear and tell her, I and Ursula Walk in the orchard, and our whole discourse Is all of her : say that thou overheard'st us And bid her steal into the pleached bower, Where honeysuckles, ripen'd by the sun.

Forbid the sun to enter

tliere will she hide her.

To listen to our purpose."

The '* pleached " (i.e., the intertwined and interwoven bower) the maze, and the bowling-green, were all indispensable adjuncts of the pleasure-grounds attached to the abode of any person of social importance.

The word " arbour," which, as previously remarked, had to us a doubtful meaning as employed in Chaucer's time, had in Shakespeare's day certainly come to be used more in our modern sense. The arbour was then commonly constructed of timber. Henry VIII., in the Privy Purse expenses in 1593, was charged hve shilling-s for the making of an arbour at " Baynardes Castell."

I think it is only in the same restricted sense that Shakespeare, in the passage quoted above, put into Hero's mouth the word '' bower." He means an arbour in the modern sense, but a rather large one. Such a " bower " Horace Walpole had in mind when planning his garden at Strawberry Hill more than one h mdred and fifty years later. He wrote : " My bower is determined, but not at all what it should be. ... I had determined that the outside should be of treillage (trellis). . . . Rosamond's bower, as you and I, and Tom Hearnc, know, was a labyrinth ; but as my territory will admit of a very small clew, I lay aside all thoughts of mazy habitation, though a bower is very different from an arbour, and must have more chambers than one." Gardens probably assumed the definite character to which I have referred, before the reign of Elizabeth, and there was little or no variation from this during that of her successor. The gardens of Hatfield, where Elizabeth as Princess spent so much of her time, are typical of the period. There is the pleached, or platted, alley and the little " Privy Garden " enclosed by it. John Tradescent, who succeeded his father as gardener to Queen Elizabeth, and whose son founded the famous Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, was gardener to the first Lord Salisbury, and ultimately to Charles I.

English gardens in Tudor times were distinguished from foreign ones by the evidence of the gardener's greater pleasure in their cultivation. We are told that to make up for the disadvantage of our damp atmosphere, and a comparative lack of sunshine, the EngUsh " indulged in bright flower parterres rather than in the use of coloured earth, sculpture, and vases," as abroad. The Tudors introduced the " knot," or intricately designed, box-bordered flower-bed, of which, later, we hear so much. They rejoiced also in sweet-smelling herbs; " the comfortable smell of their rooms," says Lavinius Leminius, a Dutchman, who paid a visit to England in 1560, " cheered me up and entirely delighted my senses," and this was owing to the English custom of strewing their houses with fragrant herbs and decorating them with flowers. Marjoram, thyme, rosemary, etc., were largely cultivated, and in many cases formed the borders of the above-mentioned " knots," that, as it were, divided the parterre into compartments. In many instances the centre of this flowery area ^vas occupied by a fountain, and sometimes open conduits conducted water to all parts of the garden. A fountain-pool might also often be found in the middle of the turfed, or stone-paved fore-court in front of the mansion. The servants' offices, stables, etc., surrounding the base, or " bass-court," usually lay at one side of this fore-court. On the other were the pleasure gardens and parterres ; very often a wide terrace overlooked the garden, so raised as to command a view of the parterre.

The garden thus overlooked would be very gay indeed, and very sweet also. In the sixteenth century Spenser could write of one wherein

' Nature lavish, in her best attire

Puts forth sweet odours and alluring sight And art with her contending doth aspire T' excell the natural with made dehght,"

He further describes how all things " fair and pleasant " in this garden abound " in riotous excess," which surely includes the Enghsh singing-birds. William Lawson, in his " New Orchard," published in 1618, remarks that " Blackbirds on a May morning may gratify the senses," but he, had rather want their company than his fruit ; but " nightingales," he says, " are another matter ; a brood of them is a chefe grace ; but they will clear you of catapillars and noysome wormes, and the gentle Robin Redbreast, and the silly wren will help in this."