CHAPTER XIII

NATURE IN THE PARK

Not long ago I came across, in the Vienna _Neue Freie Presse_, some passages in which an Austrian gentleman described the fascinations of Hyde Park as it appears to a foreigner. He sees it in an aspect that is perhaps rarely revealed to ourselves, as the “most original park in Europe.”

“Hyde Park,” he says, “is flat and poor—an English heath with only something approaching to a garden it its gates. Its charm is its vastness, its irregularity, the rest which it affords the eye with its seemingly endless stretches of turf with grazing sheep. One forgets that one is in the heart of the capital of the world. Is it the Lüneburger Heide? Is it the land of Tristan, dark Cornwall? And will not the melancholy song of the shepherd be suddenly heard?

“Hyde Park, in a way, symbolises the English character. Just as it is not the Englishman’s way of charming at first sight, or to confide in a stranger, Hyde Park does not appeal to the foreigner when he visits it for the first time. But as one grows to love the English after a longer acquaintance, so does one grow to love Hyde Park, so different from anything else.

“It is also interesting to watch the different aspects it presents at different times of the day. How fascinating, is it not, to see the strong, youthful figures of young England plunging into the cool water, racing, boxing, and playing games, and to see the men, of the same steel-like, well-proportioned race as the magnificent English horses galloping up and down.

“After four o’clock Hyde Park displays a spectacle of wealth, beauty, and elegance such as can only be found in cities of a very ancient culture; perhaps only in the Vienna ‘Prater’ or in the ‘Buen-Retiro’ of Madrid. But while in Vienna the light ‘fiacre’ predominates, and in Madrid the heavy state-coaches drawn by majestic Andalusians, London shows every conceivable kind of vehicle, from the stately turn-out with footmen with powdered hair to the modern electric-car.”

The keynote of this fully appreciative criticism lies in a single sentence—“so different from anything else.” Let us take credit to ourselves that we have been content to let Nature work its own will to a great extent. In return Nature has given us much of her best. To those familiar with the cultivated glories of Versailles and others of the huge continental gardens, where rows and rows of well-laid flower-beds and lawns of velvet testify to the loving care of an army of custodians, there may seem something disparaging in the comparison to “an English heath.” But what, after all, is more glorious than an English heath in the first tints of autumn, what more health-giving and welcome in the heart of London than broad acres, over which one may roam undisturbed, owing their beauty to the whole panorama of lawn and tree and shrub, rather than to the attention to smaller details which gives delight to a well-ordered garden?

For really beautiful gardening, in the true sense, one must go to the Regent’s Park, or to Ranelagh Club. Let no one suppose, however, that Nature is the only gardener on the Park staff. Because the hand of man is unobtrusive, it does not follow that there is a lack of attention in assisting Nature in her beautiful work. An immense amount of planting and bedding is constantly going on, results of which are seen in the always fresh appearance of the Park, and the glories of the flowering plants as they follow one another in season. If “landscape gardening”—a much-abused term—be looked for, it may be admitted there is little of it.

Indeed, almost the sole attempt has been the construction of the waterfall trickling between the boulders, and the pool, covered in summer with green growth, below the Serpentine’s steep bank. It is pretty enough, and quite a paradise for the birds and rabbits, to whom the railed-in enclosure is sacred, and yet it appears oddly out of keeping with the surroundings. It seems to have been an experiment at artificial decoration which has not been repeated. The flatness of the ground generally has no doubt set limitations on the work of the landscape gardener; and where the space is so large, the natural is better than the artificial landscape.

One need not be a botanist to admire the endless variety of the trees alone—their grotesque trunks and tapering stems; their leaves, so divergent in form and structure; the blooms that in season conceal the wealth of the green by a mass of bright colour, and when the chestnut spikes break out, Hyde Park can almost rival for a week or two the famous avenue in Bushey Park.

Earlier in the year, when the trees are throwing out their fresh green leaves, the almond blossom glows, the grass looks fresh, and the daffodils and narcissi give hope of coming achievement. Possibly Hyde Park possesses no trees so ancestral as the old elm which stands on the edge of the lake in the neighbourhood of St. James’s Park, beneath which the monks at Westminster are said to have fished for a Friday’s meal. It still bears leaves, and though its roots are plastered up, seems likely to thrive for many years. But there is at least one patriarch, an old oak stump covered with ivy, on the right side of the water near the superintendent’s house, to which an interesting story attaches. It is said that the tree was raised from an acorn gathered from the celebrated Boscobel oak, in which Charles II. concealed himself after the battle of Worcester in 1651. Held up by props, with its trunk devoid of bark, and cracked in all directions, it survives as a relic of bygone days.

Every kind of tree is here,—the elm, the lime, the beech, the common ash, the plane, and many besides. No tree flourishes so well in London as the plane, which will grow in little soil, and seems to possess a marvellous capacity for withstanding drought. It attains a great height, has a wide-spreading head, a massive trunk, and sheds the bark, which falls off in large irregular patches every year, giving a striking character to the tree. Not only hardy, the plane is one of the most attractive of all trees.

There are also some fine copper beeches. A young German who was in London was much impressed by all he saw, and one day at his boarding-house he waxed warm on the beautiful vegetation in Hyde Park, which he rightly designated as “the best in the world.”

“The ladies are lovely,” he said. “I do not know which are the most lovely, the ladies or the bloody beeches.”

Naturally everybody looked surprised, until it was explained that _copper beeches_ in German are called _blutbuche_, which the German had literally translated into _bloody beeches_.

Shrubs have been planted in endless variety, and—when the tree trunks stand out bare and bleak in winter, and the branches are leafless—give to the walks a pleasant bordering of green. The particular glory of the Park shrubs is to be found in the rhododendrons, which in the weeks when they are in full bloom are alone worth coming to London to see. Rotten Row spreads out a narrow line of tan, bordered with a perfect blaze of colour. One need travel far to find another such gorgeous setting as this. Our Austrian critic hardly does full justice to the Park when writing of it as possessing “only something approaching a garden at its gates.” True, most of the ground retains the character of an English heath; but surely that is a big garden which stretches along Park Lane from Hyde Park Corner to the Marble Arch, and again from the Marble Arch to the Serpentine. Some of the beds are very fine. Fashions change even in gardening, and it is true that we see little nowadays of the elaborate designs in “carpet bedding” which was once so much the vogue. Its stiff formality has gone, and more natural combinations are seen, which give equally pleasant and less gaudy effects. Harmony in form and colour, both in foliage and flowers, is the object sought, and as green is the predominating colour in nature, restful to the eye, refreshing and enlivening, it is chosen as the groundwork to the design.

A typical bed laid out in 1906 in varying shades of green and violet was very effective. As these are matters in which amateurs easily misunderstand, I quote expert descriptions.

This particular bed was composed of verbena venosa, violet-coloured; kochia scoparia, light green foliage plant; gymnothrix latifolia, a broad-leaved grass; salvia argentea, silver white; panicum capillaire, a feathery grass, and carpeted with Harrison’s musk. Another dainty combination consisted of dark heliotrope, nicotiania affinis, a white-flowered tobacco very fragrant in the evening; tall, trained plants of canary creeper, which looked very pretty when in bloom; and an edging of the yellow sanvitalia procumbens. A circular bed in white and gold was made up of the white lilium longiflorum, the golden Helenium pumilum, and a yellow-stemmed fern. A bed of cannas was edged with flower-garden beet, which should have been more bronzy in colour; a round bed in white, scarlet, and gold was composed of hydrangea, scarlet geraniums, and yellow privet. These were but a few of the dainties set out for the admiration of the passing throng, and for the closer study of the enthusiast, who may always find in the parks, ideas to carry away with him for development in the smaller space of his own gardens. I asked Major Hussey, of His Majesty’s Office of Works, what shrubs and plants there were in Hyde Park, and to his courtesy am indebted for the complete list to be found in an Appendix to this volume, the extent of which will no doubt come as a surprise to most people. Who imagined there were anything like the number of varieties?

Fancy poaching game in Hyde Park! But so common was the affair in London four centuries ago, that Henry VIII. made a proclamation, in 1546, “to have the games of Hare, Partridge, Pheasants, and Heron preserved from Westminster Palace to St. Giles’s in the Fields.”

Pigeon shooting was a great sport, and about that time it was estimated that some two thousand pigeon poachers were at work in the metropolis,—Sunday was the great day for setting traps. From two shillings to five shillings was received for each pigeon; so the game seems to have been lucrative.

Nature in Hyde Park, the subject of this chapter, would be but poorly covered without mention of the birds, which any one fond of an outdoor life finds a considerable addition to its delights. Here, again, the variety is likely to astound those who have given little thought to the subject.

The imported gulls, ducks and geese and moorhens, which number seven or eight hundred, never wander from the Serpentine, and are always ready to welcome pieces of bread or biscuit, have become the most domesticated, and therefore the most commonly known. The wildfowl live largely on fish, which accounts for these seldom reaching more than three ounces in weight in the Serpentine. There is no place in the length and breadth of England where birds are so certain of being unmolested as in London, in spite of its six or seven million inhabitants, and on the whole they thrive well. The health of the captive birds in the Zoological Gardens at Regent’s Park shows that the sootiness of the air is no hindrance to their prosperity.

Apart from the sparrows, which of course are everywhere, and in the parks seem to attain their highest development in self-complacency and impudence, the wild birds most frequently seen are the starlings. Darker than the sparrow, and two or three times their size, but smaller than the speckled thrush, they can readily be identified by their movements, as, generally in little droves, they run rapidly over the grass with heads down, pecking here and there. A good many thrushes are also about, but they are less frequently seen than in St. James’s Park, which for its acreage is perhaps the richest in bird-life of any of the open spaces of the Metropolis. This doubtless arises from the fact that all round the lake, save in one small area, a wide strip of the bank is railed in and sacred from intrusion by the wayfarer. The thrushes nest regularly and sing beautifully at times; but they are shy and unapproachable.

Other visitors are blackbirds. Less companionable than the starlings, they are never seen in droves, but apparently live a solitary life, and, in cold weather, fieldfares and red-wings arrive. The parks, however, are at no time rich in berries, and their visits are short. Ravens are also welcomed.

Mr. T. Digby Piggott, whose _London Birds_ is one of the most delightful books on bird life, mentions that in April one year a pair of chaffinches were to be seen very busy collecting moss for a nest between Victoria Gate and the fountain. Two blue-tits were at the same time carefully investigating the trees close by, evidently with the same views. Cole-tits, too, occasionally show themselves in the gardens. House martins in plenty build about the ornamental waters; swallows, and more rarely swifts and the little brown sand-martins, which may be seen flying over the surface of the Serpentine, Mr. Piggott also includes among the residents or casual visitors to Hyde Park.

Indeed, many of the birds which formerly haunted the metropolis when it was smaller—I dissent altogether from the common mis-statement that old London was cleaner than it is now, chimneys notwithstanding—have of late years re-appeared in the parks. No doubt there would be more but for the shortage of small insect life.

At one time Kensington Gardens was the site of the most populous rookery in London. In the high trees extending from the Broad Walk near the Palace to the Serpentine, where it commences in the Gardens, they say there were close upon one hundred nests. When the leaves fell they could be seen on the topmost branches, swinging in the wind. The birds flying hither and thither were objects of interest to every passer-by.

Alas, they have now practically all disappeared.

Dr. Hamilton, in June 1878, when counting the nests found they had been reduced to thirty, mostly confined to a few of the upper trees skirting the Broad Walk near the North Gate.

Since that time nearly every tree in the garden that had a nest in it has been cut down. Rooks, though often attached for centuries to their old quarters, when once driven away are with difficulty persuaded to return. The only substantial rookery now left in the heart of the town is Gray’s Inn, which happily shows no signs of depletion. At times the birds may be absent for a week or two, but always re-appear, and there is quite a numerous colony of them. It is curious that none other of the Inns of Court has been able to maintain a rookery; though formerly these were quite common in the middle of London.

In the summer of 1907, quite an interesting correspondence on “Birds in the Parks” appeared in the _Daily Telegraph_. It grew out of a remark by a writer in a paper, “it is many a day since a magpie fluttered in black and white in the heart of London.” Correspondents poured in letters to testify they had themselves seen the bird, so apparently a magpie is not such a rarity in the Metropolis after all.

A couple of magpies had a nest in the Green Park in June 1906, and were often seen in that and the following month. One, at least, visited St. James’s Park in the previous year. Another couple of magpies are recorded in the “Field Club,” a journal edited by that ardent naturalist, the Rev. Theodore Wood, which he noticed in the same park in May 1903.

Mr. A. Withers Green writes that he has for years past seen a couple of magpies in St. James’s Park flying across from the island to the mainland. In 1907 they had a nest in a black poplar in the hollow of the Green Park, and young ones had been hatched. An old Field-Marshal is said to feed them daily with hard-boiled eggs.

Nor are the magpies the only ornithological visitors which delight the heart of the Metropolis, so famous for its bird life.

In an interesting article by Mr. A. Collett, that appeared in _The Evening Standard_, he describes the sparrows and owls in Hyde Park:

“It is seldom, of course, that a perfectly white sparrow makes its appearance, but it is not at all uncommon to see one in autumn which is so strongly splashed and spotted with white among the brown that it immediately attracts the attention across the whole width of a square garden, and looks more like a snow bunting than the familiar London bird.... When London contains the largest crop of plump young sparrows, at the end of the nesting-season back come the owls to pick a bone with them, in no metaphorical sense. There is a hollow elm in one of the London parks, where every year, from about the end of October onwards, the ground beneath the largest hole becomes littered with the skulls and other indigestible portions of sparrows, cast up (and then thrown down) by the owls which engage the tree for the winter. To the jauntiest of sparrow bachelors this skull surrounded elm must seem the very cave of Giant Despair. There is little safety for any sparrow which chooses to go to roost among the open boughs of the park trees; and they are only acting in accordance with their natural self-protective instincts when they flock in chattering multitudes at sunset to certain well-known points of thick shrubbery, such as the ever-greens at the side of the Mall, by Stafford House, and the island in the Serpentine near the Royal Humane Society’s house.”

Carrion crows have for some years haunted Kensington Gardens. An early morning stroller has described a tragedy which he witnessed a few years ago. A duck was taking its newly-hatched brood to the Serpentine near the fountain, when one of the crows tried to seize a young duckling. The mother immediately covered them and warded off each attack of the intruder. The crow, finding that it could not succeed, flew away, and shortly afterwards returned with its mate. One crow then engaged the mother’s attention in front, while the other attacked the young from the rear, and, although the onlooker to this dastardly proceeding did all he could to drive the crows away, four of the little ducks were killed in an incredibly short time.

The same observer adds: “I have constantly visited Kensington Gardens in the early morning, and four or five years since, in the late summer, I saw a cuckoo flying along the paths which run parallel with the Bayswater Road. Last winter, in a rather foggy morning, I saw a sparrow-hawk in the Gardens, evidently by its manner a stranger; and two years ago, in November, I saw a perfectly pure albino cock blackbird flying into the island near the boat-house. I was within three or four yards of him. It was busy on the ground, but as it flew, it uttered the unmistakable cry which a cock blackbird gives on being disturbed.”

There was a curious legend that long prevailed in country districts, that the cuckoo of summer turned into a sparrow-hawk in winter, and back again into a cuckoo in the spring. On 21st August 1895, there was the rare appearance of “a cuckoo flying up and down a London street, bewildered, sheltering in its limes.”

It is excellent news that a kingfisher was recently watched flying over the Serpentine, though it is too much to hope that the bird of brilliant plumage will ever leave its favourite solitudes for the streams of the town.

Bats haunt the parks in the dusk of night.

“There is at least one tree in Kensington Gardens,” says Mr. Digby Pigott, “an old hollow oak between the refreshment-room and the gardener’s cottage,—which is the home of a considerable colony of bats. A note was made of the exact hour at which the long silent procession left the hole one evening in August. The next day, within four minutes of the same time—the time was carefully taken—seventeen bats crawled up, and with the same regular intervals took headers into the dusk, to appear again as if they had started from another quarter altogether, careering about over the tops of the trees, doing the best they could to prevent too great an increase of humbler London night fliers.”

It seems that we have not yet realised the full uses to which the parks might be put. Many people have their own ideas, and the authorities are constantly being bombarded with applications from one person or another, who desires to have a portion of the Park given over to his—or more frequently her—particular purposes.

One good lady, representing a Woman’s Temperance Society, wished to have a bandstand handed over to her when not occupied by the musicians, for meetings “for the public good.”

Requests have been made by charitable agencies, that the parks might be utilised to provide special sleeping accommodation for the unemployed.

A novelty in horrors was suggested by an application to hold a “Gramophone Gospel Service.”

A gentleman wanted a pond filled in because his wife had been stung by an insect, and he was afraid of malaria; while a lady wished to use one of the ornamental waters to exercise her ducklings.

A finer imagination still was displayed by a noble lord, who directed his secretary to write asking for the use of the York Water Gate, now half buried in Embankment Gardens, as a smoking-room.