Part 6

The widowed Princess of Wales, prompted by her friend Bute, showed a warm interest in horticulture; and under her was nursed the Botanic Garden of exotic plants that became the special feature of the Kew grounds. They were laid out by Lancelot Brown, a self-taught gardener, so celebrated in his day as to be known by the name of “Capability” Brown. He, indeed, rather than Kent, is sometimes styled the father of landscape improvers, among whom Repton, for one, speaks of him as his master or forerunner. Brown appears to have insisted masterfully on the carrying out of his own ideas, if we are to believe the story of George III. chuckling over his death to an under-gardener: “Now you and I can do as we please here!” In Mason’s _Heroic Epistle_, Brown is said to have had a free hand over the Richmond Garden also, where he destroyed Queen Caroline’s fanciful structures, so as to be accused of having “transformed to lawn what late was Fairyland.”

Under Bute’s patronage the post of superintendent of the Botanic Garden was given, but seems not to have been made _pukka_, to Sir John Hill, as he styled himself on the credit of a Swedish decoration, that humbug physician and author, best remembered now by Garrick’s epigram:---

For physic and farces, his equal there scarce is: His farces are physic, his physic a farce is.

Another questionable authority in taste, introduced by Bute to the Princess and her son, was William Chambers, an architect who built himself into no small note. In his youth, as supercargo of a vessel he had travelled as far as China, then a land of fresh wonder, to bring back extravagant notions, set forth in his _Dissertation on Oriental Gardening_, and in a mania for _Chinoiseries_, which was let loose at Kew. Hence the building of the Pagoda in 1762, of a House of Confucius, and of a mosque, with temples, grottos, and other outlandish erections, most of which have long disappeared. He also built the Observatory where Richmond Lodge came to be demolished. His innovations were not confined to buildings, as appears in Mason’s satire:--

Now to our lawns of dalliance and delight, Join we the groves of horror and affright.

The architect-gardener declared himself very complacent about the dealings with Nature here carried out. “Originally the ground was one continued dead flat, the soil was in general barren, without either wood or water. With so many disadvantages it was not easy to produce anything even tolerable in gardening; but princely munificence overcame all difficulties. What was once a desert is now an Eden!”

As controller of the works actively pushed on at Kew, Chambers prospered so much as to be knighted, and to buy Whitton Place, near Hounslow, where the third Duke of Argyll, brother and heir of Jeanie Deans’s protector, himself better known as Lord Islay, had established a nursery of exotic trees, which it was his hobby to naturalise in England. On the death of this duke the cream of his collection seems to have been transplanted to Kew, now become a truly royal botanic garden, unsurpassed in England, with a fame that went on growing till Erasmus Darwin was bound to note it in his herbarium of verse.

So sits enthron’d in vegetable pride Imperial _Kew_ by Thames’s glittering side; Obedient sails from realms unfurrow’d bring For her the unnam’d progeny of spring; Attendant nymphs her dulcet mandates hear, And nurse in fostering arms the tender year, Plant the young bulb, inhume the living seed, Prop the weak stem, the erring tendril lead; Or fan in glass-built fanes the stranger flowers With milder gales, and steep with warmer showers. Etc. etc.

A much forgotten bard, named Henry Jones, who had been an Irish bricklayer, sought to win patronage, like Stephen Duck, by a whole poem in two cantos on _Kew Gardens_, a versified catalogue of their contents, with a high-pitched description of the Pagoda, and flowing flattery of their master, as to all which the less said the better. The same title was given to one of poor Chatterton’s effusions; but he, reduced in his garret to ape _Junius_ by “patriotic” letters signed _Decimus_, lets the garden run under his pen to weeds of spite and scandal.

Hail Kew! thou darling of the sacred Nine, Thou eating-house of verse, where poets dine!

It has already been told how George III. enlarged the demesne at Kew, buying up some fields about the site of the Pagoda, and eventually getting the lane closed that separated it from the Richmond grounds. The Botanic Garden proper was enclosed and managed apart from the general pleasure-grounds, within which seem to have been dioceses or spheres of influence looked after by different _employés_. It is not quite clear to me how these gardeners were ranked or related; perhaps, as in the case of higher officials, their functions may sometimes have clashed, or been complicated by royal favour. Mrs. Papendiek records that in her time Haverfield was the King’s gardener, who lived at Kew, his second son acting as his assistant there, as did an elder son in the more remote Richmond garden; and that after him the sons succeeded to these appointments. She also mentions the Queen’s flower garden up Richmond Lane, where one Green was the gardener, who had nursed some orange trees to be the pride of his life, but was heart-broken when they dwindled for want of means to enlarge his hothouses, though he offered to pay half the cost out of his own pocket. This diarist, not always to be depended on in matters outside her own observation, intimates that the Board of Works declined undertaking any improvement in the Queen’s private garden; from which we should understand that the Botanic Garden was partly carried on at the public cost, where Chambers had already built an orangery, now turned into the Timber Museum. One thing appears plain, that even the subordinate gardeners had good places, when Green could offer £250 as his contribution towards those denied hothouses, and Haverfield brought up his youngest son to be a clergyman. In all, the Gardens came to cover some 120 acres, about half their present extent, as might have seemed a small matter to Tamerlane, who boasted of his garden measuring 120 miles round Samarcand.

The chief name among Kew gardeners of this reign was William Aiton’s, who, if he had spelt himself Aytoun, like others of the family, would at once be recognised as coming from the North. Waiving the question as to whether Adam, the first gardener, were not a Scot and a Presbyterian, one finds it notorious that Scotsmen have renowned themselves in planting the richer plots of the South, a fact explained by philosophers of Dr. Johnson’s school in the sneer that a man who has coaxed flowers and fruit to grow beyond the Tweed has an easy task elsewhere. Of course this is ignorant prejudice, as many a demesne might show in Caledonia stern and wild, where nothing is needed for exuberance but the “fertilizer” we have seen running short even in the Queen’s garden at Kew.

Aiton was a son of the soil, driven out of his own Lanarkshire Eden by poverty, who, like so many other Scots unwelcome to Wilkes and Johnson, came to seek fortune in London. He got a place at the Physic Garden of Chelsea, and thence, perhaps by patronage of Bute, was put in charge of the Princess Dowager’s Botanic Garden, whose reputation throve with his own. His functions must have grown beyond the limits of the Botanic Garden, then only a few acres, for this was the Scotsman who set Cobbett to work, among other jobs, at sweeping up leaves by the Pagoda, on the farther side of the Kew grounds. John Rogers, who worked in the gardens at this time, says that on the death of the elder Haverfield, Aiton came into the entire management both at Kew and Richmond. His first appointment was in the last year of George II. A quarter of a century later, we find him clearly head of the whole establishment. Aiton certainly rose to be no mere working gardener, who published a catalogue of the plants at Kew. He held his post till towards the end of the century, and was then succeeded by his son William Townsend Aiton, to rule at Kew for half a century more; while another son, John, had charge of the royal gardens at Windsor and at Kensington.

In the Aiton succession, we come across the fact that a talent for the study of plants is apt to be hereditary. There were two Linnés, not equal in fame, four De Jussieus, three De Candolles, three Darwins of different degrees of note in science; and for more than a century Kew Gardens were under the two dynasties of Aitons and Hookers. In the reign of William Aiton the second, among Scotsmen finding employment in Kew Gardens was a William Macnab, who rose to be foreman here, and in 1810 went to the Edinburgh Botanical Garden as curator or principal gardener. One cannot propitiate Dr. Johnson’s Manes by describing the Edinburgh Garden as a branch from Kew. It is, in fact, an older institution, founded in Charles II.’s reign, and now grown into a model, both of _utile_ and _dulce_, worthy the Modern Athens. The point I have to make is that William Macnab was succeeded at Edinburgh by his son James Macnab, godfather of the _Cupressus Macnabiana_, etc., who managed this garden till his death, 1878, and whose only son, William Ramsay Macnab, bade fair, through a too short life, to continue the family distinction in the botanical world.

This botanist by birth and birthplace was a schoolfellow of mine, whose early career deserves notice. His masters could have seen little promise in such a scholar, for, under the _régime_ then styled education, our lessons simply did not interest him, and I often wondered how he picked up the _quantum_ of Latin necessary for his medical examinations. But at fourteen he printed a monograph, either on ferns or on seaweeds, of which I had a copy but cannot lay hands on it. At the same age he gave a lecture on plant life, illustrated by diagrams prepared by himself. He also excited the wondering admiration of his schoolfellows by practising the then young art of photography. Before reaching school days, he had bought his first microscope. Not yet out of his teens, he had what I had heard called the best collection of beetles in Scotland. About this time I accompanied him and some older scientific adventurers on a natural history expedition to the Bass Rock, when, unfortunately, all the pundits were so overcome by sea-sickness, that nothing could then be added to the stock of knowledge.

Macnab left our school in dudgeon against a master who, having prescribed an essay on starch, not unnaturally accused him of plagiarising an elaborate composition based on original experiment. From another school he went early to Edinburgh University, and if I am not mistaken, to Germany, where he used his time so well that he had to wait some months to come of age for taking his M.D. degree at twenty-one. After a short digression into lunacy practice, he followed his bent in a professorship of Natural History at the Agricultural College of Cirencester, and soon became Botany Professor at the Royal College of Science, Dublin. There he died prematurely, else his life would surely have figured on some more authoritative pages than mine. The last time I saw him, if I remember right, he was staying at Kew, engaged in some work or study in the Gardens where his grandfather had been foreman. The above digression relates to the fact that the Kew gardeners were apt to be kinsmen, or at least kindly Scots. Macnab, Lockhart, Begbie, Kerr, Fraser, Morison--these are only some names occurring early among the staff to show how the Aiton dynasty did not overlook their countrymen’s claims to employment.

If not scientific men themselves, the Aitons had the advice and help of the best naturalists of their day, specially of Sir Joseph Banks, Captain Cook’s companion, who introduced to this country the fuchsia, the hydrangea, and other exotic plants. Under this President of the Royal Society, less distinguished collectors were sent out to all parts of the world, sometimes in ships of war, to procure specimens for Kew. Two such emissaries were on board the _Bounty_ on its celebrated voyage, one of them sticking by the commander, the other going off with the mutineers. To the honour of Banks, it is told that when consignments of rare specimens intended for the royal gardens at Paris were captured by our cruisers, he several times used his influence to have them sent on intact, a scientific courtesy that repaid the orders of the French Government to treat Cook’s vessels as neutral, when war with England broke out during his last expedition. Banks, indeed, a wealthy man who sought no salaried post, appears to have been practically the scientific authority of Kew Gardens in his lifetime, well deserving the royal confidence, though he came in for his share of caricaturing as a Court favourite. His picture, and those of other noted botanists, are treasured in the Kew Museums, where the mere literary man will often be put to shame to find how many names he never heard, live not forgotten among the votaries of a special study.

Under Aiton the second, Kew Gardens began to fall off, lying as they did in the shade of royal neglect. George IV. began by showing some interest in them, which soon withered away. They were opened to “all well-dressed strangers” on Sundays in summer, the Botanic Garden being accessible at other times to those who took an interest in it; but the empty palace no longer attracted people of fashion, and for the ordinary citizen Kew was still rather out of the way, though “stages” left Piccadilly every quarter of an hour in the season, and in 1808 there were already “houses of entertainment” on Kew Green, as we find particularised in a guide-book of that date. Later on, the Gardens were open every day except Sunday. But by this time they were ceasing to be attractive. Aiton had been appointed director of all the royal parks and gardens, employment which appears to have taken off his attention from Kew, where money as well as interest ran short. The part kept up shrank to the dozen or score acres of the original Botanic Gardens, the rest relapsing into thickets that made a game preserve for Ernest, King of Hanover. A formidable rival was the Horticultural Society’s Garden at Turnham Green, recently removed to Wisley Common. By the beginning of Victoria’s reign, the Kew Gardens had fallen so low that there was a talk of breaking them up and dispersing the collection, to the indignation of the inhabitants, who had an old grievance that they had given part of their Green to enlarge this royal property, on the understanding that they were to be freely admitted to its amenities.

From such extinction Kew was rescued in 1840 by the report of a parliamentary committee, upon which steps were taken and funds provided for bringing the Gardens to their present position at once as a popular resort and as a national scientific collection, while still they remained nominally a royal demesne. Aiton being pensioned off, Sir W. J. Hooker, formerly Botanical Professor at Glasgow, was appointed Director. Here appears another case of heredity, for Hooker was the son of a botanist, and came to be replaced by his own son.

Under his management the Gardens grew apace, the botanic part being much enlarged, while the Museums of Economic Botany were now set on foot. Decimus Burton, the fashionable architect of his day, was called in to design new buildings like the Palm House, unrivalled in England unless by Paxton’s Great Conservatory at Chatworth, which was the model of the Crystal Palace. To make room for such useful structures, a sweep had to be made of many of the fanciful “temples” and other gimcrackeries of the Georgian age, specimens of which are still dotted about the grounds, now laid out on a principle of compromise with formality, “the aim being to weave the various collections of trees and shrubs into a whole, which should avoid an artificial and yet yield an agreeable effect, while still subserving a definite purpose.”

In 1865, Sir W. J. Hooker was succeeded by Sir J. D. Hooker, who in his younger days had made adventurous journeys to the Himalayas and elsewhere in the interest of botanical science. He still lives at a good old age, after twenty years’ service having given place to his son-in-law, Sir W. T. Thiselton-Dyer, who also has gone on the _emeritus_ list; and the present head is Colonel Prain, whose experience in India should give a new strain of efficiency.

Sir Joseph Hooker’s management was marked by a vehement quarrel between him and his official superior, Mr. Ayrton, head of the Board of Works, a Kew man by birth, who perhaps for that reason felt himself the more moved to aggressive interference. The scientific world warmly took up the cause of its _confrère_; and Ayrton earned general unpopularity by his overbearing tone; but Sir Algernon West, then Private Secretary to the Prime Minister, Gladstone, after having had a good deal of trouble over arranging the dispute, gives us his opinion that there were faults on both sides.

It is understood that in the management of the Gardens there has been sometimes a certain friction between the demands of a scientific establishment and of a scene for popular recreation. But these two ideas seem now fairly harmonised. With the exception of isolated _penetralia_, the Gardens are open from 10 or 12 A.M. till sunset, and on Sunday afternoons. This was one of the first of our public institutions to be thrown open on Sunday, by the influence, it is said, of Prince Albert prevailing over the Sabbatarian austerity that dominated Mrs. Proudie’s generation.

As the Kew Gardens flourished, those of Richmond had withered away. The royal pleasure-grounds on that side were turned into George III.’s model farm, then into a park, which has become a golf-course and a recreation-ground, though it was only the other day that its quasi-public character came to be fully recognised by a foot-bridge thrown over the muddy moat cutting off this enclosure from the river-bank. The site of Richmond Lodge is approximately marked by the Observatory, built for George III. by Sir William Chambers, with a special view to the transit of Venus observed by Cook and Banks from Tahiti. When Kew Gardens were taken under the wing of Parliament, the Royal Society refused a free gift of this building; but it was kept going by subscriptions, then under the auspices of the Board of Trade became a Meteorological Station, with the important function of testing instruments like barometers, thermometers, and sextants, to be hall-marked with the initials of Kew Observatory. But of late years it proved not secluded enough for this work, the electric currents induced by tramways threatening its most delicate operations, so that the magnetic branch was recently transplanted to the wilds of Dumfries, where also, one hears, it had a narrow escape from interference in being housed in walls at first chosen from an ironstone quarry. Other parts of the work are now carried on at the new Physical Laboratory in Bushy Park.

A ha-ha fence cuts off Richmond Old Deer Park, as it is called, from Kew Gardens, which in all cover a space of some 250 acres. The wire fence has gone that marked the now hardly valid distinction between the Botanic Garden proper and the former pleasure-grounds. Queen Victoria showed her interest in the institution by granting successive stretches of private garden, to be added to what had become practically a public one. At the end of her reign the so-called Kew Palace, the old “Dutch House,” was given up to be opened as a museum of pictures and other relics of its history. This is soon reached by the broad walk leading straight on from the chief entrance gates on Kew Green. The Victoria Gate, on the Richmond Road, is the approach for visitors coming from Kew Station. There are other entrances both from the Richmond Road and from the riverside, where, opposite Brentford’s wharves, one closed gate reminds us how this was once a royal home.

IV

THE VILLAGE: IN AND ABOUT IT

Kew itself does not stand in the forefront of its own story, for long remaining little more than an obscure river-side hamlet, half a dozen miles out of London, connected by a ferry with Brentford, and with its quaint little neighbour Strand-on-the-Green, which might have risen to equal note had Gunnersbury or Chiswick taken a king’s fancy. It was not till the eighteenth century that Kew began to burgeon under royal favour; and for the first half of that century, Richmond lay basking on the sunnier side of patronage. When George III. left Richmond for Kew, the quiet village blossomed forth as in a forcing-house, to grow into a banyan grove of princely dwellings.

The first distinguished resident mentioned is Sir Peter Lely, as having a country house on the Green, where the Herbarium now stands. From first to last he may have been a good deal in this neighbourhood, for he painted Charles I. at Hampton Court, and after doing the same service for Cromwell, he became the fashionable artist of Charles II.’s Court, whose frail beauties still live on his canvas. His successor in vogue was Sir Godfrey Kneller, who contributed to artistic vocabulary in his portraits of the Kit-Cat Club, that had its rendezvous at Barn Elms, now the Ranelagh Club. He also settled not far off, in the house behind Twickenham named Kneller Hall, that, after various vicissitudes, has become the Army School of Music.

Swift, in his letters to Stella, mentions dining with the Duke of Argyll at Kew in 1712. I do not find any other allusion to this residence: perhaps Swift landed at Kew and went on to Sudbrook Park, where the Duke had a seat, that should rather be reckoned as belonging to Petersham, united with Kew as one dependent district of the Kingston parish. This mansion was near the famous avenues of his birthplace, the Duke of Lauderdale’s Ham House, said to have been originally intended for Prince Henry, son of James I., and chosen by the Lords of the Council as a fitting retreat for James II., when the Prince of Orange was about to enter London. It would be the convenience of water transit that had dotted the Thames side with lordly mansions and villas; and of course it should be borne in mind how, at a time when the Court could be spoken of as moving from Kensington to London, places like Kew and Richmond were practically as far from town as now are Haslemere or Missenden, while the champaign rusticity of the former would be more to the taste of Cowley’s and Pope’s generations.

Kew is said to have had some sort of chapel before the Reformation; but it was not till 1714 that its church was built, the brick building on the Green, that, with additions and dubious ornaments, has mellowed into a specimen of what may be called the ugly picturesque. The excrescence at the east end marks the sepulchral chamber containing the Duke of Cambridge’s tomb. The organ is understood to have been Handel’s, and to have been played on by George III. The gallery, added in 1805, still keeps its dusty state as a royal pew, though now used on occasion for less illustrious worshippers. Both inside and outside are many memorials to persons, famous or forgotten, some of whom must presently be mentioned. In the close-packed churchyard an unusual number of foreign names seem related to the German colony of Queen Charlotte’s attendants, and to the Hanover connection long kept up through the Dukes of Cambridge and Cumberland, the former of these princes having acted as regent or viceroy of Hanover till the Salic law put his unbeloved brother on its throne.