Part 9

This Duke, the Commander-in-Chief of our day, was born and partly brought up in Hanover, of which his father had been Regent. He had there two English nurses, Mrs. Page and Mrs. Ford, names that gave George IV. the cue for a jocular remark, “The Merry Wives of Windsor.” It was after King William’s death, when Ernest succeeded to Hanover, that the Cambridge family came back to live at Kew, of which their eldest son is found remarking in Olendorffian style, “The houses we occupy are very bad, but the place itself is very cheerful.” It is not recorded of him that he interfered with the Church service, though his everyday language was criticised as too much borrowed from its comminatory forms. In 1866, his sister, the Princess Mary of Cambridge, was married at Kew Church to the Duke of Teck, to whom was given the White Lodge in Richmond Park, whence came a bride for our present Prince of Wales.

The last quasi-royal function at Kew was the marriage in 1899 of the Princess Marie, grandchild of the Dowager Grand Duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, who, as daughter of the former Duke of Cambridge, is the sole surviving grand-daughter of George III. At the parish church, in presence of the Prince of Wales and several other members of the royal family, the young Princess was married to Count Jametal, by a bevy of clergymen, among whom the Rev. F. F. Reavely, Rector of Lexham, took a chief part at the Grand Duchess’ special request. The wedding breakfast was given at Cambridge Cottage, which, till the death of the late Duke, remained a link between Kew and royalty. It is understood to have been since offered to various members of the royal family, who declined it as involving too much expense in repairs and upkeep; and it now seems likely to be in some way turned to public use, like the rest of King George’s property here.

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.”