blooms: the “fire-tree” and the “flame-tree” that make a blaze of red and
orange upon hill-sides miles away, the crooked “honeysuckle” with its
yellow “bottle brushes,” the odd “grass-tree” bearing up a tuft of sharp
leaves from which springs several feet of flowery stalk, the “miall-tree”
with its streaming foliage and scent of violets, and the other
innumerable acacias, here known as “wattles,” that can light up even the
gloom of the scrub with their gay blossoms. These growths are apt to run
to flowers rather than to fruit, the native berries being sweeter to the
eye than to the tooth; and, while the flowers lack perfume, it is the
leaves that are often fragrant, sometimes loading the air with an aroma
wafted leagues out to sea. Then there are fine timber-trees, magnificent
cedars, the umbrageous blackwood, the funereal casuarina or she-oak,
whose dark branches droop willow-like over the fitful streams; the
jarrah and the karri belonging to the eucalyptus order, the latter voted
its most noble form. New Zealand, too, has magnificent and beautiful
trees--its kauri, king of conifers, its forests of tree-fern, its jungles
of flowering shrubs, its glowing rata parasite, strangling the trunk
that nursed it by sucking the sap into its own masses of crimson bloom,
like a cuckoo of the vegetable world. But our first Antipodean colonists
would exchange a wilderness of such glories for a patch of English turf;
and their sons still love to surround themselves with the humble garden
flowers and hardy blossoms of “home,” yielding to no land in fresh
and tender tints, however it may be surpassed in gorgeous and gigantic
growths. Many of our familiar plants, indeed, have been introduced at
the Antipodes with sometimes too much success. The branches of apple and
pear trees will there break down under their teeming crop; the thistles
rashly imported into Australia by some patriotic Scot have thriven to
the rank of a nuisance, like the rabbits; the sturdy British gorse and
sweet-brier outshoot their native modesty and the design of colonists
who thought to make them serve as hedges; and our weeds and hedge plants
take so kindly to New Zealand soil as to have overlaid the native flora
in some districts, where the coarse indigenous grass soon gives place
to succulent meadows spangled with daisies and primroses. Water-cress,
transplanted to New Zealand, has grown as troublesome as the American
weed in our canals, to the point of causing floods by damming up the
streams upon which it takes a new exuberant life.
As measles or influenza fastens upon fresh blood like a plague, so do
many of our downtrodden plants become bumptious and aggressive in the
stimulating air of a new world, wherever they find a not forbidding
environment, and a fair chance to elbow a place for themselves in the
struggle for existence. In a less degree, the same conquest is to be
noted in America, the old-settled Eastern States having been largely
colonised by imported growths, while the indigenous flora retreated with
the Red Man to the inland woods and prairies. From the more southerly
regions of America, we Europeans have got more than we give, in Indian
corn, the tomato, the pineapple, and the hardy potato, that for our
damp Western islands has come to be the staff of life as it was on the
dry sunny heights of its native Bolivia, though in Britain, as in some
parts of the Continent, it had at first to live down most pig-headed
prejudices. Besides naturalising the productions of other climates, Kew
has the less noted function of exporting our seeds to try their luck
abroad, as, for instance, barrels of acorns hence sent to take prosperous
root in South Africa.
For the timbers, huge, rich, rare, beautiful and useful, of these exotic
trees, and for their products, we turn to the Museums and Economic Houses
that are the most instructive part of this exhibition. Here Masters
Sandford and Merton might spend many days in enlarging their mental
prospects. The cane, for instance, chiefly familiar to them on the
seat of chairs, or perhaps by a use that renders sitting a property of
uneasiness, they will learn from Mr. Barlow to belong to a great race of
arborescent grasses, among which the young gentlemen may perhaps be most
interested in the raw and manufactured products of the sugar-cane. Here
their well-instructed tutor can point out to them how the bamboo, prince
of this race, is beneficent to many peoples, supplying them with paper,
ropes, hats, weapons, fans, baskets, umbrellas, tents, mats, boxes, also
houses, bridges, masts, sails, ladders, fences, flutes, and other tools,
weapons and utensils, amply illustrated in the cases of Museums II. and
III.
Off the Rhododendron Walk there is a garden of feathery bamboos that
can make shift to stand our open air. In the same quarter, a division
labelled _Betula_ is also calculated to throw a shade over the spirit
of Master Merton, if not of the blameless Harry Sandford, this in
the vernacular being a tree of knowledge too well known to British
youngsters of past generations for its base use, frowned on by latter
day humanitarians, but a smiling jest to the poets from Shakespeare to
Swinburne--
With all its blithe, lithe bounty of buds and sprays,
For hapless boys to wince at and grow red,
And feel a tingling memory prick their skins.
Now that “the rod becomes more mocked than used,” birch sprays are most
familiar to us in the humble usefulness of a broom. Yet on the other
side of the world there were nations that would have been hard put to
it to do without this tree, used for many offices, but not for that
above-mentioned, since your cruel Mohawk and thick-skinned Huron had a
strangely sentimental abhorrence of chastising their impish youngsters,
which, notes a Jesuit missionary, “will hinder our design to instruct
their youth.” But manifold were other services of birch in the wigwam
life of the backwoods--for walls, roof, furniture, clothes, torches,
powders, poultices, and what not; bark was the Red Man’s cradle and his
coffin, and the material for his masterpiece of skill, the canoe; it
even at a pinch filled empty stomachs, that could hold out for days on
the inner scrapings of bark, when moss, roots, and berries failed his
improvident hardihood.
In other parts of the world, the coco-nut tree is of still more general
utility, since it not only “bears at once the cup and milk and fruit,”
but supplies salad from the young shoots and toddy from the quickly
fermented juice; bowls and lamps from its shells, and from its pulp,
oil to fill them; cordage, mats, ornamental wreaths and plaited armour
from its fibre; fans, baskets, thatch from its leaves; torches from the
ribs, and countless other articles of daily use. The Malays, who train
monkeys to run up the trees and bring down nuts for their master, have
contrived an ingenious clock which Dr. Wallace saw used by sailors: in
a bucket floats a scraped half-shell with a small hole bored in the
bottom to let in a thread of water at a rate so exactly calculated that
the shell sinks at the end of an hour. There are South Sea islands where
brackish water makes the people wholly dependent on this tree for drink.
Then modern trade has given coconuts a new value, dried in the form of
copra and shipped to Marseilles and elsewhere, to have the oil pressed
out for making soap and candles, not to mention the “best olive oil” of
commerce, while the refuse goes as fattening food for cattle. That is the
main thing we get from Polynesia and Micronesia in exchange for trousers,
sewing-machines, concertinas, and spelling-books. In Museums I. and II.
our young friends may see what delicate and finely tinted cloth those
islanders could beat out of bark before they learned to depend too much
on our manufactures, being often more healthy and moral without the
encumbering garments which the early missionaries considered essential to
godliness.
For some islands of the South Seas, the pandanus, rather, fills the part
of universal provider. The same thing might be said of other trees in
their different regions; but perhaps enough has been said on this head,
when one mentions the Brazilian wax-palm (_Copernicia cerifera_), which,
though it makes no great show here, according to Mr. J. W. Wells, seems
to be as much of a tree-of-all-work as any other in the world.
It resists intense and protracted droughts, and is always green
and vigorous; it produces an equivalent to sarsaparilla; a
nutritious vegetable like cabbage; wine; vinegar; a saccharine
substance; a starch, resembling and equivalent to sago; other
substances resemble, or by processes are made to substitute
maizena, coffee, cork, wax, salt, alkali, and coco-nut milk; and
from its various materials are manufactured wax-candles, soap,
mats, hats, musical instruments, water-tubes, pumps, ropes, and
cords, stakes for fences, timber for joists, rafters, and other
materials for building purposes, strong and light fibres which
acquire a beautiful lustre; and in times of great drought it has
supplied food for the starving inhabitants.
Specimens of those products will be found chiefly in Museum No. II.,
illustrating the economic uses of endogenous or monocotyledonous plants,
hard words which Mr. Barlow might fancifully explain as denoting the
gentler sex of vegetable Nature, its members, from palms to grasses,
being inclined to softness, slenderness and grace rather than strength.
But perhaps Sandford and Merton might, for once, do well not to listen
to their much-informed preceptor, as he would probably be imbued with
the Linnean system of classification, now set aside for a more natural
one. The robust timber, better supplied by sturdily growing exogens,
is exhibited in Museum III., the original “Orangery” built by Sir W.
Chambers, that now makes a world-fetched show of huge sections of forest
giants; polished slabs of ornamental wood; specimens of native ingenuity
in workmanship, from bamboo toys to an appalling totem post carved upon
a Queen Charlotte Islands cedar. Another feature here is views and plans
of the Gardens at different periods, the localities often hardly to be
identified after successive alterations that have brought them to their
present state.
The largest, and, on the whole, the most attractive of the Museums is
No. I., whose red face looks across the Pond to the Palm House. Its
staircase is adorned with a window that reminds one of the _rebus_
designs with which mediæval builders recorded their names in a material
pun, for this, removed from the Guildhall and presented to the Gardens by
Alderman Cotton, displays on stained glass the stages in the growth and
manufacture of cotton. The catalogue contains over five hundred entries
and thousands of specimens, most of them capable of instructing even
Macaulay’s schoolboy. A large part of the collection was transferred here
from the India Museum at South Kensington; but all quarters of the world
are represented. Here we may see in various states, tea, coffee, cocoa,
wine, tobacco, hops, nutmegs, cloves and other more or less familiar
friends, with some not so well known in Britain, such as _maté_, the
Paraguayan tea, which begins to be introduced among us, while it goes
out of fashion in Argentine cities, still drunk all day long on the
_campos_, where also the half-savage Gaucho takes too kindly to “square
face” gin and to the gramophone that drowns the notes of his native
guitar. Here we may indulge due disgust over outlandish intoxicants: the
hemp-plants yielding “bang” and “hashish,” which are in the East what
gin and absinthe are in the West; the poppy, that is a drug to us but
elsewhere a ruinous dissipation; the coca leaves, the chewing of which
gives a Bolivian Indian strength to go on for leagues without food, “but
thereof comes in the end despondency and madness”; the kava root of the
South Seas, which, first well chewed by strong-jawed young men or girls,
then steeped in water, gives an infusion like soapsuds flavoured with
Gregory’s powder, a luxury not much appreciated by white men, especially
after seeing its preparation, and usually denied to women and youngsters,
but ceremoniously presented in coco-nut shells to the grave and reverend
seniors, whom a skinful of it affects with a peculiar drunkenness, in the
legs rather than the head.
Many medicinal plants here will give us new ideas or old qualms: the
liquorice root, yielding what is still in our country districts known as
“Spanish juice”; the senna shrubs, that flourish hardily in deserts to
furnish black draughts once too much imported into British nurseries; the
castor-oil plant, that bears such big clumps of flowers blooming under a
tropical sun “too fairly for so foul effect”; the precious quinine, which
by bold adventurers was stolen from Peruvian monopoly to thrive on Indian
hills and elsewhere. Passing by such exhibits with a shudder, Masters
Sandford and Merton will be glad to learn how many doctors nowadays do
not much dissent from O. W. Holmes’s dictum that if all drugs, except
quinine and a few other specifics, were at the bottom of the sea, it
would be so much the better for human health.
Young monkeys, still strong in jaw and gastric juice, will pay more
attention to the different kinds of nuts, too reckless dealings with
which has often caused nauseous draughts to be “exhibited”; and they
may be surprised to learn how the triangular Brazil nuts of our shops
are not independent growths, but neatly packed in parcels of two dozen
or so in a shell like a cannon ball, so hard and heavy as to crack a
man’s skull on which it should fall. The youth of this generation will
not be so much interested as an old fogey is in carob pods, believed to
be the locusts that fed St. John, and that still feed men and cattle in
some parts of the world. The other day I had a shock of mild surprise in
seeing dried locusts for sale in a back street shop-window, from which I
had supposed them long vanished; but in my period of unpampered stomachs
and scrimp pocket-money they had a great sale among schoolboys, as giving
for a minimum of expenditure a maximum of sweet, stiff chewing, with
this additional recommendation, that the seeds, scrunched under one’s
mischievous heel, made a squeaking noise subversive of discipline--a
trick, let us trust, never tried on Mr. Barlow. He will here find a
cue to explain how some fruits that are to us mere luxuries more or
less digestible, such as chestnuts and dates, make the staple food of
certain regions, not only raw but dried, ground into flour and baked
into bread; the stones of dates also being crushed as fodder for North
African cattle. Then here we have the cassava, which in its native state
is deadly poison, but can be prepared to feed wholesomely many tribes
of Africans and South Americans, and to supply us with our toothsome
tapioca. Here indeed are poisonous preparations enough to kill all
Kew, including the juice of that upas tree of whose deadly shade a
cock-and-bull story took such deep root in our language that it still
affords a fictitious trope for orators.
Mr. Barlow might find much to say on the many useful or curious plants
here represented, notably the various trees and creepers whose juice,
once oozing to waste in leafy wildernesses, now becomes more and
more important through the increasing demand for india-rubber in our
greedy manufactures. But his hearers might begin to yawn before he
had got through one-tenth of over a hundred cases here laid out for
inspection; so, as soon as the shower be over that has driven us into
this instructive refuge, let us go forth into the open air, only pausing
to look respectfully on the portraits of botanists and explorers, among
which the tutor may point to Sir Joseph Banks, or Baron von Humboldt,
while the pupils will want rather to identify Captain Cook; the general
public may be most concerned to see Charles Darwin or Marianne North; and
those who have had the patience to read through the foregoing chapters
can pick out George III., Lord Bute, the Aitons, the Hookers, and other
worthies there touched upon in connection with Kew’s history.
It would take one, indeed, from opening to closing time to go through
even the salient features of these spacious Gardens. What one turns to
by choice will partly depend on taste, and partly on the season. Early
in the year, as the official guide reminds us, we can look out for the
snowdrops, crocuses and daffodils that “take the winds of March with
beauty.” Then open the tulips about the Palm House, the bluebells in the
remote corner marked by the Queen’s Cottage, the wild hyacinths beneath
the budding beech-trees; and horse-chestnut flowers strew the way to the
blooming rhododendron walks; and next comes the turn of the azaleas and
roses, till the whole area is overspread by vari-coloured blooms, in
autumn dying with a pale sunset of chrysanthemums.
There are some who seek out first the richest flower-beds; others who
love the chequered shade of melodious groves, or the avenues of cedar,
larch, and cypress at the less cleared end towards Richmond; others will
ask for famous old trees like that horse-chestnut whose gouty limbs are
railed in near the river bank, a little below the Syon Vista opening
across the ferry from the Palm House, beside the artificial lake that
might be mistaken for a river. Open-eyed youngsters hang by the pond
with its colony of wild-fowl, on the other side of the Palm House.
Family parties stroll through the chambers of the “Palace,” empty but
for a sprinkling of pictures and relics of royalty. Certain visitors, on
hot days, one observes to spend much time in and about the refreshment
pavilion, towards which Tommy Merton’s eyes will be observed to wander,
while Harry Sandford listens attentively to a lecture on the adjacent
cedars, whose seeds may have been brought home by Bute’s adventurous
mother-in-law, and their branches to-day wear no air of “sighing for
Lebanon.” The official restaurant, not quite so “popular” as those
outside, stands beyond the Palm House, in an open glade leading up to
where the Pagoda’s towering intrusiveness marks the way to the Lion Gate
at the further corner on the Richmond road. Perhaps fewest visitors show
the preference of Richard Jefferies, so true a lover of Nature, who casts
his vote for what might strike some of us as the most commonplace show
of the Gardens, by the Cumberland Gate--that old story of “Eyes and no
Eyes!”
Within this enclosure, called the Herbaceous Ground, heedlessly
passed and perhaps never heard of by the thousands who go to
see the Palm Houses, lies to me the real and truest interest of
Kew. For here is a living dictionary of English wild-flowers.
The meadow and the cornfield, the river, the mountain, and the
woodland, the seashore, the very waste place by the roadside,
each has sent its peculiar representatives, and glancing for
the moment, at large, over the beds, noting their number and
extent, remembering that the specimens are not in the mass but
individual, the first conclusion is that our own country is the
true Flowery Land. But the immediate value of this wonderful
garden is in the clue it gives to the most ignorant, enabling
any one, no matter how unlearned, to identify the flower that
delighted him or her, it may be, years ago in far-away field or
copse. Walking up and down the green paths between the beds, you
are sure to come upon it presently, with its scientific name duly
attached and its natural order labelled at the end of the patch.
Had I only known of this place in former days, how gladly I would
have walked the hundred miles hither. For the old folk, the aged
men and countrywomen, have for the most part forgotten, if they
ever knew, the plants and herbs in the hedges they had frequented
from their childhood. Some few, of course, they can tell you;
but the majority are as unknown to them, except by sight, as the
ferns of New Zealand or the heaths of the Cape. Since books came
about, since the railways and science destroyed superstition, the
lore of herbs has in great measure decayed and been lost. The
names of many of the commonest herbs are quite forgotten--they
are weeds, and nothing more. But here these things are preserved;
in London, the centre of civilisation and science, is a garden
which restores the ancient knowledge of the monks and the witches
of the villages.
[Illustration: THE LAKE, LOOKING SOUTH]
But whatever else at Kew be done or left undone, the stranger must be
pointed to what is almost the latest and not least attractive of its
spectacles--the North Gallery, that stands on the Richmond road side,
beyond the mound on which a Douglas pine rears what boasts itself the
tallest flagstaff in the world, and near where the walk is crossed by
an imitation ruined arch, overgrown with greenery, which in Sir W.
Chambers’s time seemed an ornamental manner of carrying a roadway out of
the grounds. The pretty building itself will at once invite attention;
then hours may be spent in examining its contents, the gift and handiwork
of Miss Marianne North, who well deserved to stand godmother to several
plants brought to knowledge by her researches.
This lover of flowers, a descendant from the Roger North remembered by
his biography of three notable brothers, was born at Hastings, for which
her father sat in Parliament. Her desire to see and to paint the tropics
was awakened at Kew when Sir William Hooker gave her a glorious bunch
from the first _Amherstia nobilis_ to bloom in England. With her father
she travelled much in Europe, and as far as Syria and Egypt. Thrown on
her own guidance after his death and the marriage of her sister to J. A.
Symonds, she launched out for America and the West Indies; then took a
tour round the world and made some stay in India, bringing back from time
to time several hundred paintings to be exhibited at South Kensington.
When she found her work appreciated, Miss North resolved on presenting
the whole collection to the public, and at her own expense set about the
building of a gallery for it at Kew. Before this was opened in 1882, she
had been to Australasia for fresh subjects; then again set off to enrich
its contents from South Africa and the islands of the Indian Ocean. The
gallery had soon to be enlarged, while its indefatigable founder made her
last expedition, this time to Chili. The story of those peregrinations
is told in her _Recollections of a Happy Life_, that pass over lightly
the many hardships she braved in procuring so much pleasure for her
stay-at-home countryfolk. But perilous climates and trying exertions had
told on her nerves; and after a year spent in finally arranging the Kew
collection, she was fain to seek the repose of a Gloucestershire garden,
which many friends contributed to adorn with such beauties as she had
followed far and near. Here, a few years later, she died in 1890.
[Illustration: HERBACEOUS GARDENS]
The North collection is unique, not only in its scope and interest, but
in its being the work of one woman, whom Queen Victoria regretted that
she could distinguish by no mark of public honour: in the next reign she
might have been rewarded by the new Order of Merit bestowed on Florence
Nightingale. Her legacy to the nation, catalogued in more than a hundred
pages, pictures some thousand species of flowers and plants, from nearly
all parts of the world, for the most part executed on the spot within
little over a dozen years. This is the sight no visitor should miss; and
from whatever clime he comes, he is almost sure to find some _souvenir_
of it blooming here under the dullest sky and the chilliest influences,
against which Kew Gardens strive to carry out their aim of epitomising
the earth’s vegetable life.
FOOTNOTES
[1] _The Dictionary of National Biography_’s article on Francis Willis,
written, I understand, by a descendant of his, hardly does justice to
this one of his sons. The writer mentions John and Robert as concerned
with treating the King at different times, but does not bring forward
Thomas, who, so far as I can make out, was closely in charge during the
attack of 1801.
[2] _Letting_ in Elizabethan English, of course, bore the opposite
meaning to ours, as in “let and hinder.”
INDEX
Abel, musician, 125
Acorns exported from Kew, 185
Addison, quoted, 90
Æolus, Temple of, 169
Aiton, John, 102
Aiton, William, 100
Aiton, William Townsend, 102
Albert, Prince, 110
Amelia, Princess, 64, 79
Amelia’s House, Princess, 30
Arch, the ruined, 199
Argyll, Duke of, 9
Aroid House, 170
Assassination, George III.’s escape from, 36
Augusta, Princess of Saxe-Gotha, 13
Australian vegetation, 182
Ayrton, Mr., 109
Azaleas, 196
Bach, J. C., 40, 125
Bacon’s Essay, _Of Gardens_, 85
Bamboos, 186
Bauer, Francis, 146
Birch, uses of, 187
Bluebells, 196
Bohemia, Anne of, 2
Boswell, 70
Botanic Garden at Kew, 95, 101, 107, 112
Botanists, portraits of explorers and, 195
Bradley, Astronomer-Royal, 87
Brazil nuts, 193
Brentford, 8, 77, 113, 119, 132
Bridgeman, gardener, 91
Brown, “Capability,” 95
Buckingham Palace, 27, 32, 78
Buitenzorg Gardens, Java, 161
Burney, Miss, quoted, 46, 59, 66, 67
Burton, Decimus, 108
Bushey Park, 149
Bute, Earl of, 19, 23, 95, 123
“Buttonmaker,” nickname of George III., 31
Byam, Rev. R. B., 145
Cactus aloe, 169
Cambridge Cottage, 46, 123, 153, 156