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.

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.

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