222 A HISTORY OF GARDENING IN ENGLAND. 



By the middle of the century, however, it was a public garden, of 

 which the street now bearing its name marks the site. 



In London many old gardens were already disappearing, for 

 Celia Fiennes writes thus in her Diary : " There was formerly 

 in y e Citty severall houses of y e Noblemens w th Large gardens and 

 out houses and great attendances, but of Late are pulled down, 

 and built into streetes and squares and called by y e names of y e 

 noblemen ; and this practise by almost all even just to y c Court, 

 excepting one or two. Northumberland and Bedford House, 

 Lord Montagues, . . . and Whitehall with its privy garden and 

 famous fountain." A description of the gardens near London in 

 1691, by Gibson, has been preserved.* He enumerates twenty- 

 eight gardens, five of those being nursery-gardens the Brompton 

 Nursery, one "Clements" at Mile End, and Ricketts, Pearson 

 and Darby, all three at Hoxton. Some of the gardens are more 

 distant from London, as Hampton Court, Sir Henry Capel's 

 at Kew, and Sir William Temple's at Sheen. At Beddington 

 where the first orange trees in England had been planted by the 

 Carew family, they had been so well taken care of that it still held 

 the foremost place among the orangeries in this country. This 

 orangery was two hundred feet long, and the trees were about 

 thirteen feet high, and in one year yielded ten thousand oranges. 

 Gibson also tells us that the Queen Dowager, at Hammersmith, 

 had a good greenhouse, but was not " for curious plants or 

 flowers" ; however, her gardener, Monsieur Hermon Van Guine, 

 raised orange and lemon trees, which he had "to dispose of." 

 Arlington garden was " a fair plat." Sir Thomas Cooke's, at 

 Hackney, though very large was still being added to;f Lord 

 Ranelagh's " elegantly-designed," though "but newly-made." The 

 Archbishop, at Lambeth, was then improving the garden there, and 

 putting up a greenhouse, "of three rooms, the middle having a stove 

 under it; the foresides of the rooms are almost all glass, the roof 

 covered with lead." Gibson only mentions those gardens which he 



* Printed in the Archceologia, 1794, and lately reprinted in Hazlitt : 

 Gleanings in Old Garden Literature. 



f Rams Chapel was built in 1723 on part of the site of this garden. In 

 a deed, dated July 2Oth, 1704, in the possession of the chapel authorities, two 

 summer-houses are mentioned, one of which is used as the vestry. 



