214 A HISTORY OF GARDENING IN ENGLAND. 



are no new invention, although so vastly improved even of 

 late years, in spite of all the disadvantages of fog, smoke, and 

 darkness. Certainly from Cowley's poem one would imagine 

 the smoke nuisance to have been as troublesome in the 

 middle of the seventeenth, as at the end of the nineteenth 



century : — 



" Who that has reason and a smell 

 Would not among Roses and Jesamine dwell 

 Rather then all his spirits choak 

 With exhalations of dust and smoak, 

 And all the uncleanness which does drown 

 In pestilential clouds a populous town."' 



Leeds, though then but a village in comparison with the 

 Leeds of to-day, is thus described by Celia Fiennes : — ■" A large 

 town, severall large streetes, cleane and well pitch'd, and good 

 houses all built of stone. Some have good gardens and steps up 

 to their houses, and walls before them." Of Bedford she 

 writes : — " It is an old building washed by the river Ouse ... its 

 stored with very good fnsh, and those which have gardens on its 

 brinke keepes sort of . . . Baskets which keeps the ftish by chaines 

 to the sides of the Banks in each man's garden. It (the river) 

 runs by a ground which is made into a fine bowling green . . . well 

 kept with seates and summer houses in it." At Newcastle, she 

 finds — "This country all about is full of this Coale y*^ sulphur of it 

 taints y*^ aire and it smells strongly to strangers ... its a noble 

 town . . . and most resembles London of any place in England. 

 . . . There is a pleasant bowling-green, a Little walk out of 

 the town w*^' a Large gravel walk round it, w"* two Rows of trees 

 on each side. . . . There is a pretty Garden, by y'^ side a shady 

 walk, its a sort of spring garden where the Gentlemen and 

 Ladyes walke in the evening ; — there is a green house in the 

 garden." 



Spring Gardens, which she here refers to, were the favourite 

 resort of fashion in London, They had been in existence since 

 the first quarter of the century, and originally were part of the 

 royal park of St. James', as appears from entries in the 

 Exchequer rolls : — - 



1617. " diggmg planting etc: of roses in the Spring garden in (St. James') 

 Park . . . Gardeners, women weeders : in the spring garden . . . Pheasants and 

 wild fowl in the spring garden." 



