GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 



garden at Lambeth hath little in it but walks, the late Archbishop 

 not delighting in one, but they are now making them better ; and 

 they have already made a greenhouse, one of the finest and costliest 

 about town. It is of three rooms, the middle having a stove under 

 it ; the foresides of the room are all, almost all glass, the roof 

 covered with lead, the whole part (to adorn the building) rising 

 gravel- wise higher than the rest ; but it is placed so near Lambeth 

 Church that the sun shines not on it in winter after eleven o'clock 

 a fault owned by the gardeners, but not thought of by the con- 

 triver. Most of the greens are oranges and lemons, which have 

 very large ripe fruit on them." 



Evelyn, who did so much for horticulture in the seventeenth 

 century, when Archbishop Tillotson was installed at Lambeth in 

 1691, tells us in his diary, that he dined at Lambeth with the 

 new Archbishop " and saw the effect of my greenhouse furnaces 

 set up by my son-in-law." 



It is probable that when Archbishop Howley, some seventy 

 years ago, built the residential portion of the Palace as we now 

 see it, he laid out the gardens in their present form. The gardens, 

 together with the buildings, are said to occupy about thirteen acres 

 of ground only ; for a recent Archbishop, Dr. Temple, for the term 

 of his life, generously alienated some acres of the land attached 

 to the Palace, and surrendered it to the London County Council 

 for a people's park, called the " Archbishop's Park." His successor 

 has not withdrawn the privilege, although the quiet of the place 

 is certainly disturbed by the shouts of boys and girls at play on 

 the south side of the garden walls, and the shrill cries and cockney 

 accent of these slum children strike the ear unmusically ; but 

 who would have it otherwise ? 



So far as the flowers go. the character of an old English garden 

 is well maintained at Lambeth in the present day. There are 

 no hateful " ribbon borders," debased in taste, anywhere or 

 at any time ; but which would be entirely incongruous in such 

 venerable surroundings. The gardens make no claim to rival 

 those of Sion Park, Holland House, or Chiswick House, in beauty ; 

 they are too near London smoke, and Southwark's factories, for 

 that to be possible ; and I do not think that the hand of the 

 Dutch gardener of the seventeenth, or the landscape gardener of 

 the eighteenth centuries, is to be traced here at all. 



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