88 KEW GARDENS 



Kew House, often confused with its neighbour. 

 The Observatory, in what used to be the 

 Richmond Gardens, may be considered as 

 another monument to the scientific work so 

 early carried on at Kew. 



When Frederick, Prince of Wales, came 

 to occupy Kew, curbed in his martial and 

 political ambitions, he took to improving these 

 grounds, for which purpose he employed William 

 Kent, a bad painter, better esteemed as an 

 architect, and best remembered by his ideas 

 of what he called landscape gardening. Inigo 

 Jones had not disdained to design gardens ; 

 and the "improvers" who, throughout the 

 Georgian age, came to be busy about English 

 country - houses, were more often than not 

 architects by occupation as well as professed 

 artists in landscape, who had to design groves 

 and flower-beds, but also temples, grottos, 

 terraces, steps, statues, fountains, and other 

 ornaments in the taste of their time. Such 

 pretentious gardeners now found plenty of em- 

 ployment at lordly seats like Stowe, Badminton, 

 Wanstead, Canons Park, and others aspiring to 

 the celebrity of elaborate pleasure-grounds. 



The art of gardening, like architecture, has 



