THE STORY OF THE GARDENS 101 



richer plots of the South, a fact explained by 

 philosophers of Dr. Johnson's school in the 

 sneer that a man who has coaxed flowers and 

 fruit to grow beyond the Tweed has an easy 

 task elsewhere. Of course this is ignorant 

 prejudice, as many a demesne might show in 

 Caledonia stern and wild, where nothing is 

 needed for exuberance but the "fertilizer" we 

 have seen running short even in the Queen's 

 garden at Kew. 



Aiton was a son of the soil, driven out of 

 his own Lanarkshire Eden by poverty, who, 

 like so many other Scots unwelcome to Wilkes 

 and Johnson, came to seek fortune in London. 

 He got a place at the Physic Garden of 

 Chelsea, and thence, perhaps by patronage 

 of Bute, was put in charge of the Princess 

 Dowager's Botanic Garden, whose reputation 

 throve with his own. His functions must 

 have grown beyond the limits of the Botanic 

 Garden, then only a few acres, for this was 

 the Scotsman who set Cobbett to work, among 

 other jobs, at sweeping up leaves by the 

 Pagoda, on the farther side of the Kew 

 grounds. John Rogers, who worked in the 

 gardens at this time, says that on the death 



