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has not withdrawn the privilege, although the quiet of the place 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. 
58 
