208 A HISTORY OF GARDENING IN ENGLAND 



privy garden and famous fountain." A description of the 

 gardens near London in 1691, by Gibson, has been preserved. 1 

 He enumerates twenty-eight gardens, five of those being 

 nursery-gardens — the Brompton Nursery, one " Clements " at 

 Mile End, and Ricketts, Pearson and Darby, all three at 

 Hoxton. Some of the gardens are more distant from London, 

 as Hampton Court, Sir Henry Capel's at Kew, and Sir William 

 Temple's at Sheen. At Beddington, where the first orange 

 trees in England had been planted by the Carew family, they 

 had been so well taken care of that it still held the foremost 

 place among the orangeries in this country. This orangery 

 was two hundred feet long, and the trees were about thirteen 

 feet high, and in one year yielded ten thousand oranges. 

 Gibson also relates that the Queen Dowager, at Hammer- 

 smith, had a good greenhouse, " but was not for curious plants 

 or flowers " ; however, her gardener, Monsieur Hermon Van 

 Guine, raised orange and lemon trees, which he had " to dispose 

 of." Arlington garden was " a fair plat." Sir Thomas Cooke's, 

 at Hackney, 2 though very large, was still being added to ; Lord 

 Ranelagh's was " elegantly-designed," though " but newly- 

 made." The Archbishop, at Lambeth, was then improving the 

 garden there, and putting up a greenhouse " of three rooms, the 

 middle having a stove under it ; — the foresides of the rooms are 

 almost all glass, the roof covered with lead." Gibson only 

 mentions those gardens which he visited in December, 1691 ; 

 others equally well known he passes over. He does not notice 

 the large nursery between Spitalfields and Whitechapel, the 

 owner of which Meager refers to as " my very Loving friend 

 Captain Qarrle," and gives a long list of fruit-trees, any one of 

 which this friend can " furnish," besides " divers other rare 

 and choice plants." 3 He omits, also, Essex House in the Strand, 

 and Somerset House ; also Southampton House, Bloomsbury, 

 where the gardens were designed by Lord William Russell, 

 who was beheaded in 1683. The garden at Fulham, which had 



1 Printed in the Archaologia, 1794, and reprinted in Hazlitt, Glean- 

 ings in Old Garden Literature, 1887. 



2 Rams Chapel was built in 1723 on part of the site of this garden. In 

 a deed, dated July 20th, 1704, in the possession of the chapel authorities, 

 two summer-houses are mentioned, one of which is used as the vestry. 



3 Leonard Meager, The English Gardener, 1688, p. 60. 



