526 
JOURNAL OF HORTICULTURE AND COTTAGE GARDENER. 
[ December 14, 1893. 
in the mid-day of life, and the evening yet seems so far off, and 
the future pregnant with so many possibilities. We have so much 
to bother us, so much to cope with, ever-increasing worries, these 
scientists with their microscopes ever and anon finding out some 
new bug where no hug should be, and so we go on digging, planting, 
sowing, reaping, so busy. 
“ Well doing is our wealth. 
Our mind to us an Empire is 
While Grace alfordeth health.” 
but “ unerring nature ” at last silently but forcibly tells us we 
have had our day, the evening of life is at hand. Dame Fortune, 
the fickle jade, has not perhaps realised the possibilities of long 
ago, and perchance after all those precious guineas, sown annually, 
may not only have helped “the worn and weary brother,” but 
return to us increased an hundredfold, 
I need not go into details of the Institution ; all that will, I 
am sure, be willingly given by Mr. Ingram, the Secretary, 50, Par¬ 
liament Street, London, to those who do not already know. Do 
you not think that amongst the 156 aged gardeners or their widows 
now on the pension list, that there is not amongst that number 
some who have thought and made the remark about not needing 
it that I have supposed you to make, and have lived to find “ the 
bread then cast upon the waters ” returned to them again ? Are 
there, beyond the small amount of self-sacrifice, any good or valid 
reasons why you should not subscribe to it ? I hope to have made 
clear some reasons why you should. 
In the “ Horticultural Directory ” there are some 300 names 
of gardeners in Ireland, and in the last report of the Institution 
there are fifteen—please note, but fifteen !—gardeners subscribing 
to it from Ireland. Now I take it that he whose name appears in 
the “ Directory ” is of more or less prominence in the gardening 
world, and that there is no name there but what is worthy of being 
there, so I respectfully and earnestly say that all those names 
should be found, and are worthy of a place in the report of that 
noble institution founded in 1838 for the benefit of aged gardeners 
or their widows ; and should it never be needed by yourself you 
will at least have the unalloyed pleasure of helping some old friend 
to whom Fortune has been less kind by giving him the votes at 
your disposal on becoming a member.—E. K., Dublin. 
CITY CARDENS: PAST AND PRESENT. 
One of our modern authors, who has drawn fancy pictures of 
the future, has suggested that the City of London may some day 
undergo a pleasing transformation, and that groves or gardens may 
appear in the place of huge warehouses and busy offices. This is 
to happen by much of its business being relegated to the suburbs, 
while some of it is carried on underground, so that the surface of 
the City may be dotted over with only a few buildings, and present 
a broad space available as a place of meeting or promenade, to be 
intersected perhaps by an electric railway. As yet there are no 
signs of this change coming about, but much has been done of late 
for the improvement of those small spaces in the City which bricks 
and mortar have not covered, and most of which, not many years 
ago, were scenes of desolation, neglect, or even filth. They were 
closed mostly to the public—which was quite as well—now some of 
them are opened free, and turned into gardens ; others, still kept 
private, have also been improved by the introduction of shrubs 
and plants. Even yet much may be done to make the best of 
these generally small gaps amidst the busy streets; several, at 
present inaccessible to visitors, might be thrown open, and many 
more shrubs and trees planted. It is found that the number of 
trees which will live, flourish we can hardly say, in the City 
atmosphere is larger than was formerly supposed. Of course a 
serious disadvantage we have to contend with is the destructive 
propensities of the host of boys employed about London’s centre 
who frequently commit damage from pure mischief if trees and 
shrubs are accessible, but I am glad to find that caretakers of city 
gardens report an improvement recently. Also, we are told 
London trees suffer from the conduct of climbing and pugnacious 
cats, a nuisance not limited to the metropolis. 
We have no pictures extant showing the City as it was during 
the Middle Ages, nor even in the times of the Stuarts, but, by 
d^cription, much of it had fora long time a semi-rural appearance. 
There were rows of trees, some for shade or ornament, others of 
fruit-bearing kinds ; flower-plots and gardens of herbs attached to 
many of its mansions, also patches of ground upon which vegetables 
were grown. A large number of the London citizens and merchants 
had a ta,ste for gardening, and as they could not obtain the needful 
space within the walls, as early as the fifteenth century some of 
the citizens hired or bought land in the east and north of London, 
where they cultivated plants for use or amusement, many of these 
being situate along the City Road. In the reign of Elizabeth they 
were beginning to go still further north, and form gardens about 
Hogsden, or Hoxton, and Cantelowes, the old name for what we 
now call Kentish Town. Both the City of London and its vicinity 
were favourably situated for horticulture, owing to the numerous 
little hills and sheltered valleys below them, while the soil was 
refreshed by the course of winding streamlets, long dried up, which 
ran from the Middlesex uplands into the Thames. 
The warmth of the City favoured the growth of some plants, 
no doubt, and until the seventeenth century, or about that period, 
no coal was burnt in the metropolis, so the atmosphere was free 
from those carbonaceous particles which clog the pores of leaves and 
stop the development of buds. Evelyn, writing in the seventeenth 
century, refers to the fine orchards there were near the Barbican, 
a well-known tower on the old Roman wall (presumably these 
orchards were just beyond, not within the City), and he notes the 
fact that when the supply of coal from Newcastle was suspended, 
owing to the Civil War, a much larger yield of fruit was obtained 
than had been known for some years. He proceeds to comment 
upon the objection to sea coal, not only as being hurtful to 
vegetation, but as a cause of colds, coughs, and other diseases. 
Actually in the City, however, there were many fruit trees, some 
of which bore fruit till they were cut down to make room for new 
streets. St. Martin Pomary, in Ironmonger Lane, a church destroyed 
by the Great Fire, was said to have received its name from the 
Apples that grew around its site. Vines on the walls of some of 
the houses of the nobles yielded good crops of fruit, and it was 
observed that the Fig seemed to thrive in the London air, and 
Mulberry trees were planted here and there in City gardens ; two 
of these, of great size, near Ludgate Hill, bore fruit till the reign 
of George II. Almost in the shadow of St. Paul’s Cathedral, 
even when the Stuarts began to reign. Ivy Lane was green, from 
the specimens of that plant which covered the houses ; and the 
Drapers’ Company had a large garden in Throgmorton Street. 
Others of the City companies had gardens attached to their halls, 
and in several of these they grew Roses, Gillyflowers, and the few 
flowers besides which adorned old English gardens. 
A little way outside the City proper, gardens there were that 
yielded an abundance of Roses during the seventeenth century. In 
Eald or Old Street, St. Luke’s, was a rosery of two or three acres, 
and near it a nursery planted with the best kinds of fruit trees 
then known, from which plenty of fruit was obtained. In Ely 
Place, Holborn, there was a vineyard, and the garden was famous 
for its Strawberries, while the Roses were so abundant there that 
the flowers were measured by the bushel when gathered to be paid 
as a yearly perquisite to Bishop Cox, after he had surrendered to 
Queen Elizabeth this property long held by the Bishops of Ely. 
One of the first gardens in which a large collection of exotics was 
grown, and which testified to the skill and research of Master 
Gerard, was situate on the slope of Holborn, and the now 
unattractive Saffron Hill, Clerkenwell, was formerly yellow with 
the bloom of this much-esteemed plant. Out in the East of 
London, quite in sight of its ancient Tower, were gardens in which 
Kale and other vegetables were raised for consumption in the City. 
Goodman’s Fields was no fiction when Stow wrote about London ; 
there was a farm near the Minories, and cattle grazed along the 
fields. Subsequently this was cut up for garden plots. Prescot 
Street, close by, is said to have been originally Peascod Street, from 
the Peas planted on the ground. West of the city, the now 
curtailed Temple Gardens offered citizens a pleasant evening 
resort, and the palaces of the Strand had long gardens reaching to 
the Thames.—J. R. S. Clifford. 
WINTER IN A SCOTTISH MANSE GARDEN. 
Of all the seasons winter is generally supposed to be the least 
inspiring by reason of its prevailing barrenness of aspect, yet it is 
not altogether destitute of inspiration. It has, indeed, infinitely 
more life and energy than outwardly appears ; for are not the 
seeds of summer’s luxuriance steadfastly growing, invisibly to the 
vision, beneath the inglorious blackness of the winter earth ? Does 
not Nature tell us what Revelation declares—that what we 
sow in the seemingly lifeless ground is not quickened or vivified 
by the subtle, mysterious, reanimating elements unless it die ? 
We have now so many floral gradations, flowing onwards 
unceasingly and dying into each other, as wave into wave on a 
boundless sea, that even during the so-called desolation of winter 
the earnest horticulturist can never realise that the beauty which 
waited upon his art in fairer seasons has utterly departed, leaving 
him to mourn the glory that has fled. His hopes, which seemed to 
fade in November with the last autumnal Rose, are rekindled 
when the winter Jasmine (Jasminum nudiflorum), as if to assert 
proudly that Nature is not dead, bursts suddenly into bloom. 
