HISTORICAL GARDENS 
3°7 
there some one or other knocking at the gate. Anon 
cometh my man and saith, ‘ Sir, there is one at the 
gate would speak with you.’ ” How many of us 
that have been called in from a pleasant garden to 
perform some unpleasant task will sympathise with the 
Bishop ! 
One famous inhabitant of the Garden lived through 
many and great changes. This was a tortoise, which is 
said to have been put into the Garden by Archbishop 
Laud, and lived until 1757, when he perished by the 
negligence of a gardener. This legend is apparently quite 
true, so it had been there for over no years. 
A short account of the principal gardens near London, 
written by Gibson in 1691, describes that of Lambeth 
Palace. It “ has,” he says, “ little in it but walks, the 
late Archbishop [Bancroft] not delighting in ” gardens, 
“ but they are now making them better; and they have 
already made a green-house, one of the finest and/costliest 
about the town. It is of three rooms, the middle having 
a stove under it; . . . but it is placed so near Lambeth 
Church, that the sun shines most on it in winter after 
eleven o’clock, a fault owned by the gardener, but not 
thought of by the contrivers. Most of the greens are 
oranges and lemons, which have very large ripe fruit on 
them.” The Archbishop who thus took the garden in 
hand was Tillotson, and it is not surprising to find him 
adopting that keenness for gardening and the cultivation 
of “ greens ” brought into fashion by William III. 
Nearly ten acres of the extensive grounds of Lambeth 
Palace have now been put under the management of the 
London County Council, and made open to the public 
as “ Archbishop’s Park.” For many years this Park 
had been used for cricket and so on, but the trans- 
