174 
THE COTTAGE GARDENER AND COUNTRY GENTLEMAN, December 22, 1857. 
printed from on salted nitrate paper in the pressure- 
frame before described (page 109.) 
If the negative be carefully preserved, it will 
serve to produce an immense number of copies. 
(To be continued.) 
THE EXPERIMENTAL GARDEN. 
The chronicles of the Experimental furnish ample 
testimony that Surbiton out-of-door Grapes, in the 
last generation, could vie with our greenhouse Grapes 
of the present day. The facts arc well worth public 
record ; and the occasion will enable me to gratify a 
public curiosity at the same time. The Espemone 
\ was the cause of the search ; and the consequence may 
be the establishment of a second experimental vine¬ 
yard at Surbiton. 
| Immediately before the French revolution, which 
led to the long war that ended at Waterloo, this part 
of the valley of the Thames, and a circle of ten miles 
in diameter, with Hampton Court in the centre, were 
the focus of fashionable life. The Prince of Wales, 
! the Duke of York, and the rest of the royal dukes, 
met the hounds, and took part in all the land and 
river sports of the time, with the yeomanry of old 
England, who vied with each other in outbidding for 
every “house,” “place,” or “cottage, which came 
into the market, so as to have a “box near the 
fountain of honour in this vale. One of these yeomen, 
from the county of Norfolk, w r as the proprietor ol 
Surbiton Place at the time I mention; and, among 
other good things, he w r as noted for the extent and the 
high keeping of liis gardens, his hothouses, and par¬ 
ticularly for his out-of-door Grapes. The Slack 
Hamburgh, from the Hampton Court Vine, ripened 
three times out of four seasons with him on a south¬ 
east aspect. His gardener’s name was Miller, a scion 
of the family of the author of “ Miller’s Dictionary,” 
and the father of the present curator of the Experi¬ 
mental Garden w as one of his under-gardeners. 
Early in the present century, the royal dukes had 
to forego their pastimes here, and betake themselves 
to the fields of gore and glory abroad ; and the circle 
of ten miles of diameter became as dull as the circle 
, of a water-wlieel. Consequently, those of the circle 
w T ho did not follow the British lion, betook themselves 
to their more distant estates in different parts of the 
country ; and in 1809, Mr. Tassett sold his estate here 
to the Earl of Uxbridge, the father of the first Marquis 
of Anglesea, and went down to his Norfolk estates. 
The Earl kept up the gardens till his death, in 1812; 
and his Countess after him, till her decease, in 1817, 
in the same style, and with the same hands, as for¬ 
merly. Sometime afterwrards, the estate w r as sold to 
| Alderman Garrett, of London; and he turned out a first- 
rate gardener, remodelled the gardens, and took espe¬ 
cial care of the “ great Vine ”—the out-of-door Ham¬ 
burgh . It occupied 100 feet in length of ap eight-feet 
wall; and he made a glass wall of that size to front 
it at eighteen inches from the brick wall. There were 
twenty-four lights, and they ran on rollers in a groove 
top and bottom, the top-roof being of boards. When 
our curator was a young man, he helped to put up and 
take down this glass wall, and to give it air by work¬ 
ing the lights “backwards and forwards” on the 
rollers ; and the Grapes were, “ if anything,” finer 
than those on the mother-plant at Hampton Court, 
just opposite on the other side of the Thames; and 
they ripened perfectly every year. 
In all my researches about the Esperione, I have 
not discovered any material improvement on culti¬ 
vating Grapes, without fire-heat, on this plan by 
Alderman Garrett; winch plan-was then, as far as 
I can make out, quite original. But not longer since 
than yesterday, her majesty, “ Queen Mab,” told me 
that the patent-glass w'alls answered perfectly in North 
Wales, in the hands of the patentee, Mr. McEwen. 
All who are conversant with the Hoare system of 
growing out-of-door Vines, know r that, hitherto, the 
plants are improving in health and strength every 
year since he wrote the first edition of his treatise; 
or say, that for the first fifteen or twenty years Vines 
will go on improving under this system, other things 
being right and favourable; but, according to the ! 
nature of things, a day will come when this system j 
will check the power of the Vine to its hurt. It is | 
too limited, or, rather, he has recommended it to be j 
so kept; his ow r n experience not going beyond the 1 
allowing from thirty to fifty or sixty square feet to j 
each Vine; but we have seen that in fourteen years, ; 
Mr. Aiton, the royal gardener, allowed 800 square feet j 
to his three plants of Esperione ; and Alderman Gar¬ 
rett’s Vine here, in Surbiton, occupied 800 square feet 
itself, and was in the height of its vigour when he put 
the glass wall in front of it, some forty years back. 
My Esperione , in Herefordshire, was sixty feet long ; 
and it occupied, at least, every inch of eight feet oi a 
higher wall, or 480 feet full, with no symptoms of ; 
having got to its full size at the age of from tw r enty 
to twenty-five years. Therefore, to confine such a 
plant, or snch a kind of Vine, to forty, fifty, or sixty 
square feet, as Hoare recommends, must turn out, in | 
the end, like budding a dwarf Rose on a tall stem of 
the Dog Rose. We might be able to determine the 
point more accurately in Surbiton, were it not that 
the garden and great Vine fell into the hands of Mr. 
Raphael, late M.P. for somewhere, about which he 
and Mr. O’Connell made a bad use of their law and 
logic. Mr.'Raphael sent all the gardeners adrift, f 
rooted up the great Vine, pulled down the hothouses 1 
and every roof within his reach, and enclosed the j 
estate with high brick walls all round for miles ; while 
lie himself lived with only one servant-man, “ Old 
Joe,” and a single maid, w ho was deaf and dumb. He 
was a very charitable man with it all; and if he had 
but spared that Vine, he w ould have shown more charity 
at home. Now', how ever, every brick of his w alls is 
gone since I came here ; the estate is cut up into small 
patches, each about enough for a drying-ground in the 
country, with a splendid mansion to each “lot;” and 
more than a thousand pounds worth of gardening has 
been done already to some of these miniatures ; whilst 
we on the other side of the w all w aste whole lots in 
trying experiments for the use and guidance of the 
outer world. 
The Experimental, and the estate thereto belonging, 
are now the property and residence of a lady ; the only 
daughter of the gentleman who handed over that great 
Vine to Lord Uxbridge, the father of the hero who left 
his right leg at Waterloo. When it was told, in Lon¬ 
don, that I took part of this property for an Experi¬ 
mental Garden, for which I was to pay £15 the acre, 
people began to wish to see it, to know how I could 
make it pay ; some went even as far as to say, that 
“ this w'ould soon ruin him,” “ sink or swim now r he j 
must,” for he was “ in for itand some said it was a i 
pity, he was a man that could very ill be spared—he 
w as universally liked in the craft; and yet everybody 
feared him, or rather feared themselves, that they could 
not rise to his standard. From that day to this, mis¬ 
conceptions more or less have been entertained about 
this garden, of which I w*as hardly aware for a long 
time; and not altogether, till one day last July or 
August, when my attention w r as seriously drawn to the 
subject, by my worthy coadjutor, Mr. Fish ; and now' 
I redeem my promise to him, that I should put the 
saddle on the right horse, at the first opportunity.’ 
