KEW IN APRIL
Kew Gardens in the old days used to be largely a German paradise, for the Teutons in our midst found them more like their own pleasaunces, although wanting in beer, than any other London resort. But when I was last there, in 1919, I heard no German tones. A few French voices mingled with the thrushes and blackbirds; and a number of American soldiers, not unaccompanied by British beauty, sat on secluded seats. The rest of us were natives, promenading with true national decorum, carefully obeying all the laws concerning birds'-nesting, throwing paper about, smoking, and (in the glass-houses) keeping to the right, without the observance of which scientific botany cannot prosper. And for some reason or other (connected no doubt with the universal advance in the cost of life which has been agreed upon as necessary or salutary) we were all forced to pay a penny for admission.
It annoys me to think that not until the Germans vacated the gardens was this entrance fee charged. To them (as to us for generations) Kew was free; now that they have disappeared, one of the results of their provocative belligerence is that it is free no longer!
Although early yet both for flower and leaf, the daffodils were already millions strong, and would be stronger; in the rock garden the saxifrage's tender mauve clusters were to be seen, and there was a patch of the lovely Antennaria Plantagenia at its best. But the most beautiful object at the moment—and that which I went especially to see—was the Yulan, the Chinese magnolia, Magnolia conspicua, in nearly full bloom. Imagine a great tree with black boughs and twigs exquisitely disposed, from which burst ten thousand lilies of a dazzling purity. No buds, no leaves; nothing but these myriad serene white flowers springing from the hard wood. The position of the tree adds to the strangeness and beauty of it, for it is remote from anything formal, between the biggest glass-house and the edge of the arboretum. On Saturday, seen against an indigo thunderbank, it was unearthly in its luminosity.
I have to thank the rain for driving me into the Royal Palace, which, though I have known Kew for so many years, I had never entered before. In this pleasant mansion, red brick without and white panelling within, and smaller than would satisfy the requirements of any war profiteer to-day, poor old George III. passed part of the clouded evening of his long reign. The rooms retain certain of their pictures—chiefly Dutch flower and bird subjects, very gloomy and congested, and a large portrait of "Farmer George," done by the famous Miss Linwood in woolwork—and there are a few pieces of dreadful ancient furniture in one of the Queen's apartments; but otherwise they are empty.
In spite of the associations of the palace—the deranged old monarch and his stuffy Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz (recollections of Fanny Burney's "Diary" and of Peter Pindar's "Lousiad" kept chasing each other through my mind)—the general feeling in it is one of cheerfulness, the result, I fancy, as much of the proportions and whiteness of the rooms as of its situation in the green sanctuary.