A gloomy waste, not worth the Muse’s strain;
Where thorny brakes the traveller repell’d,
And weeds and thistles overspread the field;
Till royal George, and heav’nly Caroline
Bid Nature in harmonious lustre shine;
The sacred fiat thro’ the chaos rung
And symmetry from wild disorder sprung.
But Nature might not be trusted to shine here by her own unvarnished charms; and the Richmond Gardens were bedecked with “follies” in the taste of the time: “Merlin’s Cave,” that appears to have housed a waxwork collection as well as the library of which Stephen Duck was keeper; a hermitage, inhabited by busts of distinguished men; a menagerie, a maze, and, of course, a grotto, to gratify “heav’nly Caroline’s” admiration for what “royal George” bluntly denounced as “childish silly stuff.” Rival poets celebrated “the much sung grotto of the Queen,” one under the sly pseudonym of “Peter Drake, a fisherman of Brentford,” making fun of Stephen Duck, the so-called thresher-poet.
The widowed Princess of Wales, prompted by her friend Bute, showed a warm interest in horticulture; and under her was nursed the Botanic Garden of exotic plants that became the special feature of the Kew grounds. They were laid out by Lancelot Brown, a self-taught gardener, so celebrated in his day as to be known by the name of “Capability” Brown. He, indeed, rather than Kent, is sometimes styled the father of landscape improvers, among whom Repton, for one, speaks of him as his master or forerunner. Brown appears to have insisted masterfully on the carrying out of his own ideas, if we are to believe the story of George III. chuckling over his death to an under-gardener: “Now you and I can do as we please here!” In Mason’s Heroic Epistle, Brown is said to have had a free hand over the Richmond Garden also, where he destroyed Queen Caroline’s fanciful structures, so as to be accused of having “transformed to lawn what late was Fairyland.”
Under Bute’s patronage the post of superintendent of the Botanic Garden was given, but seems not to have been made pukka, to Sir John Hill, as he styled himself on the credit of a Swedish decoration, that humbug physician and author, best remembered now by Garrick’s epigram:—-