A much forgotten bard, named Henry Jones, who had been an Irish bricklayer, sought to win patronage, like Stephen Duck, by a whole poem in two cantos on Kew Gardens, a versified catalogue of their contents, with a high-pitched description of the Pagoda, and flowing flattery of their master, as to all which the less said the better. The same title was given to one of poor Chatterton’s effusions; but he, reduced in his garret to ape Junius by “patriotic” letters signed Decimus, lets the garden run under his pen to weeds of spite and scandal.
Hail Kew! thou darling of the sacred Nine,
Thou eating-house of verse, where poets dine!
It has already been told how George III. enlarged the demesne at Kew, buying up some fields about the site of the Pagoda, and eventually getting the lane closed that separated it from the Richmond grounds. The Botanic Garden proper was enclosed and managed apart from the general pleasure-grounds, within which seem to have been dioceses or spheres of influence looked after by different employés. It is not quite clear to me how these gardeners were ranked or related; perhaps, as in the case of higher officials, their functions may sometimes have clashed, or been complicated by royal favour. Mrs. Papendiek records that in her time Haverfield was the King’s gardener, who lived at Kew, his second son acting as his assistant there, as did an elder son in the more remote Richmond garden; and that after him the sons succeeded to these appointments. She also mentions the Queen’s flower garden up Richmond Lane, where one Green was the gardener, who had nursed some orange trees to be the pride of his life, but was heart-broken when they dwindled for want of means to enlarge his hothouses, though he offered to pay half the cost out of his own pocket. This diarist, not always to be depended on in matters outside her own observation, intimates that the Board of Works declined undertaking any improvement in the Queen’s private garden; from which we should understand that the Botanic Garden was partly carried on at the public cost, where Chambers had already built an orangery, now turned into the Timber Museum. One thing appears plain, that even the subordinate gardeners had good places, when Green could offer £250 as his contribution towards those denied hothouses, and Haverfield brought up his youngest son to be a clergyman. In all, the Gardens came to cover some 120 acres, about half their present extent, as might have seemed a small matter to Tamerlane, who boasted of his garden measuring 120 miles round Samarcand.
The chief name among Kew gardeners of this reign was William Aiton’s, who, if he had spelt himself Aytoun, like others of the family, would at once be recognised as coming from the North. Waiving the question as to whether Adam, the first gardener, were not a Scot and a Presbyterian, one finds it notorious that Scotsmen have renowned themselves in planting the richer plots of the South, a fact explained by philosophers of Dr. Johnson’s school in the sneer that a man who has coaxed flowers and fruit to grow beyond the Tweed has an easy task elsewhere. Of course this is ignorant prejudice, as many a demesne might show in Caledonia stern and wild, where nothing is needed for exuberance but the “fertilizer” we have seen running short even in the Queen’s garden at Kew.
Aiton was a son of the soil, driven out of his own Lanarkshire Eden by poverty, who, like so many other Scots unwelcome to Wilkes and Johnson, came to seek fortune in London. He got a place at the Physic Garden of Chelsea, and thence, perhaps by patronage of Bute, was put in charge of the Princess Dowager’s Botanic Garden, whose reputation throve with his own. His functions must have grown beyond the limits of the Botanic Garden, then only a few acres, for this was the Scotsman who set Cobbett to work, among other jobs, at sweeping up leaves by the Pagoda, on the farther side of the Kew grounds. John Rogers, who worked in the gardens at this time, says that on the death of the elder Haverfield, Aiton came into the entire management both at Kew and Richmond. His first appointment was in the last year of George II. A quarter of a century later, we find him clearly head of the whole establishment. Aiton certainly rose to be no mere working gardener, who published a catalogue of the plants at Kew. He held his post till towards the end of the century, and was then succeeded by his son William Townsend Aiton, to rule at Kew for half a century more; while another son, John, had charge of the royal gardens at Windsor and at Kensington.
THE AZALEAS
In the Aiton succession, we come across the fact that a talent for the study of plants is apt to be hereditary. There were two Linnés, not equal in fame, four De Jussieus, three De Candolles, three Darwins of different degrees of note in science; and for more than a century Kew Gardens were under the two dynasties of Aitons and Hookers. In the reign of William Aiton the second, among Scotsmen finding employment in Kew Gardens was a William Macnab, who rose to be foreman here, and in 1810 went to the Edinburgh Botanical Garden as curator or principal gardener. One cannot propitiate Dr. Johnson’s Manes by describing the Edinburgh Garden as a branch from Kew. It is, in fact, an older institution, founded in Charles II.’s reign, and now grown into a model, both of utile and dulce, worthy the Modern Athens. The point I have to make is that William Macnab was succeeded at Edinburgh by his son James Macnab, godfather of the Cupressus Macnabiana, etc., who managed this garden till his death, 1878, and whose only son, William Ramsay Macnab, bade fair, through a too short life, to continue the family distinction in the botanical world.