This minstrel, as is the way with his order, has an eye upon one sweetest season and upon one frequent class of visitors, who, when they get to Kew, might almost as well, it seems, be anywhere else. Noah, whose ornithological experience should have been larger than Mr. Noyes contemplates, was familiar with a phenomenon often seen at Kew, of visitors going in couples, all eyes for one another, with no more regard to their leafy and flowery surroundings than may suffice to give a vague sense of treading primrose paths. Such pairs are observed to seek out retired nooks, where perhaps they light on a wonderland hidden from more curious survey. I can tell of a blind man every day taking a walk in those spacious gardens. One can see spectacled gentlemen peering into the hothouses and museums, who may be suspected of a studious intent. But by far the majority of holiday visitors come clearly in a true holiday spirit, roaming here and there like butterflies from clump to clump of bloom or greenery, to carry away a general impression of something bearing the same relation to their own familiar back gardens as Windsor Castle or Chatsworth to a semi-detached suburban villa.
The visitors make as miscellaneous a collection as the plants. Exotic promenaders will be common on Sundays, when our foreign guests are apt to complain of a want of public amusements. All classes are represented, from disguised millionaires perhaps seeking a hint for their own newly laid out grounds, to servant girls fondly persuaded that the lilies of the field can show nothing to match the glories of their holiday array. Family parties are much in evidence. There is always a large proportion of youngsters, whose parents and guardians may be tempted to improve the occasion with useful information, more or less correct. Here would be a chance for Mr. Barlow to open the minds of Masters Sandford and Merton, or for the tutor of Evenings at Home to lecture his inquisitive pupils. But the reader need not be afraid of me as likely to abuse an opportunity of being dull and dry, if I were qualified to play the botanic pedagogue. I shall not even attempt to be a guide to the Gardens, which have their own official hand-books sold at the entrance; I only invite the visitor to stroll about with me in a desultory manner, while together we make a few observations and reflections on this great national collection.
Kew Gardens have been boasted the finest and most complete botanical collection in the world, as they certainly are if a handicap be allowed for a climate suggesting the antipodes of Eden. Their chief rival is perhaps the Buitenzorg Gardens of Java, where the Dutch turn for horticulture has full play upon the glories of tropical vegetation brought as it were to a focus. A thousand feet above the sea, amid magnificent volcanic forest-clad scenery, Buitenzorg, Sans Souci, the Richmond of Batavia, basks under a sunny sky that yet is by no means parching, for Miss North was interrupted at her easel here by rain coming down regularly each afternoon in such sheets and torrents that five minutes would turn the roads into streams a foot deep. The gardeners need be at little trouble or expense for watering this exuberant greenery, through which runs an avenue of foliage arched a hundred feet above the ground, each tree wreathed with a different creeper, “sending down sheets of greenery and lovely flowers.” Here, amid a court of “all the gorgeous water-lilies of the world,” the Victoria Regia flourishes in the open air, as at Kew only in its hothouse shelter. Here grows the Rafflesia, named after Sir Stamford Raffles—founder of our Zoological Gardens, as of Singapore—called the largest flower in the world, at Kew represented only by a wax model, which seems just as well, since this vegetable monster, measuring some yards across, soon becomes foully infested by insects, so as to putrefy with a disgusting smell. Here, too, a palm like a gigantic primrose is said to have the largest fruit and the largest leaves of any tree in the world, the former two, and the latter ten feet in diameter. For Javan curators, indeed, the trouble is to provide in cool-houses such shelter as artificially heated conservatories are under our scrimped sunshine; and a separate Garden, some thousands of feet higher up, makes an asylum for our familiar plants carefully cultivated as a pigmy show of exotics in the East. Our most tenderly nursed enclosures might cut a poor figure in a climate that does its own gardening. With all the money spent at Kew, one can imagine what results might be produced, where, outside of the Gardens, Miss North could draw a picture far more highly coloured than anything fairly to be said for Kew Green, or for the Thames bank at Brentford.
The view from the bridge in the very High Street of Buitenzorg was the richest scene I ever saw. A rushing river running deep down between high banks, covered with a tangle of huge bamboos, palms, tree-ferns, bread-fruit, bananas, and papaw trees, matted together with creepers, every individual plant seeming finer and fresher than other specimens of the same sort, and the larger such plants were, the grander their curves. Then they had the most exquisite little basket-work dwellings hidden away amongst them, and in the distance was a bamboo bridge—a sort of magnified human spider’s web. Looking straight along the street from the bridge was another pretty view—little shops full of gaily coloured things, such as scarlet jamboa fruit, yellow bananas, pomelas, melons, pines, and hot peppers of the brightest reds and greens. Pretty birds in bamboo cages, people in every shade of purple, scarlet, pink, turquoise blue, emerald green, and lemon yellow; small copper-coloured children carrying all their garments on the tops of their heads, grass-cutters carrying inverted cones of green fastened to their bamboos and almost hiding them. Long avenues of huge banyan trees bordered the principal drive to the palace, with large bird’s-nest ferns growing on their branches, each tree forming a small plantation of itself, with its hanging roots and offsets from the branches. Herds of spotted deer used to rest in the shade under these trees, and parties of the great crested ground pigeon, as big as turkeys, were always to be found there.
THE PALM HOUSE
The Botanic Garden near Rio de Janeiro, also, has tropical features we can hardly match, such as its colonnade of palms, a living temple overtopping the suburban avenues in which tram lines have been planted by foreign capital. Then the Gardens of Peradenia in Ceylon gather such a bouquet of choice flora as an enraptured traveller compares to “the paradise of some Eastern tale, designed and inhabited by invisible genii.” Our Australian colonies, so well off for sun, if not for water, are undertaking to show the Old Country what can be done in this way by children freed from some of her disadvantages. Sydney, besides its rich Botanic Gardens, can afford to keep stretches of wild scenery preserved in all their unkempt luxuriance; and behind Melbourne Nature itself has a giant grove of gum-trees, rising from the undergrowth of ferns that with us would rank as tall trees. And, of course, in many other parts of the world, comparatively little expense can bring together a collection of our rare and delicate blooms, there ranking as weeds.
We are better off for money and skill, that at Kew have done so much to acclimatise or safeguard the productions of more favoured climes. What may be called the heart of the Gardens, on the side towards the Richmond road, is the Great Palm House, hardly great enough, as from time to time some of its pushing guests have to be turned out or snuffed down for fear of their prising off the roof. This huge hothouse enshrines a medley collection of tropical forms, grand and graceful, brought together from Africa, Asia, America and Polynesia, getting their fill of heat and moisture, if not of sunshine. One guide-book says that almost every variety of palms is represented in the exotic jumble, which is rather too much to say, as their species are counted by hundreds, about a hundred in the woods of the Amazon alone. The most striking trees here, looking ill at ease in the confinement of their tubs, are specimens of the pandanus or screw-pine, with its sword-like leaves and its stilt-like roots, propping the top in the air “with its trunk hid for repairs, as it were, among an enclosure of scaffolding.” Young and eupeptic visitors will inquire for the coco-nut, whose fruit reaches them only in a dry, curdled, shrunken state, poorly representing its fibrous green globes filled with soft butter and refreshing milk. The double coco-nut of the Seychelles to be seen here is only a distant relation, whose nuts, like a pair of giant’s boxing-gloves joined together, grow “full of white jelly, enough to fill the largest soup-tureen.” It was one of General Gordon’s crotchets to regard this as the forbidden fruit of Eden; but at Kew, Eve could surely have found apples more tempting of aspect—for example, the Japanese date-plum in the Succulent House. One must not, however, attempt a catalogue of all the vegetable strangers coaxed and coddled to grow in an asylum, which might have taken a larger scale had a proposal been carried out to transfer the Crystal Palace to Kew rather than to Norwood.
Near the Palm House stands the Tropical Lily House, where now the Victoria Regia should open in July its huge white flowers tinged with royal red. This queen of water-lilies, that first flowered in Britain at Chatsworth, has to content itself here with a tank, as an exiled sovereign may have to come down to hotel lodgings; but in its native Guiana, it blocks up canals and spangles lake swamps opening in the flowery woods. The leaves are often as broad as a man’s height, with upturned rims, so that Indian women can cradle their children upon them safely while the mother does her washing in the river fringed with such weeds of truly “glorious feature.” In the same conservatory, among other water-plants, are the papyrus reeds among which Moses was set floating, in our day crowded out of fertile Egypt, but they are found growing lustily so near as Sicily; while their old economic importance, that naturalised the name in our language, has dwindled now that we can turn wood-pulp into cheap paper.
I lately found the Victoria Regia enthroned in this, its original nursery; but a guide-book locates it in what, I understand, was its quarters for a time, the group of hot-houses numbered from seven to thirteen, which stand not far from the Cumberland Gate entrance. They have a show of other aquatic plants, and freaks of Nature like the pitcher-plants and living fly-traps, able to feed themselves on insects lured to their intoxicating cups that act upon the drugged victim like the digestive organs of an animal. Here are billeted the delicate orchids, living on moist warm air, which in our day have been brought to flower in succession all through the year, even by electric light under the smoky glass of Birmingham, sought out for our hothouses so diligently that in their tropical wilds some of the richest sorts begin to grow rare, while of a thousand specimens gained perhaps at the cost of felling as many trunks, but a few may survive the trying journey, at the end of which is worth more than its weight in gold what ran wild as a parasite weed in the tree-tops of the Magdalena or the Orinoco.