In 1899 the garden was handed over to the Trustees of the London Parochial Charities, who maintain this delectable if deserted London corner for the teaching of botany and for providing opportunity and material for botanical investigation.
Perhaps it was the attraction of the Physic Garden that influenced the choice of the Huguenot market gardeners who settled in Chelsea when they were driven from their own country by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. It startled me to find that at the time when England was merry, the Guilds were every bit as dictatorial as the Trades Unions are to-day. More so, in fact, for while a goodly percentage of our workers and nearly all our waiters are now said to be foreigners, none of the foreign workmen of the seventeenth century were allowed to carry on their trades in London and compete with their English confrères.
So the hatters went to Wandsworth and the silk mercers to Spitalfields, and the nurserymen chose the village of Chelsea lying two miles out of London along the river bank.
Their spirits may still hover among the perfumed beauty of the annual Chelsea Flower Show of the Royal Horticultural Society. It is held in the grounds of the Chelsea Hospital once a year at the end of May or the beginning of June, when the delicate loveliness of the flowers attracts an immense number of garden lovers.
And now to tell you how to reach the Chelsea Hospital, the Flower Show and Ranelagh Gardens.
I have never been able to discover whether the extreme reluctance of the British to give a detailed address is due to a naïve belief that everyone is born into this world with an intimate knowledge of the topography of London, or to a malicious delight in puzzling the ignorant, but I have a deeply-rooted conviction that the maze was an English invention. So to the stranger bewildered by the laconic “Chelsea” on the cards of admission to the Flower Show I would say that it is reached either by the District Railway to Sloane Square station and then a short walk down Sloane Street to Pimlico Road, or by the 11 or the 46 bus that stops at the corner of Pimlico Road and Lower Sloane Street.
The Flower Show is one of the most charming events of the London season. In no other city in the world may you see anything like this meeting of the great brotherhood of gardeners of every social rank gathered to admire the gorgeous achievements of the grand masters of the art of growing flowers; where peeresses humbly consult horny-handed experts and frivolous young men reveal unsuspected enthusiasms for blue aquilegias.
The adjacent Ranelagh Gardens are often called Chelsea Hospital Gardens, perhaps to avoid confusion with the grounds of the Ranelagh Club at Barnes. They are closed to the general public during the three days of the Flower Show, so if you go to see the flowers you have the added and unexpected pleasure of wandering through the green glades of Ranelagh undisturbed by the shouts of the Pimlico children.
There are no flowers in these gardens, but they have a peculiar charm of their own. There is none of the flatness of Hyde Park—the undulating paths and quaint bosquets belong to another day when powdered courtiers pursued fair ladies in the pleasure gardens that were so much the fashion. The story of Ranelagh is bound up with the history of the Georgian period. There is not a book of memoirs but mentions this famous pleasure resort. Walpole said of it, “Nobody goes anywhere else; everybody goes there. My Lord Chesterfield is so fond of it that he says he has ordered all his letters to be directed there.”
It is quite true that everybody went there. Johnson, whom I find as hard to keep out of the description of any part of London as Mr. Dick found it to keep King Charles’s head out of his memorial, was very fond of going to Ranelagh. Boswell says that, to the remark that there was not half a guinea’s worth of pleasure in seeing Ranelagh, he answered, “No, but there is half a guinea’s worth of inferiority to other people in not having seen it.”