I think of all the great people who lie buried here the most fascinating is this Lady Danvers, George Herbert’s mother, whose “great and harmless wit, cheerful gravity and obliging behaviour,” attracted so many friends and among them Dr. Donne. She must have been an adorable mother. I sometimes wonder if the care of her ten children ever made her late for church, and if it were some memory of his boyhood days that made her saintly son write with the cheerful gravity he may have inherited,
Oh be drest,
Stay not for the last pin,
Thus hell doth jest away thy blessings and extremely flout thee
Thy clothes being fast but thy soul loose about thee.
Mrs. Herbert came to live in Chelsea when she married Sir John Danvers, after she had “brought up her children carefully and put them in good courses for making their fortunes.” Danvers House, where she and her husband lived, gave its name to Danvers Street, at the corner of which Crosby Hall now stands.
The Chelsea Physic Garden
“God Almighty first planted a garden.”
Bacon.
One of the things I like best in Chelsea is the old herb garden, the Chelsea Physic Garden, that makes a home of peace with its base on the Embankment and the western angle at the beginning of Cheyne Walk and the end of the Royal Hospital Road, once called the Queen’s Road in honour of Catherine of Braganza, Charles II.’s Queen.
My friendship with the garden is based on no intimate acquaintance, for not to every one is it given to pass the iron gates that guard its fragrant stillness. If you would do more than gaze through the iron bars at this enchanted space that dreams away the year round undisturbed, you must write to the Clerk of the Trustees of the London Parochial Charities, 3 Temple Gardens, E.C.4, and ask for a ticket of admission to the most ancient Botanical Garden in England.
Once you have taken the trouble to secure this card you may stroll along the paths of the Chelsea Physic Garden that are much as they were when Evelyn went there on 7th August, 1685, to visit “Mr. Wats, keeper of the Apothecaries’ Garden of Simples at Chelsea,” and admire the innumerable rarities there, the “tree bearing Jesuit’s bark, which had done such wonders in Quartan agues.”
The Apothecaries’ Society laid out the garden about two hundred and fifty years ago. They leased the ground at that time, but later on Sir Hans Sloane gave them the freehold with one of those quaint conditions attached that lend a refreshing grace to a legal transaction.
The Apothecaries had to despatch 2000 specimens of distinct plants, grown in the garden well dried and preserved and sent in batches of 50, every year to the Royal Society. One would like to know what the Royal Society did with them, but the most interesting things in history are so often left out.