Highways and Byways in London

by Emily Constance Baird Cook

"Will Regent's Park, I say, tolerate this? It is, let me repeat it, it is for Regent's Park to decide!"

But the "Regent's Park" of the hour, though thus eloquently adjured, was evidently not to be roused to fury; or even to decision. "Kim on 'ome," cries the nurse-girl to the twins, hitching the perambulator round with a sudden jerk: "Go it, old kipper," shouts a facetious larrikin. Alas! even now "Regent's Park," with its pence too, was apathetically melting away towards that all-important function of the day—its "tea."

There is, indeed, much "life" to be found in Regent's Park.

Some of London's pleasantest "by-ways" are the pretty, well-kept, and delightfully planted walks of the Zoological Gardens. One of the big gates of this institution opens near upon the "preaching trees" of Regent's Park; and, certainly, after a close experience of the "human animal," the rest of the mammalia, unoffending, harmless, and discreetly caged, often occur as quite a pleasant contrast. (I wonder that the simile did not occur to Lord Beaconsfield himself; it is certainly in his line.) Thackeray also, who enjoyed the Zoo greatly, saw, as befitted a great novelist, the human side of it: "If I have cares on my mind," he wrote, "I come to the Zoo, and fancy they don't pass the gate; I recognise my friends, my enemies, in countless cages." Yes, the Zoo is an unfailing pleasure; I can conscientiously recommend it, with one word of caution: Do not choose a very hot day for the excursion: be careful to go a little to windward of the feline race, and eschew the monkey house as much as possible. Poor Sally the chimpanzee is dead, alas! of consumption, and none of her successors, surely, can make up for the very unendurable temperature that has ever to be maintained round them. Monkeys are sad victims to pulmonary disease; every London fog kills, it is said, a few of them. The reptile house is, however, cool and pleasant; and the ponds for aquatic birds are very charming resorts. Altogether, if the great carnivora and the great crowds be shunned, the Zoological Garden becomes distinctly pleasant; its walks, moreover, have all the unexpectedness of "Alice's" peregrinations in the "Live-Flower-Garden," where, continually, round some bowery corner, she came face to face with strange and uncanny-looking beasts. Just so, in the Zoological Gardens, you may suddenly chance upon an amiable, blinking Owl, or a casual Parrot, or a wondering Pelican, peering at you round some bush in the shrubbed pathway. Yet another caution: Do not be tempted, under any circumstances, to ride the Elephant. Its saddle has a knife-board seat adapted only to juveniles; those of the Society's servants who assist you to mount the beast are uncomfortably facetious; and when you are at last safely on top, you feel positively vindictive towards the small children who, down in the depths below you, trifle with your life by offering your elephant a bun.

The Botanical Gardens, enclosed by the ring drive called "The Inner Circle," are, perhaps, best known to Londoners by their three big flower-shows, held in May and June; important functions which are thronged by all the world of rank and fashion.

But, delightful as are these open spaces and public gardens, there is, perhaps, a homelier charm in one's very own London garden,—one's own private rus in urbe. I myself never pass through any part of suburban or semi-suburban London by railway, without looking at all the back-gardens of the small houses. Oliver Wendell Holmes says that a man's belongings and house are an index of his character; but, surely, his garden, or even his yard, is more so. The nature, for instance, that can willingly content itself with a clothes-line and six mouldy cabbage-stalks, while the neighbouring London yards flaunt the golden sunflower, or the graceful foxglove,—reflects, surely, its own shallowness. And if in central London the poor have no small yard even, is there not always a window sill, where from some biscuit tin (in North-Italian fashion,) or from some painted wooden crate, flowers may spring, and rejoice the heart of many a poor wanderer, dreaming, like Wordsworth's Susan, of country meadows and streams? Even the sins of a fried-fish shop may be redeemed by yellow trails of "creeping jenny" from a box above it; even the powerful aroma of "sheeps' trotters" may be almost forgotten in the enjoyment of a stray plant of musk, treasured in some poor man's window-corner. It may be only "a weakly monthly rose that don't grow, or a tea-plant with five black leaves and one green," yet it reflects pleasantly, none the less, the owner's saving grace of taste. To some, this kind of humble garden has a charm all its own. "My gardens," said Gray the poet proudly, "are in the windows like those of a lodger up three pair of stairs in Petticoat Lane, or Camomile Street, and they go to bed regularly under the same roof that I do." There is, I believe, a society for the cultivation of "window-gardening" among the poor, a society that gives prizes to the best results; the movement is a good one, and really deserves encouragement. To beautify the dull and often ugly lives of the London poor,—what society could have a much worthier aim? How many a hideous slum—some "Rosemary Lane," or "Hawthorn Lane,"—has been redeemed from utter gloom by some sprig of greenery, some frond of sickly fern, some crippled and stunted plant brought there, at some time, by some good angel of the poor?

As to the occasional gardens of the larger houses, these, when they do exist, have, to the faithful Londoner, a beauty all their own; shut in and hidden, they have something of the quiet of old cathedral closes, as well as the charm of unexpectedness. And then—last, best of all! they hang out their "pavilions of tender green" without giving any trouble in that "spring cleaning," so trying to London housewives. Of course, however, London gardens do not thrive without affection and interest. If neglected, they die; if tended, they repay your care with a gratitude almost human. Too often the making of gardens in London is on this wise:—First, the workman, or gardener, levies an assortment of old sardine tins, kettles and other household rubbish; next, he arranges a good solid layer of brickbats; then he levels the "parterre" with a few old sacks and coats; then, finally, he fills up the chinks with a little dank, sour, half-starved London soil—"dirt" is indeed the only name for it!—adding a thin layer of it over the whole. Then the garden is considered "finished," and ready for the credulous to sow their seeds. Such a London garden—a catwalk rather than a thing of beauty—is perhaps only redeemed from utter dreariness by an occasional plane-tree.

Plane-trees, which thrive in London because of their tidy habit of shedding their sooty bark yearly, are luxuriant all over the metropolis, but especially so in Bloomsbury. Here also lived Amy Levy, most pathetic of London poets, and here she watched and loved her tree.

"Green is the plane-tree in the square,
The other trees are brown;
They droop and pine for country air;
The plane-tree loves the town.

"Here, from my garret-pane, I mark
The plane-tree bud and blow,
Shed her recuperative bark,
And spread her shade below.