Roof-gardens are even rarer than yard-gardens. One that is full of interest may be seen in Bishopsgate Street, E.C., at the Home for Working Boys. Trees of quite a respectable size are grown in it; Sycamore trees twenty feet high, Limes from eight to ten feet, with Nut and Cedar, Chestnut, Holly, Fir, and Plane. Cats are, of course, a hindrance, but the wire netting which keeps them out is hidden in summer by Virginia Creeper, and on the parapets and in tubs and boxes are Evergreens and Orange plants, and bushes of Rose and Lilac. Eight or ten sorts of flowers bloom freely, Petunias doing best of all. Gardening operations, as carried on by the boys and Superintendent, are an unfailing source of amusement to the children of the surrounding poor. A pond and fountain with spray rising sixteen feet high are crowning glories of this shady jungle, where, but a few years since there was nothing to be seen but a bare zinc roof, some twelve yards square. The place has now been pet-named “Pelham Park.”
A private roof-garden at the back of a London house, four stories from the ground, is graphically described by an amateur gardener, who says he “fights for failure,” but he does so cheerfully. There are some points, he says, on which the many-acred owner of a country garden might envy his rival on the roof. One is his personal intimacy with his garden kingdom and its subjects.
“Up among the chimney pots he has watched each plant through all difficulties struggling up into timid blossoms; he has washed away daily smuts and combated incessant sparrows with cotton entanglements, and now knows every flower, nay, every petal, with a personal love. He will tell you which day of the week the Pansy lost its second bud through the sparrows, just when it looked certain to be quite as good as the flower he got last year; or he will show you how the Canariensis, baffled by the same marauders last Friday week, has tried again with a second shoot which will be out before Wednesday; those Pansies were specially bought at Covent Garden; as for the Sweet Peas, they came as seedlings, not a tenth their present size, and they will be even better in a fortnight. The Solanum is a special prize, and comes from a country garden; but dearer than that is the Geranium, grown from one of his own cuttings, a real scion of the family.”
A Geranium among the slates and chimney stacks! This was a triumph indeed; enough to make the Clementi-Smiths at St. Andrew’s Rectory envious.
In these roof-gardens there are joys undreamed of by the stranger. A real honey-bee buzzing and working over the flower-beds, even a spider—a real garden spider, with a shining web, a country-looking weed, a stinging nettle,—a lively one that knows how to sting, and on one bright still evening, when the sunshine lingered on the gas-work’s chimneys, a humming-bird hawk-moth fluttering well-pleased among the flowers.
After these flights among the tiles and chimney-stacks it is tame work, talking of the City gardens of the level ground; but, after all, they are the commonest and most generally useful. The dreary churchyards now made into play-grounds, where a few simple flowers bloom, and there is a shrub or two; we may see such any day at St. John’s in the Waterloo Road. And there are the old, old gardens about the Temple and the Law Courts; how many generations of lawyers they have cheered (not one space can be spared); and who has not felt a thrill of joy when nearing St. Paul’s Cathedral, to see the fresh green of the trees and the indescribable beauty of the rustling, swaying boughs, so strangely sweet in such a spot.
Not the least good done by our City gardens is the welcome given by them to bird and butterfly; even the seagulls did not come to London till after we had planted trees on the Embankment and laid down turf. The more gardens we make, the more country visitors will come to them, gladdening the Londoner with rural sounds.
“A cuckoo cried at Lincoln’s Inn
Last April, somewhere else one heard
The missel-thrush with throat of glee;