From the early medieval period onward, almshouses and taverns, schools and hospitals, had their own gardens and private orchards. The city’s first chronicler, William Fitz-Stephen, noted that “the citizens of London had large and beautiful gardens to their villas.” Stow recorded that the grand houses along the Strand had “gardens for profit” while within the city and its liberties there were many “working gardeners” who produced “sufficient to furnish the town with garden ware.” In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries gardens occupied the area between Cornhill and Bishopsgate Street while the Minories, Goodman’s Fields, Spitalfields and most of East Smithfield were comprised of open meadows. Gardens and open ground were to be found from Cow Cross to Grays Inn Lane, as well as between Shoe Lane and Fetter Lane. Milton, born and educated in the very centre of the city, always professed an affection and admiration for the “garden houses” of London. His own houses in Aldersgate Street and Petty France were fine examples of that construction, and it is said that at Petty France the poet planted a cotton-willow tree in the garden “opening into the Park.”
Today there are many “secret gardens” within the City itself, those remnants of old churchyards resting among the burnished buildings of modern finance. These City gardens, sometimes comprising only a few square yards of grass or bush or tree, are unique to the capital; they have their origin in the medieval or Saxon period but, like the city itself, they have survived many centuries of building and rebuilding. Seventy-three of them still exist, gardens of silence and easefulness. They can be seen as territories where the past may linger-among them, St. Mary Aldermary, St. Mary Outwich, and St. Peter’s upon Cornhill-or perhaps their lesson can be adduced from the open Bibles in the hands of sculpted monks in the church of St. Bartholomew in Smithfield. The page to which they attend, as they congregate around the recumbent figure of Rahere, reveals the fifty-first chapter of Isaiah. “For the Lord shall comfort Zion: He will comfort all her waste places; and He will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the Lord.”
The image of the garden haunts the imaginations of many Londoners. Among the first painted London gardens is Chiswick from the River by Jacob Knyff. This urban garden is small in scale, and set among other houses. It is dated between 1675 and 1680; a woman walks along a gravelled path, while a gardener bends down towards the earth. They might have appeared in the twentieth century. Albert Camus wrote, in the middle of that century, “I remember London as a city of gardens where the birds woke me in the morning.” In the western areas of London of the twenty-first century almost every house either has its own garden or shares a community garden; in northern areas such as Islington and Canonbury, and in the southern suburbs, gardens are an integral feature of the urban landscape. In that sense, perhaps, a Londoner needs a garden in order to maintain a sense of belonging. In a city where speed and uniformity, noise and bustle, are characteristic, and where many houses are produced to a standard design, a garden may afford the only prospect of variety. It is also a place for recreation, contemplation and satisfaction.
The man known as “the father of English botany,” William Turner, lived in Crutched Friars and was buried in Pepys’s church of St. Olave’s, Hart Street, in 1568. It is not at all paradoxical that the first established botanist should be a Londoner, since the extensive fields and marshes beyond the walls were fertile ground. Turner followed the intellectual practice of his time in not giving locations “for the 238 British plants he records for the first time”-this is noted in the indispensable Natural History of the City by R.S. Fitter-but it has been revealed that one of them, the field pepperwort, was found in a garden in Coleman Street. Another sixteenth-century botanist, Thomas Penny, lived for twenty years in the parish of St. Andrew Undershaft and collected many of his specimens in the area beside Moorfields. The Tower ditch was also famed for its “aquatic” or water-loving plants such as flote grass and wild celery, while a naturalist of Holborn registered wild celery from “the fields of Holburne, neere unto Graies inn” and vernal whitlow-grass from “the brick wall in Chauncerie Lane, belonging to the Earl of Southampton.”
