London: The Biography полностью

If the suburbs of the west were good hunting-places for naturalists, the unlikely areas of Hoxton and Shoreditch became known for their nursery gardens. A native of Hoxton in the late seventeenth century, Thomas Fairchild, introduced “many new and curious plants”; and wrote a treatise on how best to order “such evergreens, fruit trees, flowering shrubs, flowers, ex-otick plants etc as will be ornamental and thrive best in the London gardens.” He entitled his book the City Gardener and by that name he was always afterwards known. Another native of Hoxton, who lived just outside Bishopsgate, George Ricketts, brought into the area trees such as the myrtle, the lime and the cedar of Lebanon. But there were many other gardeners in this strangely fruitful area amid the mud and rubble of the northern suburbs, where grew the buddleia, the anemone and the striped phillyrea.

It has always been said that Londoners love flowers; the craze for “window gardening” in the 1880s represented only the most prominent manifestation of the window boxes or window pots to be seen in almost all prints of the London streets from generation to generation. But the most striking sign of the London passion for flowers comes with the London flower-seller. Scented violets were sold upon the streets, while in early spring primroses were “first cried.” To the Cockney, wrote Blanchard Jerrold in London: a Pilgrimage, “the wall-flower is a revelation; the ten-week stock a new season; the carnation, a dream of sweet Arabia.” They are all part of a busy London trade which began in the 1830s. Before that time the only visible London flowers- or, rather, the only flowers on display-were the myrtle, the geranium and the hyacinth.

Then as the taste for floral decoration extended, particularly among middle-class Londoners, flowers, like everything else in the city, became a commercial proposition, and many of the outlying suburbs began production and distribution on a large scale. The entire north-western corner of Covent Garden Market was given over to the wholesale vendors of roses and geraniums and pinks and lilacs, which were then sold on to shops and other dealers. Very quickly, too, flowers became the object of commercial speculation. The fuchsia arrived in London in the early 1830s, for example, and the traders prospered. The interest in flowers spread ineluctably down to the “humbler classes” with hawkers at street corners selling a bunch of mixed flowers for a penny, while in the market were sold basket-loads of cabbage roses and carnations. Female vendors at the Royal Exchange or the Inns of Court hawked moss-roses; the violet girl was to be seen on every street and the “travelling gardener” sold wares which were notorious for their short lives. The price of commerce, in London, is often death and the city became nature’s graveyard. Many millions of flowers were brought into London only to wither and expire. The establishment of large extra-mural public cemeteries, located in the suburbs, in turn led to an enormous increase in the demand for flowers to place upon the newly laid tombs.

The trees of London may also become a token. “We may say,” Ford Madox Ford has observed, “that London begins where tree trunks commence to be black.” That is why the plane tree is London’s own; because of its power to slough off its sooty bark it became a symbol of powerful renewal within the city’s “corrupted atmosphere.” There was a plane tree growing some forty feet high in the churchyard of St. Dunstan’s in the East, but the oldest are those planted in Berkeley Square in 1789. Curiously enough, like many Londoners themselves, the London plane tree is a hybrid: an example of successful intermarriage between the oriental plane introduced into London in 1562 and the western plane of 1636, it has remained the tree of central London. It is the single most important reason why London has been apostrophised as a “City of Trees” with “solemn shapes” and “glooms Romantic.”

That gloom may also descend upon London’s parks, from Hyde Park in the west to Victoria Park in the east, from Battersea to St. James’s, from Blackheath to Hampstead Heath. No other city in the world seems to possess so many green and open spaces. For those in love with the hardness and brilliancy of London, they are an irrelevance. But they call to others-to vagrants, to office workers, to children, to all those who seek relief from life “on the stones.”

When the horse-drawn omnibuses, going from Notting Hill Gate to Marble Arch, travelled beside Hyde Park “hands on the upper deck would greedily snatch at a twig to take to the City” to be met with “the cries of nuthatch and reed-warbler, cuckoo or nightingale.” This observation is taken from Neville Braybrook’s London Green. Matthew Arnold suggested in “Lines Written in Kensington Gardens,” that

The birds sing sweetly in these trees

Across the girdling city’s hum