The cult of nature

What makes the air of the capital city less unhealthy, especially during the summer, is its parks and squares. We call them “lungs of London”, a phrase not so pretty; but it is obvious that the oxygen of all these trees strives to neutralize the acid carbon of all the chimneys. These islets of green strike at first the foreign traveler as strange, in this chaos of houses with no plan or logic.

For three years, I lived next to Hyde Park. I was gazing at it through my house windows at all hours and in every season. Before the war, on Sunday mornings I saw […] gentlemen in tall hats parading around with their families between noon and one p.m. after church, against a backdrop of rhododendrons and azaleas. […] I heard orators predict the end of the world and that of the Lords Chamber, in the same speeches as today; I saw old gentlemen taking a winter swim in the Serpentine, greeted by the peacocks’ cries…

[…] Parks are the last vestiges of conventual gardens and monastic orchards in which they were trimmed, following the confiscation of the clergy’s property. […] Their thick turf and wild grass, their symphony of colors treated by great masses of flowers, their sheep, peacocks and squirrels engift London with the beauty of a private park, inexistent in the Bois de Boulogne, the Prater or the Tiergarten. They ignore our staggered rows. Their trees are never pruned, their nature does not become architecture; flowers grow without order or perspective.

Same impression when you visit the parks: their style and dimensions are quite different from ours. Saint-James Park is a real countryside, and an English one: huge old trees, real meadows, a large pond populated with ducks and swimming birds, cows and parked sheep grazing on grass, always so fresh. […] These people love the countryside with all their heart. One only needs to read their literature, from Chaucer to Shakespeare, from Thompson to Wordsworth and Shelley, to have proof of it. What a contrast with the Tuileries, the Champs-Elysées, and Luxembourg gardens! In general, the French garden, that of Louis XIV, is a living room or an open-air gallery ideal for strolling and chatting in company; in the English garden […] one is better by himself; the eyes and soul make conversation with nature. In the Bois de Boulogne, we built a park on this model, but made the mistake to insert a group of rocks and waterfalls; an artificial impression immediately escapes it and shocks; the English eyes would have surely felt it. […]

Stendhal rightly said that a young English girl can walk more in a week than a young Roman girl in a whole year; the man of the North, with his athletic temperament, needs to breathe fresh air and exercise.

This park (i.e. the Regent’s Park) is in a secluded neighborhood; you can no longer hear the rolling of cars; you forget about London, you are in solitude. The sun was shining, but the air was always laden with moist clouds, which, like mobile watering cans, melted into rain every quarter of the hour. Great wet meadows had a charming softness, and the greenery dripped with a little monotonous noise on the still water of the ponds. I entered a greenhouse: splendid orchids, some of them dressed in the opulent velvet of the iris, others in skin colors of indescribable, delicious, melted tones, all penetrated by a light with which a living flesh palpitates, a woman’s breast; the hand is eager and afraid to rest on it; palm trees raise their bole in a lukewarm atmosphere close by.

It may come as a surprise to those who see nothing but narrow streets and acres of rooftops that, according to the latest Land Cover Map taken from the Landsat satellite, “over a third” of London’s total land area “is semi-natural or mown grass, tilled land and deciduous woodland.”

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.” […] 

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 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 […].

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…

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.” […] 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.

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.