LONDON PARKS AND GARDENS.•
THERE was room for a writer who should look at London apart from streets and houses, and Mrs. Evelyn Cecil has filled the gap with an engaging book. Topographical writers who have dealt with London, and even expressly with London parks, have too often been content to write of the men and women who have walked and ridden in the open spaces; they have written little of the open spaces themselves. Yet the history of London, illustrated in the growth of her open spaces, is unlike the history of any other city in the world. There has been nothing systematic in their growth, nothing like the strictly regulated progress of American towns, which provides for a "park system," much as if it were a sanitary system ; merely Londoners have never liked to lose sight of trees and grass, and have kept them within view whenever possible, and enclosed them permanently if there seemed a likelihood of their destruction. It is the history of this • London Parks and Gardens. By the Hon. Mrs. Evelyn Cecil. With Illustrations by Lady Victoria Manners. London : A. Constable and Co. [21s. net.]
irregular growth of open spaces with which Mrs. Evelyn Cecil deals, beginning with Hyde, Green, and St. James's Parks, and so through the municipal parks, the commons and open spaces, to end among the squares and private gardens. But she has written more than a mere history; she describes the parks and gardens themselves, and especially deals with their horticultural possibilities. This is the distinctive feature of the book. To take Hyde Park, for instance; it is interesting to read of the park being " substantially empayled" so that Henry VIII. and Elizabeth could hunt the deer ; or of the Ring, where Cromwell was nearly killed by a pistol exploding in his pocket, and where Hind, a famous highwayman, robbed a coach of a hundred pounds, and made his escape into St. James's Park, which was then a sanctuary. But there is an even greater interest in the history of the trees and water and flowers of the park ; in the gradual change from the days when the deer drank in the West Bourne to the period when the Chelsea waterworks had the use of all the streams and springs in the park, and were displaced by Queen Caroline to make the ponds into one,— the Serpentine ; later still, when flowers were first brought into the park. That was only forty-seven years ago, in 1860, and at first the flower-beds were not always well treated. Since that date there have been many changes and additions ; there are now about five hundred and fifty different kinds of trees and shrubs in Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, and some of the older trees are exceptionally handsome ; the ash- trees near the Mount Gate, for instance, and the oaks and elms and chestnuts between the Round Pond and Bayswater. Mrs. Evelyn Cecil's book will, in fact, prove a most welcome guide to any one who wishes to learn where to look for good specimens of forest and other trees within a mile or so of Piccadilly. There is an old superstition that only the plane- tree will thrive in London, because it sheds its bark, and so its coat of soot, every year. The chapters on the various spaces in which trees have been planted, or remain from the days when the squares and gardens were not enclosed, ought to go far to dispel that illusion. The book is not, however, entirely concerned with history or horticulture. The author writes sympathetically of the less well-known open spaces, the sorely needed " lungs " of the crowded poor neighbour- hoods,—Avondale "Park," for instance, with its four acres, its swings, and its band. " When the band plays the place is packed. 'I've calculated as many as nine hundred at one time,' says the old guardian, who is proud of the place, and as for the children, you often can't see the ground for them.'" Perhaps for that reason, the "park" does not lend itself to illustration. But the other parks have a clever illustrator in Lady Victoria Manners, whose water-colours are picturesque and well reproduced.
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