Nothing to beat a garden full of wildfowl and historical memories
PAUL JOHNSON My favourite spot in London is the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens. I like to sit there, preferably early in the morning, and watch the waterfowl. They are of three kinds. The swans are rulers of the pond, as they must be. I once counted no fewer than 90 of them on the water, but the last time I held a census there were only 22. Swans flying over London, as they constantly do, can see the pond from many miles away, and know it to be a friendly water with plenty of donated food, so they decide to alight there for a spell. They do no harm and are not aggressive — and they are beautiful. No creature ever made by God so consistently conforms to its visual ideal. Their beauty soothes and nourishes. But they lack warmth. Whoever made friends with a swan?
The geese arouse mixed feelings. The blackbeaked invaders from Canada are numerous, greedy and dirty. It is a mystery to me why the swans do not gang up and drive them away. But the world of fowl has its own pragmatic sanctions. Periodically the park rangers decide the Canada geese are too many, and take ruthless action early in the morning. The pink-beaked geese are less objectionable. You could make a friend of one, I daresay. The ducks are of many kinds, go about in pairs rather than flocks, and are the most individual, the only birds on the pond I occasionally know by sight. Altogether the endless movements of these winged creatures, who obviously love their big pool, and are happy on and around its waters, are soothing, so that my spells sitting on the verge, halfwatching, half-thinking, are restorative. The human passers-by merely punctuate the slow quadrille of the birds' motions.
The pond itself — it is not really round but oval and has a decorative rim — must have taken an immense amount of digging out, for it is not an enlargement of a natural feature but a human excavation. We owe it to that energetic and sensible creator of gardens Queen Caroline, consort of George II. She came from Anspach and, an orphan, had had a civilised upbringing by educated women at the more comfortable German courts. Leibniz was her friend and correspondent. The great polymath has a disagreeable reputation as a disputant, especially with Sir Isaac Newton, as to which of them first perfected the calculus. But he was a friend and wise mentor to the young Caroline.
She came to London as Princess of Wales, when the disagreeable George I took over the throne. She and her husband were barely on speaking terms with his father and it was a relief to all when he finally went to his Protestant Elysium, and his ugly mistresses packed their trunks to return to Hanover. George II is known to schoolchildren as the last British sovereign to fight in battle. He had mistresses too, but Queen Caroline was shrewd enough to keep on good terms with them, while she and Sir Robert Walpole ran the country. We can read agreeably of these times in the memoirs of her friend Lord Hervey, and the writings of Walpole's son Horace.
George II thought Caroline's interest in gardens frivolous but was happy for her to indulge it so long as it did not cost him money. In fact Walpole, as First Lord of the Treasury, supplied her with ample means without the King knowing it. She had begun her landscaping activities in Richmond, and was an experienced hand by the time she took possession of Kensington Palace and its park. It had been built by Sir Christopher Wren for William III, after old Whitehall Palace, traditional home of English kings, had burnt down in the 1690s. Together with its Orangerie, joint work of Vanbrugh and Nicholas Hawksmoor, it was and is a handsome complex, and of manageable size. Queen Anne added the sunken garden, which is still there, but the park remained pretty ragged until Caroline got to work. She planted splendid avenues of trees, in a pattern of lines spreading over 300 acres. The most magnificent were the elms bordering what became known as the Broad Walk, which grew to immense stature until disease struck in the 1950s and they were cut down. Many other fine trees were knocked down in the great storm of 1987. But the Queen's concept of a tree-patterned parkland remains to give delight at all times of the year. I have dozens of watercolours that I have painted of these trees, old and young, especially in autumn and winter.
Caroline wanted standing waters as well as noble trees, and drew on the resources of the West Borne stream, which meandered across the open land between Bayswater (then called `the Gravel Pits') and Kensington village, forming a series of marshy ponds. The Queen created the formidable stretch of lake known as the Long Water and the Serpentine, divided by the Serpentine Bridge, and this is now the chief ornament of Hyde Park. But she also insisted on a big fowl-pond much nearer the palace, and bordering her Broad Walk. This became the Round Pond, and to my eye is peculiarly redolent of the second quarter of the 18th century.
It is true that, in late Victorian times, Kensington Gardens underwent a sentimental transformation when it was taken over by nursery maids and their charges in immense baby-carriages. Here, Sir James Barrie set up his literary kingdom of perpetual infants and ageless grown-ups, of fairies and gnomes and goblins, of stately nannies and grenadier guardsmen escorts, and of old-fashioned policemen, ready to come to the rescue of well-behaved upper-middle-class children. It was the age of the summer parasol, much starched linen, waxed moustaches, eye-glasses for gentlemen, lorgnettes for ladies, hoops and bonnets and sailor suits for children, plenty of pipe-clay for the military, so that beneath the pungent scents of trodden leaves and wet gravel, of crushed flower-blossom and scythed grass, one caught whiffs of Blanco and brass, antimacassar hair-oil, eau de cologne and Palmolive soap. By the side of the Long Water is Sir George Frampton's Peter Pan statue, which some people love and others loathe, but which everyone wants to see, so that I am constantly asked by foreigners and provincials to direct them to it. And at the intersection of some of Queen Caroline's avenues there is an immense mass of bronze by G.E Watts called Physical Energy. Watts was a very odd artist, sometimes superlative, sometimes bathetic and often just dull. This is one of his most enigmatic efforts, and what it is doing there is unclear. Still, it does convey some of the intellectual nuances of the late 19th century and so has its role in the park's history. Personally I like to peer beneath the Victorian image to Caroline's own age, with the thump-thump of Handel resounding from William Kent's bandstand, the jangle of harness as clumsy old gilded coaches bumped up the Broad Walk to the palace gates, and the cry of the peacock from the sunken garden. What would the old Queen have said of Watts's statue? I suspect: Tell, Sir Robert Walpole, 'ee is not going to pay for zat!'
She died in 1737, still speaking broken English Things were still wild enough in the park, especially after dark fell, and footpads emerged from the shadows. George II was once robbed of his watch and purse while out for a stroll, and that was in daylight. Provision was made for 300 lanterns to be lit to guide people home. Meanwhile I sit by the border of the Round Pond and think of them, and of yet earlier times when monks owned meadows here and kept cows to supply Londoners with milk, and prayed for their immortal souls.
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