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And another thing

Nothing to beat a garden full of wildfowl and historical memories

Paul Johnson

Wednesday, 24th October 2007

Paul Johnson on his favourite spot in London.

The geese arouse mixed feelings. The black-beaked 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, half-watching, 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.