Esoteric London

Lansbury Estate, Dod Street, London, E14. Photo © Roger Dean 2012

A Looker-On in London – Mary H. Krout, 1899:

Another of the audience – a woman who, also, was not quite in sympathy with Mrs. Norman’s views – told an amusing story of a Scotch gardener. She and a friend rode on their bicycles to a well known show place in the vicinity of London, famous for its magnificent gardens which the owner had generously thrown open to the public. As they walked through the fine shrubbery and along the well-kept borders, she heard a cuckoo calling – “altogether the most ecstatic and loud-voiced cuckoo that she had ever heard,” and she paused and called her friend’s attention to it.
The disgusted comment of the gardener was: “Humph! We have too much of that sort of thing around here!” She thought this a good example of the appreciation of nature on the part of those who were forced to live in the country. The gardener disparaged everything, and if she admired a flower, or a rose of especial beauty, he would tell her that she should have seen some roses at the flower show which he had gone up to London to visit a few days before.