One part of my duties was a real delight to me. The care of the Royal Parks became a passion, and successive First Commissioners very kindly gave me a free hand in dealing with work in which they knew that I took the greatest interest. The flower gardening in Hyde Park had been begun many years before by Mr. Cowper Temple when he was First Commissioner, and had been continued down to my time. But it was a very elementary affair. The trees and shrubs moreover had been totally neglected. The trees, surely a most important consideration in any park, were crowded and killing one another. No new varieties had been introduced. The shrubs, old-fashioned lilacs, privets, ancubas and the like, had grown lanky, leggy, and hardly capable of flowering. St. James’s Park in especial was in a most degraded condition. Battersea Park, where the superintendent had made a small sub-tropical garden, was the best tended of the Parks; but even there I found room for much improvement. In short I endeavoured more or less to remodel all the Parks, and I think the public was generally pleased with the work that was done. Two improvements which have certainly given pleasure are the rhododendron garden on both sides of Rotten Row and the Dell at the east end of the Serpentine. When I took over the care of Hyde Park the place where the Dell now is was a shrubbery with open hurdles which was the lair of all the nightbirds and undesirables who haunted the Park after dark. They slept under the bushes and every morning a gang of men had to clear away a mass of filth indescribable. I determined to do away with this scandal. I put up an unclimbable fence, laid the place out as a sub-tropical garden with palms, tree-ferns, dracænas and other beauties, planted the little stream with water-lilies, royal fern and so forth, and made it from an eyesore and a den of horrors into what it now is. For that some years afterwards, long after I had left the Office of Works, I earned a piece of praise which gave me intense pleasure. One Sunday I saw quite a number of people looking at the Dell. I too was moved to go and see. Up came a couple of young guardsmen, non-commissioned officers. They stood for a few moments and as they walked away one of them said, “What’s the use of going abroad when we’ve got such a thing as that here in London?” I never felt so flattered. To the Queen and to the Duke of St. Albans as Lord Grand Falconer was confined the privilege of driving in Rotten Row. The last time that I saw the Queen drive there was once when she came up from Windsor to see my newly-planted rhododendron garden. She was very much pleased, and I had a letter from Sir Henry Ponsonby to say so. At one time the Duke of St. Albans used to drive along Rotten Row once a year in order to keep up the privilege, but whether that is continued now I know not.