The Apothecaries’ Society laid out the garden about two hundred and fifty years ago. They leased the ground at that time, but later on Sir Hans Sloane gave them the freehold with one of those quaint conditions attached that lend a refreshing grace to a legal transaction. The Apothecaries had to despatch 2000 specimens of distinct plants, grown in the garden well dried and preserved and sent in batches of 50, every year to the Royal Society. One would like to know what the Royal Society did with them, but the most interesting things in history are so often left out. In 1899 the garden was handed over to the Trustees of the London Parochial Charities, who maintain this delectable if deserted London corner for the teaching of botany and for providing opportunity and material for botanical investigation. Perhaps it was the attraction of the Physic Garden that influenced the choice of the Huguenot market gardeners who settled in Chelsea when they were driven from their own country by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. It startled me to find that at the time when England was merry, the Guilds were every bit as dictatorial as the Trades Unions are to-day. More so, in fact, for while a goodly percentage of our workers and nearly all our waiters are now said to be foreigners, none of the foreign workmen of the seventeenth century were allowed to carry on their trades in London and compete with their English confrères. So the hatters went to Wandsworth and the silk mercers to Spitalfields, and the nurserymen chose the village of Chelsea lying two miles out of London along the river bank. Their spirits may still hover among the perfumed beauty of the annual Chelsea Flower Show of the Royal Horticultural Society. It is held in the grounds of the Chelsea Hospital once a year at the end of May or the beginning of June, when the delicate loveliness of the flowers attracts an immense number of garden lovers. And now to tell you how to reach the Chelsea Hospital, the Flower Show and Ranelagh Gardens. I have never been able to discover whether the extreme reluctance of the British to give a detailed address is due to a naïve belief that everyone is born into this world with an intimate knowledge of the topography of London, or to a malicious delight in puzzling the ignorant, but I have a deeply-rooted conviction that the maze was an English invention. So to the stranger bewildered by the laconic “Chelsea” on the cards of admission to the Flower Show I would say that it is reached either by the District Railway to Sloane Square station and then a short walk down Sloane Street to Pimlico Road, or by the 11 or the 46 bus that stops at the corner of Pimlico Road and Lower Sloane Street.