The Flower Show is one of the most charming events of the London season. In no other city in the world may you see anything like this meeting of the great brotherhood of gardeners of every social rank gathered to admire the gorgeous achievements of the grand masters of the art of growing flowers; where peeresses humbly consult horny-handed experts and frivolous young men reveal unsuspected enthusiasms for blue aquilegias. The adjacent Ranelagh Gardens are often called Chelsea Hospital Gardens, perhaps to avoid confusion with the grounds of the Ranelagh Club at Barnes. They are closed to the general public during the three days of the Flower Show, so if you go to see the flowers you have the added and unexpected pleasure of wandering through the green glades of Ranelagh undisturbed by the shouts of the Pimlico children. There are no flowers in these gardens, but they have a peculiar charm of their own. There is none of the flatness of Hyde Park--the undulating paths and quaint bosquets belong to another day when powdered courtiers pursued fair ladies in the pleasure gardens that were so much the fashion. The story of Ranelagh is bound up with the history of the Georgian period. There is not a book of memoirs but mentions this famous pleasure resort. Walpole said of it, “Nobody goes anywhere else; everybody goes there. My Lord Chesterfield is so fond of it that he says he has ordered all his letters to be directed there.” It is quite true that everybody went there. Johnson, whom I find as hard to keep out of the description of any part of London as Mr. Dick found it to keep King Charles’s head out of his memorial, was very fond of going to Ranelagh. Boswell says that, to the remark that there was not half a guinea’s worth of pleasure in seeing Ranelagh, he answered, “No, but there is half a guinea’s worth of inferiority to other people in not having seen it.” There is little left of the actual gardens where Johnson, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Oliver Goldsmith, Walpole, the beautiful Duchess of Devonshire, the King of Denmark, the Spanish ambassadors and the entire English Court used to take part in the merry-making, but you may be sure they all walked up the broad avenue of trees that once shaded the brilliant scene. In the seventeenth century the property belonged to Viscount Ranelagh, an Irish nobleman by whose name the gardens are still called. When the estate was bought by a syndicate after his death a huge rotunda was built with boxes all round. It must have been something like the Albert Hall, and every night the place was filled with fine ladies and wits, rubbing shoulders with all classes of society come to gaze at the attractions and listen to the music. The vogue of Ranelagh lasted many years and only ended when the rotunda was pulled down at the beginning of the nineteenth century.