CHESTNUT SUNDAY.

Taranaki Herald, Volume LXI, Issue 144134, 2 July 1913, Page 6

CHESTNUT SUNDAY.

THE SCENE IN BUSHEV PARK. (Sydney Daily Mail.) LONDON, May 23. Last Sunday was Chestnut Sunday. It is not in the Church's calendar as such, but it is a festival well understood of Londoners. 13y tho middle of May tlie chestnut trees are presumed to bo at their fullest glory of leaf and ilower; which being so, pilgrimage is raa Je—on tho third Sunday of that month—by tens of thousands of people to Bushev Park, a few miles out of London and just outside the entrance gates of Hampton Court Palace. roi at Rushoy Park is the noblest array of chestnut trees in tho world, an avenue of them one mile in length ami four abreast, set upon a vast spaciousness seemingly of smooth green velvet, hut in reality tlie shaven English lawn-grass of linshey Park at springtime. They are wonderful trees, centuries old, and by now of a great stature and a splendid spread of branch. On Chestnut Sunday, however, no branch is to he seen, for a ■dory of foliage is about tlie trees, and From lowest bough to topmost they ine massed with white flower. The milelong stretch of them, their hulk, their noble symmetry, and the beauty 01 their leaf, and blossom, make up such a spectacle that Chestnut Sunday is always well worth its popularity in the spring programme of London. Moreover, one goes now to linshey lark in lordly case upon the top of any one of hundreds of motor-buses for a fenpence, and by favour of a magnificent drive through Kensington and Hammersmith, to the Thames at Chiswick and Richmond, and so across Kew am. Twickenham —a ride which in itself, and upon auch days as now surround us, is a sheer joy.. Tho whole countryside is aflame with spring beauty. On tlie common lands the gorSo is a running fire, and meadow after meadow is not only filled with the gold of buttercups and the shining green of, this amazing grass, but is ringed with oaks, and beeches, and planes, and elms, every one of them a splendour of young leaf. Along the roadside in these river suburbs the eye is constantly filled with beauty. Streets are boulevarded in chestnuts and okas, every garden of every house is embowered in colour —m rich colour of spring flow-ore, in the tenderer colours of the flowering trees, the lilacs, and laburnums, tho hawthorns, and the pink and white may. For mile upon mile that is the wonderful way of it. And when you have s-.t silent under it for the hour and a half of your journey, and when for grand finale you have driven down the highway centre of tho chestnut avenue of linshey Park, you alight from your vehicle—which might well by this time have become a royal chariot by virtue of tlie scenes it lias traversed, but is still a motor-bus —and you walk within tho garden of Hampton Court Palace. At least, you would walk if you were, not brought to sudden standstill by tho scene there spread before yon. From ro\d wall to Thames wall the length of the garden is about half a mile, and its breadth is a far distance of smooth lawns and avenues of trees. On Sunday last that half-mile of length was half a mile of tulips, close-sown In broad and continuous beds, tens of thousands of tulips, in flashing crimsons, and purples, and yellows, and browns, and whites, - and wonderful combinations of colour, huge cups of flowers rising high upon their stalks from foundation beds of every hue and variety of spring annual, sometimes familiarly beautiful as stock, and cineraria, and wallflower; sometimes lieautiful and unfamiliar as where a hundred pure white tulips stood out upon a solid square of sky-Muo rock-cress. But the tulip garden of Hampton Court Palace is a famous place. Its orgy of colour is really indescribable.