665. Charles II., being restored to the throne, introduced French gardening; and his gardener, Rose, Daines Barrington informs us, 'planted such famous dwarfs at Hampton Court, Carlton, and Marlborough gardens, that London, who was Rose's apprentice, in his Retired Gardener, published in 1706, challenges all Europe to produce the like.' Waller the poet, in allusion to the two last gardens, describes the mall of St. James's Park, as- 'All with a border of rich fruit trees crown'd.' When Quintinye came to England to visit Evelyn, Charles II. offered him a pension to stay and superintend the royal gardens here; but this, says Switzer (Pref. to Ichnographia Rustica), he declined, and returned to serve his own master. Daines Barrington conjectures that Charles II. had the first hot and ice houses ever built in this country, as, at the installation dinner given at Windsor, on the 23d of April, 1667, there were cherries, strawberries, and ice-creams. These fruits, however, had been long, as Switzer states, raised by dung-heat by the London gardeners, and the use of ices must have long before been introduced from the Continent.
