Cam House has one of the most charming gardens. It is now lived in by Sir Walter Phillimore, and has been in his family for some 150 years. It was well known as Argyll Lodge, as the late Duke bought the lease and made it his town residence from the time he first took office in Lord Aberdeen's ministry in 1852. Before that it was known as Bedford Lodge, as the Duchess of Bedford, step-mother of Lord John Russell, the Prime Minister, had lived there and laid out and planted most of the garden. The "two very old oaks, which," wrote the Duke of Argyll, "would have done no discredit to any ancient chase in England," are still to be seen. The Duke was also delighted with the wild birds which there made their homes in the garden; in fact, he says in his Memoirs, it was the sight of the "fine lawn covered with starlings, hunting for grubs and insects in their very peculiar fashion," the nut-hatches "moving over the trees, as if they were in some deep English woodland," the fly-catchers and the warblers, that made him decide to take the house. During the half-century he lived there many of the birds, the fly catchers, reed-wren, black cap, and willow-wren, and nut-hatches, deserted the garden, but even now starlings and wood-pigeons abound, and, what is even more rare in London, squirrels may be seen swinging from branch to branch of the old trees. Besides the two old pollard oaks there are good beech and copper-beech, elder, chestnuts, snowy medlar, sycamore, several varieties of thorn, and a large Scotch laburnum, Laburnum alpinum, which flowers later than the ordinary laburnum, and is therefore valuable to prolong the season of these golden showers. The leaves are broader and darker, and growth more spreading. On the vine trellis is a curious old vine with strongly scented flowers. All the plants which thrive in London are well grown in the charming formal garden and along the old wall, which is covered with delicious climbing plants. So luxuriously will some flowers grow, that the hollyhocks from this garden took the prize at the horticultural show held in the grounds of Holland House, in a competition open to all the gardens in the Kingdom.
[In 1948 London County Council used compulsory purchase orders to buy Cam House, Moray Lodge, and Thorp Lodge, to use the land for Council flats. There was local opposition and Holland Park School was built on the site in 1958.]
