Green around the grilles

Deadly nightshade, hemlock and giant viper's bugloss festoon the Chelsea Physic Garden on its 350th anniversary. Russell Higham explores this lush London oasis and its history of growing lethal and healing plants

- Russell Higham

TEN minutes’ walk from Sloane Square Underground station, verdant respite awaits. Founded in 1673, the Chelsea Physic Garden feels like a secluded sanctuary in the middle of Zone 1, a serene enclave hidden within London’s chaos. Now bounded by, yet discreetly hidden from, the thoroughfares of Royal Hospital Road and Chelsea Embankment, it is the country’s second oldest Botanic Garden—Oxford pips it to the post by 52 years.

The Worshipful Society of Apothecaries of London leased the plot from Charles Cheyne (of Walk fame), 1st Viscount Newhaven and owner of Chelsea Manor, then part of Middle- sex. The location was chosen not only for its fertile, south-facing land, but because it was directly on the north bank of the Thames, giving the Apothecaries—forerunners to today’s pharmacists—a place to moor the barge they used for ‘herborising’ expeditions: scout- ing the surrounding meadows for medicinal plants to bring back, grow and study.

The Apothecaries established their Hortus Medicus, as the Garden was then known, as an outdoor classroom to school their apprentices in what we now call herbalism or phytotherapy, teaching them which plants could heal and which could harm. After all, as deputy director Frances Sampayo cautions when she begins a tour of the grounds, ‘garden is an anagram of danger. In the right dosage, plants can either cure you or kill you’. A skull-and-crossbones sign planted next to a bed of poisonous specimens reinforces her point, although another reminds us that plants have developed poison to protect themselves—they can’t run away from their predators as animals can.