With such a splendid target, how was Peter the Great to resist? Naturally, he demanded to be driven through it in a wheelbarrow. The gardens were "ruin'd", Evelyn wrote in 1706, but he was proud to say that the hedge "mocks the rudest assaults of the Weather, Beasts or Hedge-breakers".The house and the rest of the gardens were to fare worse. Take a turn around the churchyard, and you'll see some of their memorial stones. After a hard day's ship-building Peter still had energy for unwinding with his "right nasty" friends Right in the middle of the great gardens was Evelyn's hedge About 40 years old, it was 400ft long and 9ft high.

Beginning in Amsterdam, Peter the Great determined to find out how to build a modern navy. In February 1698 he arrived in England and rented Sayes Court, which was, after all, conveniently placed. All his expenses were paid by William III, who had invited him over.Peter was a hands-on learner and he worked in the dockyard alongside the shipwrights and labourers. He would have appreciated the wishes of Peter the Great of Russia, a monarch from a wilder land, to learn new skills.In 1694 Evelyn moved to the family estate at Wotton in Surrey, and put Sayes Court out to rent.

Evelyn was a founding member of the Royal Society, and he was closely involved with anything new. By 1699 he and his wife Mary had buried seven of their eight children Most lie in the Church of St Nicholas at Deptford. It still stands, with its medieval tower and late-17th-century nave, a little way beyond Sayes Court, in a side street called Stowage.With its savage-looking stone skull guarding the gate into the churchyard and the charnel house, the church is a poignant piece of old London. Within, a slab commemorates the short life of Evelyn's eldest son, Richard, who died in the middle of a catastrophic winter in 1658, and Evelyn's eldest daughter, Mary, who also died of smallpox in 1685.The 1600s were an age of scientific discovery. Pepys's replies are lost, but in any case by September Elizabeth was dead from smallpox.It was only one of several tragedies to hit the Evelyn family. The wall still exists, amazingly enough, at the end of Dacca Street.