Читать книгу A Thing in Disguise: The Visionary Life of Joseph Paxton - Kate Colquhoun - Страница 9

Side by side with the political and social revolutions sweeping Europe ran a cultural revolution most keenly associated with the growth of science. Interest in plants and gardening, which had been developing throughout the eighteenth century, leapt into a new life which some have called the fourth, garden revolution. From the Romans to John Tradescant in the 1620s, new plants had been arriving in England regularly if slowly. Tradescant himself had brought the apricot from Algiers as well as the first lilac. But from the middle of the eighteenth century plants were coming from all corners of the globe, predominantly from South America, the Cape and, later, North America. Between 1731 and 1789 the number of plants in cultivation increased over fivefold to around 5,000. The thirst for information about new plants was becoming insatiable and driving a need for new publications. Philip Miller at the Botanical Gardens in Chelsea then dominated the gardening world with his massively popular Gardener’s Dictionary of 1731 and, at Kew, William Aiton’s first full catalogue of plants, Hortus Kewensis, was first published in 1789.

Initially, new trees such as the tulip tree and magnolia, as well as hugely popular plants like the first American lily, Lilium superbum (which first flowered in 1738) were shipped back to England mainly by settlers. By the later part of the century, voyages of exploration such as Cook’s three expeditions between 1768 and 1779 were unearthing unimagined botanical riches^* set to transform the English garden and the role of the gardener in it. So many new plants were arriving in Britain, that Miller saw the species at Chelsea increase fivefold during his tenure alone. On 1 February 1787, the first periodical in England devoted to scientific horticulture, The Botanical Magazine or Flower Garden Displayed, edited by William Curtis, was published aimed foursquare at the rich and fashionable who had begun to cultivate exotics with passion. Designed ‘for the use of such ladies, gentlemen and gardeners as wish to become scientifically acquainted with the plants they cultivate’, it was expensively priced at one shilling in order to cover the costs of hand-coloured plates. It was nevertheless hugely popular and provided yet more stimulus to the culture of ornamental plants.

The improvement of estates and gardens among the wealthy classes had become an established vogue since Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown started the rage in the mid-eighteenth century; garden-making and tree-planting were pursued on a scale never witnessed in England before. Expensive to create but cheap to maintain, landscaped parks were an indication of social rank and power, since the use of good farming land for a pleasure ground was, indeed, a demonstration of riches. Walls and formal flower beds were swept away, substituted by great stands of trees and, often, a ‘ha-ha’ so that from a house of any pretension the vista was uninterrupted and it appeared that nature itself reigned. All of this pleased Horace Walpole, who declared that ‘all nature is a garden’, and led Thomas Whately to announce in his book, Observations on Modern Gardening (1770), that ground, wood, water and rocks were the only four elements needed in any grand garden design. The fashion for visiting the great houses and gardens of England grew, with Stourhead and Longleat in Wiltshire and Chatsworth in Derbyshire the most popular.

At the end of the century, Brown’s heir, Humphry Repton, began to reintroduce the ‘romantic’ back into the garden, with terraces in the foreground near to the house, as well as some flower beds and specialised flower gardens for roses or for the new North American plants that intrepid explorers were now sending back to England. Gardeners were becoming a more important and senior part of the household staff and professional nurserymen began to thrive.

By 1778 Kew Gardens, begun in 1759 for the Dowager Princess Augusta, was rapidly expanding under George III and its first unofficial president, Joseph Banks, who was also president of the august Royal Society. He determined to send men on thrilling adventures to collect plants from the Cape, the Azores, Spain and Portugal, China, the West Indies and America, and he ensured that Kew became a centre of excellence in which botanical science surged forward. The tiger lily, Lilium tigrinum, sent back from China in 1804, became such a success that William Aiton, Banks’ successor at Kew, was soon distributing thousands of its bulbs to eager gardeners all over the country.

The rise of horticulture in the nineteenth century paralleled the expansion of the other natural and material sciences, on a far broader base than the elite science of the eighteenth century, flourishing as the middle classes expanded. Commercial nurseries also began to employ collectors, indicating the growing commercial curiosity in these rare plants, and, in 1804, Exotic Botany by Sir E. J. Smith became a standard and best-selling work as did John Cushings’ The Exotic Gardener published a few years later.

The creation of a horticultural society was the idea of John Wedgwood, son of the potter, who in 1803 had invited several of his friends – including Joseph Banks, William Forsyth from the Royal Gardens at Kensington and St James’s, William Town send Aiton and others – to a meeting at the house of Hatchard, the famous bookseller in Piccadilly. There, Wedgwood presented the idea of forming a new national society for the improvement and co-ordination of horticultural activities.

A prospectus for the society was written, classifying horticulture as a practical science and dividing plants into the useful and the ornamental (with the useful taking priority). The necessity of good plant selection was stressed, as was the design and construction of glasshouses, and the society expressed its aim to standardise the naming of plants. It would lease a room from the Linnean Society in Regent Street, where it would meet on the first and third Tuesdays in each month, providing a forum for the encouragement of systematic inquiry and an environment in which papers could be read, information shared, plants exhibited and distributed to interested Fellows and medals presented.

It developed along increasingly organised lines. From 1807 its Transactions were bound together and published, joining the growing volume of literature available. In 1817, one of the finest English nurseries, Conrad Loddiges & Sons in Hackney – which, according to John Claudius Loudon, had the best collection of green and hothouse exotics of any commercial garden – printed its own catalogue called The Botanical Cabinet. Horticulture stood at the doorstep of what has been called the great age of English periodicals but these publications were priced beyond the reach of the practical gardener and, for now, periodicals were made freely available to labourers and gardeners in the society’s library in Regent Street.

With so many new varieties pouring into Britain, horticulture was under pressure to grow and mature. As early as the 1760s, Philip Miller had experimented with different methods of plant acclimatisation and found that many tender plants would thrive outside the greenhouse.^* Many, however, would not, and these were often the rarest. The first free-standing glasshouses, using iron and wood instead of brick and stone, were emerging, themselves demanding further experiments designed to optimise the stability of the structures, the light they admitted, and the most efficient forms of heating. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the horticultural journalist and revolutionary, John Claudius Loudon, invented, among many novelties, a form of roof design that he called ‘ridge and furrow’ – a zigzag glass construction which he noted maximised the access of light and therefore heat, particularly in the early morning and late evening when the sun was low in the sky. Loudon, however, maintained a preference for using glass in the more normal, flat construction.

Loudon’s glasshouse breakthrough came in 1816, when he patented a flexible wrought-iron glazing bar which could be bent in any direction without reducing its strength, making curvilinear, even conical, glazing possible.^† It was one of the first indications of the future use of iron for its strength and flexibility and sparked a new mania for building glasshouses in iron for their light and elegant appearance. Innovator though he was, Loudon’s suggestions were not always quite so practical. Only a year later, he envisaged a day when animals and birds would be introduced into the different hothouse climates, along with ‘examples of the human species from the different countries imitated, habited in their particular costumes … who may serve as gardeners or curators of the different productions’.

The new Horticultural Society involved itself energetically in the general debate over the design of new greenhouses, stimulating more designs from new manufacturers like Richards and Jones (Patent Metallic Hot House Manufacturers) and Thomas Clarke, who took his first orders in 1818 and soon supplied the Queen at Osborne and Frogmore. The Loddiges nursery had, by 1820, a huge hothouse 80 feet long, 60 feet wide and 40 feet high, heated by steam, and built according to Loudon’s design.

These were the heady early days of ‘modern’ gardening and there was a pressing need for change and development – a new science was flowering and things were moving fast. The florists’ clubs of the eighteenth century had proliferated, sparking the competitive cultivation and improvement of certain species, most especially tulips, pinks, auriculas from the Pyrenees, hyacinths, carnations, anemones and ranunculas, but also lilies from Turkey, fritillaries from France, marigolds from Africa, nasturtiums and pansies. Where others had failed for years, by 1812, Loddiges had began to cultivate orchids commercially. Miller mentions only two or three tropical orchids in his Dictionary but 1818 marked a milestone – the first orchid, Cattleya labiata, flowered in cultivation, sparking a fashionable mania for orchids and orchid collection by the seriously wealthy throughout the following two decades.

With no wars to finance, income tax dropped to two pence in the pound during the 1820s so that domestic gardening was encouraged in the middle classes by the availability of disposable income, and by inevitable social competition. 1822 witnessed two further horticultural milestones. The first was the publication of John Claudius Loudon’s Encyclopaedia of Gardening, the Mrs Beeton for gardeners. Its two volumes were consulted compulsively by garden owners and their gardeners alike. It was stuffed not only with everything you might want to know about individual plants and their cultivation, greenhouses and methods of forcing, but with practical information like ‘leave your work and tools in an orderly manner … Never perform any operation without gloves on your hands that you can do with gloves on …’

The second was the commencement of new experimental gardens by the Horticultural Society on 33 acres of land leased from the 6th Duke of Devonshire at Chiswick House, Turnham Green, on the outskirts of London. After the deaths of George III and of Joseph Banks, the Botanical Gardens at Kew had begun to languish under William Aiton and his son William Townsend Aiton, so with nothing of real substance to rival them – the Royal Botanic Society was not founded until 1838 – the gardens at Chiswick confirmed the Horticultural Society’s position of enormous influence and prestige.

Chiswick was a suburb full of market gardens. The area north of the Thames, with its abundance of water due to the high water-table, had been in use since the late eighteenth century for intensive nursery cultivation to meet the needs of the growing population. For seven miles, land on each side of the road from Kensington through Hammersmith and Chiswick and on to Brentford and Twickenham, was dominated by fruit gardens and vegetable cultivation.

Chiswick House was built in the two years from 1727 by Lord Burlington, assisted by his protégé, the architect, painter, artist and landscape gardener William Kent, in the English Palladian style he pioneered. A small jewel, it was an exquisite temple to the arts, filled with the earl’s collection of paintings and architectural drawings, and conceived as a garden with a villa rather than the other way around – a carefully considered work of both architecture and horticulture where the cult of taste was celebrated^* and a new national style of gardening was born. The gardens were classically ornamental, an example of Kent’s earliest experiments in the management of water and the grouping of trees. He converted a brook into a canal lake, and scattered Italian sculpture throughout the landscape of formal hedged avenues, pools, natural river banks and wide lawns. The cedars of Lebanon were reputed to be among the earliest introduced to England. Contemporaries claimed that this was the birthplace of the ‘natural’ style of landscaping, that this was where Kent ‘leapt the fence’ and saw that all nature was a garden.

When the 5th Duke of Devonshire inherited the house, he commissioned Wyatt to add two substantial wings to the building and, in 1813, the 6th Duke, wealthy enough to indulge his passion for building and for horticulture, gilded the velvet-hung staterooms and commissioned Lewis Kennedy to create a formal Italian garden. Samuel Ware – later the architect of the Burlington Arcade – built a 300-foot long conservatory in the formal garden, backed by a brick wall, with a central glass and wood dome. In time, it would be filled with the recently introduced camellias which, along with the exotic animals, captured the very height of Regency fashion.^*

In 1820 the Duke’s sister Harriet wrote to her sister Georgiana that their brother was ‘improving Chiswick, opening and airing it: a few kangaroos, who if affronted will rip up anyone as soon as look at him, elks, emus, and other pretty sportive death-dealers playing about near it’, and ‘On Saturday we drove down to Chiswick … The lawn is beautifully variegated with an Indian Bull and his spouse and goats of all colours and dimensions. I own I think it a mercy that one of the kangaroos has just died in labour, [given] that they hug one to death’. Sir Walter Scott recorded in his diary that Chiswick House ‘resembled a picture of Watteau … the scene was dignified by the presence of an immense elephant, who, under the charge of a groom, wandered up and down, giving the air of Asiatic pageantry to the entertainment’.

In mid-July 1821 a lease was agreed between the Duke of Devonshire and the Horticultural Society for the society to take on a substantial amount of land at Chiswick House, previously let to market gardeners, for 60 years at the cost of £300 a year. The agreement included provision for a private door into the gardens for the duke’s use. An appeal went out to the Fellows of the society for voluntary subscriptions – the king subscribed £500 and the Duke of Devonshire £50.

As the first Garden Committee Reports show, exhibition, instruction and supply were the society’s clear priorities. Fruit cultivation, then culinary vegetables, took the lead, with ornamental and hothouse plants following. All existing species and new plants would be ‘subjected to various modes of treatment in order to ascertain that by which they can be made most effectively useful and productive’. An ‘authentic nomenclature’ was to be established, plants would be clearly tagged with their names, and catalogues of the fruit and vegetables would be produced.^† Grafts and buds from fruit trees would be sent to all nurserymen in order to ensure that they were selling the true plant. It was stated of the fruits that ‘at no period, nor under any circumstances, has such a collection been formed’ and there were hundreds of varieties of vegetables, including 435 lettuce types alone. Very quickly, the society established a collection of over 1,200 roses. In addition, there were large plantings of peonies, phlox and iris and 27 different lilacs in all colours. Dahlias, geraniums and clematis were particularly prized and pansies were beginning to thrive in cultivation.

One of the society’s objectives was the liberal distribution of its plants and knowledge at home and abroad. It saw one of its roles as increasing demand on nurseries by awarding medals to plants of outstanding merit. At the start of the following year, a young man who would become the first Professor of Botany at the new University College of London, a pioneer orchidologist and botanist and whose own fortunes would later be linked with those of Paxton, joined the Society as Assistant Secretary to the garden, at £120 a year. John Lindley was the son of a Norfolk farmer. At 23 he was only four years older than Paxton.

From the outset, the society clearly saw itself as providing a national school for young, unmarried men to learn the craft of horticulture. In its first report of 1823 it laid down that ‘the head gardeners will be permanent servants of the Society, but the under gardeners and labourers employed, will be young men, who, having acquired some previous knowledge of the first rudiments of the art, will be received into the establishment, and having been duly instructed in the various practices of each department, will become entitled to recommendation from the Officers of the Society to fill the situations of Gardeners in private or other establishments’.

The society became the hub of horticultural activity. From 1823 the gardens were open to its expanding membership and their guests in the afternoons; all had to sign a visitors’ book and be escorted by under-gardeners who were required to answer any questions about the plants. It was expressly forbidden to take cuttings or any other specimens, or to tip the gardeners.

On 13 November 1823, Paxton entered the Horticultural Society’s gardens as a labourer. He had been quick off the mark. The first time that his name appears in any authentic surviving document is in Handwriting Book for Undergardeners and Labourers for 1822–9 as only the fifth entrant. In his neat hand he falsified his birthdate and therefore his age, writing ‘at the time of my entering in the Gardens of the Horticultural Society, my father was dead – he was formerly a farmer at Milton Bryant in Bedfordshire where I was born in the year 1801. At the age of fifteen my attention was turned to gardening …’

Always being the youngest in a large family, perhaps he thought twenty-two a more convincing and responsible age than twenty. He does seem to have gone out of his way to make it appear that he started work at the age of fifteen, with the implied benefit of a further two years’ schooling. This lie, in the context of his life taken as a whole, was out of character. Yet, he was driven by an extraordinary new opportunity and the minor detail of the year of his birth was not going to stand in his way. So he took his place alongside Thomas McCann from Ireland, the first entrant in January 1822, Patrick Daly, who had joined on 6 October, and the various sons of shoemakers, seedsmen, stonecutters and farmers. All were paid around fourteen shillings a week.^*

It is not entirely clear in which part of the gardens Paxton was initially employed, but with the library at his disposal he set about a rigorous regime of self-education, unaware that his future lay on the other side of the fence, with the owner of the camellias and kangaroos. From November, a prodigious amount of work was needed on the arboretum, a walled area of about seven and a half acres intended to have a specimen of every kind of hardy tree and shrub capable of enduring the English climate. This was a priority for the society and necessitated the employment of many temporary labourers in the gardens. The Council Meeting Notebooks show that Patrick Daly was, in fact, taken on as only a temporary labourer, probably in the arboretum, that he later showed promise and was retained despite there being no obvious vacancies for him. Was Paxton, too, employed initially only temporarily? Did he hold his breath for those first few months in the tense hope of a permanent position?

During his first year at the gardens there was much to do: the kitchen garden walls were built, along with a pit ground for melons and pines (pineapples). The number of imported plants increased dramatically, partly because of the development of better methods of plant transportation – put simply, many more specimens arrived in England alive. This was, most certainly for a gardener, the only place to be. Paxton was surrounded by the rare and curious specimens sent by the society’s own collectors as well as others – the value in rarity and beauty of the collection was considered greater than any other garden in the world.

Within six months, he had moved to a position as labourer under the management of Mr Donald Munro, the Ornamental Gardener, who was in charge of the new plants. That year, the aspidistra was introduced from China, the fuchsia from Mexico and verbena, petunia and salvia from South America. In 1825 one of the greatest of all the society’s plant-hunters, David Douglas, was in the midst of his expedition to the north Pacific coast of America. During the 1820s Douglas introduced over two hundred new plants including mimulus and lupins; he sent Orchidaceae which mingled with the exquisite new plants donated by the directors of the East India Company and consuls abroad.

All this hunting created an even greater need for better greenhouses and stoves in which to nurture and cultivate successfully the treasured tropical and subtropical plants. An increasingly technical and complex conversation was being joined by an expanding number of voices. Skill in methods to improve and force fruit and vegetables had been growing in England since the seventeenth century at least – hotbeds for salad vegetables, heated walls to ripen fruit trees, pineapple pits and the like were commonplace. Greenhouses, however, were expensive. Glass was heavily taxed by weight, so that manufacturers made efforts to make it thinner and it became increasingly fragile. There was new experimentation with cast iron and curved frameworks, and the invention of pliable putty had helped reduce the instances of glass fracturing in extreme temperatures. By the 1820s, these new, sophisticated greenhouses were classed into four categories: ‘cold’ greenhouses; conservatories heated in winter; ‘dry stoves’ where the temperature would be controlled to a maximum of 85°F during the day and 70°F at night; and the orchid house or ‘bark stove’ where the temperature was never allowed to drop below 70°F and might rise to 90°F on a summer’s day.

John Loudon remarked that the conservatory at Chiswick was beautifully ornamental but extremely gloomy inside. He probably hated the thick wooden sash bars, always preferring iron. The results of his own experiments with glasshouse design were published in 1824 in The Greenhouse Companion hard on the heels of his Encyclopaedia. Previously he had been an advocate of heating glasshouses with fires and smoke flues, but now he was experimenting with high-pressure steam, while others, recognising that steam could too easily wound precious plants, were considering heating systems which consisted of the circulation of hot water through pipes. During the 1820s and long into the 1830s periodicals would be inundated with articles and advice on new kinds of greenhouses and heating methods.

A year after joining the society, Paxton was offered the chance to apply for promotion as an under-gardener back in the arboretum and by the end of March 1825 his three-month trial period was completed satisfactorily and his wages increased to eighteen shillings a week.

It was an auspicious time to work in the arboretum. Only a handful of evergreens were cultivated in England – including the yew, silver fir, Norway spruce and the cedar of Lebanon planted widely in the eighteenth century by Capability Brown – but now the collection of conifers sent by Douglas from North America was ensuring his place in garden history. Among his many discoveries, he sent back seeds of the Sitka spruce – beginning a passion for these huge evergreen novelties – the Monterey pine and, of course, the eponymous Douglas fir (Picea sitchensis) which could grow to over 300 feet. Another of the society’s collectors, James Macrae, sent seeds of the monkey puzzle tree^* – the favourite of the later Victorians – from his travels in Brazil, Chile, Galapagos and Peru in the two years from 1824. Loudon calculated that 89 species of tree and shrub were introduced to England in the sixteenth century, about 130 in the seventeenth, by the eighteenth century over 440, whereas in the first 30 years alone of the nineteenth century around 700 species were brought to England. Put in perspective, in 1500 perhaps 200 kinds of plants were actively cultivated in England, whereas by 1839 that figure had risen to over 18,000. Of those plants, evergreens were to transform the English garden and landscape, until now dominated by deciduous native trees.

There was progress elsewhere in the gardens, too. During 1825 Paxton would have witnessed a tank sunk in the pit to supply water to the fruit garden, as well as the building of new carpenters’ sheds and many new types of glasshouse including one with double lights for the tropical plants, a five-light melon pit, a new pine house and a new vinery between the peach house and the curvilinear fruit house. Alongside his work in the arboretum, he also embarked on a complete record and description of the most notable dahlias in the society’s collection.

‘Dahlia mania’ had swept through the English gardening community at the end of the first decade of the century. First introduced in 1789 by the Marchioness of Bute, it had been lost until rediscovered in 1804. Within ten years, it was being cultivated in most plant collections and by the 1830s, dahlia frenzy approached that for the tulip in the seventeenth century. Conceived as a paper to be presented at one of the society’s meetings, Paxton’s initial work marked the beginning of a passion for the fashionable, intricate and variously formed species that would culminate in his only monograph in later life.

By 1826, England was teetering on the brink of modernisation. The criminal code had been modified and a new police force created in London by Sir Robert Peel. A year earlier, Stephenson had built his three engines for the first passenger train between Stockton and Darlington; his ‘Rocket’ was only three years off. This was also the year in which the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge was founded, promoting adult education for workers in cities through Mechanics’ Institutes – to all intents and purposes adult night schools with libraries. These establishments were at the absolute vanguard of the notion of self-improvement and self-education even though there was still little chance of moving through the ranks. By the late 1850s and 1860s, ‘self-help’ would become a ruling preoccupation of the working and middle classes.

In horticulture there was a further, important development. Just as the first ‘modern’ strawberry (rather than the small wild woodland variety) was being cultivated, that passionate reformer and obstinate workaholic, John Loudon, launched the first periodical aimed at the practical gardener. It was the first popular magazine of its kind devoted exclusively to horticultural subjects, with the stated intention ‘to raise the intellect and the character of those engaged in this art’. In his first issue, he noted the transformation of taste over the previous twenty years, recognising that landscape gardening had given way ‘first to war and agriculture, and since the peace, to horticulture’.

Initially a quarterly, Loudon’s Gardener’s Magazine sold 4,000 of its first number in just a handful of days despite its five shilling price. It was different, packed with general advice and, in order to hold the price down, it eschewed colour plates and copper and steel engravings in favour of cruder wood engravings. Along with several other Loudon magazines, it was to continue until his death in 1843, criticising inefficiency in horticulture, visiting and reporting in detail on public and private gardens, reviewing contemporary books and periodicals, publishing nurserymen’s catalogues and price lists as well as reporting on the activities of the Horticultural Society. Every issue described the plethora of new gadgets becoming available to gardeners and was stuffed with articles on the widest range of subjects – from the use of green vegetable manure to the washing of salads or the method of setting the fruit of the granadilla. Paxton would later use many of the ideas initially published in this revolutionary magazine as a springboard for his own innovations.

Loudon used the introduction of the first issue to discuss three points closest to his heart. First, was the love of gardening he saw among all ages and all ranks of society. Secondly, he both praised the Horticultural Society for its encouragement and development of the science, and disparaged what he saw as Joseph Sabine’s mismanagement of the establishment – a criticism he would maintain doggedly until the society was reformed in 1830. Thirdly and perhaps most importantly, Loudon addressed the issue of improvement in the education of gardeners, pointing out that as the status of head gardener had risen, so had the need for development in their general instruction. This was a theme that was to continue throughout the life of the publication.

Interest in the gardens and the society was flourishing. Curiosity for new plants continued to grow so fast that, in 1827, the society held its first ‘fête’ in the garden. Only a couple of years later, over 1,500 carriages waited in a line extending from Hyde Park Corner along Hammersmith Road for the doors to open at nine o’clock, despite torrential rain. Paxton, meanwhile, witnessed the latest architectural and engineering technologies, examined the plants and techniques in the various departments, and spent time in the society’s library with the latest catalogues. He found himself in good company – the authority and distinction of the gardens were attracting labourers from some of the largest estates in England and abroad.

In 1826, Paxton was offered a position that was to settle the course of his future entirely. ‘On April 22nd Joseph Paxton, under gardener in the arboretum, left, recommended a place …’ These Council Meeting Notes of 4 May 1826 betray nothing of the fact that this was a defining moment in the young man’s life. He had been offered the position of Superintendent of the Gardens at Chatsworth – to all intents and purposes head gardener at one of the grandest estates in England and for one of the richest aristocrats in the land, the 6th Duke of Devonshire. Paxton was to be paid £1 5s a week, or £65 a year, and live in a cottage in the kitchen gardens.

The immensely rich William Spencer Cavendish, 6th Duke of Devonshire, had apparently encountered Paxton as he let himself into the gardens through the gate from Chiswick House. Son of the celebrated Georgiana, the 6th Duke had inherited his title when he was 21, in the year after Paxton’s father died. With it, came estates comprising nearly 200,000 acres of land and the stately houses of Chatsworth and Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire, Lismore Castle in County Wexford, Ireland, Bolton Abbey in the West Riding and three great London palaces – Chiswick House and, in Mayfair, Devonshire House and Burlington House. With an inherited income of over £70,000 Hart, as he was known to his family, had the world at his feet.

At 36 years old, the Duke was unmarried, despite being the most eligible bachelor in England. He was partially deaf, and of a ‘sweet disposition’. He was, according to Prince Puckler-Muskau, attending one of his parties in 1826, ‘a King of fashion and elegance …’ No one could excel, and few could rival him, in position. He was clever and comical, sensitive, extravagant, nervous and, despite throwing many of the country’s best parties, somewhat lonely.

Given his particularly Regency interest in new, valuable and exotic plants, he is likely to have sought out the labourers in the ornamental garden, where Paxton was occupied in tending the new plants and training the creepers. In Paxton he found a straightforward youth, self-effacing as well as confident, passionate about his plants, full of energy, bright and patient. He was young and unproven but the Duke was without a gardener at Chatsworth and he acted impulsively – the appointment is not even noted in the detailed daily journal he kept for many years. He was anxious to be off. On 7 April the King had approved of his replacing Wellington as Extraordinary Ambassador to the Court of St James for the coronation of Tsar Nicholas I in Russia. Wellington was needed at home and though the Duke was a liberal Whig rather than a staunch Tory like Wellington, his wealth and position in England and his close friendship with Nicholas ensured that his lobbies for the role were successful.

On 8 May, two weeks after leaving the society – and not yet quite 23 – Paxton collected his instructions from Devonshire House and took the coach to Chatsworth. Together, in an unlikely but astonishingly fruitful pairing, he and the Duke would make the gardens at Chatsworth famous again after almost fifty years of neglect.

^* Thus ‘Botany Bay’ outside Sydney, Australia. Plants discovered on these journeys included the Banksia, Grevillea, Protea, Acacia and Ficus.

^* Careful descriptions of Miller’s experiments are found in his Dictionary, including new methods of forcing apricots and cherries by nailing the trees on to a screen of boards, glazing the south face and heating the north back with a hotbed.

^† Though the Bessemer-Siemens process of ‘mild’ steel manufacture which made large-scale production possible was not commercially available until the 1860s.

^* Later, in a letter to the 6th Duke on 4 .June 1836 (Devonshire Collections; 6^th Duke’s Group No. 3512), Miss Mary Russel Mitford says she accompanied Wordsworth to the house – ‘that fine poet … who while illustrating all that is charming in natural scenery has yet so true and cultivated a taste for painting and architecture, never surely so triumphantly conjoined as at Chiswick House’.

^* The Italian garden, the conservatory and many of the original camellia plants still exist at Chiswick House Gardens, London, W4. The first book on the subject of the camellia appeared in 1819, Monograph on the genus Camellia by Samuel Curtis, and listed 29 varieties being grown in England.

^* The catalogues were consistently delayed by other work, and the fruit tree catalogue was finally finished in 1827, listing an astonishing 3,825 varieties.

^* In the second issue of Loudon’s Gardener’s Magazine, he compares these wages to those of an illiterate bricklayer who would earn around five to seven shillings a day, whereas ‘a journeyman gardener who has gone through a course of practical geometry and land surveying, has a scientific knowledge of botany, and has spent his days and his nights in reading books connected to his profession, gets no more than two shillings or two and sixpence a day.’ While the Horticultural Society, he said, was humanely paying fourteen to eighteen shillings a week, an average London nursery was paying only ten shillings. Loudon regularly lobbied for increased wages for garden labourers and gardeners.

^* Araucaria araucana or Chilean pine, like the fern and the aspidistra a great Victorian symbol, and one that Paxton and the Duke did much to popularise.