KATE COLQUHOUN

A THING IN DISGUISE
THE VISIONARY LIFE OF
JOSEPH PAXTON

DEDICATION

For David

EPIGRAPH

She did not have to be told … that glass is a thing in disguise, an actor, is not solid at all, but liquid, that an old sheet of glass will not only take on a royal and purplish tinge but will reveal its true liquid nature by having grown fatter at the bottom and thinner at the top, and that even while it is as frail as the ice on a Paramatta puddle, it is stronger under compression than Sydney sandstone, that it is invisible, solid, in short, a joyous and paradoxical thing, as good a material as any to build a life from.

Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue

Part 1: Earth

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Part 2: Air

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Part 3: Fire

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Notes

A Note on Currency

Select Bibliography

Index

Appendix

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise for A Thing in Disguise

Copyright

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

Just after 7 p.m. on Monday, 30 November 1936, a small fire started under the central transept of the Crystal Palace in south London, the greatest glasshouse ever built.

Preparations for The National Cat Show to begin the next day had just been finalised. A choir was rehearsing in the garden room, birds ruffled their feathers in the aviaries. Otherwise the Palace – with its nave of 1,608 feet and main transept larger than the dome of St Peter’s in Rome – was still. Its enormous frosty surface, made up of over 1,500,000 square feet of glass, glittered and, as the moon emerged occasionally from the cloud, it struck the statues in the formal, terraced gardens spreading out below the building. In the surrounding boroughs, families prepared their evening meals and planned their Christmases.

The two Palace nightwatchmen on duty that evening were rather slow on the uptake. Their first call was made to the Penge Fire Brigade just before eight o’clock, by which time the flames could be seen clearly from outside the building and street fire alarms were being activated all over the area. At 7.45 p.m. Police Constable Parkin, passing on a bus, was one of many who also called the brigade. They arrived at 8.03 p.m. with their one, slow fire engine. Beckenham Fire Brigade followed within a couple of minutes, and soon a call went out to all the brigades in London to join them. On the great ridge, a fresh force 5 wind from the north-west fanned the fire like bellows and drove it down the giant south nave. Within 30 minutes, all the central parts of the building were ablaze – wild waves of flame battered relentlessly against the glass and leapt right up to the roof. Encouraged by the wind, the fire devoured the great stage and organ, the 20,000 chairs stored underneath and the floors themselves. It fed on the figures in a waxwork exhibition, the plants and trees, the stuffed animals and the various exhibits. It reached such an astonishing intensity of heat that the iron framework glowed white, buckled and, one by one, the vast glass panes began to explode.

As armies of fire fighters and fire engines with their bells clanging arrived from all over London, the practising choir was evacuated, the exotic birds in the aviaries freed from their cages to fly up into the smoke and take their chances. The gas company worked fast to dig a trench to cut off the main gas supply Air forced through the organ pipes caused it to groan accompaniment. Motor pumps and turntable ladders were set up on the wide parade. Precariously balanced firemen turned scores of hoses on the fire and the new hose-lorry of the London Fire Brigade, which could reel out 1½ miles of hose at a speed of 15 miles an hour, was used for the first time after being demonstrated only the afternoon before. However, the brigade could do little but delay the inevitable. High on the hill the water pressure was simply not strong enough. Using the five million gallons of water available in the upper reservoir, still the hoses had negligible effect. Just short of an hour after the fire began, the entire building was in flames and the firemen had to retreat to 100 feet beyond the glowing mass.

Clouds of smoke stretched for miles. An exaggerated, orange glow took over the sky. It was seen in eight counties – as far as Devil’s Dyke near Brighton, about 50 miles away – causing hundreds of thousands of people to converge on the high ground of the South Downs at Epsom and on Hampstead Heath across the Thames. Tens of thousands more swarmed by every means to the Palace itself, hampering the emergency services in their race to the hill. One newspaper later reported that a parked car, used as a grandstand by hordes of onlookers, collapsed and was found the following day with its tyres burst and its wheels splayed at each corner. Many hundreds of bicycles were deserted as it became impossible to ride or push them through the dense crowds.

Throughout the 82 years it stood on Penge Hill, the Palace and its gardens had become London’s most famous resort, renowned above all for its music and for the great organ with its 3,714 speaking pipes. Over one million people visited each year to attend the Saturday festivals, wander through the historical courts or gaze at Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins’ giant dinosaur replicas. Here they enjoyed the firework displays, tightrope walkers and wild animals and cheered at cricket matches and dirt-track motorbike races. It had become a national monument for old and young well before it became national property in 1913.

Even the Duke of Kent joined the crowds to watch the fire. From every window, every tree and every available railing, people were mesmerised by the destruction of their poor old palace. One enterprising man in Hillside Road, Streatham, hired out field glasses for twopence a look. In Parliament, MPs and Lords packed the upstairs committee rooms and terraces for a view of the angry sky.

The ferocity of the fire was awe-inspiring. By 8.35, the ribs of the vast central transept roof had become a stark black skeleton against the white blaze, visibly bent and twisted. With a roar and an explosion of sparks that carried for miles, they collapsed. Just before nine o’clock, the modular arched girders of the south transept began to fall like hoops, one by one in a macabre reversal of their construction. The halls, the great organ, the immense library of Handel Festival music were gone. The vast stone steps to the terraces were shattered by the falling face of the transept, molten glass dropped from the great girders. The firemen were dwarfed against the great bowl of flame, as streams of molten glass poured down outside the building, forcing them back. Explosions rocked the neighbourhood as the fire reached the boilers in the basement, frightening a carpet of rats that streamed out across the park. The water in the central fountain inside the building boiled and the fish perished.

At either end of the Palace stood Brunel’s magnificent towers, each 282 feet high, built to house the water tanks that fed the elaborate fountains in the park. As the fire sped south down the building, the alarm was raised that the south tower was under threat and a great race was on to save it. The tower was close to the houses on Anerley Hill and contained 1,200 tons of water and material used by the Baird Company in their television researches; if it collapsed, it would take many hundreds of lives with it. Locals were evacuated from their homes – one newspaper reported that a woman was not allowed to get her coat but was told to wrap herself in newspaper to keep warm.

By 10.30, the buildings near the south tower had burst into flames but the tower appeared safe. The fire meantime worked against the wind and attention now turned to the north tower. By 11.40, flames were breaking through the roof of the northern end of the building but, luckily, a large section of the north wing had been lost after the gales of 1861, creating some distance between it and the tower. By midnight the fire was burning itself out with no further threat to Brunel’s great engineering achievements. Only the two towers, the south wing and a portion of the north wing’s roof still stood, all enveloped in flame, white-hot. By three in the morning, though small fires continued to burn, the firemen packed up – over five hundred of them, more than a third of the city’s brigade.

The following day, hoarding was erected to keep out the crowds, though sightseers continued to stream to the hill. The Daily Sketch estimated that there had been over a million visitors to the site within the first two days – the number of visitors to the Palace in a normal year. One family travelled overnight from Yorkshire. In the City, shares in Madame Tussaud’s, Olympia and White City soared.

The biggest blaze in living memory, caused perhaps by a cigarette stub, perhaps by a broken flue pipe from the boiler in the office at the front of the Palace, had left only a tangled wreck of buckled iron and molten glass, with here and there the broken arm, head or leg of a statue, lodged at fantastic angles. Amazingly, not a single life had been lost. The Christmas shows were cancelled and the booking agents were in chaos. There was concern that a major venue for the May Coronation celebrations for Edward VIII had been lost.

The general manager of the Crystal Palace Company, Sir Henry Buckland, made it clear that he did not believe the Palace would be rebuilt unless the government stepped forward with at least £5 million. He dispelled reports suggesting that the building was fully insured, and confirmed that insurance was only purchased to the value of £110,000. Eighty-four years before, it had cost £1,350,000 to build.

With blind optimism, three days after the disaster, the first sod was cut for a new road-racing circuit on the lower terraces as the burnt-out hulk of the Palace loured in the background. But national and international events were to take precedence that week. As the fire had raged on that Monday night, Madrid had been severely bombed, fuelling concern about the escalating civil war in Spain. On Thursday that week, Edward VIII sparked a constitutional crisis by asking Baldwin to sanction a morganatic marriage to Mrs Simpson. A week later the King had abdicated and Mrs Simpson, the most talked-about woman in the world, was fleeing across France, chased by the world’s press.

The weekend after the fire saw the first snows of winter. The Observer called the site ‘the very genius of December’. The naked, straggling trees were mimicked by the curious masses of twisted metal, odd twigs of ironwork and fantastic growths of remnant glass. ‘The vitrified palace had become a petrified forest.’

Two months later, in The Architectural Review, Le Corbusier articulated the essential attraction of the glass building which, by some miracle, had remained as a last witness to an era of faith and daring: he wrote ‘one could go there and see it, and feel there how far we have still to go before we can hope to recover that sense of scale which animated our predecessors in all they wrought’. Before the fire, like many millions before him, he had not been able to tear his eyes from ‘the spectacle of its triumphant harmony’. His definition of architecture as a way of thinking, of achieving order and of expressing contemporary problems in terms of materials, was epitomised by the achievement of Paxton’s miraculous building – the first in the world to be constructed of mass-produced standardised parts and the first to use glass and iron on such a scale. The Architectural Review carried its own obituary to the building, describing this ‘colossal crinolined birdcage’ as no fossilised museum piece, but instead a precept as ‘inspiring as the Parthenon … as important as Stonehenge’. The building, it said, had liberalised architecture and provided the ‘first structural renaissance of architecture since the middle ages’.

Outliving all prophecies of structural disaster, the Victorian Valhalla, Thackeray’s ‘blazing arch of lucid glass’, one of the greatest memorials to Victorian engineering, architectural achievement and popular amusement, had sunk to her knees, all but taking the memory of her creator, Joseph Paxton, with her. Paxton was a gardener first and last but, as a pioneer among Victorian self-made men, he was part of a generation who thought of their own time as one of transition from past to future and who embraced the innovations of the day. His character sprang from the spirit of the age – determined by imagination, unremitting energy, motivation, and enthusiasm – a coupling of enterprise and ambition. Like many of his contemporaries, he appeared to be able to turn his hand to almost any task: an untrained engineer and architect, half-amateur and half-professional, he not only built the most perfect greenhouses in history but became the greatest horticulturist of his day. He was a revolutionary – the Crystal Palace was one of the most astonishing design and engineering feats of the nineteenth century. With his dogged single-mindedness, Paxton typified the bold new men with abundant creative energy who grew out of and formed the age of unparalleled industrial expansion, a quintessentially persevering pragmatist.

Yet, in 1936 a jarring, prophetic note was struck by George Bernard Shaw. Asked by the Daily Sketch what he thought should replace the Palace, he replied, ‘I have no wish to see the Crystal Palace rebuilt. Queen Victoria is dead at last.’ Without its raison d’être, the garden’s magnificent terraces and blaze of flowers languished and fell to ruin. The site has still to be redeveloped. The broken stone steps, one lonely damaged statue and several sad sphinxes witness only the creep of the brambles. A television transmitter towers starkly on the ridge. The sculptured bust of Joseph Paxton, erected in 1869 four years after his death, turns its back to the forlorn, now empty hill, looking away from the vanished glory of his intoxicating pleasure dome.

PART 1 EARTH

CHAPTER ONE

Milton Bryant is a small and pretty rural village some 50 miles from London, raised slightly above the Bedfordshire plain, modestly protected from change now, as it most certainly was in the early 1800s, by its position on the edge of the Duke of Bedford’s Woburn Estate. At that time the village formed part of the collected farms of the Woburn Estate, containing a manor house as well as a public house, a collection of cottages and gravel pits, a village pond and a Saxon church. Half a mile away is the site of a now vanished mansion, Battlesden Park, and a further 2 miles away is the market town of Woburn and its abbey.

On 17 May 1810, aged 50, Joseph Paxton’s father William, a farm labourer, was buried there three months before Paxton’s seventh birthday. The boy’s family were now poorer than ever. Later in life, when he was wealthy and enjoying a fine dinner, he is said to have remarked, ‘you never know how much nourishment there is in a turnip until you have had to live on it’.

There are few documents relating to the early years of Paxton’s life. It has been suggested that his father was a tenant farmer, rather than a labourer – the disparity in incomes of the two positions was not slight – but his name does not appear in any of the rent books for the Woburn Estates, nor is there any mention of him in the land tax records for the area. William may have farmed his brother’s land or he may have laboured at Battlesden Park, where two of his sons subsequently became bailiffs. Whether he farmed or laboured, he worked on land in a county famed for market gardening, where smallholders cropped wheat, barley and some oats.

Joseph Paxton had been born on 3 August 1803, the seventh son and last of the nine children of William and Anne, who had moved to the village by the time their fourth child was baptised. His parents had been married for about 22 years, and both were in their early forties. By 1803, their eldest child – also William – was twenty and soon to be married and it is likely that five or six of the other children still lived at home. They were John (16 when Paxton was born), Henry (14), James (11), Thomas (9), Mary Ann (7) and Sarah (about 3) – all packed into a small labourer’s cottage.

It was an auspicious year for a future gardener to be born. In 1803 the Liverpool Botanical Gardens opened and the Horticultural Society was conceived; Joseph Banks sent William Kerr to collect plants in China and Humphry Repton was about to publish his Observations on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening. In the wider context of their lives, England stood on the threshold of great political and social upheaval. On the one hand, the French Revolution of 1789 had heralded democracy; on the other, Georgian aristocracy were still pursuing their lives of privilege. The demand for universal suffrage would grow in fervour right up to and beyond the First Reform Act of 1832, but now the transition from a feudal and agricultural order to a democratic and industrial society was just beginning.

From the start of the Industrial Revolution in the mid-eighteenth century, towns had been growing as labourers moved from the land to work in ‘manufactories’ with their new power looms, the spinning jenny and, by the latter part of the century, steam power. Demand for new textiles and manufactured products was stimulated by the wars that had raged for years with France and by 1815 many of these factories had become great mills. Later, the demand for iron products for roads, bridges and railways would accelerate the migration as people packed into industrial towns like Manchester, Bradford, Liverpool, Birmingham and Sheffield, swelling them by an average of 50 per cent. The population of England doubled between 1801 and 1850.

By the time Paxton’s father died, the distress of agricultural and factory workers alike was growing. The Luddite riots of 1811–12, where the workers’ anger was directed not so much at the machines as at the bosses who refused to negotiate with them over pay and conditions, erupted and the perpetrators were, for the most part, deported to Australia. As veterans returned from the French war in 1815, post-war depression and its consequent poverty set in. Crucially, cheap wheat imports were banned by the new Corn Law – a measure which maintained the high price of bread and the increasingly dismal lot of the labourer. By 1816, the price of bread had risen sixteenfold over fifty years.

In the countryside these radical changes were less obvious, though its economic structure was changing, too. The French wars had raised the cost of food and in 1803 many potato crops failed. So there were more people and less food, a distress compounded by the enclosure system, which had begun at the end of the previous century, and which meant that labourers were no longer able to use common land to grow vegetables, forage for firewood or graze animals. Wages were not increased to compensate for the loss of these auxiliary resources – so that, earning only seven or eight shillings a week, most labouring families were subsisting on a diet of tea, potatoes, some cheese and bread. Yet the pace, if not the quality, of life in the country was still broadly as it had been for centuries. Nothing travelled faster than a galloping horse and rural life followed the traditional agricultural calendar of Valentine’s Day, May Day, Summer Harvest, the village feast, hiring-fairs at Michaelmas, Guy Fawkes, late-November seeding and Christmas. Only rarely did events of national importance punctuate their rhythm: in 1814, when Napoleon was sent to Elba, there was mass celebration in Woburn, where houses were decorated with oak boughs and flowers and there was street feasting.

There are several differing reports of Paxton’s schooling. Given the death of his father and the consequent poverty of his family, it is fairly extraordinary that he made it to school at all. Education did not become a requirement by law until as late as 1880; farmers generally opposed the few free schools available, preferring their children to work in the fields for a few pennies, and conservative opinion considered popular education dangerous and undesirable. Some churches introduced Sunday Schools since this was often a child’s only free day, but weekday teaching for the working classes was rare.

There was no school in Milton Bryant until 1853, but there was a free school for boys at Woburn, started by the 1st Duke of Bedford. In 1808 it was rebuilt, reorganised and run on a voluntary subscription. According to a report in 1818, it was ‘large, of stone, three storey in height, containing two large classrooms besides many other apartments’. Working-class schools like this functioned on the pretty disastrous monitor system in which apprentice teachers passed on, by rote, what they may have rather ineffectually learned themselves, while one master supervised the entire school. Few working-class children had more than two or three years of desultory education, and few could do more than write their names.

There are no records of pupils at the Woburn school but it seems likely that Paxton attended, however intermittently, making the long walk from his village twice a day, since he could certainly read and write proficiently by the time he joined the Horticultural Society in London in 1823. In 1808, the Duke of Bedford reported to his friend the Liberal peer Samuel Whitbread that there were 104 boys enrolled there, of whom about 80 attended regularly; the hours were 9 a.m. to midday and 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. The school was divided into eight classes run by monitors and assistants, with one supervising master; the first class of boys were taught the alphabet by printing on a sand desk, repeated twelve times in a day, and the second class – in which the boys were streamed according to ability – wrote their alphabet on slates and learned words and syllables as well as spelling from cards. In subsequent years the boys learned arithmetic and were allowed to write in copy books once they had mastered joined writing; the monitors read from the Scriptures, while the boys sat in silence with their hands on their laps, and in the afternoon, Isaac Watts’ hymns were sung.

Paxton’s first job in a garden was about to be offered. The 6th Duke of Bedford was one of the most important patrons of horticulture (the science of the culture of plants). His garden was his great love and had become a centre for innovation and experimental gardening. Designed by Repton – the most fashionable landscape designer of his day, who worked widely in Bedfordshire between 1804–9 – the Duke’s garden had begun to receive some of the botanic treasures being introduced by collectors from around the world. More significantly for Paxton, in 1808 the immensely rich and possibly insane* Sir Gregory Osborne Page Turner also employed Repton to lay out his gardens at Battlesden Park. The elaborate series of watercolours of the completed garden which he commissioned from George Shepherd shows iron conservatories, luxuriant flower gardens and great groups of trees.

Paxton’s eldest brother, William, had become the bailiff and superintendent of the estates at Battlesden Park on a salary of £100 a year. In 1816, when his youngest brother was fifteen, William took on two leases there. The first, in March, was for 28 acres of meadow or pasture at a cost of £65 a year and included an understanding that he would take on a servant and a horse at his own expense, but keep all rents and profits generated on the land. The second, in December, formed an agreement to rent the entire garden ground for four years at a cost of £16 16s. This comprised ‘four pieces of garden ground used as kitchen garden, fruit garden, old orchard and nursery, pond garden and house garden’, about two and a half acres in total. Also a cottage, ‘but not the pleasure garden nor the hot houses or plants and ponds thereon’. The fruit garden alone was enormous: filled with peach, nectarine, apricot, damson, cherry, plum, pear and apple trees as well as raspberries, currants and gooseberries.

The running of Battlesden had become something of a Paxton family business. His brother, Thomas, now ran the home farm at Potsgrove (part of the Battlesden Estate); he leased land from Sir Gregory as well as acting as his land agent, successfully occupying 415 acres and employing 21 labourers. Paxton probably went to live and work with William as a gardening boy at Battlesden from around the date of these leases when he would have been fifteen or sixteen. In gardens filled with fruit trees, flowers and, since there were hothouses, presumably exotic and tender plants as well, he was first introduced to the wonders of botany and horticulture and began to learn the rudiments of his trade. Paxton’s granddaughter, Violet Markham, suggests that William treated him very severely and he ran away to Essex where he was taken in by a Quaker, who encouraged him to return to Battlesden. It is impossible to substantiate this story, though it is clear that later in life Paxton, far from hating William, remained fond of his much older brother, taking time out of hectic schedules to visit him and his family.

Aged fifteen, Paxton left his brother in order to work at the estate of Woodhall near Walton in Hertfordshire. The house had been bought by Samuel Smith in 1801 and Paxton was to work there under the charge of William Griffin. He was lucky. Here was an eighteenth-century park and woodland, with new gardens lately built around the house, run by an ardent horticulturist and reputed fruiterer. Griffin was the author of a treatise on the ‘Culture of the Pine Apple’ as well as a paper on the management of grapes in vineries; he was a part of the coalescing horticultural establishment and his name appears in 1824 among the first subscribers to the new Horticultural Society Gardens at Chiswick. A professional with a reputation for giving thorough and kindly instruction to the young men who worked with him, it is entirely possible that Griffin filled Paxton’s head with stories of the new society in London and that he encouraged the boy to think of a time when he might apply to them for a position in one of their gardens.

After an apprenticeship of about three years, the young Paxton was attracted back to Battlesden Park and the gardens, where he found himself in charge of the excavation of a large lake called the New Fish Pond. Great amounts of earth would have been removed by hand and in wheelbarrows, relying largely on observation and reasoning rather than any engineering calculus. By 1823 Sir Gregory was already showing signs of the insanity into which he would soon collapse, and was declared bankrupt with liabilities of over £100,000 – the entire contents of his house would be sold at auction by Christie’s the following year. Paxton had witnessed the sort of upper-class profligacy that would later find its echo in his patron, the 6th Duke of Devonshire. The house and gardens at Battlesden have not survived, but this new fish pond, with its island, bulrushes and the company of swans, can still be found today, surrounded only by fields. Its construction provided Paxton with experience he would later call upon as he undertook huge earthworks at Chatsworth.

On 14 April 1823, aged 62, Paxton’s mother died and was buried in the village church at Milton Bryant. One month later Paxton’s uncle Thomas followed her. Paxton’s thoughts turned to London and the chance of advancement through the profession of gardening. He was almost 20 and, with the incarceration of the lunatic Sir Gregory, he was out of a job. Some records suggest that he obtained work first in the gardens at Wimbledon House, leased by the Duke of Somerset, and it is certain that his brother James was a gardener there. Perhaps it was here that sibling disaffection raised its head. Many years later the Duke of Devonshire wrote to his gardener that it would take only one word from Paxton to secure James a position as gardener and bailiff to Lady Dover, yet the Duke imagined that Paxton would not like to recommend his brother.

It has also been suggested that at around this point Paxton went to work in the gardens of the famous nurserymen Messrs Lee and Kennedy in London, though there are no records to support this. Whatever the case, by November 1823 Paxton had turned his attention to the new gardens of the Horticultural Society in Chiswick, and in so doing, secured the direction of his own future.

* He was regularly in court to determine his state of mind. In December 1823 he was found to be of ‘unsound mind', rather than a lunatic. The jurors heard that hundreds of clocks and watches were found scattered all over the house in Bedfordshire, in a serious state of disarray. Morning Herald, 13 and 20 Dec. 1823.

CHAPTER TWO

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; 6th 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.

CHAPTER THREE

I left London by the Comet Coach for Chesterfield, and arrived at Chatsworth at half past four o’clock in the morning of the ninth of May 1826. As no person was to be seen at that early hour, I got over the greenhouse gate by the old covered way, explored the pleasure grounds, and looked round the outside of the house. I then went down to the kitchen gardens, scaled the outside wall and saw the whole place, set the men to work there at six o’clock; then returned to Chatsworth and got Thomas Weldon to play me the water works, and afterwards went to breakfast with poor dear Mrs Gregory and her niece. The latter fell in love with me, and I with her, and thus completed my first morning’s work at Chatsworth before nine o’clock.

Chatsworth is in the heart of England, about 12 miles from Chesterfield, 26 miles from Derby and 10 miles from Matlock, below the Peaks in wild natural scenery a million miles from the soft lines of Bedfordshire or Chiswick. The park in which the Palladian mansion stands is nearly 11 miles in circumference and the setting is magically diverse – hills give way to peaks, thick woods to pasture, and through it all snakes the River Derwent.

The coach would have taken between ten and fifteen hours from London. Paxton apparently walked from Chesterfield, across the high moors through the night, arriving about three hours later at the thousand-acre estate. As the sun rose on this rural idyll and birdsong joined the ripple of the Derwent to pierce the morning silence, he would have seen for the first time the breathtaking natural grandeur of his new home. With his irresistible energy he was keen to take stock of the scope of his astonishing new job.

The old walled kitchen garden, probably conceived by Capability Brown in the 1760s, was a whole 12 acres designed to produce the finest quality fruit, vegetables and flowers, month in and month out. It lay in a quiet spot on the banks of the swiftly flowing river, a fifteen-minute walk from the house across parkland dotted with sheep.

The garden over which the young man now had control had a long and various history, constructed and planted over several hundred years according to prevailing fashion. In 1555 Bess of Hardwick, a rich and powerful local heiress, married William Cavendish and started to build the first house. The steep east slope was terraced and fish ponds, fountains and formal plots with orchards and gazebos in the Tudor style were introduced. In 1570 it provided a prison for the exiled Mary Queen of Scots.

In 1659 Bess’ grandson – the 3rd Earl – modernised the gardens, adding a massive and intricate parterre with formal, geometrical beds. Between 1687 and 1707 the 4th Earl (now 1st Duke of Devonshire) rebuilt the Elizabethan house in classical, Ionic style, employing as his architect William Talman, one of the first great gardener-architects. The famous pairing of London and Wise, owners of the enormous nurseries at Brompton Park on the outskirts of London, in turn made its mark on the gardens. George London designed a new parterre to the west of the house, the planting of these elaborate embroidery designs supervised by Le Nôtre who had laid out the patterned gardens at Versailles. Henry Wise (of Hampton Court renown) later partnered London on the design of a further parterre to the south of the house. A great greenhouse, a separate masonry construction with huge south-facing windows, was erected along with a bowling green with its own classical temple.

Befitting the zenith of the formal style, these new gardens were filled with fine stone and brass works of art. The Danish sculptor, Cibber, who worked with Wren on both St Paul’s Cathedral and Hampton Court, fashioned sea horses for the fountains, the garden deity Flora, and many other works to watch over the gravel paths, shady basins, formal orchards and ornamental knots. This was formal gardening on a grand scale, introducing architectural features to the landscape in order to complement the great classical house that was rising out of it.

Inspired by a vogue in France and Holland, waterworks were to become the most characteristic feature of great gardens. On the steep east slope, a grand cascade was therefore fashioned by another Frenchman, a hydraulics engineer, Monsieur Grillet (a pupil of Le Nôtre). In the two years from 1694, he constructed a feeder reservoir on the top slope – earthworks on a massive scale that could only have fired Paxton’s imagination as he took it all in that morning. The elegant cascade house was added a few years later and water poured over the domed roof of a temple and through the mouths of its sculpted dolphins before tumbling over steep, wide steps towards the house below.

On the south front of the house, beyond the grand parterre, the slope was levelled and a canal dug in the last years of the seventeenth century, a flat sheet of water reflecting the sky and the lime walk to its west in stark contrast to the majestic River Derwent. Already in 1700, Chatsworth had become a school in which to learn gardening on a grand architectural scale. The gardens were freely open to the well-heeled public and the many visitors were astonished by this display of social rank and civilisation in the midst of the wild Derbyshire Peaks.

From the 1730s, much of this old garden, though not its architectural features, began to be erased. Kent, architect of Chiswick House, was the leader of the new style of gardening which embraced nature and fields over the formal designs and fountains of his predecessors. The 1st Duke’s grand masonry greenhouse at Chatsworth was now moved, a pineapple house built and a lawn melting into park obliterated the parterre. All that remained of the ornamental was swept away in favour of the elitism of the landscaped park. Bess’ terraces were destroyed. Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown removed the straight lines, the patterned planting and most of the flowers and topiary and undertook a massive tree-planting programme with carpets of grass stretching to distant stands of trees. Once again the gardens were moulded by fashion and Chatsworth, rich in Walpole’s perfect elements for a romantic garden – ancient trees, massive rocks, sweeping rivers and dashing natural waterfalls – provided an impeccable framework for grand rural ‘improvement’.

This was the park inherited by the 5th Duke and his beautiful and wayward wife Georgiana, and by their only son, the 6th Duke. Since Georgiana and her husband both preferred courtly and political life in London, the gardens saw almost no activity for 50 years – a grotto was built for Georgiana but little else – and they were all but neglected.

Soon after inheriting in 1811, the new duke started to rearrange again. Embracing the latest interest in flowers and flower beds, he reintroduced a parterre in front of the greenhouse in 1812 and a few years later he planted nearly two million forest trees in the old Stand Wood, rising on a hill to the east of the house. The trees covered an area of over 550 acres. Oak, ash, beech, elm, sycamore, poplar and birch, larch and spruce firs were all planted 4 feet apart. In the early 1820s, over 30,000 more trees were planted, earning the Duke the Gold Medal of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce.

The 6th Duke was a child of the Regency period and highly civilised, a patron of the arts and sciences but, unlike his parents, he was a liberal in politics and sentiment. Delayed by the weather, he had left for Russia that morning, 9 May, not to return to England for six months. In his absence, there was work in progress. He had commissioned the fashionable architect, Jeffry Wyatt,* to begin a vast remodelling of the house and parts of the garden and, when Paxton arrived that morning, the enormous new north wing extension, which would entirely change the scale of the house, was in the final stages of construction. Vast alterations in the layout of rooms and corridors were being planned; a new scullery, larder and kitchens were finished, new staterooms, an elaborate ballroom, dining room and sculpture gallery were projected. It was the height of modern aristocratic luxury, testimony to the Duke’s grand conceptions and deep purse. At the time of Paxton’s arrival, stirred though he must have been by the glorious gardens, this part of the house must have still been something of a building site – he describes the library as looking like ‘a lumber room’.

Wyatt was also turning his attention outside, forming plans for the garden in the new Picturesque* taste practised by Repton and directing a refocusing of attention from landscape and park to a formality of design based around the house, with symmetrical arrangements of sculpture and clipped trees and new embroidery parterres. The parkland immediately surrounding the house was being transformed into a ‘pleasure ground’ in which nature was once again dominated by horticulture. A new wide gravel walk nearly a third of a mile long and to be flanked by the Duke’s favourite trees, the monkey puzzle, was being fashioned, in what the Duke was later to call Wyatt’s ‘first great hit out of doors’. The west garden was to be relevelled out of Brown’s slope, with the sea-horse and tulip fountains fed by underground pipes from water in the cascade and, ever a perfectionist, the Duke also moved the whole cascade sideways to be in a more perfect alignment with the new building.

As the numbers of visitors increased during the early part of the nineteenth century, regulations concerning the visiting public were put in place and altered only marginally each year. Before the railway came to Rowsley, parties were limited to about a dozen; the house and garden were freely open every day from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m, with reduced hours often imposed on Saturdays; carriages had to depart and return later for their passengers; dogs were expressly forbidden and on wet and dirty days permission could be refused to visit the principal apartments. In the gardens, the groups were accompanied by one of the garden staff, and the waterworks were played for all visitors on request.

In the Duke’s Handbook, printed privately for his sisters in 1845, the Duke wrote that when Paxton arrived he found ‘at the kitchen garden … 4 pine houses, bad; two vineries which contained 8 bunches of grapes; 2 good peach houses, and a few cucumber frames. There were no houses at all for plants, and there was nowhere a plant of later introduction than about the year 1800. There were 8 rhododendrons and not one camellia.’ Of the kitchen garden he wrote ‘[it] was so low, and exposed to floods from the river, that I supposed the first wish of the new gardener would be to remove it to some other place.’ Paxton did not move it. He made it flourish.

Whatever he thought of the state of the gardens, Paxton could not have failed to have been dazzled by the gilding on the windows of the south and west aspects of the house. While the story of his scaling of the kitchen garden walls has been mythologised and succinctly demonstrates his extraordinary vitality and thoroughness, an interesting note in an unpublished diary suggests that in fact he particularly felt his own youth on this morning and understood the importance of an impressive start: ‘instead of going to bed, walked round grounds and so set men to work at 6 – being young this gave him the authority which he wanted’.

This done, the housekeeper, Mrs Hannah Gregory, and her niece, Sarah Bown, were waiting to meet him in the kitchen. Sarah was the third of a family of four daughters from Matlock, where her father owned a small mill turning parts for the cotton-weaving industry. She was three and a half years older than Paxton, with a generous private fortune of £5,000. Only one hasty sketch by William Henry Hunt exists to show her as a young woman – slender and perhaps rather plain. She was, by all accounts, educated, determined and reserved, and she was on the shelf. Her aunt, running the house and answerable only to the steward, was earning £20 a year against Paxton’s £65. As the housekeeper, Hannah benefited from living in the house with her full board. As head of the gardens, however, Paxton was one of the highest paid members of the estate, answerable only to the Chatsworth steward, Thomas Knowlton, who earned £150 a year.

As Paxton describes, he and Sarah fell in love at first sight. The earliest of his letters to have been preserved is, appropriately, addressed to her, written during 1826. She is his ‘lovely endearing angel … the adorable object of my heart. To say I love and adore thee my dear is but trifling – you are the very idol of soul … rest assured while I draw breath it will be my study to make myself more dear … I am and shall ever be yours till Death.’ She had apparently asked for him to send her a copy of the lines of a popular verse called ‘Fare You Well’, but she could not have known the irony implicit in this leave-taking almost from the moment they first met.

Sarah and Paxton were married on 20 February 1827 and moved into the cottage on the edge of the kitchen garden, the broad river to their right, the steep hills and woods to their left and with the windows of the great house flashing on the slope to the front.

* On the Duke’s suggestion, Wyatt remodelled the Royal Lodge at Windsor, and then, starting in 1824, Windsor Castle for George IV. This got him his knighthood in 1828 and the rather grander name of Wyatville by which he is now most often described.

† The Picturesque as a landscape theory was first described by Sir Uvedale Price in the 1790s. Repton took up the idea in his own landscapes to create the sense of embellished neatness’ where the art of horticulture prevailed over nature.

CHAPTER FOUR

There were regulations in force in the gardens and it is likely that Paxton reviewed these when he arrived, fresh from the strict environment of Chiswick. The men were encouraged to keep diaries for their own improvement – noting new plants, weather fluctuations and daily activities. Above all else, there was to be prompt attendance, good order and sobriety, and contravention of these key rules could mean instant dismissal. The hours were 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. during the summer with a half-hour for breakfast and one hour for lunch; in the winter, working hours were decided according to the weather. Sunday hours were from 8 a.m. to 4.30 p.m. between November and March and from 7 a.m. to 5.30 p.m. for the rest of the year. Fines were imposed: sixpence for anyone arriving later than ten minutes after the lodge bell had rung, two shillings for anyone absent without permission – a rule applied to Christmas Day like any other. Sixpence would also be levied on any man found lounging or wasting time in the gardens, failing to clean and stack the tools allocated for his personal use, or if any panes of glass were broken through his inattention. The gathering of fruit, vegetables, flowers or plants without permission attracted the serious fine of five shillings, and dismissal on the second occurrence. All fines were deducted fortnightly from wages and, according to James White, one of the under gardeners, ‘if anyone feales himself greaved or aney ways unfairly dealt with in the administeration of these rules I desire to have the matter explained’.

Paxton had soon roused the men to a flurry of activity. Despite the mess created by the building work, principal paths had to be maintained and smartly gravelled; there was trenching, digging of beds, raking of leaves and clearing of cuttings to be done, and pots had to be washed and stacked ready for the needs of constant transplanting. In the summer, the more tender plants were carted from their shelter and planted out into beds; hedges and grass-edges had to be clipped, trees tied back, soil or dung carted to where it was needed. Everything had to be managed carefully, lest the Duke should decide to arrive at any moment.

He did indeed return to Chatsworth from Russia in early December and he noted in his daily journal: ‘Chatsworth, che gioya! I found great progress.’ The next day, having looked over his property, he noted, ‘I am enchanted … My new gardener too, Paxton, has made a great change.’

Throughout 1827 the Duke was preoccupied with his duties as Lord Chamberlain to the Royal Household – duties he cared little for but could not happily decline – and by his place in the House of Lords, where great electoral reform was being debated as a result of the wars in Europe and the growing, predominantly urban unrest at home. Socially, Devonshire House and Chiswick occupied his attention in all but the shooting season when he returned to Chatsworth, and was again delighted by the progress he saw.

That year the Duke appointed Benjamin Currey as his London solicitor and auditor with direct responsibility for all his affairs and accounts. This was indicative not only of the aristocrat’s lethargy when it came to accountable expenditure, but also an increasing movement towards professionalism in the running of large estates. Currey was not a landowner himself as had always been the case in the past, but a member of the professional upper middle class. All the agents on the Duke’s various estates reported to Currey.

Quietly, Paxton worked away in the gardens. Gradually all the fountains were repaired and improved, iron pipes replacing lead. In the west garden, an ornamental wall was constructed, drains were repaired or replaced and parts of the garden newly laid out, with new walks added to the pleasure grounds. With his own eye for structural detail, Paxton began to work with Wyatt to amend the architect’s orangery designs. The Duke, in his own words now ‘bit by gardening’, conceived it as a conservatory to join the sculpture gallery to the new wing. He wanted it quickly and he purchased orange trees from the Empress Josephine’s collection at Malmaison, an expensive Rhododendron arboreum from Knight’s exotic plant nursery in the King’s Road, and an Altingia excelsa which came to be particularly admired. Paxton must have been thrilled with the Duke’s growing interest in plants and in the changes he was hurrying forth.

The following year, Paxton’s attention turned to the kitchen garden. A new orchard was added to it and the wire fence around the flower garden was removed. On a modest scale, he turned his attention to glass. A number of famous glass buildings had recently been constructed in England including those at Syon House in Brentford, Hungerford Market in London, the upper terrace garden of Covent Garden Market and a surprising conical glasshouse at Bretton Hall designed by Loudon and Baileys. At Chatsworth, Paxton repaired the existing pineapple and peach houses and then started to build and experiment with the design of a number of new greenhouses and stoves in which to cultivate and force all manner of fruit and vegetables.

When later asked to describe the process of design and construction of the Crystal Palace, built for the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park in 1851, Paxton was at pains to emphasise a process of years of experimentation with glass buildings, a logical development which had led him to that point. In his first reading of a paper in public, he noted that ‘in 1828 … I first turned my attention to the building and improvement of glass structures’. He found the various forcing houses at Chatsworth were made from coarse, thick glass and heavy woodwork, which rendered the roofs dark, gloomy and ill-suited for the purpose for which they were built. So he bevelled off the sides of the rafters and sash bars, lightening them considerably and discovering that the buildings lost no structural stability in the process. Frustrated by putty which failed to withstand the extremes of sun, rain and frost and which disintegrated and allowed water to drip constantly inside the houses in rainy weather, he also contrived a new, lighter sash bar, with a groove to hold the glass, obviating the need for putty altogether.

While Paxton thought that the popular, modern metallic glasshouses espoused by Loudon were graceful in appearance, he concluded that wooden structures were preferable. One advantage was that wood was less expensive than iron. More importantly, he understood that, as the iron in the sash bars and rafters expanded and contracted according to the outside temperature, the glass was prone to breakage. In addition, iron corroded and was far more complicated to repair, whereas a wooden roof needed only a common carpenter. As the debate was revisited in the pages of the Gardeners Magazine, and as his own experiments proceeded, Paxton became increasingly convinced of the superiority of treated wood over iron, experimenting with finer and finer sashes and rafters to admit the greatest amount of light into the house. Within a very short time, the new glasshouses he built yielded fruit and vegetables in perfection, and a profusion of flowers capable of filling the house.

Nine months after their marriage, on 5 December 1827, Paxton and Sarah’s first daughter, Emily, had been born. She was baptised twelve days later in the local village of Edensor. Sarah quickly became pregnant again and their first son, William, was born in January 1829.

The Duke had spent much of 1828 away from Chatsworth, returning only in September and October and noting again the great progress there. He began to take a closer interest in his gardener, visiting the kitchen garden and asking Paxton to thin the woods – showing a confidence in his new man which no doubt put the regular woodsman’s nose out of joint. In early 1829, the Duke walked out in the snow with Paxton to see the woods and sought him out on several occasions to discuss the management of his trees. He returned again in April, when an entry in his diary reveals the growing regard he held for the gardener who was transforming the park before his eyes: ‘I went to woods, much pleased – poor Paxton has been very unwell.’ Paxton rarely complained of illness, whereas the Duke was something of a hypochondriac, beset with hayfever, flu, inflamed eyes, stiffness and a multitude of other, often minor, afflictions which could cause him to be bedridden for weeks at a time. He had a peculiar tenderness for another man’s health.

This was a particularly happy year for the Duke. His sister Georgiana’s daughter, Blanche – his adored, adoring and favourite niece – announced her engagement to William Cavendish, Lord Burlington, the son of the Duke’s cousin, and his appointed heir. He, meanwhile, was busy with Wyatt, with politics and with parties in London, leaving Paxton to embark on his first great landscape scheme for the park and one of the earliest of those curiously Victorian garden features – the pinetum.

Pinetum is the name given to a collection of one or more of each variety of conifer worthy of cultivation. With tens of new varieties now being introduced to Britain, the formation of one offered satisfaction of the collector’s instinct on a grand scale. Here, Paxton’s early experience at Chiswick combined with the Duke’s own strong arboreal interests to create a startling miniature world. It is still there, a place of surprising and extraordinary tranquility, a group of trees strikingly foreign compared to the native hardwoods in the Stand Wood higher on the slope. In spring, swathes of daffodils and piercing birdsong delight in the sunlight filtered by the cool green branches.

That this was to be one of the earliest collections to be planted in England is not entirely surprising.* The creation of a pinetum required not only a serious budget but a large amount of empty ground, separate from any other garden feature. In 1829, 8 acres of the south park were given over to the plan and the ground began to be formed in the summer. Paxton carried the seeds of the Douglas fir, the pride of California and reputed to reach 200 feet high, from London wrapped in his own hat. A Norfolk pine was fetched from Ireland by Andrew Stewart, Paxton’s foreman in the kitchen garden. A giant redwood, the monkey puzzle, hemlock spruces and the Japanese white pine were purchased and planted along with tall larches. In all, over 50 species of pine were mixed with cypress, juniper, Salisburia, thuja and yew, creating a collection of every kind of hardy conifer that could possibly be procured, each planted according to its botanical classification and clearly named on painted wooden tallies. According to the Duke, the pinetum was quickly admired ‘but no two of a party take the same view of it; one extols the scenery, another is in raptures at the old oaks, and a third wonders and asks, why I plant the fir trees so thin’.

It must have been tremendously invigorating for the young Paxton to have control over the conception and planting of such a valuable and extensive collection, combining scientific with ornamental purpose. It is possible that even at this early stage, he conceived it as part of a much larger collection of trees, an arboretum, which in some years’ time would be planted around a new 4-mile walk through the pleasure grounds since part of the new walk was already completed by the time the Duke returned to Chatsworth again in the summer. In addition, the west garden was now newly planted and Cibber’s great sphinxes had been moved there.

So pleased was the Duke with his gardener that he took him to Bolton Abbey – his property in Yorkshire – to shoot. Paxton was ‘enchanted’ – quite the best reaction for a Duke proud of his castles and palaces, deeply desirous that they should be admired and provide enjoyment for his visitors. As if he needed further reason to value the gardener, the fruit ripening in the new greenhouses, particularly melons, figs, peaches and nectarines, started to win medals at the Horticultural Society shows at Chiswick House.

The Duke was becoming deeply charmed by Paxton and began to give him increasing responsibilities, including that over all the woods and forests. In three years, the gardener had shown that he was reliable, intuitive, a practical empiricist when it came to designing plant houses, thoroughly capable of achieving whatever he set his hand to, and, furthermore, a dreamer of schemes to improve the landscape of the park in keeping with the very latest horticultural fashions. As head gardener and forester he now hired and paid his own men, managed their labours and ran his own accounts. These accounts still had to be submitted to the Chatsworth agent, and to the solicitor, Benjamin Currey, but they marked Paxton’s status and responsibility. Not only did the Duke sanction the building of a new office at Paxton’s house in the kitchen garden, but he increased his salary threefold to reflect his seniority within the household. As ‘Gardener and Woodman’ Paxton was now to be paid £226 a year, which included an allowance for finding and keeping a horse.

The increasing expenditure on the gardens and pleasure grounds during these first years indicates the changes that were being wrought. It rose from £505 to almost £2,000 by 1829, much of which was spent on the numerous new glasshouses in the kitchen garden. In addition, the Duke’s own private account books show that he gave a total of £400 to Paxton over several months, to be used for ‘new stoves’. It must be said that in the context of the Duke’s wider spending, these sums were almost insignificant. Tens of thousands of pounds were being spent on Wyatt’s improvements to the house and thousands more on collections of books, sculpture, art and furniture. The Duke was happy to spend £942 during Doncaster races week alone in his efforts to outshine his neighbour the Duke of Rutland.

Just before Easter 1830, the Duke purchased a large weeping ash from a nursery garden near Derby. Around 40 years old, its roots alone were 28 feet in diameter, and its branches radiated on each side of the trunk to a distance of 37 feet. It weighed 8 tons. Paxton was dispatched to engineer its particularly problematic removal and carriage to Chatsworth. He took with him with 40 labourers, at least 6 horses and a new machine constructed to his own design by Messrs Strutt of Belper. By Good Friday, the Duke was in a lather of anticipation. ‘Up at 6 in hope tree had come but it did not all day.’ He went to church instead.

On the first attempt to lift the tree from the ground, the strong chain snapped and it was some time before it was ready to be moved the 28 miles to Chatsworth, just managing to squeeze through toll bars along the route, contrary to the expectations of the many doubters. Four days after they had set out to collect it, the tree arrived at the park gates which had to be lifted from their hinges, parts of the walls taken down and several branches lopped off to allow it in. Finally the Duke met the weeping ash at the new northern entrance to the house. He was delighted, declared it miraculous, and watched 450 labourers under Paxton haul it into place in its hole in the centre of the courtyard, spread out its roots, peg them down and form a mound of earth around its trunk. It remains there to this day.

It is not now uncommon to see mature trees hydraulically uprooted and transported over great distances and replanted. It was somewhat revolutionary in 1830; large crowds gathered to witness the curiosity and the local papers reported the ‘experiment of a novel and extraordinary description’, and Paxton’s ‘ingenious contrivance’ in detail. Paxton had undoubtedly moved fairly large trees before in his responsibilities as the Duke’s forester and in the formation of the pinetum. A voracious reader on all subjects horticultural, he would have added to his own practical knowledge the systems of others. Only a year later he would include an article in his new magazine The Horticultural Register recommending a method of earth excavation in order to leave a large root-ball intact. Later still, in the first volume of another of his own magazines, The Magazine of Botany, he would return to this favourite theme with a full description of how to remove large trees, accompanied by clear diagrams to illustrate root-ball preservation, the use of cross-levers in lifting, and replanting techniques. For the Duke, the weeping ash was a high point of the year and, such was the widespread interest in its removal, that he received a vexatious eight-page letter from Sir Henry Steuart, author of a treatise on practical planting. Steuart warned him that he should have taken his advice, for the tree would surely not survive transplantation so late in the year. He added an amusing postscript ‘I know that gardeners are, as well as poets rather an “irritable race”, I should take the liberty to advise … that this letter be not communicated to Mr Paxton.’ The Duke’s reply was restrained. ‘Mr Paxton, my woodman, who has long been in the habit of moving large trees has no doubt of the success … of the experiment.’ He could have added that Paxton was the least ‘irritable’ man in his employment.

By 1830, the first lawnmower was patented,* an early indication that gardening was to become one of the greatest of all middle-class English hobbies. The kitchen garden at Chatsworth held 22 hothouses and numerous forcing pits. In the pleasure ground, new flower gardens framed the house and plants, in particular, rose to prominence. With new glasshouses to protect them, and a man fit to cultivate them, it became expedient to augment the collection by swapping and purchasing plants and seeds – and these begin to be listed in the garden accounts. At home, Sarah was pregnant again with their third child.

Outside their enclosed world, there was revolution in France and political unease in Britain. The word ‘scientist’ was coined; invention and experimentation was creating a new world of possibility. In September 1830, Stephenson’s Rocket raced along its tracks at 16m.p.h. from Liverpool to Manchester carrying passengers as well as freight for the first time, promising a revolution in travel particularly for the expanding urban populations.

Paxton was poised to burst into action in the two most fruitful and exciting decades of his life, years where it hardly seemed possible for him to draw breath for new ideas and experiments.

* The fashion for these odd shaped evergreen trees was fed by the publication, in 1831, of a complete listing of all known conifers in cultivation by Charles Lawson. In 1838 he followed this with the publication of Pinetum Britannicum. By the end of the nineteenth century, it is estimated that over 250 different species of pines were available.

* By Edwin Budding. Illustrated in the Gardener’s Chronicle of that year. Uncatalogued material in the Chatsworth Collection shows that a Ferrabee mower was purchased in 1833. At an early stage Ferrabee shared rights in the mower with patentee Budding and licensed Ransomes of Ipswich to make them.

CHAPTER FIVE

‘I was just going to write and tell you how much pleased I was by the amount of your prizes in the Sheffield paper, when I got your dismal letter about the frost … I am coming to look at what is left on 1 June. Please tell Mrs Gregory.’ So wrote the Duke to Paxton on 14 May 1831. The frost had also destroyed the prize dahlias at Chiswick, demolished the magnolia leaves and ruined the blossom and vegetables. If this was not the first letter from the Duke to Paxton, it is the earliest to have survived, and it points at the priority now given by the Duke to all things horticultural. From this time, his diaries become peppered with references to plants and trees seen and coveted, to visits to the famous nurseries in and around London, and to the efforts and results of other gardeners at many of England’s great estates and smaller private gardens.

If the improvements at Chatsworth were intended to provide a grand display case for his passionately collected works of art, literature and sculpture, the garden and grounds soon became an equal obsession. Paxton was beginning to fashion a pattern of new walks through the woods, as well as paths and slopes between the orangery and the flower garden near the house. His enthusiasm was infectious to the beauty-loving aristocrat and the gardener’s early successes and obvious ability began to fire the Duke’s somewhat competitive and acquisitive nature. He started to study botanical books avidly, swept up in a rising intoxication for all things rare and ornamental.

Together, the Duke and his gardener would walk the woods and strike out on to the moors above the house, in a boyish and delightful search for new springs that could be diverted to feed the waterworks. The Duke visited gardens in Canterbury in September, noting some tulip trees which must be had for Chatsworth. When he arrived back, he visited the kitchen garden and saw all Paxton’s rarities. He was in raptures. Chatsworth had become, quite simply, ‘delicious’, his enjoyment of it filling the pages of his diary and his letters. Lady Newburgh, a Derbyshire neighbour, wrote to Blanche that ‘Chatsworth is getting every day more beautiful inside and out, you will hardly know it again, so much has been done.’

From the beginning of the year, across the country there was almost no talk but of ‘the Bill’. The first reading of the Great Reform Bill – introduced by the Whigs and designed to begin a realignment of power through the abolition of rotten boroughs and the extension of the vote to the prospering middle classes and male householders – was heard in the Lords at the end of September. It had a rough ride and on 8 October it was rejected. There were riots in Derby, Bristol and in manufacturing towns across England. In December, on its second reading, it was thrown out again by a majority of 160. Like its continental cousins, Britain seemed on the verge of potential revolution and the army were put on alert.

The Liberal Duke was alarmed and distressed – and he went shopping. Then he wrote jubilantly to Paxton: ‘I have bought you the Araucaria excelsa!’ He fussed about the safe arrival of the monkey puzzle, dreading delay on the canals by frost. He also sent heaths, and signalled his great desire for a glorious red euphorbia, for an amaryllis, for Barringtonia and for Eucalyptus desfoliata, once the stoves in which they could be cultivated had been completed.

If the urban population was disaffected and angry, in the enclosed and rarefied country air of the Chatsworth estate, Paxton had different distractions. His second daughter was born in April and named after the Duke’s niece, Blanche. He was also working on plans to launch a new gardening magazine, The Horticultural Register and General Magazine, jointly edited with Joseph Harrison, the gardener to Lord Wharncliffe at Wortley Hall near Sheffield. The first issue, published in July, thrust Paxton into the public arena. He was just short of his 28th birthday.

Plantsmen, eager for information on new plants and their cultivation, were already well served by the early Botanical Magazine and its rival the Botanical Register. The Horticultural Society issued its Transactions and nurseries their catalogues, including Loddiges’ Botanical Cabinet. All these contained coloured plates of foreign varieties, but they were expensive, and hardly suited to the ‘practical’ gardener. The most extensive horticultural journalist of his day was John Claudius Loudon. The Gardener’s Magazine included detailed reports of the activities of the societies, of nurseries and gardens visited, of recently published books and periodicals as well as articles on all aspects of the gardener’s responsibilities. Most radical were Loudon’s own articles, advocating novel and revolutionary ideas such as national schooling, adult education and green belts around cities.

Many other, smaller magazines came and went during the late 1820s, stimulated by an increasingly literate reading public and by the new methods of steam printing which reduced the costs of production. What exactly drove Paxton to set up a new monthly magazine, and how he met Harrison, is unclear. It may be that part of Sarah’s dowry was used to fund the project. It was a bold step, but he was never timid.

The first volume of the Horticultural Register stated its intention to ‘embrace everything useful and valuable in horticulture, natural history and rural economy … It is evident that a taste for horticulture in all its branches, both of vegetable culture and propagation, also landscape and architectural gardening, has within the last twenty years very rapidly increased, and a corresponding improvement has consequently attended it; for at no time has it reached so high a state of perfection as the present.’ Paxton was at pains to emphasise that the readiness of garden proprietors (like his Duke) to encourage their gardeners to experiment and develop their art was a fundamental factor in effecting this change. The editors wanted to produce an affordable magazine, directed at all classes of society, to circulate it as widely as possible and to include the broadest possible array of articles ‘in so plain and intelligible a form … as to be within the comprehension of all its readers’.

Including articles ranging from the grandest of horticultural schemes to the botanic minutiae of particular plants, the magazine would be divided into five parts, covering gardening in all its branches. There were reviews of and extracts from articles in other horticultural and rural publications, news of discoveries and interesting accounts of natural history, reviews of books and journals published and ‘miscellaneous intelligence’. Neat engravings would serve as illustration, the need for correct descriptions of all new and valuable plants would be met and it would close with a monthly horticultural calendar – a novel approach to managing the monthly practicalities of the gardener’s art which has been copied up to the present day. In order to include as much as possible, without increasing its price, the magazine was printed in small type and, at the end of each year, a bound volume contained additional lists of fruit and flowers recently classified, and of the most successful fruits and vegetables already in cultivation.

Paxton’s magazine provides a snapshot of the contemporary horticultural world. The first issue included remarks on new modes of glazing, on the materials to be used for hothouse roofs and on how to alter the colour of hydrangeas or retard the blooming season for common English and French roses. There is a description of how to force vines in pots by the gardener at Willersley Castle, Derbyshire, and the first reprint of an article from the Gardener’s Magazine. Catholic in its coverage, driven partly by Paxton’s own preoccupations, the magazine eclipsed its rivals and was immediately successful.

It brought Paxton head to head with Loudon who realised that his publication was, for the first time, facing serious competition. Piqued, the brilliant monomaniac set out on a tour of northern and Midland estates. The next issue of the Gardener’s Magazine carried a stinging criticism of Chatsworth which ‘has always appeared to us an unsatisfactory place’. He disapproved of the square pile of building, its situation and the scattering of its waterworks. He recommended the cascade steps should be transformed into a waterfall, railed against the gravel on the walks and offered only one morsel of praise – that the Duke allowed the waters to be played to any visitor without exception. Loudon reserved his sharpest barb for Paxton himself, lambasting the kitchen garden for including ornamental plants, ragged box edging and wooden ranges of forcing houses. He went on to say that he had ‘since learned that Mr Paxton disapproves of metallic houses and of heating by hot water; and here we are not sorry that this is the case, because the public will have an opportunity of judging between his productions and those of other first-rate gardens where metallic houses and hot water alone are employed’. He was referring to Woburn, Syon and Bretton Hall in a way designed to inflame Paxton, who was not at home during the visit. It was a possibly impulsive, certainly tactless and arrogant censure from a man plagued by pain and illness and entirely devoted to the maturation of horticulture into a professional science.*

Paxton was still a little known quantity, but his riposte showed his mettle and left Loudon in little doubt that he was not for bullying. Such public disapproval, timed just as his own patron was particularly attentive to activity in the gardens, and which also attacked the very house and grounds of which they were so proud, would have shaken a less resilient man. The sting came not from an anonymous contributor, but from the most famously trenchant of horticultural authors and journalists, the greatest garden innovator and designer of the early nineteenth century.

In the third issue of the Horticultural Register, Paxton was the model of restraint and measure, but his reply to Loudon was no less vigorous. ‘A person might almost conjecture that Mr Loudon came with a predetermination to find fault, if not it must be because he did not give himself the time to consider before he wrote his ideas of what he terms improvements.’ He questioned Loudon’s taste and he took issue with him for failing to even enter the house, from where the gardens should be viewed. He pointed out that, while at least two of the glasshouses in the kitchen garden were heated by hot water, the method was generally uneconomical in the severe winters of Derbyshire where fires warmed more consistently and needed less attention.

Paxton drew his line in the sand over Loudon’s criticisms of his preference for wood over metal in glasshouse construction. They not only admitted as much light as if they were built of metal, he said, but they provided a combination of strength, durability and lightness, honed to a more perfect balance than had ever been achieved previously in wooden ranges. In addition, his wooden ranges had cost less than a third of the price of metal ones. Finally, Paxton questioned the judgement and the veracity of the older man. He reproved: ‘did you not say to the young man who accompanied you round, that Chatsworth was altogether the finest place you had ever seen in your travels? How then is it that Chatsworth is so unsatisfactory a place?’ It was an able and finely-judged deflection. Sharp-minded Sarah, acutely judgemental herself, would have cheered the confident rebuttals of her husband.

The Horticultural Register continued to prosper, gaining sales over Loudon’s magazine. Occasionally, Loudon would try to prick the confidence of his young competitor who would reply with restrained sarcasm, but on the whole the magazines continued in successful parallel and later the two men would come to a rapprochement. Some time in 1832, Paxton’s partner in the venture, Joseph Harrison, quit the magazine and the editorship devolved wholly on Paxton. He continued to contribute articles on a variety of subjects from the tiniest detail of plant qualities, to the characteristics of large groupings of plants and the chemistry of soil, a living embodiment of his belief that gardeners should know not only the names of plants but the detail of their structure, their habit and peculiarities in order to understand the requirements of heat, soil and nutrition. Through his own writing he began to formulate and consolidate his own aesthetic and horticultural theories.

In June 1832, the Reform Bill – perhaps the most important piece of early nineteenth century legislation – was finally passed, to great general exultation. In one strike it increased by 50 per cent the number of people eligible to vote. The changes in the wider world hardly touched Chatsworth, however, where Paxton concentrated on the conversion of the beautiful old stone greenhouse, built in 1697, into a stove. He added a new glass roof, remodelled the interior to form terraces on which plants were placed in pots, included a basin for aquatic plants, and modernised the heating equipment to include four furnaces whose flues passed into the back wall of the house. The heat from the fires circulated through iron grates in the front path and via a hot air cavity round each of the front basins. The venerable old building was reborn, and the Duke was delighted. ‘My new stove is the loveliest thing I ever saw, done entirely by Paxton.’

Once the alteration was complete, Paxton worked on designs for a new parterre to be laid out in front of it, planted with bulbs and plants to give colour almost throughout the year, edged with rhododendrons and box hedges. Cut out of the grass were square and semicircular beds and two long beds in which moss roses were layered over the surface, dotted with half-standard perpetual roses rising above them. The transformation in the gardens was widely noted, nowhere more so than in letters to the Duke. Lady Southampton was typical in her praise, finding herself ‘enchanted’ and ‘delighted’. The Duke’s niece, Blanche, thought that it ‘surpassed anything I ever saw’.

On 18 October, the Duke’s recently decorated new dining room was used for the first time in rehearsal for its first royal visit. The following day, the young Princess Victoria and her mother, the Duchess of Kent, arrived as part of a tour of the great English estates. Victoria was thirteen; it was her first ‘grown-up’ dinner and the house was gleaming and opulent in its new finery. The future queen planted an oak, her mother a chestnut, in the west garden, and in the evening there were charades.

Paxton had been planning and his men had been arranging his first coup de théâtre. All the waterworks in the park were illuminated with coloured Bengal lights which were changed between each act. Even the Duke had never seen anything like it. First, the fountains glowed red, but when the group returned to the windows the gardens were bathed in blue ‘moonlight’; then the cascade appeared to turn to fire, and rockets went up in every direction. The 13-year-old and all her party were enchanted. While they slept, hundreds of garden labourers worked through the cold October night to return the gardens to their immaculate perfection so that, by the morning, there was not even a trace of autumn leaves on any of the paths. When the Princess moved on the following Monday to Sheffield, fireworks again awaited her, but the Duke was adamant that they came nowhere near the effects of Paxton’s illuminations of water and fire.

* When his right arm broke for the second time, it was amputated. It was said that after the operation in the morning, Loudon was back downstairs in the afternoon dictating to his wife Jane.

CHAPTER SIX

Paxton was now in his thirtieth year. He now had four children – his third daughter was born that October and named in honour of the future Queen – a successful magazine, a growing reputation and the confidence of his employer? The gardens at Chatsworth were organised and flourishing. Then, at the quiet beginning of the following year (1833), the Duke had one of his only disputes with Paxton, who was not exact in my accounts … He says he must have discovered his mistakes but I doubt that and it makes me very glad to have kept my accounts as perfectly as I do.’ In the light of his future vast debts, the Duke was delusional over his own accounting abilities. Paxton may not have been a great deal better (though he certainly had to deal with more complicated accounts on a daily basis, ably assisted by Sarah) and it is very possible that from 1831 he was taking private maths lessons in a neighbouring village. Characteristically, all was forgotten only a fortnight later as the Duke whisked Paxton off on a tour of great country house gardens, ostensibly to further the gardener’s education but, one also suspects, in order to share with him their mutual passion for all things horticultural.

They travelled together by coach, and it was the first time Paxton had been away from Sarah for an extended period. Coach travel was very soon to be overtaken and outdated by rail. During these early years of the 1830s, the great trunk lines were developing, including the London to Birmingham that very year. The days of master and man together, and of the enclosure of the coach, were nearing their end.

Their first stop, Dropmore – about thirty miles outside London in Buckinghamshire – was owned by Lady Grenville and maintained by her gardener Philip Frost. Lady Grenville was possibly the first gardener to challenge the sterility of landscape by introducing bedding, cutting into the grass to provide space for the flood of colour available from showy displays of the many new plants now widely cultivated. There, they also found glorious examples of pines and they were astonished to see the Araucaria excelsa planted out of doors and thriving, and American laurels arranged as if wild. They went on to Althorp, Paxton stealing ten minutes after midnight to write to Sarah, bemoaning his separation from her and his ‘little family’, his loneliness mitigated only by the Duke who ‘pays me the greatest possible attention’. At Windsor they were depressed by the wretched state of the orange trees, but again the Duke ‘took great pains to explain everything to me’. Sarah hated their being apart, and was clearly distressed not to hear from him more often, but Paxton and the Duke were on the move and letters took time to arrive. Ultimately, she did not have to wait long for her ‘dearest love’, the Duke sprained his knee and was forced to return to London.

When Paxton arrived back at Chatsworth he sent flowers to the Duke convalescing at Chiswick, who was so delighted with them that he sent them on to the Queen. His estimation of Paxton continued to rise as his own study of botany matured – possibly not to the appreciation of his gardener at Chiswick where the Duke said that he now saw and understood the ‘bad management of my plants’. Between 1830 and 1835, Paxton spent over £2,500 on plants, trees and seeds on behalf of the Duke. Many were greenhouse plants, but purchases also included the more obvious tulips, auriculas, carnations, camellias, roses, lilies, and even primroses, obtained from local Derbyshire nurseries as well as the famous London and continental establishments.

With the Duke fit again and en route to Italy, taking with him horticultural gifts for many of his friends, Paxton continued to experiment at Chatsworth. In 1833, in contemplation of continuing his experiments by building a new range of hothouses, he revisited the possibility of erecting metal structures, drawing up plans and sending to Birmingham and Sheffield for estimates. But he was horrified by the enormous costs – both estimates were over £1,800 – and ‘I at once set about calculating how much the range would cost if built of wood … I was able to complete the whole range including masonry (which was omitted in the metal estimates) for less than £500.’ Next he considered how to design a house into which the greatest possible amount of light would be admitted in the morning and afternoon, while minimising the violence of the midday sun.

Loudon had already set out the principle of fixing glass at angles on a ‘ridge and furrow’ construction and it now occurred to Paxton that his wooden roofs would admit much more light if the sashes were so fixed. It was an insight that proved to be one of the most important mental leaps of his career. He reinvented and refined Loudon’s nascent principle to such a perfect model that it became his signature practice in glass roofing, a revolution in glasshouse design that would last for over a generation. The principle worked on the basis that light in the mornings and evenings, when the sun was low in the sky, would enter the house without obstruction, presenting itself perpendicularly to the wide surface of the glass. Conversely, the strength of the midday sun was mitigated by the fact that it hit the glass at a more oblique angle.

Fired by his success on small buildings, Paxton was now inspired to build a new glasshouse of considerable dimensions to accommodate the Duke’s growing orchid collection. The new house was to be 97 feet 6 inches long and 26 feet wide – a considerable span – made up of 15 bays, and constructed again of wood supported only by 16 slender, reeded cast-iron columns. The floor was made of slatted board, allowing earth to be swept through, wooden rafters were entirely abolished and the sash bars were made lighter than ever before. In addition, the front columns were to be hollow, with a metal pipe inserted to act as a conduit for the water from the roof, directing it to a drain laid in the gravel walk outside. The angled panes of the roof were set fast, with the least possible unsightly and uneconomical overlap, and, since the sash bars were grooved, less putty was needed. The panes at the front and end could be easily slid aside, allowing entry to any part of the house without the need for a door and maximum possible ventilation. In this new house, Paxton arrived at a system of construction the principles of which would now underpin the design of every subsequent wood and glass structure that he built. Notwithstanding the tax on glass, he pronounced it to be economical, costing around twopence a cubic foot.

During the five years from 1830, Paxton spent the considerable amount of £3,409 on maintaining and constructing greenhouses, mushroom houses, forcing houses, a strawberry house, a large pine house, a melon and cucumber house, several vine ranges and a peach house – all of glass, wood and iron. He was not working in isolation but within a contemporary fashion for experimentation with the design and structure of glass buildings, often on a massive scale. Loudon, for example, designed a radical building with massive glass domes for the Birmingham Horticultural Gardens, which was widely publicised though never built. Demonstrating just how hard these types of building were to erect, the ‘Antheum’ in Hove, with its 60 foot high dome spanning 170 feet, swerved into famously serpentine lines when its scaffolding was removed, before collapsing within the month. Paxton’s own experiments though were impelled by the needs of utility, stability, convenience, economy and the desire to overcome technological limitations within the constraints imposed by the glass tax, rather than aesthetics of design or the development of his own reputation. They succeeded in their aims entirely.

He grabbed at every conceivable opportunity with indefatigable energy. In February 1834 he launched another, more ambitious, monthly magazine, The Magazine of Botany and Register of Flowering Plants. Priced at two shillings it offered detailed study of plants and their husbandry, containing four accurate and well-coloured engravings of the most prized new plants, as well as numerous other woodcut illustrations and a range of articles. It provided a cheaper alternative to magazines like the Botanical Register and, like its sibling the Horticultural Register; it promised to break away from the elitism of most journals, by using the most plain and intelligible language possible. Aiming for the broadest appeal, it would give botanical descriptions of plants in English, the culture of plants in short paragraphs and calendars of work for each month. Unsurprisingly, it was badly reviewed by Loudon who damned it as only ‘useful to the manufacturers of articles which are decorated with the figures of plants … To botanists it is of no use, as the plants are neither new, nor described with scientific accuracy.’ But the new magazine would be steadfastly supported for a generation, augmenting not only Paxton’s reputation, but his income.

The Magazine of Botany was, from the start, printed by Bradbury and Evans of Whitefriars, London (in 1835 they also took over the printing of the Horticultural Register). William Bradbury, three years Paxton’s senior and a famed liberal employer, would become one of the greatest of all Paxton’s friends. Along with his partner, Frederick Mullett Evans, the company printed Charles Dickens’ novels, and built a reputation as one of the most efficient printing firms in England, with twenty of the most modern steam-driven presses running 24 hours a day, and a specialisation in illustrated magazines and fine-art printing.

Throughout 1834 Paxton’s contributions to the Horticultural Register declined sharply. He chose to review Hortus Woburnensis – the descriptive catalogue of Woburn plants compiled by the Duke of Bedford’s gardener James Forbes – on the whole favourably, while deploring its lack of concision. Bedford and Forbes had initiated similar schemes at Woburn as Paxton and the Duke and there was healthy competition between them.*

The journalistic battle continued to rage between Loudon and Paxton in their respective magazines. Plagiarism in the form of reprinting the abstracts of articles from rival papers was the norm, driven by commercial realities, but it was one of the key areas of contention between the two men. Although the new magazine was more about plants than horticulture, Paxton included short articles on the subjects about which he and the gardening world were most preoccupied, including designs for greenhouses, different methods of heating stoves and designs for ornamental labourers’ cottages. Many of these were themselves reprints from the Horticultural Register, including those on moving large trees and designing subscription gardens, and some were taken from Loudon’s magazine, which infuriated him.

At the start of April 1834, the Duke wrote to Paxton from Florence asking him to leave immediately for Paris, with a small monkey puzzle and some rhododendrons. He wanted him to see the gardens at Versailles and St-Cloud, but he gave him little more than a week to organise his journey: ‘if you cannot arrive by the 20th in Paris, you had better not come’. Paxton left immediately, arriving on the 19th, his lips blistered and cracked by the speed of the journey. The following day they visited the Louvre and Palais Royal together on foot. They went on to visit St-Cloud and several private gardens, all the while collecting plants and seeds for Chatsworth. At the eighteenth-century Jardin des Plantes they saw vast, inspiring new glass ranges, unlike anything they had ever seen. When the Duke left for London, he ordered Paxton to stay a further week to purchase horses for him at the Russian horse sale, and to see the grand waterworks on display at Versailles at the start of May.

Paxton was bursting with excitement and news of his first foreign tour: ‘I wish to God you were here seeing all these things with me, you would be quite delighted,’ he wrote to Sarah. ‘I shall not be able to contain myself until you are acquainted with the details of my journey … I have come so far and seen so much that it seems an age since I left home.’ He was irritated by officials at French customs, by the lack of soap in the Hôtel du Rhein in the Place Vendôme and by the dirty streets. He was caught up by Ridgway, the Duke’s steward, and Santi, his Russian servant, and taken to a gambling house where ‘Santi was a fool enough to lose £70 … they wanted me to try my luck but I know better – Santi was like a madman all yesterday.’ He caught cold at the horse market and was laid up for a week with only Coote, the Duke’s musician, left with him. In his letters home, he complained that the hotel staff were so stupid that he could have died for all they cared – the merest trifle took them up to an hour to bring.

The waterworks at Versailles were a disappointing affair to Paxton, who found them ‘not half so fine as I anticipated’. It was intolerably hot, and there were crowds of thousands. What did impress him were the immense numbers of horse soldiers gathered to be received by the King. As he set his face again for London, keen to see Sarah and the children and hoping that he would not be delayed by the Duke, he vowed that he would never forget it. In London, he found a packet of letters from Sarah awaiting him, eager to know all his news. But all at once, he was up to his eyes with things to do for the Duke and ‘the hurry and confusion I am in renders it almost impossible for me to answer any of your questions’, he wrote. He assured her that he would return to Chatsworth with the Duke in two days, and rescue the reins of Chatsworth management from her. In the meantime it was down to her to call all the men in from the woods, arrange for the gardens to be neat and clean, and to order the men to lay down new gravel along the east front of the house. He told her that the tiger at Kew Gardens had died – which upset him far less than the loss of a plant at Chatsworth.

By the time the Duke arrived at Chatsworth in the middle of May after an absence of nearly six months, he found the new greenhouse completed in the kitchen garden. He was delighted. Soon, the two men were plotting great improvements together, while entertaining or visiting botanists around the country. In October, the Glasgow botanist, William Hooker, came to stay at Chatsworth, and in November, Paxton and the Duke travelled to Liverpool to see the botanic gardens there. In effect, these Liverpool gardens, only ninety or so miles from Chatsworth, were the first municipal gardens in England, albeit established by private subscription at the turn of the century. They had just moved from the city centre to a more rural site, and the Duke now considered them worth going a thousand miles to see. Correspondence between both men was now filled with horticultural news: William Aiton sent plants from Kew including some trees (‘generous Aiton. Treasure!’ wrote the Duke), Countess Amherst sent news of wonderful new plants from Montreal, the Duke was offered a collection of American aloes by a gardener in Chesterfield, the new arboretum in the pleasure grounds at Syon was charming. The two men were inspired.

At the end of the year, as with the Horticultural Register, Paxton gathered up the year’s parts of the Magazine of Botany and published them as a single volume, which he dedicated to his patron ‘with the greatest respect and gratitude … in testimony of his … enthusiastic love of botany … and … as an acknowledgement of the innumerable favours conferred on his Grace’s obliged and most obedient servant Joseph Paxton’. It was usual to flatter the sympathies of patrons, but it is possible that Paxton was nudged into this first dedication by William Hooker, Professor of Botany at Glasgow and future director of Kew Gardens. Recently, Hooker had written to thank the Duke for his stay in Derbyshire, adding ‘I cannot tell you what delight it gives me, who has devoted at most thirty years uninterruptedly to the study of Botany, to find a nobleman of your … distinguished rank and fortune so zealously devoted to this delightful pursuit … the next volume of The Botanical Magazine completes the 8th volume and after the botanical and intellectual feast I have enjoyed at Chatsworth, I was irresistibly led to dedicate that volume to your Grace.’

Such dedications recognised the moneyed luminaries of the relatively small world of international horticulture – a world which was, on the whole, generously and mutually supportive. As the news of the transformations of the gardens at Chatsworth spread, many gardeners began to feed it with their own choicest offerings* and Hooker also now promised to write to his correspondents the world over requesting them to send their finest plants to Chatsworth for the growing collections there.

The arboretum in the Horticultural Society Gardens at Chiswick and that at the nursery of Loddiges in Hackney, as well as the enormous variety of new trees available for planting, all contributed to a long-term desire in Paxton and his Duke to create a far more complete collection of trees than the pinetum. Characteristically, they were always setting their sights higher. Now they wanted to form a large experimental ground filled with trees of all species. From the start of 1835, labourers were employed in clearing the ground to be used. An enormous number of trees and shrubs were removed and the ground trenched ready for planting. The collection of trees was to be laid out in about 40 acres of park and woodland, either side of the walk already designed to form a circuit of the pleasure grounds. Winding paths split off from the meandering main walk in order to admit views of the distant park.

The work involved enormous upheaval and digging. The Duke was excited and wrote to Paxton ‘I don’t mind in the least how dirty it may be, I shall be glad to find the pleasure ground up to my neck in mud all over.’ In constant contact by letter, he also urged Paxton to allow Thomas Bailey, his gardener at Chiswick, to work in the arboretum in order to learn about the management of trees, and he reminded Paxton of the fine trees at Syon.

Progress was astonishingly rapid despite the fact that Paxton also faced the huge task of diverting a natural stream 2 miles from its original position on the east moor to form a course so apparently artless that it seemed to have been made by nature. In February, the Duke noted in his diary that it was ‘a wonderful alteration’ and in April Lord Burlington visited the park, writing to his wife that almost 130 types of azalea were already planted. He added that the place looked rather a mess but that Paxton had assured him that in two years it would be perfect.

By the beginning of June, only six months after the work began, the arboretum was all but complete. The Duke wrote again to Paxton from his estate at Hardwick that he had been ‘enraptured with the concluded half of the arboretum road … I had abstained from going, having taken it into my head that it could not have been done, and there it is finished … I can complain of nothing.’ Signalling a rapprochement, Loudon invited Paxton to write an article for the Gardener’s Magazine, in which he set out his rules for the formation of arboreta and rejoiced ‘in the idea of an arboretum on a large and comprehensive scale … open every day of the year and shown to all persons rich and poor without exception … the arboretum at Chatsworth will thus be seen by thousands’.

The arboretum, when it was finished, formed the largest collection of herbaceous plants in Europe, planted according to their scientific orders. Some 75 orders of trees were planted, including over 1,670 species and varieties, with plans to increase the number to 2,000. The smaller trees were planted nearest to the walk with the largest extending beyond them, all with room to grow into single ornamental specimens.

With some pride, Paxton claimed that the plan had been financed entirely from the sale of wood from the felled trees. Ever true to his training at the Horticultural Society and his own tidy mind, and witness that this was above all a place to be visited, to exhibit and educate, all the trees were named on wooden tallies. These were made of hearts of oak, steamed to draw out the sap, boiled in linseed oil and painted with three coats of black paint with their names in white paint, including their scientific name, country of origin, year of introduction, estimated final height and their English or common names. When the Duke saw the completed arboretum for the first time, his gardener’s most ambitious plan yet, he confided to his diary: ‘it is transcendent’. That Paxton had all but completed it in six months was confirmation of his singular powers of organisation and will. Four years later even Loudon, now reconciled to Paxton’s true genius, was to praise it though later still, having completed the first public arboretum in England, in Derby, he tactlessly argued that Paxton’s ordering and classification were unsatisfactory.

Paxton had not, however, been directing only the great arboretum undertaking – the Duke had his eye on a quite different and expensive venture. In February, James Bateman of Knypersley Hall in the Potteries wrote to the Duke about a tremendous orchid collection being offered for sale by his friend John Huntley, the Vicar of Kimbolton on the Bedfordshire – Cambridgeshire borders. Bateman, himself the owner of one of the finest collections of orchidaceous plants in England, had published The Orchidaceae of Guatemala and Mexico in a huge folio illustrated by the renowned Mrs Withers and Agnes Drake Huntley, he said, had been collecting for 20 years and only financial necessity would induce him to sell his collection of over two hundred species. The Duke was interested. He had bought his first exotic orchid in 1833 for £100 – Oncidium papilio or the butterfly orchid, a stunning plant with orange and yellow flowers and mottled leaves. The orchid was a serious status symbol and the Duke was driven to possess a collection to surpass all others.

These exotic beauties, whose cultivation frequently ended in failure, had been prized above all plant rarities since 1731 when the first tropical orchid flowered in England. By the 1760s 24 species of orchid were in cultivation in Britain, including only two from the tropics and the rest native or European. In 1782, the flowering of the serene nun orchid – Phaius tankervilleae introduced from China – at Kew Gardens had excited widespread attention and when, at the turn of the century, Francis Bauer completed the very first drawing of the nucleus of a plant cell, tellingly he used an orchid specimen. In 1812, Conrad Loddiges & Sons had started orchid cultivation in England on a commercial basis and in 1818 succeeded in cultivating Cattleya labiata for the first time, the orchid named after William Cattley, who had assembled a pioneering collection of the gorgeous plants at his London home. When Cattleya labiata flowered, it was an immediate sensation, heralding orchid growing as a fashionable pastime. By 1826, 154 orchid genera had been discovered and the Horticultural Society had erected their own orchid house in the gardens at Chiswick, which received increasing numbers of visitors.

The Horticultural Register was publishing expansive and expanding lists of Orchidaceae in its catalogues of rare and beautiful plants. Along with the Magazine of Botany, it charted Paxton’s own experiences in the management of orchids and those of countless other gardeners and nurserymen. Paxton experimented with temperature and humidity with increasing success, emphasising in his articles the absolute need to know and understand the native habitat of each plant, and to assimilate it as closely as possible in the artificial environment of the greenhouse and stove.

With money at his disposal and a gardener who could foster the collection as well as any other man in Britain, the Duke now entered into a protracted correspondence with the loquacious Huntley. The whole process was, to the vicar, a broken-hearted expedient, and he insisted that his collection remain entire and that he would not sell only those varieties most prized by Chatsworth. Paxton was dispatched to Kimbolton on the thrice-weekly coach, where he worked from the moment he arrived at 3 p.m. until he had to meet the return coach at 1 a.m. He pronounced the collection, numbering almost three hundred plants, ‘sumptuous’, and impressed Huntley, who considered him ‘far beyond his situation’. Paxton had found a collection of disappointingly small plants, yet it was an important one, rivalled only by Bateman and Loddiges, and filled with novelties which he longed to possess. However, concerned about the price, he wrote to the Duke that he had not closed the deal, ‘with all my anxiety to have a collection for your Grace unsurpassable by anyone, I cannot recommend your Grace to spend so serious a sum’.

Daily letters poured from the desperate pen of Huntley, who had heard that the Duke was considering sending his own plant collector to Calcutta. He assured the Duke that he was continuing to add rare and beautiful specimens to his collection, and railed that the £100 difference between the sum Paxton had offered and the sum he required was but a trifle to the great nobleman. He threw in his collection of cacti and other stove plants. Long letters also raced between the Duke in London and Paxton at Chatsworth, the Duke exhorting Paxton to clarify whether he thought the plants of sufficient value. Uncharacteristically, Paxton dithered. On the one hand he thought the collection superb. On the other, he was overwhelmed by the price, and felt Huntley to be mercenary. He applauded the intention behind maintaining the collection as a whole, but was equally clear that it contained plants that were not needed, so that ‘Mr Huntley may be given to understand that we shall chop and cut his collection to make a good one of our own and dispose of the rest for other plants.’ Finally he advised against the purchase.

This was all that was needed to help the Duke to a decision. If Paxton wanted the plants, hang the expense. So, without further delay, Huntley received his asking price of £500. With a mixture of concern and competitive glee, Paxton wrote ‘our collection of orchideae has now mounted completely to the top of the tree. I am fearful some of our neighbours will be a little jealous of our progress – the race will lay between Lord Fitzwilliam and Mr Bateman.’

It would take nearly a week to prepare the plants for their journey to their new home and a young gardener under Paxton, John Gibson, was sent to complete the task. In September, the erstwhile secretary of the Horticultural Society Gardens, John Lindley – now Professor of Botany at University College London and in the process of claiming his title as ‘the father of orchidology’ – had named an entire genus of plants Cavendishia, charming the Duke completely.

Since their trip to Paris together, the Duke was in the habit of summoning Paxton to London at a moment’s notice. Paxton was busier than he had ever been. He had monthly editions of two magazines to oversee, as well as their compilation into volume form at the end of each year, quite apart from the daily business and big schemes of Chatsworth. Unsurprisingly, his normally robust constitution succumbed to the increasing strain of his workload and he became bedridden with a sore throat and headache, although he managed to maintain a regular correspondence with the Duke in London about plans for Chatsworth and the continued planting of the arboretum.

The Duke’s reaction to his incapacitation substantiates the regard in which he held him: ‘I had rather all the plants were dead than have you ill,’ he wrote. Paxton and the Duke were both rare men and the regard in which they held each other – given the polarity of their stations – was becoming remarkable; they had become friends. The Duke’s sister, Harriet Countess Granville, noticed it and wrote to her brother about his decision to accept neither the offer of Lord Chamberlain again, nor that of Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, under Melbourne’s new Whig government. She imagined ‘you and Paxton, sitting under a red Rhododendron at Chatsworth, under the shade of palms and pines in your magnificent conservatory, with … no thought of your country’s weal and woe’.

In April 1834, Paxton finally relinquished his editorship of the Horticultural Register, citing extreme pressure of business which entirely deprived him of the leisure necessary to conduct the magazine along the lines to which he had been accustomed. Subscribers were assured that his advice would continue to enrich its pages, and a professional editor stepped in.

Later that year, when the Duke returned from the continent, he was again enraptured by all that Paxton was achieving, in particular with the stoves and plants in the kitchen garden. Hardly a day passed when he did not visit it, returning to note some new glory in his diary. The round of horticultural shows and visits to commercial nurseries continued and, at the end of November, Paxton was summoned to London, to visit the Chelsea Physic Garden, Knights’ and Loddiges’ nurseries, John Lindley and an assortment of private gardens. The Duke bought another fine orchid from a garden in Tooting and together they did what they both loved: hatched grander and grander schemes to enrich the gardens and grounds at Chatsworth.

At the beginning of December, the Duke hurried Paxton off on an impromptu garden tour, or ‘norticultural tower’ as Paxton called it* At Dropmore the pines remained glorious, at Highclere the grounds quite beautiful. They travelled west to Stonehenge and Bath, got up in the wind and rain to see Wilton’s fine cedars, the striking ruins of Fonthill Abbey and the magnificence of Longleat. It was freezing, and although Paxton was travelling on the box with the coachman, his delight in all he saw remained boyish. Of Stonehenge he wrote to Sarah ‘I have never seen anything so wonderful’. They took in the ruins of Thornbury Castle and Berkeley Castle, ‘a very curious mixture of antiquity and vulgarity’, and noted Nash’s perfectly beautiful cottages in Blaise Hamlet. They took the hot waters at Bath and journeyed on to Blenheim, where it was so cold that only Paxton went out into the gardens. He was exhausted by all the sights, the grand houses and their gardens and, since the Duke was travelling without entourage, further strained by arranging everything for His Grace. He wrote to his wife that he was being whisked ‘hither and thither and Lord knows where, that the Duke’s plans were up in the air and there was even talk of going to Paris.

Paxton’s letters were torture to Sarah whose return mail was chasing him around the country, never quite reaching him before he moved off again. All was far from well at home – measles in the village had spread to the children and William, in particular, was coughing violently. Her letters are discouraged, frustrated and frantic. Longing to hear from his wife, and seeing that a letter from her was among the Duke’s parcel of letters, Paxton split open the parcel and retrieved his letter, only to read of the suffering of his children. Noticing his distress, the Duke asked what was the matter, but Paxton dared not admit that he had broken a cardinal rule of the house with regard to the letter bag, that Sarah had written, and that their son was sick. He was beside himself with suspense:

I am now most seriously afraid that it will go hard with poor William, the bodily suffering that poor child has endured makes me shudder to think of – I never wanted to do anything so much in my life as I do to come home at this time … don’t deceive me if you think there is danger, let me know and I will start out immediately … all I can think of is my dear, dear children – what a melancholy thing it would be if the poor child was to die and me not see him again … but from the first moment I had forebodings for poor Will … Do all you can for our dear children, and kiss them a thousand times for me.

He suffered for two days before another letter from Sarah freed him from his torture. It was not good news. On Friday, 11 December, the Duke wrote in his diary, ‘poor Paxton went off to Chatsworth, hearing of the dangerous illness of his boy’. Paxton must, therefore, have been at home when his only son, William, died five days later, just short of his sixth birthday. The Chatsworth household accounts for that week show the making of ‘a lead coffin for young Paxton’ and for soldering it up. Paxton only twice referred to the boy in any of his surviving letters, when as an old man, his memory was stabbed by the resemblance of two of his grandsons to his own lost boy.

* Paxton was often coming up against Forbes, and the two certainly met several times. The Duke of Bedford and his gardener wanted to rival Devonshire and Paxton at Chatsworth. In a letter to Sarah, 26 January 1836, Paxton wrote: ‘I went to Woburn on Friday and what do you think old John Bedford has been at? Why, making an arboretum this winter in emulation to the one at Chatsworth, it will be a miserable failure. This is not all – the old codger has had Sir Jeffry Wyatville from London to design a STOVE. I suppose they are jealous of us …’ (Devonshire Collection; Paxton Group No. 260). ‘The Duke declared the hothouse ‘handsome … but not new or original’ and the gardener Forbes ‘a very consequential stupid fellow – very different from my gardener I think’. (6th Duke’s Diaries, 10 November 1836).

* In December, the horticulturist Dr Daniel Rock sent from Alton Towers, with Lord Shrewsbury’s compliments, a banana (Musa sapintum), hearing of the Duke’s interest in curious tropical fruits: ‘it may be eaten raw but I should think that it would be far more pleasant when cooked in a thin silver dish, like a pudding. I think (I speak in doubt) with butter.’ (Devonshire Collection, 6th Duke’s Group, 2 Dec. 1834.)

* A rare indication of Paxton’s accent. Leveson-Gower noted the Bedfordshire accent which never quite left Paxton, in particular his misuse of the letter H which could cause some confusion: ‘he once said that his employer had the heye of an ’awk and when it was proposed to build a church … in his neighbourhood he offered to ‘eat it’.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Paxton and the Duke were ambitious for yet more floral prizes and they knew that orchid treasure was there for the taking. With almost 30,000 species and native to every continent except Antarctica, flourishing in the most arid desert and the densest cloud forest, orchids make up around 10 per cent of all flowering plants, exceeded in variety only by the daisy family. ‘Of all tribes of plants this is the most singular, the most fragrant and the most difficult of culture,’ wrote Lindley in Loudon’s Encyclopaedia of Plants. ‘The flowers are often remarkable for their grotesque configuration … The species are found inhabiting the mountains and meadows of the cooler parts of the globe, or adhering by their tortuous roots to the branches of the loftiest trees of the tropical forest to which their blossoms often lend a beauty not their own …’ The most seductive tribe of plants, orchids held a unique status in the horticultural world. So, with thriving trade routes assisting botanical exploration, and with the Indian collections of William Roxburgh and Robert Wight as precedent and stimulus, it was to the tropical mountains in India that the Duke decided to send his explorer to search out prized epiphytes, the orchids found clinging to the branches of host trees.

The Duke had been interested in the progress of various plant hunting expeditions for some time – he had subscribed to an unsuccessful expedition to Mexico the previous year, from which the collector had returned early and unwell, with few new plants. Huntley had sent a man to ‘the Spanish Main’ in the formation of his own collection. As he sent off the cheques to Huntley, the Duke gave orders to Paxton that arrangements should be made and put into action for their very own adventure.

Lord Auckland, a friend of the Duke, had been posted to India as Governor General and was making his own preparations for departure. This was their opportunity. ‘The expense of the journey to Calcutta,’ wrote Paxton to the Duke in March 1835, ‘if permission was given to go out with the Governor General would not exceed £100, otherwise it might cost a serious sum.’ Paxton next considered who should be sent. He chose one of his ‘intelligent’ gardeners at Chatsworth, John Gibson: ‘he has a good knowledge of plants, particularly orchideae, is obliging in his manner and very attentive’. Gibson had been drawn to Paxton’s attention when he submitted an article to the Horticultural Register, published in October 1832. The following year, he had arrived to work at Chatsworth from the gardens at Eaton Hall near Congleton, where he had worked with his father. Now he was sent for a season to learn the secrets of orchid cultivation from Joseph Cooper, a specialist orchid grower for Earl Fitzwilliam at nearby Wentworth Woodhouse. In preparation for his expedition to India, he was then dispatched to trawl the nurseries in London and as many public and private gardens and herbaria as he had time to examine.

While Gibson set about accumulating as much knowledge as possible to ensure the success of his mission, the Duke approached his friend Lord Auckland, on the point of sailing. He also wrote to solicit the assistance of Dr Nathaniel Wallich, the curator of the Botanical Garden in Calcutta which had become something of a clearing house for plants from all over southern Asia. From Glasgow, William Hooker wrote letters of introduction and at Chatsworth, Paxton began a collection of double dahlias and other showy flowers that were likely to thrive in India, all to be packed up as a gift for the Calcutta gardens. He was very aware that the success of the expedition relied not only on finding new varieties, but in transporting them home alive, advising Gibson that all his plant discoveries should be established in boxes at least three months before they started their journey home, to maximise the likelihood of their surviving the voyage.

The transportation of plants by sea, their exposure to the wind and salt in particular, had been a hit-and-miss affair and it was often the case that a vast proportion of plants sent home from abroad would perish in transit. Happily, the surging numbers of new plant species being discovered around the world now acted as an impetus to innovation. Gardening magazines, including the Horticultural Register, were filled with illustrations of ‘new’ designs for boxes, cases or jars, all of which promised increased success. For the Indian trip, John Lindley suggested that Gibson take a new kind of packing case which had already been used with some success. Loddiges, too, recommended the use of these air-tight boxes made of wood and plate glass into which the plants were placed in soil and watered, before being tightly sealed.

These were the ‘Wardian cases’, designed by Nathaniel Ward after a chance discovery, during which he found that a sealed jar into which he had placed a moth cocoon had also preserved the small plants hidden within the moss used as packing material. He had reasoned that, so long as the plant material was watered before the jar was sealed, moisture would evaporate and condense against the glass, maintaining a consistently moist environment, perfect for plants. For overseas collection, this was a real breakthrough and, as their success was proved, smaller and more decorative Wardian cases also became fashionable in the drawing rooms of many middle-class Victorians in Britain, used particularly for the display of the ferns that so fascinated them.

Orchids were not the Duke’s only obsession. In 1826 Nathaniel Wallich had discovered an evergreen tree with velvety leaves and glorious scarlet and yellow flowers in Burma near the town of Martaban on the Salven River. He claimed that the tree was unsurpassed in magnificence or elegance and his descriptions inflamed the imagination and desire of botanists and gardeners everywhere. Amherstia nobilis, as it was called, had never survived transportation to England. Its very rarity, quite apart from its beauty, meant that it would be the perfect prize for Chatsworth, and the Duke valued it above all else. So Gibson was also to go to Martaban to procure Amherstia for the glory of the Devonshires.

After numerous delays Gibson, outfitted for the most arduous journey of his life, laden with flowering and medicinal plants, fruit trees and seeds for distribution to foreign gardens, joined the Jupiter at Woolwich and sailed in late September on rough seas for Madeira. He recognised that this was his chance for glory and he was full of gratitude to Paxton. He was clearly excited despite the pressure to return with a valuable cargo of Orchideae. His only concern was with the famed air-tight cases stored on the poop deck, in which the outgoing plants were already looking rather sick.

Gibson’s journey to Calcutta was to take six and a half months. During a week in Madeira he found no new plants but, abroad for the first time in his life, he was caught up in admiration and wonder at the spontaneous growth of oranges and lemons, grapes and bananas and the flowering hedgerows of mixed myrtle and fuchsia. The season was unfavourable for collecting in Rio de Janeiro and he had time during his fortnight there simply to make out a list of the plants considered worthy of transportation to Chatsworth and to set up the means of organising their shipment. He found a man in ‘an English garden’ willing to amass the plants and swap them with the Duke for orchids, palms and other showy plants from the English collection. By December, after heavy gales that carried off two of the Jupiter’s sails, he arrived at the Cape of Good Hope, where he worked hard, collecting over two hundred species of plants, including ericas and proteas, on a single journey of only 20 miles up country. This was just the beginning. Although Cape plants were not particularly valuable, they would all be new to Chatsworth and the bulbs he gathered, when resold in England, would pay for the freight of the plants.

As Gibson departed England, Paxton was considering a magnificent project – to erect an innovative jewel-box in which to house the plants they expected to be coming home. His experiments on the glasshouses at Chatsworth were propelling him towards the design of one that would be capable of holding the most gigantic of tender plants, allowed to grow to their full potential. In Paxton’s imagination, ‘the Great Stove’ would be the apotheosis of all greenhouses, of colossal dimensions and unrivalled in Europe. A greenhouse on this scale was entirely untried – the Palm House at Kew, for example, would not be built for almost a decade. Paxton’s construction would take the form of a central nave with two side aisles, cover an acre of ground, be 227 feet long, 123 feet wide and 67 feet high, and be built almost entirely of wood supported by iron columns. In a break from the pitched-roof houses he had designed and built in the kitchen garden, the form of the glass roof was to be curvilinear, made up of a series of undulating ellipses like the waves on a ‘sea of glass … settling and smoothing down after a storm’.

A century earlier, perhaps, the Duke would have built a temple or mausoleum as a permanent memorial to his passions, but this was the age of scientific discovery, and scientific obsessions. This stove, unlike an ordinary, small greenhouse, would be composed internally of beds and borders rather than trellises to hold potted plants. The design was the natural child of his own experiments: he had already supplied designs for a large curvilinear palm house at Loddiges’ nursery in Hackney constructed with wood rather than iron, though, as he said in the Magazine of Botany