A Thing in Disguise: The Visionary Life of Joseph Paxton

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’.