A Thing in Disguise: The Visionary Life of Joseph Paxton

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.*