A Thing in Disguise: The Visionary Life of Joseph Paxton

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.