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.’