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