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