During his first year at the gardens there was much to do: the kitchen garden walls were built, along with a pit ground for melons and pines (pineapples). The number of imported plants increased dramatically, partly because of the development of better methods of plant transportation – put simply, many more specimens arrived in England alive. This was, most certainly for a gardener, the only place to be. Paxton was surrounded by the rare and curious specimens sent by the society’s own collectors as well as others – the value in rarity and beauty of the collection was considered greater than any other garden in the world.
Within six months, he had moved to a position as labourer under the management of Mr Donald Munro, the Ornamental Gardener, who was in charge of the new plants. That year, the aspidistra was introduced from China, the fuchsia from Mexico and verbena, petunia and salvia from South America. In 1825 one of the greatest of all the society’s plant-hunters, David Douglas, was in the midst of his expedition to the north Pacific coast of America. During the 1820s Douglas introduced over two hundred new plants including mimulus and lupins; he sent Orchidaceae which mingled with the exquisite new plants donated by the directors of the East India Company and consuls abroad.
All this hunting created an even greater need for better greenhouses and stoves in which to nurture and cultivate successfully the treasured tropical and subtropical plants. An increasingly technical and complex conversation was being joined by an expanding number of voices. Skill in methods to improve and force fruit and vegetables had been growing in England since the seventeenth century at least – hotbeds for salad vegetables, heated walls to ripen fruit trees, pineapple pits and the like were commonplace. Greenhouses, however, were expensive. Glass was heavily taxed by weight, so that manufacturers made efforts to make it thinner and it became increasingly fragile. There was new experimentation with cast iron and curved frameworks, and the invention of pliable putty had helped reduce the instances of glass fracturing in extreme temperatures. By the 1820s, these new, sophisticated greenhouses were classed into four categories: ‘cold’ greenhouses; conservatories heated in winter; ‘dry stoves’ where the temperature would be controlled to a maximum of 85°F during the day and 70°F at night; and the orchid house or ‘bark stove’ where the temperature was never allowed to drop below 70°F and might rise to 90°F on a summer’s day.
John Loudon remarked that the conservatory at Chiswick was beautifully ornamental but extremely gloomy inside. He probably hated the thick wooden sash bars, always preferring iron. The results of his own experiments with glasshouse design were published in 1824 in The Greenhouse Companion hard on the heels of his Encyclopaedia. Previously he had been an advocate of heating glasshouses with fires and smoke flues, but now he was experimenting with high-pressure steam, while others, recognising that steam could too easily wound precious plants, were considering heating systems which consisted of the circulation of hot water through pipes. During the 1820s and long into the 1830s periodicals would be inundated with articles and advice on new kinds of greenhouses and heating methods.
A year after joining the society, Paxton was offered the chance to apply for promotion as an under-gardener back in the arboretum and by the end of March 1825 his three-month trial period was completed satisfactorily and his wages increased to eighteen shillings a week.
It was an auspicious time to work in the arboretum. Only a handful of evergreens were cultivated in England – including the yew, silver fir, Norway spruce and the cedar of Lebanon planted widely in the eighteenth century by Capability Brown – but now the collection of conifers sent by Douglas from North America was ensuring his place in garden history. Among his many discoveries, he sent back seeds of the Sitka spruce – beginning a passion for these huge evergreen novelties – the Monterey pine and, of course, the eponymous Douglas fir (Picea sitchensis) which could grow to over 300 feet. Another of the society’s collectors, James Macrae, sent seeds of the monkey puzzle tree* – the favourite of the later Victorians – from his travels in Brazil, Chile, Galapagos and Peru in the two years from 1824. Loudon calculated that 89 species of tree and shrub were introduced to England in the sixteenth century, about 130 in the seventeenth, by the eighteenth century over 440, whereas in the first 30 years alone of the nineteenth century around 700 species were brought to England. Put in perspective, in 1500 perhaps 200 kinds of plants were actively cultivated in England, whereas by 1839 that figure had risen to over 18,000. Of those plants, evergreens were to transform the English garden and landscape, until now dominated by deciduous native trees.
There was progress elsewhere in the gardens, too. During 1825 Paxton would have witnessed a tank sunk in the pit to supply water to the fruit garden, as well as the building of new carpenters’ sheds and many new types of glasshouse including one with double lights for the tropical plants, a five-light melon pit, a new pine house and a new vinery between the peach house and the curvilinear fruit house. Alongside his work in the arboretum, he also embarked on a complete record and description of the most notable dahlias in the society’s collection.
‘Dahlia mania’ had swept through the English gardening community at the end of the first decade of the century. First introduced in 1789 by the Marchioness of Bute, it had been lost until rediscovered in 1804. Within ten years, it was being cultivated in most plant collections and by the 1830s, dahlia frenzy approached that for the tulip in the seventeenth century. Conceived as a paper to be presented at one of the society’s meetings, Paxton’s initial work marked the beginning of a passion for the fashionable, intricate and variously formed species that would culminate in his only monograph in later life.
By 1826, England was teetering on the brink of modernisation. The criminal code had been modified and a new police force created in London by Sir Robert Peel. A year earlier, Stephenson had built his three engines for the first passenger train between Stockton and Darlington; his ‘Rocket’ was only three years off. This was also the year in which the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge was founded, promoting adult education for workers in cities through Mechanics’ Institutes – to all intents and purposes adult night schools with libraries. These establishments were at the absolute vanguard of the notion of self-improvement and self-education even though there was still little chance of moving through the ranks. By the late 1850s and 1860s, ‘self-help’ would become a ruling preoccupation of the working and middle classes.
In horticulture there was a further, important development. Just as the first ‘modern’ strawberry (rather than the small wild woodland variety) was being cultivated, that passionate reformer and obstinate workaholic, John Loudon, launched the first periodical aimed at the practical gardener. It was the first popular magazine of its kind devoted exclusively to horticultural subjects, with the stated intention ‘to raise the intellect and the character of those engaged in this art’. In his first issue, he noted the transformation of taste over the previous twenty years, recognising that landscape gardening had given way ‘first to war and agriculture, and since the peace, to horticulture’.
Initially a quarterly, Loudon’s Gardener’s Magazine sold 4,000 of its first number in just a handful of days despite its five shilling price. It was different, packed with general advice and, in order to hold the price down, it eschewed colour plates and copper and steel engravings in favour of cruder wood engravings. Along with several other Loudon magazines, it was to continue until his death in 1843, criticising inefficiency in horticulture, visiting and reporting in detail on public and private gardens, reviewing contemporary books and periodicals, publishing nurserymen’s catalogues and price lists as