Loudon used the introduction of the first issue to discuss three points closest to his heart. First, was the love of gardening he saw among all ages and all ranks of society. Secondly, he both praised the Horticultural Society for its encouragement and development of the science, and disparaged what he saw as Joseph Sabine’s mismanagement of the establishment – a criticism he would maintain doggedly until the society was reformed in 1830. Thirdly and perhaps most importantly, Loudon addressed the issue of improvement in the education of gardeners, pointing out that as the status of head gardener had risen, so had the need for development in their general instruction. This was a theme that was to continue throughout the life of the publication.
Interest in the gardens and the society was flourishing. Curiosity for new plants continued to grow so fast that, in 1827, the society held its first ‘fête’ in the garden. Only a couple of years later, over 1,500 carriages waited in a line extending from Hyde Park Corner along Hammersmith Road for the doors to open at nine o’clock, despite torrential rain. Paxton, meanwhile, witnessed the latest architectural and engineering technologies, examined the plants and techniques in the various departments, and spent time in the society’s library with the latest catalogues. He found himself in good company – the authority and distinction of the gardens were attracting labourers from some of the largest estates in England and abroad.
In 1826, Paxton was offered a position that was to settle the course of his future entirely. ‘On April 22nd Joseph Paxton, under gardener in the arboretum, left, recommended a place …’ These Council Meeting Notes of 4 May 1826 betray nothing of the fact that this was a defining moment in the young man’s life. He had been offered the position of Superintendent of the Gardens at Chatsworth – to all intents and purposes head gardener at one of the grandest estates in England and for one of the richest aristocrats in the land, the 6th Duke of Devonshire. Paxton was to be paid £1 5s a week, or £65 a year, and live in a cottage in the kitchen gardens.
The immensely rich William Spencer Cavendish, 6th Duke of Devonshire, had apparently encountered Paxton as he let himself into the gardens through the gate from Chiswick House. Son of the celebrated Georgiana, the 6th Duke had inherited his title when he was 21, in the year after Paxton’s father died. With it, came estates comprising nearly 200,000 acres of land and the stately houses of Chatsworth and Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire, Lismore Castle in County Wexford, Ireland, Bolton Abbey in the West Riding and three great London palaces – Chiswick House and, in Mayfair, Devonshire House and Burlington House. With an inherited income of over £70,000 Hart, as he was known to his family, had the world at his feet.
At 36 years old, the Duke was unmarried, despite being the most eligible bachelor in England. He was partially deaf, and of a ‘sweet disposition’. He was, according to Prince Puckler-Muskau, attending one of his parties in 1826, ‘a King of fashion and elegance …’ No one could excel, and few could rival him, in position. He was clever and comical, sensitive, extravagant, nervous and, despite throwing many of the country’s best parties, somewhat lonely.
Given his particularly Regency interest in new, valuable and exotic plants, he is likely to have sought out the labourers in the ornamental garden, where Paxton was occupied in tending the new plants and training the creepers. In Paxton he found a straightforward youth, self-effacing as well as confident, passionate about his plants, full of energy, bright and patient. He was young and unproven but the Duke was without a gardener at Chatsworth and he acted impulsively – the appointment is not even noted in the detailed daily journal he kept for many years. He was anxious to be off. On 7 April the King had approved of his replacing Wellington as Extraordinary Ambassador to the Court of St James for the coronation of Tsar Nicholas I in Russia. Wellington was needed at home and though the Duke was a liberal Whig rather than a staunch Tory like Wellington, his wealth and position in England and his close friendship with Nicholas ensured that his lobbies for the role were successful.
On 8 May, two weeks after leaving the society – and not yet quite 23 – Paxton collected his instructions from Devonshire House and took the coach to Chatsworth. Together, in an unlikely but astonishingly fruitful pairing, he and the Duke would make the gardens at Chatsworth famous again after almost fifty years of neglect.
* Thus ‘Botany Bay’ outside Sydney, Australia. Plants discovered on these journeys included the Banksia, Grevillea, Protea, Acacia and Ficus.
* Careful descriptions of Miller’s experiments are found in his Dictionary, including new methods of forcing apricots and cherries by nailing the trees on to a screen of boards, glazing the south face and heating the north back with a hotbed.
† Though the Bessemer-Siemens process of ‘mild’ steel manufacture which made large-scale production possible was not commercially available until the 1860s.
* Later, in a letter to the 6th Duke on 4 .June 1836 (Devonshire Collections; 6th Duke’s Group No. 3512), Miss Mary Russel Mitford says she accompanied Wordsworth to the house – ‘that fine poet … who while illustrating all that is charming in natural scenery has yet so true and cultivated a taste for painting and architecture, never surely so triumphantly conjoined as at Chiswick House’.
* The Italian garden, the conservatory and many of the original camellia plants still exist at Chiswick House Gardens, London, W4. The first book on the subject of the camellia appeared in 1819, Monograph on the genus Camellia by Samuel Curtis, and listed 29 varieties being grown in England.
* The catalogues were consistently delayed by other work, and the fruit tree catalogue was finally finished in 1827, listing an astonishing 3,825 varieties.
* In the second issue of Loudon’s Gardener’s Magazine, he compares these wages to those of an illiterate bricklayer who would earn around five to seven shillings a day, whereas ‘a journeyman gardener who has gone through a course of practical geometry and land surveying, has a scientific knowledge of botany, and has spent his days and his nights in reading books connected to his profession, gets no more than two shillings or two and sixpence a day.’ While the Horticultural Society, he said, was humanely paying fourteen to eighteen shillings a week, an average London nursery was paying only ten shillings. Loudon regularly lobbied for increased wages for garden labourers and gardeners.
* Araucaria araucana or Chilean pine, like the fern and the aspidistra a great Victorian symbol, and one that Paxton and the Duke did much to popularise.
I left London by the Comet Coach for Chesterfield, and arrived at Chatsworth at half past four o’clock in the morning of the ninth of May 1826. As no person was to be seen at that early hour, I got over the greenhouse gate by the old covered way, explored the pleasure grounds, and looked round the outside of the house. I then went down to the kitchen gardens, scaled the outside wall and saw the whole place, set the men to work there at six o’clock; then returned to Chatsworth and got Thomas Weldon to play me the water works, and afterwards went to breakfast with poor dear Mrs Gregory and her niece. The latter fell in love with me, and I with her, and thus completed my first morning’s work at Chatsworth before nine o’clock.
Chatsworth is in the heart of England, about 12 miles from Chesterfield, 26 miles from Derby and 10 miles from Matlock, below the Peaks in wild natural scenery a million miles from the soft lines of Bedfordshire or Chiswick. The park in which the Palladian mansion stands is nearly 11 miles in circumference and the setting is magically diverse – hills give way to peaks, thick woods to pasture, and through it all snakes the River Derwent.
The coach would have taken between ten and fifteen hours from London. Paxton apparently walked from Chesterfield, across the high moors through the night, arriving