The old walled kitchen garden, probably conceived by Capability Brown in the 1760s, was a whole 12 acres designed to produce the finest quality fruit, vegetables and flowers, month in and month out. It lay in a quiet spot on the banks of the swiftly flowing river, a fifteen-minute walk from the house across parkland dotted with sheep.
The garden over which the young man now had control had a long and various history, constructed and planted over several hundred years according to prevailing fashion. In 1555 Bess of Hardwick, a rich and powerful local heiress, married William Cavendish and started to build the first house. The steep east slope was terraced and fish ponds, fountains and formal plots with orchards and gazebos in the Tudor style were introduced. In 1570 it provided a prison for the exiled Mary Queen of Scots.
In 1659 Bess’ grandson – the 3rd Earl – modernised the gardens, adding a massive and intricate parterre with formal, geometrical beds. Between 1687 and 1707 the 4th Earl (now 1st Duke of Devonshire) rebuilt the Elizabethan house in classical, Ionic style, employing as his architect William Talman, one of the first great gardener-architects. The famous pairing of London and Wise, owners of the enormous nurseries at Brompton Park on the outskirts of London, in turn made its mark on the gardens. George London designed a new parterre to the west of the house, the planting of these elaborate embroidery designs supervised by Le Nôtre who had laid out the patterned gardens at Versailles. Henry Wise (of Hampton Court renown) later partnered London on the design of a further parterre to the south of the house. A great greenhouse, a separate masonry construction with huge south-facing windows, was erected along with a bowling green with its own classical temple.
Befitting the zenith of the formal style, these new gardens were filled with fine stone and brass works of art. The Danish sculptor, Cibber, who worked with Wren on both St Paul’s Cathedral and Hampton Court, fashioned sea horses for the fountains, the garden deity Flora, and many other works to watch over the gravel paths, shady basins, formal orchards and ornamental knots. This was formal gardening on a grand scale, introducing architectural features to the landscape in order to complement the great classical house that was rising out of it.
Inspired by a vogue in France and Holland, waterworks were to become the most characteristic feature of great gardens. On the steep east slope, a grand cascade was therefore fashioned by another Frenchman, a hydraulics engineer, Monsieur Grillet (a pupil of Le Nôtre). In the two years from 1694, he constructed a feeder reservoir on the top slope – earthworks on a massive scale that could only have fired Paxton’s imagination as he took it all in that morning. The elegant cascade house was added a few years later and water poured over the domed roof of a temple and through the mouths of its sculpted dolphins before tumbling over steep, wide steps towards the house below.
On the south front of the house, beyond the grand parterre, the slope was levelled and a canal dug in the last years of the seventeenth century, a flat sheet of water reflecting the sky and the lime walk to its west in stark contrast to the majestic River Derwent. Already in 1700, Chatsworth had become a school in which to learn gardening on a grand architectural scale. The gardens were freely open to the well-heeled public and the many visitors were astonished by this display of social rank and civilisation in the midst of the wild Derbyshire Peaks.
From the 1730s, much of this old garden, though not its architectural features, began to be erased. Kent, architect of Chiswick House, was the leader of the new style of gardening which embraced nature and fields over the formal designs and fountains of his predecessors. The 1st Duke’s grand masonry greenhouse at Chatsworth was now moved, a pineapple house built and a lawn melting into park obliterated the parterre. All that remained of the ornamental was swept away in favour of the elitism of the landscaped park. Bess’ terraces were destroyed. Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown removed the straight lines, the patterned planting and most of the flowers and topiary and undertook a massive tree-planting programme with carpets of grass stretching to distant stands of trees. Once again the gardens were moulded by fashion and Chatsworth, rich in Walpole’s perfect elements for a romantic garden – ancient trees, massive rocks, sweeping rivers and dashing natural waterfalls – provided an impeccable framework for grand rural ‘improvement’.
This was the park inherited by the 5th Duke and his beautiful and wayward wife Georgiana, and by their only son, the 6th Duke. Since Georgiana and her husband both preferred courtly and political life in London, the gardens saw almost no activity for 50 years – a grotto was built for Georgiana but little else – and they were all but neglected.
Soon after inheriting in 1811, the new duke started to rearrange again. Embracing the latest interest in flowers and flower beds, he reintroduced a parterre in front of the greenhouse in 1812 and a few years later he planted nearly two million forest trees in the old Stand Wood, rising on a hill to the east of the house. The trees covered an area of over 550 acres. Oak, ash, beech, elm, sycamore, poplar and birch, larch and spruce firs were all planted 4 feet apart. In the early 1820s, over 30,000 more trees were planted, earning the Duke the Gold Medal of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce.
The 6th Duke was a child of the Regency period and highly civilised, a patron of the arts and sciences but, unlike his parents, he was a liberal in politics and sentiment. Delayed by the weather, he had left for Russia that morning, 9 May, not to return to England for six months. In his absence, there was work in progress. He had commissioned the fashionable architect, Jeffry Wyatt,* to begin a vast remodelling of the house and parts of the garden and, when Paxton arrived that morning, the enormous new north wing extension, which would entirely change the scale of the house, was in the final stages of construction. Vast alterations in the layout of rooms and corridors were being planned; a new scullery, larder and kitchens were finished, new staterooms, an elaborate ballroom, dining room and sculpture gallery were projected. It was the height of modern aristocratic luxury, testimony to the Duke’s grand conceptions and deep purse. At the time of Paxton’s arrival, stirred though he must have been by the glorious gardens, this part of the house must have still been something of a building site – he describes the library as looking like ‘a lumber room’.
Wyatt was also turning his attention outside, forming plans for the garden in the new Picturesque* taste practised by Repton and directing a refocusing of attention from landscape and park to a formality of design based around the house, with symmetrical arrangements of sculpture and clipped trees and new embroidery parterres. The parkland immediately surrounding the house was being transformed into a ‘pleasure ground’ in which nature was once again dominated by horticulture. A new wide gravel walk nearly a third of a mile long and to be flanked by the Duke’s favourite trees, the monkey puzzle, was being fashioned, in what the Duke was later to call Wyatt’s ‘first great hit out of doors’. The west garden was to be relevelled out of Brown’s slope, with the sea-horse and tulip fountains fed by underground pipes from water in the cascade and, ever a perfectionist, the Duke also moved the whole cascade sideways to be in a more perfect alignment with the new building.
As the numbers of visitors increased during the early part of the nineteenth century, regulations concerning the visiting public were put in place and altered only marginally each year. Before the railway came to Rowsley, parties were limited to about a dozen; the house and garden were freely open every day from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m, with reduced hours often imposed on Saturdays; carriages had to depart and return later for their passengers; dogs were expressly forbidden and on wet and dirty days permission could be refused to visit the principal apartments. In the gardens, the groups were accompanied by one of the garden staff, and the waterworks were played for all visitors on request.
In the Duke’s Handbook, printed privately for his sisters in 1845, the Duke wrote that when Paxton arrived he found ‘at the kitchen garden … 4 pine houses, bad; two vineries which contained 8 bunches of grapes; 2 good peach houses, and a few cucumber frames. There were no houses at all for plants, and there was nowhere a plant of later introduction than about the year 1800. There were 8 rhododendrons and not one camellia.’ Of the kitchen garden he wrote ‘[it] was so low, and exposed to