Classic Gardening Magazine

26 The tradesmen’s entrance

Picture: NTPL/Stephen Robinson

Aristocrats, up to now the great garden-patrons, began to go skint in the eighteenth century, and those whose fortunes were forged from trade began to take their place.

The banker Henry Hoare spent 30 years and much of his fortune on Stourhead in Wiltshire, with its walks leading between a string of temples in the trees and around the grand lake he created by damming the River Stour. He established what is quite simply one of the finest landscaped gardens in the world, often referred to as a paradise.

The cultured visitor would recognise that Hoare had created a series of scenes from Virgil’s Aeneid. There was a grotto to represent Virgil’s underworld, and a Pantheon, which held statues of philosophers and heroes.

This is gardening with grand ambitions: Aenaes built Rome, Hoare built Stourhead.

Other great 18^th century gardens inlcude those created by Charles Hamilton at Painswick, and Leasowes created by the poet William Shenstone near Halesowen in Staffordshire.

What these gardens had in common was that, rather than looking down on patterns as had been the case in Tudor and Jacobean times, now you walked through a series of scenes.

Thomas Fairchild was the first person to create an artificial hybrid by pollination, in 1691. He crossed a gillyflower, (Dianthus Caryophyllus), with a Sweet William (D. barbatus) to breed what was the ancestor of the modern carnation. As such, he has become known as known as the forgotten father of the flower garden. Most of the flowers in our gardens – from rhododendrons to sweet peas – are hybrids.

Fairchild was taking advantage of the recent discovery that plants breed through sexual reproduction when he transferred the pollen of a Sweet William into the pistil of a carnation. His creation, known as Fairchild’s Mule, marked the beginning of scientific plant hybridization, contributed towards our understanding of the mechanisms of sexual reproduction in plants and caused considerable theological unease that man was 'playing God' when it was presented to the Royal Society in 1720.

It bothered Fairchild too. He died worrying about what he had done, and left money in his will for a sermon to be preached about the supreme role of an all-knowing God in the creation of species.

Fairchild was a nurseryman, with premises in Hoxton, East London, supplying the urban gentry of the City and Bloomsbury. He wrote a book, called the City Gardener, that showed how a modest urban plot could hold a thousand blooms, and in which he said all London gardener’s should aspire to a country life. The book is the first serious study of the problems of urban gardening: lack of space and light, and the effects of air pollution.

His market garden was established in 1691 in Ivy Lane, Hoxton, and he is buried in the overspill churchyard on Shoreditch High Street, where his grave is one of the few remaining.

He had an extensive collection of grape vines and made one of the last serious attempts at viticulture in England prior to the 20th century. The London News of 1724 described a bunch of grapes seen in his garden as “half a yard in length, above an ell in circumference, and the grape in proportion as large, which far exceeds anything of the like nature in England.”

Fairchild’s work was nationally important in the history of gardening in England. In addition to being a successful commercial nurseryman, he was a scientific botanist, and something of an influence on garden design in towns. His design for laying out a town square is reproduced below.

Doctors saw the potential in all the new plants that were flooding in to the country, and began to experiment to discover their medicinal qualities.

The Worshipful Society of Apothecaries was given the lease to Chelsea Physic Garden in 1722 by the wealthy doctor Hans Sloane (left). The garden at Chelsea, Philip Miller, was a master horticulturalist, and made his garden the leader among the other physic and botanic gardens that had sprung up around the country.

He had excellent contacts among the plant collectors and experts in Britain, Europe and America and experimented successfully with exotic plants such as the paw paw, pineapples and melons.

He wrote the first Gardener’s Dictionary, forerunner to every horticultural encyclopaedia that has followed.

Among the many plant hunters that Philip Miller, gardener at the Chelsea Physic Garden (see entry 29), sponsored was John Bartram, a Philadelphia farmer who became America’s most renowned 18^th century botanist, despite being self-taught.

Over 30 years, Bartram sent back 2,000 new species, in hundreds of boxes for which he was paid five guineas each, including Helianthus, Phlox, Ceanothus, Balsam fir and, perhaps the most magnificent of all, Magnolia grandiflora (below), a native of South Carolina.

Other plants that came from America in the first third of the 18th century were the azure Morning Glory, Heliotrope, Rudbekia, Black-eyed Susan, Turk’s-cap Lilly, andVerbena bonariensis.