A Thing in Disguise: The Visionary Life of Joseph Paxton

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The Duke was becoming deeply charmed by Paxton and began to give him increasing responsibilities, including that over all the woods and forests. In three years, the gardener had shown that he was reliable, intuitive, a practical empiricist when it came to designing plant houses, thoroughly capable of achieving whatever he set his hand to, and, furthermore, a dreamer of schemes to improve the landscape of the park in keeping with the very latest horticultural fashions. As head gardener and forester he now hired and paid his own men, managed their labours and ran his own accounts. These accounts still had to be submitted to the Chatsworth agent, and to the solicitor, Benjamin Currey, but they marked Paxton’s status and responsibility. Not only did the Duke sanction the building of a new office at Paxton’s house in the kitchen garden, but he increased his salary threefold to reflect his seniority within the household. As ‘Gardener and Woodman’ Paxton was now to be paid £226 a year, which included an allowance for finding and keeping a horse.

The increasing expenditure on the gardens and pleasure grounds during these first years indicates the changes that were being wrought. It rose from £505 to almost £2,000 by 1829, much of which was spent on the numerous new glasshouses in the kitchen garden. In addition, the Duke’s own private account books show that he gave a total of £400 to Paxton over several months, to be used for ‘new stoves’. It must be said that in the context of the Duke’s wider spending, these sums were almost insignificant. Tens of thousands of pounds were being spent on Wyatt’s improvements to the house and thousands more on collections of books, sculpture, art and furniture. The Duke was happy to spend £942 during Doncaster races week alone in his efforts to outshine his neighbour the Duke of Rutland.

Just before Easter 1830, the Duke purchased a large weeping ash from a nursery garden near Derby. Around 40 years old, its roots alone were 28 feet in diameter, and its branches radiated on each side of the trunk to a distance of 37 feet. It weighed 8 tons. Paxton was dispatched to engineer its particularly problematic removal and carriage to Chatsworth. He took with him with 40 labourers, at least 6 horses and a new machine constructed to his own design by Messrs Strutt of Belper. By Good Friday, the Duke was in a lather of anticipation. ‘Up at 6 in hope tree had come but it did not all day.’ He went to church instead.

On the first attempt to lift the tree from the ground, the strong chain snapped and it was some time before it was ready to be moved the 28 miles to Chatsworth, just managing to squeeze through toll bars along the route, contrary to the expectations of the many doubters. Four days after they had set out to collect it, the tree arrived at the park gates which had to be lifted from their hinges, parts of the walls taken down and several branches lopped off to allow it in. Finally the Duke met the weeping ash at the new northern entrance to the house. He was delighted, declared it miraculous, and watched 450 labourers under Paxton haul it into place in its hole in the centre of the courtyard, spread out its roots, peg them down and form a mound of earth around its trunk. It remains there to this day.

It is not now uncommon to see mature trees hydraulically uprooted and transported over great distances and replanted. It was somewhat revolutionary in 1830; large crowds gathered to witness the curiosity and the local papers reported the ‘experiment of a novel and extraordinary description’, and Paxton’s ‘ingenious contrivance’ in detail. Paxton had undoubtedly moved fairly large trees before in his responsibilities as the Duke’s forester and in the formation of the pinetum. A voracious reader on all subjects horticultural, he would have added to his own practical knowledge the systems of others. Only a year later he would include an article in his new magazine The Horticultural Register recommending a method of earth excavation in order to leave a large root-ball intact. Later still, in the first volume of another of his own magazines, The Magazine of Botany, he would return to this favourite theme with a full description of how to remove large trees, accompanied by clear diagrams to illustrate root-ball preservation, the use of cross-levers in lifting, and replanting techniques. For the Duke, the weeping ash was a high point of the year and, such was the widespread interest in its removal, that he received a vexatious eight-page letter from Sir Henry Steuart, author of a treatise on practical planting. Steuart warned him that he should have taken his advice, for the tree would surely not survive transplantation so late in the year. He added an amusing postscript ‘I know that gardeners are, as well as poets rather an “irritable race”, I should take the liberty to advise … that this letter be not communicated to Mr Paxton.’ The Duke’s reply was restrained. ‘Mr Paxton, my woodman, who has long been in the habit of moving large trees has no doubt of the success … of the experiment.’ He could have added that Paxton was the least ‘irritable’ man in his employment.

By 1830, the first lawnmower was patented,

an early indication that gardening was to become one of the greatest of all middle-class English hobbies. The kitchen garden at Chatsworth held 22 hothouses and numerous forcing pits. In the pleasure ground, new flower gardens framed the house and plants, in particular, rose to prominence. With new glasshouses to protect them, and a man fit to cultivate them, it became expedient to augment the collection by swapping and purchasing plants and seeds – and these begin to be listed in the garden accounts. At home, Sarah was pregnant again with their third child.

Outside their enclosed world, there was revolution in France and political unease in Britain. The word ‘scientist’ was coined; invention and experimentation was creating a new world of possibility. In September 1830, Stephenson’s Rocket raced along its tracks at 16m.p.h. from Liverpool to Manchester carrying passengers as well as freight for the first time, promising a revolution in travel particularly for the expanding urban populations.

Paxton was poised to burst into action in the two most fruitful and exciting decades of his life, years where it hardly seemed possible for him to draw breath for new ideas and experiments.

The fashion for these odd shaped evergreen trees was fed by the publication, in 1831, of a complete listing of all known conifers in cultivation by Charles Lawson. In 1838 he followed this with the publication of Pinetum Britannicum. By the end of the nineteenth century, it is estimated that over 250 different species of pines were available.

By Edwin Budding. Illustrated in the Gardener’s Chronicle of that year. Uncatalogued material in the Chatsworth Collection shows that a Ferrabee mower was purchased in 1833. At an early stage Ferrabee shared rights in the mower with patentee Budding and licensed Ransomes of Ipswich to make them.

CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_98f8870f-36c1-55f8-bbae-9a0f0fb493d2)

‘I was just going to write and tell you how much pleased I was by the amount of your prizes in the Sheffield paper, when I got your dismal letter about the frost … I am coming to look at what is left on 1 June. Please tell Mrs Gregory.’ So wrote the Duke to Paxton on 14 May 1831. The frost had also destroyed the prize dahlias at Chiswick, demolished the magnolia leaves and ruined the blossom and vegetables. If this was not the first letter from the Duke to Paxton, it is the earliest to have survived, and it points at the priority now given by the Duke to all things horticultural. From this time, his diaries become peppered with references to plants and trees seen and coveted, to visits to the famous nurseries in and around London, and to the efforts and results of other gardeners at many of England’s great estates and smaller private gardens.

If the improvements at Chatsworth were intended to provide a grand display case for his passionately collected works of art, literature and sculpture, the garden and grounds soon became an equal obsession. Paxton was beginning to fashion a pattern of new walks through the woods, as well as paths and slopes between the orangery and the flower garden near the house. His enthusiasm was infectious to the beauty-loving aristocrat and the gardener’s early successes and obvious ability began to fire the Duke’s somewhat competitive and acquisitive nature. He started to study botanical books avidly, swept up in a rising intoxication for all things rare and ornamental.

Together, the Duke and his gardener would walk the woods and strike out on to the moors above the house, in a boyish and delightful search for new springs that could be diverted to feed the waterworks. The Duke visited gardens in Canterbury in September, noting some tulip trees which must be had for Chatsworth. When he arrived back, he visited the kitchen garden and saw all Paxton’s rarities. He was in raptures. Chatsworth had become, quite simply, ‘delicious’, his enjoyment of it filling the pages of his diary and his letters. Lady Newburgh, a Derbyshire neighbour, wrote to Blanche that ‘Chatsworth is getting every day more beautiful inside and out, you will hardly know it again, so much has been done.’

From the beginning of the year, across the country there was almost no talk but of ‘the Bill’. The first reading of the Great Reform Bill – introduced by the Whigs and designed to begin a realignment of power through the abolition of rotten boroughs and the extension of the vote to the prospering middle classes and male householders – was heard in the Lords at the end of September. It had a rough ride and on 8 October it was rejected. There were riots in Derby, Bristol and in manufacturing towns across England. In December, on its second reading, it was thrown out again by a majority of 160. Like its continental cousins, Britain seemed on the verge of potential revolution and the army were put on alert.

The Liberal Duke was alarmed and distressed – and he went shopping. Then he wrote jubilantly to Paxton: ‘I have bought you the Araucaria excelsa!’ He fussed about the safe arrival of the monkey puzzle, dreading delay on the canals by frost. He also sent heaths, and signalled his great desire for a glorious red euphorbia, for an amaryllis, for Barringtonia and for Eucalyptus desfoliata, once the stoves in which they could be cultivated had been completed.

If the urban population was disaffected and angry, in the enclosed and rarefied country air of the Chatsworth estate, Paxton had different distractions. His second daughter was born in April and named after the Duke’s niece, Blanche. He was also working on plans to launch a new gardening magazine, The Horticultural Register and General Magazine, jointly edited with Joseph Harrison, the gardener to Lord Wharncliffe at Wortley Hall near Sheffield. The first issue, published in July, thrust Paxton into the public arena. He was just short of his 28th birthday.

Plantsmen, eager for information on new plants and their cultivation, were already well served by the early Botanical Magazine and its rival the Botanical Register. The Horticultural Society issued its Transactions and nurseries their catalogues, including Loddiges’ Botanical Cabinet. All these contained coloured plates of foreign varieties, but they were expensive, and hardly suited to the ‘practical’ gardener. The most extensive horticultural journalist of his day was John Claudius Loudon. The Gardener’s Magazine included detailed reports of the activities of the societies, of nurseries and gardens visited, of recently published books and periodicals as well as articles on all aspects of the gardener’s responsibilities. Most radical were Loudon’s own articles, advocating novel and revolutionary ideas such as national schooling, adult education and green belts around cities.

Many other, smaller magazines came and went during the late 1820s, stimulated by an increasingly literate reading public and by the new methods of steam printing which reduced the costs of production. What exactly drove Paxton to set up a new monthly magazine, and how he met Harrison, is unclear. It may be that part of Sarah’s dowry was used to fund the project. It was a bold step, but he was never timid.

The first volume of the Horticultural Register stated its intention to ‘embrace everything useful and valuable in horticulture, natural history and rural economy … It is evident that a taste for horticulture in all its branches, both of vegetable culture and propagation, also landscape and architectural gardening, has within the last twenty years very rapidly increased, and a corresponding improvement has consequently attended it; for at no time has it reached so high a state of perfection as the present.’ Paxton was at pains to emphasise that the readiness of garden proprietors (like his Duke) to encourage their gardeners to experiment and develop their art was a fundamental factor in effecting this change. The editors wanted to produce an affordable magazine, directed at all classes of society, to circulate it as widely as possible and to include the broadest possible array of articles ‘in so plain and intelligible a form … as to be within the comprehension of all its readers’.

Including articles ranging from the grandest of horticultural schemes to the botanic minutiae of particular plants, the magazine would be divided into five parts, covering gardening in all its branches. There were reviews of and extracts from articles in other horticultural and rural publications, news of discoveries and interesting accounts of natural history, reviews of books and journals published and ‘miscellaneous intelligence’. Neat engravings would serve as illustration, the need for correct descriptions of all new and valuable plants would be met and it would close with a monthly horticultural calendar – a novel approach to managing the monthly practicalities of the gardener’s art which has been copied up to the present day. In order to include as much as possible, without increasing its price, the magazine was printed in small type and, at the end of each year, a bound volume contained additional lists of fruit and flowers recently classified, and of the most successful fruits and vegetables already in cultivation.

Paxton’s magazine provides a snapshot of the contemporary horticultural world. The first issue included remarks on new modes of glazing, on the materials to be used for hothouse roofs and on how to alter the colour of hydrangeas or retard the blooming season for common English and French roses. There is a description of how to force vines in pots by the gardener at Willersley Castle, Derbyshire, and the first reprint of an article from the Gardener’s Magazine. Catholic in its coverage, driven partly by Paxton’s own preoccupations, the magazine eclipsed its rivals and was immediately successful.

It brought Paxton head to head with Loudon who realised that his publication was, for the first time, facing serious competition. Piqued, the brilliant monomaniac set out on a tour of northern and Midland estates. The next issue of the Gardener’s Magazine carried a stinging criticism of Chatsworth which ‘has always appeared to us an unsatisfactory place’. He disapproved of the square pile of building, its situation and the scattering of its waterworks. He recommended the cascade steps should be transformed into a waterfall, railed against the gravel on the walks and offered only one morsel of praise – that the Duke allowed the waters to be played to any visitor without exception. Loudon reserved his sharpest barb for Paxton himself, lambasting the kitchen garden for including ornamental plants, ragged box edging and wooden ranges of forcing houses. He went on to say that he had ‘since learned that Mr Paxton disapproves of metallic houses and of heating by hot water; and here we are not sorry that this is the case, because the public will have an opportunity of judging between his productions and those of other first-rate gardens where metallic houses and hot water alone are employed’. He was referring to Woburn, Syon and Bretton Hall in a way designed to inflame Paxton, who was not at home during the visit. It was a possibly impulsive, certainly tactless and arrogant censure from a man plagued by pain and illness and entirely devoted to the maturation of horticulture into a professional science.

Paxton was still a little known quantity, but his riposte showed his mettle and left Loudon in little doubt that he was not for bullying. Such public disapproval, timed just as his own patron was particularly attentive to activity in the gardens, and which also attacked the very house and grounds of which they were so proud, would have shaken a less resilient man. The sting came not from an anonymous contributor, but from the most famously trenchant of horticultural authors and journalists, the greatest garden innovator and designer of the early nineteenth century.

In the third issue of the Horticultural Register, Paxton was the model of restraint and measure, but his reply to Loudon was no less vigorous. ‘A person might almost conjecture that Mr Loudon came with a predetermination to find fault, if not it must be because he did not give himself the time to consider before he wrote his ideas of what he terms improvements.’ He questioned Loudon’s taste and he took issue with him for failing to even enter the house, from where the gardens should be viewed. He pointed out that, while at least two of the glasshouses in the kitchen garden were heated by hot water, the method was generally uneconomical in the severe winters of Derbyshire where fires warmed more consistently and needed less attention.

Paxton drew his line in the sand over Loudon’s criticisms of his preference for wood over metal in glasshouse construction. They not only admitted as much light as if they were built of metal, he said, but they provided a combination of strength, durability and lightness, honed to a more perfect balance than had ever been achieved previously in wooden ranges. In addition, his wooden ranges had cost less than a third of the price of metal ones. Finally, Paxton questioned the judgement and the veracity of the older man. He reproved: ‘did you not say to the young man who accompanied you round, that Chatsworth was altogether the finest place you had ever seen in your travels? How then is it that Chatsworth is so unsatisfactory a place?’ It was an able and finely-judged deflection. Sharp-minded Sarah, acutely judgemental herself, would have cheered the confident rebuttals of her husband.

The Horticultural Register continued to prosper, gaining sales over Loudon’s magazine. Occasionally, Loudon would try to prick the confidence of his young competitor who would reply with restrained sarcasm, but on the whole the magazines continued in successful parallel and later the two men would come to a rapprochement. Some time in 1832, Paxton’s partner in the venture, Joseph Harrison, quit the magazine and the editorship devolved wholly on Paxton. He continued to contribute articles on a variety of subjects from the tiniest detail of plant qualities, to the characteristics of large groupings of plants and the chemistry of soil, a living embodiment of his belief that gardeners should know not only the names of plants but the detail of their structure, their habit and peculiarities in order to understand the requirements of heat, soil and nutrition. Through his own writing he began to formulate and consolidate his own aesthetic and horticultural theories.

In June 1832, the Reform Bill – perhaps the most important piece of early nineteenth century legislation – was finally passed, to great general exultation. In one strike it increased by 50 per cent the number of people eligible to vote. The changes in the wider world hardly touched Chatsworth, however, where Paxton concentrated on the conversion of the beautiful old stone greenhouse, built in 1697, into a stove. He added a new glass roof, remodelled the interior to form terraces on which plants were placed in pots, included a basin for aquatic plants, and modernised the heating equipment to include four furnaces whose flues passed into the back wall of the house. The heat from the fires circulated through iron grates in the front path and via a hot air cavity round each of the front basins. The venerable old building was reborn, and the Duke was delighted. ‘My new stove is the loveliest thing I ever saw, done entirely by Paxton.’

Once the alteration was complete, Paxton worked on designs for a new parterre to be laid out in front of it, planted with bulbs and plants to give colour almost throughout the year, edged with rhododendrons and box hedges. Cut out of the grass were square and semicircular beds and two long beds in which moss roses were layered over the surface, dotted with half-standard perpetual roses rising above them. The transformation in the gardens was widely noted, nowhere more so than in letters to the Duke. Lady Southampton was typical in her praise, finding herself ‘enchanted’ and ‘delighted’. The Duke’s niece, Blanche, thought that it ‘surpassed anything I ever saw’.

On 18 October, the Duke’s recently decorated new dining room was used for the first time in rehearsal for its first royal visit. The following day, the young Princess Victoria and her mother, the Duchess of Kent, arrived as part of a tour of the great English estates. Victoria was thirteen; it was her first ‘grown-up’ dinner and the house was gleaming and opulent in its new finery. The future queen planted an oak, her mother a chestnut, in the west garden, and in the evening there were charades.

Paxton had been planning and his men had been arranging his first coup de théâtre. All the waterworks in the park were illuminated with coloured Bengal lights which were changed between each act. Even the Duke had never seen anything like it. First, the fountains glowed red, but when the group returned to the windows the gardens were bathed in blue ‘moonlight’; then the cascade appeared to turn to fire, and rockets went up in every direction. The 13-year-old and all her party were enchanted. While they slept, hundreds of garden labourers worked through the cold October night to return the gardens to their immaculate perfection so that, by the morning, there was not even a trace of autumn leaves on any of the paths. When the Princess moved on the following Monday to Sheffield, fireworks again awaited her, but the Duke was adamant that they came nowhere near the effects of Paxton’s illuminations of water and fire.

When his right arm broke for the second time, it was amputated. It was said that after the operation in the morning, Loudon was back downstairs in the afternoon dictating to his wife Jane.

CHAPTER SIX (#ulink_45c495a2-0332-5efc-a386-82898f251a2a)

Paxton was now in his thirtieth year. He now had four children – his third daughter was born that October and named in honour of the future Queen – a successful magazine, a growing reputation and the confidence of his employer? The gardens at Chatsworth were organised and flourishing. Then, at the quiet beginning of the following year (1833), the Duke had one of his only disputes with Paxton, who was not exact in my accounts … He says he must have discovered his mistakes but I doubt that and it makes me very glad to have kept my accounts as perfectly as I do.’ In the light of his future vast debts, the Duke was delusional over his own accounting abilities. Paxton may not have been a great deal better (though he certainly had to deal with more complicated accounts on a daily basis, ably assisted by Sarah) and it is very possible that from 1831 he was taking private maths lessons in a neighbouring village. Characteristically, all was forgotten only a fortnight later as the Duke whisked Paxton off on a tour of great country house gardens, ostensibly to further the gardener’s education but, one also suspects, in order to share with him their mutual passion for all things horticultural.

They travelled together by coach, and it was the first time Paxton had been away from Sarah for an extended period. Coach travel was very soon to be overtaken and outdated by rail. During these early years of the 1830s, the great trunk lines were developing, including the London to Birmingham that very year. The days of master and man together, and of the enclosure of the coach, were nearing their end.

Their first stop, Dropmore – about thirty miles outside London in Buckinghamshire – was owned by Lady Grenville and maintained by her gardener Philip Frost. Lady Grenville was possibly the first gardener to challenge the sterility of landscape by introducing bedding, cutting into the grass to provide space for the flood of colour available from showy displays of the many new plants now widely cultivated. There, they also found glorious examples of pines and they were astonished to see the Araucaria excelsa planted out of doors and thriving, and American laurels arranged as if wild. They went on to Althorp, Paxton stealing ten minutes after midnight to write to Sarah, bemoaning his separation from her and his ‘little family’, his loneliness mitigated only by the Duke who ‘pays me the greatest possible attention’. At Windsor they were depressed by the wretched state of the orange trees, but again the Duke ‘took great pains to explain everything to me’. Sarah hated their being apart, and was clearly distressed not to hear from him more often, but Paxton and the Duke were on the move and letters took time to arrive. Ultimately, she did not have to wait long for her ‘dearest love’, the Duke sprained his knee and was forced to return to London.

When Paxton arrived back at Chatsworth he sent flowers to the Duke convalescing at Chiswick, who was so delighted with them that he sent them on to the Queen. His estimation of Paxton continued to rise as his own study of botany matured – possibly not to the appreciation of his gardener at Chiswick where the Duke said that he now saw and understood the ‘bad management of my plants’. Between 1830 and 1835, Paxton spent over £2,500 on plants, trees and seeds on behalf of the Duke. Many were greenhouse plants, but purchases also included the more obvious tulips, auriculas, carnations, camellias, roses, lilies, and even primroses, obtained from local Derbyshire nurseries as well as the famous London and continental establishments.

With the Duke fit again and en route to Italy, taking with him horticultural gifts for many of his friends, Paxton continued to experiment at Chatsworth. In 1833, in contemplation of continuing his experiments by building a new range of hothouses, he revisited the possibility of erecting metal structures, drawing up plans and sending to Birmingham and Sheffield for estimates. But he was horrified by the enormous costs – both estimates were over £1,800 – and ‘I at once set about calculating how much the range would cost if built of wood … I was able to complete the whole range including masonry (which was omitted in the metal estimates) for less than £500.’ Next he considered how to design a house into which the greatest possible amount of light would be admitted in the morning and afternoon, while minimising the violence of the midday sun.

Loudon had already set out the principle of fixing glass at angles on a ‘ridge and furrow’ construction and it now occurred to Paxton that his wooden roofs would admit much more light if the sashes were so fixed. It was an insight that proved to be one of the most important mental leaps of his career. He reinvented and refined Loudon’s nascent principle to such a perfect model that it became his signature practice in glass roofing, a revolution in glasshouse design that would last for over a generation. The principle worked on the basis that light in the mornings and evenings, when the sun was low in the sky, would enter the house without obstruction, presenting itself perpendicularly to the wide surface of the glass. Conversely, the strength of the midday sun was mitigated by the fact that it hit the glass at a more oblique angle.

Fired by his success on small buildings, Paxton was now inspired to build a new glasshouse of considerable dimensions to accommodate the Duke’s growing orchid collection. The new house was to be 97 feet 6 inches long and 26 feet wide – a considerable span – made up of 15 bays, and constructed again of wood supported only by 16 slender, reeded cast-iron columns. The floor was made of slatted board, allowing earth to be swept through, wooden rafters were entirely abolished and the sash bars were made lighter than ever before. In addition, the front columns were to be hollow, with a metal pipe inserted to act as a conduit for the water from the roof, directing it to a drain laid in the gravel walk outside. The angled panes of the roof were set fast, with the least possible unsightly and uneconomical overlap, and, since the sash bars were grooved, less putty was needed. The panes at the front and end could be easily slid aside, allowing entry to any part of the house without the need for a door and maximum possible ventilation. In this new house, Paxton arrived at a system of construction the principles of which would now underpin the design of every subsequent wood and glass structure that he built. Notwithstanding the tax on glass, he pronounced it to be economical, costing around twopence a cubic foot.

During the five years from 1830, Paxton spent the considerable amount of £3,409 on maintaining and constructing greenhouses, mushroom houses, forcing houses, a strawberry house, a large pine house, a melon and cucumber house, several vine ranges and a peach house – all of glass, wood and iron. He was not working in isolation but within a contemporary fashion for experimentation with the design and structure of glass buildings, often on a massive scale. Loudon, for example, designed a radical building with massive glass domes for the Birmingham Horticultural Gardens, which was widely publicised though never built. Demonstrating just how hard these types of building were to erect, the ‘Antheum’ in Hove, with its 60 foot high dome spanning 170 feet, swerved into famously serpentine lines when its scaffolding was removed, before collapsing within the month. Paxton’s own experiments though were impelled by the needs of utility, stability, convenience, economy and the desire to overcome technological limitations within the constraints imposed by the glass tax, rather than aesthetics of design or the development of his own reputation. They succeeded in their aims entirely.

He grabbed at every conceivable opportunity with indefatigable energy. In February 1834 he launched another, more ambitious, monthly magazine, The Magazine of Botany and Register of Flowering Plants. Priced at two shillings it offered detailed study of plants and their husbandry, containing four accurate and well-coloured engravings of the most prized new plants, as well as numerous other woodcut illustrations and a range of articles. It provided a cheaper alternative to magazines like the Botanical Register and, like its sibling the Horticultural Register; it promised to break away from the elitism of most journals, by using the most plain and intelligible language possible. Aiming for the broadest appeal, it would give botanical descriptions of plants in English, the culture of plants in short paragraphs and calendars of work for each month. Unsurprisingly, it was badly reviewed by Loudon who damned it as only ‘useful to the manufacturers of articles which are decorated with the figures of plants … To botanists it is of no use, as the plants are neither new, nor described with scientific accuracy.’ But the new magazine would be steadfastly supported for a generation, augmenting not only Paxton’s reputation, but his income.

The Magazine of Botany was, from the start, printed by Bradbury and Evans of Whitefriars, London (in 1835 they also took over the printing of the Horticultural Register). William Bradbury, three years Paxton’s senior and a famed liberal employer, would become one of the greatest of all Paxton’s friends. Along with his partner, Frederick Mullett Evans, the company printed Charles Dickens’ novels, and built a reputation as one of the most efficient printing firms in England, with twenty of the most modern steam-driven presses running 24 hours a day, and a specialisation in illustrated magazines and fine-art printing.

Throughout 1834 Paxton’s contributions to the Horticultural Register declined sharply. He chose to review Hortus Woburnensis – the descriptive catalogue of Woburn plants compiled by the Duke of Bedford’s gardener James Forbes – on the whole favourably, while deploring its lack of concision. Bedford and Forbes had initiated similar schemes at Woburn as Paxton and the Duke and there was healthy competition between them.

The journalistic battle continued to rage between Loudon and Paxton in their respective magazines. Plagiarism in the form of reprinting the abstracts of articles from rival papers was the norm, driven by commercial realities, but it was one of the key areas of contention between the two men. Although the new magazine was more about plants than horticulture, Paxton included short articles on the subjects about which he and the gardening world were most preoccupied, including designs for greenhouses, different methods of heating stoves and designs for ornamental labourers’ cottages. Many of these were themselves reprints from the Horticultural Register, including those on moving large trees and designing subscription gardens, and some were taken from Loudon’s magazine, which infuriated him.

At the start of April 1834, the Duke wrote to Paxton from Florence asking him to leave immediately for Paris, with a small monkey puzzle and some rhododendrons. He wanted him to see the gardens at Versailles and St-Cloud, but he gave him little more than a week to organise his journey: ‘if you cannot arrive by the 20th in Paris, you had better not come’. Paxton left immediately, arriving on the 19th, his lips blistered and cracked by the speed of the journey. The following day they visited the Louvre and Palais Royal together on foot. They went on to visit St-Cloud and several private gardens, all the while collecting plants and seeds for Chatsworth. At the eighteenth-century Jardin des Plantes they saw vast, inspiring new glass ranges, unlike anything they had ever seen. When the Duke left for London, he ordered Paxton to stay a further week to purchase horses for him at the Russian horse sale, and to see the grand waterworks on display at Versailles at the start of May.

Paxton was bursting with excitement and news of his first foreign tour: ‘I wish to God you were here seeing all these things with me, you would be quite delighted,’ he wrote to Sarah. ‘I shall not be able to contain myself until you are acquainted with the details of my journey … I have come so far and seen so much that it seems an age since I left home.’ He was irritated by officials at French customs, by the lack of soap in the Hôtel du Rhein in the Place Vendôme and by the dirty streets. He was caught up by Ridgway, the Duke’s steward, and Santi, his Russian servant, and taken to a gambling house where ‘Santi was a fool enough to lose £70 … they wanted me to try my luck but I know better – Santi was like a madman all yesterday.’ He caught cold at the horse market and was laid up for a week with only Coote, the Duke’s musician, left with him. In his letters home, he complained that the hotel staff were so stupid that he could have died for all they cared – the merest trifle took them up to an hour to bring.

The waterworks at Versailles were a disappointing affair to Paxton, who found them ‘not half so fine as I anticipated’. It was intolerably hot, and there were crowds of thousands. What did impress him were the immense numbers of horse soldiers gathered to be received by the King. As he set his face again for London, keen to see Sarah and the children and hoping that he would not be delayed by the Duke, he vowed that he would never forget it. In London, he found a packet of letters from Sarah awaiting him, eager to know all his news. But all at once, he was up to his eyes with things to do for the Duke and ‘the hurry and confusion I am in renders it almost impossible for me to answer any of your questions’, he wrote. He assured her that he would return to Chatsworth with the Duke in two days, and rescue the reins of Chatsworth management from her. In the meantime it was down to her to call all the men in from the woods, arrange for the gardens to be neat and clean, and to order the men to lay down new gravel along the east front of the house. He told her that the tiger at Kew Gardens had died – which upset him far less than the loss of a plant at Chatsworth.

By the time the Duke arrived at Chatsworth in the middle of May after an absence of nearly six months, he found the new greenhouse completed in the kitchen garden. He was delighted. Soon, the two men were plotting great improvements together, while entertaining or visiting botanists around the country. In October, the Glasgow botanist, William Hooker, came to stay at Chatsworth, and in November, Paxton and the Duke travelled to Liverpool to see the botanic gardens there. In effect, these Liverpool gardens, only ninety or so miles from Chatsworth, were the first municipal gardens in England, albeit established by private subscription at the turn of the century. They had just moved from the city centre to a more rural site, and the Duke now considered them worth going a thousand miles to see. Correspondence between both men was now filled with horticultural news: William Aiton sent plants from Kew including some trees (‘generous Aiton. Treasure!’ wrote the Duke), Countess Amherst sent news of wonderful new plants from Montreal, the Duke was offered a collection of American aloes by a gardener in Chesterfield, the new arboretum in the pleasure grounds at Syon was charming. The two men were inspired.

At the end of the year, as with the Horticultural Register, Paxton gathered up the year’s parts of the Magazine of Botany and published them as a single volume, which he dedicated to his patron ‘with the greatest respect and gratitude … in testimony of his … enthusiastic love of botany … and … as an acknowledgement of the innumerable favours conferred on his Grace’s obliged and most obedient servant Joseph Paxton’. It was usual to flatter the sympathies of patrons, but it is possible that Paxton was nudged into this first dedication by William Hooker, Professor of Botany at Glasgow and future director of Kew Gardens. Recently, Hooker had written to thank the Duke for his stay in Derbyshire, adding ‘I cannot tell you what delight it gives me, who has devoted at most thirty years uninterruptedly to the study of Botany, to find a nobleman of your … distinguished rank and fortune so zealously devoted to this delightful pursuit … the next volume of The Botanical Magazine completes the 8th volume and after the botanical and intellectual feast I have enjoyed at Chatsworth, I was irresistibly led to dedicate that volume to your Grace.’

Such dedications recognised the moneyed luminaries of the relatively small world of international horticulture – a world which was, on the whole, generously and mutually supportive. As the news of the transformations of the gardens at Chatsworth spread, many gardeners began to feed it with their own choicest offerings

and Hooker also now promised to write to his correspondents the world over requesting them to send their finest plants to Chatsworth for the growing collections there.

The arboretum in the Horticultural Society Gardens at Chiswick and that at the nursery of Loddiges in Hackney, as well as the enormous variety of new trees available for planting, all contributed to a long-term desire in Paxton and his Duke to create a far more complete collection of trees than the pinetum. Characteristically, they were always setting their sights higher. Now they wanted to form a large experimental ground filled with trees of all species. From the start of 1835, labourers were employed in clearing the ground to be used. An enormous number of trees and shrubs were removed and the ground trenched ready for planting. The collection of trees was to be laid out in about 40 acres of park and woodland, either side of the walk already designed to form a circuit of the pleasure grounds. Winding paths split off from the meandering main walk in order to admit views of the distant park.

The work involved enormous upheaval and digging. The Duke was excited and wrote to Paxton ‘I don’t mind in the least how dirty it may be, I shall be glad to find the pleasure ground up to my neck in mud all over.’ In constant contact by letter, he also urged Paxton to allow Thomas Bailey, his gardener at Chiswick, to work in the arboretum in order to learn about the management of trees, and he reminded Paxton of the fine trees at Syon.

Progress was astonishingly rapid despite the fact that Paxton also faced the huge task of diverting a natural stream 2 miles from its original position on the east moor to form a course so apparently artless that it seemed to have been made by nature. In February, the Duke noted in his diary that it was ‘a wonderful alteration’ and in April Lord Burlington visited the park, writing to his wife that almost 130 types of azalea were already planted. He added that the place looked rather a mess but that Paxton had assured him that in two years it would be perfect.

By the beginning of June, only six months after the work began, the arboretum was all but complete. The Duke wrote again to Paxton from his estate at Hardwick that he had been ‘enraptured with the concluded half of the arboretum road … I had abstained from going, having taken it into my head that it could not have been done, and there it is finished … I can complain of nothing.’ Signalling a rapprochement, Loudon invited Paxton to write an article for the Gardener’s Magazine, in which he set out his rules for the formation of arboreta and rejoiced ‘in the idea of an arboretum on a large and comprehensive scale … open every day of the year and shown to all persons rich and poor without exception … the arboretum at Chatsworth will thus be seen by thousands’.

The arboretum, when it was finished, formed the largest collection of herbaceous plants in Europe, planted according to their scientific orders. Some 75 orders of trees were planted, including over 1,670 species and varieties, with plans to increase the number to 2,000. The smaller trees were planted nearest to the walk with the largest extending beyond them, all with room to grow into single ornamental specimens.

With some pride, Paxton claimed that the plan had been financed entirely from the sale of wood from the felled trees. Ever true to his training at the Horticultural Society and his own tidy mind, and witness that this was above all a place to be visited, to exhibit and educate, all the trees were named on wooden tallies. These were made of hearts of oak, steamed to draw out the sap, boiled in linseed oil and painted with three coats of black paint with their names in white paint, including their scientific name, country of origin, year of introduction, estimated final height and their English or common names. When the Duke saw the completed arboretum for the first time, his gardener’s most ambitious plan yet, he confided to his diary: ‘it is transcendent’. That Paxton had all but completed it in six months was confirmation of his singular powers of organisation and will. Four years later even Loudon, now reconciled to Paxton’s true genius, was to praise it though later still, having completed the first public arboretum in England, in Derby, he tactlessly argued that Paxton’s ordering and classification were unsatisfactory.

Paxton had not, however, been directing only the great arboretum undertaking – the Duke had his eye on a quite different and expensive venture. In February, James Bateman of Knypersley Hall in the Potteries wrote to the Duke about a tremendous orchid collection being offered for sale by his friend John Huntley, the Vicar of Kimbolton on the Bedfordshire – Cambridgeshire borders. Bateman, himself the owner of one of the finest collections of orchidaceous plants in England, had published The Orchidaceae of Guatemala and Mexico in a huge folio illustrated by the renowned Mrs Withers and Agnes Drake Huntley, he said, had been collecting for 20 years and only financial necessity would induce him to sell his collection of over two hundred species. The Duke was interested. He had bought his first exotic orchid in 1833 for £100 – Oncidium papilio or the butterfly orchid, a stunning plant with orange and yellow flowers and mottled leaves. The orchid was a serious status symbol and the Duke was driven to possess a collection to surpass all others.

These exotic beauties, whose cultivation frequently ended in failure, had been prized above all plant rarities since 1731 when the first tropical orchid flowered in England. By the 1760s 24 species of orchid were in cultivation in Britain, including only two from the tropics and the rest native or European. In 1782, the flowering of the serene nun orchid – Phaius tankervilleae introduced from China – at Kew Gardens had excited widespread attention and when, at the turn of the century, Francis Bauer completed the very first drawing of the nucleus of a plant cell, tellingly he used an orchid specimen. In 1812, Conrad Loddiges & Sons had started orchid cultivation in England on a commercial basis and in 1818 succeeded in cultivating Cattleya labiata for the first time, the orchid named after William Cattley, who had assembled a pioneering collection of the gorgeous plants at his London home. When Cattleya labiata flowered, it was an immediate sensation, heralding orchid growing as a fashionable pastime. By 1826, 154 orchid genera had been discovered and the Horticultural Society had erected their own orchid house in the gardens at Chiswick, which received increasing numbers of visitors.

The Horticultural Register was publishing expansive and expanding lists of Orchidaceae in its catalogues of rare and beautiful plants. Along with the Magazine of Botany, it charted Paxton’s own experiences in the management of orchids and those of countless other gardeners and nurserymen. Paxton experimented with temperature and humidity with increasing success, emphasising in his articles the absolute need to know and understand the native habitat of each plant, and to assimilate it as closely as possible in the artificial environment of the greenhouse and stove.

With money at his disposal and a gardener who could foster the collection as well as any other man in Britain, the Duke now entered into a protracted correspondence with the loquacious Huntley. The whole process was, to the vicar, a broken-hearted expedient, and he insisted that his collection remain entire and that he would not sell only those varieties most prized by Chatsworth. Paxton was dispatched to Kimbolton on the thrice-weekly coach, where he worked from the moment he arrived at 3 p.m. until he had to meet the return coach at 1 a.m. He pronounced the collection, numbering almost three hundred plants, ‘sumptuous’, and impressed Huntley, who considered him ‘far beyond his situation’. Paxton had found a collection of disappointingly small plants, yet it was an important one, rivalled only by Bateman and Loddiges, and filled with novelties which he longed to possess. However, concerned about the price, he wrote to the Duke that he had not closed the deal, ‘with all my anxiety to have a collection for your Grace unsurpassable by anyone, I cannot recommend your Grace to spend so serious a sum’.

Daily letters poured from the desperate pen of Huntley, who had heard that the Duke was considering sending his own plant collector to Calcutta. He assured the Duke that he was continuing to add rare and beautiful specimens to his collection, and railed that the £100 difference between the sum Paxton had offered and the sum he required was but a trifle to the great nobleman. He threw in his collection of cacti and other stove plants. Long letters also raced between the Duke in London and Paxton at Chatsworth, the Duke exhorting Paxton to clarify whether he thought the plants of sufficient value. Uncharacteristically, Paxton dithered. On the one hand he thought the collection superb. On the other, he was overwhelmed by the price, and felt Huntley to be mercenary. He applauded the intention behind maintaining the collection as a whole, but was equally clear that it contained plants that were not needed, so that ‘Mr Huntley may be given to understand that we shall chop and cut his collection to make a good one of our own and dispose of the rest for other plants.’ Finally he advised against the purchase.

This was all that was needed to help the Duke to a decision. If Paxton wanted the plants, hang the expense. So, without further delay, Huntley received his asking price of £500. With a mixture of concern and competitive glee, Paxton wrote ‘our collection of orchideae has now mounted completely to the top of the tree. I am fearful some of our neighbours will be a little jealous of our progress – the race will lay between Lord Fitzwilliam and Mr Bateman.’

It would take nearly a week to prepare the plants for their journey to their new home and a young gardener under Paxton, John Gibson, was sent to complete the task. In September, the erstwhile secretary of the Horticultural Society Gardens, John Lindley – now Professor of Botany at University College London and in the process of claiming his title as ‘the father of orchidology’ – had named an entire genus of plants Cavendishia, charming the Duke completely.

Since their trip to Paris together, the Duke was in the habit of summoning Paxton to London at a moment’s notice. Paxton was busier than he had ever been. He had monthly editions of two magazines to oversee, as well as their compilation into volume form at the end of each year, quite apart from the daily business and big schemes of Chatsworth. Unsurprisingly, his normally robust constitution succumbed to the increasing strain of his workload and he became bedridden with a sore throat and headache, although he managed to maintain a regular correspondence with the Duke in London about plans for Chatsworth and the continued planting of the arboretum.

The Duke’s reaction to his incapacitation substantiates the regard in which he held him: ‘I had rather all the plants were dead than have you ill,’ he wrote. Paxton and the Duke were both rare men and the regard in which they held each other – given the polarity of their stations – was becoming remarkable; they had become friends. The Duke’s sister, Harriet Countess Granville, noticed it and wrote to her brother about his decision to accept neither the offer of Lord Chamberlain again, nor that of Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, under Melbourne’s new Whig government. She imagined ‘you and Paxton, sitting under a red Rhododendron at Chatsworth, under the shade of palms and pines in your magnificent conservatory, with … no thought of your country’s weal and woe’.

In April 1834, Paxton finally relinquished his editorship of the Horticultural Register, citing extreme pressure of business which entirely deprived him of the leisure necessary to conduct the magazine along the lines to which he had been accustomed. Subscribers were assured that his advice would continue to enrich its pages, and a professional editor stepped in.

Later that year, when the Duke returned from the continent, he was again enraptured by all that Paxton was achieving, in particular with the stoves and plants in the kitchen garden. Hardly a day passed when he did not visit it, returning to note some new glory in his diary. The round of horticultural shows and visits to commercial nurseries continued and, at the end of November, Paxton was summoned to London, to visit the Chelsea Physic Garden, Knights’ and Loddiges’ nurseries, John Lindley and an assortment of private gardens. The Duke bought another fine orchid from a garden in Tooting and together they did what they both loved: hatched grander and grander schemes to enrich the gardens and grounds at Chatsworth.

At the beginning of December, the Duke hurried Paxton off on an impromptu garden tour, or ‘norticultural tower’ as Paxton called it

At Dropmore the pines remained glorious, at Highclere the grounds quite beautiful. They travelled west to Stonehenge and Bath, got up in the wind and rain to see Wilton’s fine cedars, the striking ruins of Fonthill Abbey and the magnificence of Longleat. It was freezing, and although Paxton was travelling on the box with the coachman, his delight in all he saw remained boyish. Of Stonehenge he wrote to Sarah ‘I have never seen anything so wonderful’. They took in the ruins of Thornbury Castle and Berkeley Castle, ‘a very curious mixture of antiquity and vulgarity’, and noted Nash’s perfectly beautiful cottages in Blaise Hamlet. They took the hot waters at Bath and journeyed on to Blenheim, where it was so cold that only Paxton went out into the gardens. He was exhausted by all the sights, the grand houses and their gardens and, since the Duke was travelling without entourage, further strained by arranging everything for His Grace. He wrote to his wife that he was being whisked ‘hither and thither and Lord knows where, that the Duke’s plans were up in the air and there was even talk of going to Paris.

Paxton’s letters were torture to Sarah whose return mail was chasing him around the country, never quite reaching him before he moved off again. All was far from well at home – measles in the village had spread to the children and William, in particular, was coughing violently. Her letters are discouraged, frustrated and frantic. Longing to hear from his wife, and seeing that a letter from her was among the Duke’s parcel of letters, Paxton split open the parcel and retrieved his letter, only to read of the suffering of his children. Noticing his distress, the Duke asked what was the matter, but Paxton dared not admit that he had broken a cardinal rule of the house with regard to the letter bag, that Sarah had written, and that their son was sick. He was beside himself with suspense:

I am now most seriously afraid that it will go hard with poor William, the bodily suffering that poor child has endured makes me shudder to think of – I never wanted to do anything so much in my life as I do to come home at this time … don’t deceive me if you think there is danger, let me know and I will start out immediately … all I can think of is my dear, dear children – what a melancholy thing it would be if the poor child was to die and me not see him again … but from the first moment I had forebodings for poor Will … Do all you can for our dear children, and kiss them a thousand times for me.

He suffered for two days before another letter from Sarah freed him from his torture. It was not good news. On Friday, 11 December, the Duke wrote in his diary, ‘poor Paxton went off to Chatsworth, hearing of the dangerous illness of his boy’. Paxton must, therefore, have been at home when his only son, William, died five days later, just short of his sixth birthday. The Chatsworth household accounts for that week show the making of ‘a lead coffin for young Paxton’ and for soldering it up. Paxton only twice referred to the boy in any of his surviving letters, when as an old man, his memory was stabbed by the resemblance of two of his grandsons to his own lost boy.

Paxton was often coming up against Forbes, and the two certainly met several times. The Duke of Bedford and his gardener wanted to rival Devonshire and Paxton at Chatsworth. In a letter to Sarah, 26 January 1836, Paxton wrote: ‘I went to Woburn on Friday and what do you think old John Bedford has been at? Why, making an arboretum this winter in emulation to the one at Chatsworth, it will be a miserable failure. This is not all – the old codger has had Sir Jeffry Wyatville from London to design a STOVE. I suppose they are jealous of us …’ (Devonshire Collection; Paxton Group No. 260). ‘The Duke declared the hothouse ‘handsome … but not new or original’ and the gardener Forbes ‘a very consequential stupid fellow – very different from my gardener I think’. (6th Duke’s Diaries, 10 November 1836).

In December, the horticulturist Dr Daniel Rock sent from Alton Towers, with Lord Shrewsbury’s compliments, a banana (Musa sapintum), hearing of the Duke’s interest in curious tropical fruits: ‘it may be eaten raw but I should think that it would be far more pleasant when cooked in a thin silver dish, like a pudding. I think (I speak in doubt) with butter.’ (Devonshire Collection, 6th Duke’s Group, 2 Dec. 1834.)

A rare indication of Paxton’s accent. Leveson-Gower noted the Bedfordshire accent which never quite left Paxton, in particular his misuse of the letter H which could cause some confusion: ‘he once said that his employer had the heye of an ’awk and when it was proposed to build a church … in his neighbourhood he offered to ‘eat it’.

CHAPTER SEVEN (#ulink_ec90596b-2309-5549-896f-7fd0d6ccf6f9)

Paxton and the Duke were ambitious for yet more floral prizes and they knew that orchid treasure was there for the taking. With almost 30,000 species and native to every continent except Antarctica, flourishing in the most arid desert and the densest cloud forest, orchids make up around 10 per cent of all flowering plants, exceeded in variety only by the daisy family. ‘Of all tribes of plants this is the most singular, the most fragrant and the most difficult of culture,’ wrote Lindley in Loudon’s Encyclopaedia of Plants. ‘The flowers are often remarkable for their grotesque configuration … The species are found inhabiting the mountains and meadows of the cooler parts of the globe, or adhering by their tortuous roots to the branches of the loftiest trees of the tropical forest to which their blossoms often lend a beauty not their own …’ The most seductive tribe of plants, orchids held a unique status in the horticultural world. So, with thriving trade routes assisting botanical exploration, and with the Indian collections of William Roxburgh and Robert Wight as precedent and stimulus, it was to the tropical mountains in India that the Duke decided to send his explorer to search out prized epiphytes, the orchids found clinging to the branches of host trees.

The Duke had been interested in the progress of various plant hunting expeditions for some time – he had subscribed to an unsuccessful expedition to Mexico the previous year, from which the collector had returned early and unwell, with few new plants. Huntley had sent a man to ‘the Spanish Main’ in the formation of his own collection. As he sent off the cheques to Huntley, the Duke gave orders to Paxton that arrangements should be made and put into action for their very own adventure.

Lord Auckland, a friend of the Duke, had been posted to India as Governor General and was making his own preparations for departure. This was their opportunity. ‘The expense of the journey to Calcutta,’ wrote Paxton to the Duke in March 1835, ‘if permission was given to go out with the Governor General would not exceed £100, otherwise it might cost a serious sum.’ Paxton next considered who should be sent. He chose one of his ‘intelligent’ gardeners at Chatsworth, John Gibson: ‘he has a good knowledge of plants, particularly orchideae, is obliging in his manner and very attentive’. Gibson had been drawn to Paxton’s attention when he submitted an article to the Horticultural Register, published in October 1832. The following year, he had arrived to work at Chatsworth from the gardens at Eaton Hall near Congleton, where he had worked with his father. Now he was sent for a season to learn the secrets of orchid cultivation from Joseph Cooper, a specialist orchid grower for Earl Fitzwilliam at nearby Wentworth Woodhouse. In preparation for his expedition to India, he was then dispatched to trawl the nurseries in London and as many public and private gardens and herbaria as he had time to examine.

While Gibson set about accumulating as much knowledge as possible to ensure the success of his mission, the Duke approached his friend Lord Auckland, on the point of sailing. He also wrote to solicit the assistance of Dr Nathaniel Wallich, the curator of the Botanical Garden in Calcutta which had become something of a clearing house for plants from all over southern Asia. From Glasgow, William Hooker wrote letters of introduction and at Chatsworth, Paxton began a collection of double dahlias and other showy flowers that were likely to thrive in India, all to be packed up as a gift for the Calcutta gardens. He was very aware that the success of the expedition relied not only on finding new varieties, but in transporting them home alive, advising Gibson that all his plant discoveries should be established in boxes at least three months before they started their journey home, to maximise the likelihood of their surviving the voyage.

The transportation of plants by sea, their exposure to the wind and salt in particular, had been a hit-and-miss affair and it was often the case that a vast proportion of plants sent home from abroad would perish in transit. Happily, the surging numbers of new plant species being discovered around the world now acted as an impetus to innovation. Gardening magazines, including the Horticultural Register, were filled with illustrations of ‘new’ designs for boxes, cases or jars, all of which promised increased success. For the Indian trip, John Lindley suggested that Gibson take a new kind of packing case which had already been used with some success. Loddiges, too, recommended the use of these air-tight boxes made of wood and plate glass into which the plants were placed in soil and watered, before being tightly sealed.

These were the ‘Wardian cases’, designed by Nathaniel Ward after a chance discovery, during which he found that a sealed jar into which he had placed a moth cocoon had also preserved the small plants hidden within the moss used as packing material. He had reasoned that, so long as the plant material was watered before the jar was sealed, moisture would evaporate and condense against the glass, maintaining a consistently moist environment, perfect for plants. For overseas collection, this was a real breakthrough and, as their success was proved, smaller and more decorative Wardian cases also became fashionable in the drawing rooms of many middle-class Victorians in Britain, used particularly for the display of the ferns that so fascinated them.

Orchids were not the Duke’s only obsession. In 1826 Nathaniel Wallich had discovered an evergreen tree with velvety leaves and glorious scarlet and yellow flowers in Burma near the town of Martaban on the Salven River. He claimed that the tree was unsurpassed in magnificence or elegance and his descriptions inflamed the imagination and desire of botanists and gardeners everywhere. Amherstia nobilis, as it was called, had never survived transportation to England. Its very rarity, quite apart from its beauty, meant that it would be the perfect prize for Chatsworth, and the Duke valued it above all else. So Gibson was also to go to Martaban to procure Amherstia for the glory of the Devonshires.

After numerous delays Gibson, outfitted for the most arduous journey of his life, laden with flowering and medicinal plants, fruit trees and seeds for distribution to foreign gardens, joined the Jupiter at Woolwich and sailed in late September on rough seas for Madeira. He recognised that this was his chance for glory and he was full of gratitude to Paxton. He was clearly excited despite the pressure to return with a valuable cargo of Orchideae. His only concern was with the famed air-tight cases stored on the poop deck, in which the outgoing plants were already looking rather sick.

Gibson’s journey to Calcutta was to take six and a half months. During a week in Madeira he found no new plants but, abroad for the first time in his life, he was caught up in admiration and wonder at the spontaneous growth of oranges and lemons, grapes and bananas and the flowering hedgerows of mixed myrtle and fuchsia. The season was unfavourable for collecting in Rio de Janeiro and he had time during his fortnight there simply to make out a list of the plants considered worthy of transportation to Chatsworth and to set up the means of organising their shipment. He found a man in ‘an English garden’ willing to amass the plants and swap them with the Duke for orchids, palms and other showy plants from the English collection. By December, after heavy gales that carried off two of the Jupiter’s sails, he arrived at the Cape of Good Hope, where he worked hard, collecting over two hundred species of plants, including ericas and proteas, on a single journey of only 20 miles up country. This was just the beginning. Although Cape plants were not particularly valuable, they would all be new to Chatsworth and the bulbs he gathered, when resold in England, would pay for the freight of the plants.

As Gibson departed England, Paxton was considering a magnificent project – to erect an innovative jewel-box in which to house the plants they expected to be coming home. His experiments on the glasshouses at Chatsworth were propelling him towards the design of one that would be capable of holding the most gigantic of tender plants, allowed to grow to their full potential. In Paxton’s imagination, ‘the Great Stove’ would be the apotheosis of all greenhouses, of colossal dimensions and unrivalled in Europe. A greenhouse on this scale was entirely untried – the Palm House at Kew, for example, would not be built for almost a decade. Paxton’s construction would take the form of a central nave with two side aisles, cover an acre of ground, be 227 feet long, 123 feet wide and 67 feet high, and be built almost entirely of wood supported by iron columns. In a break from the pitched-roof houses he had designed and built in the kitchen garden, the form of the glass roof was to be curvilinear, made up of a series of undulating ellipses like the waves on a ‘sea of glass … settling and smoothing down after a storm’.

A century earlier, perhaps, the Duke would have built a temple or mausoleum as a permanent memorial to his passions, but this was the age of scientific discovery, and scientific obsessions. This stove, unlike an ordinary, small greenhouse, would be composed internally of beds and borders rather than trellises to hold potted plants. The design was the natural child of his own experiments: he had already supplied designs for a large curvilinear palm house at Loddiges’ nursery in Hackney constructed with wood rather than iron, though, as he said in the Magazine of Botany