A Thing in Disguise: The Visionary Life of Joseph Paxton

CHAPTER FOUR

There were regulations in force in the gardens and it is likely that Paxton reviewed these when he arrived, fresh from the strict environment of Chiswick. The men were encouraged to keep diaries for their own improvement – noting new plants, weather fluctuations and daily activities. Above all else, there was to be prompt attendance, good order and sobriety, and contravention of these key rules could mean instant dismissal. The hours were 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. during the summer with a half-hour for breakfast and one hour for lunch; in the winter, working hours were decided according to the weather. Sunday hours were from 8 a.m. to 4.30 p.m. between November and March and from 7 a.m. to 5.30 p.m. for the rest of the year. Fines were imposed: sixpence for anyone arriving later than ten minutes after the lodge bell had rung, two shillings for anyone absent without permission – a rule applied to Christmas Day like any other. Sixpence would also be levied on any man found lounging or wasting time in the gardens, failing to clean and stack the tools allocated for his personal use, or if any panes of glass were broken through his inattention. The gathering of fruit, vegetables, flowers or plants without permission attracted the serious fine of five shillings, and dismissal on the second occurrence. All fines were deducted fortnightly from wages and, according to James White, one of the under gardeners, ‘if anyone feales himself greaved or aney ways unfairly dealt with in the administeration of these rules I desire to have the matter explained’.

Paxton had soon roused the men to a flurry of activity. Despite the mess created by the building work, principal paths had to be maintained and smartly gravelled; there was trenching, digging of beds, raking of leaves and clearing of cuttings to be done, and pots had to be washed and stacked ready for the needs of constant transplanting. In the summer, the more tender plants were carted from their shelter and planted out into beds; hedges and grass-edges had to be clipped, trees tied back, soil or dung carted to where it was needed. Everything had to be managed carefully, lest the Duke should decide to arrive at any moment.

He did indeed return to Chatsworth from Russia in early December and he noted in his daily journal: ‘Chatsworth, che gioya! I found great progress.’ The next day, having looked over his property, he noted, ‘I am enchanted … My new gardener too, Paxton, has made a great change.’

Throughout 1827 the Duke was preoccupied with his duties as Lord Chamberlain to the Royal Household – duties he cared little for but could not happily decline – and by his place in the House of Lords, where great electoral reform was being debated as a result of the wars in Europe and the growing, predominantly urban unrest at home. Socially, Devonshire House and Chiswick occupied his attention in all but the shooting season when he returned to Chatsworth, and was again delighted by the progress he saw.

That year the Duke appointed Benjamin Currey as his London solicitor and auditor with direct responsibility for all his affairs and accounts. This was indicative not only of the aristocrat’s lethargy when it came to accountable expenditure, but also an increasing movement towards professionalism in the running of large estates. Currey was not a landowner himself as had always been the case in the past, but a member of the professional upper middle class. All the agents on the Duke’s various estates reported to Currey.

Quietly, Paxton worked away in the gardens. Gradually all the fountains were repaired and improved, iron pipes replacing lead. In the west garden, an ornamental wall was constructed, drains were repaired or replaced and parts of the garden newly laid out, with new walks added to the pleasure grounds. With his own eye for structural detail, Paxton began to work with Wyatt to amend the architect’s orangery designs. The Duke, in his own words now ‘bit by gardening’, conceived it as a conservatory to join the sculpture gallery to the new wing. He wanted it quickly and he purchased orange trees from the Empress Josephine’s collection at Malmaison, an expensive Rhododendron arboreum from Knight’s exotic plant nursery in the King’s Road, and an Altingia excelsa which came to be particularly admired. Paxton must have been thrilled with the Duke’s growing interest in plants and in the changes he was hurrying forth.

The following year, Paxton’s attention turned to the kitchen garden. A new orchard was added to it and the wire fence around the flower garden was removed. On a modest scale, he turned his attention to glass. A number of famous glass buildings had recently been constructed in England including those at Syon House in Brentford, Hungerford Market in London, the upper terrace garden of Covent Garden Market and a surprising conical glasshouse at Bretton Hall designed by Loudon and Baileys. At Chatsworth, Paxton repaired the existing pineapple and peach houses and then started to build and experiment with the design of a number of new greenhouses and stoves in which to cultivate and force all manner of fruit and vegetables.

When later asked to describe the process of design and construction of the Crystal Palace, built for the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park in 1851, Paxton was at pains to emphasise a process of years of experimentation with glass buildings, a logical development which had led him to that point. In his first reading of a paper in public, he noted that ‘in 1828 … I first turned my attention to the building and improvement of glass structures’. He found the various forcing houses at Chatsworth were made from coarse, thick glass and heavy woodwork, which rendered the roofs dark, gloomy and ill-suited for the purpose for which they were built. So he bevelled off the sides of the rafters and sash bars, lightening them considerably and discovering that the buildings lost no structural stability in the process. Frustrated by putty which failed to withstand the extremes of sun, rain and frost and which disintegrated and allowed water to drip constantly inside the houses in rainy weather, he also contrived a new, lighter sash bar, with a groove to hold the glass, obviating the need for putty altogether.

While Paxton thought that the popular, modern metallic glasshouses espoused by Loudon were graceful in appearance, he concluded that wooden structures were preferable. One advantage was that wood was less expensive than iron. More importantly, he understood that, as the iron in the sash bars and rafters expanded and contracted according to the outside temperature, the glass was prone to breakage. In addition, iron corroded and was far more complicated to repair, whereas a wooden roof needed only a common carpenter. As the debate was revisited in the pages of the Gardeners Magazine, and as his own experiments proceeded, Paxton became increasingly convinced of the superiority of treated wood over iron, experimenting with finer and finer sashes and rafters to admit the greatest amount of light into the house. Within a very short time, the new glasshouses he built yielded fruit and vegetables in perfection, and a profusion of flowers capable of filling the house.

Nine months after their marriage, on 5 December 1827, Paxton and Sarah’s first daughter, Emily, had been born. She was baptised twelve days later in the local village of Edensor. Sarah quickly became pregnant again and their first son, William, was born in January 1829.

The Duke had spent much of 1828 away from Chatsworth, returning only in September and October and noting again the great progress there. He began to take a closer interest in his gardener, visiting the kitchen garden and asking Paxton to thin the woods – showing a confidence in his new man which no doubt put the regular woodsman’s nose out of joint. In early 1829, the Duke walked out in the snow with Paxton to see the woods and sought him out on several occasions to discuss the management of his trees. He returned again in April, when an entry in his diary reveals the growing regard he held for the gardener who was transforming the park before his eyes: ‘I went to woods, much pleased – poor Paxton has been very unwell.’ Paxton rarely complained of illness, whereas the Duke was something of a hypochondriac, beset with hayfever, flu, inflamed eyes, stiffness and a multitude of other, often minor, afflictions which could cause him to be bedridden for weeks at a time. He had a peculiar tenderness for another man’s health.

This was a particularly happy year for the Duke. His sister Georgiana’s daughter, Blanche – his adored, adoring and favourite niece – announced her engagement to William Cavendish, Lord Burlington, the son of the Duke’s cousin, and his appointed heir. He, meanwhile, was busy with Wyatt, with politics and with parties in London, leaving Paxton to embark on his first great landscape scheme for the park and one of the earliest of those curiously Victorian garden features – the pinetum.

Pinetum is the name given to a collection of one or more of each variety of conifer worthy of cultivation. With tens of new varieties now being introduced to Britain, the formation of one offered satisfaction of the collector’s instinct on a grand scale. Here, Paxton’s early experience at Chiswick combined with the Duke’s own strong arboreal interests to create a startling miniature world. It is still there, a place of surprising and extraordinary tranquility, a group of trees strikingly foreign compared to the native hardwoods in the Stand Wood higher on the slope. In spring, swathes of daffodils and piercing birdsong delight in the sunlight filtered by the cool green branches.

That this was to be one of the earliest collections to be planted in England is not entirely surprising.* The creation of a pinetum required not only a serious budget but a large amount of empty ground, separate from any other garden feature. In 1829, 8 acres of the south park were given over to the plan and the ground began to be formed in the summer. Paxton carried the seeds of the Douglas fir, the pride of California and reputed to reach 200 feet high, from London wrapped in his own hat. A Norfolk pine was fetched from Ireland by Andrew Stewart, Paxton’s foreman in the kitchen garden. A giant redwood, the monkey puzzle, hemlock spruces and the Japanese white pine were purchased and planted along with tall larches. In all, over 50 species of pine were mixed with cypress, juniper, Salisburia, thuja and yew, creating a collection of every kind of hardy conifer that could possibly be procured, each planted according to its botanical classification and clearly named on painted wooden tallies. According to the Duke, the pinetum was quickly admired ‘but no two of a party take the same view of it; one extols the scenery, another is in raptures at the old oaks, and a third wonders and asks, why I plant the fir trees so thin’.

It must have been tremendously invigorating for the young Paxton to have control over the conception and planting of such a valuable and extensive collection, combining scientific with ornamental purpose. It is possible that even at this early stage, he conceived it as part of a much larger collection of trees, an arboretum, which in some years’ time would be planted around a new 4-mile walk through the pleasure grounds since part of the new walk was already completed by the time the Duke returned to Chatsworth again in the summer. In addition, the west garden was now newly planted and Cibber’s great sphinxes had been moved there.

So pleased was the Duke with his gardener that he took him to Bolton Abbey – his property in Yorkshire – to shoot. Paxton was ‘enchanted’ – quite the best reaction for a Duke proud of his castles and palaces, deeply desirous that they should be admired and provide enjoyment for his visitors. As if he needed further reason to value the gardener, the fruit ripening in the new greenhouses, particularly melons, figs, peaches and nectarines, started to win medals at the Horticultural Society shows at Chiswick House.

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.