A Thing in Disguise: The Visionary Life of Joseph Paxton

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).