The Brother Gardeners

One January morning in 1734, cloth merchant Peter Collinson hurried down to the docks at London’s Custom House to collect cargo just arrived from John Bartram, his new contact in the American colonies. But it was not reels of wool or bales of cotton that awaited him, but plants and seeds . . .

Over the next forty years, Bartram would send hundreds of American species to England, where Collinson was one of a handful of men who would foster a national obsession and change the gardens of Britain forever, introducing lustrous evergreens, fiery autumn foliage and colourful shrubs. They were men of wealth and taste but also of knowledge and experience, like Philip Miller, author of the bestselling Gardeners Dictionary, and the Swede Carl Linnaeus, whose standardised botanical nomenclature popularised botany as a genteel pastime for the middle-classes; and the botanist-adventurer Joseph Banks and his colleague Daniel Solander who both explored the strange flora of Tahiti and Australia on the greatest voyage of discovery of modern times, Captain Cook’s Endeavour.

This is the story of these men – friends, rivals, enemies, united by a passion for plants – whose correspondence, collaborations and squabbles make for a riveting human tale which is set against the backdrop of the emerging empire, the uncharted world beyond and London as the capital of science. From the scent of the exotic blooms in Tahiti and Botany Bay to the gardens at Chelsea and Kew, and from the sounds and colours of the streets of the City to the staggering vistas of the Appalachian mountains, The Brother Gardeners tells the story how Britain became a nation of gardeners.

About the Author

Andrea Wulf was born in India and moved to Germany as a child. She trained as a design historian at the Royal College of Art and is the co-author (with Emma Gieben-Gamal) of This Other Eden: Seven Great Gardens and 300 Years of English History. She has written for the Sunday Times, the Financial Times, The Garden, Kew Magazine, the Architects’ Journal, and reviews for several newspapers, including the Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement and the Mail on Sunday. She regularly appears on BBC radio and television, and was a judge for the Benjamin Franklin House Literary Prize 2008.

ALSO BY ANDREA WULF

This Other Eden: Seven Great Gardens and 300 Years of English History
(with Emma Gieben-Gamal)

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Andrea Wulf has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

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Our England is a garden, and such gardens are not made
By singing: – ‘Oh, how beautiful!’ and sitting in the shade,
While better men than we go out and start their working lives
At grubbing weeds from gravel-paths with broken dinner-knives.

A Note on the Plant Names

In order to avoid the unwieldy use in the text of both the common and Latin names of plants, I have used either one or the other depending on the name by which a plant is most likely to be known. However, every plant is listed in the index under its common name (with the Latin name in brackets) and under its Latin name (with its common name in brackets).

When eighteenth-century correspondents only used common names of a genus such as ‘Solomon’s seal’ and it has been impossible to identify the exact plant species, this name is used throughout the book.

Additional information on the plants that played an important role in the eighteenth-century garden and their introduction to Britain can be found in the Glossary at the end of the book.

Introduction

But here it is worth noting a minor English trait which is extremely well marked though not often commented on, and that is a love of flowers. This is one of the first things that one notices when one reaches England from abroad, especially if one is coming from southern Europe.

George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, 1941

When I left my home town of Hamburg more than a decade ago, few of my friends possessed a garden. Even now, they mostly still prefer to live in huge apartments, putting off buying houses with outside space for their retirement. In Germany, gardening is often considered an occupation for pensioners. I certainly thought of it like that. It meant growing a few pansies in almost bare flowerbeds, planting out your allotment in regimented rows, or obsessively trimming your hedge with a ruler (on one occasion a neighbour sent a policeman to our house to inform my parents that our unruly hedge was at least four inches too close to the pavement).

I was therefore amazed, when I moved to London in the mid nineties, to find a nation obsessed with gardening. The shelves of my local newsagent groaned beneath lavish displays of gardening magazines; everywhere I went I saw signs for garden centres, and my new friends all seemed to think that the best way to spend a weekend was to visit the grounds of a stately home (unless they had an allotment, in which case the thrill of digging and weeding could not be surpassed). It seemed that everybody had a garden, and if they didn’t, they wanted one: young and old, fashionable and staid, middle-class or working-class. At parties I listened for hours to twenty-something Londoners rave about plants or moan about horticultural disasters. I went with a trendy graphic designer to a nightclub, only to listen for half the evening to the minute details of the yield of his vegetable plot. On one occasion, a beautiful and perfectly groomed young woman told me that it was pointless throwing snails over the garden wall on to the railway embankment because they would return – she knew for certain because she had marked their shells with white paint.

Before long, I had my own garden – a tiny patch of green at the back of a typical London terrace. The previous owners had lovingly tended their flowers and herbs, and before I moved in they gave me a little tour of the garden. Only half listening, because I was much more interested in the house, I carelessly nodded when they asked me to care for the plants.

Yet by the time the house was renovated almost a year later, the garden had been destroyed by neglect and building work. Walking out of my back door, I was confronted by a jungle of thistles and dandelions, endless metres of bindweed, and knee-high grass. Guiltily I set to work, weeding and digging, and found beneath the weeds strangled shrubs and the remains of the flowers. Squashed and suffocated as they were, I hoped to make them flourish again.

But I had a problem: how was I supposed to care for these plants if I didn’t know anything about them? My horticultural journey began with an excursion to a bookshop and the purchase of a glossy plant dictionary. Identifying my plants proved to be more complicated than I had anticipated and I took to sending startled visitors into the garden in case they could help. Soon I learnt that the large bushy plant in the corner, with a blossom resembling an elderly woman’s flowery bathing cap, was Hydrangea macrophylla, with the more revealing common name ‘mophead’. There was also a jasmine which perfumed the air in the summer, and a clematis that had taken over most of the garden wall. It seemed that I also owned a red camellia and an old fuchsia that leaned against the shed. Nothing special, I thought, until I began to discover the extraordinary history behind these seemingly ordinary plants.

It was neither a gardener nor a botanist who gave me a glimpse of these hidden stories but a mathematics professor with a penchant for eighteenth-century prints, hieroglyphs and languages. It was not that he had an extensive knowledge of plants, but what he did know, he was passionate about. When I asked his wife how to prune my straggly fuchsia, he launched into a lecture that lasted the whole of dinner. ‘Fooks-ia’, he chided, was the correct pronunciation, not ‘fjoosha’, because it was named after the German Leonard Fuchs, a renaissance botanist. He made a point of explaining that, in the first half of the sixteenth century, Fuchs had been one of the first scientists to shake off deep-rooted beliefs in mysticism in favour of direct observation of nature.

Later, I learned that Fuchs had never even seen a fuchsia because he was long dead when the first specimen arrived in Europe from South America. But I also found out that Joseph Banks – the naturalist on Captain Cook’s circumnavigation of the globe – had thought the fuchsia so valuable that, in 1788, he had carried one into the greenhouse at Kew on his head, unwilling to trust such a treasure to any of the gardeners (incidentally, it was also in 1788 that Banks acquired from the Far East the ancestor of my Hydrangea macrophylla, the first Asian hydrangea to put down roots in English soil).

A few weeks after the ‘fooks-ia’ conversation I received a parcel containing three books written by the Swedish botanist Carl Linné, also known as Linnaeus. It was the continuation of my botanical lecture. This time I was being educated about my daughter’s name Linnéa, which is an old-fashioned Swedish girl’s name as well as belonging to a delicate pink forest flower (the reason why I had chosen it). This flower, I now discovered, had itself been named after Carl Linnaeus – the botanist who had classified the natural world and invented a standardised botanical nomenclature. I also learned that Linnaeus had played a central role in popularising botany as a genteel pastime for the middle classes of eighteenth-century England.

As my interest grew, I visited the Botanic Garden at Kew and the Chelsea Physic Garden to learn more. I joined the armies of garden fanatics who spent weekends wandering along neatly laid-out flowerbeds, staring into tree canopies or hiding from the rain in steamy greenhouses. I had never quite realised before how different leaves could look – glossy, fleshy, heart-shaped, sword-like, paper-thin, serrated, creased … Equally, blossom presented a never-ending panoply of colour and shape. After countless days at Kew and Chelsea and hours of questioning gardening friends, I began to be able to tell some plants apart and knew about their cultivation. Penstemon had to be cut back in spring, for instance, whereas tradescantia preferred an autumn trim; and my hydrangea should be pruned less severely than the rose. I divided my delphinium clumps and harvested my first tomatoes. My kitchen became a greenhouse as I tried to grow some annuals from seed. I was incredibly proud when I succeeded in taking cuttings from dahlia tubers – quadrupling my plants. I showed them off to everybody who came round to my house. And whenever I was working in a library, I would use my lunch breaks to search out plant books. Then one day I opened a volume that fundamentally changed the way I looked at my plants.

This was the Gardeners Dictionary, first published in 1731 by Philip Miller, the head gardener of the Chelsea Physic Garden. Listing all known plants in cultivation in the England of his day, Miller provided thousands of entries, giving each plant’s country of origin, sometimes the year of introduction and advice on cultivation. He suggested planting-patterns for climbers, evergreens or perennials for open borders, and plants suitable for shaded parts of the garden. He even advised on pest control, soils, propagation and the dangers of wind and frost. The book seemed to be the ancestor of the modern dictionary I had bought – just less glossy and without illustrations.

What most surprised me was how much of what I had learned about gardening during the previous months had been developed during the eighteenth century, and how many of my plants had been introduced into Britain at that time. As I delved further, it became clear that Miller was part of a much larger plant-collecting and botanical network that stretched to every known corner of the globe. When I then discovered the correspondence between Peter Collinson, a wealthy English merchant, and the American farmer John Bartram, it ushered me into a world in which flowers, trees and shrubs took precedence over war and politics. Like a slowly developing photograph, a picture began to emerge of a horticultural and botanical revolution which had laid the foundations of the English garden.

Soon I too was in the grip of an obsession. I saw how letters sent between Collinson and Bartram, but also between famous Enlightenment men like Carl Linnaeus, Hans Sloane, Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Banks, fostered an international community where plants and ideas could be exchanged across vast distances. By the mid eighteenth century American trees were flooding into Britain, changing the landscape for ever, and by the end of the century Banks had added thousands of plants from Africa, Australia and the Far East. In tandem with the expanding empire the numbers of plants that arrived in Britain increased, providing gardeners with an ever wider choice. As the nineteenth century dawned, even the most humble garden could boast exotic flowers and shrubs. The gardens had undergone such seismic changes that England, which only a hundred years earlier had been largely parochial and insular, had emerged as the garden of the world. Now, when I walked out into my little plot, I saw it not as a chaos of unidentifiable plants but as the ordered result of pioneering work by an extraordinary and dedicated group of men who turned their fellow countrymen into a nation of gardeners. This is their story.

Prologue

The Fairchild Mule

Yet nature is made better by no mean
But nature makes that mean: so, over that art
Which you say adds to nature, is an art
That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry
A gentler scion to the wildest stock,
And make conceive a bark of baser kind
By bud of nobler race: this is an art
Which does mend nature, change it rather, but
The art itself is nature.

On an early summer’s day in 1716, Thomas Fairchild went into his Hoxton garden, closed the door of his potting shed and set in motion a chain of events so momentous that in time no gardener would ever think about plants in the same way again. At the same time, it led Fairchild, a devout Christian, to live in fear of God’s wrath for the rest of his life.¹

The leading nurseryman of his day, Fairchild was famed for his rare plants, his talent for coaxing the most recalcitrant bulbs into bloom, and his exquisite grape vines. At forty-nine, he was still a bachelor, having dedicated his life to horticulture, and his bulging belly was testimony to his success. No day went by without his working at the nursery in Hoxton, a suburb known for his market gardens some two and a half miles from the City of London, but on this particular occasion Fairchild was not merely sowing or pruning.² Alone in his potting shed, he placed a collection of flowerpots on the workbench. Some were planted with sweet Williams, others with carnations. Taking a feather, Fairchild drew its tip across the stamen of a sweet William – his hands, roughened by their daily contact with soil and water, were nevertheless delicate and steady. Then he gently brushed the stigma of a carnation with the feather, so that the dust-like pollen crossed from one flower to the other. The work was quickly accomplished. Now he had to wait.

Over the following months the seeds ripened inside the carnation, each containing its parents’ traits. But it was only when spring came and those seeds grew and then flowered that Fairchild could see his creation: a pink flower that melded the carnation’s double blossom with the clustering flower heads of the sweet William. It was the world’s first man-made hybrid.³

At a time when most botanists were still refuting the idea that plants reproduced sexually like animals, the Fairchild Mule, as the hybrid came to be known, was tangible proof of this proposition. Fairchild was aware of the sexual theory, and knew that the male pollen from the sweet William had fertilised the female stigma of the carnation. Yet, instead of rejoicing in his achievement, he was anxious. His act was an incendiary one because it contradicted the universally held belief that God had given birth to all plant species on the third day of Creation, while changes in plants’ appearances were explained as ‘accidents’ and ‘varieties’. So what had driven Fairchild to undertake this blasphemous experiment?

For today’s gardeners – spoilt by tens of thousands of plant varieties that provide a plethora of choice for every season – it is perhaps difficult to imagine just how dull and dreary the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century garden looked for at least five months of the year. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, England’s biggest nursery, Brompton Park, was only able to supply plants that flowered between February and the end of September.⁴ In spring, regiments of tulip, narcissi and hyacinth lined flowerbeds, and in summer, the different heights of lavender, lily, snapdragon and periwinkle created waves that rose and fell between the topiary, but in autumn and winter there was hardly any colour at all. No fiery autumn foliage, no frost-dusted blooms. Only rows of yew and holly sheared into immaculate pyramids, cones and balls, and the dark lines of thin ribbon-like flowerbeds twisting in swirling curves through gardens, all empty.

The English garden of Fairchild’s day was known for its turf and topiary, not its large collection of flowers or shrubs. It consisted, as one French visitor observed, ‘principally of extremely smooth lawns … divided into plots and squares by long wide paths’ as well as ‘holly, yew, laurel, and cypress cut in all sorts of shapes and figures’.⁵ These gardens sought beauty in geometrical splendour rather than movement and colour. Intricate patterns in the turf provided the variety, not drifts of blossom. Gardeners laid out what plants there were, carefully choosing their positions in the overall composition, all trimmed and manicured. Not even a strong wind could rustle the leaves of the stiff green sculptures – the only noise in this stillness came from the gurgling water of the fountains.

England had never led the fashion; instead, gardeners had imitated Continental fashions such as cascading Italian Renaissance water terraces or marching avenues lined by rows of stately trees. They had copied French grand baroque gardens such as Versailles, in which trees were shaped into rigid walls of hedges and symmetry reigned over nature, and learned from the Dutch the theatrical display of jewel-like individual plants. Throughout the seventeenth century English gardeners had been so behind their European colleagues that two decades before Fairchild’s experiment, when William and Mary had arrived from the Netherlands to claim the British throne, they had been frustrated by the paucity of flowers available in London nurseries.⁶ To furnish the gardens and greenhouses of Hampton Court, they had imported plants from the Netherlands instead. Dutch gardeners had benefited considerably from the increased trade that came with the expansion of the empire. As Dutch merchant ships criss-crossed the globe, they picked up floral treasures along the way, and brought them back to the nurseries of Holland and Flanders.⁷

The Dutch East India Company had even founded a botanic garden at Cape Town in which South African plants were tended, as well as some from India, Sri Lanka and the West Indies. It became a horticultural clearing-house for the Dutch colonies and provided copious bulbs and seeds for the gardens of the Netherlands.

Thomas Fairchild shared William and Mary’s disappointment with England’s poor selection of plants, and had bought some of his stock from Dutch nurseries. At the same time he had worked hard to expand his network of contacts, so that he was ready to exploit any opportunity to procure rare plants from abroad. As a result, his little half-acre nursery in Hoxton was bursting with plants never before seen in an English garden. He particularly adored the colourful shrubs, flowers and trees to be found in the American colonies. But these were difficult to procure. Since the foundation of the first English settlement, Jamestown in Virginia, in 1607, few North American plants had made it to England, most having perished during the long journey – often not even one in 500 seeds arrived in a healthy enough condition to germinate.⁸ There were some successes: John Tradescant the Younger had been the first professional gardener to travel to the new colonies in the late 1630s for a plant-hunting expedition.⁹ Mainly exploring the forest and swamps around Jamestown, he had returned with the first of the North American Michaelmas daisies, the American sycamore and the tulip tree. But there were still very few American plants available in commercial nurseries.¹⁰

This engraving illustrates the prevailing taste for formal French gardens at the time that Fairchild experimented with his hybrid. In a garden that is ruled by geometry, tall hedges are clipped into green walls and the centre path is lined with topiary. Exotics are displayed in vases as valuable specimen plants.

Fairchild, though, sold Tradescant’s sycamores as well as Virginian sunflowers, asters, golden rod and rudbeckias. Aesculus pavia from North America, a small tree which was introduced as ‘scarlet flower’d horse chestnut’ in 1711, blossomed for the first time in Fairchild’s garden, and he was so successful at cultivating tulip trees that he was able to supply ‘the chief Gardens abroad’.^{11, 12} In the Hoxton nursery there were plants from across the world. Fairchild sold lilies of all sorts, including a new species with white and purple stripes that he had ‘purchas’d from abroad’.¹³ In 1710 bladder senna had come from the Caucasus, and Fairchild’s customers were delighted by its strangely shaped petals – which looked like pouting lips – soon it would adorn Georgian shrubberies.

Some exotics were only available from Fairchild: hellebores, for example, one horticultural publication explained, ‘are so rare, that they are scarcely to be seen, unless at Mr Fairchild’s at Hoxton’.¹⁴ Reputedly, he was the first to grow evergreen Portugal laurel and the oriental poppy, as well as the first to make Nerine sarniensis bloom repeatedly every autumn.¹⁵ Some thirty years after he had established his nursery, Fairchild could boast that more than twenty species blossomed in his garden each December. His collection was so exceptional that his nursery became as important a landmark on visiting gardeners’ itineraries of London as the royal garden at Hampton Court.¹⁶

Yet Fairchild wasn’t satisfied. Well-stocked as his nursery was, he still had to rely on others to increase his selection, and his correspondents were often as unreliable as the weather, which frequently caused the loss of cargo in storms at sea. Over the years Fairchild grew so frustrated about the small number of plants he could get hold of that he decided to take matters into his own hands and meddle with nature herself.

The creation of the Fairchild Mule was a watershed event not only because it revealed nature’s workings – the sexual reproduction of plants – but because it demonstrated the power of an empirical approach to gardening based on observation and experimentation. In order to make his discovery, Fairchild had relied on the most recent philosophical and scientific methods, casting aside the vernacular myths and superstition that still ruled his profession.

The few botanical books that were published at the dawn of the eighteenth century repeated the flawed advice from ancient Greek and Roman horticultural treatises. Many gardeners, for example, believed in the moon’s influence over plants, not because it had been scientifically proven but because ‘[f]rom Pliny to this day most Authors have been of that opinion’.¹⁷ As late as 1693 one writer instructed ‘[w]hen you sow to have double Flowers, do it in the Full of the Moon’.^{18, 19} Writers also believed that vines should be pruned only when the full moon was in line with certain star constellations, or that lemons could be turned red by grafting them on to pomegranate and mulberry trees, or that apples could be made sweeter by watering the tree with urine. Some even insisted that white lilies would turn purple if their stems were dipped in red wine, or that flowers became more scented when soaked in cinnamon-infused water. And even the pragmatic horticultural writer John Evelyn, who published the first monthly to-do-list in 1664, still instructed his gardeners to transplant ‘when the wind is south or west’.²⁰

Although at the same time men like Isaac Newton explained the workings of the universe through a set of physical laws, most people still held deeply rooted and archaic worldviews. In this old framework, forces of nature such as thunderstorms, earthquakes and droughts were interpreted as an expression of God’s almighty power, making the comets that shot through the skies in the closing years of the seventeenth century signs of God’s anger and heralds of political unrest.²¹ In this God-centred view of the world, each plant and animal was like a cog in the divine machine and each had its place in the hierarchy dependent on their relationship to and use for man.

This belief that man’s destiny was intertwined with nature nurtured a great number of superstitions and myths about the meaning and uses of plants.²² Bay trees and beeches, for example, were often planted near houses to ward off lightning, while pregnant women were thought at risk of miscarriage if they stepped over cyclamen. Similarly, any apple tree which fruited and flowered at the same time was viewed with particular foreboding. The names given to plants often reflected the myths associated with them: Motherdee (red campion), for example, was feared because it was believed that the parents of any child who picked it would die. Meanwhile, in medicinal use of plants, apothecaries and physicians insisted that by matching the shape and colour of plants to different organs, illnesses could be cured – a method called the ‘Doctrine of Signatures’. The oil from the walnut, for instance, with its likeness to the human brain, was a remedy for head wounds; the lung-like leaves of lung-wort were used to treat respiratory diseases; and jaundice was treated with yellow herbs.

Fairchild, however, was not convinced of this close correlation between man and nature. The experiments he had made with grafting plants on to different rootstocks and his observation of the movement of sap had taught him that leaves, fruits and roots all fulfilled functions that were necessary for the plant’s own nutrition and reproduction.²³ It was this reliance on observation rather than myth that allowed him to make the innovations he did. He would have agreed with John Locke, who had written some twenty years earlier, ‘[T]here is noe thing constantly observable in nature, which will not always bring some light with it and lead us farther into the knowledge of her ways of workeing.’²⁴

Fairchild’s hybrid was so revolutionary that the Royal Society itself invited him to present a dried specimen of it at one of their Thursday meetings. For scientifically minded men like Fairchild, the Royal Society was the most important institution in Britain. Founded in the 1660s ‘for the improvement of naturall knowledge by Experiment’, it disseminated rational thought and propagated new ideas.^{25, 26} Once a week its like-minded members met in the belief that exchanging knowledge would create a more enlightened and therefore better world. Bridging continents, languages, political hostilities and religions, these men were convinced that through reason and observation the principles of nature could be elucidated.

Experiments were the backbone of all enquiry at the Royal Society, ranging from the science of pressure cookers, which tenderised bones into an edible soft paste, to exploding dogs and even blood transfusions carried out between humans and sheep. These scientific ‘performances’ had in fact become so strange that Jonathan Swift mocked them in Gulliver’s Travels (1726) when he created the imaginary capital of Lagado, in which dusty philosophers extract sunbeams from cucumbers, soften marble into pillows and pump air into dogs’ guts – all thinly disguised allusions. Robert Hooke, for example, had been obsessed with air pumps, and having suffocated uncountable dogs and birds in vacuums, then volunteered to experiment on himself. The Society’s secretary and future president, Hans Sloane, also seemed to care little for convention or the sentiments of his genteel neighbours in Chelsea when he dissected the decaying corpse of an elephant on the lawn at his house – all in the name of natural philosophy.²⁷

Many of the experiments furthered the advancement of knowledge, the progress of technology and an understanding of the natural world. Clocks, telescopes and surveying instruments that improved cartography, astronomy or navigation were first presented at the Thursday meetings, while fellows introduced new mathematical theories and botanical discoveries. Fairchild was not a fellow of the Society himself – probably because of his humble background. But some of the fellows with an interest in botany regularly used Fairchild’s horticultural talents to confirm their theories, asking him to perform experiments at his nursery, and he was also an avid reader of the Society’s publications. One book in particular had fascinated him: The Anatomy of Plants (1682), in which the author and Royal Society fellow, Nehemiah Grew, declared stamens to be a plant’s male organs and pollen the spermatic fluid.²⁸

Despite being respected by the Society as ‘the most rational Gardener,’ with a ‘true Bent of Genius’, Fairchild had never been asked to attend a meeting himself, so it would have been with some trepidation that he made the carriage journey from Hoxton to the headquarters of the Royal Society at Crane Court near Fleet Street, on 4 February 1720, almost three years after the Mule had first flowered.^{29, 30, 31} It was the secretary, Hans Sloane, who presided over the meeting that day, instead of the seventy-seven-year-old president, Isaac Newton, who was ill.³² Sloane sat in a large armchair at the top of a long table, behind him, above the blazing fire, a portrait of the royal patron, George I. Down each side of the table, the fellows were seated on benches upholstered in green, while one man sat at a separate little desk, ready to take the minutes.

Sloane was the physician to the king and ran a successful practice in fashionable Bloomsbury, as well as being one of the most passionate plant-collectors in Britain. As a young man he had been the personal physician to the Duke of Albermarle in Jamaica and when he had returned in 1689 with the embalmed body of his employer, his bags were full of pickled animals and hundreds of dried plant specimens that nobody had ever seen in England. Now, aged fifty-nine, Sloane had long given up plant-hunting himself but regularly financed expeditions to augment his collection.

The botanical lecture that Thursday was to be given by Patrick Blair, a fellow of the Society who had worked with Fairchild on a number of theories. It seems that when, a few weeks earlier, Blair had suggested to Fairchild that he present the novel hybrid to the Society, Fairchild’s religious scruples had caused him to panic, and he had changed the story of the Mule’s conception, claiming that serendipity rather than human agency had produced it.³³ Given that even Isaac Newton insisted that the universal laws he was revealing had initially been devised by God, Fairchild’s fears of being regarded as blasphemous were understandable. After all, he also believed that God was the divine architect. For him the complexity of plant reproduction expressed God’s omnipotence, and the contemplation of flora revealed ‘the Power and Wisdom of the Creator’.³⁴ So, when it came to displaying the dried and mounted specimen of the Mule to the fellows, Blair told them that it was ‘of a middle nature between a sweet William and a carnation’ – an ‘accidental’ hybrid which Fairchild had found in his nursery in a plot where the two plants grew so close together that the flowerheads had touched and thereby pollinated each other.³⁵

Whether or not the fellows believed Blair’s story, only few understood the significance of the hybrid for gardens. One such forward-looking man was the horticultural writer and friend of Fairchild, Richard Bradley, who prophesied that ‘[a] Curious Person may by this knowledge produce such rare Kinds of Plants as have not yet been heard of’.³⁶ No longer would gardeners have to rely on the God-given flowers and plants that lay at hand. Fairchild heralded a new era, in which England came to lead gardening fashions in Europe and America. Within five decades of his experiment, English gardens were being copied across the world and no other country could boast so many foreign plants in cultivation.

Foreigners toured the country to see the gardens because ‘[t]his art is very highly thought of in England’, while English gardeners were admired for their ability to ‘paint’ with plants and thought to be ‘the true artists of their nation’.^{37, 38} In fact, gardens and their content had become so important to the English that sales particulars of houses advertised and highlighted shrubberies, specimen trees and pleasure grounds ‘planted with various valuable Exotics’.³⁹ Flower-sellers pushed their carts through the streets selling their wares, women decorated their hair with silky petals, and the first gardening magazine was launched in 1787.⁴⁰

A nation of amateur gardeners was born. As the nineteenth century dawned, nurserymen were beginning to mass-produce hybrids in order to fill the beds and new conservatories of the middle classes. Businesses like Fairchild’s were no longer a rarity: garden-owners could purchase plants from the more than 200 nurseries which had sprung up everywhere in the country. And it was not only hybrids that these nurseries stocked. Their beds were filled with the thousands of new species that had been introduced to England as her merchants plundered the globe. Cedars, pines and other evergreens provided winter interest, while rhododendrons paraded showy blossoms in late spring. In early summer magnolias and tulip trees flowered and in autumn the russet foliage of American deciduous trees set the landscape alight.

Though Fairchild continued to collect plants from around the world after his creation of the Mule, he did not live to see the full extent of what he had set in motion. He died on 10 October 1729, bequeathing to his parish church the sum of £25: for preaching ‘annually forever’ a sermon on ‘the wonderfull works of God in the Creation’ – a prophylactic measure in case he had provoked God’s scorn.⁴¹ Fulfilling Fairchild’s wishes, priests would preach that man had ‘never been able to produce any new species’.⁴²

To this day, the ‘Fairchild Sermon’ is delivered annually in St Giles, Cripplegate, the ancient church where John Milton worshipped and which is now hidden in the labyrinth of London’s Barbican. Every first Tuesday in Pentecost, the Worshipful Company of Gardeners march towards the altar in pairs, dressed in fur-rimmed gowns and ceremonial chains, carrying their trademark silver spade, while outside, in the concrete jungle, a few lonely flowers creep over balconies and windowsills – pelargoniums, lobelias, roses and many more. They are hybrids, and Fairchild’s legacy to the world.

Part I

ROOTS

‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’

There ought to be gardens for all the months in the year, in which severally things of beauty may be then in season.

The first three months of the year were always the busiest time for the cloth merchant Peter Collinson, for it was then that the ships from the American colonies arrived in London. But on this January morning in 1734 he was concerned, not with the arrival of reels of wool or bales of cotton, but with an altogether different cargo. Awaiting him at Custom House, down by the docks, were two boxes of plants that, for Collinson, were the most exciting piece of merchandise he had ever received.¹

As he hurried towards the Thames from his Gracechurch Street office, in the financial centre of the city, Collinson could see the clusters of tall masts above the rooftops and hear the cries of stevedores as they unloaded precious goods from the holds.² The stretch of the river between London Bridge and the Tower was the main harbour of London and more than two thousand vessels – besides barges, wherries and ferries – created ‘a forest of ships’.³ Moored side-by-side, the vessels left only narrow channels for the barges between them, and the wharves, quays and stairs that lined the river were so crowded it was hard to move. These ships brought tea and silk from China; sugar and coffee from the West Indies; spices from the East Indies and corn and tobacco from the American colonies. The river was, as one visitor said, the ‘foster-mother’ of London, pumping money, goods and life into a city which more than half a million people called their home – the largest metropolis in the world.⁴

Collinson was one of the many merchants benefiting from the huge expansion of trade that had occurred since the accession of King George II. Soon to be forty, he had inherited the cloth business from his father a few years earlier and was involved in shipping cloth all around the globe, with his main market in the American colonies. Between the 1720s and the 1760s exports to the American colonies quadrupled, while those to the West Indies multiplied almost by seven, providing untold wealth to a new class of businessman.⁵ As Daniel Defoe wrote, ‘our merchants are princes, greater and richer, and more powerful than some sovereign princes’.⁶

And, as London grew, so too did the trade to be done within the city. In one year alone, Londoners consumed nearly 2 million barrels of beer, 15 million mackerel and 70,000 sheep. London was one vast consumer market and the streets thronged with trade.⁷ Not far from Collinson’s office were the shops of Cheapside and Fleet Street, whose large windows created the impression that they were ‘made entirely of glass’.⁸ Sweets, cakes and fruits were stacked in precarious towers, and even the apothecaries’ colourful potions were lavishly displayed to entice the passers-by. Tourists wandered for hours, admiring what one called ‘the choicest merchandise from the four quarters of the globe’.⁹ When dusk settled on the city, thousands of candles threw a soft light on to glittering jewellery, polished silverware and framed engravings. Lanterns fastened to the front of each house created a luminous necklace along the streets, giving London a permanently festive atmosphere.

Although Collinson was not one of the richest merchants in the city, he was very comfortably off. He lived with his beloved wife in a ‘little cottage’ in the ‘pleasant village’ of Peckham.^{fn1, 10} It was ‘the most Delightfull place to Mee’, he said, where he could retreat from the ‘hurrys of town’, and where he could indulge the great passion of his life: gardening.^{11, 12} Collinson had been fascinated by the natural world from an early age, when he wandered the garden of his grandmother, full of topiary and ‘curious plants’.^{13, 14} His grandmother, who had brought him up, had encouraged his enthusiasm and taken him on many trips to the nurseries around London, in particular Fairchild’s little plot in Hoxton where the adolescent Collinson had gazed in awe at the exotic world contained in the hothouses. As he got older, his interest in nature only increased. ‘I must be peeping about,’ he wrote, confessing that nature haunted him everywhere he went.¹⁵

During the week, though, Collinson was forced to attend to his business in the City, where he felt like ‘a Cockney who Lives in a Wilderness of Chimneys’.¹⁶ His main trade was with the colonies in North America, in particular with Pennsylvania, which, due to its rapid rise in population, was one of the fastest growing markets for cloth. And it was from the docks of Philadelphia that Collinson’s plant boxes had been dispatched.¹⁷

To get to the Custom House, Collinson would have hailed one of the many porters that carried busy merchants on sedan chairs to their appointments. The porters forged a path through the crowds by pushing and crying, ‘By your leave,’ and they were so fast that pedestrians who did not jump out of their way fast enough were knocked to the ground.¹⁸ His office was at the heart of the city, not far from the Royal Exchange, that engine of trade in whose courtyard merchants like Collinson met to sell and buy their stocks – said to be ‘the wealthiest corner of earth’.¹⁹ Nearby were many coffee houses in which more business was conducted, such as Lloyd’s Coffee House in Lombard Street, which became the venue for marine insurance, and the Pennsylvania Coffee House in Birchen Lane.²⁰ In the latter, Collinson traded and negotiated but also heard the latest news from America, since it was frequented by captains, and visitors from the colonies who often had their lodgings there when they first arrived in London. There was hustle and noise everywhere. Shopkeepers advertised their wares, animals were herded to the slaughterhouses, and musicians played at the street corners. The cacophony of voices, church bells and rattling coaches was interrupted each hour by the shouts of the watchmen who called out the time and the state of the weather.

The scene in the Custom House was similarly chaotic and teeming.²¹ Here, in a room that ran the whole length of the 190-foot-long building, merchants and captains as well as tourists queued for hours along the rows of counters and desks in order to retrieve their goods, trunks and luggage, and to declare their imports. Foreigners found the confusion and crowds in the so-called Long Room daunting and were shocked to see that the customs officers pocketed a share of the duty themselves. Even Collinson, who had ‘good friends among the Commissioners’, often wasted many hours here.²²

Today, however, his patience was rewarded. Peering into the two wooden cases from Philadelphia, Collinson could hardly believe what he saw.²³ Inside were hundreds of seeds neatly wrapped in paper, a few living plants and, most extraordinary of all, two flourishing kalmia cuttings.^{fn2, 24} Collinson had admired the kalmia’s many hundred puckered pink flowers that opened like mini-umbrellas in drawings but had never seen a real one. Nobody had ever seen them growing in England, since other cuttings had never survived the journey from America, which took between five weeks and three months.

For a number of years now, Collinson had been using his trading connections to augment his flowerbeds with the horticultural spoils of distant countries. ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, he pleaded with his business partners, and occasionally, along with rolls of cloth, he might find some seeds in a little paper bag, or the remains of a shrub that had been severely neglected.²⁵ Plants suffered greatly on sea voyages. Often the boxes and barrels with trees and shrubs were put on the open deck, exposed to wind, salt water and fluctuating temperatures. Rats and mice feasted on the leaves and often built their nests in the safety of the cosy boxes, while sailors helped themselves to plant water or even the rum in which choice specimens were stored. In addition, since plant boxes were the least valuable cargo on merchant ships, they were often the first freight to be jettisoned during storms or pirate attacks.²⁶ One of Collinson’s correspondents blamed the continuous failure to procure healthy plants on the captains, who were, according to him, so stupid that ‘[o]ne may as soon tutor a monkey to speak, or a French-woman to hold her tongue, as to bring a skipper to higher flights of reason’.²⁷ Whenever Collinson knew a passenger, he asked them to guard the boxes, thinking ‘it might be a pretty amusement for them to peep & Look after it’, but to no avail – ‘Hitt or Miss Lucks all’, he concluded.²⁸ Nine out of ten plants perished on the journey, and even fewer went on to flower once planted in English soil.

On this occasion, though, Collinson had been lucky. The captain had been more helpful than others and had stowed the plant boxes underneath his own bed, where they had profited from the warmth of the cabin. At last Collinson would be able to create the kind of garden he longed for, bringing a new world of plants to Britain, and so celebrate God’s abundance. For Collinson, every foreign species in his garden testified to God’s creation, making it akin to a horticultural bible. ‘[I] admire them [plants] for the sake of the Great & all Wise Creator of them to Enlarge my Ideas of his Almighty power & Goodness to Mankind,’ he said.²⁹ His garden in Peckham was therefore a place of ‘Sublime Contemplation’ through which he might discern a closer understanding of the divine plan that underpinned nature.³⁰

Although these ideas were widely held, they were even more pertinent to Collinson because he was a Quaker. William Penn, the founder of the Quaker settlement Pennsylvania, had already in 1693 encouraged his fellow believers to live with nature because ‘there we see the Works of God’.³¹ Similarly, Collinson believed that plants were a direct route to a relationship with God, while other material possessions were only a pompous display of wealth – they were ‘Man’s work’ and only for ‘Pride, Folly and Excess’, Penn had declared.³² Thus Collinson, who could have dressed in flamboyant and luxurious silks, favoured modest dark clothes without any of the embroidery, ribbons and ornate buttons that were so fashionable at the time. No lace was applied to his plain white shirts, nor did he wear colourful waistcoats. Equally, in his house he eschewed heavily decorated furniture or lustrous fabrics, adding colour and beauty instead with cut flowers and ‘nosegays’.³³

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