Bay of Plenty
How exciting it is to find a new leaf and add it to a tree, when the leaf is a life and the tree a family line.
Sandra Simpson looks up a plantsman ancestor in her husband’s family.
The recent Covid-19 restrictions offered a fine opportunity to find out more about the horticultural legacy left by my children’s great-great grandfather, William Sydenham.
Born in Salisbury, Wiltshire in 1853, William was the ninth of 10 children of a bootmaker. He joined his two older brothers in their successful jewellers business in Birmingham, established in about 1877, and spent many years travelling to Ireland on behalf of Sydenham Brothers. (Birmingham was once the largest centre of jewellery-making in Britain and still has a jewellery quarter where the Sydenham Brothers premises, spanking new in about 1900, is today apartments.) A silver brooch made by the company in 1916-17 is held by the V&A Museum.
George, Robert and William also shared a love of flowers, although gem buyer George “had to restrain his tastes in that direction”, as one report says, to keep his sight sharp.
Robert and William were another story, however, and a 1900 profile of Robert and his 1913 obituary, bundled into one online document, reveal that his seed and bulb business, which began as a hobby, was run from the jewellery premises from about
1883. By 1886, he was selling almost 16 tonnes of bulbs and in 1899 about a tonne of sweet pea seed as well to some 10,000 customers. In 1914 the business claimed to be the largest retailer of bulbs and sweet peas in the UK, and had “the honour of supplying Royalties of several countries”.
Robert was an award-winning grower and, among many prizes, for seven consecutive years won the Champion
Medal for most points in the exhibition classes of the Midland Carnation and
Picotee Society (he was the founding chairman). He was also founding treasurer of the Midlands Daffodil Society and a president of the National Sweet Pea
Society. A prize in his name is still presented at the Shrewsbury Flower Show.
William specialised in violas and Belgian pansies, which arrived in England in about 1850.
He was awarded a Royal Horticultural Society medal in 1878 for violas, and won a gold medal at the 1899 National Viola Society show in London – a display of 48 sprays of tufted pansies with nine distinct blooms in each spray. In 1898 William hosted the Tamworth Pansy & Viola Show in the grounds of his home, Bole Hall. He won a First Class Certificate for ‘Tom Thumb’, a new viola, and his 16-year-old daughter Emmeline was mentioned for her display of pansies and violas. The depth of William’s passion is evident in an 1895 Journal of Horticulture article, with the writer noting the many flowering beds of pansies – 30 around the house, 40 in a field next to the carriage drive, a walled garden of 300 varieties of fancy pansies, and “still there are more plants, even acres of them, in the adjoining field”. In 1909, William moved to Kings Newton in Derbyshire and opened Gayborder Nurseries, specialising in violas, pansies, Michaelmas daisies and early-flowering chrysanthemums. Later, he added hardy plants, mainly alpines and herbaceous, and by 1920 the nursery was making a name in the growing and breeding of asters.
William and his family eventually emigrated to New Zealand.
William, accompanied by daughter Mary, was the last to arrive in 1925.
He remained interested in plants, and in 1938 the Op¯otiki¯ newspaper reported he’d sold most of the seed from his own-cross delphiniums at Covent Garden flower market in London, but also some in Australia and New Zealand. He had also made a bright pink aubretia, ‘Fire King’, but had no plans to sell it!
William died in O¯po¯tiki in 1944, aged 91, and his wife Fanny in 1947, aged 93.
William’s green fingers run through the family but descended most obviously to grandson Frank, Massey University’s first master’s graduate in horticulture in 1933. After serving in World War II, Frank set up a floriculture business in Tauranga, regularly opening his garden as a charity fundraiser. A bachelor, Frank gifted his land to the city for horticultural purposes. Since 2012, it has been in development as Sydenham Botanic Park.