In pursuit of the homegrown pineapple
The majority of pineapples eaten in the UK are Costa Rican imports. A few dedicated souls here, however, still grow their own. At Tatton
Park in Cheshire, gardeners are again raising the fruit in a pineapple house of 1774, restored in 2007; pineapple pits at the Lost Gardens of Heligan in Cornwall also produce homegrown fruit. Once in a while, on a sunny windowsill, a member of the public gets lucky, such as the grandmother from Truro, Cornwall, whose success in 2015 was celebrated in newspapers nationwide.
fruited a homegrown pineapple in the gardens of her estate of Vijverhof near Leiden. Block was sufficiently proud of this breakthrough to commission a group portrait of her family that included the trophy fruit. Its size and distinctly unripe colouring in Jan Weenix’s picture of 1694 point to the progress still to be made in European pineapple cultivation.
An earlier painting at Houghton Hall, Norfolk, of which there are copies in the Royal Collection and at Ham House, London, shows Charles II’S gardener, John Rose, offering a pineapple to the King, possibly at Dorney House. Almost certainly incorrectly, the pineapple in question—again, a rather offcolour specimen—was long identified as the first one grown in England. As the painting depicts an imaginary meeting—rose was dead by the time of Hendrick Danckerts’s double portrait—it can more safely be interpreted as a celebration of the pineapple’s lofty status, the so-called ‘king of fruits’ and a fitting gift for a monarch. Not until 1715 can an English garden lay claim with any certainty to producing a ripe pineapple: the fruit that Dutch gardener Henry Telende gave to his employer, Sir Matthew Decker. As was Block, Sir Matthew was moved to commission a painting of the exotic beauty.
For obvious reasons, neither image betrays the besetting problems of indoor pineapple growing for British gardeners: the enormous cost of heating glasshouses year round and the proliferation of insects that thrived in artificially heated pineapple pits or pineryvineries, where pineapples underplanted vines. In Smollett’s The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle of 1751, Mrs Grizzle accurately denounces pineapples as ‘unnatural productions, extorted by the force of artificial fire, out of filthy manure’. In 1777, the Duke of Portland’s gardener
William Speechly claimed to have produced a solution to the problem, which he offered, on payment of five guineas, to ‘all Noblemen, Gentlemen and Gardeners, who possess PineStoves’. The Duke endorsed Speechly’s advertisement, perhaps anxious to recoup some of the considerable cost of the 10,000 pineapple plants then under cultivation at Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire. William III, by contrast, contented himself with a silver pineapple. Shortly after the war that forced Louis XIV to recognise him as rightful King of England, William took delivery of a magnificent silver table, made by silversmith Andrew Moore to a design by Daniel Marot. Among its features
It was the so-called “king of fruits” and a fitting gift for a monarch
is a large pineapple at the intersection of the table’s elaborate X stretcher. This may simply be a decorative flourish; alternatively, the incorporation of ‘the fruit of the sun’ may represent Dutch William crowing at the expense of his erstwhile enemy, the Sun King.
Unsurprisingly, given its desirability, the fruit often features in 18th-century decorative arts. Surviving wallpaper fragments from Joshua Reynolds’s house in Leicester Square, London WC2, from the mid 1700s include a damask-style design centred on a large pineapple motif and Josiah Wedgwood, a man with a keen nose for a commercial trend, produced green-and-yellow pineapple-inspired earthenware in the 1760s. The acme of such design is surely the extravagant, pineapple-shaped summerhouse built on his estate at Elphinstone by John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore, the last British governor of Virginia, possibly to designs by Sir William Chambers. The glasshouses once ornamented by this towering fruity folly have long gone, but, after restoration by the Landmark Trust, The Pineapple near Airth in Falkirk is available for holiday lets. It is an appropriate rebirth for a building in the shape of a fruit once widely regarded as a symbol of hospitality and welcome.
That Dickens’s alcoholic evangelist Revd Stiggins, in The Pickwick Papers, has a taste for ‘hot pineapple rum and water’ suggests the declining exoticism of the fruit as glasshouse innovations increased its availability. Even today, however, one British pineapple remains distinctly exclusive: it crowns the late-19thcentury silver-gilt cup presented to the winner of the men’s singles title at Wimbledon.