Paxton’s progress

Sir Joseph Paxton (1803–65) was born into a farming family near Woburn in Bedfordshire. With a limited formal education, he began work as a garden boy at Battlesden House in the same county aged 15, rising to become the Duke of Devonshire’s head gardener on his Chatsworth estate in Derbyshire by the age of 22. Paxton’s work there combined designing Picturesque pleasure-garden features with practical experiments on new types of greenhouse, the glass panes set at angles to take advantage of the sun’s rays across the day.

The high point was the Great Stove, completed in 1840, to house Chatsworth’s collection of exotic plants. The hundreds of thin wooden sash-bars needed for the glazing were mass produced by a Paxton-designed machine, foreshadowing the methods so effectively deployed on the Crystal Palace. Paxton also designed Mentmore Towers, Buckinghamshire, for the Rothschilds and profited from speculation in Britain’s expanding railway network.

A gardener and botanist at heart, he was one of the founders of The Gardeners’ Chronicle and edited other botanical magazines. He also served as the Liberal MP for Coventry from 1854 until his death.