A natural obsession
Tales of booby-trapped bulbs in a tumbledown secret garden make for an irresistible explore.
How to lose a fortune, on plants.
PLANTS HAVE BEEN fuel for many an obsession. There have been crazes for tulips, orchids, ferns, snowdrops, seaweed, even celery. And there are people who have devoted their entire lives to the wonderful world of botany.
Take Ellen Willmott. In the late 19th century she might be spotted walking the paths of Essex with a knapsack full of muddy plants. She cultivated 100,000 species from around the world and created a garden at Warley Place near Brentwood which included an alpine ravine with boulders of millstone grit brought from the north of England, a fernery in a glass-roofed cave, and thousands of bulbs that bloomed into bright drifts each spring.
That garden is now a nature reserve but, aside from some spring bulbs which still flourish, it’s a very different place from the one Willmott knew. Today, the glasshouses are crumbling, and the paths beneath your boots are twined with greenery yet in Willmott’s time a single weed would have been a sackable offence for one of her gardeners. She employed over 100, all of them men, because ‘women would be a disaster in the border’.
Willmott had the money to do it. On her seventh birthday in 1865 she found a £1000 cheque on her breakfast plate, a gift from her godmother, Helen Tasker, from whom she inherited a vast fortune– in addition to the family home left by her parents. She toured Europe buying plants, and estates in France and Italy. She funded botanists on planthunting trips to China and the Middle East, and more than 50 of the species they discovered were named after her or Warley Place. Here and there you can still spot an exotic specimen among the foxgloves and bluebells at Warley Place, like a Japanese gingko or Chusan palm.
Willmott’s expertise saw her accepted to the Royal Horticultural Society where she made it onto the previously all-male Narcissus Committee. She was one of the first women permitted to join the Linnean Society and one of just two to win a Victoria Medal of Honour for horticulture in 1897, the award’s inaugural year. The other was Gertrude Jekyll, who called Willmott ‘the greatest of all living women gardeners’.
Willmott cultivated plants more skilfully than she cultivated cash though, and her fortune ran out. She was forced to sell first her European properties and then her personal possessions including jewellery and a Stradivarius violin. She also had to let staff go, including Warley’s head gardener, James Preece.
Rumours flew about her eccentricity – she booby-trapped daffodil bulbs to deter thieves, she carried a loaded revolver in her handbag, she surreptitiously scattered seeds of Eryngium giganteum in other people’s gardens. In fact, this tall sea holly became known as Miss Willmott’s Ghosts, as their silvery leaves mysteriously appeared long after she had left.
When she died in 1934, Warley Place had to be sold to pay her outstanding debts. It narrowly escaped being buried under a housing estate and eventually came into the care of the Essex Wildlife Trust, in a state of terrible disrepair. There’s no intention to fully restore Willmott’s estate, but instead to keep the site’s 25 acres in a balance of wild nature and fascinating horticultural history, like a magical secret garden.
““My plants and my gardens come before anything in life for me, and all my time is given up to working in one garden or another, and when it is too dark to see the them.” plants themselves, I read or write about
ELLEN WILLMOTT