The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
When gardening became big business
Robert Leigh-Pemberton locates a £38,000 tree in an enjoyably number-crunching history of English gardens
The great landscaper Lancelot “Capability” Brown is a surprisingly divisive figure. To one modern biographer he was a “Michelangelo”, an “original, self-taught genius”, and on his death Horace Walpole wrote to a friend, “Your dryads must go into black gloves… their father-in-law, Lady Nature’s second husband is dead…” However, to John Claudius Loudon, author of the immensely influential Encyclopaedia of Gardening in 1822 (and coiner of the term “arboretum”), Brown was a ruthless, heartless vandal, the creator of nothing more than “tiresome monotony” and “the most disgusting formality”.
Yet, in the midst of this discussion, blinded by vistas and the relative merits of a serpentine lake, much is overlooked. Not least, the astonishing fact that over the course of his career, in modern terms, Brown took receipt of something not far short of
£1billion from his various clients.
Garden historians have not neglected the wider social questions surrounding garden and landscape design over the last three centuries. The politics of “Whig gardens” like Stowe (the first British garden to need a guide book), with its temple of “British Worthies”, or Frederick Prince of Wales’s court garden at Carlton House, are familiar, as is Neville Chamberlain’s belief that “every spadeful of manure dug in, every fruit tree planted” would turn the heart of a potential communist.
However, what is almost never considered is the cost of these spaces; that, for example, Frederick’s garden, the home of British “liberal” ideals, cost the equivalent of £10million, including £38,000 for a single tulip tree. It is an omission that the historian Roderick Floud, a long-term champion of quantitative and statistical historiography, seeks to address with his new history of the English garden since the Restoration.
The headlines here come in the form of royal excess, and there is much joy to be found in various monarchical whims. It is a great shame that Elizabeth I’s vast checkerboard garden at Hampton Court was one of the many losses of that era. Among its successors were the formal parterres of William III who insisted, on two occasions, that the entire garden be lowered so as not to impede the view of the river from his apartments. The whole cost, millions by today’s reckoning, was wasted when Queen Anne ripped it all out on the grounds that she loathed the smell of box.
While such extravagance could not hold a candle to the 2,000 acres of Versailles (Louis XIV’s fountains used more water than Paris, and the contract for the lead piping made the Duke of Bolton the equivalent of half a billion pounds) there remains the vast scale of private work to be considered. Capability Brown alone was responsible for more than 250 projects.
While the 17th and 18th centuries saw relatively little major change outside the remodelling of aristocratic estates, by the 19th, the country was starting to brim with gardens. Floud estimates that since 1850 1.2million acres of gardens, of the smaller private type, have been created. However egalitarian the garden would become, as late as 1905 Lord Leverhulme still felt at something of a disadvantage in approaching Thomas Mawson to design his garden at Thornton Manor: “You have never worked for anyone holding less social rank than a Duke, whereas I am only a poor and indigent soap-maker…” One must not feel too sorry for the wily industrialist. Among other features of his garden was a vast pergola atop a mound he persuaded the government to actually pay him to construct, built from earth excavated for the Northern Line.
Costs aside, the scale of garden work undertaken in this period is astounding. The lake at Blenheim required eight layers of lime and clay to be hammered watertight, by hand, over 150 acres (a job so demanding that in India in the 19th century elephants were used in place of men). As Floud argues, such effort and outlays had a wider social effect than previously imagined. It created a great nursery industry (the 100-acre Brompton Park Nursery contained, at its 18th-century peak, some 10million plants valued at “perhaps more than all the Nurseries of France put together”) and an entire social world of under-gardeners, garden boys, jobbing plantsmen
AN ECONOMIC HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH GARDEN
The lake at Blenheim required eight layers of lime and clay to be hammered by hand
and head gardeners. For some reason, these were almost always Scottish. “A gardener is Scotch as a French teacher is Parisian,” claimed George Eliot. Beatrix Potter’s Mr McGregor and PG Wodehouse’s McAllister would bear testament to this fact a century later.
More surprising are the technological advances which the 19th century owes to its gardeners. Alongside the first mower in the 1830s (pulled, of course, by a pony in soft leather boots to protect one’s lawn), are Thomas Savery’s 1690s “Engine to raise Water by Fire” which was “us’d to play a Fountain… in a very delightful manner”, and the early hothouses, where the glass and metal architecture that defined the later Victorian era was perfected. The Great Stove at Chatsworth, heated by 300 tons of coal and coke a year, is large enough to have allowed the Queen to drive through in her carriage (much to her delight).
Despite its rather unpromising title, this is an immensely engaging book. The figures Floud presents, while abundant and obviously carefully uncovered, are so remarkable that being bombarded with them is less of a chore than one would expect.
A cynical reader might argue that the historical price conversions on which Floud depends so heavily (based on average earnings rather than the less successfully illustrative but more common system of adjusting for inflation) are always slightly spurious as money meant very different things in an era when one might easily expect to spend the vast majority of one’s income on food or, indeed, go through life having very little contact with hard cash. Nonetheless, such comparisons bring the dryer moments of history to life. While the sums mentioned might seem bizarre, it is worth remembering that the Royal Parks today cost some £27million per year. Though, as Floud points out, in total over the past 350 years, they have cost less than two aircraft carriers. Cheap at the price.
Having met Capability Brown late in his life, the writer Hannah More describes him gesturing to his work at Hampton Court: “Now there… I make a comma, and there... a colon; at another part, where an interruption is desirable to break the view, a parenthesis – now a full stop, and then I begin another subject.” To Brown, creating a landscape was an act of communication just as rich as any other form of art. Floud’s economic approach may seem an oblique means of interpreting it but, trust me, it’s surprisingly rewarding.
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