When Chatsworth went bananas
The life and legacy of Joseph Paxton, by Ian Morton
For all its rigid class structures and prejudices, the 19th century was a time when native talent, recognised and supported by a wealthy and influential patron, could blossom from obscure rural beginnings and go on to great achievement. Joseph Paxton, born the seventh son of a modest family that farmed at Milton Bryan, in Bedfordshire, was a classic example. Young Paxton showed an enterprising spirit from an early age, launching his quest for employment with a cheeky deception: he declared himself to have been born in 1801, two years earlier than his real birth year. As a result, he was taken on as a gardener’s boy at Battlesden Park, near Woburn, seat of Sir Gregory Osborne Page-turner, when he was only 15. During the next five years, he absorbed every scrap of knowledge that a countryhouse garden could impart, before going on to apply successfully for employment at the Horticultural Society’s gardens in Chiswick. Close by was Chiswick House, which belonged to William Cavendish, sixth Duke of Devonshire and son of the notorious Georgiana. Visiting the gardens there, Paxton happened to meet the 33-year-old Duke, who was so impressed with his visitor’s knowledge and vitality that he promptly offered him the position of head gardener at Chatsworth, one of the eight stately homes that Cavendish had inherited and, perhaps more importantly, already one of the finest landscaped gardens of the period. Paxton was then 20.
His eagerness to make the most of this new opportunity was evident from the beginning. By his own account, having been dropped near Chatsworth by the Chesterfield coach at 4.30 in the morning, he shinned over the kitchen garden wall, introduced himself to his staff, issued them with instructions for the day, found his way to the housekeeper’s domain, had breakfast with her and met her niece, Sarah – whom he would in due course marry – all before 9am. Responding to Paxton’s creative enthusiasm, his employer gave him full rein. He promptly redesigned the garden by the north wing and organised the expansion of a conifer collection into a 40-acre arboretum, which still stands today. The work involved transplanting several mature trees, the largest of which weighed eight tons. It was dug up in Kedleston, near Derby, and transported more than 20 miles to Chatsworth by a cart towed by a team of six horses.
No project was too ambitious for Paxton, nor, apparently, too daunting for the unquestioning estate staff and their heavy horses. For the rock garden he designed for Chatsworth – the latest Victorian fashion but also a reminder for the Duke of his Grand Tour visit to the Alps – he selected mighty blocks of stone at Dobb Edge, more than eight miles away, and organised their uplift and haulage over difficult terrain.
Equally striking was Paxton’s response to the Duke’s request for a fountain to greet Czar Nicholas I on a planned visit to Chatsworth, which was a nod to the Russian ruler’s own fountain display at Peterhof. Over the course of six months in 1843, Paxton dug an eight-acre lake in the moors 350ft above the house, designed a gravityfed pipe system and constructed a fountain, the jet of which was recorded at 300ft. It was – and still is – called the Emperor Fountain in honour of the Czar, although Nicholas never made it to the Derbyshire estate. From 1893 until 1936, the water was run through turbines to supply the house with electricity; it still meets one-third of
Chatsworth’s power needs – a tribute to the genius who conceived it in 1843.
Paxton’s many qualities extended to rural planning. The fourth Duke had enlisted Capability Brown to remodel the park, a project that included the removal of Edensor village cottages, which intruded on His Grace’s grand new vista. In those days of grand concept, history counted for naught. Execution of the fourth Duke’s scheme fell to his grandson, who instructed Paxton to relocate the little community out of sight. Ironically, the result is regarded today as a model Peak District village.
But Paxton’s horticultural skills were soon to have global impact. Apparently intrigued by a depiction on Chinese wallpaper in a Chatsworth bedroom, he had acquired a Mauritian banana plant. This he installed in a pit in a glasshouse of his own design, called the Great Stove, which he had contrived using prefabricated cast-iron columns and frames, plus 10in by 49in glass panes, the largest then available. The Great Stove was the biggest construction of its type in the world and, heated to between 65°F and 85°F, it was the centrepiece of what had become an experimental area for plant and garden engineering.
In November 1835, five years after it had been planted in a pit of loam and wellrotted manure, the banana plant flowered. The following May, it bore more than 100 bananas, one of which earned a Horticultural Society show prize. Paxton christened the variety Musa acuminata ‘Cavendish’ in honour of his friend and patron, and the Cavendish Banana it remains to this day.
In due course, plants were sent to tropical islands where they established local industries and plantations spread through India and China. Gros Michel, a variety that had previously dominated the market, was wiped out by a soil-borne fungus to which the Cavendish banana was immune, and 47% of global production shipped worldwide now carries the great family name. In the UK, we eat five billion a year. Unfortunately, the fungus now threatens even the Cavendish strain and hopes rest on containment and genetic engineering. Nonetheless, back at Chatsworth, descendants of Paxton’s original planting still provide the family with their eponymous berry (botanically speaking, bananas are not fruit).
A LILY FOR A QUEEN
As if the ducal banana were not enough, Paxton went on to see an even greater achievement, which resulted from his combined horticultural and architectural skills. It all started with a lily. At Kew Gardens, the Royal Horticultural Society, of which the Duke was president, had been trying unsuccessfully to progress an Amazon lily with huge pads, named Victoria Regia in the Queen’s honour (now known as V amazonica). When a plant was offered to Chatsworth, Paxton constructed in his Great Stove a 12ft square, 3ft deep tank. It had a central pile of peat and burned loam to his recipe, with a system of lead pipes to heat the water to 85°F and a pump to simulate the gentle flow of the river that had been home to the lily. In August 1849, Paxton collected from Kew a tiny specimen with four leaves. Within seven weeks at its Derbyshire home, it had 19 leaves, the largest of which was 4ft across, and its tank size was doubled. Paxton recognised the load-bearing integrity of the leaf structure and demonstrated it by sitting his five-yearold daughter, Annie, on a plank laid across the largest pad. By November, the lily was showing buds and Paxton took a flower and leaf to Windsor to present to the Queen.
National fame was now in the offing. The Royal Commission charged with
Intrigued by a depiction on Chinese wallpaper, he acquired a banana plant
planning the Great Exhibition of 1851 had rejected about 250 proposed designs for a grand hall. Paxton famously scribbled an outline design based on his Great Stove – the sketch is in the Victoria & Albert Museum – and offered to the Commission a vast glass and iron structure that married his Chatsworth conservatory experience to the stress-carrying spread he had perceived in the lily leaf ribs. Within a fortnight, he had turned his initial blotting paper doodle into a detailed design complete with costings. The Crystal Palace – christened so by Punch magazine – was born and a Hyde Park site was designated. It took the construction teams a mere five weeks to erect the 1,000-plus iron columns and install the 900,000 glass panes. The cost was £2 million, the equivalent of more than £270 million in today’s money. On 1 May 1851, after opening the Great Exhibition, Queen Victoria wrote in her journal: ‘This day is one of the greatest and most glorious of our lives… it is a day which makes my heart swell with thankfulness.’
Over the six months of its exhibition life, the Crystal Palace attracted more than six million visitors and generated a profit of £186,000, as well as portraying Britain’s industrial and commercial expertise to the world – an extraordinary outcome in view of its Chatsworth provenance. It was only natural that Joseph Paxton should receive a knighthood.
After three years in its original location, the Crystal Palace was bought for £70,000 by a company formed by Paxton, moved to Sydenham Hill in South London and reconstructed, with water towers designed by Brunel as the centrepiece of a 200-acre park, at a cost of £1.3 million. The Queen opened it in 1854 and the residential area was renamed after the new landmark. The structure burned down in 1936, the cause probably electrical, and the last major bit of construction, a Brunel tower, was felled in 1941 because it was serving as a beacon for German bombers approaching the capital.
Although the building is no longer there, the name remains. The park is restored to Grade Ii*-listed status and the local football club, founded in 1905, is nationally appreciated as a Premier League contender. In the pantheon of celebrated 19th-century innovators, Paxton may not quite stand alongside Brunel and Telford in public recognition but he should, and his legacy remains palpable. A generous nod in the direction of the Bedfordshire farmer’s son would not go amiss when we think of visiting Chatsworth, checking the football results or simply peeling a banana.
He scribbled an outline for Crystal Palace based on his Great Stove