The Garden History Blog

As regular readers will know I’ve got a soft spot for garden gnomes and have often lectured about them and even written  about their introduction to Britain in the mid-19thc by the rather eccentric Sir Charles Isham of Lamport Hall.

A few weeks ago I finally got to visit Lamport for myself and quickly discovered there’s a lot more to it than just gnomes as I hope this post will show, but let’s begin with a few lines by Sir Charles himself introducing his garden…

A lovely park, but much too short, leads to Elysian ground
Where much to cheer the heavy heart is visible around
E’en those who suffer from hard times, bowed with excess of grief
Will frequently experience miraculous relief.
We recollect old Lamport days, days which have fled and passed
We never heard but one complaint —”The sun goes down too fast”

I did say he was rather eccentric, and perhaps should have added not much of a poet either…

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Bankside is the riverside area on  the south side of the Thames opposite the City of London proper, and in early modern times  it was  outside the control of the City authorities. Renowned for its market gardens and orchards it was also London’s  main space for recreation and entertainment  of all kinds.

It was home to Shakespeare’s Globe and two  other theatres, to bull and bear baiting arenas, fishing ponds and riverside taverns. Yet it was  also considered the most disreputable quarter of early modern London.

Part of the reason can be seen in the woodcut above which dates to the 1630s. It  shows a  large moated building with a garden at the rear, with flowerbeds, trees and an arbour, and even some ducks bobbing about in the water.   BUT…take a closer look and ask yourself what else might be going on…

Bankside from Visscher’s Panorama of London 1616

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Ive always been surprised at how many great horticultural businesses just disappear  almost without trace, I’ve already looked at the stories of  two which did – Carters and Ryder Seeds – so a few moths ago thought I’d research Cuthbert’s  who I remembered  from my childhood.    I thought I knew quite a lot but in fact it turns out I  didn’t – and nor did Mr Google – and what information there was  often turned out to be of dubious quality!

The story starts out simply but then quickly became very confusing so it has taken me many months to get it straight, but the process helped make me realise is how important it is to check your sources properly and cite them when you write anything…and luckily there are lots of nice pictures!

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If you’d like to see  a house with “a perfect, extremely reticent design… done in an impeccable taste” and  with a garden to match can I recommend Kelmarsh Hall in Northamptonshire.

That opening quote came from Pevsner and when I first visited Kelmarsh over 25 years ago,  I could immediately see what he meant. The red-brick Palladian building  by James Gibbs had a wonderful “liveable” feel, while its gardens largely created by Nancy Lancaster, with help from Norah Lindsay and later added to by Geoffrey Jellicoe, although then sadly in need of some tlc  clearly had a glorious past and  future potential.

The estate had just passed into the hands of a charitable trust after the death of the last owner and we were taken around by the late Keith Goodway, who was a trustee, met the head gardener and heard about their exciting plans for its future.  After the tour I could see why  they were both so enthusiastic, but would it all actually happen?

I finally managed to return a couple of weeks ago and yes it has – and more!

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The “New Palace”

Papendieck and Hullmandel might sound like an obscure German plant nursery  or perhaps a Victorian music hall double act but they were actually the people behind a collection of colour images of the royal gardens at Kew  in the final days of Georgian England.  While no-one who has visited Kew can have missed the pagoda or failed to see any of the remaining classical buildings dotted around the gardens, they probably don’t realise how cluttered the place was  two hundred years ago.  Amongst many other things  littering the gardens were ten temples, several ruins, and a huge royal palace resembling a medieval fort, that cost a fortune, was never lived in and was demolished about 25 years later.

detail of The Temple of Pan

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