These days there’s only one famous Mrs Richmond – my friend the media star Advolly – but I hate to tell her she has, or at least had, a rival!

Who was this other Mrs Richmond ?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Advolly is very up-to-date. She has a splendid website, appears on Gardeners’ World and Gardeners’ Question Time, and does podcasts.  She’s even started writing for the on-line platform Scribehound.  But as a plant and garden historian  she also does that more traditional thing and writes articles and has just published a book: A Short History of Flowers.   The other Mrs R was equally modern in her own day as a gardening columnist for The Queen magazine, a contributor to other gardening magazines and author of a popular book, but despite all that she remains a very sketchy figure…

I discovered the second Mrs Richmond when I saw a copy of In My Lady’s Garden first published in 1908. This described her as “author of  Flowers and Fruit  for the Home, Three Courses for Threepence etc” a Fellow of the Royal Horticultural Society  and late Garden Editor of The Queen.   The book had a couple of colour plates by Beatrice Parsons, an artist I’ve written about before,  and 48 black and white photo plates mainly of flowers, which together looked worthy of a blog and  I thought it would be easy discover more.

It hasn’t been, and indeed when I started writing this post I’d almost  admitted defeat. Having tried all my usual tricks of internet searching I’d  come up with just a few snippets and didn’t  even know  her name -was she Iris, Ivy or Irene, Ilsa, Isobel or Ina,  or was she simply a good Victorian/ Edwardian wife and instead using her husband Ian, Ivor or Isaac’s  initials?

In the end I decided to go ahead and explain how I eventually tracked down the elusive Mrs R, although even now I still don’t know much. But since my readers are cleverer than me I thought I’d ask you to rack your brains too and see if we can collectively discover any more.

I tried to track Mrs R down via census  returns, without quite realising how many Richmonds there were! In the 1891 census there are 5,938 of them but none with the initials I.L. or even plain I. By 1901 there are 8,285 with that family name but again none with the right initials, and there are none in 1911 either.   I drew another apparent  blank in the registers of births, marriages and deaths. One possible reason for this is that when material is being digitised it is done by optical machine readers and it’s very easy for them to misread text, especially when it’s handwritten.   Luckily the British Newspaper Archive, offered a few potential clues.

Let’s start with what we do know.

The first references to anyone named  I.L. Richmond in print that I could  find is from 1886 when a Mrs I.L.Richmond is mentioned as the Honorary Superintendent of a home run by the Girl’s Aid Society in Torquay. Unfortunately I could find no further information about the society or the premises mentioned so there was no way of checking further.  In 1895  Mrs I.L Richmond wrote an article in The Mother’s Companion about how to enthuse children about church and Bible study on Sundays – but again it contained no useful leads on how to track her down.

More usefully her name appears as I.L.Richmond without the Mrs  in the 3rd March 1894 issue of The Queen women’s magazine, at the foot of a column labelled “The Garden”. This was a short article about orchids and there followed several others that year about exotic introductions. One article at least implies that she might have lived in Devonshire. The Queen had carried a gardening column from at least Feb 1890, but before that,  as far as I can see it had only had  snippets about gardening and the usual garden-related adverts.  Most of these earlier pieces were  signed Flos. If anyone knows any more about Flos please get in touch.

We know too that Mrs Richmond was elected a Fellow of the RHS on June 25th 1895

In 1891 a Mrs Richmond of Clare House, Tiverton in Devon was ridiculed in The Gardening World Illustrated for her proposal to establish a “a school for the training of ladies as gardeners.”  Obviously I got very excited because I thought I’d finally made a  breakthrough. Checking census records for Tiverton there was indeed a Mrs Richmond living “on her own means” at Clare House, a substantial villa near the town centre but sadly she was Julia L  not I.L.  But I’ve  included the editorial because its so funny. Of course if anyone knows anymore about her attempts to set up a training school let me know.

Thanks to my fellow blogger The Folly Flaneuse for a newspaper cutting from The Gentlewoman Christmas Eve 1904 which says that Mrs R was “instrumental in obtaining the opening of Swanley Horticultural College for Women” so she had the last laugh over the editor of The Gardening World.

By  the 1911 census  this Mrs R was noted as being the wife of an Indian Army Colonel and had moved to Lustleigh also in Devon That matched up with  an earlier  small piece in the RHS Journal of 1908 saying that Mrs R of Lustleigh  had sent in a specimen of Moraea iridiodes, [now Dietes iridioides] a South African plant but which she had grown from seed collected in Ceylon.

 

A search of Biodiversity Heritage Library revealed several references to other gardening books by Mrs Richmond, except unfortunately they turned out to be by an American contemporary of Mrs I.L,  Mrs Grace S.Richmond.

In 1904 Mrs R recycled some of her articles from The Queen into a short book, Flowers and Fruit for the Home which as far as I can see, isn’t available digitally. The author was again simply I.L. Richmond.   Gardeners Chronicle reviewed it in one short paragraph saying it “will appeal to those who are interested in the rather gossipy type of garden book.” However, “the author manages to convey a fair amount of information in the style of the newspaper article and the illustrations are well executed.”

The Journal of Horticulture was not quite so kind. Although it “provides interesting reading on a few subjects suitable for cultivation by amateurs… The editor would have been well advised to have rewritten some of the chapters” already published and added others such as “The mixed flower border, and annuals. Imagine a garden without Asters, Stocks, Sweet Peas, Antirrhinums, Pinks, or Wallflowers, none of which are mentioned. …Fruits are treated in four chapters, but the most important fruit, namely the Apple, is omitted.”

Other things are covered twice:  “Liliums have a section to themselves, so that it was unnecessary to deal with them under ”Hardy Bulbs.” In the same way perpetual Strawberries occur in two chapters: one devoted to them alone, and also as small fruits.”

And there were mistakes.

For example “Xanthoceras sorbifolia, we are told, is a new introduction from China.”

Yet “the Botanical Magazine figure, published in 1887, was drawn from a plant which flowered in the Cambridge Botanic Garden the previous year..”

The reviews concluded “The author states …a good reason for writing such a book, [is]  to provide the amateur with some practical guidance in choosing the best varieties of plants for the home garden ” [and] also to provide details of the cultivation necessary to success in growing them.  This has scarcely been accomplished.”

Nevertheless the book was re-issued in 1907.

Mrs Richmond carried on writing the column until 1908, when she published In My Lady’s Garden. The fact that it was published “by kind permission of the editor of the Queen‘ suggests it too was a compilation of things she’d already written for them.  Now, however,  authorship is  acknowledged by Mrs rather than plain I.L.

It’s a week by week guide for things to think about in the garden. Nothing so basic as ‘now is the time to plant your cabbages’ but as the RHS Journal said: ” The authoress tells us from her own experience what to do, and what to expect in flower every week for the whole year, the whole being written so clearly that no one can make any mistake as to the meaning or instruction given.”

At the same she seems to have branched out and written for other. magazines including Amateur Gardening.   She also took photos including this one of a  Tiger Lily for William Goldring’s Book of the Lily published in 1905, which leads me to suspect she may well have taken the photos used in  her own book.

 

It also appears that several plants have been named after her [or obviously some other Mrs R].  I’ve found references to a a tuberous begonia  ; a gaillardia that was “carmine edged with white”, and a  single pink peony . These have all long vanished from commercial cultivation and I can’t find any images of them.

However, still in commercial production and still regarded very highly is a water lily named for  her which  was awarded an AGM [Award of Garden Merit] by the RHS in 1910.

 

Gardeners Chronicle featured it September the following year : “This hybrid is one of the last introductions of the late M. Latour-Marliac, and in its colour one of the finest Nymphaeas yet raised. It may be described as a glorified N. Laydekeri rosea in form and colour. The flower exhibited measured 8 inches in diameter, and it possessed wide and massive sepals and a greater number of petals. The colour is a bright, rosy pink, which deepens with age ; the stamens are of a rich golden yellow.”    It was exhibited by the James Hudson, the head gardener for Leopold  Rothschild, of  Gunnersbury House. Hudon himself then went on to write an article for William Robinson’s The Garden in April 1913 using much the same language before adding that ” Its vigour, too, is all that one can desire. It has flowered now for two seasons with us, and is gaining in vigour.”

The mention 0f Latour-Marliac sent me searching my shelves for a book by my friend Caroline Holmes whose  Water Lilies and Bory Latour-Marliac, was published in 2015.  She had a couple of short paragraphs which mention the plant and Mrs Richmond, and so I got in touch to see what else she might know.  It wasn’t quite EUREKA!  but pretty close.

Mrs Richmond had corresponded with. and became  a friend of Bory Latour-Marliac, who was the pioneer of water lily hybridising.  She had bought plants from him which were sent to her home in, of all places, Lustleigh in Devon.

In other words Mrs Julia L. Richmond must be  one and the same as Mrs I.L. Richmond.

Caroline was also able to tell me that from her research in the Latour-Marliac archives  that Mrs R stayed in contact with Edgard Latour-Marliac who inherited the business after his father died, corresponding about a blue water lily. Together with   her husband she also arranged for accommodation in Britain for Edgard’s nephew, Camille, when he cameo Britain, and for keeping the family up date with news about him. Outgoing letters from the nursery still largely survive  so there may yet  be more to be discovered there.

So why write as I. L. when you’re name is Julia L?  As I suggested earlier I thought perhaps  she used her husband’s initials, so now I tried to search the Indian Army lists for a trace of him, initially without success. Nor is he at her address on census returns for 1891,1901 or 1911 although he must have still been alive as Mrs R is not a widow, and indeed says she has been married for 41 years. That of course gave me a year of marriage so I went  back to the Marriage Registers but again there is no trace, which of course suggests that if he was in service at the time perhaps they married abroad. So back to the census, this time for 1881, where I tracked down Julia L to  the parish of Tormoham in Devon.  It turns out that Torquay was known as Tormoham  until 1876,  so it surely must have been  her who was  the honorary superintendent of the girls home.

However at this point Mrs R was living with her widowed mother, her two sons and – hurrah! – her husband.  He had been  born in “the Madras presidency”  and was a  “Major on the Madras staff on active service” so was presumably home on leave.   But she hadn’t been using his initials as he was John A Richmond.  Further checking just for the sake of knowing revealed that he retired from the Indian army as a colonel in 1890, and in 1891 he was a lodger in Duke St Mayfair and in the 1901 census as a lodger in Edith Grove Chelsea. I couldn’t find him in the 1911 census. What was he doing? Maybe best not to ask.

So that still leaves the question why write as Mrs I.L when she was actually Mrs J.L?  It can hardly have been for anonymity and while it could have been a printer’s error if it was just once, clearly it was her preferred choice.  I’m afraid I have absolutely no idea unless her name had been written in traditional Latin where there was originally no J at all – and so she would have been iulia Richmond just as Julius Caesar was iulius .  The letter J is a printer’s invention dating from 1528.   [For more on that see“There’s No J In Latin, Your Holiness”]  If you have a better explanation – or indeed any explanation get in touch.

After the publication of In My Lady’s Garden I can’t find any further horticultural mentions of Mrs Richmond, apart from the water lily   but she does crop up in other, later newspaper reports  in a completely different context.  She was apparently  involved in the Conservative & Unionist Womens Franchise Association which argued for women’s suffrage when the bulk of the Conservative party was opposed on principle to women gaining the right to vote.  But her ” delicious political innocence” was mocked by a female anti-suffragist who argued that “the alliance between conservative suffragists and socialists is one of the most shameful features of the suffrage movement, but typical of what we may expect when women vote. They would gladly sell the Empire tomorrow…”

At the end of the day perhaps her identity doesn’t matter that much because  like her modern counterpart, Mrs. Richmond is as Caroline says ” a joy to read, with glorious plant descriptions etc and  her gardening advice still holds!”

Julia Richmond  died a widow probably at Woodlands in Lustleigh,  aged 89 in 1929, leaving an estate of £1946 with the Public Trustee as her executor, which is surprising as her son John was a solicitor.  Anyone who has any more information please get in touch!