The Rothschild family have long had a reputation as great garden makers but while Waddesdon, Exbury or Ascott might be the sites that immediately spring to mind,  it was actually Gunnersbury Park bought by Nathan and Hannah Rothschild  for £17,000 in 1835  that was the first to be laid out by the great banking dynasty.

Although Nathan died shortly afterwards, Hannah, their son Lionel,  and grandson, Leopold completed the mansion and  transformed the gardens and grounds, notably creating  one of the earliest Japanese gardens in Britain.  Together with  their skilled and creative staff they made Gunnersbury one of the most celebrated gardens of its day.

As usual the photos are mine unless otherwise acknowledged

The Rothschilds were an international family. The founder of the dynasty Mayer Amschel Rothschild had  five sons who established branches of the family’s business in five major cities: Paris, Frankfurt, Vienna, Naples and London .The brothers  were all granted the title of Baron by the Emperor of Austria in 1822 although Nathan, who headed the London business, chose not to use it and so did not request official recognition of his foreign title in Britain. However, in 1838, two years after his death, Queen Victoria authorised its  use and thereafter Hannah is often referred to as Baroness de Rothschild.

 

The couple sought  advice from John Claudius Loudon about improvements to the approach to the house and commissioned Sydney Smirke [Robert Smirke’s younger brother] to re-model the mansion. He also designed a new stable block, tucked away almost out of sight,  beyond their neighbour’s south wall although this was not completed until after Nathan’s death. Meanwhile the farm buildings on the west side of the estate were converted into a thatched ornamental farm and a herd of prize winning cattle was established there.

Loudon later included lots of references to specimen trees at Gunnersbury  in his encyclopaedic account of British trees and shrubs, Arboretum et fruticetum Britannicum (1844), where he  also notes the estate’s  innovative ways of growing and propagating them.

At his death Nathan was the richest man in Britain, but, as Diana Davis points out, Gunnersbury was never a typical rich man’s estate and instead remained just a large [if luxurious] Regency villa and very much a private retreat and family home.  Nevertheless for next 14 years  Hannah also entertained royalty and the aristocracy with a number of lavish fêtes champêtres, showcasing the gardens.  When Disraeli attended one of these in 1843, it impressed him as “a most beautiful park and a villa worthy of an Italian Prince, though decorated with a taste and splendour which a French financier in the olden times could alone have rivalled . . . [with] beautiful grounds, temples and illuminated walks.”  He is thought to have modelled one of the venues in his novel Tancred [1847] and another in Endymion [1880] on what he saw at Gunnersbury.

Hannah also continued to improve the estate,  notably  commissioning Smirke to design the Orangery next to the Horseshoe Pond  and also to add a conservatory.

[For more on this see Davis’s article “A rite of social passage:  Gunnersbury Park, 1835–1925, a Rothschild family villa” in the  Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, which is available free via academia although you will need to open an account], and also volume 1 of Neil Ferguson’s The House of the Rothschilds,  which is also available on. academia

Hannah   took a keen interest in the garden employing talented gardeners who helped develop the estate’s reputation for horticulture, especially for growing fruit of all kinds notably pineapples.   Among them was George Mills who had from 1833  been gardener to Alexander Copland, the previous owner.  According to his obituary notice in the Journal of Horticulture,  at the time of the sale in 1835 “Mr. Mills had a house of magnificent Muscat of Alexandria Grapes at Gunnersbury, and so much were the purchasers pleased with the appearance of this house that they resolved to continue Mr. Mills in the post of gardener.”    Mills is known for writing An Improved Mode of Cultivating the Cucumber and Melon, and  The Cultivation of the Pine-apple, both of which were dedicated to “the late Baroness de Rothschild”, and he stayed working there for twenty years, until his retirement in 1853.

You get some sense of the scale of the glasshouses  from a newspaper article on 5th June 1849 reporting that a hailstorm had broken no less than 3940 panes of glass.  Some of them, including the span-roofed vine house, were inherited from Copland but it’s clear that the Rothschilds had continued to expand and improve the range.

Meanwhile Thomas Farmer who bought the Small Mansion appointed James Hudson as his gardener in 1876. Hudson was to become a major influence on the development of Gunnersbury over the next nearly 40years. Both he and Richards were keen exhibitors and regular prizewinners [see for eg GC May 1880]

 

Lionel Rothschild died in 1879 and his son Leopold took over. Ten years later after Farmer’s death his daughter and heir put the Small Mansion up for sale giving Leopold the opportunity to reunite the original Maynard landholding. He snapped it up.

The wall between the estates was demolished.  The living areas of the small mansion were used as guest accommodation while  the cellars were given over to mushroom growing.  Crucially for the estate’s horticultural reputation James Hudson was kept on as part of an enlarged garden team. Gunnersbury was about to reach its apogee.

 

By now almost every issue of the major horticultural magazines carried a mention of Gunnersbury, and recorded the many prizes its plants and produce gained at shows and exhibitions.  It’s clear  from them that Hudson took the lead role. He was to become one of the first recipients of the Victoria Medal of Honour established by the Royal Horticultural Society in 1897 to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee.

One innovation was the way that roses were trained over frameworks to form basket shapes, a technique which has been reintroduced by the current garden team. New glasshouses continued to be added, including  several for forcing fruit. These  new houses, according to Gardeners Chronicle in May 1898 ” were really orchard-houses, that is, they provide for the forcing of standard trees in pots, without the trellises or trained trees common in most fruit houses. When visiting the gardens a fortnight ago the Nectarine fruits in the earliest house were ready for the table.” [see image below] There were ripe figs in February, and grapes by April.  A report from 1900 also notes that paw-paws had been grown from seed and were already ten feet tall and fruiting.

There was a fine collection of aquatic plants including  recently introduced  hybrids of water lilies from Latour-Marliac and a tank installed in one of the hothouses “where the water will be heated, and blue Nymphaeas cultivated.”  It was there that Hudson raised a new blue waterlily that was given his name.  One of the earliest cultivars of the gigantea group it was  for decades the largest blue waterlily available although now it is very hard to find commercially.

 

The Journal of Horticulture carried a 3 page spread on the garden in 1899 which is worth reading if you want to know more detail. You can also get a sense of the vast scale of the gardening operation from the pocket book of Thomas Hobbs, one of the gardeners in the 1890s which has been preserved in the Rothschild Archive

 

 

 

 

 

 

The magazine also reported that “some of the pretty nooks are worked out from Mr. Leopold de Rothschild’s own designs, as, for example, the pretty little country Swiss Garden, with sundial in the centre, the idea for which was obtained in a quiet Swiss retreat” although “more often the new gardens result from conferences with Mr. Hudson, who always superintends every detail of the work.”   (I suspect this Swiss Garden is the one called the Round Garden in the postcard below but I’ sure someone will correct me if I’m mistaken.)

However their great creation was the Japanese garden which was laid out near the stable block by Hudson  in 1900-1901.  Surrounded by a series of bamboo fences and gates it  included a bamboo avenue, using thirty different species and varieties, and a bamboo bridge. Complete with an elegant tea house  as well as lanterns lit with electricity, stepping stones and an island with dwarf conifers, it was widely publicised in the horticultural press, and caused a sensation. Although there had been Japanese exhibitions in London in the previous 20 years the great boost to creating Japanese Gardens in Britain did not occur until after the 1910 Great Japan Exhibition at White City, so once again Gunnersbury was ahead of the curve. However although it was called a Japanese garden the emphasis was definitely on  Japanese plants rather than authentic Japanese design.

There are several more  lengthy articles in the horticultural press. For example The Gardening World carried one in December 1903 with a detailed description of the many greenhouses [almost too many to count let alone list here!] but which also shows that Hudson and Rothschild had started gardening on the roof  too,  ” a phase of gardening which is seldom seen, and is here carried out. very handsomely.”

 

Gardeners Chronicle carried another in 1906 describing the garden in detail and showing James Hudson still going strong aged 64. He eventually died aged 91 in 1932.

But even as the estate was flourishing and continuing to expand the signs of its end were in sight. London was spreading and suburbia had begun to approach  and encroach on Gunnersbury.

Leopold de Rothschild died in 1917, and his widow  Marie and  her son Lionel must soon have decided to sell up and move on .   The final straw seems to have been plans, initially proposed in 1914, for the Great West Road [now the North Circular] which was to run parallel with the long eastern boundary wall  although this wasn’t actually begun until 1922.   Follow this link for more on the building of the Great West Road

By 1920  negotiations started with Ealing Council to buy 74 acres of the grounds for a park.  There was lot of local opposition and the start of a 5 year campaign  about whether or not to buy Gunnersbury for public use.   [I tried to follow this through newspaper reports but it was so complex that writing a proper account  would make as suitable topic for an MA  if  not a PhD!]

By this point Hudson had retired and been replaced by  one of his foremen Arthur Bedford, but  despite his evident skill it was reported that  “Gunnersbury has lost much of its pre-war glory.”  Lionel who was later to describe himself as ‘a banker by hobby but a gardener by profession’ had bought Exbury in the New Forest and used  Gunnersbury  as a base  to grow plants for the new garden there.  For example  “a collection of seedlings, raised from the seeds collected by many well-known Chinese and Thibetan collectors of recent years[were]  destined to be planted in the recently acquired property of Mr. Rothschild in Hampshire, where the soil and climate are admirably suited for the growth of these rare shrubs, particularly the Rhododendron family.”

Eventually at the very end of 1925, Gunnersbury was bought by  two adjacent local authorities – Ealing and Acton for £125,000, ironically funded by a mortgage from the Rothschild bank, on the understanding that houses would be built along two main roads nearby to fund repayment. However  the philanthropic streak in the Rothschilds put restrictive covenants  in place to ensure  that the rest of the estate  could only be put to a beneficial public use and not developed as housing.

Eventually the park was managed by a joint committee of Ealing and Acton together with the boroughs of Chiswick and Brentford. The grounds immediately around the houses continued to be managed as formal gardens but £7000 was spent transforming it into a public park, including buying the Rothschild’s machinery, leasing the fields for grazing, employing a team of 36 staff, buying 100 benches, drinking fountains,  and setting up facilities for golf, tennis, football, cricket as well as bowls and fishing.  Tea rooms were set up in both the stables and farm buildings.

84 candidates applied for the job of  superintendent and Sydney Legg, previously head of the parks in Margate, was appointed on a salary of £400p.a and free accommodation.  When Margate heard the news they upped his pay to £450 and promised £500 the following year. Mr Legg changed his mind and the job was then offered to William Armstrong who had been parks superintendent at Coatbridge in Scotland.

 

The new park was opened in 1926 by Neville Chamberlain then the Health Minister in front of huge crowds. The following year the Rothschild’s  mansion became a museum.

 

With the reorganisation of local government Gunnersbury became jointly owned and funded by the  London Boroughs of Ealing and Hounslow. Like many other great urban parks it fell on hard times in the second half of the 20thc. There is  no endowment fund, so the cost fell on the council tax payer and when one borough cut contributions, the other one had to do the same, with very damaging results.  Estate buildings fell into disrepair with many put on the At Risk Register. Being under divided management didn’t help but the fact that it’s a  Grade II* , nationally important, registered landscape has helped prevent a total disaster.

The park is really well used and there is an active Friends group founded in 1981.  They pressured the authorities to prepare a comprehensive plan for the park’s future and there have been a series of reports and surveys since then attempting  to reverse the decline.  You can follow the long and often sorry saga on the Friends website including the current ten year plan which covers the years until 2026. A lot of restoration work has been carried out, thanks in large part to a £21m grant from  the Heritage Lottery Fund in 2014, although there remains masses more to do and, as elsewhere, income generation schemes have proved controversial, especially as the museum and the park itself cost just under £2.5 million a year to run.

The estate is now run by the non-profit Gunnersbury Museum and Park Development Trust, so while the picture still isn’t that rosy there is cause for a little optimism because as Owen Thomas, head gardener to Queen Victoria said “It matters little at what season of the year one visits Gunnersbury, there is sure to be something to admire.”

For more information, apart from  “Gunnersbury Park” by Val Bott & James Wisdom (2018) which I mentioned last week, try searching the Rothschild Archive which has a huge amount of information about the family, and some colour photos by Lionel.  If you want a way of spending an hour or two following the story try searching Biodiversity Heritage Library and prepare to be surprised by the number of hits you get. Similarly if you can access to British Newspaper Archives there’s a lot more to discover.  And finally there are  enough research opportunities for several MAs and PhD projects so get in touch if you want to pursue one of them [but not the Japanese garden please because I already have a student working on that right now!]