The Garden History Blog

The Tradescants and their Tomb

Posted on 02/05/2020 by The Garden History Blog

Carved tree on the corner of the tomb

Just before the virus struck I was at the Garden Museum in Lambeth helping out on a course. We were in the new Clore Learning Centre which overlooks the courtyard garden designed by Dan Pearson, [featured in March edition of Gardens Illustrated]. I sat at the back listening to the speakers but also watching the rain lash down outside on the two large chest tombs standing amongst the greenery. One is that of Admiral Bligh of Mutiny on the Bounty fame and the other that of the family of the 17thc plant hunters John Tradescant senior and his son John junior. [If you’re not sure who they were check last weeks post which was an introduction to today’s]

Luckily the rain stopped during the lunch break, so I went to take a closer look. Whilst Bligh’s monument is imposing but relatively austere that of the Tradescants is anything but plain.

The view from the Clore Learning Centre, in the rain, Feb 9th 2020. Bligh’s monument is the centre, the Tradescant’s tomb on the right.

In fact, as you can probably tell from even from the photo above, their tomb is a work of art, or rather a series of works of art, and the more I looked at it and researched it afterwards the more intriguing and unusual it became.

Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged 17thc, Garden Museum, John Tradescant, plant hunters | 9 Comments

The Tradescants

Posted on 25/04/2020 by The Garden History Blog

John Tradescant the elder, attributed to Emanuel de Critz, Ashmolean Museum

I’d just finished writing a post about something I’d seen at the Garden Museum when I realised there might be some readers who wouldn’t know anything about the subject and would need a bit of background. So I started writing that and of course the piece became so long that I had to split it into two… so today’s is the introduction to next weeks!

John Tradescant the Younger , attributed to Thomas de Critz, Ashmolean Museum

It’s about the 17thc gardeners John Tradescant and his son, also John. They were an extraordinary pair: Gardeners to the aristocracy and royalty, plant hunters, nurserymen and founders of the first museum to be open to the public. Famous in their own lifetimes, and continuously in the centuries since, their lives have even been romanticised by a modern novelist.

But how much do you actually know about them? Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged 17thc, Cecil, Hatfield, John Parkinson, plant hunters, Tradescant | Leave a comment

William Goldring and Asylums

Posted on 18/04/2020 by The Garden History Blog

The Conservatory at Rauceby Hospital in its heyday. Still from “Abandoned Rauceby”

At the end of last year I wrote about the work of William Goldring, a prolific landscape and garden designer who died in 1919. Apart from his private commissions and work on public parks he was also involved in the design of landscapes that have been generally overlooked by garden and landscape historians: those of hospitals and asylums. A large number of these were being built in the later 19thc so I thought, with the Victorian love of order and record keeping, this would be an easy subject to research but once again I’ve been proved wrong.

The Conservatory at Rauceby after closure © Steffie Shields 1999

The grounds of these new hospitals, particularly those for mental illness, were seen as having equal therapeutic value to the buildings where the patients were housed. But whereas architects are almost always known, landscape designers are not. This is surprising considering that many were mainly on large rural or semi-rural sites and in many way can be seen as a continuation of the planning and layout of great landed estates in earlier times.

William Goldring from The Journal of the Kew Guild, 1913

Sarah Rutherford attempted to uncover these lost designers in her PhD thesis about the landscapes of asylums but says that when she started her research “of all the 115 public asylum sites begun by 1914 only one was known to have a named designer.” Luckily that one was by William Goldring and she went on to show that he designed at least two more. These three sites, Napsbury near St Albans in Hertfordshire, Hellingly in Sussex and Rauceby, near Sleaford in Lincolnshire, are the subjects of today’s post.

The remains of Rauceby Hospital from Google Street View

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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged conservation, conservatory, garden buildings, hospital, planning, William Goldring | 3 Comments

The Other London Zoo OR Vesuvius and a parachuting monkey

Posted on 11/04/2020 by The Garden History Blog

detail of “Summer Fashions, 1844” set in Surrey Zoological Gardens

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the new menagerie that was set up during the French Revolution in Paris’s Jardin des Plantes which helped put science rather than entertainment centre stage. This led to pressure for London to have an equivalent [or better!] , and in 1822 the Linnaean Society resolved to form a “Zoological Club of the Linnaean Society of London” which in turn led to the establishment of London Zoo.

Up until then the only way most people could see any “exotic” animals was to visit a travelling menagerie or one of the large indoor menageries on London. The most famous of these was at Exeter Change on the Strand, which from 1814 was run by Edward Cross.

But the tide was turning on such cruel conditions. The public mood shifted towards seeing animals given a little more space and better treatment. Menageries slowly began to close and zoological gardens began to open around Britain: Dublin in 1831, Liverpool in 1832, Manchester in 1836, and Edinburgh in 1839. But the first amongst them was created with the animals from Edward Cross’s menagerie and became London’s other zoological garden, and as far as I’m aware the only one that had a parachuting monkey…

The Tortoise enclosure, detail of a painting by E.J. Capel, 1831

Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged conservatory, giraffes, John Claudius Loudon, menagerie | 4 Comments

Dickensian Gardens

Posted on 04/04/2020 by The Garden History Blog

Pip and Estella walking in the garden, Great Expectations. by John McLenan, 1861

A few weeks back I was going to write about the way Dickens used gardens in his books, but ended up writing about the man himself and his garden at Gad’s Hill, so today I’m going to try again. I’m a great Dickens fan and its pretty clear that gardens play a critical role in several books, but rather than try and do a heavy literary analysis I thought I’d look at how Dickens uses them to set the scene for his stories as they unfold, and in doing so shows the importance of gardens and gardening to the aspiring Victorian lower-middle class.