The Garden History Blog

Studley Royal park © Fountains Abbey and Studley Royal/National Trust

Last week’s post saw us follow John Byng’s trip from London to Yorkshire where he spent a lot of time peering at medieval ruins, exploring gardens and admiring picturesque landscapes.

In this week’s post he does all three in the same place:  the estates of the Aislabie family: Studley Royal, Fountains Abbey and Hackfall.

Byng was clearly enthusiastic from the outset. He’d spent the day travelling to Ripon  but “tho’ it was a gloomy threat’ning evening, yet, not to lose time  I determined upon a survey of Studley Gardens, 3 miles distant.”

Was he impressed?  or was it to be another verbal demolition job as we saw several times last week.  At least it starts off well because “the Park is pleasant, with famous hawthorns, good trees, and fine views towards Ripon, and its old black Minster.”  Will it continue in the same positive vein or will Studley Royal, Fountains and Hackfall disappoint?  Have a guess and then read on to find out if you’ve judged Byng’s taste correctly.

‘View of Fountains Abbey’ (1768) by Balthasar Nebot

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Plumpton Rocks looking south, by Turner, 1798. Harewood House

John Byng by Ozias Humphry, 1796 from The Torrington Diaries

“At 12 o’clock, Saturday May 26th 1792, I had taken the Paddington Road, which the rains of last night had made nice riding, and the face of nature gay”  So begins the  account by  Colonel the Honourable John Byng.  of his journey from London to explore  the sites on the road  to Yorkshire.

So what, you might think.  After all Byng was just the younger son of  a not-very-well-known aristocratic family, who followed the normal career path for younger sons, choosing the army over the navy or church and ending up as a tax official. In the last few weeks of his life he inherited his brother’s title and became Viscount Torrington, but none of this is the stuff of great novels or an obvious way to get  written about on The Garden History Blog.

Plumpton Rocks looking north,  by Turner, 1798. Harewood House

However, John Byng was also a great traveller and better still a great diarist, and he kept a detailed account of his many tours around Britain.  His journals are often sharp, acerbic and amusing [if only by default]  and from them we get an 18thc gentleman’s insights into the British landscape, its great houses and gardens  and  much more…including on this trip a less than flattering  account of Humphry Repton. Continue reading →

Foliage, Flowers and Seed-Vessels of a Peruvian Bark Tree, Marianne North.  Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; 

A few month ago I wrote about the Botanical Gardens at Ooty in southern India where the first superintendent was a Kew-trained gardener, William McIvor.   He arrived there in 1848 and spent the rest of his life in Ooty running the gardens

While that was an impressive achievement he became  much more famous in his own lifetime for his work growing  cinchona – which was to be “the commodity which changed the world.”

If you haven’t heard of cinchona you’ll definitely have heard of the product which is derived from its bark and, if you’re old enough, may even have benefited from it yourself if you’ve ever  travelled to the tropics.

Unfortunately his story doesn’t end that well and he died a disappointed man on June 8th 149 years ago.

Cinchona Bark from  Versuch einer Monographie der China. Nur Atlas, 1826

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Parsley from Vol 2 of The flowering plants, grasses, sedges, & ferns of Great Britain and their allies

It was The Times that called Anne Pratt “the popular writer on botany” but I suspect to most of us [me included] she’s an unknown &  forgotten woman. Yet that’s  a bit strange given that  she was one of the most well-known botanical writers and  illustrators of her day, with 20 books to her credit, and apparently a favourite of Queen Victoria.

Anne  merits an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, but for such an apparently prominent author she’s been quite difficult to  track down. Almost everything known about her – including the ODNB entry – comes from an obituary in The Journal of Botany, British and Foreign for July 1894 and even that starts off: “we briefly reported in this Journal the death of this lady who was known to several generations of children…but were then unable to give much information about her.”  However they eventually  “obtained some particulars of her early life from her niece, Mrs. E. Wells, and a short notice of her work seems desirable”.

So who was Anne Pratt?

from The flowering plants, grasses, sedges, & ferns of Great Britain and their allies vol.1

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