Acknowledgements

Laird, Mark

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Acknowledgements

Mark Laird

A Natural History of English Gardening: 1650–1800

Introduced to English gardens by Peter Collinson in 1734, this North American shrub, with its clusters of funnel-shaped, reddish to pale pink flowers, added a new fragrance to English gardens. Ehret, writing in German, distinguished young foliage (bright green insert) from the old...

Author

Mark Laird

PublisherPaul Mellon Centre

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-32108

Acknowledgements

I should first acknowledge Robert Williams. In inviting me to talk on botanical representation at the Vanbrugh conference at Castle Howard in July 1999, he set me thinking about William Sherard. That paper — a kind of botanical biography — led me to the duchess of Beaufort and to London coffee houses. From this germ there grew a canopy. It was a departure from the methodology I had used in The Flowering of the Landscape Garden (1999) and yet a continuation of many of its methods.

The same season saw the publication of a short piece I had presented at a conference in Bamberg, Germany: ‘Climate, Weather and Planting Design in English Formal Gardens of the Early 18th Century’ (Die Gartenkunst des Barock, ICOMOS Journals of the German National Committee, XXVIII, 1999). Here I should pause to thank my colleagues in Germany and Austria, and notably Géza Hajós in Vienna, for many such invitations to speak and work on planting issues.

As we, in the conservation community, began to grapple with impacts on landscape heritage of climate change, my focus began to shift towards understanding the nature of the environment in the age of the English landscape garden. The October 1987 ‘Hurricane’ (an extra-tropical cyclone) and the Burns’ Day Storm of January 1990 appeared replays of the Great Storm of November 1703. Just as I witnessed gales among trees at Painshill, Surrey, on 25 January 1990, so I was troubled on site by sunshine baking lawns in the droughts of 1995 and 2003. The grass resembled the 1762 and 1765 ‘savannahs’. I am grateful to all at Painshill Park Trust — Janie Burford, the late Teige O’Brien, Marie Alexander, Mike Gove and Mark Ebdon — for helping set the stage for that environmental shift. In my thirty-year ongoing role at Painshill, I have pursued a long-term, real-time study of a designed landscape through plantings reconstructed by mid-eighteenth-century method. In turn, the gardening of the late Kath Clark, with assistant Chris Carr, and the horticultural craft of Karen Bridgman have revealed processes of care over time. John Phibbs’s welcome guidance at Painshill and beyond — affirmative and challenging — was critical to my validation of meadows and groves in both book and park (even as I had to skirt around some of his theories on wilderness, orchard and grove).

The impetus for the book came from other lucky invitations to talk or write about aspects of natural history within early modern landscapes. Amy Meyers first asked me to think about Mark Catesby’s plant introductions to England — introductions adjunct to his Natural History of Carolina. She then directed my attention to the birds and beasts of the English landscape garden (research published in her volume, Knowing Nature, 2011). She was also instrumental in making the ‘Mrs Delany & her Circle’ exhibition and publication possible, which leaves me doubly indebted to her at the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA). Therese O’Malley played a similar foundational role in inviting me to participate in the 2002 symposium at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. This led to the 2008 volume The Art of Natural History; my essay for it was supported by Margaret Riley’s appendix on the botanical club at the Temple Coffee House. I am indebted to Therese for help with images for my Natural History, and for suggesting I apply for a David R. Coffin Publication Grant, which was graciously awarded by the Foundation for Landscape Studies in 2013. The invitation from David Elliott and the Catesby Commemorative Trust to return to the impact of Mark Catesby’s plants on English gardens in the 2012 conference in Charleston, SC, rounded off fifteen years’ work.

The invitation from Frances Harris and Michael Hunter to participate in the 2001 conference on John Evelyn at the British Library prompted reflections on the natural history of Deptford beyond the reconstructive work I had already done on Evelyn’s Sayes Court garden, east of London. Equally significant was Mavis Batey’s help in shaping my essay in the 2007 volume on Evelyn that came out of the proceedings of the Wotton tercentennial conference of 2006 (help that followed years of support in bringing my attention to the Hartwell planting plans in the Bodleian and to documents on Robert Penson, gardener to St John’s College, Oxford, in the 1770s). I am grateful to all who have assisted me with Evelyn scholarship over two decades, notably Douglas Chambers, whose The Letterbooks of John Evelyn (co-edited with David Galbraith, University of Toronto Press) has just been published.

I was fortunate to call upon diverse experts in their respective fields for a reading of the manuscript or parts of the manuscript. This followed its completion in draft through a Senior Fellowship from the Paul Mellon Centre in 2010. I am very grateful to Brian Allen, Director of Studies, 1993–2012, who enthusiastically embraced my project early on, and to Mark Hallett, Director of Studies from 2012, who continued to underwrite the project. In 2011, I asked Maria Zytaruk to review chapter 1 on John Evelyn and received much useful advice with reference to her own recent essays. I turned to Clarissa Campbell Orr for indispensable guidance on chapter 6, which built on our previous collaborations for the Mrs Delany exhibition and publication. She was also kind enough to guide me in adjusting the introduction and refining many aspects of other chapters. Paul Foster was exceptionally generous in working through every detail of my coverage of Gilbert White’s natural history. Without his authority, it would have remained an uphill slog to stray into the wider fields of Selborne beyond the garden proper. John Harris, who provided unstinting help with The Flowering of the Landscape Garden and remained a chief encourager of A Natural History of English Gardening, put his full weight behind the researches. The support that John and Eileen Harris have given me over these years matches the graciousness of the Duke of Beaufort, who made the flower and insect albums, and the Badminton archives generally, available to me on numerous visits.

A close reading of the entire work by John Edmondson and Therese O’Malley followed in 2012. I acknowledge their respective inputs: clarifying points, correcting errors, and lending assistance as I ploughed on with a revised draft. I then commissioned Charles Nelson to give the second draft a substantive scientific edit. As I fully expected, he found plenty to challenge, quibbling with entire sections, or, just as much, with individual words. While it proved impossible to put right all such criticisms, I benefitted from his inexhaustible capacity to question everything. The revisions that followed made for a greatly improved third draft. At that point, I was consulting Margaret Riley on aspects of chapters 2 and 3, since her knowledge of the Sherard brothers brought an unrivalled familiarity with manuscript sources, notably the duchess of Beaufort’s papers at the British Library. She also helped substantially in checking for me John Evelyn’s ‘Elysium Britannicum’ manuscript in the British Library. I am indebted to her for much over the long haul. Shorter term, but equally beneficial, have been my consultations with Cathryn Spence on Thomas Robins the Elder and the talented Robins family. In addition to updating my knowledge of her own publications, she raised questions of authorship that are yet to be resolved. Some botanical works still attributed in this book to Thomas Robins the Elder may well prove to be the products of one or other son, or of their collaborative efforts with the father.

As a final overview in late 2012, Keith Thomas kindly read parts of that third draft: my ongoing work on the introduction, and what remained an unwieldy concluding chapter. By helping me to define more rigorously the scope and themes of the book as they overlap with his influential Man and the Natural World (1983), he allowed me to find the confidence to re-write the introduction and chapter 7. It was while reading modern history with the distinguished historians at St John’s College, Oxford — Howard Colvin, Ross McKibbin, and Keith Thomas — that I came upon the history of architecture and the garden. The method of working up my narratives from years of amassed data, with telling details, reflects their instruction and my belief that history is the foundation of good landscape history. The welcome invitations of Nicholas Purcell to give the first and final Penson Lectures of his time as Keeper of the Groves at St John’s formed appropriate bookends, and I last spoke in Oxford on 27 June 2011 about my Natural History as it grew out of The Flowering.

Other final, but fruitful, consultations included exchanges with Judith Magee on G. D. Ehret and William Bartram, with Henrietta Ryan and Sachiko Kusukawa on Everhard Kick (Kickius), and with Florence Pieters and Kay Etheridge on Maria Sibylla Merian. The latter exchanges led to an insight on the dating of the Great Storm of November 1703. All this expertise became accessible through the network of scholars working on the volume of essays edited by Charles Nelson and David Elliott: The Curious Mister Catesby (University of Georgia Press, March 2015). Among the authors of that volume, Kraig Adler was generous in advising me on herpetology, and Stephen Harris, Charlie Jarvis and James L. Reveal offered kind help on taxonomic and illustrative matters. Outside the Catesby circle, Judith Marshall of the Natural History Museum, London, was of assistance on crickets and locusts; her colleague Gavin Broad helped me on parasitoid wasps and hawk-moth caterpillars; and their colleague Patrick Campbell aided my researches into Timothy the tortoise. Mark Spencer, Curator, British and Irish & Sloane Herbariums at the Natural History Museum, helped with the duchess of Beaufort’s Herbarium. Meanwhile, Beth Fowkes Tobin of the Institute for Women’s Studies at the University of Georgia provided invaluable coverage of the conchology of Margaret Cavendish Bentinck, duchess of Portland. Indeed it would have proved difficult to complete chapter 7 without the timely access to her researches, now published as The Duchess’s Shells (Yale University Press, 2014).

The later stages of editorial revision also coincided with two significant pieces of research. These offered complementary viewpoints to mine on the periods of John Evelyn and Mary Somerset, duchess of Beaufort. Jan Woudstra was responsive to the idea of our doing back-to-back studies of greenhouse technology for the Dumbarton Oaks Garden and Landscape Symposium of May 2011: ‘Technology and the Garden’. I gained new insights from his work, now published in the volume with that title (Dumbarton Oaks, 2014). I was also very fortunate to have access to David Jacques’s book manuscript when it was submitted to Yale University Press: ‘Gardens of Court and Country: Formal Designs in England and Wales from Carolean to Early Georgian Times’. This confirmed much that I had already worked up on sites such as Badminton. I am grateful to him and all those associated with conservation studies at the former Institute of Advanced Architectural Studies in York, notably Peter Goodchild and Janette Ray, for help in launching my studies in planting history. Duncan Donald, then Curator of Chelsea Physic Garden, should be mentioned as an influence in the years after York. He introduced me to William Curtis’s Flora Londinensis. While Research Fellow at the Physic Garden I completed short publications on William Hudson’s Flora Anglica and on Sir Joseph Banks’s links with the Apothecaries’ Garden. Banks, Curtis and Hudson feature prominently at the end of this book as an expansion of those preliminary forays into botanical matters.

It was in York that I first attempted watercolour reconstructions of historic plantings, using drawing skills developed while studying landscape architecture at the University of Edinburgh. These reconstructions were further developed during fellowships at Dumbarton Oaks. I am grateful to Joachim Wolscke-Bulmahn, Director of Studies in Landscape Architecture, 1991–6, for support during the second fellowship (1994–5), and indebted to John Dixon Hunt, Director of Studies in Landscape Architecture, 1988–91, for his formative help in the first fellowship (1988–9). He encouraged me to publish research and drawings in the University of Pennsylvania Press’s The Flowering of the Landscape Garden. I have republished four of those original watercolours in this Natural History. Those are complemented by two that were drafted for the Dumbarton Oaks volume on John Evelyn and one for the Delany exhibition. Two entirely fresh works for chapters 2 and 4 make up the complete set. The personal dedications of these plates reflect an acknowledgement of the people who have played a principal role over the long years of the book’s making. I regret that Mavis Batey and Kath Clark would not live to see my watercolour of the Strawberry Hill grove and shrubbery — those painterly effects that Karen Bridgman, restoration architect Peter Inskip and I still strive to realize.

It proves impossible to do equal justice to the scores of people who contributed to the book in other significant ways. Notable was the spadework accomplished by the Delany exhibition organizers and workers — Eleanor Hughes, Tim Knox, Amy Meyers, Stephen Saitas, Jason Siebenmorgen, Alicia Weisberg-Roberts and Jane Wildgoose; and behind and beyond them are countless others. Barbara Hopkinson for one pointed out to me very recently that Mrs Delany’s plan was to complete precisely 1,000 collages. Fanny Burney in her diary gives this vital information in an account that supports my conclusion that only four collages were produced in the initial year of 1773. In addition to those who have helped with such fine points of scholarship or with illustrative matters — Mungo Campbell, Jan Clark, Victoria Dickenson, Joel Fry, Alison Hardie, Jeff Harrison, Julie Harvey, Joanna Marschner, Janice Neri, Maisoon Rehani, David Scrase, Paul Spencer-Longhurst, David Standing, Susan Staves, Michael Symes, Stewart Tiley, Paul Tod, Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi, Scott Wilcox, Alastair Wright — I should turn to those who supported me in the year-long assembling of digital images. The search began at Harvard, where I have enjoyed for fifteen years a wealth of resources and the support of colleagues and students; it also began at Dumbarton Oaks, where the current Director of Garden and Landscape Studies, John Beardsley, the Director of Gardens, Gail Griffin, and the Librarian of the Rare Book Collection, Linda Lott, were unfailingly helpful. Sarah Burke Cahalan as Reference Librarian looked after my request for images from that Rare Book Collection, and Susan Halpert at Harvard’s Houghton Library gave guidance on managing equivalent early requests. I should like to thank Mary Haegert, who continued to manage the Houghton requests, Dana Fisher, who aided the search for images at Ernst Mayr Library, Museum of Comparative Zoology, and Jacqueline Ford at the Botany Libraries, Harvard University Herbarium, who, along with Lisa DeCesare, provided kind services. Jacqueline’s counsel was appreciated not only in-house but also for images accessible through the excellent Biodiversity Heritage Library, for which Harvard Botany Libraries was a founding member.

Susan Fraser and Vanessa Sellers of the LuEsther T. Mertz Library at the New York Botanical Garden were generous in offering images from the Library’s copy of William Curtis’s Flora Londinensis. Lisa Ford at the Yale Center for British Art, following decade-long collaborations, continued to offer kind help with images obtained through the YCBA and the Yale University Libraries. I was assisted by curatorial, research and imaging staff at the YCBA: Abigail Armistead, Maria Singer and Sarah Welcome. I should also express my gratitude to Lynda Brooks and Elaine Charwat at the Linnean Society Library, Karin Dyko at Schloss Marienburg, Andrea Hart at the Botany Library of the Natural History Museum, London, Mark Hayden on behalf of Ruth Hayden and Kate Verrier-Jones, June Holmes of the Natural History Society of Northumbria, Gareth Hughes at Welbeck, Stephen Lloyd at Knowsley Hall, Diane Martz on behalf of Mrs Heinz, Elaine Milsom with Andy Neal of The Somerset Trust / Badminton Estate Office, James Peill at Goodwood, Philip White at Hestercombe, Tony Willis at Oak Spring Garden Library and Marion Woodward in connection with John Evelyn. My gratitude extends to all those at the many institutions who assisted in the supply of hundreds of high-resolution digital images.

David Ryan, Director of Records in The Royal Household and Pamela Clark, Senior Archivist, Royal Archives, took care of my obtaining rights to use the Royal Archives documents that relate to Princess Augusta. These are cited by permission of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

I had the very good fortune to work with Sally Salvesen, Publisher, at Yale University Press, London, in the making of Mrs Delany and her Circle. Sally exhibited patience and good humour under the pressures of an exhibition deadline and turned out an exquisitely-designed book. I was equally blessed to work with Gillian Malpass, Publisher, Art and Architecture, who oversaw my complex project from its inception in 2007 to its expert production in the course of 2014–15. With valuable editorial contributions from Delia Gaze, and assisted by Hannah Jenner, Gillian generously responded to every concern an author could have in trying to bring to life a large body of work. She engaged Emily Lees, Senior Editor, Art and Architecture, in the process of visualizing how text and image might be brought to a finesse that marks out books produced by the Press. It has been a great pleasure to work with Emily, who designed the beautiful book I had always hoped for. Meanwhile, Meg Davies, as an accomplished indexer, saved me from Gilbert White’s complaint (the ‘darning’ that opens this Natural History); she brought me closure instead. Above all, I remain indebted to the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art for its exceptional generosity in supporting the publication, and to Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, President, Foundation for Landscape Studies, and her selection committee, for the generous David R. Coffin Publication Grant.

This long-drawn-out passion for writing on my subject was encouraged by my wife, Sharon Kirsch, whose affecting and sharp-minded What Species of Creatures: Animal Relations from the New World (New Star Books, 2008) blazed a trail. Sharing her love of the natural world, I was happy, in this book, to follow the path of the wild.

TORONTO, 12 / 13 DECEMBER 2014
MOON AT CELESTIAL APOGEE / ST. LUCY’S DAY

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Description: Sketch no. 22, Azalea nudiflora (Rhododendron nudiflorum syn R. periclymenoides),...

Detail of G. D. Ehret, sketch no. 22, ‘Azalea nudifl ora’ (Rhododendron nudiflorum syn R. periclymenoides), undated but drawn for his Plantae selectae illustration of 1755 (vol. 5, t. 48), watercolour and graphite, 16 ⅞ × 10 ¾ in. (43 × 27.2 cm). © The Natural History Museum, London

Introduced to English gardens by Peter Collinson in 1734, this North American shrub, with its clusters of funnel-shaped, reddish to pale pink flowers, added a new fragrance to English gardens. Ehret, writing in German, distinguished young foliage (bright green insert) from the old.

From John Evelyn’s Fumifugium: or, The Inconvenience of the Aer, and Smoake of London Dissipated (London, 1661; reprinted for Benjamin White in 1772), pp. 47–8, the proposal for surrounding the polluted city with fragrant shrubs and crops:

To these may be added the Rubus odoratus, Bayes, Juniper, Lignum-vitæ, Lavender: but above all, Rosemary, the Flowers whereof are credibly reported to give their scent above thirty Leagues off at Sea, upon the coasts of Spain: and at some distance towards the Meadow side, Vines, yea, Hops.

Et Arbusta passim,

Et glaucas Salices, Casiamque Crocumque rubentem
Et pinguem Tiliam & ferrugineos Hyacinthos, &c.1Virgil

For, there is a very sweet smelling Sally2Sallow or Willow, and the blossoms of the Tilia, or Lime-tree, are incomparably fragrant; in brief, whatsoever is odoriferous and refreshing.

1 Virgil »

2 Sallow or Willow »

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