Introduction

Laird, Mark

Save Cite Share

Free

Introduction

Mark Laird

A Natural History of English Gardening: 1650–1800

The naturalist Gilbert White (1720–1793, pls 3a and b) wrote that compiling an index is as ‘entertaining’ as the ‘darning of stockings...

Author

Mark Laird

PublisherPaul Mellon Centre

Related print edition pages: pp.3-25

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-32110

Chapter subject tags:Gardens, English--HistoryWhite, Gilbert, 1720-1793Horticulture--Great Britain--HistoryArt and natural history--Great Britain--HistoryDelany, Mrs. (Mary), 1700-1788Walpole, Horace, 1717-1797Evelyn, John, 1620-1706Women naturalists--Great Britain--HistoryBotanical illustration--England--18th century

Introduction

~

Description: Conjectural reconstruction as bird's-eye view of the oval parterre, Sayes Court by...

1. Mark Laird, conjectural reconstruction as bird’s-eye view of the oval parterre based on John Evelyn’s Sayes Court plan of circa 1653 and drawings in the British Architectural Library and the British Library, graphite, coloured pencils and watercolour, 1993 (first published 1998)

The parterre, flanked by a ‘wilderness’, was John Evelyn’s adaptation of Continental models of decorative flower display in the Baroque or ‘formal’ style. On the left side, two evergreen thickets with ‘Cabinetts’ were for birds and contemplative walks; on the right side, the two ‘Cabinetts of Ivie, and Aliternes’ were surrounded by soft-fruit plantings. Many evergreens, notably rosemary hedges, were destroyed in the bitter winter of 1683–4. Evelyn promoted clipped yew in English borders (plate-bandes) after his sentinel cypresses proved poorly suited to the extremes of what is now called the Little Ice Age.

This plate is dedicated by Mark Laird to Douglas Chambers, Frances Harris and Maria Zytaruk

The naturalist Gilbert White (1720–1793, pls 3a and b) wrote that compiling an index is as ‘entertaining’ as the ‘darning of stockings’.1See Paul G. M. Foster, Gilbert White and his Records: A Scientific Biography (London: Christopher Helm, 1988), 146. White was busy with the index in January 1788, but according to Paul Foster in his ‘Note on the Text’ in the Oxford World’s Classics edition (1993), the index proved ‘rudimentary’ and was augmented in that later edition. For a fascinating account of verbal descriptions and portraiture of Gilbert White, see June E. Chatfield, ‘Likenesses of the Reverend Gilbert White’, Proceedings of the Hampshire Field Club and Archaeological Society, XLIII (1987), 207–17. I am grateful to Paul Foster for providing me with a copy of this informative article. So to introduce a book by an index might seem utterly dull. To note, however, that White himself is absent or barely represented in indexes of any history of the English garden is highly instructive.2See Miles Hadfield, A History of British Gardening, 3rd edn (London: John Murray, 1979), 232–3, for one short passage on the Revd Gilbert White as author of the garden diary, writing about routine work in a small garden. For a single reference unrelated to gardening or natural history, see Tom Williamson, Polite Landscapes: Gardens and Society in Eighteenth-century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 125, citing Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne as evidence of dwindling timber shortages in forests due to browsing. Author of a widely read work on natural history, The Natural History of Selborne (1789), Gilbert White appears to inhabit a different field of knowledge from gardening. And yet, since his life coincided with the age of the landscape garden, and since he kept a garden and detailed garden records, it seems reasonable to dig deeper. Surely there is scope, at the intersection of garden history and natural history, to relate ‘Capability’ Brown’s landscapes to Gilbert White’s creatures, not least earthworms and the birds that fed on them. For example, White pointed out that gardeners detested worm casts, which littered the carpet-like lawns of the English pleasure ground, and which had to be removed with shovels or chains: ‘But these men [gardeners] would find that the earth without worms would soon become cold, hard-bound, and void of fermentation; and consequently steril.’3Gilbert White, The Natural History of Selborne [1789], ed. Paul Foster (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 182–3. Thus Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown (1716–1783), the master of landscape gardening, unwittingly made Art by dint of what White called a necessary but ‘despicable link in the chain of Nature’.4Ibid., 182.

~

Description: Portrait of Gilbert White by Chapman, Thomas

3a. T. Chapman, pen and ink portrait of ‘G.W.’ (Gilbert White) in Alexander Pope’s translation of Homer’s Iliad, vol III. Portrait on a flyleaf at the beginning of the volume. © The British Library Board (Add. MS 38877, fol. 1, vol. III)

In June 1743 Gilbert White graduated Bachelor of Arts at Oxford University. Alexander Pope, as ceremonial guest, presented copies of his own translation of Homer’s Iliad. White’s personal copy contains a double-spread ‘Portrait of G.W.’ — the only two authentic likenesses of the naturalist. Thomas Chapman of Trinity College, Oxford, was probably the ‘T C’ who sketched the portraits. Two years before his graduation, while on ‘field-diversions’ (hunting), White had experienced, by dint of a gossamer shower, an awakening of the ‘spirit of enquiry’: his lifelong dedication to natural history.

~

3b. T. Chapman, pen and ink portrait of ‘G.W.’ (Gilbert White) in Alexander Pope‘s translation of Homer‘s Iliad, vol V. Portrait on a flyleaf at the beginning of the volume. © The British Library Board (Add. MS 38879, fol. 1, vol. V)

To understand why White and Brown appear divided by an invisible fence, one should go back to the first attempt at a narrative of ‘modern’ English garden design: Horace Walpole’s The History of the Modern Taste in Gardening, published in 1780. John Dixon Hunt characterizes the rhetorical tactics of Walpole’s ‘Essay’ as a patriotic and political act: ‘to secure for eighteenth-century England the credit for the “natural” garden and at the same time to make fun of earlier styles, what was sometimes called “formal,” geometrical, or regular’ (see pl. 1).5See John Dixon Hunt’s introduction to Horace Walpole, The History of the Modern Taste in Gardening [1780] (New York: Ursus Press, 1995, based on the edition of 1782), 7. According to the encomiums of Walpole, ‘Mr. Kent’ (William Kent, 1685–1748), who ‘invented the new style’, was succeeded by ‘a very able master . . . Mr. Brown’.6Ibid., 40, 56 and 57. Put simply, the history of English gardening has been prone to a Walpolean bias ever since. Walpole’s ‘divides’ were then compounded by the division of natural history into separate disciplines in the nineteenth century — botany, ornithology, entomology, etc. (as discussed in chapter 7), which themselves became separated from the science of horticulture.7Mark Laird, ‘John Claudius Loudon (1783–1843) and the Field’s Identity’, Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes, 34 (3), July–September 2014, 248–53. Since the English garden was ‘natural’, the nature of nature was unquestioned, even as natural history came to reveal more of its workings.

Since the 1980s much has been done to correct this bias, notably by Hunt and a generation of scholars who have tackled the Walpolean divides of natural / formal and English / French.8Two back-to-back essays in Perspectives on Garden Histories, ed. Michel Conan (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1999), frame the question of Horace Walpole’s influence on history and historiography. See John Dixon Hunt, ‘Approaches (New and Old) to Garden History’, ibid., 77–90, and Michael Leslie, ‘History and Historiography in the English Landscape Garden’, ibid., 91–106. See also Mark Laird, ‘Revisiting English Gardens, 1630–1730: The French Connection in Britannia’, in André Le Nôtre in Perspective, 1613–2013, ed. Patricia Bouchenot-Déchin and Georges Farhat (Paris: Hazan, and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 310–23. Tom Williamson, for example, has worked from studies of rank, politics, economy and region to pinpoint the survival of geometry in estate management in the Georgian era. By complement, my own The Flowering of the Landscape Garden found ‘Baroque’ patterns persisting in ‘Picturesque’ flower gardens and shrubberies (compare pl. 1 with pls 296a and b). Such geometries are plainly an ordering inherent in any design that is an artifice of nature.9See Williamson, Polite Landscapes, and Mark Laird, The Flowering of the Landscape Garden: English Pleasure Grounds, 1720–1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999).

This book, coincident with the replanting of Walpole’s garden at Strawberry Hill in Twickenham, considers those aspects of English gardening that Walpole omitted or concealed in his rhetoric (see pl. 148). The most obvious (in the context of Kentian or Brownian garden design) is the dynamic of gardening: the many interventions and accommodations in response to growth and maturation, environmental and cultural contingency, and wildlife incursions. Some of these contingencies obliged Walpole to comment and act over fifty years of gardening at Strawberry Hill, and in ways that contradict his rhetoric on garden design: for example, adding in the late 1760s, in response to horticultural and cultural prompts, a French-style lattice to front his ‘theatrical’ English shrubbery (see again pl. 148). Though his letters are full of lilac scent and nightingale song, his History of the Modern Taste in Gardening, and the garden histories that followed, have a strong visual bias resulting from the focus on taste and heroic designers, Kent and Brown. So equally, though Walpole’s correspondence is packed with weather observations, a reader of the History’s delightful text easily overlooks the covert, but revealing, remarks on, say, the advantage of ‘old-fashioned’ winter gardens or of treillage, whose ‘wooden verdure’ resisted the city’s summer dust.10Walpole, History of the Modern Taste in Gardening, 24, 50–51.

In short, what Walpole (and followers) excluded — including life forms that inhabit a garden, or women who spent more time than men in the garden, pursuing horticulture and natural history through the garden — have never received the attention they deserve. (Stephen Bending’s Green Retreats: Women, Gardens and Eighteenth-century Culture of 2013 covers part of this deficit.)11Stephen Bending, Green Retreats: Women, Gardens and Eighteenth-century Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). To accommodate the omitted, the overlooked and the excluded in one book, then, and without excluding Walpole, requires an approach that is closer to White’s embracing natural history: for example, documenting and accounting for the arrival from Africa of nightingales at John Evelyn’s Sayes Court in Deptford on 14 April 1684 as much as for the arrival from Buckinghamshire of Mary Delany at her London home in St James’s Place on 18 December 1783.

Mrs Delany’s return to London each season was not a biological imperative, of course, yet, on the move with her pet bullfinch, Tony, she was pulled by seasonal gatherings and cultural nourishment. Such social and cultural networks, connecting town and country, amateur and professional, women and men, can be described as aspects of ‘milieu’ or ‘environment’. Hence this book, in opposing the divides that Walpole laid down (rather as natural history or ecology counters or complements taxonomic divisions),12Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1977), seeing Gilbert White as one beginning of ecological understanding, sets White in the Arcadian tradition as opposed to Linnaeus’s imperial tradition of taxonomic science. offers an environmental view of English gardening, in which biodiversity plays a crucial role, caught within human ‘theatres’ of physic, display and hunting.

If ‘milieu’ aptly conveys the sense of being in the midst of cultural, social, intellectual and topographical environments, and if ‘theatre’ (meaning field of action, collecting ground, compendium, displays, etc.) is used throughout to connect milieux, the term ‘web’ offers an overarching analogy drawn from nature as well as culture. On the one hand, people were caught up in a web of interdependence or reciprocity; on the other, in creating communication networks — what have been called the ‘commonwealth of learning’ or the ‘république des gens de sciences’13See William J. Cook, ‘The Correspondence of Thomas Dale (1700–1750): Botany in the Transatlantic Republic of Letters’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, XLIII (2012), 232–43; and Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi, ‘Gardens of Knowledge and the République des Gens de Sciences’, in Baroque Garden Culture: Emulation, Sublimation, Subversion, ed. Michel Conan (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2005), 85–129. — they found escape from familial or social constraints. All life forms, from animals to the ‘human animal’, were ultimately entangled in what today is known as the web of life.

I should pause here to note that my studies are biased or divided in their way too: my focusing on gardens in southern England and the lines of communication between the capital (the court and city), intellectual centres and the counties — London and Oxford, Middlesex and Essex, Surrey and Hampshire, Gloucestershire and Somerset, Buckinghamshire and Dorset. The exclusion of most of the Midlands and the North thereby limits the coverage of ‘English’ gardening. While justifiable in terms of my emphasis on close metropolitan / rural ‘webs’, that limitation also simply reflects a familiarity with the places I grew up in and have worked in, notably Painshill, in the county of Surrey. For example, encounters at Painshill with nibbling rabbits and deer or with the storms and droughts of the 1980s and 1990s led me to reflect on the historical record in the light of our concerns today. Inevitably, a modern sensibility (affected by habitat loss, climate change, threats to biodiversity, etc.) tends to insinuate itself in our perceptions of the past. Responses, however, within that past to, say, hares or rabbits are symptomatic of the split sensibilities that are well documented in the early modern period and explored in this book: feeding hares in the garden (Margaret Cavendish Bentinck, duchess of Portland); outwitting them in the garden (Lady Hertford); seeing them as ‘vermin’ in the garden, yet feeling compassion for them in a frigid winter during the hiatus in gardening (Gilbert White).14See Victoria Dickenson, Rabbit (London: Reaktion, 2013). Thus, in essence, this book is about the nature of gardening, as much as a natural history of select gardens in diverse localities, communities and biological environments at large.

By ‘digging deeper’, then, I mean trying to find common ground in the early modern period by linking the ordering of the garden to the quest for order within the natural world (rather than, say, discussing how White, like Brown, made shrubberies).15Paul Foster and David Standing, Landscape and Labour: Gilbert White’s Garden, 1751–1793, Selborne Paper, 2 (Selborne: Gilbert White’s House & The Oates Museum, 2005), provides a good account of White’s landscaping, planting and gardening. David Standing kindly pointed out to me (personal communication, 17 January 2012) that White referred to various shrubberies nine times in his Calendar, beginning in November 1751. For example, the gardening of Mary Somerset, duchess of Beaufort, at Badminton was poised between the Baroque geometries and hierarchies inspired by André Le Nôtre (1613–1700), on the one hand, and, on the other, emblematic hierarchies giving way to the scientific systems of John Ray (1627–1705) or the cycles of Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717). Emblematic similitudes made by the duchess of Beaufort’s contemporary, John Evelyn, could lead, in that hierarchy or ‘chain of Nature’, to likening the smallest to the largest: ‘Wormes there are of serverall sorts, their dilation & contraction, like the Proboscis of the Elephant is very strange.’16John Evelyn, ‘Elysium Britannicum; or, The Royal Gardens in Three Books’, British Library, Add. MS 78342, fol. 236v. See Evelyn, Elysium Britannicum; or, The Royal Gardens, ed. John E. Ingram (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 309.

Given such aims, ‘Worm’ should follow ‘White’ in any index of the landscape garden. With this in mind, my book is not intended as a history of natural history, which is a discipline in its own right.17The Society for the History of Natural History was founded as the Society for the Bibliography of Natural History in 1936. Archives of Natural History, which has continued to publish work on behalf of the Society since 1981, takes the ‘history of natural history’ to include ‘botany, geology, palaeontology and zoology, the lives of naturalists, their publications, correspondence and collections, and the institutions and societies to which they belong’. Articles cover areas that overlap with the scope of this book. Those most relevant to my study are cited to direct the reader beyond the gardening focus of my work. Nor is it a study of Gilbert White, though his voice is invoked in all later chapters. (Paul Foster has already provided an excellent scientific biography of the naturalist in Gilbert White and his Records, and the literature on the man, his life and his ‘abject reptile’ — a tortoise, pl. 4 — is mounting.18See, for example, Richard Mabey, Gilbert White: A Biography of the Author of The Natural History of Selborne (London: Century, 1986), and Ted Dadswell, The Selborne Pioneer: Gilbert White as Naturalist and Scientist: A Re-Examination (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2002). For an imaginative, twenty-first-century interpretation of how the tortoise viewed White and Selborne, see Verlyn Klinkenborg, Timothy; or, Notes of an Abject Reptile (New York: Knopf, 2006).) This book, like The Flowering of the Landscape Garden, is firmly grounded ~in English gardening. By gardening, however, I mean to distance myself, even while echoing Thomas Whately’s Observations on Modern Gardening, from the rhetorical preoccupations of garden design, which flow from Walpole’s History of the Modern Taste in Gardening and the rise of taste and its ‘upholders’ more generally.19See Keith Thomas, The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 129–31. Indeed, as stated above, by ‘garden’ that larger ‘milieu’ is understood, first, in the sense of a community of gardeners, urban and rural, women as well as men; and second, in the sense of an environment that extends into the clouds, down into the soil, and some way beyond the ha-ha and pale of the park. That Gilbert White investigated the ‘life & manners’ of animals, from sky to earth, is helpful in understanding what I mean by milieu; his view of ‘natural history’ as a study of a cultural, as well as natural, community is also implied in my title (though White’s interest in antiquities and the full spectrum of the early modern understanding of ‘natural history’ to include mythology, languages and anthropology is not pursued here).20For an example of a recent work of ‘natural history’ (by historians, archaeologists and scientists), see Wilhelmina Jashemski and Frederick G. Meyer, eds, The Natural History of Pompeii (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). The editors give a short account of natural history in the ‘older, more inclusive sense’ derived from the Naturalis historia of Pliny the Elder (AD 23/4–79) on p. 1. For a good summary of what ‘natural history’ meant in Mark Catesby’s time, see Janet Browne, ‘Mark Catesby’s World: England’, in The Curious Mister Catesby: A ‘Truly Ingenious’ Naturalist Explores New Worlds, ed. E. Charles Nelson and David J. Elliott (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 2015). Hence White and his work both need classifying in this introduction, so that, by conclusion, I naturalize him in these pages devoted to gardening as an ongoing, and often hands-on, practice.

~

Description: The African Land-Tortoise by Edwards, George

4. George Edwards, A Natural History of Uncommon Birds, vol. IV (London, 1751), 204: the African Land-Tortoise. This is the holotype of Linnaeus’s Testudo graeca, though only the carapace appears authentic. From the collections of the Ernst Mayr Library, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University

The shell of Gilbert White’s tortoise Timothy, now in the Natural History Museum, London, was identified as a female of the same species as Edwards’s Testudo graeca. White likened Timothy — his aunt Rebecca’s tortoise, who, after her death in 1780, was a resident of Wakes — to a snail with a shell on its back. Referring to the Greek term ‘house-carriers’, White spotted both tortoise and snail emerging by ‘coincidence’ on a spring day at 50°F (10°C). Along with bird migration, tortoise hibernation was well covered in The Natural History of Selborne — notably in Letters 7, 13 and 50 to Daines Barrington. This was part of documenting the ‘coincidences’ of the natural world at large.

Paul Foster’s entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography tells of the birth of the parson-naturalist: ‘White, Gilbert (1720–1793), naturalist, was born on 18 July 1720 at the vicarage, Selborne, Hampshire, the eldest son of John White.’21Paul Foster, ‘White, Gilbert (1720–1793)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online edition: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/29243 [accessed 30 September 2013]. In 1728 ‘Wakes’ (now ‘The Wakes’) in Selborne became his home, and he lived there until his death (pl. 5). He was admitted as ‘commoner’ to Oriel College, Oxford, in December 1739, where he developed a close and lifelong friendship with John Mulso (whose sister Hester became, on marriage, Hester Chapone of the Bluestockings). By the time he graduated in 1743, he had already experienced a Damascene conversion — from a predatory to an observing attitude to nature (see again pl. 3). After his sister Anne had married Thomas Barker of Lyndon Hall in Rutland in 1751, White visited the couple and learned of Barker’s meteorological studies. White’s Garden-Kalendar, which began more than forty years of record keeping in both garden and nature, was a direct offshoot of that encounter. An entry on swallows of 1758 is the first explicit reference to natural history in the calendar. Yet an out-of-the-blue account on 20 May 1761 of the field cricket (Gryllus campestris) leaps out as prefiguring the work for which he is so well known, the full title of which is The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789).

~

Description: South View of Selborne Church by Grimm, Samuel Hieronymus

5. Samuel Hieronymus Grimm, South View of Selborne Church, in the album of drawings prepared for The Natural History of Selborne in 1776, Indian ink and watercolour. Houghton Library, Harvard University (MS Eng 731.11)

This view of Selborne parish church shows a large yew tree, which blew down in the gales of January 1990. Gilbert White makes reference to ring ouzels (Turdus torquatus) feeding on yew berries, especially when haws were less plentiful. White, who died on 26 June 1793, was buried, at his own wish, on the north side of the chancel. His grave is low and simple, inscribed only with the letters ‘G W’ and the date of his death. Today, the stump of the large yew, though dead, is alive with honeysuckles, the flowers of which ‘garnish’ the massive trunk every summer.

Since White provides a kind of ‘chorus’ for the second half of my book, I would like to introduce his unmistakable voice, along with the voice of the cricket itself (pl. 6):

My Brother Tho:[mas] & I went down with a spade to examine into the nature of those animals that make that chearfull shrill cry all the summer months in many parts of the south of England. We found them to be of the Cricket-kind, with wings & ornamented Cases over them, like the House kind. But tho’ they have long legs behind with large brawny thighs, like Grass-hoppers, for leaping; it is remarkable that when they were dug-out of their holes they shewed no manner of activity, but crawled along in a very shiftless manner, so as easily to be taken. We found it difficult not to squeese them to death in breaking the Ground: & out of one so bruised I took a multitude of eggs, which were long, of a yellow Colour, & covered with a very rough skin.22Francesca Greenoak, ed., The Journals of Gilbert White, 3 vols (London: Century, 1986–9) [vol. I: 1751–73; vol. II: 1774–83; vol. III: 1784–93], 1, 104.

~

Description: Locusta Germanica (Gryllus campestris) by Rösel von Rosenhof, Johannes...

6. ‘Locusta Germanica’ (Gryllus campestris), in August Johann Rösel von Rosenhof, Der monatlich-herausgegeben Insecten-belustigung, 4 vols (Nuremberg, 1746–61), vol. II (1749), pl. XIII. Houghton Library, Harvard University (Typ 720.49.749)

In Gilbert White’s early, and characteristically meticulous, record of the habits and habitats of the field cricket (Gryllus campestris), a number of virtues were listed in combat as well as in quiet retirement: notably the ‘shrilling noise’ made ‘out of rivalry, & emulation’. White placed a few of these crickets in a dry wall in the hope of having them breed; he went on to praise the pleasing summer sound, which, on a still night, could be heard at a considerable distance.

These field notes thus document the ‘life & manners’ of the cricket: the ‘shrilling noise’ made by males only ‘out of rivalry, & emulation during their breeding time’; and the cry, night and day in fine weather, from May to July. White notes that, though they abound most in sandbanks near heaths, ‘especially in Surrey, & Sussex’, they are to be found at Selborne in a ‘steep, rocky pasture-field facing to the afternoon sun’ (the Lythe).23Ibid., 1, 104–5. All this signifies more than pure natural history: in the warm summer of 1761, a landscape garden like Charles Hamilton’s Painshill, Surrey, lying close to heathland, must have reverberated with descant crickets above the polyphonic bleating of sheep (pl. 7).

~

Description: The Plan of Painshill by Rocque, John

7. John Rocque, ‘The Plan of Painshill’, 1744. The National Archives, Kew (MR1/294)

The proximity of Painshill, Surrey, to ‘Walton Common’ (top) confirms a distinction between ‘improved’ and barren ground, which Rocque mapped and visitors recorded. John Parnell’s 1763 account of his approach to the park mentions a ‘dreary wild heath’. Charles Hamilton’s pleasure ground was thus seen as ‘a beautiful and profitable contrast to the poor and unproductive rabbit warren’. Yet its adjacency to heathland also meant that visitors could have enjoyed the ‘borrowed’ sounds of field crickets chirping from across the London — Guildford Road. Gilbert White documented how crickets were abundant in sandbanks near heaths, ‘especially in Surrey, & Sussex’.

Such observations suggest something rarely registered in the literature of garden history since the time of John Evelyn. Evelyn, in assembling all horticultural knowledge, wrote in his ‘Elysium Britannicum’: ‘Insects are as gemmes to huge stones . . . miracula in nodo, and that made St Aug: preferr a silly Fly before the Sun, because it exercis’d vital acts which that {glorious} planet did not’ (see pl. 8).24Evelyn, ‘Elysium Britannicum’, fol. 231. See Evelyn, Elysium Britannicum, ed. Ingram, 299, n. 87, pointing to margin note ‘de duabus animis: c. 4’, referring to chapter 4 of St Augustine, De duabus amimabus contra manichaeos (AD 391), which is entitled ‘Even the Soul of a Fly is More Excellent than the Light’. I am very grateful to Margaret Riley for her help with the transcription, which replaces Ingram’s ‘preserve’ with ‘preferr’. Following Virgil’s Georgics, he noted ‘some Eminent Bees’ before the swarm make a noise ‘resembling that of a Trumpet’; moreover, a Mr Butler ‘has contrived this Melisso melos into a . . . ditty of 4 parts, & shewes how if the Art of musique were quite lost, it might againe be recovered by the Muses Birds’.25Evelyn is referring to Charles Butler, author of The Feminine Monarchie of 1609. Between Evelyn and White, a silence descends. There is a literary trope of birds in the wilderness and shrubbery,26Laird, The Flowering of the Landscape Garden, 22. yet Walpole and Whately have little to say on mellisonant sounds (even though warbling nightingales and the murmur of brooks are in their repertoire). While The Flowering of the Landscape Garden brought colour and scents back to the Georgian pleasure ground, this work brings to life the biodiversity of the English garden in its arable and pastoral surroundings, and with sound in mind. I try to do justice to all the inhabitants: tortoises, moles, butterflies, barn owls, moose, snails, hares, twittering swallows and swifts, and even wasps, or the bluebottle flies that became ‘myriads’ and ‘swarmed’ in the oppressive summer of 1783 (pls 8 and 9). Gilbert White saw how earthworms, featuring at the start and close of my book, enabled, in the food chain, the blackbird’s song at the start and close of day.

~

8. Robert Hooke, ‘Blue Fly’, from Micrographia (London, 1665), schema 26, engraving. Wellcome Library, London (L0074568)

A specimen of a fly, observed through the microscope, is revealed as a beautiful and noble creature. While John Evelyn likened insects to gems, Robert Hooke wrote: ‘Nor was the inside of this creature less beautiful then [sic ] its outside . . . [including] abundance of branchings of Milk-white vessels, no less curious then the branchings of veins and arteries in bigger terrestrial Animals.’ This wonderment at nature’s microscopic construction stands as a complement to White’s rapture, more than a hundred years later, at the aerial exploits of spiders during gossamer showers.

~

Description: Eye of a Fly by Hooke, Robert

9. Robert Hooke, ‘Eye of a Fly’, from Micrographia (London, 1665), schema 24, engraving. Wellcome Library, London (L0034687)

Hooke, examining a dissected fly under a microscope, presents the viewer with the intense stare of a magnified eye (which John Evelyn likened to a mulberry fruit; see pl. 47b). As though peering out of the surrounding darkness, the fly’s vision stands in counterpoint to the human gaze, which, in reflex, defines the Picturesque as one field of vision. Gilbert White documented how a sharpness of vision among swallows aided catching flies in the Picturesque ‘pasture-fields, and mown meadows where cattle graze’. In the ‘theatre’ of combat in field and garden, the work of the excubitor (a sentinel warning small birds of large raptors) always depended upon such acute fields of vision.

Since the landscape garden extended out into pastures and arable land, it inevitably entailed — as well as managed husbandry — field ecologies, for example, the coming and going of songbirds or ‘Birds of Passage’.27Quoted from a letter of John Mulso to Gilbert White by Foster in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 3. He also used the term ‘Visitants’ that is cited in the same paragraph. Much has been written on livestock management, forestry and hunting within the landscape park.28See, for example, Williamson, Polite Landscapes, chapter 6; Robert Williams, ‘Rural Economy and the Antique in the English Landscape Garden’, Journal of Garden History, VII/I (January–March 1987), 73–96; and Stephen Daniels, ‘The Political Iconography of Woodland in Later Eighteenth-century England’, in The Iconography of Landscape, ed. Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 51–72. Yet the ground of White’s field studies and ‘field-diversions’, on the one hand, and of landscapes of ‘enclosure’, on the other, is simply common ground within parochial boundaries (the ‘walking of the bounds’, the parish perambulation, took place at Selborne in 1703, 1741, 1748, 1765, 1771 and 1780, and all that was animate or inanimate therein, irrespective of ownership, went into White’s field notes, pl. 10).29See the explanatory notes to Letter 5 to Thomas Pennant, undated, in White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Foster, 264. In going into ‘enclosures’ intent on shooting ‘Visitants’ and partridge as ‘field-diversions’, White stumbled upon something that proves just as eye-opening to us as it was to him. By a sudden turn of events, the gun turned out to be the enabler of the parson-naturalist as much as of the aristocratic landowner or country squire.

~

Description: A View of Selborne from the Inside of the New Hermitage by Grimm, Samuel Hieronymus

10. Samuel Hieronymous Grimm, A View of Selborne from the Inside of the New Hermitage, in the album of drawings prepared for The Natural History of Selborne in 1776, Indian ink and watercolour. Houghton Library, Harvard University (MS Eng 731.11)

This view over Gilbert White’s parish of Selborne is framed by the architecture in a Picturesque manner that recalls Alexander Pope’s view to the Thames through his grotto at Twickenham. White’s fields are visible to the centre left. The clump of trees is his quincunx of firs on Baker’s Hill. The Lythe — home of the field crickets — lies beyond the church tower on the other side of the village. Despite the private ownership of ‘enclosures’, the whole parish was the animating ‘common ground’ of White’s field studies.

One date that stood out in Gilbert White’s mind was 21 September 1741. That mysterious autumn day came back to him on 8 June 1775, as he was composing part of his Natural History. The recollection, forming Letter 23 to Daines Barrington, went back to when the twenty-year-old White had been on a visit home during his second year at Oriel College. He had risen before daybreak. The letter continues:

. . . when I came into the enclosures, I found the stubbles and clover-grounds matted all over with a thick coat of cobwebs, in the meshes of which a copious and heavy dew hung so plentifully that the whole face of the country seemed, as it were, covered with two or three setting-nets drawn one over another. When the dogs attempted to hunt, their eyes were so blinded and hoodwinked that they could not proceed, but were obliged to lie down and scrape the incumbrances from their faces with their fore-feet, so that, finding my sport interrupted, I returned home musing in my mind on the oddness of the occurrence.30Letter 23 to Daines Barrington, 8 June 1775, ibid., 163.

The gossamer shower, which lasted until the ‘close of day’, was so intense that an observer beheld ‘a continual succession of fresh flakes falling into his sight, and twinkling like stars as they turned their sides towards the sun’.

The phenomenon, though not alone in determining the naturalist’s future, is viewed today as tightening the ‘springs of enquiry’ that would unwind when White turned observer from predator. As Paul Foster summarizes:

Gratuitous killing (even for sport), he came to realize, was alien to the purposes of Providence, and although he continued to shoot for the table and, later, to provide specimens for identification and dissection, the thrill of the chase and the deceit of the stalk were to be replaced in his maturity by a spirit of enquiry and the outcomes of scientific curiosity.31Foster, entry in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 3.

The remembrance of one autumnal day in White’s letter was prompted by a spider that had alighted on his book as he was reading in the parlour. The ‘crawler’ ran to the top of the page and launched itself by a web, displaying ‘some loco-motive power without the use of wings, and to move the air faster than air itself’: ‘But why these apterous [wingless] insects should that day take such a wonderful aërial excursion, and why their webs should at once become so gross and material as to be considerably more weighty than air, and to descend with precipitation, is a matter beyond my skill.’32White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Foster, 164–5.

Later science was able to answer many of White’s questions. John Henry Comstock, for example, noted the following in The Spider Book, the revised edition of which (1948) is said to have influenced E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web (1952):

It is usually, but not invariably, very young spiders that exhibit the aeronautic habit; and exhibitions of it are most often observed in warm and comparatively still autumn days. At this time great numbers of young spiders, of many different species, climb each to the top of some object. This may be a fence post, the top of a twig, the upper part of some herb, or merely the summit of a clod of earth. Here the spider lifts up its abdomen and spins out a thread, which if there is a mild upward current of air is carried away by it. Occasionally the spider will attach a small flocculent mass to this thread which will increase the force of the current of air upon it. This spinning process is continued until the friction of the air upon the silk is sufficient to buoy up the spider. It then lets go its hold with its feet and is carried off by the wind.

That these ballooning spiders are carried long distances in this way is shown by the fact that they have been met by ships at sea hundreds of miles from land. And the showers of gossamer which are occasionally observed are produced by ballooning spiders.33John Henry Comstock, The Spider Book [1912], ed. W. J. Gertsch (Ithaca, NY: Comstock, 1948), 215–16.

Paul Foster, in his notes to the Oxford edition of Selborne (delving into why White recounted events of three decades earlier in the letter dated ‘June 8 1775’),34White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Foster, 284. points the reader to one of White’s Journal entries for January 1775. Significantly, it was jotted down just months before the spider jumped off his book:

Saturday 28 [January 1775]

Insects abound.

Chaucer speaking of Gossamer as a strange

phenomenon,

says,

‘As sore some wonder as the cause of thunder;’

‘On ebb, & flode, on gosomor, & mist:’

‘And on all thing: ’til that the cause is wist.’35Francesca Greenoak, ed., The Journals of Gilbert White, II, 68.

Rather than seeking out causes and circumstances in nature (as science or the history of science would do), this book asks a set of questions rooted in gardening and husbandry in England from circa 1650 to circa 1800. One central question looms large: how does Gilbert White and The Natural History of Selborne — featuring the tortoise Timothy, the field crickets of the Lythe and the spiders of the gossamer shower — fit within ‘the new garden history’ of the Picturesque (represented by the work of John Dixon Hunt, Tom Williamson and others, as discussed above)?36The term is used by Tom Williamson in Polite Landscapes, 4–9, highlighting the work of John Phibbs, Ann Bermingham, etc. Yet it can refer equally to studies initiated by John Dixon Hunt, who, with Peter Willis in The Genius of the Place (1975), redefined the intellectual period of the landscape garden as 1620–1820. Some essays in the book edited by Hunt, Garden History: Issues, Approaches, Methods (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1992), represent benchmarks in the ‘new garden history’ of the Picturesque. See, for example, Stephen Daniels et al., ‘Landscaping and Estate Management in Later Georgian England’, 359–72. Taking inspiration from White’s ‘co-incidents’ in nature, that question is considered with another in mind: what was the nature of those networks that connect all the activities defined by John Evelyn as ‘hortulan’ — activities happening in city clubs and on country estates, in greenhouses during a deep freeze or a great storm, in cabinets and grottoes, on vellum, canvas or in hortus siccus, and happening on a given day (that day, as White puts it)?37Historians of science, medicine, botany and natural history have provided excellent histories of networks. See, for example, Emma C. Spary, Utopia’s Garden: French Natural History from Old Regime to Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), and Steven J. Harris, ‘Networks of Travel, Correspondence and Exchange’, in The Cambridge History of Science, vol. III: Early Modern Science, ed. Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and see again Cook, ‘The Correspondence of Thomas Dale’. A Natural History of English Gardening provides a history of gardening networks as they overlap with natural history networks, for example, in the production of the horti sicci of John Evelyn (chapter 1) and the duchess of Beaufort (chapter 2). Stephen A. Harris explains how horti sicci (literally, dry gardens) were assembled and used in ‘The Plant Collections of Mark Catesby in Oxford’, in The Curious Mister Catesby, ed. Nelson and Elliott.

E. L. Jones, in his Seasons and Prices: The Role of the Weather in English Agricultural History (1964),38E. L. [Eric Lionel] Jones, Seasons and Prices: The Role of the Weather in English Agricultural History (London: Allen and Unwin, 1964). offering a modern study of early modern produce, commodities and environment, provides a model for thinking in terms of natural and cultural ‘co-incidents’. He rightly cautions, though, that every set of contingencies requires a case-by-case approach; hence the attempt to find links cannot be pushed further than the evidence allows. In many cases, ‘coincidental happenings’ amount to one person being oblivious of another, or simply the indifference of nature towards human plight. Nevertheless, in the light of White’s gossamer epiphany, the gun proves to be at the centre of confluent forces, and hunting is the common denominator. Such ‘co-incidents’ are worth exploring afresh.

In Tom Williamson’s Polite Landscapes (1995), for example, the discussion of gun technology (and the ‘gentry’s obsession with shooting’) leads to an intriguing correlation between woodland-edge habitat (where pheasants live) and the essential forms of the landscape garden: clump and belt.39Williamson, Polite Landscapes, 140. Indeed, shooting records (‘game books’) provide some of the best information on the living landscape garden. The shift from shooting or netting indigenous partridge to shooting reared pheasant went hand-in-hand with lighter guns suited to aerial slaughter (pls 11 and 12). Equally insightful on the gentry and the gun is a section of Paul Foster’s Gilbert White and his Records (1988). Foster writes of White’s early practice of data collecting that would serve him well in natural history:

These early records are devoted to routine matters of daily expenditure, but a clear picture emerges of monies devoted to ‘field-diversions’; and some comparative costs can be established. For example, shooting expenses concerned exclusively with the instrument of death, that is, with minor repairs to his gun and with the purchase of gun-flints, powder, shot and papers, amass in a year to the equivalent of, say, 20lb of breakfast sugar, twenty quires of writing paper, or 15 Sunday dinners.40Foster, Gilbert White and his Records, 12.

In addition, there were the considerable costs of hunting dogs, their feed and upkeep, hunting boots, and the expense of hiring a boy to do drudgery on the shoot.

~

Description: Portrait of a Gentleman Netting Partridges by Devis, Arthur

11. Arthur Devis, Portrait of a Gentleman Netting Partridges, 1756, oil on canvas, 27 ½ × 38 ½ in. (69.9 × 97.8 cm). Paul Mellon Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (1964.2.3)

Game books, which became common from the 1750s onwards, record the pre-eminence of partridge as quarry before the rise of pheasant hunting in the second half of the eighteenth century. In the dry summers of 1740 and 1741, as Gilbert White noted, partridges ‘swarmed’ in the parish of Selborne. Netting was also used to trap live songbirds. Eleazar Albin explained in his Natural History: ‘Linnets are taken with Clap-Nets in June, July and August; and likewise Flight-Birds about Michaelmas in great Plenty.’ This scene brings to life what White meant by ‘setting-nets’ when describing the gossamer shower of 21 September 1741.

~

Description: Two Gentlemen Shooting by Stubbs, George

12. George Stubbs, Two Gentlemen Shooting, circa 1769, oil on canvas, 39 × 49 in. (99.1 × 124.5 cm). Given by Paul Mellon in memory of his friend James Cox Brady, Yale College, Class of 1929

By the 1780s, with improvements to the flintlock gun, the shooting of pheasants on the wing was replacing the shooting and netting of the ground-hugging partridge. The partridge was an indigenous bird, resting under bushes or in stubble and meadow grasses. The ecology of game birds, contingent upon the seasons, constitutes a complex natural and cultural field of study. Gilbert White recorded, for example, that the harsh seasons of the early 1770s reduced the exotic pheasant population but not the numbers of wild partridges and hares.

Yet such accounts, however good, overlook adjunct ‘field-diversions’ without a gun. When White described the gossamer cobwebs as like ‘two or three setting-nets drawn one over another’, he was thinking of other forms of hunting (see again pl. 11). These included that of bird trappers who went out into the fields in autumn and winter to ensnare songbirds such as the chaffinch and linnet. In Eleazar Albin’s A Natural History of English Song-Birds of 1741, there is an account of trapping ‘Flight-Birds about Michaelmas in great Plenty, by laying the Nets near where the Birds come to drink, or feed, or any Spot of Ground they frequent’ (see chapter 5).41Eleazar Albin, A Natural History of English Song-Birds and Such of the Foreign as are usually brought over and esteemed for the singing [1737], 2nd edn (London, 1741), 36. The feast of Michaelmas took place on 29 September. Thereafter the caged songbirds would make their way to London, where, among year-round urban dwellers, ladies and families returning from the season in the countryside would enjoy the melodies and company of a ‘winged chorister’ in the depths of winter (pl. 13). One such lady was Mary Delany, who found that her pet bullfinch, Tony, sang better in London than at the duchess of Portland’s house of Bulstrode, where Delany spent her summers.42Mary Delany to Mary Port, 7 December 1771, in The Autobiography and Correspondence of Mary Granville, Mrs Delany, ed. Lady Llanover, 6 vols (London: Bentley, 1861–2), IV, 381.

~

Description: The Graham Children, detail by Hogarth, William

13. William Hogarth, The Graham Children (detail), 1742, oil on canvas, 63 ⅛ × 71 ¼ in. (160.5 × 181 cm). © The National Gallery, London (NG4756) / Art Resource, NY

Goldfinches, trapped by netting, made good pets in town for ladies and children. The Graham children’s father, Daniel, was apothecary to the king. The Graham son is playing a mechanical organ to accompany the singing goldfinch, while a lively tabby cat climbs up the chair to gaze at the caged bird. The other side of this painting is more sombre. With a clock on the mantelpiece decorated with the figure of Cupid holding a scythe (as a symbol of death, see pl. 332a), it alludes to the Graham baby’s death (after which the portrait was painted). Thus the plight of beings in town and country was linked by cycles in nature and culture. Gilbert White wrote how his parish ‘swarmed’ with children, yet infant mortality was high during the epidemic of measles in 1773. The same contagion affected the children of the aristocracy and gentry wintering in London.

Two things follow from this inclusion of ‘netting’ within ‘field-diversions’: the first is a close connection between country and town; the second is the role women played in consumption and taste.

One aspect of the ‘new garden history’ has been to look at town gardens as well as rural estates;43Todd Longstaffe-Gowan, The London Town Garden, 1700–1840 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001). and this reflects the interest in culture generated in coffee houses, reading societies, debating clubs, assembly rooms and concert halls, partnered by commerce rather than court.44John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London: HarperCollins, 1997). As a consequence of the new emphasis on bourgeois histories, the prince of Wales’s courtly Carlton House garden in London (pl. 14) — though recognized in 1734 as an example of William Kent’s pre-eminent ‘new taste in gardening’ — gets less attention than it deserves (for example, in Todd Long-staffe-Gowan’s otherwise comprehensive The London Town Garden of 2001).45Longstaffe-Gowan, The London Town Garden. Carlton House, so significant in terms of ‘horticultural culture’ (as chapter 3 makes clear), is thus overshadowed by a concentration on the country estates of Stowe and Painshill, as well as on more modest ‘vernacular gardening’ in town.46See, for example, Todd Longstaffe-Gowan, ‘Private Urban Gardening in England, 1700–1830: On the Art of Sinking’, in The Vernacular Garden, ed. John Dixon Hunt and Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1993), 47–75.

~

Description: A Numerical Register of all His Majesty's Houses between St. James's Street &...

14. Zachary Chambers, ‘A Numerical Register of all His Majesty’s Houses between St. James’s Street & Green Park, etc., 10 April 1769’ (detail). The National Archives, Kew (MR1/271)

William Kent’s ‘new taste in gardening’ at Carlton House (here modified by the dowager princess of Wales, see pl. 16) dominates the lower right quadrant. Such taste-generation involved court and commerce in town. To the north, along the south side of Pall Mall, a ‘who’s who’ includes the duke of York, The Hon. Hamilton Esq., Lord Temple, Lord Egmont and the countess of Gore. Some of them played a role in generating garden taste on country estates. From 1769 onwards Mary Delany lived just off St James’s Street: first at Thatched House Court, then at St James’s Place (centre left). Gilbert White’s London, by contrast, was in South Lambeth — a few miles to the south over the Thames near Vauxhall Gardens — where the brothers Thomas and Benjamin lived.

In terms of rank and such vernacular taste, social emulation tends to be defined as a simple flow downwards and outwards, moving from rural country seat to London town garden. As Tom Williamson puts it: ‘The small spaces available to the middle classes thus demanded, by their very nature, different principles of design’, which were furnished with the commodities of the consumer revolution: the seeds and plants of a commercial nursery trade (pl. 15). He concludes: ‘The very scale and number of such enterprises makes it clear that their prime customers were the urban and rural bourgeoisie rather than the far smaller group of the landed rich.’47Williamson, Polite Landscapes, 114

~

Description: Trade card of James Scott at Turnham Green by Vivarès, François

15. François Vivares after Pierre Bourguignon, trade card of James Scott at Turnham Green, circa 1754, etching with engraved lettering. British Museum (Heal 74.41). © The Trustees of the British Museum

While the tools of the gardener are displayed in Vivares’ iconography, seeds and hothouse plants in tubs make up the four corner vignettes. A cornucopia of fruits spills out on both sides. Among the supplies listed are birdseeds, pointing to consumers who kept caged birds or fed them wild. The nurseryman referred to the ‘new invented Fire Walls to raise early Melons & Cucumbers free from the Watery quality they have in wet Seasons’. Gilbert White was attentive to raising melons at Selborne — his beloved ‘Cantaleupes’. Thus country gardening and city gardening were both dependent on the commercial nursery trade, on provision of horse manure from Dung Wharf (near Blackfriars), or from local farms, and on the whims of each season. In the warm seasons of the mid-eighteenth century, fruit and crops were plentiful.

While much of this holds true (since new flowers, like new goods, tended to work themselves down the social scale), there is an argument for looking at commonalities as well as distinctions and for a more fluid model of taste generation. For one thing, since the centre of emulative consumption was London, where front-stage goods were in excess, it is not surprising to find new aspects of horticultural culture being generated in the metropolis, in particular at Carlton House. For example, take the relationship between the nurseryman Robert Furber and Frederick, prince of Wales (for the princess of Wales) at Carlton House (as explored in chapter 3); or, with the dowager princess’s shift to Kew (chapter 5), take the relationships among Mrs Delany, the Bluestockings, the botanists John Lightfoot and Daniel Solander, and the nurseryman James Lee, as documented in chapter 6 and following the model of our exhibition and publication Mrs Delany and her Circle.48Mark Laird and Alicia Weisberg-Roberts, eds, Mrs Delany and her Circle (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009).

In short, this book suggests that the city and the court were, as much as the country house, nests of gardening culture; and it argues that the dowager princess of Wales, Augusta (among notable women, pl. 16), was an engaged patron of an innovative vision of Eden at Kew — part aviary, part botanic garden, part pleasure ground with shrubbery and groves. The enigmatic role that John Hill played for Lord Bute, Augusta’s director at Kew, which built on early botanical pursuits with Lord Petre and the 2nd duke of Richmond (chapters 3 and 5), is complicated by the decisive role that Hill played in developing a herbal literature, notably for women, that took away the age-old ground of women’s herbal lore. Hence, when reconstructing Hill’s life (as a ‘friendless’ man), historians should look to networks that include effective women amongst men within court as well as commercial circles.49See George Rousseau, The Notorious Sir John Hill: The Man Destroyed by Ambition in the Era of Celebrity (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, and Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), notably 130, and 193, where William Stukeley’s petition to the princess of Wales of 1754 — that Hill oversee new gardens at Kensington Palace — is discussed along with the ‘kitchen physic’ of Hill’s The Useful Family Herbal (1755).

~

Description: Augusta, Princess of Wales (1719–1772) by Ramsay, Allan

16. Allan Ramsay, Augusta, Princess of Wales (1719–1772), circa 1760–68, oil on canvas, 94 ½ × 58 ¼ in. (240.3 × 148.3 cm). Purchased by Queen Mary (rcin 409152). Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2013

Princess Augusta, after the prince of Wales’s death in 1751 (and her remodelling of Carlton House Gardens in the 1750s, see pl. 14), played an influential role at Kew. There an ‘Eden’ was developed from a ‘Desart’. The novelty of creating a self-contained enclosure for exotic plants and birds — three loosely linked spaces, within, but distinct from, the pleasure ground — carries the imprint of Lord Bute. Yet the exotic floriculture of the Aviary Flower Garden, on display with English songbirds (trapped as Gilbert White documents), points to Augusta’s engagement. Such female patronage goes back through the Princess Royal’s support of Robert Furber’s Twelve Months of Flowers to Queen Mary at Hampton Court; it was kept up by Queen Charlotte in her menagerie at Kew.

Tom Williamson rightly points to the recognition in 1769 of the dowager duchess of Portland as ‘exceedingly fond of gardening’ like the larger contingent of gentlemen, and to ‘evidence that gardening was increasingly regarded as an activity more appropriate for their wives’.50Rousseau, The Notorious Sir John Hill, 115–17. Yet studies in garden and landscape history have stopped short of enlarging on the significance of this statement, ceding the ground to historians of science, social historians and scholars in the field of gender studies. Back in 1976, David E. Allen had already staked out a special place in natural history for eighteenth-century women. Paramount among them was the duchess of Portland at Bulstrode. He wrote:

So far as the natural history of these islands was concerned, Bulstrode was probably even more important than the British Museum (which arose out of Sloane’s great collections and was opened to the public, in a rather grudging manner, only in 1759). Naturalists thronged to inspect it and were always made welcome by the Duchess, a person of abundant charm and kindliness.51David Elliston Allen, The Naturalist in Britain: A Social History [1976], revised edn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 25.

Keith Thomas, writing in Man and the Natural World (1983), also established the fundamental importance of the garden to women: a place of escape and renewed vitality, especially when most other spheres of activity were closed (pl. 17). (Thomas, in The Ends of Life, 2009, provides supporting evidence of women’s loss of ground in the eighteenth century as reaping, the dairy trade and midwifery ceased to be female domains, and of female constraints in the public sphere, lack of recognition in work and the ultimate lot of dying in oblivion.52Thomas, The Ends of Life, 23, 40, 53, 105, 219, 255.) Indeed, it was by default, because relegated to the margins, that women took to flower gardening: ‘Flowers were conceded to women, partly because of the association in men’s minds between the ephemeral beauty of women and flowers, partly because flower-gardening was a useless but decorative pursuit appropriate for the growing number of leisured, well-to-do females.’53Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800 (London: Allen Lane, 1983), 238–9.

~

Description: Lady Reading in a Wooded Park, detail by Stubbs, George

17. George Stubbs, Lady Reading in a Wooded Park (detail), 1768–70, oil on canvas, 24 ½ × 29 ½ in. (62.2 × 74.9 cm). Private Collection. Bridgeman Art Library (BAL 30553)

In eighteenth-century architecture, the rise of privacy brought an increased specialization of spaces such as the feminized drawing room. The idea of privacy extended out into the pleasure ground, where a grotto, garden room or dairy — even a bench or an impromptu breakfast table in a grove — provided peace for reading and spots for intimacy among women. George Stubbs set this private reading in a grove or ‘wilderness’ with ferns and wild flowers (e.g., cow parsley). Hedge bindweed (Calystegia sepium), entwined around the bench, seems to replicate interior artifice or dress embroidery, far removed from the reality of gardeners and farmers contending with weeds. Gilbert White noted in April 1767 how his field — Baker’s Hill (see pl. 10) — had been ‘hand-pick’d of the weeds by women’. Such ‘weeder women’ were the lowest-ranked among all menial labourers.

Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi, Elizabeth Hyde and Ann Shteir, among others, have demonstrated how female engagement with flower cultivation and botany overcame such negative associations, prejudices compounded by the ambivalent view since antiquity of the goddess Flora and by the modern ‘sexual’ system of Linnaean botany.54See Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi, An Oak Spring Flora: Flower Illustration from the Fifteenth Century to the Present Time (Upperville, VA: Oak Spring Garden Library, 1997), xxxv; see also Tongiorgi Tomasi, ‘“La femminil pazienza”: Women Painters and Natural History in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries’, in The Art of Natural History: Illustrated Treatises and Botanical Paintings, 1400–1850, ed. Therese O’Malley and Amy R. W. Meyers (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2008), 158–85. See Elizabeth Hyde, Cultivated Power: Flowers, Culture and Politics in the Reign of Louis XIV (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 15–19. For the discussion of Linnaean taxonomy and women, see Ann. B. Shteir, Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora’s Daughters and Botany in England, 1760–1860 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). Botany might have seemed a doubtful recreation for young ladies since it involved close scrutiny of the ‘private parts’ of wild flowers, but women gravitated to it.55Ann Shteir provides the background to problematic features of Linnaean botany: how to make plant sexuality ‘proper’ for women, notably William Withering’s ‘bowdlerizing’ and Richard Polwhele’s ‘diatribe’ against women writers and female botanizing. See Shteir, Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science, 21–9. Mary Delany and the duchess of Portland, at the zenith of female accomplishment and virtuosity, did not shy away from mycology (the study of fungi) — including Georg Dionysius Ehret’s portrait of the fungus Phallus impudicus — nor was their contribution to science nugatory. That the tortoise Timothy, resident of Wakes, Selborne, turned out to be a female is emblematic of the discovery that women lie behind much significant art and science in the period.56See ‘Historical Note’ in Klinkenborg, Timothy, 159: ‘Timothy’s shell is preserved in the Natural History Museum in London. Scientists in the nineteenth century determined from the shape of the shell that Timothy [inherited from White’s aunt] was indeed female.’

While Amanda Vickery discussed the full scope of female accomplishment in Mrs Delany and her Circle, and while Kim Sloan wrote on women as amateur artists, Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi was the first to look at ‘women painters and natural history’ more specifically.57Amanda Vickery, ‘The Theory and Practice of Female Accomplishment’, in Mrs Delany and her Circle, ed. Laird and Weisberg-Roberts, 94–109; Kim Sloan, ‘A Noble Art’: Amateur Artists and Drawing Masters, c. 1600–1800 (London: British Museum Press, 2000). For a broader discussion of female accomplishment within domesticity, see Amanda Vickery, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), notably chapter 9: ‘What Women Made’. Covering European visual culture in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, she noted how a characteristic long foisted on women — femminil pazienza (feminine patience) — made embroidery of flowers, naturalistic illustration and forms of still life (often linked to herbal or nurturing knowledge in ‘physic and surgery’) quintessentially female genres.58See again Tongiorgi Tomasi, ‘La femminil pazienza’. Giovanna Garzoni (d. 1670), Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717), Barbara Regina Dietzsch (1706–1783) and Elizabeth Blackwell (1700?–1758) represent the range of artists working for a living in these genres (pl. 18).

~

Description: Frontispiece from Dissertatio de generatione et metamorphosibus insectorum...

18. Maria Sibylla Merian, frontispiece from Dissertatio de generatione et metamorphosibus insectorum Surinamensium (Amsterdam, 1719). © Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Rare Book Collection, Washington, DC

One of the greatest painters in the history of scientific illustration was Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717). This frontispiece shows the artist examining specimens offered by six putti; the land beyond the arch is tropical Surinam, where she collected. Unlike contemporary authors of botanical and entomological treatises, Merian — an artist-naturalist — provides perspectives on habitat, predation and reproduction, and the interactions of organisms with their environment. Her studies of creatures in their natural settings and in metamorphic processes influenced the duchess of Beaufort at Badminton. Merian’s approach to plant–animal interrelationships, like that of Mark Catesby, makes her one in a line of early modern holistic naturalists leading up to the ‘ecologically’ inclined Gilbert White at the end of the eighteenth century.

By contrast, this book makes no claim to distinction for women in the professional art of English natural history in the early modern period, which was dominated by male artists. That professional art or accomplished amateur art is abundantly illustrated throughout my book by the dazzling performances of English as well as émigré artists — men such as Alexander Marshal, Everhard Kick (Kickius), Jacobus van Huysum, Mark Catesby, Benjamin Wilkes (pl. 19), Georg Dionysius Ehret, Thomas Robins the Elder and James Sowerby. Through networks such as those of Sir Hans Sloane, an artist like Mark Catesby could draw upon Sloane’s ‘paper museum’ of natural history images to ‘borrow’ from Kickius or George Edwards. Yet Catesby was also influenced by Merian’s original drawings or the printed copies of her Surinam book (see pl. 18).59See Henrietta McBurney, ‘Mark Catesby’s Preparatory Drawings for the Natural History’, in The Curious Mister Catesby, ed. Nelson and Elliott. Thus a professional woman artist could exert an influence without being within London’s coffee-house circles. Merian’s influence might extend further to private households such as the duchess of Beaufort’s Badminton, where Kickius trained a servant to copy plates from her Metamorphosis of 1705 (see chapter 2). Hence, while the professional woman artist is not the focus of this book, women’s engagement with the natural world proves inextricably linked to artistic production in diverse genres as well as to matters of taste and consumption.

~

Description: A Painting of Butterflies by Wilkes, Benjamin

19. Benjamin Wilkes, A Painting of Butterflies, circa 1745, gouache on paper, 9 ½ × 12 in. (24.4 × 30.5 cm). Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Rare Book Collection, Washington, DC

Wilkes (fl. 1740–50), painting a metamorphosis of swallowtail (Papilio machaon) on figwort (Schrophularia, sp.), is a central figure in the decorative culture of women. They were drawn to his butterfly patterns of 1742 (see front endpapers). His dark background may be compared to works by G. D. Ehret (see pl. 133) or to Mary Delany’s botanical collages (pl. 20). Mrs Delany (along with the virtuosa duchess of Portland) pursued female accomplishment for spiritual and non-pecuniary gain. Accomplishments meant cementing bonds of friendship and kinship, pursuing creative impulses in home and garden, and, like Gilbert White, documenting the works of each day as a memento vivere.

By complement, then, my studies strive to give women due place within the cultures of gardening and natural history, first as patrons of and subscribers to works on butterflies, shells and flowers, and second as practitioners of virtù (amateur collecting and the cataloguing of nature and art). English botanical art and natural history illustration, though well surveyed by Wilfrid Blunt and William T. Stearn, becomes more compelling when situated, as part of the visual culture of science, within these twinned practices: gardening as a horticultural pursuit and natural history as virtù (pl. 20).60Wilfrid Blunt, The Art of Botanical Illustration [1950], ed. William T. Stearn (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1994). By my emphasis on activities in the garden (rather than what Walpole called the works of the ‘undertaker in fashion’), I have shifted the history of English gardens away from the Walpolean focus on the genius of Kent or the masterly Brown. Women’s role in the garden, day in and day out — making the best of being confined ‘at home’ rather than supported ‘abroad’ — emerges thereby as one of considerable autonomy and agency.

~

Description: Helleborus fœtidus by Delany, Mary Granville

20. Mary Delany, ‘Helleborus fœtidus’, dated ‘25 March 1778’, collage of coloured papers, with bodycolour and watercolour, 13 ¾ × 9 in. (35.3 × 23.1 cm). British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings (1897,0505.409). © The Trustees of the British Museum

This collage of the stinking hellebore was composed in London at Mrs Delany’s home at St James’s Place from a specimen growing at Bulstrode. Gilbert White’s Letter 41 to Daines Barrington, dated 1778, includes the stinking hellebore among the ‘ample Flora’ of his district. He wrote that it was found in the ‘High-wood and Coney-croft-hanger.’ He elaborated on how ‘this continues a great branching plant the winter through, blossoming about January, and is very ornamental in shady walks and shrubberies. The good women give the leaves powdered to children troubled with worms; but it is a violent remedy, and ought to be administered with caution.’ The role of women in herbal knowledge was gradually replaced by the professionalization of apothecary medicine. John Hill’s Useful Family Herbal of 1754 led the way, while William Curtis’s Flora Londinensis of 1775–98 later cut out the herbal roots of female accomplishment entirely.

The discovery that weather — day in and day out — is an unsung artist, as well as the despoiler of gardens, should be mentioned alongside this celebration of the gardening virtuosa. E. L. Jones’s work provides a way of looking at weather patterns in relationship to wheat, barley, hops and hogs in eighteenth-century England: the fruits of the husbandman’s labours that White’s ‘prognostic’ hoped to help. The link to garden production is less obvious and needs investigating. How a mild winter created a perfect ‘verdure’ or how a wet spring painted the meadows with ‘enamel’ has been entirely overlooked. Yet the clues are there: for example, Lady Luxborough and the countess of Hertford writing on natural embroidery (explored in detail in chapter 4), a correspondence emblematic of women living a gardening life.

Since 2000 the Frost Fairs on the Thames (resulting from the so-called Little Ice Age, and extending from 1309 to 1814), the Great Storm of 1703 and the volcanic summer of 1783 have caught the attention of historians, cultural geographers and literary writers.61See Nicholas Reed, Frost Fairs on the Frozen Thames (London: Lilburne Press, 2002); Helen Humphreys, The Frozen Thames (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2007); Martin Brayne: The Greatest Storm (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton: 2002); and Richard Hamblyn, Terra: Tales of the Earth: Four Events that Changed the World (London: Picador, 2009). This book reinterprets those extremes (for example, the Frost Fair winters of 1683–4, 1715–16 and 1739–40, pl. 21) in relationship to gardening in town and country. At the same time, by giving attention to weather in general, I have tried to create a new landscape-historical methodology. Here it is worth reviewing climate histories more broadly. Jan Golinski’s British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment (2007) stands out, for example, because it offers a variety of ways of interpreting garden-historical material in cultural contexts (discussed in detail in the concluding chapter 7).62Jan Golinski, British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

~

Description: The Thames during the Great Frost of 1739 by Griffier, Jan, II

21. Jan Griffier the Younger (circa 1690–1750), The Thames during the Great Frost of 1739, 1739, oil on canvas, 15 ¾ × 25 ½ in. (40 × 65 cm). Corporation of London, Guildhall Art Gallery

This view is from near Westminster, looking down river towards London Bridge. Several decades later, the London of Mary Delany would lie to the left (see pl. 14), while Gilbert White’s London would be to the right. The two piers of the future Westminster Bridge (completed 1750) are jutting up on the right. During this winter, the ice was broken up every twelve hours by high tides, giving a rugged surface. After the winter of 1739–40 there was a gap of three decades before the next freezing of the Thames in 1776 — a winter that Gilbert White described as ‘Laplandian’. An ‘improving trend’ allowed for the mid-century decades of ‘plenty’ following the food crisis of 1740–43. This was a ‘cornucopia’ period of thirty-six years linked to summers and autumns almost as warm as those in the later twentieth century.

Another recent work, Eighteenth-century Naturalists of Hudson Bay (2003), takes advantage of the most ‘extensive and detailed record of climate and environment’ for any region of the world over a prolonged period to chart recognition around 1760 of an ‘improving climate’ (but still within the Little Ice Age).63Stuart Houston, Tim Ball and Mary Houston, Eighteenth-century Naturalists of Hudson Bay (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), 117–18. While Hudson Bay Company employees informally supplied specimens to London (as will become clear in chapter 5), its governors formally imposed accurate record keeping on their staff, which also meant consulting Indians. Later, the explorer Alexander Mackenzie, supported by native knowledge, discounted the idea that this ‘meliorating’ trend came from forest clearance, writing: ‘Such a change, therefore, must proceed from some predominating operation in the system of the globe, which is beyond my conjecture, and, indeed above my comprehension.’ Apart from the brutal winter of 1739–40, such an improving climate was already apparent in English gardening and husbandry by the 1730s and consolidated by mid-century. But other factors complicated what scientists were then trying to determine as cause and effect. It would take Benjamin Franklin to see that one form of ‘climate change’ could occur through volcanic dust in the atmosphere of 1783.

Extreme weather (a seeming ‘climate change’) may appear eloquently in the written word, thereby helping to date a text. For example, Titania’s lines in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (11, i, 81–117) could fit any of the three years 1594–6 but especially the cold and sodden summer of 1594:

The nine men’s morris is filled up with mud
And the quaint mazes in the wanton green
For lack of tread are undistinguishable

. . .

And through the distemperature we see
The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts
Fall in the lap of the crimson rose64See William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, ed. Alfred Harbage (New York: Viking Press, 1979), Madeleine Doran’s introduction to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 146.

In the issue of Nature for July 1997, Dr Euan Nisbet argued that Jane Austen’s famous ‘error’ in Emma — describing apple trees in bloom in June — was perhaps based on accurate observation in the summer of 1814, the year she began writing the novel. Following the final Frost Fair in February 1814,65See Reed, Frost Fairs on the Frozen Thames, 2–3, 30–39. the mean temperatures in May and June were even colder than in 1816 (when volcanic dust from Mount Tambora veiled the sun, provoking the European famine of 1816–17).66See Clive Oppenheimer, Eruptions that Shook the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 312–19. It is possible, according to Nisbet, that Jane Austen saw apple blossom on two warmer days, 14 and 15 June 1814; and, by his account, that first day was on a visit to Painshill.

Given such literary cues, it seems entirely predictable that the garden as a cultural production in nature is affected by the retarding and accelerating impacts of extreme weather. Hence, when viewed as heritage today, a site like Painshill should be understood historically as contingent on variable seasons, which in turn had an impact on the ‘sound’ and ‘smell’ as well as the ‘look’ of the ensemble. A visitor to Painshill Park in the second decade of the twenty-first century will see colour and enjoy scents in restored shrubberies and flowerbeds. This book takes the reader a step further, illustrating the art of weather in the insect-inhabited meadows in and around Painshill, from Surrey to Hampshire, where abundant corncrake and cricket once added to the evening acoustics.

In short, as a concatenation within the chain or ‘webs of life’, sward was not always a perfect emerald green, thanks to the weather; nor was it always smooth, thanks to moles and earthworms; nor was it without flowers, thanks to daisies.

More recently, and in the light of climate change, attention has turned to climate and horticulture, notably in Brent Elliott’s article of 2009: ‘Changes in the Flowering Times of Garden Plants over Three Centuries’.67Brent Elliott, ‘Changes in the Flowering Times of Garden Plants over Three Centuries’, The Plantsman (September 2009), 154–60. This established a datum point within the Little Ice Age of retarded flowering times, drawn from Evelyn’s records, made from 1664 to 1691. Thereafter, advancing flowering times given by Philip Miller (1748–1762) began to slip back to later flowering times from the Victorian age onwards. It was only in the second half of the twentieth century that flowering times became comparable again to those in the third quarter of the eighteenth century. Now, with the effects of climate change compounded by rapid worldwide urbanization, the earliest flowering times appear to be advancing inexorably.68See Mark Laird, ‘A Natural History of English Gardening, 1650–1800’, Harvard Design Magazine, XXXVI (2013), 157–60.

In a sequel paper delivered at the Painshill Park and Beyond conference in June 2010, Elliott rightly steered away from climatic determinism: ‘External constraints and innovations, it seems to me, do not create tastes.’69Brent Elliott, ‘The Climate of the Landscape Garden’, in Painshill Park: The Pioneering Restoration of an 18th-Century Landscape Garden. The Proceedings of the Painshill Park and Beyond Conference: Painshill Park, 24–25 June 2010, ed. Patrick Eyres (Leeds: New Arcadian Press, 2010), 105–19, and especially 105. So equally, my work avoids any claim that styles changed with climatic conditions. With reliable data from more accurate thermometers in the second quarter of the eighteenth century, however, and with the evidence of Frost Fairs, it has proved possible to draw a temperature chart that highlights points relevant to the practice of gardening described in this book: the gap of thirty-six years between the freezing of the Thames in 1740 and 1776 (see pl. 21), in contrast to the six Frost Fairs of the second half of the seventeenth century; the mid-eighteenth-century decades of ‘plenty’ following the food crisis of 1740–43 — a ‘cornucopia’ linked to summers and autumns ‘almost as warm as in the later twentieth century’;70Ibid., 109. the advanced flowering times of the third quarter of the eighteenth century (comparable to those in the second half of the twentieth century); and a fall in temperatures in the 1780s (with a more dramatic plunge after 1810) largely caused by volcanic activity.71Mark Laird, ‘The Future of Garden Restoration: Re-Planting Recalibrated’, in Painshill Park, ed. Eyres, 80. It should be mentioned that the publication in 1997 of Annie Christensen’s The Klingenberg Garden Day-Book, 1659–1722 (with English translation by Peter Hayden) may offer another resource on flowering times before the broadly improving trend of the mid-eighteenth century set in.72Annie Christensen, The Klingenberg Garden Day-Book, 1659–1722, trans. Peter Hayden (Copenhagen: Rhodos, 1997).

In counterpoint to the statistical approach of the climate historian, the landscape historian is much concerned with anecdotal records (pl. 22). Even the casual references in Horace Walpole’s letters are useful (and offer a startling corrective to his rhetorical History of the Modern Taste in Gardening): the ‘jubilee Summer’ of 1757 or June 1783 as ‘abominable as any one of its ancestors in all the pedigree of the Junes’. In this respect, Gilbert White’s record keeping for more than forty years in garden and nature yields tangible evidence of the effects of precipitation, or lack thereof, on the look of the garden as well as on crop and fruit production, and this is valuable beyond measure.

~

Description: A Park Shower; or, The Beau Mond in Distress by Walker, Anthony

22. Anthony Walker (1726–1765), A Park Shower; or, The Beau Mond in Distress, 22 September 1755, etching with engraved lettering, published by John Smith of Hogarth’s Head, Cheapside. British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings (Crace XII.89, 1880-11-13-2341). © Trustees of the British Museum

The fashionable world — men and women gathered in The Mall — is thrown into panic by a sudden shower. To the centre, a hapless woman is revived with smelling salts. The dating of this moment to a particular day — 22 September 1755 — helps the landscape historian to build a picture from anecdotal records that stand in contrast to the statistical data of the climate historian. Sometimes two sets of data converge: for example, 1755 (within some statistically warm / wet summers) witnessed hot, dry weather until mid-July. Then a cooler break suddenly occurred, which lasted through much of the remaining year. Hence 22 September 1755 was in that cool and wet spell of late summer and early autumn. Gilbert White noted how late October was the ‘only good weather since July’, and the early winter was also ‘terrible’ for floods and ‘Tempests’.

Before proceeding to the contents of the book, I should pause briefly to explain one background already alluded to: my book of 1999, The Flowering of the Landscape Garden. While it is not essential for readers to know this background, they should be aware of a shadow cast by heated debates on what I have previously termed ‘theatrical’ or graduated shrubbery. In particular, John Phibbs has rightly challenged a narrow reading of all eighteenth-century pleasure grounds through the central thesis of The Flowering of the Landscape Garden: ‘that garden design was led by the introduction of new exotic species and by the adoption of graduated planting as a means of showing off these plants’.73John Phibbs, ‘The Persistence of Older Traditions in Eighteenth-century Gardening’, Garden History, XXXVII/2 (Winter 2009), 174–88. See also his two other essays in Garden History, XXXVIII/1 (Summer 2010), and his more explicit critique of Painshill’s ‘tiered or layered planting’ in his essay ‘On Architecture’, in Painshill Park, ed. Eyres, 87–91.

Though I maintain that collecting / displaying — the ‘theatre’ as a staged collection of plants on display in the shrubbery — constitutes an exquisite and central aspect of Georgian gardening, I am eager to shift attention away from the shrubbery (and its associated American exotics) to the grove, including ancient woodlands, coppice and orchard. Significantly, the grove’s shade provided a haven for quadrupeds and passerines, ladies and ladybirds, as well as for the touring passer-by, whose written accounts depended after all on the productions of the bird — the quill. As Shenstone put it, each ‘writeable’ feather — turkey or peacock — had its distinctive voice, which is now among the sources of the following evocations of milieu.74See Jane Brown, My Darling Heriott: Henrietta Luxborough: Poetic Gardener and Irrepressible Exile (London: Harper Press, 2006), 182–3.

To help the reader range over diverse topographies and feel at home among diverse milieux, I have provided an extended synopsis at the beginning of the seven chapters. These outline the scope and structure of each narrative. To accompany them, my watercolour reconstructions at the beginning of this introduction (see pl. 1), and fronting all seven chapters, form ‘stage sets’ for readers versed in design practice conventionally labelled ‘Baroque’ or ‘Picturesque’ — parterre, grove and ‘wilderness’, grove with shrubbery, and ‘theatrical’ plantings in general. At the beginning of chapter 7, my watercolour reconstructions of Lady Elizabeth Lee’s flowerbeds (1799, see pls 296a and b) represent the perennial role of women throughout the period, brought to perfection at century’s end. These drawings should assist the reader in visualizing continuities as well as change over 150 years of gardening. They are my interpretation (with conjecture) of the ordering of the garden, and they act as counterpoints to the naturalist’s quest for order in the natural world.

I have divided some chapters into two or three parts, the second or third covering the wider setting and complementary environments. An extended summary in chapter 7 — ‘Aftermath: Natural History and Gardening Just Before and Well Beyond 1800’ — offers some further reflections. That concluding chapter is an attempt to weave together three significant themes that emerge out of my particular histories in chapters 1 to 6: first, the contribution of women to gardening and natural history; second, the role of amateurs, women as well as men, to natural sciences before they were professionalized as distinct disciplines; and third, the split sensibilities innate to gardening, which prove to have some gender dimensions. The index is, of course, always there as the last resort for those interested in any topic that is perhaps tangential to the thrust of the main narratives yet significant, for example, enquiries into ‘electricity’ by mid-eighteenth-century scientists.75See J. L. Heibron, Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries: A Study of Early Modern Physics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), and R. W. Home, Electricity and Experimental Physics in 18th-Century Europe (Aldershot, Hampshire, and Brookfield, VT: Variorum, 1992).

Before the reader embarks on reading the body of the book, I should sketch out the main themes of each of the six chapters. In chapter 1 (1650–1706) on John Evelyn’s gardening at Sayes Court, the discussion is shaped around the loss of his exotic plants and pet tortoise in the bitter winter of 1683–4. To this environmental breakdown (amid bereavement for dead daughters within the disease-weather cycles of the era), the chapter adds local instances of destruction and reconstruction: the daily depredations of bug, mole and birds on food — the foodstuff, figurative as well as literal, for philosopher and practitioner; the greenhouse as a place for re-creating the classical ideal of perpetual spring, Ver perpetuum; and Alexander Marshal’s florilegium as an enduring form of recovered purity.

Chapter 2 (1680–1715) is divided into two parts. Initially it looks at the duchess of Beaufort’s shift from cultivating florists’ flowers in London (pictured through Alexander Marshal’s seasonal florilegium) to the omnium-gatherum hothouse cultivation at Badminton (pictured in Everhard Kick’s pan-seasonal compositions). The Great Storm of 1703 brought instability to Badminton as the freeze had done in 1683–4. In the first great age of cultivating tropical trees, conservatory technology offered hope for human agency as Kick’s a-seasonal florilegium implies. Yet the duchess’s ‘nursing skill’ was not technological. In the second part, I try to interpret her work with Flora and Lepidoptera (among other ‘butterfly women’) as an applied science or ‘green-fingers’ knowledge that did not depend on technology.

Chapter 3 (1715–45) moves from the distaff domain to the coffee house. Clubbing together, medico-botanists (adjunct to the Royal Society) and plain gardeners (without Latin) met at coffee houses in new alliances. Mark Catesby as collector-naturalist-artist, Thomas Fairchild as nursery-man and Jacobus van Huysum as botanical artist all played significant roles in the representation and consumption of acclimatized (as opposed to hothouse) exotics. Subscriptions underwrote this newly generated ‘culture of horticulture’, with books marketed in English (rather than Latin), and with women as significant subscribers. After the bitter winter of 1739–40, which reversed a dozen improving seasons, and after the premature death of Lord Petre — the Maecenas of collecting — the nurseryman James Gordon helped to retail exotics more effectively within the world of commerce. Friendships proved integral to the exchange of favours.76For discussion of friendship as one among many forms of alliance for mutual self-interest (instrumental relationships), see Thomas, The Ends of Life, 190–93.

The first part of chapter 4 (1748–83) begins in the ‘cornucopia’ harvest year of 1748, when G. D. Ehret published Linnaeus’s sexual classification as a layered trompe l’oeil and when Thomas Robins the Elder painted the estate of Painswick, using frame as much as canvas to convey milieu. The discussion shows how, in meadow and grove, native flora and fauna coexisted with exotics. The second part looks at topographical art against meteorological data: how droughts in particular affected gardens and arable farming with record harvests. As documented by Gilbert White, the droughts of 1781 and 1783 proved, even as the shrubbery was ascendant, the ‘enamelled’ grove’s enduring appeal.

Chapter 5 (1730–72) turns to the menagerie and aviary as Edenic counterparts to the shrubbery and grove. Three ‘theatres’ of collecting and compassion are presented: the 2nd duke of Richmond’s menagerie at Goodwood; Princess Augusta’s aviary at Kew; and Gilbert White’s notes on the Goodwood moose and on trapping birds (e.g., the linnets trapped for Kew), which offer a corresponding commentary. At the intersection of the colonial and the parochial, White was a rare observer of how exotic bird, beast or plant crossed paths with the indigenous and what happened to them, along with children, in the severe weather around 1770. The chapter also places gardeners / garden labourers / ‘weeder women’ — the lowest links in the chain — on the scales of consumption and compassion.

The first part of chapter 6 (1768–88) is devoted to Mary Delany’s collages as elevated female accomplishment. She learned from the dissections of G. D. Ehret, the Linnaean taxonomy of William Hudson’s Flora anglica (1762) and the duchess of Portland’s ‘English herbal’. Her collages remained a universalizing theatrum botanicum; her accomplishments proved a ‘distaff version of gentlemanly virtuosity’. The second part of the chapter places Mrs Delany in cultural-geographical contexts following Joseph Banks’s transit of Venus observations in 1769. The year 1783 was one of volcanic dust, meteor and air balloons, as well as the drought year that Gilbert White documented in The Natural History of Selborne. In 1785–6 White, observing swallows in flight, saw a balloon flight over Selborne, and the ‘aironaut’ published his account of the clouds.

If White was more than just a ‘stationary man’ recording the ‘life & manners’ of animals in his parish in The Natural History of Selborne, his horizons were always localized, whether through his brother’s Gibraltar fauna or through the Goodwood moose.77Paul Foster, in personal communication, January 2012, pointed out what is intimated by David E. Allen in The Naturalist in Britain (18): that White moved around quite a bit and was in touch with the world beyond Selborne through letters, literature and company. His travels to London form one important counterpoint to his bucolic life, as I have tried to bring out in this book. Mary Delany’s devotional-scientific work was contrastingly peripatetic and wholly dependent upon the imperial collections of Bulstrode and Kew. Yet both White and Delany relied on kinship and friendship; amity as non-instrumental or affectionate relationships played a role in their respective exchanges of knowledge or objects.78See again Thomas, The Ends of Life, 193–225. Hence the Flora Delanica amounts to an album amicorum within the close-knit milieux of town and country. This is just one among the many social milieux that constitute the networks or ‘webs’ at the heart of my study of the myriad ‘theatres’ of English gardening.

These chapters evolved from discrete studies taken up over a dozen years as a response, on different occasions, to different enquiries: conferences, talks and symposia, and, finally, while co-curating the Mrs Delany and her Circle exhibitions at Yale and in London. I hope I have succeeded in bringing a degree of unity without creating an unwieldy whole. At a certain point, dangers arise in trying to connect too many disparate matters (though I have attempted in chapter 7 to attach my accounts to some larger narratives established by other scholars). Marshalling arguments to fit one grand narrative is better avoided in a work that attempts, rather on the model of Mrs Delany and her Circle, to present gardening and natural history in the early modern period as a ‘horizontal diffusion’ of artistic and scientific knowledge. Where advancement took place, it was amid a ‘cloud of technological, cultural and social concerns’.79See Alicia Weisberg-Roberts, ‘Introduction (1): Mrs Delany from Source to Subject’, in Mrs Delany and her Circle, ed. Laird and Weisberg-Roberts, 2. From today’s vantage point, that ‘cloud of curiosity’ can sometimes resemble a fog. The best hope is for a reconstruction of fragments of finely worked tissue, and therein gossamer — the cobweb shower in nature or the manufactured gauzy veil of fashion — serves well as a figurative expression.

Weather, for all its vagaries, proves to be one consistency over time, and its characteristics — ‘sweet’ and prodigal or ‘louring’ and niggardly — are instantly recognizable. Indeed, even in our unsettling age, clouds remain one reassuring constant, exactly as defined by Luke Howard around 1800: cumulus, stratus and cirrus, or variations thereof. And yet the atmosphere of some three hundred years ago is refreshingly strange, as John Evelyn’s blueprint for environmental remediation of London shows. Hence it is important to let the language (some fine to rather homespun English prose) and the imagery (refined to quaint English art) affect the reader directly. Pictorial and literary representations — including caricature and satire — thereby help us to enter the early modern world, a time before weather forecasting, within the discipline of meteorology, became a science of prognostication. Caricatures of gentle folk slipping in wet or windy weather remind us, at the same time, that many a slip can occur when trying to gain a firm footing in any of our ‘field-diversions’, whether in town or country (compare pls 22 and 23). This is especially true in my study, which attempts to cover more than one spot of ground and one bevy of creatures.

~

Description: A Real Scene in St Pauls Church Yard on a Windy Day by Dighton, Robert, the elder

23. Robert Dighton, A Real Scene in St Pauls Church Yard on a Windy Day, 1782–4, hand-coloured mezzotint, 13 ¾ × 9 ¾ in. (35 × 25 cm). British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings (1935, 0522.1.30). © Trustees of the British Museum

In 1782 Karl Phillip Moritz described the Strand, with its shops displaying paintings and mechanisms of all kinds, as resembling a ‘well regulated cabinet of curiosities’. This book charts the rise from its medico-botanical roots of natural history, both in court and commercial circles, and within botanic gardens and pleasure gardens. Women, as gardener-naturalists, were integral to the doings in the city as much as the country. Here an accomplished woman, out to shop for curiosities, competently weathers all that assails her. Gilbert White was linked to the city through his brother Benjamin’s book business, which published The Natural History of Selborne. The networks of virtuosi and coffee house club members, booksellers and subscribers, nurserymen and gardeners, Bluestockings and Reverends, amateur artists and scientists, thus formed webs of collecting and consumption.

Back then, and all of a sudden, something might come out of the blue: not just ‘cats and dogs’, but an Atlantic right whale stranded in the Thames, as John Evelyn witnessed in 1658 (chapter 1). Jonathan Swift conveys well the miscellaneous consequences of a downpour in A Description of a City Shower (1710), proving that weather, in a world of rank and distinction, is not only a great leveller but also a perennial encourager of conversation:

Careful observers may foretell the hour

(By sure prognostics) when to dread a shower:

When rain depends, the pensive cat gives o’er

Her frolics, and pursues her tail no more.

Returning home at night, you’ll find the sink

Strike your offended sense with double stink.

If you be wise, then go not far to dine;

You’ll spend in coach hire more than save in wine.

A coming shower your shooting corns presage,

Old achès throb, your hollow tooth will rage.

Sauntering in coffeehouse is Dulman seen;

He damns the climate and complains of spleen.

. . .

Now in contiguous drops the flood comes down,

Threatening with deluge this devoted town.

To shops in crowds the daggled females fly,

Pretend to cheapen goods, but nothing buy.

The Templar spruce, while every spout’s abroach,

Stays till ’tis fair, yet seems to call a coach.

The tucked-up sempstress walks with hasty strides,

While streams run down her oiled umbrella’s sides.

Here various kinds, by various fortunes led,

Commence acquaintance underneath a shed.

Triumphant Tories and desponding Whigs

Forget their feuds, and join to save their wigs.

From Evelyn’s Fumifugium (1661) onwards, conversations were being conducted in print and in person on what today would be called the topic of ‘the environment’. White’s The Natural History of Selborne, which serves as one bookend for early modern environmental awareness, also introduced the public to the ‘conversations’ of the animal kingdom. I hope that my book, like the weather, encourages a conversation under the umbrella of landscape or environmental history: fostering fellowship between the humanities and the sciences, and among the disciplines, including those concerned with human–animal relations.80When considering scholarship on attitudes to animals and on human–animal relations beyond the scope of this book, the works of Harriet Ritvo and Erica Fudge come to mind. See, for example, Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), and Erica Fudge, Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality and Humanity in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006).

1 See Paul G. M. Foster, Gilbert White and his Records: A Scientific Biography (London: Christopher Helm, 1988), 146. White was busy with the index in January 1788, but according to Paul Foster in his ‘Note on the Text’ in the Oxford World’s Classics edition (1993), the index proved ‘rudimentary’ and was augmented in that later edition. For a fascinating account of verbal descriptions and portraiture of Gilbert White, see June E. Chatfield, ‘Likenesses of the Reverend Gilbert White’, Proceedings of the Hampshire Field Club and Archaeological Society, XLIII (1987), 207–17. I am grateful to Paul Foster for providing me with a copy of this informative article. »

2 See Miles Hadfield, A History of British Gardening, 3rd edn (London: John Murray, 1979), 232–3, for one short passage on the Revd Gilbert White as author of the garden diary, writing about routine work in a small garden. For a single reference unrelated to gardening or natural history, see Tom Williamson, Polite Landscapes: Gardens and Society in Eighteenth-century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 125, citing Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne as evidence of dwindling timber shortages in forests due to browsing. »

3 Gilbert White, The Natural History of Selborne [1789], ed. Paul Foster (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 182–3. »

4 Ibid., 182. »

5 See John Dixon Hunt’s introduction to Horace Walpole, The History of the Modern Taste in Gardening [1780] (New York: Ursus Press, 1995, based on the edition of 1782), 7. »

6 Ibid., 40, 56 and 57. »

7 Mark Laird, ‘John Claudius Loudon (1783–1843) and the Field’s Identity’, Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes, 34 (3), July–September 2014, 248–53. »

8 Two back-to-back essays in Perspectives on Garden Histories, ed. Michel Conan (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1999), frame the question of Horace Walpole’s influence on history and historiography. See John Dixon Hunt, ‘Approaches (New and Old) to Garden History’, ibid., 77–90, and Michael Leslie, ‘History and Historiography in the English Landscape Garden’, ibid., 91–106. See also Mark Laird, ‘Revisiting English Gardens, 1630–1730: The French Connection in Britannia’, in André Le Nôtre in Perspective, 1613–2013, ed. Patricia Bouchenot-Déchin and Georges Farhat (Paris: Hazan, and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 310–23. »

9 See Williamson, Polite Landscapes, and Mark Laird, The Flowering of the Landscape Garden: English Pleasure Grounds, 1720–1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). »

10 Walpole, History of the Modern Taste in Gardening, 24, 50–51. »

11 Stephen Bending, Green Retreats: Women, Gardens and Eighteenth-century Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). »

12 Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1977), seeing Gilbert White as one beginning of ecological understanding, sets White in the Arcadian tradition as opposed to Linnaeus’s imperial tradition of taxonomic science. »

13 See William J. Cook, ‘The Correspondence of Thomas Dale (1700–1750): Botany in the Transatlantic Republic of Letters’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, XLIII (2012), 232–43; and Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi, ‘Gardens of Knowledge and the République des Gens de Sciences’, in Baroque Garden Culture: Emulation, Sublimation, Subversion, ed. Michel Conan (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2005), 85–129. »

14 See Victoria Dickenson, Rabbit (London: Reaktion, 2013). »

15 Paul Foster and David Standing, Landscape and Labour: Gilbert White’s Garden, 1751–1793, Selborne Paper, 2 (Selborne: Gilbert White’s House & The Oates Museum, 2005), provides a good account of White’s landscaping, planting and gardening. David Standing kindly pointed out to me (personal communication, 17 January 2012) that White referred to various shrubberies nine times in his Calendar, beginning in November 1751. »

16 John Evelyn, ‘Elysium Britannicum; or, The Royal Gardens in Three Books’, British Library, Add. MS 78342, fol. 236v. See Evelyn, Elysium Britannicum; or, The Royal Gardens, ed. John E. Ingram (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 309. »

17 The Society for the History of Natural History was founded as the Society for the Bibliography of Natural History in 1936. Archives of Natural History, which has continued to publish work on behalf of the Society since 1981, takes the ‘history of natural history’ to include ‘botany, geology, palaeontology and zoology, the lives of naturalists, their publications, correspondence and collections, and the institutions and societies to which they belong’. Articles cover areas that overlap with the scope of this book. Those most relevant to my study are cited to direct the reader beyond the gardening focus of my work. »

18 See, for example, Richard Mabey, Gilbert White: A Biography of the Author of The Natural History of Selborne (London: Century, 1986), and Ted Dadswell, The Selborne Pioneer: Gilbert White as Naturalist and Scientist: A Re-Examination (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2002). For an imaginative, twenty-first-century interpretation of how the tortoise viewed White and Selborne, see Verlyn Klinkenborg, Timothy; or, Notes of an Abject Reptile (New York: Knopf, 2006). »

19 See Keith Thomas, The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 129–31. »

20 For an example of a recent work of ‘natural history’ (by historians, archaeologists and scientists), see Wilhelmina Jashemski and Frederick G. Meyer, eds, The Natural History of Pompeii (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). The editors give a short account of natural history in the ‘older, more inclusive sense’ derived from the Naturalis historia of Pliny the Elder (AD 23/4–79) on p. 1. For a good summary of what ‘natural history’ meant in Mark Catesby’s time, see Janet Browne, ‘Mark Catesby’s World: England’, in The Curious Mister Catesby: A ‘Truly Ingenious’ Naturalist Explores New Worlds, ed. E. Charles Nelson and David J. Elliott (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 2015). »

21 Paul Foster, ‘White, Gilbert (1720–1793)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online edition: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/29243 [accessed 30 September 2013]. »

22 Francesca Greenoak, ed., The Journals of Gilbert White, 3 vols (London: Century, 1986–9) [vol. I: 1751–73; vol. II: 1774–83; vol. III: 1784–93], 1, 104. »

23 Ibid., 1, 104–5. »

24 Evelyn, ‘Elysium Britannicum’, fol. 231. See Evelyn, Elysium Britannicum, ed. Ingram, 299, n. 87, pointing to margin note ‘de duabus animis: c. 4’, referring to chapter 4 of St Augustine, De duabus amimabus contra manichaeos (AD 391), which is entitled ‘Even the Soul of a Fly is More Excellent than the Light’. I am very grateful to Margaret Riley for her help with the transcription, which replaces Ingram’s ‘preserve’ with ‘preferr’. »

25 Evelyn is referring to Charles Butler, author of The Feminine Monarchie of 1609. »

26 Laird, The Flowering of the Landscape Garden, 22. »

27 Quoted from a letter of John Mulso to Gilbert White by Foster in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 3. He also used the term ‘Visitants’ that is cited in the same paragraph. »

28 See, for example, Williamson, Polite Landscapes, chapter 6; Robert Williams, ‘Rural Economy and the Antique in the English Landscape Garden’, Journal of Garden History, VII/I (January–March 1987), 73–96; and Stephen Daniels, ‘The Political Iconography of Woodland in Later Eighteenth-century England’, in The Iconography of Landscape, ed. Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 51–72. »

29 See the explanatory notes to Letter 5 to Thomas Pennant, undated, in White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Foster, 264. »

30 Letter 23 to Daines Barrington, 8 June 1775, ibid., 163. »

31 Foster, entry in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 3. »

32 White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Foster, 164–5. »

33 John Henry Comstock, The Spider Book [1912], ed. W. J. Gertsch (Ithaca, NY: Comstock, 1948), 215–16. »

34 White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Foster, 284. »

35 Francesca Greenoak, ed., The Journals of Gilbert White, II, 68. »

36 The term is used by Tom Williamson in Polite Landscapes, 4–9, highlighting the work of John Phibbs, Ann Bermingham, etc. Yet it can refer equally to studies initiated by John Dixon Hunt, who, with Peter Willis in The Genius of the Place (1975), redefined the intellectual period of the landscape garden as 1620–1820. Some essays in the book edited by Hunt, Garden History: Issues, Approaches, Methods (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1992), represent benchmarks in the ‘new garden history’ of the Picturesque. See, for example, Stephen Daniels et al., ‘Landscaping and Estate Management in Later Georgian England’, 359–72. »

37 Historians of science, medicine, botany and natural history have provided excellent histories of networks. See, for example, Emma C. Spary, Utopia’s Garden: French Natural History from Old Regime to Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), and Steven J. Harris, ‘Networks of Travel, Correspondence and Exchange’, in The Cambridge History of Science, vol. III: Early Modern Science, ed. Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and see again Cook, ‘The Correspondence of Thomas Dale’. A Natural History of English Gardening provides a history of gardening networks as they overlap with natural history networks, for example, in the production of the horti sicci of John Evelyn (chapter 1) and the duchess of Beaufort (chapter 2). Stephen A. Harris explains how horti sicci (literally, dry gardens) were assembled and used in ‘The Plant Collections of Mark Catesby in Oxford’, in The Curious Mister Catesby, ed. Nelson and Elliott. »

38 E. L. [Eric Lionel] Jones, Seasons and Prices: The Role of the Weather in English Agricultural History (London: Allen and Unwin, 1964). »

39 Williamson, Polite Landscapes, 140. »

40 Foster, Gilbert White and his Records, 12. »

41 Eleazar Albin, A Natural History of English Song-Birds and Such of the Foreign as are usually brought over and esteemed for the singing [1737], 2nd edn (London, 1741), 36. »

42 Mary Delany to Mary Port, 7 December 1771, in The Autobiography and Correspondence of Mary Granville, Mrs Delany, ed. Lady Llanover, 6 vols (London: Bentley, 1861–2), IV, 381. »

43 Todd Longstaffe-Gowan, The London Town Garden, 1700–1840 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001). »

44 John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London: HarperCollins, 1997). »

45 Longstaffe-Gowan, The London Town Garden. »

46 See, for example, Todd Longstaffe-Gowan, ‘Private Urban Gardening in England, 1700–1830: On the Art of Sinking’, in The Vernacular Garden, ed. John Dixon Hunt and Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1993), 47–75. »

47 Williamson, Polite Landscapes, 114 »

48 Mark Laird and Alicia Weisberg-Roberts, eds, Mrs Delany and her Circle (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009). »

49 See George Rousseau, The Notorious Sir John Hill: The Man Destroyed by Ambition in the Era of Celebrity (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, and Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), notably 130, and 193, where William Stukeley’s petition to the princess of Wales of 1754 — that Hill oversee new gardens at Kensington Palace — is discussed along with the ‘kitchen physic’ of Hill’s The Useful Family Herbal (1755). »

50 Rousseau, The Notorious Sir John Hill, 115–17. »

51 David Elliston Allen, The Naturalist in Britain: A Social History [1976], revised edn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 25. »

52 Thomas, The Ends of Life, 23, 40, 53, 105, 219, 255. »

53 Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800 (London: Allen Lane, 1983), 238–9. »

54 See Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi, An Oak Spring Flora: Flower Illustration from the Fifteenth Century to the Present Time (Upperville, VA: Oak Spring Garden Library, 1997), xxxv; see also Tongiorgi Tomasi, ‘“La femminil pazienza”: Women Painters and Natural History in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries’, in The Art of Natural History: Illustrated Treatises and Botanical Paintings, 1400–1850, ed. Therese O’Malley and Amy R. W. Meyers (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2008), 158–85. See Elizabeth Hyde, Cultivated Power: Flowers, Culture and Politics in the Reign of Louis XIV (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 15–19. For the discussion of Linnaean taxonomy and women, see Ann. B. Shteir, Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora’s Daughters and Botany in England, 1760–1860 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). »

55 Ann Shteir provides the background to problematic features of Linnaean botany: how to make plant sexuality ‘proper’ for women, notably William Withering’s ‘bowdlerizing’ and Richard Polwhele’s ‘diatribe’ against women writers and female botanizing. See Shteir, Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science, 21–9. »

56 See ‘Historical Note’ in Klinkenborg, Timothy, 159: ‘Timothy’s shell is preserved in the Natural History Museum in London. Scientists in the nineteenth century determined from the shape of the shell that Timothy [inherited from White’s aunt] was indeed female.’ »

57 Amanda Vickery, ‘The Theory and Practice of Female Accomplishment’, in Mrs Delany and her Circle, ed. Laird and Weisberg-Roberts, 94–109; Kim Sloan, ‘A Noble Art’: Amateur Artists and Drawing Masters, c. 1600–1800 (London: British Museum Press, 2000). For a broader discussion of female accomplishment within domesticity, see Amanda Vickery, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), notably chapter 9: ‘What Women Made’. »

58 See again Tongiorgi Tomasi, ‘La femminil pazienza’. »

59 See Henrietta McBurney, ‘Mark Catesby’s Preparatory Drawings for the Natural History’, in The Curious Mister Catesby, ed. Nelson and Elliott. »

60 Wilfrid Blunt, The Art of Botanical Illustration [1950], ed. William T. Stearn (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1994). »

61 See Nicholas Reed, Frost Fairs on the Frozen Thames (London: Lilburne Press, 2002); Helen Humphreys, The Frozen Thames (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2007); Martin Brayne: The Greatest Storm (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton: 2002); and Richard Hamblyn, Terra: Tales of the Earth: Four Events that Changed the World (London: Picador, 2009). »

62 Jan Golinski, British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007). »

63 Stuart Houston, Tim Ball and Mary Houston, Eighteenth-century Naturalists of Hudson Bay (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), 117–18. »

64 See William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, ed. Alfred Harbage (New York: Viking Press, 1979), Madeleine Doran’s introduction to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 146. »

65 See Reed, Frost Fairs on the Frozen Thames, 2–3, 30–39. »

66 See Clive Oppenheimer, Eruptions that Shook the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 312–19. »

67 Brent Elliott, ‘Changes in the Flowering Times of Garden Plants over Three Centuries’, The Plantsman (September 2009), 154–60. »

68 See Mark Laird, ‘A Natural History of English Gardening, 1650–1800’, Harvard Design Magazine, XXXVI (2013), 157–60. »

69 Brent Elliott, ‘The Climate of the Landscape Garden’, in Painshill Park: The Pioneering Restoration of an 18th-Century Landscape Garden. The Proceedings of the Painshill Park and Beyond Conference: Painshill Park, 24–25 June 2010, ed. Patrick Eyres (Leeds: New Arcadian Press, 2010), 105–19, and especially 105. »

70 Ibid., 109. »

71 Mark Laird, ‘The Future of Garden Restoration: Re-Planting Recalibrated’, in Painshill Park, ed. Eyres, 80. »

72 Annie Christensen, The Klingenberg Garden Day-Book, 1659–1722, trans. Peter Hayden (Copenhagen: Rhodos, 1997). »

73 John Phibbs, ‘The Persistence of Older Traditions in Eighteenth-century Gardening’, Garden History, XXXVII/2 (Winter 2009), 174–88. See also his two other essays in Garden History, XXXVIII/1 (Summer 2010), and his more explicit critique of Painshill’s ‘tiered or layered planting’ in his essay ‘On Architecture’, in Painshill Park, ed. Eyres, 87–91. »

74 See Jane Brown, My Darling Heriott: Henrietta Luxborough: Poetic Gardener and Irrepressible Exile (London: Harper Press, 2006), 182–3. »

75 See J. L. Heibron, Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries: A Study of Early Modern Physics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), and R. W. Home, Electricity and Experimental Physics in 18th-Century Europe (Aldershot, Hampshire, and Brookfield, VT: Variorum, 1992). »

76 For discussion of friendship as one among many forms of alliance for mutual self-interest (instrumental relationships), see Thomas, The Ends of Life, 190–93. »

77 Paul Foster, in personal communication, January 2012, pointed out what is intimated by David E. Allen in The Naturalist in Britain (18): that White moved around quite a bit and was in touch with the world beyond Selborne through letters, literature and company. His travels to London form one important counterpoint to his bucolic life, as I have tried to bring out in this book. »

78 See again Thomas, The Ends of Life, 193–225. »

79 See Alicia Weisberg-Roberts, ‘Introduction (1): Mrs Delany from Source to Subject’, in Mrs Delany and her Circle, ed. Laird and Weisberg-Roberts, 2. »

80 When considering scholarship on attitudes to animals and on human–animal relations beyond the scope of this book, the works of Harriet Ritvo and Erica Fudge come to mind. See, for example, Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), and Erica Fudge, Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality and Humanity in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006). »

Previous chapter Next chapter

Base text size -

Chapter images ()