1. Purity in the Parsley Bed: ​John Evelyn’s Battles with Instability in his Garden Elysium at Sayes Court​

Laird, Mark

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1. Purity in the Parsley Bed: John Evelyn’s Battles with Instability in his Garden Elysium at Sayes Court

Mark Laird

A Natural History of English Gardening: 1650–1800

John Evelyn (1620–1706, pl. 25) is celebrated as a well-loved English diarist, as author of an influential work on trees, Sylva (1664, 1670, 1679 and 1706), and as a virtuoso with intimate connections to the Royal Society.The first three editions dated 1664, 1670 and 1679 were entitled Sylva; or, A Discourse on Forest-Trees, but by 1706 the publishers had adopted Silva instead. Sylva is used here in general discussions, but Silva in reference to the 1706 edition specifically. Yet his masterwork ‘Elysium Britannicum; or, The Royal Gardens in Three Books’, remaining in manuscript over a lifetime of revisions, waited until 2001 for...

Author

Mark Laird

PublisherPaul Mellon Centre

Related print edition pages: pp.29-61

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-32111

Chapter subject tags:Evelyn, John, 1620-1706Gardens, English--History--17th centuryNatural history--Great Britain--17th centuryGreat Britain--Climatic factors--HistoryGarden ecology--Great Britain--HistoryBotanical illustration--England--17th centuryConservatories--England

1. Purity in the Parsley Bed: John Evelyn’s Battles with Instability in his Garden Elysium at Sayes Court

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Description: Conjectural reconstruction as a bird's-eye view of the grove at Sayes Court,...

24. Mark Laird, conjectural reconstruction as a bird’s-eye view of the grove at Sayes Court, Deptford, based on the plan of circa 1653, graphite, coloured pencils and watercolour, 1993 (first published 1998)

John Evelyn’s grove — already ‘infinitely Sweete & beautifull’ after five seasons’ growth — was influenced by the Italian bosco and the French bosquet. It appears the epitome of the ‘formal’ equilibrium of the Baroque. Evelyn was innovative in his use of different hedge species to define the edges of wooded quarters. This rectangular grove, 40 yards by 80 yards and subdivided into eight compartments with a circular centre, was contained to the south by a barberry hedge (top), and to the east (and possibly north) by a lilac hedge. The central circle was a mount, ‘planted with Bayes, but the Circle Walke with Laurel’. In this circle were planted two of the fourteen ‘Cabinetts of Aliternies’ (Rhamnus alaternus), each one shaded by a ‘great French walnutt’ (Juglans regia).

This plate is dedicated by Mark Laird to David Jacques, Jan Woudstra and former Colleagues of IoAAS, York

John Evelyn (1620–1706, pl. 25) is celebrated as a well-loved English diarist, as author of an influential work on trees, Sylva (1664, 1670, 1679 and 1706), and as a virtuoso with intimate connections to the Royal Society.1The first three editions dated 1664, 1670 and 1679 were entitled Sylva; or, A Discourse on Forest-Trees, but by 1706 the publishers had adopted Silva instead. Sylva is used here in general discussions, but Silva in reference to the 1706 edition specifically. Yet his masterwork ‘Elysium Britannicum; or, The Royal Gardens in Three Books’, remaining in manuscript over a lifetime of revisions, waited until 2001 for publication.2John Evelyn, Elysium Britannicum; or, The Royal Gardens, ed. John E. Ingram (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). Now Evelyn has been the subject of three major conferences over two decades, including the significant British Library conference of 2001 in which much of this material was first presented.3Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture, 17 (May 1993), the British Library Conference (17–18 September, 2001) and the Surrey Gardens Trust/Garden History Society Conference (22–3 April, 2006). Marking the tercentenary of his death, three significant books came out in 2006 and 2007. Gillian Darley’s biography John Evelyn: Living for Ingenuity provides an overview of his long career and includes a comprehensive bibliography.4Gillian Darley, John Evelyn: Living for Ingenuity (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006). Maggie Campbell-Culver’s A Passion for Trees: The Legacy of John Evelyn looks at Sylva in particular.5Maggie Campbell-Culver, A Passion for Trees: The Legacy of John Evelyn (London: Eden Project Books, 2006). By contrast, A Celebration of John Evelyn edited by Mavis Batey — the proceedings of the conference held in 2006 at Wotton House, Surrey — offers new and wide-ranging perspectives on Evelyn’s life and work in the realm of the garden.6Mavis Batey, ed., A Celebration of John Evelyn: Proceedings of a Conference to Mark the Tercentenary of his Death (Sutton: Surrey Gardens Trust, 2007).

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Description: John Evelyn by Walker, Robert

25. Robert Walker, John Evelyn, 1648, oil on canvas, 34 5⁄8 × 25 ¼ in. (87.9 × 64.1 cm). © National Portrait Gallery, London (NPG 6179)

Evelyn, aged twenty-eight at the time of this portrait, records in his Diary that he sat for Walker on 1 July 1648. His portrait was to accompany a treatise on marriage, which he had written for his young wife, Mary Browne. Walker originally intended depicting him holding a miniature or medal of her. The skull was substituted later, with a Greek motto (above his head: ‘Repentance is the beginning of Wisdom’) and a Latin quote from Seneca (on the table) alluding to the importance of preparing for death.

While the essays in the last focus on the family estate of Wotton, this chapter concentrates on John Evelyn’s garden at Sayes Court, which was the family home of his wife (Mary Evelyn née Browne, circa 1634–1709).7For the complicated background to the family’s crown lease of 1604 on the property, see Darley, John Evelyn, 79. Since Mary was ‘barely 13’ (see Frances Harris, Transformations of Love: The Friendship of John Evelyn and Margaret Godolphin, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, 41) in 1647, when the twenty-six-year-old Evelyn married her, she must have been born in 1634. It was at the heart of Evelyn’s gardening from 1653 to 1694. Situated on the Thames in Deptford, close to industry and the naval dockyards on the eastern edge of London, it was scarcely a promising place to establish a terrestrial ‘Elysium’. Yet Evelyn invoked the ‘entire Mysterie’8British Library, Add. MS 78340, fol. 88v. Quoted in Harris, Transformations of Love, 22. She points out that the soil at Sayes Court required a liberal mix of lime, loam and cow dung to enrich it. of gardening — from the preparation of soil to the re-creation of paradise on earth — to make his setting for ‘villa’ life. It became resplendent in all that was evocative of the antique and modern gardens he had seen in Italy and France in the 1640s.

A formal and horticultural reconstruction of the Sayes Court garden — based on Evelyn’s plan of circa 1653 and complementary texts and images — leads to a conventional view of its style, situated between the architectural ideals of the Renaissance and Baroque (see pls 1, 24 and 27). By contrast, reconstructing the human-biological life in and around the garden (especially in the final decade of family residence from 1684 to 1694) renders the ‘formal garden’ dynamic rather than static, shaped by contingency and gardening rather than by design. The discovery, while the Evelyn archive was being catalogued at the British Library, of Evelyn’s re-design of February 1685 provides a convenient point of departure for this chapter. In the wake of a devastating winter, he devised a replanting of the area formerly occupied by the oval parterre (his ‘Morin Garden’) and part of the orchard. This re-design shows how the garden evolved from the 1650s to the layout surveyed on two plans of the 1690s.

Evelyn’s radical revision of the garden came in his mid-sixties, and during a low ebb in family fortunes. After the loss of one daughter to smallpox, and just before a second would succumb to the disease in July 1685, the long-suffering Mary Evelyn wrote to a friend: ‘Mr. Evelyn makes the Garden his businesse and delight[.] It now gros towards finishing and dos answer expectation very well being finer than ever, for the future I hope it will be lesse expensive.’9Add. MS 78539: to Ralph Bohun, quoted in Prudence Leith-Ross, ‘The Garden of John Evelyn at Deptford’, Garden History, XXV/2 (Winter 1997), 147. While it was the prolonged frosts of 1683–4 (a variable within the Little Ice Age) that created an environmental breakdown in the order, harmony and ornamentation of Evelyn’s initial layout, decimation and disease in garden and home seemed to him ‘judgements’ by God. As Frances Harris suggests, ‘What he now regarded as the excessive pride he had taken in his house and garden became a matter for confession and self-castigation.’10Harris, Transformations of Love, 300.

Despite personal doubts, the garden as ‘Elysium’ retained for him its restorative meaning in a sacroscientific sense. In the traditions of the Hortus medicus or physic garden (Padua, Leiden, Oxford), anatomy and pharmacology shared the ‘theatrical’ purpose of the garden as a whole. Reassembled from the four corners of the earth, the physic garden, divided into four quarters by continent, formed a ‘theatre’ (i.e., a complete collection, like the collections of natural and artificial objects housed in an adjacent museum, theatrum, ambulacrum or ark, arcus).11For a discussion of these terms in the context of Leiden, see Erik de Jong, Nature and Art: Dutch Garden and Landscape Architecture, 1650–1740 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 135–42. The quarters contained natives and exotics used in physic. It was in the apothecary garden at Chelsea in 1685 that Evelyn saw how improvements in the artificial environment of the greenhouse allowed tropical shrubs and trees to overwinter. In simulating the ‘perpetual spring’ of Elysium, these exotics — notably Jesuit’s bark — held the key to restoring good health, warding off ague (a fever often associated with malaria) and other deadly diseases.12For discussion of ‘ague’ and the ‘Little Ice Age’, see P. Reiter, ‘From Shakespeare to Defoe: Malaria in England in the Little Ice Age’, Emerging Infectious Diseases, VI/1 (February 2000).

Evelyn’s published revision to the heating system of the greenhouse — taking the furnace outside the conservatory to avoid ‘pent-in’ fumes — can be related more broadly to his concern for ‘purity’ in a physical as well as spiritual sense.13His ideas on the greenhouse, published in Kalendarium hortense in 1691, are discussed in Mark Laird, ‘“Perpetual Spring” or Tempestuous Fall: The Greenhouse and the Great Storm of 1703 in the Life of John Evelyn and his Contemporaries’, Garden History, XXXIV/2 (Winter 2006), 153–73. In 1661 he had published Fumifugium; or, The Inconvenience of the Aer, and Smoake of London Dissipated. In 1699 he would publish Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets. What the two works shared in common with his edition of Kalendarium hortense of 1691 was a concern to promote health through pure air and wholesome food. This included fruit, which was associated with purity. Tracing an ‘innocent diet’ back to Eden, Evelyn argued that long lives in the Bible must have been due to ‘the Wholesomness of the Herby-Diet’ and to the atmosphere, when ‘Men breath’d the pure Paradisian Air, sucking in a more aethereal, nourishing and baulmy Pabulum’.14John Evelyn, Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets (London, 1699), 137, 125. See Graham Parry, ‘John Evelyn as Hortulan Saint’, in Culture and Cultivation in Early Modern England: Writing and the Land, ed. Michael Leslie and Timothy Raylor (Leicester and London: Leicester University Press, 1992), 147. In the real world, abandoning meat entirely proved less the ideal than eating more fruit.15See John Prest, The Garden of Eden: The Botanic Garden and the Re-creation of Paradise (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981), 75. For the wider context for abstaining from meat, see Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800 (London: Allen Lane, 1983), 287–300. And it was pure air, argued Evelyn, that allowed fruit to ripen in London, unlike the shrivelled harvest of Sayes Court, which resembled ‘the Apples of Sodome’ (the legendary Dead Sea apple, turning to smoke and dust when touched).

If battles to restore a Golden Age came with a millennial spirit,16For Evelyn’s association with millenarianism, see Parry, ‘John Evelyn as Hortulan Saint’, 137–8. and if the garden as ‘Elysium’ could be recovered (recovering itself from frosts and storms), a war against insects, vermin and birds continued in and outside the garden. Trapping bullfinches in nets, poisoning mice with bait and killing moles underground were daily stratagems to protect the innocent ‘Herby-Diet’ of his ‘Elysium’. Evelyn thus called the garden the purest of human resorts. Dilemmas that faced science — what measure of cruelty was allowable in experiment — were confined, or so it seems, to the ‘theatre’ of anatomy or vivisection. While misgivings over scientific practices began to arise in Evelyn’s generation, he saw the garden ‘theatre’ as remaining a pure locus of reformation through practical technologies: what his correspondent John Beale called ‘advancing the Light of nature into the Light of grace’.17Quoted from Douglas Chambers, ‘John Evelyn and the Invention of the Heated Greenhouse’, Garden History, XX/2 (Autumn 1992), 205. However perennially true was Evelyn’s belief in the redemptive power of gardening, this faith would be tested by the environment’s inherent instability.

Making ‘Elysium’ at Sayes Court

In the year 1652, after running ‘about the World, most part out of my owne country neere 10 years’,18Quoted from Batey, ed., A Celebration of John Evelyn, 164. John Evelyn took up residence at Sayes Court in Deptford. It was the family home of his young wife, Mary. The following February, having obtained a lease on the property, which had been sequestered during the Commonwealth,19See again Darley, John Evelyn, 117–19. and having drafted a plan for a garden, he set out an oval parterre. This layout of circa 1653 (pl. 27) was ‘the beginning of all the succeeding Gardens, Walkes, Groves, Enclosures & Plantations there’.20John Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. Esmond S. de Beer, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), III, 80, entry for 17 January 1653.

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Description: Plan of Sayes Court house and garden, detail by Unknown

27. Plan of Sayes Court house and garden (detail), circa 1653, with north to bottom; both handwriting and draughtsmanship uncertain. © The British Library Board (Add. MS 78628A)

At the centre of the composition was what Evelyn called his ‘Morin’ or ‘dial’ garden (top, and see pl. 1): an oval parterre based on Pierre Morin’s garden in Paris and radiating from a sundial. Evelyn used the measure of a French toise (just over 6 foot) to compare his layout with Morin’s, but the layout also reflected other elements in French parterres. By September 1653 the ‘plott’ (plan) was finished and planting was under way that autumn. Just north of the Oval Garden was the rectangular grove (see pl. 24), with more than 500 standard trees (‘oake, ash, elme Ceruise [Sorbus domestica], beech-chesnutt’) and with thickets of ‘Birch, hazel, Thorne, wild fruites, greenes &c’. The diagonal boundary (left side) helps locate the garden in the setting of the docks at Deptford (see pl. 30).

By 1658 the gardens were enjoying five seasons’ growth, and Evelyn’s grove, though immature, appeared to him part of a garden ‘infinitely Sweete & beautifull’.21Leith-Ross, ‘The Garden of John Evelyn at Deptford’, 145–6. The letter is from July 1658 and refers to ‘the ravage of this winter upon my nursery’ and to his ‘dwarfe’ grove. The year had begun tragically with the death of his son Richard, and rather dismally with the loss of nursery trees. John Evelyn was thirty-seven and grieving. Only the end of the year presaged better times. He went into London on 23 November to see the ‘superb Funerall’ of Oliver Cromwell, the ‘Ursurper’.22Quoted from Batey, ed., A Celebration of John Evelyn, 165. In the course of 1658 he had published The French Gardiner, his translation of Nicolas de Bonnefons’ influential work, Le jardinier françois of 1651.23Nicolas de Bonnefons, Le jardinier françois, qui enseigne à cultiver les Arbres, et Herbes Potagères; Avec la manière de conserver les Fruicts, et faire toutes sortes de Confitures, Conserves, et Massepans. Dédié aux dames. Cinquiesme Edition reveuë par l’Autheur (Paris, 1651). And by 1659 he was ready to show people the manuscript that would become his life’s work: ‘Elysium Britannicum; or, The Royal Gardens in Three Books’. During the Interregnum, the ‘Elysium Britannicum’ had been ‘provided against the next Age’ — the hope of the monarchy’s restoration.24For these references, see Batey, ed., A Celebration of John Evelyn, 165.

The year 1658 is also notable for another small incident, which John Evelyn recorded in his diary.25Evelyn, Diary, ed. De Beer, III, opposite 215. An entry in early June sets the scene: ‘June 2. An extraordinary storme of haile & raine, cold season as winter, wind northerly neere 6 moneths’.26Ibid., III, 214. The following day, in the wake of the storm, a portent emerged in the low tide outside the garden walls:

A large Whale taken, twixt my Land butting on the Thames & Greenewich, which drew an infinite Concourse to see it, by water, horse, coach, on foote from Lond, & all parts: It appeared first below Greenewich at low-water, for at high water, it would have destroyed all the boates: but lying now in shallow water, incompassd with boates, after a long Conflict it was killed with the harping yrons, & struck in the head, out of which spouted blood & water, by two tunnells like Smoake from a chimny: & after an horrid grone it ran quite on shore & died.27Ibid., III, 214–15.

Evelyn attempted a sketch and gave the following description of the whale’s features (pl. 28):

The length was 58 foote: 16 in height, black skin’d like Coach-leather, very small eyes, greate taile, small finns & but 2: a piked snout, & a mouth so wide & divers men might have stood upright in it: No teeth at all, but sucked the slime onely as thro a grate made of that bone which we call Whale bone: The throate <yet> so narrow, as would not have admitted the least of fishes: The extreames of the Cetaceous bones hang downewards, from the Upper <jaw>, & was hairy towards the Ends, & bottome withinside: all of it prodigious, but in nothing more wonderfull then that an Animal of so greate a bulk, should be nourished onely by slime, thro’ those grates.28Ibid., III, 215.

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Description: John Evelyn's diary entry for 3 June 1658, detail by Evelyn, John

28. Detail from John Evelyn’s diary entry for 3 June 1658. © The British Library Board (Add. MS 78323)

Evelyn referred in his diary to the storm of 2 June 1658, which, following on from six months of cold weather, produced hail and rain more like winter than late spring. The whale, which he sketched in the margin, was washed up the Thames estuary by the winds and tides. On 3 June, appearing in low water near Greenwich, and drifting aground close to Evelyn’s ‘Elysium’ abutting the Thames, the Atlantic right whale drew a crowd. Viewed from the garden or embankments, Evelyn saw how it was ‘struck in the head, out of which spouted blood & water, by two tunnells like Smoake from a chimny’.

A drawing by the virtuoso traveller Peter Mundy features details of an Atlantic right whale (pl. 29). Mundy’s account concludes — mistakenly — that it was young ‘by the smallnesse and shortnesse of the said fynnes’.29See Peter Mundy, The Travels of Peter Mundy in Europe and Asia, 1608–1667, vol. v (London: The Hakluyt Society, 1936), 95–6. See here Proceedings of the Linnean Society (10 January 1935), 35–7, in which F. C. Fraser first identified the whale as an adult Atlantic right whale, Balaena glacialis. He comments that the drawing no. 2 depicts the tongue ‘in an inflated and extended condition as commonly seen in decomposed Cetacea. This could easily have happened between Mundy’s first and second visits to the carcass’; and that drawing no. 3 is inaccurate as regards feeding off a shoal of fish, but Mundy’s description of the feeding mechanism is correct and perhaps one of the first true accounts. Judy Chupasko, Curatorial Associate at the Mammal Department of the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, Cambridge, MA, kindly confirmed that the drawing was of a great right whale, now Eubalaena glacialis. Peter Mundy seems to have misjudged the age, because 58 feet would make this creature close to the maximum adult length of 60 feet. Since the right whale spends much of its time in shallow coastal waters, it rarely ends up stranded. Hence it can be assumed that the storm of June 1658 accounts for the Greenwich stranding. The original number of right whales in the world has been estimated at 100,000 to 300,000. The species, however, has now become one of the most rare of large mammals; the total world population may be as low as 2,000–3,000. The eastern North Atlantic population is virtually extinct, and — according to several recent authorities — the present population in the western North Atlantic is approximately only 200–350. See here Walker’s Mammals of the World, 6th edn, ed. Ronald M. Nowak (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), II, 963–8; and Lyall Watson, Sea Guide to Whales of the World (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1981), 68–70. The poet John Dryden saw the whale’s arrival as a joyous portent of Cromwell’s death.30Evelyn, Diary, ed. De Beer, III, 215, n. 3, citing John Dryden, A Poem upon the Death of His Late Highness, Oliver Lord Protector (London, 1659): ‘But first the Ocean, as a Tribute sent/ That Giant-Prince of all her Watry Herd;/ And th’Isle, when her protecting Genius went, Upon his Obsequies loud Sighs conferr’d.’ See Joe Roman, Whale (London: Reaktion, 2006), 50, for a discussion of the ‘royal fish’, 62–3, for stranded whales as representations and omens. For further discussion of stranded whales and harbingers of evil fate, see Klaus Barthelmess and Joachim Münzing, Monstrum horrendum: Wale und Walstrandungen in der Druckgraphik des 16. Jahrhunderts und ihr motivkundlicher Einfluss (Hamburg: Ernst Kable, 1991), and Klaus Barthelmess and Ingvar Svanberg, ‘Two Eighteenth-century Strandings of Sperm Whales (Physeter macrocephalus) on the Swedish Coast’, Archives of Natural History, XXXVI (2009), 63–9. A good contextual study is William E. Burns, An Age of Wonders: Prodigies, Politics and Providence in England, 1658–1727 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002). To the modern eye, however, the incident is more troubling, not least because it happened so close to the ‘Elysium’ that John Evelyn had constructed on the banks of the Thames.31The remains of the whale are on display in the Museum of Docklands. Its jawbones stood as a roadside arch in Dagenham, still remembered in the name of Whalebone Lane. For an account of an excavation of a Greenland right whale at Greenwich, see www.pre-construct.com/Specials/Greenwich_whale.htm (accessed 3 September 2013).

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Description: Travels: Whale in the Thames, June 1658 by Mundy, Peter

29. Peter Mundy, Travels: ‘Whale in the Thames, June 1658’. The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford (MS RAWL.A.315)

The drawing shows an Atlantic right whale (Eubalaena glacialis). At 58 feet, this whale would be close to the maximum length of 60 feet. Since the right whale spends much of its time in shallow coastal waters, it rarely ends up stranded; hence the storm of June 1658 may account for the anomalous appearance and stranding in the Thames near Greenwich. Drawing no. 2 depicts the tongue inflated and extended, which would have occurred after some decomposition. Drawing no. 3 is incorrect in showing the whale feeding on a shoal of fish, but correct in terms of the feeding mechanism: the baleen fringe (Evelyn’s ‘grates’). This filters out the microscopic copepods from seawater.

The layout of that ‘Elysium’ can be reconstructed from Evelyn’s plan of circa 1653 (pl. 27). Various links to the early formulation of his ‘Elysium Britannicum’ help in reconstructing pictures from the plan.32See Mark Laird, ‘Parterre, Grove and Flower Garden: European Horticulture and Planting Design in John Evelyn’s Time’, in John Evelyn’s ‘Elysium Britannicum’ and European Gardening, ed. Therese O’Malley and Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1998), 171–219. A new framework for understanding Evelyn’s Elysium Britannicum is provided by David Jacques, ‘The Compartiment System in Tudor England’, Garden History, XXVII/1 (Summer 1999), 32–53. See also Jan Woudstra, ‘What Is Edging Box? Towards Greater Authenticity in Garden Conservation Projects’, Garden History, XXXV/2 (Winter 2007), 229–42. The oval parterre, which was based on Pierre Morin’s garden in Paris, appears to be a complex fusion of French prototypes (see pl. 1). The grove reflects an Italian bosco and a French bosquet (see pl. 24). Indeed, the laurels, pines and olives of the Villa Borghese in Rome directly inspired the image of a Ver perpetuum of alaternus, bays, laurel and citrus in deepest Deptford. Evelyn aspired to a formal equilibrium, in which the weather merely affected a yearly renewal of anemones and tulips.

Yet that perennial order was less secure than a plan or other representations convey (pl. 30). The stranded cetacean and ominous weather are subversions from below and above. Picture the ‘Dock Yard at Deptford’ from the Isle of Dogs as a literal fish-eye view (pl. 31); take Johannes Vorsterman’s painting of Greenwich and Deptford as a literal bird’s-eye view (pl. 32). In the blink of an eyelid, Vorsterman’s heavenly clouds and golden evening light turn into an approaching storm, cold winds suddenly gusting from Hampstead, or transform themselves still further into that ‘Hellish and dismall Cloud of SEACOALE’33John Evelyn, Fumifugium; or, The Inconvenience of the Aer, and Smoake of London Dissipated (London, 1661), 18. issuing from the city. As Evelyn wrote in Fumifugium, smoke diffuses and spreads, becoming an

Avernus to Fowl, and kills our Bees and Flowers abroad, suffering nothing in our Gardens to bud, display themselves, or ripen; so as our Anemonies and many other choycest Flowers, will by no Industry be made to blow in London, or the Precincts of it, unlesse they be raised on a Hot-bed, and governed with extraordinary Artifice to accellerate their springing; imparting a bitter and ungrateful Tast to those few wretched Fruits, which never arriving to their desired maturity, seem, like the Apples of Sodome, to fall even to dust, when they are but touched.34Ibid., 20–21.

Even the elm avenue in the painting’s foreground, a perfect symbol of orderly planting, looks less absolute in the light of circumstantial evidence: His Majesty’s gardeners had appropriated these very trees from Sayes Court — ‘at least 40 of my very best’, grumbled Evelyn in a letter to Sir Richard Browne.35Add. MS 78219: Evelyn to Sir Richard Browne, 22 December 1665, quoted in Leith-Ross, ‘The Garden of John Evelyn at Deptford’, 146.

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Description: A Map of Deptford, extract by Evelyn, John

30. Extract from A Map of Deptford, 1623, from an original pen and ink sketch with additional remarks by John Evelyn, Esq., from William Bray, ed., Memoirs, Illustrative of the Life and Writings of John Evelyn . . . , 2nd edn, 2 vols (London, 1819). Private Collection

This plan (north to bottom) locates Sayes Court in Deptford, with the ‘K.s Ship Yarde’ and ‘great Dock’ along the Thames. Between the 1630s and 1660s Deptford doubled its population. In Evelyn’s day (1650s onwards) there lay, just outside his garden and behind the river frontage, storehouses with stockpiles of sailcloth, hemp, pitch and rope, and trunks kept wet in a mast-pond giving off a ‘continual flux of noxious Vapours’. When a south-easterly wind blew off the river, the garden must have suffered from a stench, whereas prevailing westerly winds frequently brought smoke from the city of London.

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Description: View of the Dock Yard at Deptford taken from the opposite Side of the Thames by...

31. ‘View of the Dock Yard at Deptford taken from the opposite Side of the Thames’. © The British Library Board (King’s MS 43, fols 65v–66r)

The view at the top is from the east, and the plans are orientated the same way, with north to the right. The plan at lower left shows the yard before the Revolution in 1688. The plan at lower right shows the same yard in 1698, following improvements since the Revolution. The fifty-two references relate to the 1698 plan, pointing to the ‘Mast Dock’ at 28, a ‘Pitch-house’ at 20, a ‘Mould Loft &c’ at 31, and many storehouses. John Evelyn’s Sayes Court garden lies hidden just behind the docks and the buildings of Deptford.

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Description: Greenwich from One Tree Hill, detail by Vorsterman, Jan

32. Johannes Vorsterman (1643–1699), Greenwich from One Tree Hill (detail), circa 1680, oil on canvas, 30 × 64 ½ in. (76 × 164 cm). © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London

Vorsterman’s symbolically golden bird’s-eye panorama shows the stretch of the River Thames between Greenwich (foreground) and Deptford (middle ground). It was here that the right whale had come aground and died in 1658. Sayes Court is glimpsed as greenery behind the docks. In the background, back-lit by the setting sun, is the city of London, usually under a pall of smoke as described by John Evelyn in his Fumifugium. In the foreground is part of the terraced landscape modelled after André Le Nôtre’s proposal of 1662. Forty elms were requisitioned from Evelyn’s Sayes Court to complement the thousands of lime trees planted in Greenwich Park by royal gardeners in 1665.

During his travels in Europe in ‘exile’ from the Commonwealth, Evelyn had seen wonderful and unsettling things. Beyond gardens like the Villa Aldobrandini in Frascati, which surpassed ‘the most delicious places that my eyes ever beheld’,36Evelyn, Diary, ed. De Beer, II, 392: 5 May 1645. and beyond antiquities like Posilipo with its crypt and Virgil’s tomb — ‘noble, and altogether wonderfull’37Ibid., II, 337–8: circa 8 February 1645. — lay many strange phenomena. For example, travelling by mule and scrambling on hands and feet to the summit of Vesuvius, he peered into an abyss: ‘I layd my selfe on my belly to looke over & into that most frightfull & terrible Vorago, a stupendious pit.’ In its centre, he saw a ‘hill shaped like a great browne loafe . . . continualy vomiting a foggy exhalation, & ejecting huge stones’.38Ibid., II, 332–6: circa 7 February 1645. The eruption of 1631 had left the countryside covered in ash and brimstone. On 21 November 1644 Evelyn visited the great Roman collector and scholar Cassiano dal Pozzo, and viewed his ‘true Carbuncle’ among rare stones, antiquities and drawings (pls 33 and 34).39Ibid., II, 277–8. These must have given him a taste of the ‘wholly new and ambiguous’.40See Douglas Chambers, ‘“Wholly New and Ambiguous”: The Discourse of Nature’, in A Celebration of John Evelyn, ed. Batey, 75–83, and especially 77, where he quotes from Francesco Stelluti’s work on fossilized minerals, Trattato del legno fossile minerale of 1637. Stelluti described this fossil research as ‘wholly new and ambiguous’. Indeed, as with dal Pozzo’s wider circle, ‘Evelyn’s imagination was caught by the “borderline” cases of natural phenomena’.41For a good account of Cassiano dal Pozzo and John Evelyn, see Maria Zytaruk, ‘Cabinets of Curiosities and the Organization of Knowledge’, University of Toronto Quarterly, LXXX/1 (Winter 2011), 1–23, and especially 20–21. He later called his tortoise a kind of ‘Plant-Animal’ because of its hibernation underground, rather like a bulb in winter.

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Description: Gems, stones and amulets by Unknown

33. Gems, stones and amulets, circa 1630 by an unidentified artist, from Cassiano dal Pozzo’s ‘Paper Museum’, watercolour and bodycolour with some silver and gold paint over black chalk, 15 ½ × 9 5⁄8 in. (39.3 × 24.4 cm). Royal Library, Windsor Castle (RL 25496). Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2013

The ‘Paper Museum’ of the antiquarian and collector Cassiano dal Pozzo (1588–1657) was a visual encyclopaedia of the ancient and natural worlds consisting of thousands of drawings and prints. Of the 7,000 surviving drawings, 2,500 are of natural history objects. This representation, one among a group of drawings of gems, minerals and semi-precious stones, depicts an arrangement typical of the curiosity cabinets that Evelyn saw on his visit to Rome in 1644. Most agates, jaspers and jades were believed to hold magical curative properties.

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Description: Anatomical details of the common or crested porcupine (Hystrix cristata) by...

34. Vincenzo Leonardi (attributed), anatomical details of the common or crested porcupine (Hystrix cristata), circa 1630–40, from Cassiano dal Pozzo’s ‘Paper Museum’, watercolour and bodycolour heightened with gum arabic over black chalk, 16 ⅛ × 8 ½ in. (41.1 × 21.8 cm). Royal Library, Windsor Castle (RL 19438). Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2013

The ‘Paper Museum’ was made available to scholars from all over Europe and facilitated an exchange of knowledge. Cassiano commissioned drawings of animals in Cardinal Barberini’s exotic collection in Rome. Wild porcupines were also common in southern Italy. Evelyn saw a living crested porcupine on show in London on 4 October 1658, and that captive creature could well be the same porcupine as the one painted by Alexander Marshal on folio 138 of his florilegium, now in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle.

In Padua in 1645 he acquired a hortus hyemalis or hortus siccus of plants from the physic garden.42Ibid., 21. Zytaruk explains that in notes for book three of Elysium Britannicum, which is largely lost, Evelyn supplied directions for assembling the hortus hyemalis (winter garden) as a hortus siccus. See Add. MS 78344, fol. 95v, for Evelyn’s seed cabinet in his ‘hortulan’ library. His hortus hyemalis of 1645 is British Library, MS JE C16. Maria Zytaruk discusses it in ‘ “Occasional Specimens, Not Compleate Systemes”: John Evelyn’s Culture of Collecting’, Bodleian Library Record, XVII (2002 for 2001), 189–91. He bought a set of ‘tables’ as an anatomical equivalent to the herbarium. These were dried relics from dissections: veins, nerves and arteries mounted on boards. Evelyn had the surgeon prepare another board of ‘the Lungs, liver, & Nervi sexti par: with the Gastric vaines, which I transported into England, the first of that kind’.43Evelyn, Diary, ed. De Beer, II, 475. Examples of such boards are kept at the Royal College of Physicians near Regent’s Park in London and these may be viewed on one of the days in the ‘Open Garden Squares Weekend’ every summer. Human organs, so arranged collectively as a Thesaurus anatomicus, could be a reminder of mortality as well as a ‘theatre’ of cures (pl. 35).

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Description: Frontispiece to Frederik Ruysch, Thesaurus anatomicus primus by Huyberts, Cornelis

35. Cornelis Huyberts, frontispiece to Frederik Ruysch, Thesaurus anatomicus, 1701–6, engraving. Wellcome Library, London (L0007581)

Frederik Ruysch (1638–1731), botanist and professor of anatomy in Amsterdam from 1685, developed ways to preserve human organs, which were displayed as anatomical specimens in five rooms of his house. In the Royal College of Physicians in London, similar panels of human tissues are still on display to this day. Ruysch’s collection had a strong emphasis on the vanitas theme of still-life art, with preserved organs and skeletons of small children creating affecting allegories of death.

The return journey through the Alps in May 1646, contrasting with his previous enjoyment of a ‘most serene heaven’ above the clouds in the Apennines, brought Evelyn to a hellish landscape.44Ibid., II, 208. It was quite unlike the sweetly contrived rocks and waters of Frascati and Tivoli. Heavy snow covered the crags. The mountain people were disfigured by goitres: ‘monstrous Gullets or Wenns of flesse . . . some . . . as big as an hundred pound bag of silver hanking under their Chinns’.45Ibid., II, 510. And in the town of Briga (now Brig, Switzerland), he found savage icons: ‘Every doore almost had nailed on the outside, & next the Streete, a Beares, Wolfes or foxes-head’.46Ibid., II, 515. In the weeks of May and June, struck down by smallpox, he struggled for his life. Recovering thereafter, he was afforded one grace throughout the lifelong outbreaks of smallpox at Sayes Court that took many of his offspring: IMMUNITY.

In the course of a long life, Evelyn would outlive all his children except his daughter Suzanne. At the age of seventy-nine he suffered the misfortune of losing his last remaining son, John, having lost his little son Richard forty years earlier: ‘but 5 yeares [5 months] and 3 days old . . . a prodigie for witt and understanding; for beauty of body a very Angel’.47Cited in Joseph M. Levine, ‘John Evelyn: Between the Ancients and the Moderns’, in John Evelyn’s ‘Elysium Britannicum’ and European Gardening, ed. Therese O’Malley and Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1998), 58. Both deaths coincided with ominous whale strandings from stormy weather, and thus frame Evelyn’s gardening life as a struggle with God as well as with Nature.

While the ‘extraordinary losse’ of Richard was the main upset in Evelyn’s household in 1658, the instability of weather was unsettling the garden at Sayes Court.48Darley, John Evelyn, 151–2; Harris, Transformations of Love, 47–8, who writes of a probable ‘malarial infection’ and of Evelyn’s sudden inner and outer transformation with a ‘peruq of Grey-haires’. Of the four children born since 1652, only one survived after 1658. This was John, who would also eventually pre-decease Evelyn, in 1699. The storm of 2 June 1658, which brought the whale’s portentous arrival, was followed by another on 30 August. It produced devastation in the form of a ‘tempestious Wind, which threw-downe my greatest trees at Says Court, & did much mischiefe all England over: It continued all night, till 3 afternoone next day, & was S. West, destroying all our winter fruit.’49Evelyn, Diary, ed. De Beer, III, 220. This was not an isolated incident. A few years later Evelyn jotted down an entry for 17 February 1662: ‘this night, & the next day fell such a storme of Haile, Thunder & lightning, as never was seene the like in any mans memorie; especialy the tempest of Wind, being South-west, which subverted besids huge trees, many houses, innumerable Chimnies, among other that of my parlor at Says Court’.50Ibid., III, 316. By 20 February 1662 he had ‘returned home to repaire my miserably shatt<er>ed house by the late Tempest’.51Ibid., III, 316–17.

Evelyn saw such vagaries of weather as a divine ‘judgement’. They were linked to other events, national as well as personal.52Harris, Transformations of Love, 47–8. Richard’s death was interpreted as a personal judgement: ‘God found me so unworthy to keepe him longer, in whom I had so great a felicity.’ Thus on 9 March 1667 he recorded: ‘Greate frosts, snow & winds, prodigious at the vernal æquinox; indeede it had hitherto ben a yeare of nothing but prodigies in this Nation: Plage, War, fire, raines, Tempest: Comets.’53Evelyn, Diary, ed. De Beer, III, 477. And a few years later, on 30 January 1671, he noted: ‘we have had a plague, a Warr, & such a fire, as never was the like in any nation since the overthrow of Sodome, and this very yeare so Wett, Stormy & unseasonable’.54Ibid., III, 569. The ability to interpret portents in weather was obviously increased in hindsight, when Evelyn was revising his diary. The reliability of his meteorological observations is, however, largely borne out by other contemporary accounts, which De Beer includes in his editorial notes.

‘Judgement upon the Land’: The Winter of 1683–1684

None of this could prepare Evelyn for a sequence of calamities twice visited upon his home and garden. The second arrived in his eighty-third year: the Great Storm of 1703. The first came in his mid-sixties, when he was forced to admit: ‘’tis late for me to begin new paradises’.55Quoted from Harris, Transformations of Love, 299–300. It all started with just a hint of ensuing trouble — the entry in his diary of 20 December 1683: ‘I went to Deptford, return’d the 22d in very cold & severe weather: My poore Servant Humphry Prideaux being falln sick of the small-pox some days before:’56Evelyn, Diary, ed. De Beer, IV, 357. On 23 December he recorded: ‘This night died my poore excellent servant of the small pox . . . It was exceedingly mortal at this time; & the season was unsufferably cold. The Thames frozen, &c.’57Ibid.

On 24 January 1684 the impact of a month of bitter weather was beginning to tell. Evelyn painted a vivid picture — a scene confirmed by Hondius’s Frost Fair (pls 36a–c):

The frost still continuing more & more severe, the Thames before London was planted with bothes in formal streetes, as in a Citty, or Continual faire, all sorts of Trades & shops furnished, & full of Commodities, even to a Printing presse . . . There was likewise Bull-baiting, Horse & Coach races, Pupet-plays & interludes, Cookes & Tipling, & lewder places; so as it seem’d to be a bacchanalia, Triumph or Carnoval on the Water, whilst it was a severe Judgement upon the Land.

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Description: A Frost Fair on the Thames at Temple Stairs, detail by Hondius, Abraham

36a. Abraham Hondius, The Frost Fair of 1684 (detail), oil on canvas, 26 ⅜ × 44 in. (66.9 × 111.9 cm). © Museum of London

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36b. Abraham Hondius, The Frost Fair of 1684 (detail), oil on canvas, 26 ⅜ × 44 in. (66.9 × 111.9 cm). © Museum of London

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36c. Abraham Hondius, The Frost Fair of 1684 (detail), oil on canvas, 26 ⅜ × 44 in. (66.9 × 111.9 cm). © Museum of London

Evelyn’s account is supported by much of what appears in Hondius’s painting, notably the shops and printing press (A), but the painter provides further evidence of activities on the ice. On the right of the painting, in front of the circular Temple Church, a large crowd has gathered, observing what appear to be military manoeuvres (C). Three cannon are being fired, perhaps on the visit of King Charles II and family on 31 January 1684. On the left is a ‘whirling sledge’ to the rear with a large sledge pulled by horses in the foreground (B). The street of tents (named ‘Temple Street’) leads from the south bank of the Thames to the Middle Temple. The tents were made of blankets stretched over the oars of watermen. A printing booth was midway along, while outside the street ninepins was played and drivers were plying their trade in a ‘Drum Boat’, sledges and coaches.

He continued with an account of the nipping and choking effects:

. . . the Trees not onely splitting as if lightning-strock. . . . The fowle [Fish] & birds, & all our exotique Plants & Greenes universaly perishing; many Parks of deere destroied . . . London, by reason of the excessive coldnesse of the aire, hindring the ascent of the smoke, was so filld with the fuliginous steame of the Sea-Coale, that hardly could one see crosse the streete, & this filling the lungs with its grosse particles exceedingly obstructed the breast, so as one could scarce breath.58Ibid., IV, 361–3.

It was not until 4 February, however, that Evelyn saw the damage in the garden first hand:

I went to Says-Court to see how the frost & rigorous weather had dealt with my Garden, where I found many of the Greenes & rare plants utterly destroied; The Oranges & Myrtils very sick, the Rosemary & Lawrell dead to all appearance, but the Cypresse like to indure it out.59Ibid., IV, 364–5.

His record of that winter destruction formed the basis of his report to the Royal Society ‘concerning the dammage done to his Gardens by the preceding Winter’.60Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, XIV (1684), 559–63. The ‘abstract of a Letter’ is dated 14 April 1684. He began by observing how it was largely overgrown oaks that suffered among English ‘Timber Trees’. His elms of ‘about 25 and 30 years standing’ were untouched, and the limes, walnuts, ash, beech, hornbeams and chestnuts came though unscathed. He continued:

As for Exotics, I fear my Cork-trees will hardly recover . . . The Constanioplitan [sic] or Horse Chesnut [sic] is turgid with buds, and ready to explain its leaf. My Cedars I think are lost: The Ilex and scarlet Oak not so; The Arbutus doubtful, and so are Bays, but some will escape, and most of them repullulate and spring afresh if cut down near the Earth, at the latter end of the month . . . Amongst our Shrubs, Rosemary is intirely lost, and to my great sorrow; because I had not only beautiful hedges of it, but sufficient to afford me flowers for making a considerable quantity of the Queen of Hungaries celebrated Water; . . . Halimus or Sea Pursellan (of which I had a pretty hedge) is also perish’d, and so another of French Furse; the Cypress are all of them scorch’d, and some to death, especially such as were kept shorn in pyramids; but amongst great numbers, there will divers escape, after they are well chastiz’d, that is, with a tough hazel or other wand to beat off their dead and dusty leaves . . .61Ibid., 560.

His accounting balanced survival against loss: the ‘Savin’ (Juniperus sabina), which he saw as the best substitute for cypress, did not suffer at all; the laurestinus looked ‘suspiciously’; the two types of Phillyrea (forming the best evergreen hedges he knew) were only tarnished in the leaf; but the old Alaternus were killed off, especially those exposed to the sun, though there was a chance of rescuing some by cutting back to the ground. Anticipating what Gilbert White would ascertain a hundred years later, he deduced that the alternations between frost and sun were more detrimental than a constant cold under shade. This applied to his holly hedges on the south side as opposed to the north side.

After working his way through greenhouse plants, fruit trees, espaliers, esculent plants and salads, Evelyn turned to animals:

My Tortoise (which by his constant burying himself in the Earth at the approach of Winter I look upon as a kind of Plant-Animal) hapning to be obstructed by a Vine-root, from mining to the depth, he was usually wont to interr, is found stark dead, after having for many years escaped the severest Winter. Of Fish I have lost very few; and the Nightingale (which for being a short wing’d Bird, and so exceeding fat, at the time of the year, we commonly suppose them to change the Climate, whereas indeed they are then hardly able to flee an hundred yards) are as brisk and frolic as ever . . .62Ibid., 562–3.

Given the date of this account (his ‘Rhapsody of such Observations’ — 14 April 1684), and given Gilbert White’s records of the nightingale’s return in mid-April, it seems likely that Evelyn had correctly observed the migrant’s arrival (though he knew none among ornithologists who gave a satisfactory confirmation that they ‘change the Climate’). By contrast, those birds like the yellowhammer that remained in England may have been caught out by the severity of the cold and perished (pl. 37).

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Description: Study of a dead yellowhammer (Emberiza citrinella) by Marshal, Alexander

37. Alexander Marshal, study of a dead yellowhammer (Emberiza citrinella), watercolour and bodycolour with white heightening on vellum, 4 5⁄8 × 6 ⅜ in. (11.9 × 16 cm). Royal Library, Windsor Castle (RL 24426C). Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2013

Among the supplementary drawings at the end of Alexander Marshal’s florilegium (1650s–1682), now at Windsor Castle, is a group of eight studies that appear to have been conceived as still-life cabinet miniatures. Unlike Marshal’s study of the dead jay (which was clearly shot, see pl. 49), the dead yellowhammer could have been trapped, or perhaps died a ‘natural’ death from old age, or perhaps perished in the bitter cold of one of the Frost Fair winters before Marshal’s own death in 1682.

On the first day of the new year, 1685, Evelyn prayed for blessings and benefits, but felt a chill wind blowing once again: ‘I implord the continuance of Gods mercy & providence for the yeare now enter’d . . . It proved so sharp weather and so long & cruel frost that the Thames was frozen crosse.’63Evelyn, Diary, ed. De Beer, IV, 402. By 3 February 1685 he had mustered the energy to draft a plan revising the garden layout in the light of the damage from the previous winter. Just a month later, however, and before any fruit planting could begin, he recorded on 7 March: ‘Newes coming to me that my Daughter Mary was falln ill of the Small Pox, I hastned home full of apprehensions.’64Ibid., IV, 420. A week later she had ‘rendred [up] her soule to the Lord Jesus’.65Ibid. She was nineteen. John and his wife Mary were distraught beyond measure.

Even as the harsh winter conditions subsided and Evelyn set about planting in the spring of 1685, gardening conditions were as difficult as the desolation of home life. On 24 May, for example, he noted: ‘We had hithertoo [not] any raine for many monethes, insomuch as the Caterpillar had already devoured all the Winter fruite through the whole land, & even killed severall greate & old trees; such two Winters, & Summers I had never known.’66Ibid., IV, 446. Only by 28 June had conditions improved: ‘We had now plentifull Raine after two yeares excessive drowth, & severe winters.’67Ibid., IV, 450. But the damage to the sturdy oaks was such that ‘some Ages will hardly repair’.68John Evelyn, Silva; or, A Discourse of Forest-Trees (London, 1706), 200.

On 27 July that summer, another daughter, Betty, brought further distress into the desolation of her parents’ home: ‘This night when we were all asleepe went my Daughter Eliz: away, to meete a young fellow, nephew to Sir Jo: Tippet (Surveyor of the Navy: & one of the Commissioners) whom she married the next day being Tuesday.’ Just weeks later Evelyn would enter in his diary that his ‘undutifull daughter’, though nursed by his ‘disconsolate Wife’, had died of smallpox; ‘thus in lesse than 6 moneths were we depriv’d of two Children for our unworthinesse, & causes best known to God’.69Evelyn, Diary, ed. De Beer, IV, 460–64.

The Little Ice Age and the ‘Contours of Mortality’

What Evelyn would never know was that he was trying to garden at the end of the Little Ice Age. This did not mean that it was universally cold, simply that with cooler temperatures there also came an enhanced variability of the temperature level. Heat could be one variable, as the hot summers of Plague and Fire (1665 and 1666) proved.70H. H. Lamb, Climate, History and the Modern World (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 229: ‘The well-known occurrence of very hot summer weather in the two summers of 1665 and 1666, when London experienced its last great epidemic of the plague which ended with the great fire that burnt the city in September 1666, occurred in the middle of the coldest century of the last millennium.’ December 1676 was cold enough for the Thames to freeze over, yet the summer of 1676 was amongst the hottest on record. Overall, temperatures in 1695 were enough to reduce the growing season by at least two months, yet good harvests occurred from 1685 to 1690.

Cold was, however, clearly the dominant extreme. Between 1670 and 1700 the long-term average winter temperatures for central England were sufficiently cold to suggest that the normal number of days with snow lying was twenty to thirty per year. In one location in southern England that figure rose to 102 days in the winter of 1657–8, making sense of Evelyn’s remarks on 2 June 1658 (the day before the whale arrived): the six months of northerly winds. The great winter of 1683–4 was especially remarkable for one record: in Somerset the ground was frozen to a depth of nearly 4 feet as a result of being snow-free. The implications of these figures for harvests and health are obvious, though complicated. The vernal fever that followed the bitter winter of 1658 brought catarrh, feverish distemper and high mortality (although, interestingly, the winter of 1683–4 brought no epidemics). Despite good harvests at the end of the 1680s, the yearly number of burials still exceeded births from the 1660s until about 1730.71These figures are extracted from ibid., 228–32, and with reference to Mary Dobson’s book cited below.

Of course, mortality followed not just complex meteorological patterns, but also the contours of geographical zones. The low-lying marshes of south-east England — what have been called the ‘sinks of disease, the depths of death’72Mary Dobson, Contours of Death and Disease in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 2. — comprised one such zone. Sayes Court on the Thames at Deptford sat in a geographical as well as meteorological matrix of death and disease. This was at the moment when Fellows of the Royal Society — Wren, Hooke, Locke, Boyle and Evelyn — began to develop the rain gauge, thermometers, barometers, the wind recorder and hygroscope for measuring the weather and the disease–weather relationship.73Ibid., 19. See also Richard Hamblyn, The Invention of Clouds: How an Amateur Meteorologist Forged the Language of the Skies (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2001), especially 43 (Descartes’ work on clouds, and the development of the thermometer and barometer) and 12–34 (Robert Hooke’s engagement with ‘A Method for Making a History of the Weather’, 1665). Yet advances in science could do nothing to ameliorate the polluting vapours trapped among dockland and marshland that were also breeding grounds for malarial mosquitoes. In a reconstructed ‘olfactory map’ for the Evelyn period, Sayes Court lies by the docks at the confluence of London’s ‘smoky airs & foul smells’ and the Thames estuary’s ‘bad airs & noxious smells’. ‘Confined airs & filthy smells’, as well as ‘pestiferous airs & lousy smells’, follow the Thames out of London (pl. 38 and cf. pl. 30). In other words, the inhabitants benefitted little from the fresh air of the surrounding hills. No wonder John Evelyn suggested in his Fumifugium of 1661 that industry be placed behind the ‘Mountain’ of Greenwich.

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Description: Plan of the county of Essex, detail by Morden, Robert

38. Plan of the county of Essex by Robert Morden (detail), circa 1700. Harvard University, Pusey Map Library

Deptford is shown (bottom left) in relationship to Greenwich and London. The map also shows a large area of marsh between East Ham and Purfleet, the source (with docks and channels) of what Evelyn called ‘Agues, & other malignant distempers’. In spite of Evelyn’s care to keep his own ditches and channels clean, malarial mosquitoes were not entirely removed from the area until the Thames marshes were drained two centuries later.

When writing ‘Elysium Britannicum’, Evelyn tried to make sense of the weather as a set of conditions that could be predicted in part. Thus, for example, the winds had certain properties, the causes of which could be scientifically studied and the effects of which were all too familiar to the ordinary gardener. Starting from first principles, he stated the general effect of one wind or another, noting that accident or contingency played a role:

The Wind is onely an agitation of the particles of Aire, or rather a flux thereof, caused by the plenty of exhalations, attributed to the external and internal operations of heate upon the terraqueus Globe, and imbu’d with the qualities of the vapours through which . . . {it} passes; so as the same winds are . . . {wholesome} and insalubrous according to {the variety of} accidents; sometymes wafting cold and nitrous atomes, blasts, and medews producing wormes, killing . . . nipping, scorching . . . {and} retarding the beauty and maturitie of our flowers and fruite, when they seeme to flatter us with the fairest expectations.74John Evelyn, ‘Elysium Britannicum; or, The Royal Gardens in Three Books’, Add MS 78342, fol. 18v. See Evelyn, Elysium Britannicum; or, The Royal Gardens, ed. John E. Ingram (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 45–6.

The east wind was ‘one of the most noxious winds to our Gardens (whatever Virgils’ counsell be concerning the site of Vineyards) as frequently blowing so long at the Spring that it nipps and dries the flowers and blossoms of our choycest fruits.’ In contrast, there was ‘the West and genial Zephyre, the most benigne and temperate of all’.75Evelyn, ‘Elysium Britannicum’, fol. 22; Elysium Britannicum, ed. Ingram, 46. Wind was, in effect, tied to everything that concerned Evelyn in matters of purity and wholesomeness. Yet, significantly, the same Zephyr wind brought unwholesome city smoke to Deptford.

There were various ways in which the gardener could monitor circumstances. First, he could use instruments to measure or forecast adverse conditions. And second, he could observe the signs. A primitive form of hygroscope is described in the following marginal note of ‘Elysium Britannicum’ (pl. 39a):

Take ye stipula or spirall beard of ye wild Oate {vine}, or rather . . . the cod of a wild Vetch, place it on a style, as in ye fig: A.B. so as one extreame may be fix’d on a piece of a stick or the like; then put on the other point of it: viz. B. a small . . . slip of paper form’d like a magnetic index viz, B.C. placd horizontaly on A. Touch this Oate beard or Vetch wth the least . . . moisture & ’twill untwist itselfe so as to move the Needle; wch when dry will revert the contrary way again.76Evelyn, ‘Elysium Britannicum’, fol. 21v; Elysium Britannicum, ed. Ingram, 46.

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Description: A hygroscope to detect the degrees of wett & dry, or any change of Weather by...

39a. John Evelyn, a ‘hygroscope’ to ‘detect the degrees of wett & dry, or any change of Weather’; pen and ink drawing from Elysium Britannicum’. © The British Library Board (Add. MS 78342, fol 21v)

Evelyn’s primitive form of hygroscope used a wild oat, vine or vetch stalk. For his thermoscope or weather glass, he wrote of the green water being propelled up the tube in warm weather and sinking by condensation in cooler weather: ‘These Instruments are most certaine & usefull in the Summer, Spring and Autumne.’ The device allowed the gardener to decorate the garden with ‘an ingenious variety’ and to ‘become very knowing in the judgment & disposition of the Aer’.

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Description: How to contrive a Thermoscope or Weather-Glass for a Garden by Evelyn, John

39b. John Evelyn, ‘How to contrive a Thermoscope or Weather-Glass for a Garden’; pen and ink drawing from Elysium Britannicum’. © The British Library Board (Add. MS 78342, fol 189r)

In a later section of ‘Elysium Britannicum’, Evelyn wrote instructions on How to contrive a Thermoscope or whe{a}ther-Glasse for a Garden (pl. 39b). These began: ‘Make a Siphon or Tube of Glasse straight or Tortuous like to some winding Stalke, or Convolvulus’, and ended: ‘We have severall formes of these Weather-glasses, placed artificially in Rock-worke, the water for better distinction . . . {tinged} greene’.77Evelyn, ‘Elysium Britannicum’, fol. 189; Elysium Britannicum, ed. Ingram, 251.

Evelyn balanced empirical observation and gardening lore with some respect for the influence of celestial bodies. He claimed in one separate insertion: ‘I am no friend to Astrological nicities in these matters; & that generally warme & moist weather is [certainly] the best for all these . . . operations what ever the Aspect or Signe be’.78Evelyn, ‘Elysium Britannicum’, fol. 30v; Elysium Britannicum, ed. Ingram, 56. At the same time, he acknowledged that:

as the Moone is of all the rest neerest to the Earth; so hath she a very greate influence upon the Labours and endeavors of our Gardiner, during the intire course of her periodic moneth. . . . for Seedes committed to the Earth at the end or beginning of the Moone, produce lusty and goodly plants, those in the full Low, & Shrubby.79Evelyn, ‘Elysium Britannicum’, fols 31–31v; Elysium Britannicum, ed. Ingram, 57.

Thus, on 19 February 1653 he followed the astrological and meteorological indicators: ‘I planted the Ortchard at Sayes-Court, New Moone, wind West.’80Evelyn, Diary, ed. De Beer, III, 81. But, just to be sure as an insurance policy, his ‘300 fruit trees of the best sorts mingled’ were ‘warranted for 3 yeares upon a bond of 20 pound’.81Add. MS 78628A: plan of Sayes Court, [1653?], key no. 118.

The Revisions of 1685 and the ‘Directions’ of 1686

Whatever astrological or empirical precautions Evelyn had observed in 1653, he could scarcely have predicted the course of events some thirty years later. In the winter of 1683–4 it was not so much the orchard that suffered as the elaborate parterre of Continental aspiration. Here the youthful confidence of the ideal plan of the 1650s can be measured against the seasoned revision of February 1685 — a revision that surveys of the 1690s suggest was implemented (pls 40 and 41 and cf. pl. 27).

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Description: Plan of the southern part of the garden at Sayes Court by Evelyn, John

40. John Evelyn, plan of the southern part of the garden at Sayes Court, showing the changes from the former parterre, dated 3 February 1685, with north to bottom. © The British Library Board (Add. MS 78628B)

While the banqueting house of the plan of circa 1653 was retained and enlarged (top centre), the oval parterre (see pls 1 and 27) and part of the great orchard were removed. The semicircle of the bowling green was edged with holly to complement the holly hedge bordering the mount and ‘lower grass walk’ (bottom left and right). Fruit trees were planted in the two spandrels. These trees, each individually numbered or lettered on the plan, included twelve named varieties of cherries and twenty-one pear cultivars. Between the trees were inserted gooseberry and currant bushes, with strawberries in the borders and violets along the south pale and around the half circle.

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Description: Part of the plan of the manor of Sayes Court by Grove, John

41. Part of plan of the manor of Sayes Court, attributed to John Grove, 1690–1700, with north to bottom. © The British Library Board (K. Top. XVIII. 17.3)

This plan, along with another survey of the 1690s, confirms the layout of the semicircular bowling-green with spandrels for fruit trees. Both surveys indicate that a second grove had been laid out adjacent to the (apparently simplified) original grove, thereby emphasizing the central axis between them. A third grove is also shown to the north-west corner of the site, where in the 1650s there had been ‘an extravagant place mangled by digging Gravell’. While the extent of the orchards was reduced, the areas of lawn had been substantially increased, creating a need for a weekly mowing regime in summer.

The major sacrifice to create the half-circle bowling green and orchards involved the uprooting of the oval garden — Evelyn’s ‘Morin Garden’. At the centre of that oval, the circular parterre had been composed of box broderie combined with twelve flowerbeds (see again pls 1 and 27). Eight cypress trees had stood as sentinels around a mount with a sundial, and an additional twenty-four cypress trees had been used to punctuate every junction of parterre, grass plats and gravel walks. These cypress cones or pyramids were victims of the bitter cold, along with hedges of rosemary, sea purslane and French furze or gorse. From every point of view (including ‘economy’, as Mary Evelyn hoped), it made sense to simplify. At the age of sixty-four, after thirty years of gardening, Evelyn appeared to see the advantages of home-grown as opposed to imported ways; and, in the light of the winter of 1683–4, his mind was turning to the efficacy of greenhouse technology (pl. 42).

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Description: Portrait of John Evelyn: Holding my Sylva in my right hand by Kneller, Godfrey

42. Sir Godfrey Kneller, Portrait of John Evelyn: ‘Holding my Sylva in my right hand’, 1689, oil on canvas, 33 ⅛ × 27 in. (84 × 68.5 cm). Private Collection. Photograph courtesy of Sotheby’s Picture Library

This portrait was painted at the request of Samuel Pepys. Evelyn’s daughter Susanna found it ‘very like & finely painted’. By that point in his life, Evelyn had published three editions of Sylva — in 1664, 1670 and 1679 — and by 1686 he was directing the gardener Mosse on mowing operations in a new Sayes Court. Between his viewing of a greenhouse’s new ‘subterranean heate’ at Chelsea Physic Garden in 1685 and the 1691 edition of Kalendarium Hortense, Evelyn’s attention turned to greenhouse technology.

To what extent this reflected a gradual shift in personal taste or in English gardening style remains conjectural.82See my discussion of the shift from the plan of the 1650s to the layout of the 1690s in Laird, ‘Parterre, Grove and Flower Garden’, 215–19. But, in constructing a grand, simple, axial layout of lawn, hedgework and fruit trees, Evelyn resorted to the very hardy holly for the new hedging. He eliminated topiary, broderie and tender exotics. The predominant fruits were cherries around the half-circle, dwarf pears in the east triangle, golden pippin and damsons along the north-facing wall, peaches, apricots, figs and vines along the west-facing wall, and vines along the south-facing wall by the lower grass walk.83The best account of the fruit plantings is in Prudence Leith-Ross, ‘Fruit Planted around a New Bowling Green at John Evelyn’s Garden at Sayes Court, Deptford, Kent, in 1684/5’, Garden History, XXI/1 (Spring 2003), 29–33. In the west triangle he could take advantage of existing trees retained from part of the old orchard. It can be assumed that he still chose a propitious day of Zephyr winds and new moon to plant fruit and vines, which held the promise of a Golden Age.

Of course, it was one thing to deal with a cataclysm in the garden; quite another to go on fighting the daily battles against weeds, moles and other subterfuges. Every encounter with an organism or organic processes had a corresponding instrument (pls 43 and 44). The drudgery of such diurnal and seasonal encounters in the garden is illustrated by the upkeep of the bowling-green grass. The bowling green was on the circuit of routine gardening tasks formulated in Evelyn’s ‘Directions’. These were written for Jonathan Mosse, who was taken on as an apprentice gardener for six years on 24 June 1686. Thus, for example, on any given Monday in the summer, Mosse would rise before sunrise. Evelyn recorded the sun as coming up at 3.51 in June.84John Evelyn, Kalendarium hortense, incorporated into Silva, 4th edn (1706), 243: entry for June. Mosse would follow the instructions:

Early, before the deaw be off in Mowing season, and as his grasse is growne too high (that is, if any daiysie or like appeare) he is to cut the grasse of the greate Court, & roll all the gravell: having rolled also the carpet, the Saturday night before, and this Monday evening the upper Terrace & lower.85John Evelyn, Directions for the Gardiner at Says-Court But which may be of Use for Other Gardens, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford: Nonesuch Press, 1938), 96.

Presumably, then, because Sunday was a church day, it was necessary to prepare for mowing before sundown on the Saturday. Evelyn recorded the sun as setting at 8.09 in June. Clearly, daisies studded the chemical-free lawn; clearly, worm casts had to be prevented from studding the ‘carpet’ (pl. 45a).

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Description: Garden tools and implements (nos. 1–35) by Evelyn, John

43. John Evelyn, garden tools and implements (nos. 1–35), pen and ink drawing from ‘Elysium Britannicum’. © The British Library Board (Add. MS 78342, fol. 57v)

Along with the spades, rakes, forks and hoes of the upper rank, Evelyn illustrated all those ‘Instruments’ involved in lawn care in the lower ranks. The most important was the scythe (29), which the gardener Jonathan Mosse wielded every morning for summer mowing. Given the early dawns and dusks of the early modern world, Mosse was early to rise and quick to bed. Every night before mowing he used the roller (31) to flatten the grass blades on which the dew would settle. Rammers (33) helped make the surface of lawns even, so that a carpet could be restored against the ‘subversions’ of worm and mole.

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Description: Garden tools and implements (nos. 36–70) by Evelyn, John

44. John Evelyn, garden tools and implements (nos. 36–70), pen and ink drawing from ‘Elysium Britannicum’. © The British Library Board (Add. MS 78342, fol. 58r)

The foist or watering truck (43) was a crucial ‘Instrument’ in lawn care, and its spray could also destroy caterpillar infestations. Because of its flexibility and its mimicry of rain, Evelyn regarded it as ‘the most elegant, usefull, and Philosophicall’ of the gardener’s implements. More selective watering was undertaken with ‘watering potts’ (42). ‘Mole-Graines . . . Field Traps . . . And Samson Post Netts’ for the ‘destruction of Birds & Vermine’ are shown under 67 (bottom right corner). The instrument for whetting the scythe, sickles and billhooks, illustrated above, is at 56 (centre right).

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Description: Marginal illustration of a shover by Evelyn, John

45a. Marginal illustration of a ‘shover’ from ‘Elysium Britannicum’. © The British Library Board (Add. MS 78342, fol. 55)

Special attention was given to two lowly creatures that caused havoc: the earthworm, and the caterpillar that Evelyn called the ‘cursed Devourer’. Worm casts had to be scraped off the ‘carpet’ or lawn with a ‘shover’ before rolling and mowing; those casts were also good as manure. The ‘pair of Reachers’ used in picking fruit is no. 35. Evelyn wrote that ‘Reachers’ could be from 10 to 20 feet in length. Apart from their use in fruit harvesting, and clipping arbours or tall hedges, these instruments could reach ‘inaccessible twiggs on which the Caterpillars do fasten their webbs’.

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Description: Garden tools and implements, detail by Evelyn, John

45b. Detail from John Evelyn, garden tools and implements, pen and ink drawing from ‘Elysium Britannicum’. © The British Library Board (Add. MS 78342, fol. 57v)

The lawns were rolled a night or two before mowing to take advantage of the weight of the dew (pl. 45b). Each blade of grass, bent over by the roller, would remain prone as long as the dew persisted — perhaps an hour or so after dawn. The blade of the freshly whetted scythe would find resistance against the dew-heavy blades of grass. In this way, Mosse would proceed to mow the upper and lower terrace near the bowling green first thing on Tuesday morning. In fact, he would reach the bowling green itself only the following Monday, after the round of the fountain and greenhouse lawns, the grass walks of the groves, the long promenade of more than 400 feet to the island, and what Evelyn called the ‘three former crosse grasse walkes’.86Ibid., 97. Once again, before the start of that second week, Mosse rolled the bowling-green lawn on Saturday evening. Given the size of this lawn, it would require him to return to the task on two consecutive mornings before the scything was complete. The effect of the regimen was to ensure that every part received regular attention: ‘And thus alternatively may all the Grasse & Walkes be rolled, & cut once a fortnight, with ease: that is the grasse every 15 dayes, & the gravell rolled twice every six dayes.’87Ibid., 98. Finer watering with pot and finer pruning with shears were also desirable when it came to parterre and flower garden.

What the lawns looked like on 4 May 1694 — that momentous day when Evelyn finally left Sayes Court in Deptford and moved back to the family estate in Wotton in Surrey — is a matter of conjecture. Statistical data record the summer as a cold one in central England. But just twelve days before leaving, Evelyn noted in his diary for 22 April: ‘I return’d this Evening home, it being an extraordinary hot season.’ There was a ‘firy exhalation rising out of the sea in Montgomery-shire . . . burning all Straw, hay, Thatch, grasse’.88Evelyn, Diary, ed. De Beer, V, 174. The chances are high, then, that less than a fortnight later the grass was more yellowish than green. After forty years of gardening it would have been a sorry sight: a parched bowling green in springtime when the apples and pears were in blossom.

There was one device that could offset drought: the foist or watering truck (see again pl. 44). And, during a dry spell, Mosse would doubtless resort to it at the expense of other tasks. Because it could mimic rain and destroy noxious caterpillars, it was described in ‘Elysium Britannicum’ in rather charming terms: ‘In summ, of all the Gardiners Instruments, this . . . is the most elegant, usefull, and Philosophicall’.89Evelyn, ‘Elysium Britannicum’, fol. 56; see Elysium Britannicum, ed. Ingram, 89.

From the ‘Directions’ of 1686 to the Kalendarium Hortense of 1691

If drought was an environmental impact of periodic nature, weeds were a perennial and seasonal curse. One section of the ‘Directions’ was devoted to ‘Weeding, Howing, Rolling, &c’ and reads as follows:

Above all, be carefull not to suffer weedes (especially Nettles, Dendelion, Groundsill, & all downy-plants) to run up to seede; for they will in a moment infect the whole ground: wherefore, whatever work you neglect, ply weeding at the first peeping of ye Spring. Malows, Thistles, Beane-bind, Couch, must be grubb’d up and the ground forked & diligently pick’d.

Whatever you How-up, rake-soone away off the ground, for most weedes will run to seede, and some rootes fasten againe in the ground: . . .

Ground, walkes & Carpet grasse is best Rolled after soaking raines: the worme-casts pared off becomes good mould: These Carpet grasse walkes & Greenes, should also be sometimes beaten in moist seasons with a broad Rammer where the grasse rises in Tufts, & the ground uneven.

Mould made of rotted weedes, infects the ground againe where it is used.90Evelyn, Directions for the Gardiner, 80–81.

Along with watering, mowing, rolling and weeding, the gardener was expected to deal with whatever conspired to vex him: strong winds knocking down flowers, moles throwing up molehills or birds pecking at blossoms. Indeed, it was the first duty of the week to assess damage or trouble. Consequently, Mosse was instructed:

The Gardiner should walke aboute the whole Gardens every Monday-morning duely, not omitting the least corner, and so observe what Flowers or Trees & plants want staking, binding and redressing, watering, or are in danger; especialy after greate stormes, & high winds and then immediately to reforme, establish, shade, water &c what he finds amisse, before he go about any other work.91Ibid., 96.

One section of the ‘Directions’ is entitled ‘Vermine & Diseases’. It introduces all that can afflict the garden, along with the appropriate remedies. John Worlidge had published a calendar of interventions in 1668, which set a model for Evelyn: ‘January: set traps to destroy vermin. February: pick up all the snails you can find, and destroy frogs and their spawn. March: the principal time of the year for the destruction of moles. April: gather up worms and snails. May: kill ivy. June: destroy ants. July: kill . . . wasps, flies’.92Quoted from Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 274–5. Following Evelyn’s Kalendarium hortense of 1691 and using the tools depicted in ‘Elysium Britannicum’, Mosse would prosecute his business by such a monthly regimen.

In January, for example, when the sun rose at 8 and set at 4.06, he would be expected to set traps for vermin, notably mice. Field traps could be rather like a modern mousetrap: ‘the wrire springs fastned with threid boiled in oate meale’.93Evelyn, ‘Elysium Britannicum’, fol. 57; Elysium Britannicum, ed. Ingram, 92. Or they might resemble a cage. By 1618, for example, an elaborate ‘portcullis’ type had come on the market.94See Anthony Huxley, An Illustrated History of Gardening (London: Papermac, 1983), 173. Or they could be enticed into netting — what Evelyn calls ‘Samsons Posts Netts’ (see again pl. 44). Or, indeed, they might be lured near their ‘Haunts’ by a bait: ‘A Paste made of course Honey, wherein is mingled Green-glass beaten, with Copperas’.95Evelyn, Kalendarium hortense, 224: entry for January. See also Directions for the Gardiner, 82–3.

By March it would be Mosse’s duty to eliminate moles. Evelyn’s picture of ‘Mole-Graines’ and tubes is not especially graphic, but a woodcut of 1590 demonstrates a vicious device that looks like a turnstile within the mole tunnel. On pushing through, the mole was lacerated by sharp blades released by the action. In April Mosse would follow the instructions in the Kalendarium hortense: ‘Gather up Worms and Snails after Evening Showers’. He would also take preventative action: ‘Soot-Ashes, refuse Sweepings of Tobacco-Stalks, made into a fine Powder, or Dust, and strewed half an Inch in thickness at the foot of Trees, and now and then renewed, prevents Pismires and other crawling Insects, from invading the Fruit, &c.’96Evelyn, Kalendarium hortense, 233–4: entry for April. The pismire, an ant, was so named from the urinous smell of the anthill.

A good deal of effort would be expended from July to September keeping insects and birds from fruit. An especially flexible tool for dealing with infestations and picking fruit was what Evelyn described as ‘A paire of Reachers’ (see again pl. 45b).97Evelyn, ‘Elysium Britannicum’, fol. 55; see Elysium Britannicum, ed. Ingram, 97. Apart from its use in clipping arbours or tall hedges, this device could reach ‘inaccessible twiggs on which the Caterpillars do fasten their webbs’.98Evelyn, ‘Elysium Britannicum’, fol. 55v; Elysium Britannicum, ed. Ingram, 97. The gardener Mosse thus cleansed the orchards of caterpillars in the early summer, thereafter converting the tool to pick fruit at the end of the summer. William Lawson in A New Orchard and Garden of 1618 wrote that, for harvesting, the fruit picker should have ‘a gathering apron like a poake before you, made of purpose, or a wallet hung on a bough, or a basket with a sive bottome or skin bottome, with lathes or splinters under, hung in a rope to pull up and downe’.99Quoted from Huxley, An Illustrated History of Gardening, 124.

The Double Identity of Insects and Birds: Drawing a Line in the Garden

Evelyn might view the caterpillar as a ‘cursed Devourer’, but the butterfly ranked as one of ‘the flying flowers of our Elysium’ (pls 46a and b).100Evelyn, ‘Elysium Britannicum’, fol. 230v; Elysium Britannicum, ed. Ingram, 299. Whether the butterfly was alive or dead, it represented the curious and the collectable, as precious as a tulip. Indeed, every insect had a double identity: noxious and despicable, yet wonderful in construction, industry and power. Take the butterfly’s wings, ‘whose colours mocks the skill of the painter to imitate’;101Ibid. or the spider’s web, which displays their ‘{geometricall} Toyles’ and ‘taught foulers both how to make their netts, & to catch wth them’ (pls 47a and b);102Evelyn, ‘Elysium Britannicum’, fol. 232; Elysium Britannicum, ed. Ingram, 301. or the ant’s ‘Industry, Justice, love and regimen’.103Evelyn, ‘Elysium Britannicum’, fol. 235; Elysium Britannicum, ed. Ingram, 307. Like a storm, drought or epidemic, insects could be a ‘judgement’; a spider could drive a person to madness, thereafter inspire music as the antidote (pls 48a and b). As Evelyn concluded in ‘Elysium Britannicum’, providing marginal illustrations to force home the argument:

{And if we will argue from their worth} He . . . yt contemplates the Bee, the Silkeworme, & the Cochinell, & yt wch makes our Gummlug, besides . . . what others contribute to . . . the dispensatory, will not despise Insects & . . . even these productions of our Gardens. And then for their fortitude & other considerations, How even these despicable things can when . . . {Heaven} pleases confound the power of the greatest {potentate}; God himself calls them his Army . . .104Evelyn, ‘Elysium Britannicum’, fol. 237v; Elysium Britannicum, ed. Ingram, 311–12.

Birds presented an extreme dilemma resulting from this double identity. Paradise itself had been full of avian choristers, and birds with wings and two legs appeared close to angels and humans. As Evelyn wrote in ‘Elysium Britannicum’:

But whither this divine Art was taught by birds or Angels, there is nothing certainely more agreable then the chirping of these winged Choristers, the cherefull inhabitants of our Gardens & Groves, where if the place or the Climat prove so . . . unhospitable as . . . not to invite their spontaneous frequenting; . . . our Elysium cannot be without their company, though it be at the price of their liberty.105Evelyn, ‘Elysium Britannicum’, fol. 190; Elysium Britannicum, ed. Ingram, 254.

The indigenous winged choristers were attracted into the garden by planting appropriate fruit and shrubs. Thus, for example, on the plan of circa 1653 (cf. pls 1 and 27), the evergreen thicket to the east of the parterre was labelled for ‘Birds private walkes, shades and Cabinetts’.106Add. MS 78628A: plan of Sayes Court, [1653?], key no. 37. Whether the same licence was extended to the same birds hopping into the two ‘Cantons’ on the opposite side remains doubtful. This was furnished with raspberries, strawberries, currants and cherries. Evelyn might write that orchards ‘harbour a constant aviary of sweet singers, which are here retained without the charge or violence of the Italian Wiers’, but his gardener was probably less charitable when it came to protecting fruit for the table. There was a line to draw somewhere.

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Description: Florilegium, fol. 114, detail by Marshal, Alexander

46a. Alexander Marshal, detail from fol. 114 (RL 24381) of his florilegium, 1650s–1682, watercolour on paper, approx. 18 ⅛ × 13 ⅛ in. (approx. 46 × 33.3 cm). Royal Library, Windsor Castle. Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2013

The vapourer moth larva (Orgyia antiqua) is depicted feeding on an apricot leaf. To Evelyn, caterpillars, as the ‘cursed Devourer’, had to be removed from fruit trees by cutting out the infected high branches with ‘Reachers’ or by spraying with a ‘foist’. By contrast, Evelyn saw butterflies such as Marshal’s swallowtail (Papilio machaon ssp. britannicus on monkshood, Aconitum napellus) as desirable ‘flying flowers of our Elysium’.

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Description: Florilegium, fol. 62, detail by Marshal, Alexander

46b. Alexander Marshal, detail from fol. 62 (RL 24329) of his florilegium, 1650s–1682, watercolour on paper, approx. 18 ⅛ × 13 ⅛ in. (approx. 46 × 33.3 cm). Royal Library, Windsor Castle. Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2013

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Description: Florilegium, fol. 140, detail by Marshal, Alexander

47a. Alexander Marshal, detail from fol. 140 (RL 24407) of his florilegium, 1650s–1682, watercolour on paper, approx. 18 ⅛ × 13 ⅛ in. (approx. 46 × 33.3 cm). Royal Library, Windsor Castle. Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2013

The black mulberry (Morus nigra), long grown in England, is shown supporting a spider’s web. Marshal correctly observed the characteristic ‘orb-web’ of this genus, with radiating spokes joined by concentric threads that have trapped a fly. Evelyn marvelled at the geometry of construction and saw it as prototype for fowling nets. The relative size of the large abdomen to smaller carapace suggests a gravid female (Araneus quadratus). Swollen with eggs, this four-spot orb-weaver would have been maturing in autumn along with the mulberry fruits (which Evelyn likened to a fly’s eye, see pl. 9).

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Description: Detail showing illustration of a microscopic view of a fly’s eye by Evelyn,...

47b. Detail from John Evelyn’s ‘Elysium Britannicum’, showing his illustration of a microscopic view of a fly’s eye, based on Robert Hooke’s Micrographia. © The British Library Board (Add. MS 78342, fol. 231v)

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Description: Illustrations in the Elysium Britannicum by Evelyn, John

48a. John Evelyn, illustration in the ‘Elysium Britannicum’. © The British Library Board (Add. MS 78342, fol 234)

These sketches show the tarantula as a ‘stupendious Insect’ and the notations for the curative music that was needed after a noxious bite — the ‘Antidotum Tarantula’. The latter ‘goes by the name of the Turkish aire’. Evelyn tells of gardeners frequently bitten by tarantulas in summer months in southern Italy, thereafter exhibiting the ‘symptombs [sic] of all sorts of madnesse’ (tarantism). This madness could be alleviated only by music and dance, which he considered part of gardening or ‘hortulan’ lore.

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48b. John Evelyn, illustration in the ‘Elysium Britannicum’. © The British Library Board (Add. MS 78342, fol 234v)

The exotica of an aviary might be seen as akin to pets, worthy of compassion that was not extended to their foraging cousins. On 9 February 1665, for example, in describing birds in St James’s Park, Evelyn mentioned:

2 Balearian Cranes, one of which having had one of his leggs broken and cut off above the knee, had a wodden or boxen leg & thigh with a joynt for the <knee> so accurately made, that the poore creature could walke with it, & use it as well as if it had ben natural: It was made by a souldier.107Evelyn, Diary, ed. De Beer, III, 399.

A bird in a cage could receive the tender care of the ‘sick and wounded’,108See Gillian Darley, ‘“Action to the Purpose”: Evelyn, Greenwich and the Sick and Wounded Seamen’, in John Evelyn and his Milieu, ed. Frances Harris and Michael Hunter (London: British Library, 2003), 165–84. but a bird outside a cage was a potential enemy. The inescapable fact was that ‘winged choristers’, along with vermin and insects, could destroy fruit and crops. Hence, among the tools of the gardener there were various devices either to scare birds or to destroy them (see again pl. 44). Number 62 in Evelyn’s list was the rather quaint ‘Scarr-Crows and Terriculamenta t’afright the birds, made . . . {wth} horse bells, hanging upon a string which having feathers fastned crosseways ’twixt every bell, sett them a ringing and trembling being plaied upon by the least breath of aire or wind’.109Evelyn, ‘Elysium Britannicum’, fol. 57; Elysium Britannicum, ed. Ingram, 92. Hand and wind clappers might be used for the same purpose. Less appealing were the ‘Samsons Posts Netts’ in which birds, once meshed, might struggle and thrash in prolonged death throes.

The farmer and the gardener were part of a merciless campaign in every parish to rid the air of birds and, as Gilbert White later reported (see chapter 7), nailed-up birds and vermin were part of English parochial life (pl. 49).110See Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 273–4: ‘In early Tudor times the campaign was placed on a statutory basis. An Act of Parliament in 1533 required parishes to equip themselves with nets in which to catch rooks, choughs and crows. In 1566 another authorized churchwardens to raise funds to pay so much a head to all those who brought in corpses of foxes, polecats, weasels, stoats, otters, hedgehogs, rats, mice, moles, hawks, buzzards, ospreys, jays, ravens, even kingfishers. . . . In later Stuart times the campaign turned against kites and ravens because they were a menace to poultry and agriculture; hitherto they had been protected as indispensable scavengers, but they became more vulnerable when urban authorities took to cleaning the streets and selling the manure to farmers. Also harried were the jays and bullfinches who nipped the buds off the fruit trees . . . As surviving parochial records show, the destruction effected under these Acts of Parliament was colossal, particularly from the later seventeenth century, when guns were increasingly used to shoot birds on the wing. At Tenterden, Kent, for example, they killed over 2,000 jays in the 1680s.’ Thus, the killing of foxes and the nailing up of wolves’ and boars’ heads were not confined to ‘savage’ mountain regions, as Evelyn had already discovered in the Loire.111Evelyn, Diary, ed. De Beer, II, 141. Hence the gardener Jonathan Mosse was caught in a vicious battle within the Sayes Court ‘Elysium’ that reflected hostilities without. He was at war with moles, mice, insects and birds. Doubtless he knew which of the spontaneous visitors to feed in the winter along with exotic birds and pets (pl. 50). When it came down to it, however, he must have resorted to many cruel practices to protect the winter fruit for the table. Evelyn’s innocent and pure diet of salads could not preclude the killing of animals.

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Description: Purple crocuses, cloth of gold crocus, liverwort (double form), poppy anemones and...

49. Alexander Marshal, detail from fol. 5 (RL 24272) of his florilegium, 1650s–1682, watercolour on paper, approx. 18 ⅛ × 13 ⅛ in. (approx. 46 × 33.3 cm). Royal Library, Windsor Castle. Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2013

The Eurasian jay (Garrulus glandarius) is depicted below Hepatica nobilis and crown anemones (double-flowered cultivars), with a crocus just behind the dead bird. The jay has a shot in the left leg and in the chin, the signs of being exterminated. Acts of Parliament (1533 and 1566) had empowered parishes and churchwardens to rid the countryside of birds and vermin. Surviving parochial records show that the bounty was mounting by the later seventeenth century as birds were shot on the wing. At Tenterden, Kent, it is recorded that more than 2,000 jays were exterminated in the 1680s.

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Description: Seed trough by Evelyn, John

50. John Evelyn, ‘Elysium Britannicum’, seed trough, pen and ink drawing. © The British Library Board (Add. MS 78342, fol. 192)

In the chapter ‘Of Aviaries, Apiaries, Insects’, Evelyn described and drew a seed trough; it was on a pillar (to keep mice out) and furnished with a lid (to keep bird droppings out). Like a modern ‘feeder’, the seeds spilled on to a ledge. His delight in songbirds extended to the ‘spontaneous frequenting’ of ‘Redbreast’ (Erithacus rubecula) and ‘Yellow-hamer’ (Emberiza citrinella), or to those birds that were ‘retained without the charge or violence of the Italian Wiers’. No such compassion was extended to marauding bullfinches and blackbirds, hunted down mercilessly amid his fruit bushes.

In Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets (1699), the arguments are not solely concerned with the merits of ‘the Herby-Diet’; Evelyn also discusses what makes for good food. This is especially vital for ‘those who dwell in the Middle and Skirts of vast and crowded Cities, inviron’d with rotten Dung, loathsome and common Lay Stalls’.112Evelyn, Acetaria, 132. Bad feed produces bad food. By contrast, good practices are rewarded by good taste, ‘most powerfully in Fowl, from such as are nourish’d with Corn, sweet and dry Food’.113Ibid., 134. Such aspects of purity and innocence are entirely removed from concerns over cruelty. Yet cruelty and care, as with the ‘sick and wounded’ Balearic crane, were always a matter of where to draw an arbitrary line (or where to define a boundary in a garden). Purity might be one factor. Evelyn had witnessed anatomy lectures in Padua, for example, and his applauding the charity extended to patients in the ‘tortures’ of surgery was overshadowed by a worry that some ‘of the femal Sex’ were ‘lew’d’ in front of ‘Gentlemen Travellers’ seated in the amphitheatre.114Evelyn, Diary, ed. De Beer, II, 476. That an anatomy theatre could have an intimate relationship to a garden and a museum was clear to Evelyn from his visit to the Hortus Botanicus in Leiden in 1643. There the Theatrum Anatomicum, depicted in anatomical sessions over the winter of 1610, doubled up as a museum during the summer. The garden as an Edenic ‘theatre’ brought physical as well as spiritual remediation in the vagaries of life.

Beyond weighing up the price of liberty for or violence against birds (see pl. 50), Evelyn saw little that was cruel in the practice of gardening. Cruelty more obviously arose for him in the ‘theatre’ of science. Compare, for example, his reactions on two occasions. First, on 15 March 1665 he observed: ‘It was now Lent: Afternoone at our Society, where was tried some of the Poysons sent from the King of Macassar out of E. India, so famous for its suddaine operation: we gave it a wounded dog, but it did not succeede.’115Ibid., III, 403. Then second, on 10 October 1667, he commented:

To Lond: dined with the Swedish Resident: where was a disection of a dog, the poore curr, kept long alive after the Thorax was open, by blowing with bellows into his lungs, & that long after his heart was out, & the lungs both gashed & pierced, his eyes quick all the while: This was an experiment of more cruelty than pleased me.116Ibid., III, 497–8. For the implications of such observations and a comprehensive account of attitudes to animals, see Thomas, Man and the Natural World, especially 143–91.

Between the fondled pet and the expendable cur lay all those dogs kept lean and mean for hunting (pl. 51).

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Description: Florilegium, fol. 2, detail by Marshal, Alexander

51. Alexander Marshal, detail from fol. 2 (RL 24269) of his florilegium, 1650s–1682, watercolour on paper, approx. 18 ⅛ × 13 ⅛ in. (approx. 46 × 33.3 cm). Royal Library, Windsor Castle. Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2013

A very lean bloodhound, probably a hunting dog of a kind kept by Bishop Compton, is depicted on this folio. It stands next to the flower then known as ‘Tradescant’s Turkie purple Primrose’ (Primula vulgaris ssp. sibthorpii) but now considered one of the parents of coloured primroses today. There was no agreed standard for dog breeds at this time: the ‘beagle’, ‘water spaniel’ and ‘greyhound’ of the preceding folio, like this ‘bloodhound’, do not equate with modern manicured breeds. By modern standards, such dogs were kept lean and mean for hunting, while pet dogs lived in the lap of luxury.

The Tropical Greenhouse, ‘Perpetual Spring’ and Pure Air

A dog might die by poison or through vivisection. A mouse might chew bait laced with glass. A whale could get stranded between Greenwich and Deptford and harpooned. Mary would die of smallpox brought from London, and the tortoise and many cypress trees would succumb to the cold. As Evelyn reshaped his garden at Sayes Court in the summer of 1685, a brief period of benign weather gave him a respite. At the end of June came plentiful rain; the winter that followed was especially mild. Nevertheless, with two bitter winters fresh in his memory, and the loss of his daughter still acute, the viewing of a conservatory at the physic garden in Chelsea must have offered a glimpse of a ‘perpetual spring’ (Ver Perpetuum) removed from all such vagaries in life. It sheltered plants that could cure even the agues of the Thames estuary. He wrote on 6 August 1685:

I went to Lond: next day to see Mr. Wats, keeper of the Apothecaries Garden of simples at Chelsey: where there is a collection of innumerable rarities of that sort: Particularly, besids many rare annuals the Tree bearing the Jesuits bark, which had don such cures in quartans: & what was very ingenious the subterranean heate, conveyed by a stove under the Conservatory, which was all Vaulted with brick; so as he leaves the doores & windowes open in the hard<e>st frosts, secluding onely the snow &c117Evelyn, Diary, ed. De Beer, IV, 462.

Given the weather at this dismal trough within the Little Ice Age, the conservatory must have appeared especially miraculous.118Chambers, ‘John Evelyn and the Invention of the Heated Greenhouse’, 201–5.

Tempering the air for the benefit of fruit had always been the ideal of the greenhouse. Citrus fruit, cultivated in orangeries in the Low Countries since before 1600, required only winter protection at around 8°C or 46.4°F (pl. 52). To keep plants protected from frosts, experimentation with technologies had progressed steadily: from the first English tender evergreen collections at Beddington and Wimbledon (1562 and 1639) to the ‘Conservatory for Evergreens’ at Oxford (by 1648), and finally to George London’s Woburn Abbey conservatory heated by a Dutch iron stove (by 1685).119This background is amply covered by Jan Woudstra, ‘ “Much better contrived and built then any other in England”: Stoves and Other Structures for the Cultivation of Exotic Plants at Hampton Court Palace, 1689–1702’, in Technology and the Garden, ed. Michael G. Lee and Kenneth I. Helphand (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2014), 79–107. When Evelyn first encountered the novel idea of growing tropical shrubs and trees in a ‘stove’ at Chelsea, however, he noted that the most significant innovation was ‘subterranean heate’, replacing iron stoves above ground. John Watts, appointed in 1680, seems to have learned this from Paul Hermann at Leiden during his visit in 1683.120D. O. Wijnands, ‘Hortus auriaci: The Gardens of Orange and their Place in Late 17th-century Botany and Horticulture’, Journal of Garden History, VIII/2–3 (April–September 1988), 74. For a fuller account of Hermann and Watts, see again Woudstra, ‘Much better contrived’, 86. On 11 November 1684 (following the bitter winter of 1683–4), Hans Sloane recorded:

Mr Watts having a new contrivance (at least in this country), viz. he makes under the floor of the house a great fire-place with grate, ash-hole &c., and conveys the warmth through the whole house by tunnels: so he hopes, by the help of weather-glasses within, to bring or keep the air at what degree of warmth he pleases, letting in upon occasion the outward air by the windows. He thinks to make, by this means, an artificial spring, summer and winter, &c.121Quoted from Woudstra, ‘Much better contrived’, 86.

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Description: Den Nederlandsten Hovenier by Groen, Jan van der

52. Jan van der Groen, Den Nederlandsten Hovenier (Amsterdam, 1683). © Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Rare Book Collection, Washington, DC

A traditional free-standing stove heats this greenhouse with its tender trees and shrubs — figs, lemons and oranges. They are arranged in tubs and pots. Citrus fruit, cultivated in orangeries in the Low Countries before 1600, and throughout England after 1600, required winter protection at around 8ºC (46.4ºF) to avoid frost damage. Evelyn was concerned about the impure air that resulted from such interior stoves. His reform of the greenhouse became one with his quest for reformation and purity through gardening.

On his return visit in March 1684, he noted: ‘I was the other day at Chelsea, and find that the artifices used by Mr Watts have been very effectual for the preservation of his plants, insomuch, that this severe enough winter has scarce killed any of his fine plants.’122Quoted ibid., 86.

A second innovation came from the Netherlands. Glass frames placed on hotbeds and cold frames had already demonstrated the power of the sun’s rays on the shortest days of the year. It was thus logical to enlarge the frames into ‘glass houses’, using the additional heat of underground furnaces. The credit for this invention remains unclear (for example, whether it can be traced back to Hermann at Leiden).123See Marisca Sikkens-De Zwaan, ‘Magdalena Poulle (1632–99): A Dutch Lady in a Circle of Botanical Collectors’, Garden History, XXX/2 (Winter 2002), 212–14. The innovation had clearly appeared at the Hortus Botanicus in Amsterdam by 1682, and at Magdalena Poulle’s Gunterstein circa 1690 (pls 53a and b).124Wijnands, ‘Hortus auriaci’, 75–6, 276. Also David Jacques and Arend Jan van der Horst, The Gardens of William and Mary (London: Christopher Helm, 1988), 179. The same idea lies behind three ‘glass cases’ at Hampton Court that were built for Queen Mary by the Dutch carpenter Hendrik Floris in 1689. A drawing in the National Archives at Kew records a glass case that was erected in 1701 to replace the original three (pl. 54a).125For this illustration and further discussion, see Mark Laird, ‘Greenhouse and Great Storm: John Evelyn on the Workings of God and Man in the Garden’, in A Celebration of John Evelyn, ed. Batey, 105–8. Jan Woudstra gives a comprehensive account of Evelyn’s innovations in ‘Much better contrived’, 98–100.

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Description: Hortus Botanicus in Amsterdam, detail by Stoopendaal, Bastiaen

53a. Detail of the Hortus Botanicus in Amsterdam by B. Stoopendaal (1685) from C. Commelin, Beschryvinge van Amsterdam (Amsterdam, 1693), plate between 654 and 655. Houghton Library, Harvard University (3250.3F*)

Stoopendaal’s view (above), though published in 1685, was produced in 1682. It records a large glass frame of 80 × 4 ½ feet. It was facing south and heated from below by five fires; in front of it was a cold frame. The smaller grass frame (not shown here) was 36 feet long by 5 feet wide and heated by three fires. They provided accommodation for tropical plants until at least 1714. The angled glass and the chimneys on top of the greenhouse (right) suggest that Magdalena Poulle had added frames to her conservatory on the model of Amsterdam. These added ‘stoves’ were used for growing tropical plants.

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Description: Veues de Gunterstein, detail showing the orangery garden and its hothouse by Swidde,...

53b. Engraving in Willem Swidde, Veues de Gunterstein, showing the orangery garden and its hothouse, circa 1690. Private Collection. Photo courtesy of Jan Woudstra

Evelyn had become aware of the glass stoves at Hampton Court by 1691 when Mary Evelyn mentioned them in writing of her visit in August that year. Yet he understood that, whatever the advances with glass, there remained a problem with smoke coming up from the hypocaust system. In the 1691 edition of the Kalendarium hortense, which illustrated his novel greenhouse innovations, he wrote:

’Tis now after many severe Winters Observation, both whilst they use of ordinary Iron Stoves and other Inventions to moderate the sharp Air in the Green-house (as they call it) and even since the Subterranean Caliducts have been introduc’d, I often took notice that . . . Plants . . . rarely pass’d their Confinements, without Sickness, a certain Languor or Taint discoverable by their Complexions. [Extract taken from 1699 edn]126John Evelyn, Kalendarium hortense (London, 1691; and here in the 1699 edition), 153.

The plants could not breathe, as he presumed, ‘the pure and genuine Air, impregnated with its Nitrous Pabulum, which is not only the Nourishment, and Life of Animals, but of all Plants and Vegetables whatsoever’. The ‘pent-in’ air was effete and vitiated.127Ibid., 154–5. Hence he came up with the idea of having the stove outside the house (pl. 54b). Refinements followed as the idea of the external stove was tested in practice. By 30 May 1694 Evelyn’s collaborator, Sir Dudley Cullum, could report that:

notwithstanding the closeness of the place (rendring it so darke when all was shut up that I could not see my hand), yet by the Admission of that Aire you Advis’d . . . one would have thought himself abroad in the open Aire in Aprill, when in January all things then without doores (nay in the house) was freezing very hard.128Quoted from Chambers, ‘John Evelyn and the Invention of the Heated Greenhouse’, 205. See also Woudstra, ‘Much better contrived’, 99–100.

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Description: A survey of Hampton Court: a new Glass Case, completed in May 1701 (top) and the new...

54a. A survey of Hampton Court: a new ‘Glass Case’, completed in May 1701 (top) and the new ‘Greenhouse’ or orangery, built to designs of William Talman in August 1701 (bottom). The National Archives, Kew (Work 34/1838)

When the three narrow glass cases, built at Hampton Court in 1689 (and described in a report to the duchess of Beaufort in 1692), were demolished in June 1701, the tropical plants were immediately transferred to the new Glass Case (54a, top). Surprisingly, the orangery or Greenhouse of 1701 (54a, bottom) is not shown with chimneys or ducts, though there is evidence that under-floor ducts were incorporated for one third of the structure. Evelyn’s attempt to avoid tainted air gave prominence to an external stove (54b). Yet he also advised ‘ample Windows or Chasses’ since ‘Light itself, next to Air is of wonderful importance’.

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Description: Illustration of John Evelyn's design for a greenhouse with external furnace by...

54b. John Evelyn, Kalendarium hortense (London, 1691), 157: illustration of his design for a greenhouse with external furnace. Houghton Library, Harvard University (EC65.EV226.664KH)

The effectiveness of the improved system was further tested in the bitter winter of 1694–5, when Evelyn, now resident at Wotton, wrote of being kept from church by the slippery conditions. He told Pepys that they were comfortable with ‘Luculent Fires in most of the Roomes’, but had to suffer ‘very sorry Conversation among the Bumkins’.129Quoted from Darley, John Evelyn, 288. With the Thames frozen once again, the smallpox returned as an epidemic. The winters of 1696–7 and 1697–8 were bitter too. Even in May 1698 the lingering cold provoked fears of famine. Early in 1699 the Evelyns’ one remaining son, John, died at the age of forty-four. As an omen, a whale was washed up the Thames just two days after the untimely death.

Purifying the City and Immortalizing Flowers and Insects

Despite the mortifying repetition of devastation and loss, Evelyn’s grandson Jack — a ‘deare, deare good child’130Ibid., 299. For Sir John Evelyn’s fulfilment of the promise, see Peter Brandon ‘ “Invest in Gardening, Groves and Walkes”: How Evelyn’s Grandson Carried out his Instructions to Revive the Wotton Landscape’, in A Celebration of John Evelyn, ed. Batey, 120–39. — would eventually fulfill all hopes, including the renewal of Wotton’s woods, devastated by logging and by the Great Storm of 1703. Evelyn’s daughter, Susanna, born in 1669, led a full life, marrying William Draper in 1693 and excelling as an accomplished amateur artist and scholar of Latin and French.131See Carol Gibson-Wood, ‘Susanna and her Elders: John Evelyn’s Artistic Daughter’, in Harris and Hunter, John Evelyn and his Milieu, 233–54. Susanna’s later years, however, were blighted by debt. Evelyn seems to have remained perennially hopeful of the garden’s redemptive powers as a symbol of endurance and renewal. Even after the loss of oaks in their thousands in the Great Storm of 26–7 November 1703, he observed how ‘a most famous and monstrous Oak growing at Epping in Essex, (blown down) raised itself, and withstood the Hurricane’.132Evelyn, Silva (1706), 199. Despite the ‘dismal Groans of our forests’, and despite the self-castigating acceptance of a ‘judgement’ of national and personal sins, he could end the 1706 edition of Sylva on an ascendant note: ‘[I] shall if God protract my years and continue health be continually planting ’till it please him to transplant me into the glorious regions above, the celestial Paradise, planted with perennial groves and trees bearing immortal fruit.’133Quoted by Harris, Transformations of Love, 300, citing Silva [1706], ed. John Nisbet, 2 vols (London: Doubleday, 1908), II, 260.

Spring bulbs in the terrestrial garden were like a resurrection from the dead after the ‘last cruell Winter’.134See Evelyn, ‘Elysium Britannicum’, chapter XVI: ‘Of Coronary Plants’. On 9 December 1693, only a short time before moving to his elder brother’s estate of Wotton, Evelyn was still receiving a delivery of plants from Henry Wise of the Brompton Park nursery. It included ‘50 roots of the Royall Parrott Tulips and 100 Roots of Ranunculoes which were received not long since from Flanders’.135Add. MS 78318: Wise to Evelyn, 9 December 1693, quoted in Leith-Ross, ‘The Garden of John Evelyn at Deptford’, 148. Whether he continued to try anemones in London, as opposed to in the heart of Surrey, is unknown. As he had explained in ‘Elysium Britannicum’: ‘No plant, nor flower delights more in a sweet warme delicate aire then the Anemone, which you may see by the ill blowing of these flowers . . . in and neere London where every thing is smutted & the aire spoild with the smoake of sea coale.’136Evelyn, ‘Elysium Britannicum’, fol. 278 [part of several page insertions]; Elysium Britannicum, ed. Ingram, 451–2.

Back in 1661 Evelyn had believed in the melioration of London’s air through a hedged ‘green belt’ of sweet brier, honeysuckles, jasmine, mock orange and roses, and through acres of beans and peas (pl. 55). He wrote how an Act of Parliament was required to place industry behind the ‘Mountain’ at Greenwich — a noble attempt at statutory regulation that failed, as the re-printing of Fumifugium in 1772 underscores. His solutions might seem quaint to the modern mind, familiar with a depleted ozone layer, climate change and vast polluted oceans (and distanced moreover from the use of perfumes and aromatic herbs in times of plague). Yet the overarching concern with purity, whether in the artificial climate of the greenhouse or the wider atmosphere of city and country, whether of air and soil or of body and soul, makes Evelyn a luminary in policy as much as in technology.

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Description: Florilegium, fol. 47, detail by Marshal, Alexander

55. Alexander Marshal, fol. 47 (RL 24314) of his florilegium, 1650s–1682, watercolour on paper, approx. 18 ⅛ × 13 ⅛ in. (approx. 46 × 33.3 cm). Royal Library, Windsor Castle. Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2013

Evelyn promoted the field pea (Pisum sativum, bottom left) and sweet-smelling shrubs such as the Persian lilac (Syringa × persica, bottom right) as a ‘green belt’ to ameliorate London’s smoke. His belief in the restorative power of gardening also took inspiration from spring bulbs that were like a ‘resurrection’ each spring. Marshal’s tulip, called ‘la damoiselle’, appears a malformed specimen with a misshapen leaf that has partly taken up the colouring of the petal. Evelyn, who traced the tulip’s superior pedigree as a cultivar, acknowledged how it took a ‘rascaly’ root to produce a ‘gallant’ flower.

There were, of course, limits to scientific ingenuity in creating artificial environments, while governmental inertia failed to make decrees that would regulate the environment at large. One stratagem, however, remained effective in preserving the miracles of nature in the purity that gardening deserved: the cabinet of curiosity and the cognate forms of hortus hyemalis (winter garden), hortus siccus (dried garden), Hesperides (citrus fruit album), seed cabinet and, above all, the florilegium or painted flower album.137See again Zytaruk, ‘Cabinets of Curiosities and the Organization of Knowledge’, 21–2. Evelyn benefitted from his formative travels in Italy and France in understanding the possibilities of the picture archive or object archive, though sometimes he doubted ‘perfection’, writing how only ‘he that can number the stars in the heaven may hope to perfect the Catalogue of flowers’.138Quoted ibid., 21: British Library, Add. MS 78342, fol. 320v.

In the garden, the caterpillar was the gardener’s enemy, while the butterfly was a ‘flying flower’. In contrast, within the collector’s cabinet or on the pages of a florilegium, all insects — noxious or otherwise — were welcome. When Evelyn visited Pierre Morin’s garden in Paris in April 1644, he recorded how the insects, especially butterflies, were prepared ‘that no corruption invading them he keepes in drawers, so plac’d that they present you with a most surprizing and delighfull tapissry’.139Evelyn, Diary, ed. De Beer, II, 133.

In Padua in 1645 he had first seen how a hortus hyemalis could keep plants pressed in a state of permanence. Though the colour of the flowers might fade, the leaves retained their integrity, such that Evelyn showed his own hortus hyemalis to Samuel Pepys twenty years later in 1665, claiming that it was ‘better than any herball’.140See again Zytaruk, ‘Occasional Specimens’, 190 and n. 23. Like the her-barium, the ‘tables’ of human tissue could even preserve organs in a desiccated condition. And the earth itself yielded up plenty of other forms of preservation in perpetuity. Carlo Ruzini’s cabinet in Venice, for example, ‘abounded in things petrified, Walnuts, Eggs, in which the Yealk rattled’. It included ‘pieces of Amber wherein were several Insects intomb’d’.141Ibid., 471. Evelyn’s own cabinet is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. See Anthony Radcliffe and Peter Thornton, ‘Evelyn’s Cabinet’, Connoisseur, CXCVII (April 1978), 256–61.

Over the decade when Evelyn was reshaping Sayes Court on the Thames, he took himself off to see other collections, which included florilegia as well as cabinets of minerals like those he had seen in Rome in 1644 (cf. pl. 33). Thus, for example, on 16 December 1686 he recorded in his diary:

I carried the Countesse of Sunderland to see the rarities of one Mr. Charleton at the Middle Temple, who shewed us such a Collection of Miniatures, Drawings, Shells, Insects, Medailes, & natural things, Animals whereoff divers were kept in glasses of Sp: of wine, I think an hundred, besids, Minerals, precious stones, vessels & curriosities in Amber, Achat, chrystal &c.142Evelyn, Diary, ed. De Beer, IV, 531.

He returned again on 11 March 1690 and 30 December 1691. Of particular significance was his visit to another spot on the Thames: Bishop Compton’s garden in Fulham on the west side of London. The diary entry for 1 August 1682 reads: ‘& thence to Fulham to visite the Bish: of London, & review againe the additions which Mr. Marshall had made of his curious booke of flowers in miniature, and Collection of Insecta’.143Ibid., IV, 289. The florilegium of Alexander Marshal in the Royal Library at Windsor, now published,144Prudence Leith-Ross, The Florilegium of Alexander Marshal at Windsor Castle (London: Royal Collections Enterprises, 2000). recovers the biological world that existed in the minds of Evelyn’s contemporaries, and sometimes — albeit fleetingly and sporadically — in those garden pockets along the Thames.

The garden was, in this sense, a fugitive ideal world. As Evelyn put it in the opening pages of ‘Elysium Britannicum’:

So that to define a Garden now, is to pronounce it Inter Solatia humana purissimum. A place of all terrestriall enjoyments the most resembling Heaven, and the best representation of our lost felicitie. It is the common Terme and the pit from whence we were dug: We all came out of this parsly bed.145Evelyn, ‘Elysium Britannicum’, fol. 8v; Elysium Britannicum, ed. Ingram, 31.

Amid the felicity, any number of ‘judgements’ might suddenly materialize like a whale out of the Atlantic. In his Deptford garden, winged choristers were snared in ‘Samson Posts Netts’, and raging storms, putrid air, disease and destruction breached the garden walls. And so within that pure place, prone to decay from inside and decimation from outside, the orangery was the closest to a terrestrial paradise: a place of perennial verdure and miraculous cures. The hope was that what had gone wrong in Eden might be put right in England. But even in a greenhouse the mortal coil was hard to escape. Safest of all from corruption were a collection of miniatures and a florilegium that defied the smoke, the storms, pestilence, even decay and death. Anemones would flourish in the clean air of vellum, and fruit would ripen without the acrid taste of sea-coal smoke. Even petals might fall without flowers fading or losing their copper-bottomed orangeness (pl. 56). Here at last, in quietude, the mullein moth larva might crawl on a Turk’s cap, near a sad dame’s violet, without damaging the moth mulleins of adjoining pages (pls 57 and 58).

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Description: Velvet rose, unidentified rose, flaxleaf pimpernel, damask rose, water...

56. Alexander Marshal, detail of fol. 78 (RL 24345) of his florilegium, 1650s–1682, watercolour on paper, approx. 18 ⅛ × 13 ⅛ in. (approx. 46 × 33.3 cm). Royal Library, Windsor Castle. Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2013

The damask rose (Rosa damascena) and the native water forget-me-not (Myosotis scorpioides) are shown next to the Austrian copper rose (Rosa foetida ‘Bicolor’) with its fallen petals. The influence on Marshal of Dutch and Flemish artists working in London is apparent through such representational gestures: the drops of water on leaves, and the holes made by caterpillars feeding on them, suggest the fallen and corrupted. For Evelyn, the damask rose was chief among ‘coronary’ plants for scented crowns, chaplets or garlands. Planted in vast numbers, the rose could also help to purify smoky cities.

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Description: Florilegium, fol. 136, detail by Marshal, Alexander

57. Alexander Marshal, fol. 136 (RL 24403) of his florilegium, 1650s–1682, watercolour on paper, approx. 18 ⅛ × 13 ⅛ in. (approx. 46 × 33.3 cm). Royal Library, Windsor Castle. Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2013

This folio shows (along with a central snapdragon, Antirrhinum majus) five different mulleins, some probably hybridized. The five include a possible moth mullein (Verbascum blattaria, bottom right), a V. phoeniceum (bottom left) and the white V. lychnitis (section of stem, bottom right). In many pages of the florilegium, Marshal achieved elegance through informality and whimsy, but here he retained a pattern-book layout of closely related species. In an insertion in the ‘Elysium Britannicum’, Evelyn listed the yellow and purple mulleins (Verbascum nigrum, top right, and V. phoeniceum) as ‘herbs’ amid the trees and shrubs of the grove. Regenerating by seed, and overwintering as biennials with leafy rosettes, such ‘Perennial-greenes’ helped make ‘perpetual Springs’ in England.

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Description: Florilegium, fol. 90, detail by Marshal, Alexander

58. Alexander Marshal, detail of fol. 90 (RL 24357) of his florilegium, 1650s–1682, watercolour on paper, approx. 18 ⅛ × 13 ⅛ in. (approx. 46 × 33.3 cm). Royal Library, Windsor Castle. Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2013

This detail of the scarlet Turk’s cap lily (Lilium chalcedonicum) also depicts the mullein moth larva (Cucullia verbasci) — one among thirty-eight species of insects included in the florilegium. It is shown away from its natural food plant, the mullein. As his insect studies (now in an album in the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia) make evident, Marshal knew full well that this larva ‘feeds upon the great moth mullein’. But here he put aside empirical observation and the gardener’s battles with the ‘cursed Devourer’ to achieve a formal beauty — the hallmark of a florilegium. At once Edenic ‘theatre’ and field notes on gardening and natural history, Marshal’s work is thus illustrative of Evelyn’s ‘Elysium Britannicum’: a promise of reformed purity through ‘hortulan’ industry.

1 The first three editions dated 1664, 1670 and 1679 were entitled Sylva; or, A Discourse on Forest-Trees, but by 1706 the publishers had adopted Silva instead. Sylva is used here in general discussions, but Silva in reference to the 1706 edition specifically. »

2 John Evelyn, Elysium Britannicum; or, The Royal Gardens, ed. John E. Ingram (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). »

3 Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture, 17 (May 1993), the British Library Conference (17–18 September, 2001) and the Surrey Gardens Trust/Garden History Society Conference (22–3 April, 2006). »

4 Gillian Darley, John Evelyn: Living for Ingenuity (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006). »

5 Maggie Campbell-Culver, A Passion for Trees: The Legacy of John Evelyn (London: Eden Project Books, 2006). »

6 Mavis Batey, ed., A Celebration of John Evelyn: Proceedings of a Conference to Mark the Tercentenary of his Death (Sutton: Surrey Gardens Trust, 2007). »

7 For the complicated background to the family’s crown lease of 1604 on the property, see Darley, John Evelyn, 79. Since Mary was ‘barely 13’ (see Frances Harris, Transformations of Love: The Friendship of John Evelyn and Margaret Godolphin, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, 41) in 1647, when the twenty-six-year-old Evelyn married her, she must have been born in 1634. »

8 British Library, Add. MS 78340, fol. 88v. Quoted in Harris, Transformations of Love, 22. She points out that the soil at Sayes Court required a liberal mix of lime, loam and cow dung to enrich it. »

9 Add. MS 78539: to Ralph Bohun, quoted in Prudence Leith-Ross, ‘The Garden of John Evelyn at Deptford’, Garden History, XXV/2 (Winter 1997), 147. »

10 Harris, Transformations of Love, 300. »

11 For a discussion of these terms in the context of Leiden, see Erik de Jong, Nature and Art: Dutch Garden and Landscape Architecture, 1650–1740 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 135–42. »

12 For discussion of ‘ague’ and the ‘Little Ice Age’, see P. Reiter, ‘From Shakespeare to Defoe: Malaria in England in the Little Ice Age’, Emerging Infectious Diseases, VI/1 (February 2000). »

13 His ideas on the greenhouse, published in Kalendarium hortense in 1691, are discussed in Mark Laird, ‘“Perpetual Spring” or Tempestuous Fall: The Greenhouse and the Great Storm of 1703 in the Life of John Evelyn and his Contemporaries’, Garden History, XXXIV/2 (Winter 2006), 153–73. »

14 John Evelyn, Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets (London, 1699), 137, 125. See Graham Parry, ‘John Evelyn as Hortulan Saint’, in Culture and Cultivation in Early Modern England: Writing and the Land, ed. Michael Leslie and Timothy Raylor (Leicester and London: Leicester University Press, 1992), 147. »

15 See John Prest, The Garden of Eden: The Botanic Garden and the Re-creation of Paradise (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981), 75. For the wider context for abstaining from meat, see Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800 (London: Allen Lane, 1983), 287–300. »

16 For Evelyn’s association with millenarianism, see Parry, ‘John Evelyn as Hortulan Saint’, 137–8. »

17 Quoted from Douglas Chambers, ‘John Evelyn and the Invention of the Heated Greenhouse’, Garden History, XX/2 (Autumn 1992), 205. »

18 Quoted from Batey, ed., A Celebration of John Evelyn, 164. »

19 See again Darley, John Evelyn, 117–19. »

20 John Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. Esmond S. de Beer, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), III, 80, entry for 17 January 1653. »

21 Leith-Ross, ‘The Garden of John Evelyn at Deptford’, 145–6. The letter is from July 1658 and refers to ‘the ravage of this winter upon my nursery’ and to his ‘dwarfe’ grove. »

22 Quoted from Batey, ed., A Celebration of John Evelyn, 165. »

23 Nicolas de Bonnefons, Le jardinier françois, qui enseigne à cultiver les Arbres, et Herbes Potagères; Avec la manière de conserver les Fruicts, et faire toutes sortes de Confitures, Conserves, et Massepans. Dédié aux dames. Cinquiesme Edition reveuë par l’Autheur (Paris, 1651). »

24 For these references, see Batey, ed., A Celebration of John Evelyn, 165. »

25 Evelyn, Diary, ed. De Beer, III, opposite 215. »

26 Ibid., III, 214. »

27 Ibid., III, 214–15. »

28 Ibid., III, 215. »

29 See Peter Mundy, The Travels of Peter Mundy in Europe and Asia, 1608–1667, vol. v (London: The Hakluyt Society, 1936), 95–6. See here Proceedings of the Linnean Society (10 January 1935), 35–7, in which F. C. Fraser first identified the whale as an adult Atlantic right whale, Balaena glacialis. He comments that the drawing no. 2 depicts the tongue ‘in an inflated and extended condition as commonly seen in decomposed Cetacea. This could easily have happened between Mundy’s first and second visits to the carcass’; and that drawing no. 3 is inaccurate as regards feeding off a shoal of fish, but Mundy’s description of the feeding mechanism is correct and perhaps one of the first true accounts. Judy Chupasko, Curatorial Associate at the Mammal Department of the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, Cambridge, MA, kindly confirmed that the drawing was of a great right whale, now Eubalaena glacialis. Peter Mundy seems to have misjudged the age, because 58 feet would make this creature close to the maximum adult length of 60 feet. Since the right whale spends much of its time in shallow coastal waters, it rarely ends up stranded. Hence it can be assumed that the storm of June 1658 accounts for the Greenwich stranding. The original number of right whales in the world has been estimated at 100,000 to 300,000. The species, however, has now become one of the most rare of large mammals; the total world population may be as low as 2,000–3,000. The eastern North Atlantic population is virtually extinct, and — according to several recent authorities — the present population in the western North Atlantic is approximately only 200–350. See here Walker’s Mammals of the World, 6th edn, ed. Ronald M. Nowak (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), II, 963–8; and Lyall Watson, Sea Guide to Whales of the World (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1981), 68–70. »

30 Evelyn, Diary, ed. De Beer, III, 215, n. 3, citing John Dryden, A Poem upon the Death of His Late Highness, Oliver Lord Protector (London, 1659): ‘But first the Ocean, as a Tribute sent/ That Giant-Prince of all her Watry Herd;/ And th’Isle, when her protecting Genius went, Upon his Obsequies loud Sighs conferr’d.’ See Joe Roman, Whale (London: Reaktion, 2006), 50, for a discussion of the ‘royal fish’, 62–3, for stranded whales as representations and omens. For further discussion of stranded whales and harbingers of evil fate, see Klaus Barthelmess and Joachim Münzing, Monstrum horrendum: Wale und Walstrandungen in der Druckgraphik des 16. Jahrhunderts und ihr motivkundlicher Einfluss (Hamburg: Ernst Kable, 1991), and Klaus Barthelmess and Ingvar Svanberg, ‘Two Eighteenth-century Strandings of Sperm Whales (Physeter macrocephalus) on the Swedish Coast’, Archives of Natural History, XXXVI (2009), 63–9. A good contextual study is William E. Burns, An Age of Wonders: Prodigies, Politics and Providence in England, 1658–1727 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002). »

31 The remains of the whale are on display in the Museum of Docklands. Its jawbones stood as a roadside arch in Dagenham, still remembered in the name of Whalebone Lane. For an account of an excavation of a Greenland right whale at Greenwich, see www.pre-construct.com/Specials/Greenwich_whale.htm (accessed 3 September 2013). »

32 See Mark Laird, ‘Parterre, Grove and Flower Garden: European Horticulture and Planting Design in John Evelyn’s Time’, in John Evelyn’s ‘Elysium Britannicum’ and European Gardening, ed. Therese O’Malley and Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1998), 171–219. A new framework for understanding Evelyn’s Elysium Britannicum is provided by David Jacques, ‘The Compartiment System in Tudor England’, Garden History, XXVII/1 (Summer 1999), 32–53. See also Jan Woudstra, ‘What Is Edging Box? Towards Greater Authenticity in Garden Conservation Projects’, Garden History, XXXV/2 (Winter 2007), 229–42. »

33 John Evelyn, Fumifugium; or, The Inconvenience of the Aer, and Smoake of London Dissipated (London, 1661), 18. »

34 Ibid., 20–21. »

35 Add. MS 78219: Evelyn to Sir Richard Browne, 22 December 1665, quoted in Leith-Ross, ‘The Garden of John Evelyn at Deptford’, 146. »

36 Evelyn, Diary, ed. De Beer, II, 392: 5 May 1645. »

37 Ibid., II, 337–8: circa 8 February 1645. »

38 Ibid., II, 332–6: circa 7 February 1645. »

39 Ibid., II, 277–8. »

40 See Douglas Chambers, ‘“Wholly New and Ambiguous”: The Discourse of Nature’, in A Celebration of John Evelyn, ed. Batey, 75–83, and especially 77, where he quotes from Francesco Stelluti’s work on fossilized minerals, Trattato del legno fossile minerale of 1637. Stelluti described this fossil research as ‘wholly new and ambiguous’. »

41 For a good account of Cassiano dal Pozzo and John Evelyn, see Maria Zytaruk, ‘Cabinets of Curiosities and the Organization of Knowledge’, University of Toronto Quarterly, LXXX/1 (Winter 2011), 1–23, and especially 20–21. »

42 Ibid., 21. Zytaruk explains that in notes for book three of Elysium Britannicum, which is largely lost, Evelyn supplied directions for assembling the hortus hyemalis (winter garden) as a hortus siccus. See Add. MS 78344, fol. 95v, for Evelyn’s seed cabinet in his ‘hortulan’ library. His hortus hyemalis of 1645 is British Library, MS JE C16. Maria Zytaruk discusses it in ‘ “Occasional Specimens, Not Compleate Systemes”: John Evelyn’s Culture of Collecting’, Bodleian Library Record, XVII (2002 for 2001), 189–91. »

43 Evelyn, Diary, ed. De Beer, II, 475. Examples of such boards are kept at the Royal College of Physicians near Regent’s Park in London and these may be viewed on one of the days in the ‘Open Garden Squares Weekend’ every summer. »

44 Ibid., II, 208. »

45 Ibid., II, 510. »

46 Ibid., II, 515. »

47 Cited in Joseph M. Levine, ‘John Evelyn: Between the Ancients and the Moderns’, in John Evelyn’s ‘Elysium Britannicum’ and European Gardening, ed. Therese O’Malley and Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1998), 58. »

48 Darley, John Evelyn, 151–2; Harris, Transformations of Love, 47–8, who writes of a probable ‘malarial infection’ and of Evelyn’s sudden inner and outer transformation with a ‘peruq of Grey-haires’. Of the four children born since 1652, only one survived after 1658. This was John, who would also eventually pre-decease Evelyn, in 1699. »

49 Evelyn, Diary, ed. De Beer, III, 220. »

50 Ibid., III, 316. »

51 Ibid., III, 316–17. »

52 Harris, Transformations of Love, 47–8. Richard’s death was interpreted as a personal judgement: ‘God found me so unworthy to keepe him longer, in whom I had so great a felicity.’ »

53 Evelyn, Diary, ed. De Beer, III, 477. »

54 Ibid., III, 569. The ability to interpret portents in weather was obviously increased in hindsight, when Evelyn was revising his diary. The reliability of his meteorological observations is, however, largely borne out by other contemporary accounts, which De Beer includes in his editorial notes. »

55 Quoted from Harris, Transformations of Love, 299–300. »

56 Evelyn, Diary, ed. De Beer, IV, 357. »

57 Ibid. »

58 Ibid., IV, 361–3. »

59 Ibid., IV, 364–5. »

60 Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, XIV (1684), 559–63. The ‘abstract of a Letter’ is dated 14 April 1684. »

61 Ibid., 560. »

62 Ibid., 562–3. »

63 Evelyn, Diary, ed. De Beer, IV, 402. »

64 Ibid., IV, 420. »

65 Ibid. »

66 Ibid., IV, 446. »

67 Ibid., IV, 450. »

68 John Evelyn, Silva; or, A Discourse of Forest-Trees (London, 1706), 200. »

69 Evelyn, Diary, ed. De Beer, IV, 460–64. »

70 H. H. Lamb, Climate, History and the Modern World (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 229: ‘The well-known occurrence of very hot summer weather in the two summers of 1665 and 1666, when London experienced its last great epidemic of the plague which ended with the great fire that burnt the city in September 1666, occurred in the middle of the coldest century of the last millennium.’ »

71 These figures are extracted from ibid., 228–32, and with reference to Mary Dobson’s book cited below. »

72 Mary Dobson, Contours of Death and Disease in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 2. »

73 Ibid., 19. See also Richard Hamblyn, The Invention of Clouds: How an Amateur Meteorologist Forged the Language of the Skies (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2001), especially 43 (Descartes’ work on clouds, and the development of the thermometer and barometer) and 12–34 (Robert Hooke’s engagement with ‘A Method for Making a History of the Weather’, 1665). »

74 John Evelyn, ‘Elysium Britannicum; or, The Royal Gardens in Three Books’, Add MS 78342, fol. 18v. See Evelyn, Elysium Britannicum; or, The Royal Gardens, ed. John E. Ingram (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 45–6. »

75 Evelyn, ‘Elysium Britannicum’, fol. 22; Elysium Britannicum, ed. Ingram, 46. »

76 Evelyn, ‘Elysium Britannicum’, fol. 21v; Elysium Britannicum, ed. Ingram, 46. »

77 Evelyn, ‘Elysium Britannicum’, fol. 189; Elysium Britannicum, ed. Ingram, 251. »

78 Evelyn, ‘Elysium Britannicum’, fol. 30v; Elysium Britannicum, ed. Ingram, 56. »

79 Evelyn, ‘Elysium Britannicum’, fols 31–31v; Elysium Britannicum, ed. Ingram, 57. »

80 Evelyn, Diary, ed. De Beer, III, 81. »

81 Add. MS 78628A: plan of Sayes Court, [1653?], key no. 118. »

82 See my discussion of the shift from the plan of the 1650s to the layout of the 1690s in Laird, ‘Parterre, Grove and Flower Garden’, 215–19. »

83 The best account of the fruit plantings is in Prudence Leith-Ross, ‘Fruit Planted around a New Bowling Green at John Evelyn’s Garden at Sayes Court, Deptford, Kent, in 1684/5’, Garden History, XXI/1 (Spring 2003), 29–33. »

84 John Evelyn, Kalendarium hortense, incorporated into Silva, 4th edn (1706), 243: entry for June. »

85 John Evelyn, Directions for the Gardiner at Says-Court But which may be of Use for Other Gardens, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford: Nonesuch Press, 1938), 96. »

86 Ibid., 97. »

87 Ibid., 98. »

88 Evelyn, Diary, ed. De Beer, V, 174. »

89 Evelyn, ‘Elysium Britannicum’, fol. 56; see Elysium Britannicum, ed. Ingram, 89. »

90 Evelyn, Directions for the Gardiner, 80–81. »

91 Ibid., 96. »

92 Quoted from Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 274–5. »

93 Evelyn, ‘Elysium Britannicum’, fol. 57; Elysium Britannicum, ed. Ingram, 92. »

94 See Anthony Huxley, An Illustrated History of Gardening (London: Papermac, 1983), 173. »

95 Evelyn, Kalendarium hortense, 224: entry for January. See also Directions for the Gardiner, 82–3. »

96 Evelyn, Kalendarium hortense, 233–4: entry for April. »

97 Evelyn, ‘Elysium Britannicum’, fol. 55; see Elysium Britannicum, ed. Ingram, 97. »

98 Evelyn, ‘Elysium Britannicum’, fol. 55v; Elysium Britannicum, ed. Ingram, 97. »

99 Quoted from Huxley, An Illustrated History of Gardening, 124. »

100 Evelyn, ‘Elysium Britannicum’, fol. 230v; Elysium Britannicum, ed. Ingram, 299. »

101 Ibid. »

102 Evelyn, ‘Elysium Britannicum’, fol. 232; Elysium Britannicum, ed. Ingram, 301. »

103 Evelyn, ‘Elysium Britannicum’, fol. 235; Elysium Britannicum, ed. Ingram, 307. »

104 Evelyn, ‘Elysium Britannicum’, fol. 237v; Elysium Britannicum, ed. Ingram, 311–12. »

105 Evelyn, ‘Elysium Britannicum’, fol. 190; Elysium Britannicum, ed. Ingram, 254. »

106 Add. MS 78628A: plan of Sayes Court, [1653?], key no. 37. »

107 Evelyn, Diary, ed. De Beer, III, 399. »

108 See Gillian Darley, ‘“Action to the Purpose”: Evelyn, Greenwich and the Sick and Wounded Seamen’, in John Evelyn and his Milieu, ed. Frances Harris and Michael Hunter (London: British Library, 2003), 165–84. »

109 Evelyn, ‘Elysium Britannicum’, fol. 57; Elysium Britannicum, ed. Ingram, 92. »

110 See Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 273–4: ‘In early Tudor times the campaign was placed on a statutory basis. An Act of Parliament in 1533 required parishes to equip themselves with nets in which to catch rooks, choughs and crows. In 1566 another authorized churchwardens to raise funds to pay so much a head to all those who brought in corpses of foxes, polecats, weasels, stoats, otters, hedgehogs, rats, mice, moles, hawks, buzzards, ospreys, jays, ravens, even kingfishers. . . . In later Stuart times the campaign turned against kites and ravens because they were a menace to poultry and agriculture; hitherto they had been protected as indispensable scavengers, but they became more vulnerable when urban authorities took to cleaning the streets and selling the manure to farmers. Also harried were the jays and bullfinches who nipped the buds off the fruit trees . . . As surviving parochial records show, the destruction effected under these Acts of Parliament was colossal, particularly from the later seventeenth century, when guns were increasingly used to shoot birds on the wing. At Tenterden, Kent, for example, they killed over 2,000 jays in the 1680s.’ »

111 Evelyn, Diary, ed. De Beer, II, 141. »

112 Evelyn, Acetaria, 132. »

113 Ibid., 134. »

114 Evelyn, Diary, ed. De Beer, II, 476. »

115 Ibid., III, 403. »

116 Ibid., III, 497–8. For the implications of such observations and a comprehensive account of attitudes to animals, see Thomas, Man and the Natural World, especially 143–91. »

117 Evelyn, Diary, ed. De Beer, IV, 462. »

118 Chambers, ‘John Evelyn and the Invention of the Heated Greenhouse’, 201–5. »

119 This background is amply covered by Jan Woudstra, ‘ “Much better contrived and built then any other in England”: Stoves and Other Structures for the Cultivation of Exotic Plants at Hampton Court Palace, 1689–1702’, in Technology and the Garden, ed. Michael G. Lee and Kenneth I. Helphand (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2014), 79–107. »

120 D. O. Wijnands, ‘Hortus auriaci: The Gardens of Orange and their Place in Late 17th-century Botany and Horticulture’, Journal of Garden History, VIII/2–3 (April–September 1988), 74. For a fuller account of Hermann and Watts, see again Woudstra, ‘Much better contrived’, 86. »

121 Quoted from Woudstra, ‘Much better contrived’, 86. »

122 Quoted ibid., 86. »

123 See Marisca Sikkens-De Zwaan, ‘Magdalena Poulle (1632–99): A Dutch Lady in a Circle of Botanical Collectors’, Garden History, XXX/2 (Winter 2002), 212–14. »

124 Wijnands, ‘Hortus auriaci’, 75–6, 276. Also David Jacques and Arend Jan van der Horst, The Gardens of William and Mary (London: Christopher Helm, 1988), 179. »

125 For this illustration and further discussion, see Mark Laird, ‘Greenhouse and Great Storm: John Evelyn on the Workings of God and Man in the Garden’, in A Celebration of John Evelyn, ed. Batey, 105–8. Jan Woudstra gives a comprehensive account of Evelyn’s innovations in ‘Much better contrived’, 98–100. »

126 John Evelyn, Kalendarium hortense (London, 1691; and here in the 1699 edition), 153. »

127 Ibid., 154–5. »

128 Quoted from Chambers, ‘John Evelyn and the Invention of the Heated Greenhouse’, 205. See also Woudstra, ‘Much better contrived’, 99–100. »

129 Quoted from Darley, John Evelyn, 288. »

130 Ibid., 299. For Sir John Evelyn’s fulfilment of the promise, see Peter Brandon ‘ “Invest in Gardening, Groves and Walkes”: How Evelyn’s Grandson Carried out his Instructions to Revive the Wotton Landscape’, in A Celebration of John Evelyn, ed. Batey, 120–39. »

131 See Carol Gibson-Wood, ‘Susanna and her Elders: John Evelyn’s Artistic Daughter’, in Harris and Hunter, John Evelyn and his Milieu, 233–54. Susanna’s later years, however, were blighted by debt. »

132 Evelyn, Silva (1706), 199. »

133 Quoted by Harris, Transformations of Love, 300, citing Silva [1706], ed. John Nisbet, 2 vols (London: Doubleday, 1908), II, 260. »

134 See Evelyn, ‘Elysium Britannicum’, chapter XVI: ‘Of Coronary Plants’. »

135 Add. MS 78318: Wise to Evelyn, 9 December 1693, quoted in Leith-Ross, ‘The Garden of John Evelyn at Deptford’, 148. »

136 Evelyn, ‘Elysium Britannicum’, fol. 278 [part of several page insertions]; Elysium Britannicum, ed. Ingram, 451–2. »

137 See again Zytaruk, ‘Cabinets of Curiosities and the Organization of Knowledge’, 21–2. »

138 Quoted ibid., 21: British Library, Add. MS 78342, fol. 320v. »

139 Evelyn, Diary, ed. De Beer, II, 133. »

140 See again Zytaruk, ‘Occasional Specimens’, 190 and n. 23. »

141 Ibid., 471. Evelyn’s own cabinet is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. See Anthony Radcliffe and Peter Thornton, ‘Evelyn’s Cabinet’, Connoisseur, CXCVII (April 1978), 256–61. »

142 Evelyn, Diary, ed. De Beer, IV, 531. »

143 Ibid., IV, 289. »

144 Prudence Leith-Ross, The Florilegium of Alexander Marshal at Windsor Castle (London: Royal Collections Enterprises, 2000). »

145 Evelyn, ‘Elysium Britannicum’, fol. 8v; Elysium Britannicum, ed. Ingram, 31. »

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