3. Retaliating Favours and Taking Up Cudgels: Coffee House to Commerce in the Art of Mark Catesby and Jacobus van Huysum​

Laird, Mark

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3. Retaliating Favours and Taking Up Cudgels: Coffee House to Commerce in the Art of Mark Catesby and Jacobus van Huysum

Mark Laird

A Natural History of English Gardening: 1650–1800

What began in the physic gardens of the seventeenth century as an effort to re-create the Garden of Eden would shift by the end of the eighteenth to a colonial-cum-Edenic enterprise...

Author

Mark Laird

PublisherPaul Mellon Centre

Related print edition pages: pp.127-165

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-32113

Chapter subject tags:Catesby, Mark, 1683-1749Huysum, Jacob van, approximately 1687-approximately 1740Gardens, English--History--18th centuryArt and natural history--Great Britain--History--18th centuryMen--Societies and clubs--Great Britain--18th centuryBotanical illustration--England--18th centuryGreat Britain--Climatic factors--HistoryPublishers and publishing--Great Britain--History--18th centuryNaturalists--Great Britain--HistoryKnowlton, Thomas, 1691-1781Garden ecology--Great Britain--HistoryEhret, Georg Dionysius, 1708-1770

3. Retaliating Favours and Taking Up Cudgels: Coffee House to Commerce in the Art of Mark Catesby and Jacobus van Huysum

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Description: Reconstruction as elevaton of Batty Langley's account Manner of Disposing and...

112. Mark Laird, reconstruction as elevation of Batty Langley’s account ‘Manner of Disposing and Planting Flowering Shrubs’ in New Principles of Gardening (1728), pencil, watercolour and crayon, 1998 (first published 1999)

Groves, modified circa 1730 from French bosquets (see pl. 24), began to anticipate the ‘theatrical’ shrubbery. Langley’s account of 1728 was a first step towards such theatrical plantations: flowering trees and shrubs arranged in three graduated rows behind a low hedge punctuated by standards (here ‘garnished’ with honeysuckles). Langley placed the North American tulip tree (Liriodendron tulipifera, right) within the taller back-row trees. ‘Theatricality’ was later stimulated by the influx of North American species introduced by Mark Catesby and John Bartram. Catesby’s Natural History and posthumous Hortus britannoamericanus played the formative role in promoting a vision of an ‘American garden’ in England.

This plate is dedicated by Mark Laird to John Edmondson, Charles Nelson and Margaret Riley

What began in the physic gardens of the seventeenth century as an effort to re-create the Garden of Eden would shift by the end of the eighteenth to a colonial-cum-Edenic enterprise.1See John Prest, The Garden of Eden: The Botanic Garden and the Re-Creation of Paradise (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981). Collecting plants from the four continents — reflected in the structure of the quadripartite physic garden — now occurred within the pleasure grounds of the English landscape garden.2Developments in planting are covered extensively in Mark Laird, The Flowering of the Landscape Garden: English Pleasure Grounds, 1720–1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). Chapter 2 provides the background to John Bartram’s export of American plants through Peter Collinson in London, and how Lord Petre as the main sponsor used these plants in the new ‘theatrical’ style. The change was under way by the 1720s, when Mark Catesby (1683–1749) voyaged to colonial Carolina in search of natural history. Catesby, witness to the violence of the natural world, returned to gentle (but polluted) Hoxton in London in 1726. With the help of the nurseryman Thomas Fairchild (1667?–1729), he constructed what Joyce Chaplin has called ‘an American garden that was the opposite of an anarchic mangrove swamp’.3Quoted from Joyce E. Chaplin, ‘Mark Catesby: A Skeptical Newtonian in America’, in Empire’s Nature: Mark Catesby’s New World Vision, ed. Amy R. W. Meyers and Margaret Beck Pritchard (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 77. Despite the city smoke, the dramatic fluctuations of the weather and the resistance of many American plants to adapt to English conditions, a felicitous harmony began to emerge (pl. 112). It took the form of the ‘theatrical’ shrubbery of mid-eighteenth-century English pleasure grounds. America thus topped the old ideal of a four-continent theatrum botanicum.

In the subscription-publishing boom of the late 1720s, Catesby’s Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands (1729–47) led the way. More to the rear was John Martyn’s Historia plantarum rariorum (1728–37), which, featuring tropical as well as hardy American plants, differed in its aims, language and readership. Written in Latin for a medico-botanical audience, with subscriptions from apothecaries, physicians and Fellows of the Royal Society, the Historia was allied to Martyn’s Botanical Society. The coffee-house culture from which Catesby’s sponsorship grew was also its generator.

The arrival of coffee in Europe in the seventeenth century had led, by the 1680s, to a flourishing of London coffee houses. They were new cultural communities.4For some background here, see the standard work by Bryant Lillywhite, London Coffee Houses: A Reference Book of Coffee Houses of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1963). John Brewer gives a good overview of the coffee-house club in The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London: HarperCollins, 1997), 34–40. For a more recent survey of the literary culture of the eighteenth-century coffee house, see Markman Ellis, ed., Eighteenth-century Coffee-House Culture, 4 vols (London and Brookfield, VT: Pickering & Chatto, 2006). Around 1700 a loosely defined ‘club’ at the Temple Coffee House amounted to a headquarters for a shift in botanical knowledge. Hans Sloane (1660–1753) and James Petiver (circa 1665–1718) were representative of its medico-botanical roots and its tangential affiliation to the Royal Society.5A misrepresentation of the ‘club’ of ‘forty members’ in a thesis of 1950 by George Pasti, Jr (and followed by many scholars) is now comprehensively reconsidered within a D.Phil. thesis by Margaret Riley, ‘ “Procurers of Plants and Encouragers of Gardening”: William and James Sherard, and Charles du Bois: Case Studies in Late Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-century Botanical and Horticultural Patronage’, School of Humanities in the University of Buckingham, September 2011.

In The Pleasures of the Imagination, John Brewer wrote: ‘Coffee-house clubs and tavern associations were involved in all the processes by which culture was shaped: the creation of works of art and the imagination, their communication, reception and consumption.’6Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination, 50. With regard to the club at the Temple Coffee House, Brewer’s assertion raises a question for the history of gardening and natural history: how did London coffee-house society generate ‘horticultural culture’?7For an early discussion of the question, see Mark Laird, ‘Exotics and Botanical Illustration’, in Sir John Vanbrugh and Landscape Architecture in Baroque England, 1690–1730, ed. Christopher Ridgway and Robert Williams (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton, 2000), 97–9. This was developed further in Mark Laird, ‘The Culture of Horticulture: Class, Consumption and Gender in the English Landscape Garden’, in Bourgeois and Aristocratic Cultural Encounters in Garden Art, 1550–1850, ed. Michel Conan (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2002), 240–44. For a more recent authoritative study of the club at the Temple Coffee House, see Margaret Riley, ‘The Club at the Temple Coffee House Revisited’, Archives of Natural History, XXXIII/1 (2006), 90–100. Her essay also appears in complement to Mark Laird, ‘The Congenial Climate of Coffee-House Horticulture: Jacobus van Huysum’s Paintings for John Martyn’s Historia Plantarum Rariorum (1728–1737) and for the Society of Gardeners’ Catalogus Plantarum (1730)’, in The Art and History of Botanical Painting and Natural History Treatises, ed. Amy Meyers and Therese O’Malley (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2007). Three instances of urban conviviality are crucial: first, the circumstantial evidence of gatherings at the Temple Coffee House from 1689 to circa 1706; second, the better-documented but ultimately abortive proceedings of Martyn’s Botanical Society, which met at the Rainbow Coffee House in Watling Street from 1721; and third, the productive pursuits of the Society of Gardeners at Newall’s Coffee House in Chelsea in the late 1720s. This led directly to the Catalogus plantarum of 1730. A full century before the founding of the Horticultural Society of London in 1804, these informal groups were helping to shape botanical science, plant collecting and the nursery trade.

In contrast to the Historia plantarum rariorum — and to J. J. Dillenius’s Hortus Elthamensis (1732) — the Society of Gardeners’ Catalogus plantarum was marketed in English. Supported by aristocrats (but not by sponsorship), the Society chose to feature ‘acclimatized’ exotics by their correct names and likenesses. Nurserymen could thus avoid the mix-ups of the ‘Blockheads’ in the commercial packaging of plants for sale.8Part of the impetus for the Catalogus plantarum was to demonstrate which plants were hardy. The parallel incentive was to eliminate nomenclatural confusion in pre-Linnaean taxonomy. As the authors explained in the preface, nurserymen were being branded by their elite clients as ‘either a Knave or a Blockhead’ for appearing to sell a product under a false name. Already by the mid-1730s the prince of Wales was turning to the nurserymen Robert Furber and Richard Butt to supply him with the most exclusive, ostentatious and costly exotics for his garden at Carlton House.9Laird, ‘Exotics and Botanical Illustration’, 248; see also David Coombs, ‘The Garden at Carlton House of Frederick, Prince of Wales, and Augusta, Princess Dowager of Wales: Bills in their Household Accounts, 1728–1772’, Garden History, XXV/2 (Winter 1997), 153–77. One order from Furber included a Catalpa that had originated with Catesby’s Carolina voyage.

Thomas Fairchild’s work on acclimatization, hybridization and the cultivation of plants in city spaces, while anticipating the science of horticultural societies one hundred years later, remained rooted in religious re-creative ideals. As John Harvey pointed out, Fairchild ‘is especially worthy of honour in that . . . he had serious moral scruples about what he was doing. The production of new forms, even by the artificial mixing of those created, smacked to him of interference with the plan of the Creator.’10John Harvey, Early Nurserymen (London and Chichester: Phillimore, 1974), 76. See also Michael Leapman, The Ingenious Mr Fairchild: The Forgotten Father of the Flower Garden (London: Headline, 2000). Harvey, Early Nurserymen, 76. In his will, apparently trying to ‘discharge his soul of impiety’, he ensured a legacy (beyond hybridization) that was later perpetuated by subscriptions from Sir Hans Sloane, Lady Walpole, the Shoreditch vinegar maker Cornelius Wittenoom and eventually the Royal Society itself: the ‘Vegetable Sermon’ on the wonders of God’s creation.11Leapman, The Ingenious Mr Fairchild, 215. Subscriptions thus fundamentally underwrote the culture of horticulture, with women subscribers supporting books on butterflies as well as flowers.

Thomas Fairchild also left in his will one guinea for a ring for Mark Catesby — the ultimate favour rendered posthumously. Mark Catesby’s position within the nursery world and the world of subscription publishing makes him pivotal in the merchandizing of plants through high-priced ‘coffee-table books’ and affordable catalogues.12At 22 guineas (£23 2s. 0d.) for the complete work, Catesby’s Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands was beyond the reach of Linnaeus as a professor in a Swedish university. Yet possible access to copies owned by Charles De Geer and Queen Ulrika Eleonora may help to explain Catesby’s influence on Linnaeus. See Charles E. Jarvis, ‘Linnaeus and the Influence of Mark Catesby’s Botanical Work’, in The Curious Mister Catesby: A ‘Truly Ingenious’ Naturalist Explores New Worlds, ed. E. Charles Nelson and David J. Elliott (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 2015). A number of authoritative studies have documented the full extent of his influence in art and science, notably Empire’s Nature (1998) and The Curious Mister Catesby: A ‘Truly Ingenious’ Naturalist Explores New Worlds (2015), while the identifications of Catesby’s plants and animals by James Reveal have aided my researches.13See Henrietta McBurney, with an introductory essay by Amy R. W. Meyers, Mark Catesby’s Natural History of America: The Watercolours from the Royal Library, Windsor Castle (London: Merrell Holberton, 1997); see also Meyers and Pritchard, eds, Empire’s Nature; and Nelson and Elliott, eds, The Curious Mister Catesby, with an appendix by James L. Reveal. For the background to the Reveal identifications, see James L. Reveal, ‘Identification of the Plant and Associated Animal Images in Catesby’s Natural History, with Nomenclatural Notes and Comments’, Rhodora, III/947 (2009), 273–388, and ‘Identification of the Plants and Animals Illustrated by Mark Catesby for his Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands’, Phytoneuron, VI (2013), 1–55.

This chapter thus takes up the story of the shift from Latin to vernacular works in the decade before Thomas Fairchild’s death in 1729. Thomas Knowlton (1691–1781), through his letters as gardener to James Sherard and Lord Burlington, offers a unique commentary: first on ‘retaliating favours’ in subscription publishing; and second on retailing acclimatized exotics, in which Peter Collinson (1694–1768) played a mercantile role of ‘exchange’, having loaned Catesby funds to publish his Natural History.14See Jean O’Neill and Elizabeth P. McLean, Peter Collinson and the Eighteenth-century Natural History Exchange (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2008). The authors of this work use the term ‘exchange’ to describe the way Collinson (and some in his network) shared information and plants without necessary expectation of repayment. For example, plants were exchanged between John Power at Dyrham House and Collinson over decades (47); and Lord Petre responded to Collinson’s upset on one occasion by saying he was ‘sorry if my having taken the Liberty of Presenting you with those few things, should have been misunderstood’ (69). The authors point out, in the gardeners’ age-old system of exchange, Collinson was generous within the network.

Blanche Henrey’s study of Knowlton (published posthumously in 1986) first identified the significant rough voice of this ‘No ordinary gardener’.15Blanche Henrey, No Ordinary Gardener: Thomas Knowlton, 1691–1781 (London: British Museum [Natural History], 1986). Sir Charles Wager (1666–1743) — a soft man with a rough countenance — represents, by complement, the mercantile and martial life in the service of natural history and gardening. Wager’s Magnolia grandiflora — portrayed by Georg Dionysius Ehret (1708–1770) and appearing in Catesby’s Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands — epitomizes the shift from the medico-botanical sponsorship of the Historia plantarum rariorum with its plant portraits. Jacobus van Huysum (circa 1687–1746) was commissioned to paint the watercolours for both the Historia and the Catalogus plantarum. Because the latter struggled in a commercial market without sponsors, only some of his watercolours were printed as mezzotints. (His glorious Campsis radicans, for example, remains in a drawer in the British Museum, pl. 113.)

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Description: Campsis radicans, the trumpet flower by Huysum, Jacob van

113. Jacobus van Huysum, Campsis radicans, the trumpet flower, drawing for Society of Gardeners, Catalogus plantarum (London, 1730), watercolour on paper, 15 ⅛ × 21 ½ in. (38.5 × 54.7 cm). British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings (Sloane MS 5284, fol. 139). © Trustees of the British Museum

Introduced from eastern North America by 1640, the trumpet vine (Campsis radicans) represents the promise of ‘America’ fulfilled in English pleasure grounds a century later (circa 1740–50). G. D. Ehret’s fine portrait of Campsis radicans — a decade after this unpublished work by Van Huysum — coincides with the new fashion for American shrubbery that emerged from the designed ‘wilderness’ or grove. ‘Capability’ Brown’s wilderness at Petworth (1750s) contained Campsis planted with three acclimatized Catalpa — offspring of Catesby’s collecting in South Carolina.

The setbacks in publishing were compounded by a major setback in plant cultivation. The bitter winter of 1739–40 reversed the run of a dozen benevolent seasons, killing off the evergreen magnolias (Magnolia grandiflora) among Carolina plants. Peter Collinson (with the help of John Bartram, 1699–1777) had to overcome other losses in realizing Catesby’s vision of ‘American gardens’ in England. Unlike Charles Wager, and indeed Knowlton’s correspondents, Samuel Brewer (1670–1743) and Richard Richardson (1663–1741) — all of whom lived long — Lord Petre (1713–1742) had his life cut short, like a young Carolina Callicarpa or Magnolia in the bitter winter of 1740. Robert James Petre, 8th Baron Petre, had been the ‘Phoenix’ of Collinson’s subscribers. As the chapter ends, Lord Petre’s former gardener James Gordon (circa 1708–1780) is found revitalizing a nursery trade from Petre’s ashes and taking up the ‘cudgel’ of marketing exotics. Interdependency — give and take — shapes all doings.

Prelude: Sir Charles Wager and the Memory of the Great Storm

The memory of the Great Storm of 1703 was still acute for years thereafter. In the immediate aftermath, John Evelyn completed a revised edition of Sylva in 1706, the year of his death. It was a chance to publish his final reckoning: ‘3000 brave Oaks, in one part only of the Forest of Dean blown down . . . and in about 450 Parks and Groves, from 200 large Trees to a 1000 of excellent Timber’.16Cited in Mark Laird, ‘Greenhouses and Great Storm: John Evelyn on the Workings of God and Man in the Garden’, in A Celebration of John Evelyn: Proceedings of a Conference to Mark the Tercentenary of his Death, ed. Mavis Batey (Sutton, Surrey: Surrey Gardens Trust, 2007), 110. Following the ‘publique fast after the dreadfull storm’ (19 January 1704), storm sermons were preached and printed on that day throughout the reign of Queen Anne. Into the 1730s, by endowment, the Lord’s mercy was invoked in storm sermons at the Congregational Church in Little Wild Street, London.17This is discussed in Martin Brayne, The Greatest Storm (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton, 2002), 211–12.

Captain Charles Wager, on board the Hampton Court, survived to tell the tale of bringing his tattered ship into Torbay on the night of 26–7 November 1703.18Ibid., 227. He was thirty-seven at the time and went on to become rear admiral, with a command in Jamaica. The cold season of 1709 was a good year for this lucky and ambitious man. He had just been knighted following his services off Cartagena (see pl. 129). From 1733 to 1742 he would serve as First Lord of the Admiralty. He would subscribe to Mark Catesby’s Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands, while his Fulham garden — like Bishop Compton’s Fulham Palace and the duchess of Beaufort’s Chelsea House in their time — became prized for exotics. He grew Acer saccharinum, which he appears to have introduced from North America around 1725. It was called ‘Wager’s maple’. Georg Dionysius Ehret’s studies of Wager’s Magnolia grandiflora would follow in 1737. New attention was turning from greenhouse climate control to acclimatization.

Collecting Networks, Subscription Publishing and Exotic Gardening

In February 1722 the naturalist-collector Mark Catesby embarked for Charleston, South Carolina, landing on 3 May. There, in September 1722, he encountered a violent hurricane as the colony suffered from inland flooding along the rice fields of the Savannah River. Catesby wrote home to William Sherard: ‘The Deer were found frequently lodged on high trees.’ And, in his later account of the brown viper in the Natural History, he described how ‘larger Serpents’ preyed on smaller snakes as a result of the storm. This diluvial vision was incorporated into ‘An Account of Carolina and the Bahama Islands’ (placed, with a map, at the end of the second volume):

Panthers [Cougars], Bears, and Deer were drowned, and found lodg’d on the Limbs of Trees. The smaller Animals suffered also in this Calamity; even Reptiles and Insects were dislodged from their Holes, and violently hurried away, and mixing with harder Substances were beat in Pieces, and their Fragments (after the Waters fell) were seen in many Places to cover the Ground.19Mark Catesby, The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands, 2 vols (London, 1731–43 [1729–47]*), II, 45 (brown viper) and ‘An Account’ at the end of II, vii. See again Chaplin, ‘Mark Catesby’, 74.

* Catesby’s Proposals of 1728 to 1729 led to the presentation of parts I–V (vol. I) between 1729 and 1732 (though the title page is dated 1731). Parts VI–X (vol. II) followed between 1734 and 1743, with the appendix in 1747, and hence the full span of the publication is 1729–47.

Even for those who had lived through the Great Storm of 1703, such apocalyptic visions were unimaginable (pl. 115). The Quaker Peter Collinson was just a boy in 1703, being brought up by his gardening grandmother in Peckham.20For the background to Quakers in natural science and mercery (with connections in Maryland and Pennsylvania), and for Collinson’s early years, see O’Neill and McLean, Peter Collinson, chapter 1. Though he became, through the mercer’s trade, the great facilitator of global traffic in plants, he never ventured further than crossing the ‘Herring pond’ (as he called the North Sea in a letter to his wife in 1727 or 1728).21See Alan W. Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden . . . ’: Selected Letters, 1725–1768, of Peter Collinson, FRS (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2002), 4. O’Neill and McLean, Peter Collinson, 14. For example, writing to Sir Charles Wager in August 1739 about the vastly improved rice trade (‘Forty Sail of Carolina Rice Ships’ in dock at West Cowes), Collinson poked fun at himself among the ‘Fresh Water Sailers’ crossing to the Isle of Wight: ‘We had frequent Turnadoes & hazey thick Weather, Rains & Calms. It seem’d as if Wee was to have Little Smalle Samples of what you experience in Long Voyages.’22Quoted from Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 77.

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Description: Bison Americanus and Pseudo Acacia by Catesby, Mark

115. Mark Catesby, Bison bison (American bison), later modified after Everhard Kick’s buffalo drawing for publication in his Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands (1729–47), vol. II, appendix, pl. 20, watercolour and gouache heightened with gum arabic, over graphite. Royal Library, Windsor Castle (RL 26092). Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2013

The foliage drawn in outline has been identified as Gliricidia sepium (quickstick) of Central America, which resembles the rose acacia of Catesby’s text. Catesby had seen the rose acacia (Robinia hispida) in one place ‘near the Apelatchian mountains’ frequented by browsing bison. Yet he failed to collect seed in a spot burned by ‘ravaging Indians’. Hence he returned to England with specimens only, and these went into Sloane’s hortus siccus. He was later informed that Sir John Colleton of Exmouth had introduced the tree to cultivation. This belated date of introduction (1743) meant that drawing revisions did not occur by publication in 1747, leaving the mix-up of two entirely different species. Catesby’s vision of a Bison ‘lodged’ in a tree also recalls his diluvial account, after the hurricane of September 1722, of flooding on the Savannah River.

In time, the trade that Peter Collinson initiated with John Bartram of Philadelphia inextricably linked the two sides of the Atlantic ‘Pond’ as an exchange.23O’Neill and McLean, Peter Collinson, especially chapter 6. That trade built on Mark Catesby’s voyage to the Carolinas, Florida and the Bahamas in the mid-1720s, which followed his earlier expedition to Virginia and the West Indies (1712–19).24See E. Charles Nelson, ‘“The Truly Honest, Ingenious, and Modest Mr. Mark Catesby, F.R.S.” — Documenting his Life’, in Nelson and Elliott, eds., The Curious Mister Catesby, for background biographical information and discussion of the first voyage of 1712–19. Catesby’s Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands thus caught the collecting network in its extensive web. Plant ‘Lovers’, who pored over his lovely, but sometimes disturbing, plates, were drawn into the new marketplace (pl. 116): subscribing to Peter Collinson’s syndicate, or paying nurserymen for London-raised plants that thrived in the improving climatic trend.

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Description: Tufted titmouse (Baeolophus bicolor) and mountain azalea (Rhododendron canescens) by...

116. Mark Catesby, Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands (1729–47), vol. I, pl. 57, illustrating tufted titmouse (Baeolophus bicolor) and mountain azalea (Rhododendron canescens), engraving, hand-coloured in watercolour. © Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Rare Book Collection, Washington, DC

In his watercolour (Royal Library, Windsor, RL 25892), which was the basis of this engraved plate, Catesby showed flowers of two colour expressions, with long stamens, now identified as Rhododendron cansecens. In contrast (and confusing his readers), Catesby, knowing Rhododendron nudiflorum (cf. p. vi) and R. viscosum in cultivation in England, wrote how the latter, introduced by 1691 and reintroduced in 1734, ‘will endure our Climate in the open Air, having for some years past produc’d its beautiful and fragrant Blossoms at Mr. Bacon’s at Hoxton, and at Mr. Collinson’s at Peckham; and at Mr. Christopher Grays, at Fulham’. Stephen Bacon was Thomas Fairchild’s nephew. A harmony of bird and plant was an animating vision for British subscribers, charmed by the Natural History and its evocation of an Edenic New World.

Books and gardens appeared to change with the changing climate. In 1722 Collinson began his catalogue of plants.25The catalogue of 1722 coincides with the earliest extant record of Collinson’s first link to horticulture through John Power, gardener at Dyrham Park, and with Sloane’s lease of land on a peppercorn rent to Chelsea Physic Garden in return for fifty specimens presented to the Royal Society each year. See O’Neill and McLean, Peter Collinson, 22, 47. The catalogue of 1722 was amended after Collinson’s move from Peckham to Mill Hill and given the date 1752. It was later bound into his copy of the 7th edition of Philip Miller’s Gardeners Dictionary and called ‘Hortus Collinsonianus’ (142). By chance, 1722 was also the year that the nurseryman Thomas Fairchild published The City Gardener in London. The book was intended to address an environmental issue. This was not a natural disorder, but what John Evelyn had called the ‘Avernus’ of human making: the polluted air.26See Mark Laird, ‘Sayes Court Revisited’, in John Evelyn and his Milieu, ed. Frances Harris and Michael Hunter (London: British Library, 2003), 115–44. Avernus — a lake in Campagna, Italy — was thought in the ancient world to give off an effluvium that killed over-flying birds. Fairchild explained how to grow plants that were tolerant of city smoke. He also kept a personal record of what bloomed in his Hoxton nursery, month by month from April 1722 to March 1723.27This list, in the form of three letters sent to Richard Bradley’s journal, A General Treatise of Husbandry and Gardening, with its Monthly Register, is reproduced in transcription in Harvey, Early Nurserymen, appendix IV, 150. Aster grandiflorus (Symphyotrichum grandiflorum), for example, was among the new American perennials flowering late into autumn. Called ‘Mr Catesby’s new Virginian starwort’, it had entered cultivation in 1720. After Mark Catesby had settled in London in 1726, he collaborated with Thomas Fairchild in Hoxton. They doubtless exchanged anecdotes about the odd summer of 1725 (the coldest in the entire thermometer record, 1659–1996)28See Hubert H. Lamb, Climate, History and the Modern World, 2nd edn (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 244, and Mike Hulme and Elaine Barrow, eds, Climates of the British Isles: Present, Past and Future (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 272 and 404–8. — a summer that Catesby conveniently missed while studying fish, birds, crustaceans and plants on the Bahama Islands (pls 117 and 118).

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Description: Head of American Flamingo (Phoenicopterus ruber) and bent sea-rod (Plexaura...

117. Mark Catesby, head of American flamingo (Phoenicopterus ruber) and bent sea-rod (Plexaura flexuosa), Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands (1729–47), vol. 1, pl. 74. © Smithsonian Libraries, photograph courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library

In 1725 Catesby made a trip to the Bahamas, where, in wonderment, he drew birds, fish and marine life. He commented: ‘tho’ I had been often told they were very remarkable, yet I was surprised to find how lavishly Nature had adorn’d them with Marks and Colours most admirable’. His responsive and startling representations drew many admirers — admiration that continues to the present day. Missing England’s coldest ever summer (the ‘winter’ of July 1725), he returned to a run of warm seasons. These seasons favoured exotics, until the bitter winter of 1739–40 killed off Magnolia grandiflora, just as the frigid winter of 1683–4 had laid waste to John Evelyn’s Mediterranean evergreens.

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Description: Map of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands by Catesby, Mark

118. Mark Catesby, map of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands, bound into a later edition of his Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands (1754), vol. II, appendix, and adapted from Henry Popple’s ‘Map of the British Empire in America . . .’ (London, 1754), engraving and hand-coloured in watercolour. Missouri Botanical Garden, Peter H. Raven Library, photograph courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library

As a preface to the second volume of his Natural History, Catesby described the climate, soil and topography of the region extending from Carolina to the Bahama Islands, which he had explored on his expedition. That ‘Account’ is placed at the end of the second volume in most bound sets, preceded by this map of Britain’s colonial possessions in the Americas. His Proposal of 1729 led to the presentation of parts I–V (vol. I) between 1729 and 1732 (though the title page is dated 1731). Parts VI–X (vol. II) followed between 1734–5 and 1743, with the appendix in 1747. While the dedication of the first volume was to Queen Caroline (under ‘your august name carolina’) and the second to Princess Augusta — both royal gardeners — the subscribers were predominantly men.

Gardeners have always had to contend with the vicissitudes of the weather. But the 1720s and 1730s were exceptional decades of change in England in the environment of horticulture: a time of occasional extreme weather within a generally congenial climate for growing new plants. Although the Little Ice Age of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries began to wane, gardeners in England still encountered the ‘wide variability’ of the previous hundred years.29Lamb, Climate, History and the Modern World, 243–4. Fairchild and Catesby — among the first to muse on growing a batch of North American plants in English soil — found themselves blessed by an improving trend. Having got through the dismal ‘winter in summer’ of July 1725, this meant that, overall at least, Catesby’s Carolina shrubs such as Amorpha fruticosa (pl. 119) enjoyed warm winters, summers and especially autumns in their initial years in London.30See Michael Dukes and Philip Eden, ‘ “Phew! What a Scorcher”: Weather Records and Extremes’, in Climates of the British Isles, ed. Hulme and Barrow, 266, and appendix D for the complete air temperature record. While 1733 is tied with five other years (including 1995) as the third warmest year on record (1659– 1996), the autumns of 1729, 1730 and 1731 rank as a sequence of the three warmest. The winters of 1734, 1737 and 1739 were exceptionally mild (and equivalent to some in the 1990s), while the summers of 1726, 1727, 1728, 1731, 1733 and 1736 were all very warm. Apparently, too, the London smoke was not a hindrance to cultivating Amorpha, then called familiarly the ‘Bastard Indigo’.31Philip Miller’s account in The Gardeners Dictionary of 1768 supports this view (entry ‘Amorpha Fruticosa’): ‘The seeds of this plant were sent to England from Carolina, by Mr. Mark Catesby, FRS in 1724, from which many plants were raised in the gardens near London; these were of quick growth, and many of the plants produced flowers in three years.’ It is interesting that, by 1768, Miller associated Amorpha uniquely with the ‘shrubbery’, a term he otherwise avoided in favour of the old term ‘wilderness’.

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Description: Amorpha fruticosa (bastard indigo) and Cistus ladanifer (gum cistus) by Huysum,...

119. Jacobus van Huysum, Amorpha fruticosa (bastard indigo) and Cistus ladanifer (gum cistus), watercolour drawing for the Society of Gardeners, Catalogus plantarum (London, 1730), watercolour on paper, 14 ¾ × 10 ½ in. (37.5 × 26.5 cm). British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings (Sloane MS 5284, fol. 14) © Trustees of the British Museum

Catesby introduced Amorpha fruticosa (bastard indigo) to English gardens as seed in 1724. By 1730 the Catalogus plantarum was describing it as hardy and growing up to 8 or 10 feet in height. The nursery trade would ensure a wide dissemination of Amorpha, bringing its price down from 2s. to an affordable 9d. by the end of the century. In the Gardeners Dictionary of 1768, Philip Miller associated Amorpha with the new term ‘shrubbery’. He thus uniquely departed in that entry from his old allegiance to the term ‘wilderness’ as one type of grove.

It is within this environmental matrix that new forms of botanical and horticultural literature burgeoned at the end of the 1720s. The initial plates of the Historia plantarum rariorum were printed in 1728, and this was continued by John Martyn in five ‘Decades’ up to 1737. In turn, the first twenty plates of Mark Catesby’s Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands appeared in 1729, intensifying the zeal of those curious in natural history. Then the Society of Gardeners’ Catalogus plantarum came out in 1730. It illustrated exotic and domestic plants ‘propagated for Sale, In the Gardens near London. Divided, according to their different Degrees of Hardiness’.32The title is Catalogus Plantarum, Tum Exoticarum tum Domesticarum, quae in Hortis haud procul a Londino Sitis in Venditionem propagantur/A Catalogue of Trees, Shrubs, Plants, and Flowers, both Exotic and Domestic, Which are propagated for Sale, In the Gardens near London. Divided, according to their different Degrees of Hardiness, into particular Books, or Parts . . . (London, 1730). Acclimatization was becoming the main concern, and a series of other works showed how acclimatized exotics might be used in garden design. For example, Batty Langley’s ‘Manner of Disposing and Planting Flowering Shrubs in the Proper Parts of a Wilderness’, which appeared in his New Principles of Gardening of 1728, gave a place to the North American tulip tree within a graduated plantation (see pl. 112). Robert Furber’s ‘Borders of Cut Work’ in the Catalogue of English and Foreign Trees was another model of gardening with exotics. It was printed in 1727 ahead of his Twelve Months of Flowers, which came out in 1730. The latter attracted a high percentage of women subscribers and reinforced the cult of floriculture along with the new cult of acclimatized exotics (pl. 120).33This is discussed in Laird, ‘The Culture of Horticulture’, 247–8.

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Description: Frontispiece from Robert Furber, Twelve Months of Flowers by Fletcher, Henry

120. Henry Fletcher after Pieter Casteels, frontispiece from Robert Furber, Twelve Months of Flowers (London, 1730), engraving, hand-coloured in watercolour. © Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Rare Book Collection, Washington, DC

Unlike the medico-botanical sponsorship of Mark Catesby’s Natural History and John Martyn’s Historia plantarum rariorum, Robert Furber’s Twelve Months of Flowers was sponsored by many women of diverse rank — around one-third of all subscribers. The engagement of an audience under royal patronage (the prince of Wales and the Princess Royal) and the marketing of Furber’s nursery stock by illustrated catalogue propelled a mid-century taste for shrubbery and flower gardens. Catesby’s plants played a decisive role in these new gardens. Yet the named cultivars among the florists’ flowers in this decorative border point to a resilient fashion among women for long-established Primula species (notably auriculas), which the duchess of Beaufort had grown at Chelsea.

Catesby, Fairchild and their contemporaries did not, of course, gauge the implications of this environmental moment. Yet, in engaging issues of classification and graduation, standardization and consumption — and, above all, the question of acclimatization — these horticultural and botanical authors effectively contended with an unsettling interplay of human and biological forces. Along with exotics from the rest of the globe, the plants of the American colonies were coming into a new home within English gardens. They were placed in new planting structures, traded in a new marketplace and subjected to all kinds of environmental stresses as well as the loving hand of personal cosseting. In much the same fashion, human individuals had to become accustomed to a new climate of publishing: collectives offering protection and potential for growth. Subscriptions, and the trading of favours that this entailed, would keep some of them from ending up ‘beat in Pieces’ like the fragments of creatures left after a deluge.

Trading Favours for Catesby and Co.: Thomas Knowlton’s Role in Cultivating Alliances of Book and Plant

The best way of entering this world of alliances of book and exotic is through the personal fortunes of a given plant. The double nasturtium (Tropaeolum majus) is one such cultivar. It had a precarious footing after its mutation (post-1686) from the Peruvian species that had come to England via the Netherlands.34The early history of Tropaeolum majus, after its introduction to the Dutch Republic from Peru in 1684, is discussed in 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), 76–7. This double-flower variety was ultimately lost to cultivation, but it reappeared in gardening in the twentieth century, probably due to a recurrence of the mutation.35Wilfrid Blunt, The Art of Botanical Illustration [1950], ed. William T. Stearn (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1994), 150. Robert Furber described it in 1732: ‘This Plant we lately received from Holland, but it was first raised in Italy, and many Contrivances were used before it could be brought to Holland; it first bore a great Price, and was esteem’d as a great Rarity, and by planting it of Cuttings it is now become pretty plentiful.’ Charles Nelson added the following observations by personal communication in September 2012 to describe the culture of this chance mutation: ‘The present opinion suggests that T. majus (double) is a spontaneous hybrid. It is a sterile mutation of an annual plant. Being sterile it cannot reproduce by seed, and is only perpetuated with the intervention of a gardener. It had to be kept “alive” by taking and rooting cuttings. Not an easy task with a rather fleshy annual — indeed contrary to logic as annuals should perish after flowering. So it is a great tribute to the skill of the gardener, who first noticed the mutant, that it ever entered cultivation so widely. It was a “difficult” plant, and having it year upon year demonstrated your skill. It also had to be overwintered in a glasshouse.’ Jacobus van Huysum’s sumptuous watercolours in the Royal Society and the British Museum convey its Baroque appeal (pl. 121). The watercolours may be compared to the reverse depiction as a simulated mezzotint in the Catalogus plantarum (pl. 122).36See again Laird, ‘The Congenial Climate of Coffee-House Horticulture’. See also Warren D. Allmon, ‘The Evolution of Accuracy in Natural History Illustration: Reversal of Printed Illustrations of Snails and Crabs in Pre-Linnaean Works Suggests Indifference to Morphological Detail’, Archives of Natural History, XXXIV/1 (April 2007), 174–91. Reversal in printing does not appear to make a difference with plants, but, as Allmon points out, Catesby’s reversed printing of the asymmetrical crab is significant. Kirkall had probably used an engraving tool known as a roulette wheel to create tone on certain areas of the printing plate, rather than a rocker, the traditional tool used in true mezzotint to incise an overall dot pattern on the surface of the plate. Robert Furber claimed that the double nasturtium came from the Netherlands but was first raised in Italy. And this is where Thomas Knowlton enters the story of exotic plant introductions and acclimatization. He wrote in very rough but to-the-point prose (which takes the modern reader a moment to adjust to).

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Description: Tropaeolum majus (Acriviola maxima..., double nasturitum) by Huysum, Jacob van

121. Jacobus van Huysum, Tropaeolum majus (‘Acriviola maxima . . .’, double nasturtium), drawing for Society of Gardeners, Catalogus plantarum (London, 1730), watercolour on paper, 14 ¾ × approx. 10 ⅜ in. (37.5 × approx. 26.5 cm). British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings (Sloane MS 5284, fol. 6). © Trustees of the British Museum

Two versions of this portrait were prepared for engraving as ‘mezzotints’ for publication in the Catalogus plantarum (pl. 122). (The other is kept at the Royal Society.) Jacobus van Huysum was the younger brother of the great Dutch flower painter, Jan van Huysum, and came to London in 1721. In the late 1720s he worked simultaneously on the portraits for the Historia plantarum rariorum and the Catalogus plantarum. Until dismissed for drunken behaviour, Jacobus also worked for Robert Walpole. He is best known for his month-by-month flower paintings in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (see pls 146 and 147), which parallel Pieter Casteel’s paintings for Robert Furber’s Twelve Months.

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Description: Tropaeolum majus (double nasturitum) with Spanish Tree Germander and Dwarf Colutea...

122. Elisha Kirkall after Jacobus van Huysum, Tropaeolum majus (double nasturtium) with ‘Spanish Tree Germander’ and ‘Dwarf Colutea’, from Society of Gardeners, Catalogus plantarum (London, 1730), line engraving with mezzotint printed in colour and hand-coloured in watercolour, 14 × 10 in. (35.5 × 25.6 cm). British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings (1923,1112.171). © Trustees of the British Museum

Elisha Kirkall (or Kirkhall, circa 1682–1742) engraved Van Huysum’s portraits to imitate true mezzotint, probably by use of a ‘roulette wheel’ to create tone on certain areas of the printing plate, rather than a ‘rocker’, the traditional tool used to incise an overall dot pattern on the surface of the plate. Thomas Knowlton’s frustrations with this rather tricky annual plant, double nasturtium (Tropaeolum majus cv.), entailed alliances in exchanging favours, know-how and materials.

In a letter of 22 April 1729 Knowlton wrote to Richard Richardson in Yorkshire about some exotic plants including Aloe — those succulents that the duchess of Beaufort had collected with passion — adding in conclusion: ‘NB . . . I had a letter from Buckingham House in St James parke & my fraind [friend] tells me ye double nasturtum is Killd every-where about the town wch I am sorrey to heare but hope it will be preserved some.’37Henrey, No Ordinary Gardener, 102. It is possible that Knowlton first encountered the nasturtium on one of his two trips to the Dutch Republic, since Hermann Boerhaave listed ‘Acriviola maxima odorata’ in his catalogue of 1720 published in Leiden.38Ibid., 106. The first trip was in 1723 while working for James Sherard at Eltham. The second was in 1726 on behalf of Thomas Fairchild.

On 24 August 1729 Knowlton wrote to Samuel Brewer in Yorkshire on miscellaneous matters including the double nasturtium. Having mentioned James Petiver and Sir Hans Sloane in passing, he explained the imperatives of ‘favers’ and ‘retaliation’ (reciprocal favours with regard to Dr Richardson and Brewer):

I Recd his favers a Letter wch I ought to have acknowlegde sooner but had thoughts of seeing him before is ye reson of this omition if amoung yr plants double nasturtum be I should acknowlige it a very grate faver if I could gain a plant being first brought over by my self.39Ibid. I am grateful to Therese O’Malley for introducing me to the idea of gift giving and reciprocity (including the naming of plants as a favour). See her essay ‘Cultivated Lives, Cultivated Spaces: The Scientific Garden in Philadelphia, 1740–1840’, in Knowing Nature: Art and Science in Philadelphia, 1740–1840, ed. Amy R. W. Meyers (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011), 44–9. See also William Stearns, ‘Historical Survey of the Naming of Cultivated Plants’, Acta horticulturae, CLXXXII (1986): International Symposium on Taxonomy of Cultivated Plants in Wageningen, Netherlands, July 1986. Linneaus wrote about naming plants after people, for example.

On 17 November, thanking Brewer for the offer of a plant, he indicated that he had already obtained one previously from London. This was the moment to mention something of equal import, and in the new literary form of the obituary:

Mr fairchild’s Death . . . was in all the London papars being a hamsome account of his past Life with feunerall &c well worth reading & is to Long otherwise should tran’scribe it for you; I have Likewise since been advertised of it both by Mr Baccon & Mr Catesbey the first haveing a few sorts of trees from the other . . .40Henrey, No Ordinary Gardener, 118.

Death was the last chance to render favours, and Fairchild made sure the score was settled for Mark Catesby: one guinea for a ring for his very good friend. Fairchild’s will also stated that a sum of £25 be invested towards the payment of 20 shillings in interest each year for the preaching of a sermon. St Leonard in Shoreditch was the chosen venue; the afternoon of Tuesday in every Whitsun week was the appointed time. The subject was specified to be the ‘wonderfull works’ of God in creation and the certainty of resurrection in relationship to the animal and vegetable parts of ‘the Creation’.41See Harvey, Early Nurserymen, 77; Leapman provides a full transcription of the will, but it should be noted that his ‘wonderful world’ does not match Harvey’s transcription ‘wonderfull works’. The ‘Vegetable Sermon’ continued in Shoreditch until 1981, when, under the auspices of the Worshipful Company of Gardeners, it transferred to St Giles, Cripplegate. In 2012 the lecture was given by Rabbi Dr Abraham Levy in the Bevis Marks Synagogue in the City. Thomas Fairchild also took care in the will to leave money for his servants and relatives. The residue, including his lands, goods, garden stock and personal estate, went to his nephew Stephen Bacon, nurseryman of Hoxton and signatory to the preface of the Catalogus plantarum. The following year, 1730, the book came out. On 19 May the initial Fairchild Lecture was delivered at the church. Subscribers would later ensure its continuance in the form known today as the ‘Vegetable Sermons’. Thus the commonwealth of favours could have an afterlife well after death.

In his letter to Brewer of 8 February 1730, Knowlton referred to the nasturtium once again in very affectionate terms: ‘I hope my Deare Double nasturtum’s well & will be perserved over ye winter & that youl have the pleasure of seeing it in perfection in yr garden wch I hope to see some time next spring.’42Henrey, No Ordinary Gardener, 121. In a further letter of 28 March 1730, however, he confided to Brewer that he was unsuccessful in growing the nasturtium himself (and by August that year he had given up entirely). He went on to remark on something completely different: ‘I have ye compeneys Book of gardening it costs 1ll 11s 6d a very Ridiculus price I see full of nothing but faults Lik the Company.’43Ibid., 123. Since the Society of Gardeners’ Catalogus plantarum had just appeared on 17 February 1730, it is more than likely that this was the volume he was referring to (rather than a work issued by the Worshipful Company of Gardeners, a guild distinct from the Society and incorporated by Royal Charter in 1605). In depicting the ‘Double Nasturtium’, the authors (led by Philip Miller, who was ‘Clerk’ of the Society) made no reference to Thomas Knowlton’s role in its introduction and cultivation (see again pls 121 and 122). This accounts for his being infuriated by the price and the faulty contents. For whatever reason (perhaps an alienation that began with working for James Sherard, and thereafter the isolation of Yorkshire), Knowlton also appears to have been outside that particular alliance of London gardeners, though clearly he had links with Thomas Fairchild.

Knowlton was not alone in pouring scorn on the ‘compeny’ (i.e., the Society of Gardeners) as one form of alliance. The Worshipful Company of Gardeners of London, which had been founded in 1605 for ‘the Publick Good’, had its own problems in keeping its house in order: desisting from prosecution of the higglers, costermongers, forestallers and other ‘rude’ labourers who violated its monopoly.44This is discussed in Todd Longstaffe-Gowan, The London Town Garden, 1700–1840 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), 154. The Society of Gardeners’ attempts to standardize commerce were thus more than a taxonomic issue; they aspired to industry standards. By choosing to publish in English they certainly got attention, attracting satires within a year or two of publication.45See again Riley, ‘The Club at the Temple Coffee House Revisited’, 90–100, for a discussion of satire and the ‘Club’. Two obscene skits on its writings appeared in 1732. ‘The natural history of the Arbor vitae: or, the tree of life, published by a Society of Gardeners, J. Wilkinson’, was the first. The second was rudely entitled: ‘The natural history of the Frutex vulvaria or flowering shrub . . . By Philogynes Clitorides, botanist, and one of the missionaries for propagating knowledge in foreign parts, by W. Jones’.46See Blanche Henrey, British Botanical and Horticultural Literature before 1800 (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), II, 213. Thomas Fairchild’s work on hybridization — his ‘Mule’ of 1717 that crossed Dianthus caryophyllus (clove pink or carnation) with Dianthus barbatus (sweet William) — had by then made tangible the questions of sexual generation discussed by botanists of his time. Fairchild’s links to the Society of Gardeners may help to explain the thrust of these rude satires.

Philip Miller’s close involvement with the Catalogus plantarum (the beginning of what became Knowlton’s later antipathy towards Miller’s snobbery)47O’Neill and McLean, Peter Collinson, 58. did not prevent Knowlton giving fulsome praise to the prospectus for his ‘fraind’ Miller’s Gardeners Dictionary. To Knowlton’s correspondent, Samuel Brewer, he noted in that same letter of 28 March:

. . . my fraind Mr Miller is just now publishing proposal[s] for a Book in gardening being about 1 pd & 5 shiling . . . I shall have the proposal[s] in a short time & will send or Bring ym over in order for you to assist wch will be a very good thing & worthy every ones purchasse.48Henrey, No Ordinary Gardener, 123.

By 1729 he had also become a subscriber to Mark Catesby’s Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands, soliciting subscriptions from others.49His role as a central ‘encourager’ after William Sherard’s death in 1728 is discussed in David R. Brigham, ‘Mark Catesby and the Patronage of Natural History in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century’, in Empire’s Nature, ed. Meyers and Pritchard, 115–18. In the continuation of the letter to Brewer he wrote:

Mr Catersby has published another seat [set] our Ld [Burlington] had three of ym when I was in town & was pleased to say to me it was ye best done he ever see any thing of that Kind I was glad to heare his LdShipe was so well pleased I hope it will be for mr Catesby[’s] advantage his LdShipe Intended to see him att fairchilds with ye Aloe . . .50Henrey, No Ordinary Gardener, 125.

From 1726 Lord Burlington had been Knowlton’s employer at Londesborough. This followed the years working for James Sherard (1720–25), and a year as gardener to the duke of Chandos at Canons (1725). Prior to that, Knowlton had worked for Sir Henry Penrice at Offley Park in Hertfordshire. (In 1711 he had listed some wild plants of Hertfordshire and, by 1714, recorded the bird’s-nest orchid, Neottia nidus-avis, in Offley Park.)51Ibid., 35. The earliest reference to his career occurs in Eleazar Albin’s Natural History of English Insects (1720), the book for which Mary, dowager duchess of Beaufort, had been chief patroness. Significantly, it is in the form of a sponsorship. Plate 88 is dedicated ‘To Tho: Knowlton gardiner at Sr Henry Penrisces at Offly Place in Hartfordshire’, referring to one caterpillar ‘taken on the Aspen Tree near Mussel Hill’ (pl. 123). Knowlton’s love affair with the cultivated double nasturtium thus never precluded the passion for wild flora and fauna that had induced him to join the list of subscribers. As a member of the first Aurelian Society (founded between 1720 and 1742, and probably in 1738), Knowlton came into contact with another entomological enthusiast and member, Peter Collinson (with whom he later conducted a correspondence on miscellaneous subjects such as the mistletoe and native orchids).52O’Neill and McLean, Peter Collinson, 36, 52–3. See appendix B, 169, for Collinson’s list of trees that Knowlton saw with mistletoe, and appendix C, 170–71, for a list of Collinson orchids, which includes Ophrys insectifera found in Middlesex in July 1757 after a visit to Bulstrode.

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Description: A Natural History of English Insects, pl. 88 by Albin, Eleazar

123. Eleazar Albin, A Natural History of English Insects (London, 1720), pl. 88, engraving, hand-coloured with watercolour. Houghton Library, Harvard University (F Typ 705.20.132 [A])

This plate was sponsored by Thomas Knowlton within a network of sponsors. As a member of the first Aurelian Society (probably founded in 1738, see pl. 98), Knowlton came into contact with another ‘fly’ enthusiast and Society member, Peter Collinson. He later exchanged correspondence with Collinson on mistletoe and native orchids amid miscellaneous horticultural subjects. Among such ‘Lovers’ of nature, Sir Charles Wager, corresponding with Collinson, conformed to the expectation that natural history was inseparable from gardening in the new alliances of book and letter.

Knowlton had an interest in birds as much as insects. Hence in the letter to Brewer of 28 March 1730 there was reference to Eleazar Albin’s Natural History of Birds, which appeared in three quarto volumes from 1731 onwards, becoming A Natural History of English Song-Birds by 1737. Albin was looking for subscribers, as Knowlton made clear in relationship to a ‘favour’ he asked of Brewer:

Mr albine is . . . publisheing an history english & forren Birds 80 plats [plates] being already engraved I havee proposalls & specimen’s by me & have enter’d myself one & promisd to gaine some others it is well done & is humble proposed att 4 pd & 4 shilling in quarto good paper & in naturall colours if you can procure any for hime it will be a faver acknowledged . . .53Henrey, No Ordinary Gardener, 125.

Clearly, as with Richardson, a ‘favour acknowledged’ amounted to the art of ‘retaliation’. Gaining subscribers was a question of trading favours, which could involve women as well as men. A review of the list of subscribers to Eleazar Albin’s A Natural History of English Insects elicits a comparatively high engagement of women sponsors (many more, interestingly, than could be found in Albin’s A Natural History of English Song-Birds, and later in George Edwards’s book on birds).54In the 1738 edition of Albin’s A Natural History of English Song-Birds, not even 20 of the 122 subscribers were women. These included aristocrats, such as Lady Hartford and Lady Northampton, and women of lower rank, such as Mrs Besswick. The insect volume, dedicated to Her Royal Highness the Princess of Wales, contains the names of a total of 171 subscribers. Of these, approximately sixty-three, or around 37 per cent, were women. Many were aristocratic subscribers, such as the duchess of Grafton and the countess of Northampton. On the other hand, as with Furber’s Twelve Months of Flowers, the subscription list is notable for the assortment of women who were not members of the aristocracy (though some were significant ladies of lesser rank): Mrs Bovey, Mrs Ermin Cartwright, Mrs Mary Goopye (probably the subscriber to Birds too), Mrs Howland and Mrs Lambert. Significant as Mrs Weld of Lulworth Castle in Dorset was, she found herself listed at the bottom of the entry ‘W’ in the hierarchy according to rank, first, and gender, second.

Despite this, readers, however high or low, were all contributing support as avid consumers of natural history. Sponsorship could involve alliances formed between the medico-botanical world and polite society at large. Some indication of the impetus to solicit subscribers is provided in the preface to the volume (as previously discussed in chapter 2). Eleazar Albin wrote how Joseph Dandridge had introduced him to a ‘Mrs. How, Widow of the late famous Physician of that Name’. He continued:

For this curious Lady I painted a great Number of both Caterpillars and Flies, and likewise several Things relating to Natural History for Sir Hans Sloane: After this I was introduc’d to Her Grace Mary the late Dutchess Dowager of Beaufort, who imployed me in the same manner; this excellent Lady first persvaded me to undertake the following Work, and encouraged me by procuring me Subscriptions from several Persons of the first Quality: While this good Lady lived it went on apace, and I am persuaded had been finished long since if it had pleased God to have spared her; but after the loss of my Patroness, Subscriptions coming in slowly, and my Circumstances (having a great Family to provide for) not being able to carry it on without, retarded it. These Considerations I hope will dispose those honourable and worthy Persons who subscribed early to pardon me that they have expected it so long.55Eleazar Albin, A Natural History of English Insects (London, 1720; here in the 1724 edition), first page of the preface.

In other words, the sponsorship began with a widow of a physician — George How, censor of the Royal College of Physicians — who, as Laetitia How (née Foley), had links to Lord Foley on the subscription list. It was then promoted by another physician: Sir Hans Sloane. Yet, ultimately its momentum depended on an aristocratic ‘Patroness’ (the duchess of Beaufort), a lady who had family and friends to commandeer outside medico-botanical circles. To what extent the presence of women in the list indicates active involvement in natural history is unclear. For example, was Mrs Etheldred Hovel, wife of the archbishop of Canterbury, persuaded to subscribe for reasons of status or connection, or did she have an independent interest in natural history as opposed to delight in the decorative or ‘exquisite’? Doubtless passive and active engagement fused. Perhaps women simply proved effective in drumming up subscriptions among their kind.

In the summer of 1733 Knowlton wrote again to Brewer about a range of botanical or horticultural works, including John Martyn’s Historia plantarum rariorum. He mentioned in passing that Catesby had offered to return his favour (of bringing subscribers to the Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands) by procuring what Knowlton might want in the Netherlands:

Mr Catesby has published his fifth part with a preafece [possibly the dedication leaf] & is gone over to Hollande he wrot to me to Know if he could be of any sarvice to me there . . . as to the amaranthus you may have what specmens you please if you think ym of any worth — I know there is one of martains . . .56Henrey, No Ordinary Gardener, 135–6.

Knowlton had become aware of ‘martains’ — John Martyn’s Historia plantarum rariorum — in 1729, since he asked Brewer how the publication was proceeding. Clearly, he had seen the first ‘Decade’ by 28 June 1733, when he made reference to a particular plant that appeared as plate 5. This was ‘Amaranthus sinensis foliis variis, panicula elegantur plumosa’, now Amaranthus paniculatus. Today, it is believed to be a Central American plant despite the polynomial allusion to China (the epithet ‘sinensis’). Another plant, ‘Amaranthus spica’ (Celosia argentea), sponsored by the earl of Oxford, also appeared in that ‘Decade’ as plate 6. Jacobus van Huysum’s original plant portrait for the Historia is in the Royal Society Library, and the patron of the more muted ‘mezzotint’ version was Edward Harley, 2nd earl of Oxford and Mortimer, one of the twelve sponsors of Catesby’s voyage of 1722–6 (pl. 124).

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Description: Historia plantarum rariorum by Martyn, John

124. John Martyn, Historia plantarum rariorum (London, 1728–37), line engraving and mezzotint printed in colour and hand-coloured in watercolour. Gray Botany Library, Harvard University (Oversize fol. 1 M36.5 1728)

Although the tropical annual ‘Amaranthus spica’ has uncertain origins, it represents a new range of flowers that Robert Furber promoted for late summer flower gardens. Edward Harley, 2nd earl of Oxford and Mortimer, who sponsored this plate, was among the twelve sponsors of Catesby’s Carolina trip of 1722–6, and he subscribed to two copies of the Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands. The earl is best known as book collector and patron of the arts; he owned 50,000 books at his death. His daughter, Margaret Cavendish, would keep up the family interest in natural history as the duchess of Portland at Bulstrode.

Eleazar Albin’s A Natural History of English Insects has in common with John Martyn’s Historia plantarum rariorum the device of patronage of an individual plate. Yet there is a fundamental difference of representation. In Albin’s Natural History, the subscriber is represented as a dedicatee: for example, ‘To the Most Noble Mary Capell Dutchess Dow.r of Beaufort this Plate is humbly Dedicated by Eleazar Albin’ (see pl. 107). In contrast, the plates of the Historia include not merely the name of the sponsor but also his coat of arms, or some other emblem if the patron were without landed title.57Jean O’Neill and Elizabeth McLean point out that Peter Collinson sported a ‘coat of arms’ in the company of other Quakers (from John Fothergill to John Bartram). It appeared in the dedicated plate in Moses Harris’s The Aurelian in 1766: a squirrel, three tomahawks and two stars. These motifs also appear in the Historia plantarum rariorum plate of ‘Helleborine Americana’ (Bletia purpurea) sponsored by Collinson. See O’Neill and McLean, Peter Collinson, 36. Though it does appear rather unusual, this practice was not unique, nor was it John Martyn’s own innovation. Robert Morison’s Plantarum umbelliferarum distributio nova of 1672 is one early precedent. In that case, each of the twelve copper plates was the gift of a donor and bore his name, office and heraldic arms. Similarly, the ‘Pars tertia’ of Morison’s Plantarum historia universalis Oxoniensis, published in 1699, included sixty-nine of the total 166 plates that bear the names of donors and their heraldic arms. In this lineage of medico-botanical publications, family pedigree counted as much as male professional status. But this old collegiality was giving way to new collectives. In the bourgeois publishing marketplace, it was a risky venture to publish without subscribers, and even more so in Latin as opposed to English. While Peter Collinson sustained the age-old practice of exchange of knowledge and plants in a network, those who clubbed together to publish commercial books learned how favours could be traded in collective barter.

Hortus Elthamensis as Rival to the Historia Plantarum Rariorum

It seems likely from another comment in 1736 that the rest of Martyn’s work remained unfamiliar to Knowlton. He would have been incommoded by the Latin text. The Latin did not prevent him from acquiring another work of erudition, however, for in the same letter of 1733 he referred to obtaining a copy of Hortus Elthamensis. This had been published by J. J. Dillenius as two large volumes with more than 300 plates in 1732 (pl. 125). It showcased many stove plants that continued to attract collectors such as James Sherard, but it also featured English flora amid exotics from four continents.58Thomas Knowlton’s ‘Account of the culture of the coffee plant’ — dated at ‘Petworth in Sussex, Feb. 4. 1725–6’ — is reproduced in Henrey, No Ordinary Gardener, 46–7. After William Sherard brought over a coffee tree from the physic garden in Amsterdam in 1723, Knowlton cultivated it at James Sherard’s Eltham garden. See Mark Laird, ‘Greenhouse Technologies and Horticulture: The 1st Duchess of Beaufort’s Badminton Florilegium (1703–5) and J. J. Dillenius’s Hortus Elthamensis (1732)’, in Technology and the Garden, ed. Michael G. Lee and Kenneth I. Helphand (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2014), 51–72. In the early 1720s Dillenius had begun the task of making drawings (with Latin descriptions) of new plants growing at James Sherard’s garden in Eltham.59Riley, ‘ “Procurers of Plants and Encouragers of Gardening” ’, 390: evidence of Dillenius drawing plants as early as November 1722 and well before the date of 1724 given in the preface. The reasons for Knowlton abandoning Eltham in early 1725 ‘in a huff’, leaving the plants ‘in the utmost disorder’, remain obscure.60Henrey, No Ordinary Gardener, 42–3. See again Riley, ‘ “Procurers of Plants and Encouragers of Gardening” ’, 343–4. Whatever occurred may account for the slightly peevish tone in Knowlton’s otherwise enthusiastic letter to Brewer, his correspondent plant ‘Lover’:

. . . att Last I have the D.rs H. Eltham: & find several plants figuer’d very well in severall authors before & wonder what usse that repitition can be . . . to Lovers . . . but indeed ye generall part are Intierly new therefore it is the more welcome to me & every othear ye same way Inclynde; the gratest part of those plants was Draon by ye Dr when I Lived att Eltham . . . I . . . wonder he did not put it into English as well as Lattin wch would have maide it sell better besides might be done att ye same charge as ye H. A — mensis is.61Henrey, No Ordinary Gardener, 133.

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Description: Callistephus chinensis (Aster Chenopodii folio...) by Dillenius, Johann Jacob

125. J. J. Dillenius, Hortus Elthamensis (London, 1732), pl. 34: Callistephus chinensis (‘Aster Chenopodii folio . . .’), engraving, hand-coloured with watercolour. Sherardian Library of Plant Taxonomy, Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford

After the introduction of the China aster to James Sherard’s Eltham garden (by 1732), dispersal followed through nurseries and informal exchange. Collinson sent seed to John Bartram in Philadelphia. As early as 1736, Thomas Knowlton had come by some seed, and in 1754 he was able to offer ‘favours’ of an improved ‘double red’. The botanical legacy of Dillenius’s work came from Linnaeus’s later naming of plants from it. However, written in Latin and without sponsorship, its impact during Dillenius’s lifetime was limited to an elite, largely medico-botanical, audience.

The doubtful decision to publish only in Latin meant that the total print run ended up more limited than it might have been. This was despite the fact that James Sherard — according to Dillenius at least — wanted to ‘make himself known’ and demanded that the botanist add fifty extra plates to make the book ‘bigger and more pompous’.62Riley, ‘ “Procurers of Plants and Encouragers of Gardening” ’, 391–2. Given Sherard’s demand to use ‘Royal’ paper and his reneging on promises to finance the project, Dillenius chose to complete only 145 of the 500 series of prints. This would put the total of copies just under the 155 underwritten by the subscribers to Catesby’s Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands. Dillenius’s account to Richardson runs in full:

All his [James Sherard’s] kindness ended in an offer to lend me money, and to take thirty books (which he did to hinder my taking subscriptions.) — I finished the book without his money; and he, instead of thirty, took only ten books, for which I had thirty guineas. — I gave him, besides, one more gratis; and, some time after, another, which in some manner he begg’d of me. This is all I ever had from him. Besides the loss of time and labour, I lose by him at least £200; for it is a book of but few people’s buying; and therefore I do not think it safe to go through the whole impression. There were five hundred copies printed at his desire . . . to which I got one hundred and forty-five copies of plates printed off: the rest I do not design to perfect.63Quoted ibid., 395.

Hence, without subscriptions (and with some copies as gifts), Dillenius lost substantial money on the project, even though he assumed the role of artist and printmaker, which Ehret would use to full advantage as a precedent a few decades later (see chapter 4).

Dillenius’s Hortus Elthamensis was clearly in rivalry with Martyn’s Historia plantarum rariorum (and posterity has judged the former to be more significant, scientifically if not pictorially, compare pls 125 and 126).64Ibid., 310–21, for the significance of Hortus Elthamensis, and the falling out with John Martyn. A patently thin-skinned ‘workaholic’, Dillenius wrote in 1727 with more than the usual suspicions of rival entrepreneurs:

As to Mr Martin publishing descriptions and figures of ye new plants about London I believe things have been unterhand & carried on for some time past. Miller I take to be the chief contriver, for Martin does not know a nettle from a ?Daisy. They have got in everywhere & broke Mr Sherard’s correspondence & what they could not have by second hand, they found the means to get by ye third . . . Had I but time I would soone put a stop to this business, however I do hope I shall save Mr Sherard’s new plants & my labour bestowed upon them & disappoint them & their incorredgers. If but . . . (?James Sherard) would keep these people at a distance we should do very well enough.65I am grateful to Margaret Riley for this transcription of the letter from Dillenius to Brewer, 28 December 1727.

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Description: Passiflora serratifolia or passion-flower (Granadilla Americana...) by Kirkall,...

126. Elisha Kirkall after Jacobus van Huysum, Passiflora serratifolia or passion-flower (‘Granadilla Americana . . .’), from John Martyn, Historia plantarum rariorum (London, 1728–37), line engraving and mezzotint printed in colour and hand-coloured in watercolour. Gray Botany Library, Harvard University (Oversize fol. 1 M36.5 1728)

The Catholic Robert James Petre, 8th Baron Petre of Writtle, who adopted the symbolic passion-flower for his sponsorship of the Historia plantarum rariorum, was among the 155 subscribers to Catesby’s Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands. His premature death in 1742 cut short the primary support given to the emerging syndicate of collectors of Collinson / Bartram exotics. Van Huysum’s composition, attractively rendered in print by Kirkall with the Petre coat of arms, is far superior artistically to Dillenius’s plain scientific portraits in Hortus Elthamensis (pl. 125). Yet the Historia fell short of Dillenius’s botanical showcase of James Sherard’s Eltham plants. That display provided the basis of Linnaean names still used to this day.

By keeping his plants to himself, though, James Sherard would be assuming precisely the risks that Dillenius took in publishing alone rather than in syndicate. Unlike his brother William, who helped sponsor Mark Catesby’s voyage to the Carolinas in 1722–6, James Sherard remained (with the one exception of subscribing to Furber’s Twelve Months of Flowers of 1730) a reluctant ‘encourager’ of others. As Knowlton’s methods of ‘retaliating favours’ indicate, there were advantages in giving as well as taking.

Knowlton’s interest in natural history publications is evident in a further letter to Brewer of 1 October 1736, when he mentions Englebert Kaempfer’s History of Japan, which was published in two volumes in 1727.66Henrey, No Ordinary Gardener, 142. Sir Hans Sloane’s librarian, Dr Jean Gaspard Scheuchzer, had just translated it into English. (Scheuchzer also sponsored the Historia plantarum rariorum plate of ‘Lychnidea Caroliniana’, Phlox carolina, pl. 127.) Knowlton would find the work invaluable when, in 1755, he sent Peter Collinson a transcription of Kaempfer’s account of the paper mulberry (Broussonetia papyrifera). Collinson had raised the Chinese tree from seed in 1751 and Knowlton was happy to oblige with a favour.67Ibid., 234–6. Knowlton referred in his letter to James Gordon having the paper tree by 1755. For background on the introduction of Broussonetia papyrifera (along with Ailanthus altissima) through Père D’Incarville in Nanjing in 1751, see O’Neill and McLean, Peter Collinson, 133–4. Along with the China aster (see again pl. 125), the paper tree represented the Orient’s rivalry with the New World. Yet Kaempfer’s History of Japan never surpassed the appeal of Catesby’s Natural History, for example, in promoting Catalpa bignonioides with its large heart-shaped leaves, midsummer blooms and huge pods (pl. 128).68For G. D. Ehret’s portrait of the plant named after Englebert Kaempfer, Kaempferia, see Enid Slater, ‘From the Archives: Kaempferia, the Painting by G. D. Ehret in the Linnean Society’, The Linnean, XVII (2001), 18–26. Indeed, China and Japan would have to wait a century to gain dominance over cultivated plants in Europe.

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Description: Phlox carolina (Lychnidea Caroliniana...) by Kirkall, Elisha

127. Elisha Kirkall after Jacobus van Huysum, Phlox carolina (‘Lychnidea Caroliniana . . .’), from John Martyn, Historia plantarum rariorum (London, 1728–37), line engraving and mezzotint printed in colour and hand-coloured in watercolour. Gray Botany Library, Harvard University (Oversize fol. 1 M36.5 1728)

Sir Hans Sloane’s librarian, Dr Jean Gaspard Scheuchzer, who sponsored this plate, translated into English Englebert Kaempfer’s History of Japan. It came out in two volumes in 1727, but it never matched the impact of Catesby’s Natural History. Catesby probably introduced Phlox carolina to English gardens. Such North American flowers helped to lengthen the flowering season, as Fairchild recorded in 1722–3. Robert Furber’s illustrated Twelve Months of Flowers (1730) and Jacobus van Huysum’s Twelve Months of Flowers (circa 1733–5) thus show American flowers in bloom in September (see pl. 147).

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Description: Catalpha bignonioides (The Catalpa Tree) and Icterus spurius or orchard oriole (The...

128. Mark Catesby, Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands (1729–47), vol. I, pl. 49, illustrating Catalpa bignonioides (‘The Catalpa Tree’) and Icterus spurius (L. 1766) or orchard oriole (‘The Bastard Baltimore’), hand-coloured engraving. Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Rare Book Collection, Washington, DC

A Catalpa, which Catesby had sent to London from South Carolina circa 1722–5, was planted as a 13-foot specimen in the prince of Wales’s Carlton House garden in 1734. It came from Robert Furber’s nursery and cost the enormous sum of £3 3s. Yet, when ‘Capability’ Brown ordered three Catalpa for the Petworth wilderness in 1755, the nurseryman John Williamson charged him a modest 1s. 6d. each. Such were the successes of acclimatization and the skill of the nursery trade in marketing exotics.

Back in 1736 Knowlton had simply wanted reassurance that the ‘learned’ gave Kaempfer approbation. Like Dillenius, he remained suspicious of Martyn’s Historia:

. . . if you have Kemphers pray Lett me Know how hes approved of by ye Larned wether he Describes any plants & figurs [in] ye same if well done & if you Know ye prise of ym because I have some mind to bey ym if you think ym worth my purchessing pray Lett me Know how many of Jno Martains Decads . . . are of plants . . . I suppose [it] is a very pompous work.69Henrey, No Ordinary Gardener, 142.

Writing to Samuel Brewer on 7 February 1738, Knowlton referred to the China aster (Callistephus chinensis), which had appeared as plate 34 of Hortus Elthamensis (see again pl. 125). Knowlton seems to have acquired the annual by August 1736,70Ibid., 168 and 138. but the seed produced was evidently no good. It was in the same letter of February 1738 that Knowlton mentioned Catesby and Collinson together for the first time in the context of American imports. He wrote:

I have Recd Mr Cateby 8 part wch with a cargo of some seeds just arrived from Caralina being some of ym from Mr Collison thirs Tulip trees . . . one [of] ym being ye Laurell Leaved [Magnolia virginiana] ye other Comon [Liriodendron tulipifera] with some fine Sassafras Burreys [Sassafras albidum] & other things wch I designe you in part . . .71Ibid., 168–9. Part 8 of Catesby’s Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands was reviewed in the Philosophical Transactions for April, May and June 1736, but Knowlton got his copy of this part 8 only by early 1738. For the chronology of publishing parts 1–5 (vol. I, May 1729, January 30, November 1731 and November 1732), and parts 6–10 (vol. II, 1734–43), see Leslie K. Overstreet, ‘The Publication of Mark Catesby’s The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands’, in The Curious Mister Catesby: A ‘Truly Ingenious’ Naturalist Explores New Worlds, ed. E. Charles Nelson and David J. Elliott (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 2015).

Knowlton went on to mention his success in persuading Richard Richardson to subscribe:

Dr Richardson has att Last I suppose Bought mr Catesby 8 parts of his nat: Hist: of Coralina . . . from . . . a Bookseller . . . if ye Dr had a mind he had bettr had it of ye author who would some times oblidge him wth some forain seeds as they come to hand.72Henrey, No Ordinary Gardener, 169.

Clearly, a direct purchase from Catesby had the advantage of the author returning the favour — reciprocating, in effect — with seeds of American plants. Catesby knew sea captains who brought fresh seed batches every voyage. Sir Charles Wager was the top captain, and Collinson was a top merchant. The action was moving from the exchange of information through subscription publishing (with exchange of favours) to retailing and nursing exotics to maturity in their new home from home.

Combat and Commerce in Sir Charles Wager’s Gardening with Peter Collinson

By 1738 Peter Collinson had been importing seeds from John Bartram for several years.73O’Neill and McLean, Peter Collinson, chapters 5 and 6, give important background on ‘colonial exchange’, which Collinson claimed to bring him ‘no profit’ (79). Collinson traced the ‘Connection’ back to ‘anno 1733’ (103) and referred to 1740 as the year the exchange became a ‘settled Trade & Business’ (114). He wanted to extend Bartram’s collecting southwards into Virginia in search of a particular Magnolia: the umbrella tree (Magnolia tripetala), a new cousin to Magnolia virginiana. He already had Lord Petre and the duke of Richmond on board; he was able to send Bartram good seed from Europe in return for the promise of American seeds. For example, in 1735 he was including seed of the China aster (with a cone of cedar of Lebanon). Collinson could not contain his relish for Callistephus chinensis. Like the American perennial Michaelmas daisy, this annual aster bloomed late into autumn. It was for him:

the Noblest & finest Plant thee ever saw of that Tribe. It was Sent by the Jesuits from China to France & from thence to us. It is an Annuall. Sow it in Rich Mould Immediately & when it has half a Dozen Leaves transplant in the Border. It makes a glorious Autumn flower. There is White & purple in the Seeds.74Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 29.

In December 1737 Collinson described Bartram to his prospective host in Virginia, John Custis, as ‘a down right plain Country Man’: he was coming to Virginia ‘in serch of Curiosities In the Vegitable kindome’.75Ibid., 59. O’Neill and McLean, in Peter Collinson, 12, 80–84, give a good account of how Sir Charles Wager, William Byrd II and John Custis formed a network extending from England to Virginia. He asked Custis to direct Bartram to the ‘Umbrella Tree’. He reminded Bartram to dress handsomely: he should make up the ‘Druggett Clothes’ that Collinson had sent.76Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 64. Drugget was a coarse woven fabric suitable for plain folk. Collinson thus sent gratuities of cloth, plants, seeds and books to return favours for Bartram’s plants; it was a friendship, mixed with occasional testiness (especially on financial remuneration), that was based on mutual curiosity and Quaker principles. On one occasion, Collinson put it this way in response to the ‘great pains’ that Bartram took to collect: ‘I shall not forget It: but in some measure to show my gratitude, tho’ not In proportion to thy Trouble I have sent thee a small token a Callico gown for thy wife & some odd Little things that may be of use amongst the Children.’77Cited in O’Neill and McLean, Peter Collinson, 106.

By 31 January 1740 it is clear from Collinson’s letter to John Custis that the encounter had gone well. Collinson began by mentioning the ‘pleasure to heare of the kind Reception J. Bartram rece’d under thy Roof. He was much Delighted with thy Garden which is the best Furnish’d & next to John Claytons of any He Mett With in all that Journey.’78Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 80. For further information on John Clayton, whom Collinson called the ‘Greatest Botanist of American’, see O’Neill and McLean, Peter Collinson, 86–7. Custis, who was sixty-two at the time, had come down with some illness: ‘my good athletic constitution is destroyed’.79O’Neill and McLean, Peter Collinson, 83–4, characterize Custis as having a ‘jaundiced view of life’, in contrast to Collinson’s largely sunny disposition. Hence Collinson counselled broths and gentle exercise:

I have observed Many att or near your years have had almost Bent and then run on a Long Easie Race to above fourscore. My Grandmother was a Remarkable Instance. Sir Charles Wager is another who had so severe Illness att 70 that he had Tenn blisters on Him att one Time, and it is generally allow’d that to the Effects of Temperance His Recovery was principally owing that now He is so Jolly Strong & Hearty as any Man of His years and Continues strictly to Drinking Water and Moderate meals.80Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 81.

As it turned out, Sir Charles Wager lived only a few years beyond this date. After his death in 1743, a monument was erected in Westminster Abbey. He had served the nation as rear admiral, as MP, and eventually, from 1733 to 1742, as First Lord of the Admiralty. He was remembered by Arthur Onslow, speaker of the House of Commons, as a ‘person of most extraordinary worth’, who acquired a simplicity of manner by being brought up among the Quakers: ‘And all this, with his particular roughness of countenance, made the softness of his nature still more pleasing, because unexpected at first.’81Quoted from Daniel A. Baugh, ‘Wager, Sir Charles (1666–1743)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online edition: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/28393 [accessed 1 October 2013]. He was a ‘Worthy Man’82Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 129. par excellence for Peter Collinson, to whom he had entrusted the care of his stoves in many absences at sea. Indeed, in 1764, recalling all those who had helped in his effort to plant English gardens with exotic trees, Collinson wrote: ‘That Gentle Tree so like a Cypress looks uncommon, thats the Syrian Cedar. The Seed was gave Mee by Sir Charles Wager first Lord of the Admiralty, gather’d in the Isle of Iona [Ionian Islands].’83Ibid., 256. The letter was written to the physician virtuoso in the province of New York, Cadwallader Colden, on 25 February 1764, associating trees and shrubs with ‘Absent Friends’: the duke of Northumberland, duke of Richmond, duke of Argyle, Lord Petre, Sir Henry Trelawny, John Bartram, John Clayton and Thomas Lamboll of South Carolina. The identity of ‘Syrian Cedar’ as Cedrus libani is yet to be verified. In 1770 John Fothergill reported in his Some Account of the Late Peter Collinson (London, 1770) that Wager was: ‘a most generous and fortunate contributor to [Sir Hans Sloane’s] vast treasure of natural curiosities; omitting nothing, in the course of his many voyages, that could add to its magnificence, and encouraging the commanders under him, who were stationed in different parts of the globe, to procure whatever was rare and valuable in every branch of natural history. To this he was strongly excited by Peter Collinson; for whom and his family Sir Charles had a very singular esteem, and continued it to the last moments of his life.’ Quoted from Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 79.

Charles Wager came from naval stock on the maternal as well as paternal side. Following the death of Wager’s father, his mother married the Quaker merchant Alexander Parker. That brought Wager into Merchant Navy service among the Quakers of New England (and hence, probably, the link to Collinson).84O’Neill and McLean, Peter Collinson, 46. The enormous wealth that he later directed into exotic collecting came from service with British squadrons in the Caribbean and especially against the Spanish off Cartagena. The silver of a captured galleon had an estimated value of £60,000 alone. The action against the galleons made him a hero and he was knighted on 8 December 1709 (the beginning of that cold London winter, pl. 129).

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Description: Sir Charles Wager by Kneller, Godfrey

129. Sir Godfrey Kneller, Sir Charles Wager, 1710, oil on canvas, 56 × 40 in. (142.2 × 101.6 cm). © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London

This three-quarter-length portrait, painted just after Charles Wager was knighted in 1709, shows the naval man of great wealth in a grey velvet coat. His flagship is depicted in action, blue at the fore, with a red ensign. He was aged forty-four at the time. The blue flag was an addition after 1716 when he was appointed a commissioner of the Admiralty, a position he held until he became First Lord in 1733. He took a constant interest in conditions of service in the navy and was an early innovator in the use of citrus fruits against scurvy. His central role in cultivating new exotics is epitomized by his success in getting Magnolia grandiflora to bloom in his Parsons Green garden in Fulham in 1737.

With Lady Martha, his wife from 1691, Sir Charles leased Hollybush, a stately brick mansion at the south-east corner of Parsons Green in Fulham. For twenty-two years (1720–42), this would be the headquarters of his global plant collecting. He is supposed to have introduced Acer saccharinum from North America, which was thereafter known as ‘Wager’s maple’.85For the complicated histories of Acer saccharinum and A. rubrum, see Mark Laird, ‘Mark Catesby’s Plant Introductions and English Gardens of the Eighteenth Century’, and Charles E. Jarvis, ‘Linnaeus and the Influence of Mark Catesby’s Botanical Work’, in The Curious Mister Catesby, ed. Nelson and Elliott. The tender ‘Cassia Bahamensis’ (Cassia ligustrina) of Martyn’s Historia plantarum rariorum, which Catesby had sent from the Bahama Islands in 1726, first flowered at Wager’s private residence (as also at Chelsea Physic Garden). In 1731, receiving a dried-up tuber of another species from the Bahamas, Collinson passed on the specimen to Wager, who placed it in a bed of warm tanner’s bark. It was ‘Helleborine Americana’ (Bletia purpurea), the first tropical orchid to flower in England. Not surprisingly, the plate of the orchid in Martyn’s Historia carries Collinson’s ‘coat of arms’. By 1736 one kind of melon was either named after Wager or supplied by him to Collinson for John Custis.86Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 54. But it is largely by dint of the tribute to him in the Catalogus plantarum and by consequence of his connection to Georg Dionysius Ehret’s superlative portrait of Magnolia grandiflora that he is remembered today.

Acclimatization: Lengthening the Human Life Span, Prolonging the Season and the Losses of 1739–40 and 1742

The preface to the Catalogus plantarum listed distinguished ‘Patriots of Horticulture’ — those who had pioneered exotic acclimatization. They were ‘curious Gentlemen . . . in the Business of Gardening and Vegetation’. This list ranged from Sir Charles Wager to James Sherard, and from Peter Collinson to Charles du Bois. Du Bois was linked to the club at the Temple Coffee House, developing through his role at the East India Company a significant plant collection in his Mitcham garden.87Riley, ‘ “Procurers of Plants and Encouragers of Gardening” ’, chapters 2 and 6. Du Bois and James Sherard’s brother, William Sherard, were among the twelve that sponsored Mark Catesby’s trip to the Carolinas. William Sherard — the éminence grise in the sponsorship of Catesby’s second voyage and so much else in early eighteenth-century botany — sponsored a plate in John Martyn’s Historia plantarum rariorum: ‘Geranium Africanum’ (Pelargonium inquinans, pl. 130). The doings of the medico-botanists were so entwined with the ventures of the entrepreneurs and merchants that, like a vine and ivy interwoven, they were often indistinguishable.

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Description: Pelargonium inquinans (Geranium Africanum...) by Kirkall, Elisha

130. Elisha Kirkall after Jacobus van Huysum, Pelargonium inquinans (‘Geranium Africanum . . .’), from John Martyn, Historia plantarum rariorum (London, 1728–37), line engraving and mezzotint printed in colour and hand-coloured in watercolour. Gray Botany Library, Harvard University (Oversize fol. 1 M36.5 1728)

William Sherard, who had worked at Badminton, went on to acquire wealth as consul in Smyrna, just as Wager profited from his naval career. Sherard thus had resources to share specimens with Samuel Dale from Catesby’s first expedition to Virginia (1712–19; many of these specimens are now in the Dale herbarium of the Natural History Museum, London). Sherard then led the sponsorship of Catesby’s second trip (1722–6). This plate, sponsored by Sherard, recalls his time with the duchess of Beaufort at Badminton, when an influx of Pelargonium species reached England. Pelargonium inquinans was first cultivated by Bishop Compton in his Fulham garden. Robert Furber’s ‘June’ in the Twelve Months of Flowers (1730) features a ‘Scarlet Geranium’, which is probably P. inquinans.

Peter Collinson, writing to Charles Wager from 9 to 15 August 1739, was obviously comfortable in the admiral’s company: natural history sat easily alongside merchandizing They shared a Quaker sensibility and a catholic interest in all aspects of nature. The letter begins respectfully: ‘I can scarcely Justifie my Self to borrow your Attention from the publick Weal to read my Scrawls.’88Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 76. The full letter quoted below is 76–9. He then enquires after Wager’s ‘Welfare’ and that of his lady before plunging into a discursive account of a journey to his sister-in-law in Winchester: ‘The Late Rains (tho Heart aching to the Farmers) was pleasant to Us. The Sun was as Indulgent and did not dazel our Eyes with his luster all the Journey.’ This was the decade of bountiful harvests. In the hot and dry summers, a good sprinkling of rain was often more welcome than not (except at haymaking or harvest time).

There follows an account of an encampment outside Winchester that served as ‘one of the greatest Cheese Fairs in England’. As Collinson put it: ‘The Concourse is very Great and it is computed at this Morlin Hill Fair not less than 2500 Waggons load with Cheese are sold in 12 Hours Time beside Leather and Wood.’ The letter is full of commentary on industry and merchandise — interests shared by the two men as citizens of the trade world: white salt production near Lymington; a vineyard yielding a ‘pretty wine and another that very much resembled Frontigniac’; the ‘Carolina Rice Ships’; Charles du Bois’ trials of ‘East India Rice’ in the American colony; and the exportation of wheat from the Isle of Wight (to where he was headed). The rest of the letter contains pastoral and scientific descriptions, jotted down in notebook style, yet inclining to the rhapsodic:

Having some Time on my Hands I made an Excursion into New Forest . . . Here in this delightful Wild Nature seems to appear in all Her Virgin Charms. The Hardy Oke & Lofty beach with Ash & Birch compose the Groves & Border all the Lawns, where Colts & Kine & Herds of Deer mixt with the Grunting Tribe securely graze . . .

I found Osamond Royall in a Spring in a Wood leading from Hamble or Amble to Nettly Place . . . Here I observed a Vine to grow out of the Stone Work and an Old Vine & Ivy so Interwoven together that it was not very Easie to distinguish the One from the Other . . .

August 13th: In the road to Alsford I saw the Clouded Yellow Butterfly [pl. 131].

Collinson ended the letter with another recipe for living to a ripe old age, in this case island-living on the Isle of Wight:

The people of the Island are Very Healthy. I was shown as Wee pass’d by Water a Fisherman a fishing with a Nett that was in his Ninetieth year, and his Wife in her hundredth and but this year was prevailed on to walk with a Stick. I was told also that One of the Aldermen of Newport was in his Ninetieth year, walk’d about and were very Hearty.

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Description: The Aurelian; or, Natural History of English Insects, pl. XXIX, including Colias...

131. Moses Harris, The Aurelian; or, Natural History of English Insects (London, 1766), pl. XXIX, including Colias croceus (‘Clouded Yellow’, m, n, and o), engraving, hand-coloured in watercolour. Houghton Library, Harvard University (f *59–1499)

Just as Peter Collinson and Sir Charles Wager shared natural history and gardening interests, so Richard Bateman (1705–1773) — best known for his garden at Grove House, Old Windsor (see pl. 164) — was drawn to subscribe to Catesby’s Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands. He sponsored this plate featuring the clouded yellow (Colias croceus). Women sponsors to The Aurelian included the countess of Berkeley, Lady Charlotte Townshend (Baroness Ferrers), Lady Spencer and the duchess of Richmond (see pl. 306).

Thus in August 1739 it seemed to Collinson that, with temperance and a temperate climate, people might live as long as trees. The mild seasons of the 1730s were certainly smiling on Carolina plants. Georg Dionysius Ehret’s grandiose portrait of Magnolia grandiflora, based on numerous studies of the plant flowering in Wager’s Parsons Green garden in 1737 (pls 132 and 133), epitomizes the bravura with which gardeners took on the challenge of the Catalogus plantarum. In the appendix to the first edition of his Gardeners Dictionary (1731), Philip Miller wrote of the Magnolia that:

. . . since they are hardy enough to resist the Cold of our Climate in the open Air, I doubt not but we shall have the Pleasure of seeing their Flowers in a few Years; there being several Trees planted in the Gardens of some curious Persons near London, where they have endured the Cold of four or five Winters without Shelter.89Philip Miller, The Gardeners Dictionary (London, 1731), entry for ‘Magnolia’.

A date of introduction of circa 1726–7 is implied by this account. Yet Catesby had sent seed several times in 1723–4. Sir John Colleton, 3rd baronet (1669–1754), of Exmouth, Devonshire — a subscriber to the Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands — appears the first to have enjoyed his plant in flower. This was before 1736 and, since Colleton had inherited a Proprietorship in Carolina, he could have brought back his M. grandiflora from the colony. Sir Charles Wager was close on his heels with the flowering of 1737. Whether a seedling could assume stature enough to flower in a dozen seasons in England (even in those mild seasons that followed 1725) is uncertain, and hence it is conceivable that Catesby nursed some growing plants through the sojourn in the Bahamas.90See Laird, ‘Mark Catesby’s Plant Introductions’ [forthcoming].

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Description: Magnolia grandiflora, sketch no. 147 by Ehret, Georg Dionysius

132. Georg Dionysius Ehret, sketch no. 147, Magnolia grandiflora, undated but drawn in 1737, pencil and watercolour, 16 ¾ × 11 in. (42.75 × 27.75 cm). © The Natural History Museum, London

The blooming of Magnolia grandiflora in Sir Charles Wager’s garden at Parsons Green, Fulham, occurred during August 1737, as many observers recorded: from Mark Catesby in his Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands to Christopher Gray in his Catalogue, to Christoph Jakob Trew in the German periodical Commercium litterarium. This single bud was recorded just the day before Ehret depicted that same flower in stages of opening over several days. The sketch would form the basis of the bud depicted at the top centre of his bodycolour-on-vellum masterpiece (pl. 133), which synthesized four stages of unfolding, with fruiting as a fifth stage in the weeks thereafter.

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Description: Magnolia grandiflora by Ehret, Georg Dionysius

133. Georg Dionysius Ehret, Magnolia grandiflora, probably circa 1739, bodycolour on vellum, 29 ¾ × 21 ⅝ in. (75.6 × 55 cm). Collection of Rachel Lambert Mellon, Oak Spring Garden Library, Upperville, Virginia

Ehret put artistic energy as much as scientific rigour into composing his complex and dynamic masterpiece, which epitomizes Baroque bravura. The flower-laden branches are arranged in a bouquet, which is embellished, like many of his early works, with a ribbon carrying his signature. Such Baroque majesty was achieved by cleverly synthesizing scientific information gained from study of a single bloom unfolding over several days: from a bud (top) on day one, to a one-day-old flower (centre), to caducous (fallen) stamens after two days (top left), to a drooping blossom (top right). With the addition of the later fruiting of the same bloom on Sir Charles Wager’s Magnolia grandiflora, Ehret made a synthetic composition of five stages — a unique composite of a single life cycle.

The story of Ehret walking the roughly 3 miles from his Chelsea home to Wager’s Parsons Green garden to study the unfolding of the flower each day has added to the allure of the finished portraits.91Gerta Calmann, Ehret: Flower Painter Extraordinary (Boston, MA: New York Graphic Society/Little, Brown, 1977). How Catesby came to publish one of Ehret’s studies in the Natural History is less well known and has been documented only recently.92See Amy R. W. Meyers, ‘ “The Perfection of Natural History”: Mark Catesby’s Drawings of American Flora and Fauna in the Royal Library, Windsor Castle’, introductory essay in McBurney, Mark Catesby’s Natural History of America, 23–4. I am indebted to Charles Nelson for allowing me to consult his definitive account before publication: E. Charles Nelson, ‘Georg Dionysius Ehret, Mark Catesby and Sir Charles Wager’s Magnolia grandiflora: An Early Eighteenth-century Picture Puzzle Resolved’ in Rhododendrons, Camellias and Magnolias, 65 (2014), 36–51. In the ninth fascicle, which was published in June 1739, Catesby wrote in the text accompanying plate 61 of volume II that ‘in the Year 1737, one of them blossom’d at Parsons Green, in the Garden of the Right Honourable Sir Charles Wager; one of which Blossoms expanded, measured eleven Inches over’. In the Natural History Museum in London, a field sketch by Ehret of a Magnolia flower bud (pl. 132), though undated, provides a glimpse before the opening of petals in a sequence of August days thereafter — studies that became the basis of published images (e.g., Trew’s Plantae selectae, Miller’s Figures of Plants) and of Ehret’s later portraits.93For a number of Ehret’s drawings of Magnolia grandiflora, including his vellum of 1744, see Sandra Knapp, Potted Histories: An Artistic Voyage through Plant Exploration (London: Scriptum, 2003), ‘Magnolias’: 130–45. The handsome Oak Spring portrait of circa 1739, which is on a dark brown ground, amounts to Ehret’s clever combing of all the stages of a bloom unfolding over the course of several days.94Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi, An Oak Spring Flora: Flower Illustration from the Fifteenth Century to the Present Time (Upperville, VA: Oak Spring Garden Library, 1997), 190–92. The field-sketch bud is refashioned at the top, and the fruiting head to lower left indicates that Ehret returned to Parsons Green well after the blossom had first opened. It thus synthetically represents a cumulative reality (pl. 133).

Mark Catesby had been confident of the ability of the English gardener to acclimatize the best of North American plants to English conditions. Without an understanding of the North Atlantic Drift (Gulf Stream), which Benjamin Franklin would map only several decades later, he based his vision of domesticated exoticism on a simple observation: that the mild winters of London were more conducive to growth than those variable ones of the southern colonies in the New World.95See again Chaplin, ‘Mark Catesby’, 79. Magnolia grandiflora was a test case. In his Natural History, Catesby explained: ‘Their native place is . . . South Carolina to the North of which I have never seen any, nor heard that they grow.’ Yet, in England, which lay far to the north, it was already ‘naturalized’. Thus, Christopher Gray used the Magnolia grandiflora in bloom at Parsons Green (not far from his Fulham nursery and ‘drawn in its exact Dimensions’) as the centrepiece of A Catalogue of American Trees and Shrubs That Will Endure the Climate of England (circa 1739, pl. 134). The engraved, uncoloured illustration bears the distinctive monogram of Mark Catesby on the end of the main stem at the bottom margin. Hence Catesby must have used Ehret’s study of the newly opened flower as his model (what has been called his ‘first-day field sketch’), adding a dark background in the manner of the Natural History plate. This in due course became the template for the plate published in his posthumous Hortus Britanno-Americanus (1763), which was dedicated to all the American plants acclimatized in England during his lifetime.

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Description: A Catalogue of American Trees and Shrubs That Will Endure the Climate of England by...

134. Christopher Gray, A Catalogue of American Trees and Shrubs That Will Endure the Climate of England (London, circa 1739), with Mark Catesby’s engraving of Magnolia grandiflora based on G. D. Ehret’s study of the newly opened bloom, representing the one-day-old flower. It contrasts with Ehret’s own engraving of the two-day-old flower, pl. 61 of Mark Catesby’s Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands (1729–47). Collection of Rachel Lambert Mellon, Oak Spring Garden Library, Upperville, Virginia

The alphabetical list of hardy species includes Amorpha fruticosa and Campsis radicans under ‘a’ and ‘c’, with Catalpa bignonioides (under ‘b’ for ‘Bignonia’). ‘M’ is dominated by Magnolia grandiflora, M. tripetala and M. virginiana. The early trials with the ‘Umbrella tree’ (M. tripetala), first introduced as seed by Mark Catesby before 1725, were apparently unsuccessful. It was a later reintroduction of the species that first produced flowers in England in 1760. The quartet of Magnolia introductions from Colonial America was completed with M. acuminata (not listed here), which arrived in the early 1740s. Key letters in the margin point customers to the Catalogus plantarum, Hortus Elthamensis and Catesby’s Natural History as sources of information on North American species.

Writing to Samuel Brewer in November 1738, Thomas Knowlton explained how details of Catesby’s plate 61, ‘Magnolia altissima’, had appeared in the issue of Philosophical Transactions for August–September: ‘I very Latly have Recd very oblidging Lettr from Mr Catesby who tells me ye Last nr of ye transactions is worthy my reading so will send it me down with one of ye Large Lawerl Leaved Tulipt tree.’96Henrey, No Ordinary Gardener, 181–2. The letter continued in a chain of thought that linked Catesby to Lord Petre, and Lord Petre (through his gardener James Gordon) to Thomas Fairchild:

. . . he [Catesby] was Latly att Ld peatreas where is such a verity . . . and abundance . . . to Longe to Relate in a Latt.r — I have by ye same post a Lettr from my L.d pettra gard.r Gordon who is about Leaveing him & settling some where about Mile End in ye way & maner mr fairchilds was att Hoxton.97Ibid., 182.

This is a first hint that James Gordon would take up retailing exotics where Fairchild left off. Back in 1722–3, Thomas Fairchild, listing the plants in bloom in his Hoxton nursery, had recorded that ‘Mr. Catesby’s new Virginian Starwort’ (Aster grandiflorus)98Aster grandiflorus appears as plate 17 — ‘Aster virginiana’ — in John Martyn’s Historia plantarum rariorum. was still flowering in October. ‘Mr. Catesby’s fine blue Startwort’ (presumably again Aster grandiflorus, syn. Symphyotrichum grandiflorum) was still blooming in December 1722.99Harvey, Early Nurserymen, 150–59; see also John H. Harvey, ‘The English Nursery Flora, 1677–1723’, Garden History, XXVI/1 (Summer 1998), 60. In short, the introduction of North American flowers was helping to lengthen and strengthen the flowering season. Catesby’s introduction of Coreopsis lanceolata in 1724 added a new midsummer to early autumn bloomer in the palette of perennials (pl. 135).

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Description: Coreopsis lanceolata (Bidens Caroliniana...) by Kirkall, Elisha

135. Elisha Kirkall after Jacobus van Huysum, Coreopsis lanceolata (‘Bidens Caroliniana . . .’), from John Martyn, Historia plantarum rariorum (London, 1728–37), line engraving and mezzotint printed in colour and hand-coloured in watercolour. Gray Botany Library, Harvard University (Oversize fol. 1 M36.5 1728)

Thomas Fairchild, listing plants in bloom in his Hoxton nursery (1722–3), recorded that ‘Mr. Catesby’s new Virginian Starwort’ (Aster grandiflorus syn. Symphyotrichum grandiflorum) was still flowering from October to December 1722. Catesby thus contributed to a longer flowering season. His introduction in 1724 of Coreopsis lanceolata, which typically flowers into late summer, meant that English gardens were flower-filled with American perennials from August until December. The plate’s sponsor, Sir Conrad Joachim Sprengwell, was a physician and member of the Royal Society.

By contrast, some twenty years earlier, Henry Wise possessed only the North American ‘Red and Blue Cardinal Flower’ (Lobelia cardinalis and L. siphilitica) in his September entry. Apparently there was insufficient bloom to itemize flowers in October, November and December.100Harvey, Early Nurserymen, 150. By contrast, Robert Furber’s Twelve Months of Flowers (1730) illustrated a ‘Spiked Aster’ and ‘Michaelmas Daisie’ in his ‘October’, and a ‘Virginian Aster’ (Aster grandiflorus) and ‘Carolina Star Flower’ (Aster sp.) in ‘November’. What could be Rudbeckia hirta (labelled ‘Perennial dwarf Sun flower’ in Furber’s ‘November’) corresponds to the bright radial flower in Van Huysum’s ‘September’ (cf. pl. 147). Rudbeckia hirta was first grown in England in 1714, though Thomas Fairchild did not stock it in 1722–3. The nurseryman James Gordon would make these, and many other late bloomers, widely available to consumers through his nursery stock, thereby extending and exploiting seasonality.

The winter of 1723–4 and eight of the winters of the 1730s proved among the mildest on record.101Lamb, Climate, History and the Modern World, 244. All subsequent statistics in this paragraph are drawn from ibid., 230 and 244. The average temperature in December to February 1733–4, for example, was 6.1ºC (43ºF), making it the sixth warmest on record (for the years 1659–1979).102Ibid., 230. See also Hulme and Barrow, eds, Climates of the British Isles, 408: since 1979, the winter of 1988–9 at 6.5°C (43.7°F) and the winter of 1989–90 at 6.2°C (43.2°F) have proved slightly warmer still. Similarly, the summers of the late 1720s and 1730s were very warm. From 1730 to 1739 there was a sequence of ten good harvests. The hot summer of 1733 permitted large wheat exports.103Eric L. Jones, Seasons and Prices: The Role of the Weather in English Agricultural History (London: Allen & Unwin, 1964), 137.

These must have lulled any gardener into a false confidence, which was broken by the bitter winter of 1739–40. Magnolia grandiflora were killed off.104See Mark Laird, ‘From Callicarpa to Catalpa: The Impact of Mark Catesby’s Plant Introductions on English Gardens of the Eighteenth Century’, in Empire’s Nature, ed. Meyers and Pritchard, 190. The Frost Fair returned to the Thames (pl. 136). The desire of those ‘curious in gardening’ to get a Magnolia increased the subsequent value placed on them. Thus it was that, in his letter to John Custis of 31 January 1740, Collinson’s tone changed from optimism (Bartram meeting Custis, the ‘Long Easie Race’ to the age of eighty, the arrival of the ‘Sorrel Trees’ [Oxydendrum arboreum], his heart jumping at the quantity of ‘Umbrella’ seed [Magnolia tripetala], etc.) to apprehension in measuring England’s climate by that in Virginia:

I find you have Extreams of Wett & Dry. Wee have att this Juncture an Extreame of Cold. A sharp Frost began the 26 December and has continued Ever since. Till Last Week Wee had no Relaxation, but it thaw’d pretty much in the Citty but Little in the Country, but now it Continues. The Thames is full of Ice and att sundry Times has been Cross’d by numbers of People & Booths on It, but the spring Tides Frequentyly brakes it Into Islands of Ice & then all Retreat [pl. 136].

This is a Trying Time to Our Gardens & south Country plants. I have been Obliged to keep Constant fires In My stove & Green house by which Means I am in Hopes I shall be but a small sufferer, but those that would not take the pains are quite Demolish’d. The frost was so very sharp & severe. The Like has not been known since the 1715/16 or 1709.105Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 84.

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

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

In Griffier’s representation, the rugged and broken surface of the icy Thames confirms Peter Collinson’s account. He wrote that (as in the winter of 1683–4, see pls 36a–c) the ice was full of people and booths, but the spring tides, causing breaks in the ice, sometimes forced people to flee. The loss of many costly Magnolia grandiflora was the chief horticultural disaster of the coldest winter since 1715–16. Catesby’s Carolina introduction Callicarpa americana was also destroyed, but his Catalpa bignonioides, introduced in the early 1720s, turned out to be entirely hardy in England.

Indeed, it was not just the bitter winter alone. The year 1740 proved the coldest calendar year in English temperature records (kept from 1659 onwards), averaging only 6.8ºC (44.2ºF) in central England. Yet, even before the shock of that winter (which averaged -0.4ºC, or 31.3ºF, for December, January and February, making it the coldest winter since 1683–4, which averaged -1.2ºC or 29.8ºF, and thus the second coldest on record for the years 1659–1996), there had been one severe warning. The summer of 1725 was the coldest on record, averaging only 13.1ºC (55.6ºF) for the months of June, July and August. July 1725 was described as ‘more like winter than summer’. Catesby might have missed its impact by his sojourn in the Bahamas, but Fairchild doubtless kept record of stunted flowering to put alongside the favourable year of 1722–3. With the London smoke as a constant inhibiting factor, it is clear that the environment was by no means invariably conducive to growing the newly acclimatized exotics.

Peter Collinson’s sunny faith would be tested in other ways. In a letter written to a fellow Quaker, Joseph Hobson, in 1742 he was at his most rapturous: ‘I was greatly Delighted with thy Curious account of the amazing Increase from one Mallow seed, 200,000 may be reproduced.’106Ibid., 95; the quotes below are also on this page. The ‘Bountifull Hand of the Great Lord of the Universe’ was behind it: ‘This is Evidently Seen by the provision in thy Calculation which is principally Intended for the Subsistence of the Feathered Tribe & perhaps for the Lesser Animals, mice, Insects, etc.’ In another letter of 2 June 1742, however, there is a mix of the light and dark. In boosting the 72-year-old Samuel Brewer, Collinson displayed empathy:

. . . Notwithstanding what you have done, I am perswaded it will not shorten your thread.

Take Courage (This Living Weather) & Chear up, and as much as In you Lies throw off all Gloomy anxious thoughts. You know by Long practice a Little Suffices Nature, but yett I confess it is hard rowing against the Streame. The Cruel Treatmt you have Mett with is Enough to Make a Wise Man Mad.

. . . Oh the peep of a New thing, how it revives the Flagging Spirits . . .107Ibid., 99.

The letter continues informatively, bringing together in a few paragraphs the doings of Dillenius, Knowlton, James Sherard and Lord Petre:

Dr Delenius has been Lately In Town. I Communicated to Him what you hinted to Mee in your of the 9 May, & He said as you was an Old Lover you Should have the Two Vols of the Horts Elthamens & his History of Moss, all In Sheets for 2 Guineas. The first binding in pastboard will cost 7: 6 & the Mosses about 2s: 6d.

I am glad you have been Able to take a Turn to see Mr Knowlton . . .

Our Old Gardners are all gone off So that Curious & Rare plants are gott into private hands. Butt Wee have one Lately raised Up, that Is James Gordon, a most knowing and Ingenious Man who has had great Experience being Gardner to Mr Sherrard & Ld Petre. He has taken up the Cudggels.108Ibid.

Like plants, some men were ‘raised Up’, while others were cut down. Just a month after writing this, Peter Collinson was thrown into turmoil by the premature death of Lord Petre, who had been his main patron for some years (as well as patron to the young John Hill).109O’Neill and McLean, Peter Collinson, 64–70, provide background on the Collinson–Petre exchange. For Hill’s time with Lord Petre at Thorndon Hall, see George Rousseau, The Notorious Sir John Hill: The Man Destroyed by Ambition in the Era of Celebrity (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, and Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), 16–17. His letter to John Bartram of 3 July 1742 is one of the most heartfelt and begins:

Oh Friend John

I can’t Express the Concern of Mind that I am under on so many Accounts. I have lost my Friend, my brother, the man I Loved & was dearer to Mee than all men, is no More. I could fill the Sheet, and many more But oh my anxiety of mind is so great that I can hardly write & yett I must Tell thee that on Friday July 2nd our dear friend Ld Petre was Carried off by the small-pox in the thirtieth year of His age. Hard hard Cruel Hard to be taken from his Friends, His Family, His Country, in the prime of Life when He had so many thousand Things Locked up in Breast for the Benefit of them all, are now Lost in Embrio.110Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 101.

The letter contains the tender and often-cited portrait of the ‘Tall, comely personage’ — the ‘Great Mechanic . . . Elegant in his Tastes’. But it also conveys the disappointment — on Bartram’s behalf as much as his own — at the failure of their embryonic venture: ‘All our Schemes are broke Send no more Seeds for him nor the Duke of Norfolk for now. He that gave motion is Motionless, all is att an End.’ It was a desolate picture: as though a storm had left Catesby’s ‘Panther’ lodged lifeless in a barren tree.

A month later in a letter to Richard Richardson, Collinson kept up the lamentations: ‘I never was more affected . . . He was the Phoenix of his age . . . I am so dispirited.’111Ibid., 102. As to what would become of Lord Petre’s collections and the venture with Bartram, that was where his thoughts wandered:

At the Duke of Richmonds [Goodwood] there is a great Collection of hardy American Plants & Flowers. The Cetalpha [Catalpa] flower wonderfully this year [pl. 137].

Mr Gordon has also had flower Obscoletheca with a red flower. He is the only Gardener now left that has a good Stove. But now Ld P is gone I am afraid all Stove Plants will go down. My hopes are in Mr Blackburn.112Ibid.

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Description: Hortus europae-americanus, figures 47, 48, 49 and 50 by Catesby, Mark

137. Mark Catesby, Hortus europae-americanus (London, 1763), figures 47, 48, 49 and 50. Missouri Botanical Garden, photograph courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library

In this posthumous publication, Catesby’s record of North American introductions to English gardens was extensively catalogued. No. 47 is Catalpa bignonioides, which came through the winter of 1739–40 unscathed and proved one of the most successful of Catesby’s imports from North America. Equally hardy were Campsis radicans (no. 49, see pl. 113) and Kalmia angustifolia (no. 50), but Bignonia capreolata (no. 48) turned out to be only borderline hardy, requiring a hot bed to germinate before placement on a south-facing wall. ‘Capability’ Brown planted Campsis and Catalpa at Petworth, Sussex, in the 1750s.

New Fire from the Ashes: James Gordon’s Commerce, John Blackburne’s Stoves and the Tribe of Magnolias

A letter to John Blackburne followed on 20 October 1742: a plea to take up Lord Petre’s vacant subscription: ‘I presume you have Mr Catesbys Natural History of Florida in which you will See the Trees & Shrubbs Delineated in their Natural Colours.’113Ibid., 104–5. The letter is also valuable in explaining that many American seeds lie in the ground ‘till the Third Summer before they will come up, in pticular the Fringe Tree’. John Blackburne did not end up subscribing to Mark Catesby’s Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands. Within a year or two, Collinson had the support of the dukes of Richmond, Norfolk and Bedford. Philip Miller and James Gordon were among subscribing gardeners and nurserymen. By 4 April 1746, on a visit to Thorndon Hall to see what remained of Lord Petre’s collections, Collinson recognized that the momentum was shifting to the commercial nursery trade:

The Only Man that Makes a Figure in Raiseing plants for Sale is Mr Gordon at Mile End . . . I have not spared to assist Him. His great Love & Care gives Mee pleasure of Mind in Doing it because I dont see what I have procured with Some pains & Success thrown away.114Ibid., 133.

Looking back in 1763, Collinson would write in his copy of Philip Miller’s seventh edition of the Gardeners Dictionary that only James Gordon could ‘raise the dusty Seeds of the Calmias, Rhododendrons, Azaleas’ (pl. 138).115O’Neill and McLean, Peter Collinson, 56; Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 100. He continued the encomium: Gordon’s loblolly bay (Gordonia lasianthus), raised from seed after twenty years of trials, was second only in beauty to ‘Magnolia’, as could be seen by viewing the former in plate 44 of volume II of Catesby’s Natural History.116Quoted in Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 100. Clearly he was raised up to raise seeds. His time with James Sherard (1731–circa 1737) and Lord Petre (circa 1737–8) must have brought on his skills.117See O’Neill and McLean, Peter Collinson, 54–6, and especially the tribute Collinson paid to Gordon in 1763; Riley, ‘ “Procurers of Plants and Encouragers of Gardening” ’, 345–7, quotes John Ellis’s opinion of Gordon: ‘He has more knowledge in vegetation than all the gardeners and writers on Gardening in England put together.’

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Description: Kalmia angustifolia and Rhododendron maximum by Catesby, Mark

138. Mark Catesby, Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands (1729–47), vol. II, appendix, pl. 17, based on an original watercolour with gouache work by G. D. Ehret and M. Catesby, hand-coloured engraving. © Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Rare Book Collection, Washington, DC

Kalmia angustifolia, as Catesby noted of this John Bartram / Peter Collinson introduction of 1736 (top left), produced blossoms in Collinson’s Peckham garden in September 1743. It took much longer to get another Bartram introduction, Rhododendron maximum, to flower in English conditions (lower right). Hence Ehret’s studies of this Rhododendron were initially from a dried specimen, and only subsequently from a seedling plant that James Gordon raised successfully to bloom on 21 June 1758.

By 1746 Sir Charles Wager’s collection of rare plants was ‘given away & Scater’d’,118Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 129. as Collinson informed Ehret’s patron, Christoph Jakob Trew. Despite the dismantling and dispersal of collections, however, names lived on. As with the sponsorship in perpetuity of Fairchild’s ‘Vegetable Sermons’, a ‘species of eternity’ could be found after death by naming: the genus Petrea, the genus Catesbaea, the genus Bartramia and the species Collinsonia canadensis (pl. 139).119In 1739, when Collinson learned that Collinsonia was the name Linnaeus gave to a North American perennial, he commented to the great Swedish botanist: ‘Something, I think, was due to me from the Commonwealth of Botany . . . and you have been so good as to pay it, by giving me a species of eternity, botanically speaking; that is, a name as long as men and books endure.’ See James Edward Smith, ed., A Selection of the Correspondence of Linnaeus and Other Naturalists (London, 1821), 5. Bestowing a name of a friend on a plant was the ultimate favour reciprocated. While ‘Wager’s Maple’ has gone out of usage, Ehret’s Magnolia grandiflora at Parsons Green will always — ‘as long as men and books endure’ — commemorate the rough-countenanced but mild-mannered Sir Charles Wager.

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Description: Collinsonia (Collinsonia canadensis), detail by Ehret, Georg Dionysius

139. Detail from Georg Dionysius Ehret, Collinsonia (Collinsonia canadensis), watercolour and bodycolour over traces of graphite on vellum, 21 ¼ × 14 ½ in. (53.9 × 36.9 cm). © The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

In 1744 Peter Collinson wrote to Linnaeus: ‘I was Delighted to find the Coreopsis altissima (query if not Rudbeckia) and the Collinsonia was acceptable to you. I hope John Bartram our Collector will send More this year. For his great pains and industry, pray find out a new genus and name it Bartramia.’ Collinson, nominated by Linnaeus to the Royal Society of Sweden in 1747, sent Collinsonia roots as return favours for this honour.

Thomas Knowlton was writing to the younger Richard Richardson on 18 July 1749 (though by dictation, since, not in his hand, it follows more conventional English usage rather than his clumsy phonetics):

When I was in London I saw Sir Hans Sloane . . . I saw likewise Mess.rs Catesby & [George] Edwards who has materials for a 3.d Volume of Birds, Flies & Animals &c. but poor M.r Catesby’s Legs swell & he looks badly. D.rrs Mead and Stack said there were little hopes of him long on this side of the Grave . . .

The infinity of new Trees, Shrubs &c. now of late introduced by him into the Gardens from North America fill me with the greatest Wonder & Astonishment imaginable.120Henrey, No Ordinary Gardener, 208–9.

Knowlton himself would live to be ninety, through the era of John Hill’s On the Virtues of Sage, in Lengthening Human Life (1764). (Only John Blackburne, born three years after Knowlton in 1694, outlived him, achieving the ripe old age of ninety-two.) While in his seventies, Knowlton still wrote occasional letters, though the deaths of Brewer and Richardson in the early 1740s had robbed him of correspondents. William Stonehouse, gardener to the younger Richardson, became something of a substitute correspondent. On 27 February 1763, for example, Knowlton wrote to Stonehouse about a host of things.121Ibid., 257. In searching for succulents (Drosanthemum spp.), he said that he would be glad to ‘retaliate the favour’, should Stone-house supply them: ‘Esq.r Blackburn has not them now . . . [he] has . . . lately rebuilt his stoves in a more modern way.’122Ibid., 255. Again using an English beyond the rude vernacular (perhaps by another’s hand), Knowlton turned to the supreme exotic tribe, including the Magnolia virginiana that the duchess of Beaufort had grown shortly after its introduction in the 1680s (see pl. 78):

I am as Zealous as ever in the Botanick way and have dayly new amusements from that subject from the infinite varietys which North America now affords and furnishes us with, as the noble tribe of Magnolia’s ye, altissimas [Magnolia grandiflora] with y.e umbrella tree [M. tripetala] and the new mountain sorts [M. acuminata] with the little [M. virginiana] all of which flower yearly in those Gardens which are possess’d with them, particularly my friend M.r Peter Collinson at Mill Hill near London w.ch I do assure you flowers profusely there.123Ibid., 256.

Peter Collinson had grown his Magnolia grandiflora in 1740 after the bitter winter of 1739–40. Within twenty years (presumably withstanding the move from Peckham to Mill Hill in 1748), it flowered in 1760. He recorded: ‘Planted them against the piers of the Green House, in my Garden at Ridgeway House . . . and this 6th of August 1760, one of Them flowered fro the First Time, the tree is 15 feet High’.124Cited in O’Neill and McLean, Peter Collinson, 148–9. Prior to this, he reported that a ‘Large Tree that Stands in the Open Air’ at Christopher Gray’s London nursery was in flower in September 1758.125Quoted from Henrey, No Ordinary Gardener, 256. Presumably one of Colleton’s plants survived the winter in Exmouth, since in 1768 Miller described his as the largest tree in England. In December 1834 J. C. Loudon’s Gardeners Magazine gave an account of that original Magnolia grandiflora var. exoniensis passed down by generations and known to the gardener to Lord Rolle, Glendinning. That original was mistakenly cut down circa 1794 instead of an old apple tree, though layers had been taken that perpetuated the cultivar.

Back in August 1724, in a letter to William Sherard from Charleston, Mark Catesby had stated: ‘The loose Cones in the Box are those of the Umbrella [M. tripetala] the small are the Sweet flowring Bay [M. virginiana].’126Royal Society, Sherard letters II:178, Mark Catesby to William Sherard, 16 August 1724. Whether the ‘Umbrella’ cones proved viable is not known. After the initial efforts of the late 1730s (with the Custis or Bartram seeds), Collinson received afresh Magnolia tripetala from South Carolina in 1753, passing it on James Gordon at Mile End ‘to encrease it’.127Henrey, No Ordinary Gardener, 256. On 24 May 1760 this tree was the first to flower in England (pls 140 and 141). Dr John Hope saw a ‘beautiful Umbrello tree’ when he visited Peter Collinson’s garden at Mill Hill in 1766. By contrast, Magnolia acuminata had come to Collinson in the early 1740s; in 1748 he took one of two that he had raised by seed in Peckham in 1746 to the new home and garden, Ridgeway House in Mill Hill. He planted it in ‘the Corner of the Best Garden’.128O’Neill and McLean, Peter Collinson, 147. On 20 May 1762 it flowered at Mill Hill, ‘being the largest and highest tree in England’. G. D. Ehret drew the buds unfolding in April and May 1763. His studies include minutiae jotted down as text (pl. 143). Dr John Hope recorded this same tree in 1766 as being 20 feet tall.129John H. Harvey, ‘A Scottish Botanist in London in 1766’, Garden History, IX/1 (Spring 1981), 59.

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Description: Umbrella Tree (Magnolia tripetala), sketch no. 140 by Ehret, Georg Dionysius

140. Georg Dionysius Ehret, sketch no. 140, ‘Umbrella Tree’ (Magnolia tripetala), watercolour over graphite with graphite and ink writing, 14 ½ × 10 ¼ in. (36.75 × 26 cm). © The Natural History Museum, London

When John Bartram went south to Virginia in 1737, Collinson asked John Custis to direct Bartram to the ‘Umbrella Tree’ (Magnolia tripetala). In January 1740 Collinson wrote that his ‘Heart Jump’d’ at the quantity of ‘plump’ seed collected. He later received the Magnolia species from South Carolina in 1753, passing it on James Gordon at Mile End ‘to encrease it’. On 24 May 1760 this tree was the first to flower in England.

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Description: Umbrella Tree (Magnolia tripetala), sketch no. 141 by Ehret, Georg Dionysius

141. Georg Dionysius Ehret, sketch no. 141, ‘Umbrella Tree’ (Magnolia tripetala), watercolour over graphite with graphite and ink writing, 10 ¼ × 14 ½ in. (26 × 37 cm). © The Natural History Museum, London

Ehret drew the buds of this umbrella tree (Magnolia tripetala) at Gordon’s Mile End nursery, noting the date as 24 May 1760. Dr John Hope saw a ‘beautiful Umbrello tree’ when he visited Peter Collinson’s garden at Mill Hill in 1766. Mark Catesby was the first to send seed of M. tripetala from South Carolina in 1724–5, but the seed, like that which followed from John Custis and John Bartram (late 1730s), failed before the success in 1753.

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Description: Magnolia tripetala, sketch no. 145 by Ehret, Georg Dionysius

142. Georg Dionysius Ehret, sketch no. 145 (Magnolia tripetala), watercolour over graphite with graphite and ink writing, 15 × 19 in. (38 × 48 cm). © The Natural History Museum, London

Ehret noted details as he drew: the flowers smelling like the white lily; the smell being ‘soft’ in the evening when approaching at 10 to 12 feet from the tree; twelve of the twenty-six flower buds ‘blown’ (that is, bloomed); Mr Gordon presenting him with a ‘fine bunch’ to take home to study in detail.

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Description: Deciduous Magnolia (Magnolia acuminata), sketch no. 146 by Ehret, Georg Dionysius

143. Georg Dionysius Ehret, sketch no. 146, ‘Deciduous Magnolia’ (Magnolia acuminata), watercolour over graphite with ink writing, 15 ¾ × 11 ¼ in. (40 × 28.5 cm). © The Natural History Museum, London

Ehret noted in the bottom left corner that this specimen came from Peter Collinson on 19 April 1763. He recorded the ‘progress of the deciduous Magnolia’ from 19 to 26 April 1763, and again on 5 and 17 May 1763, labelling each stage with letters, for example: ‘d. the Bud and Leaf are covered with exceding fine hair shining like silver’.

Ehret’s semi-finished folios (e.g., pl. 132) are superlative steps to his very greatest production: the Oak Spring vellum of circa 1739 (see pl. 133). The sketches of Magnolia tripetala of 1760 (pls 140–42) also commemorate a sunny moment before three plant robberies that took place at Mill Hill in 1762, 1765 and 1768. In 1765, along with the loss of two fine Kalmia latifolia, Collinson had to endure the thieves marauding: ‘Destroyed a fine Layer of an Umbrella Magnolia’.130O’Neill and McLean, Peter Collinson, 153.

One of the last letters Knowlton wrote was to John Ellis, who was associated with the introduction of the Venus’s flytrap from the Carolinas.131See E. Charles Nelson, Aphrodite’s Mousetrap: A Biography of Venus’s Flytrap with Facsimiles of an Original Pamphlet and the Manuscripts of John Ellis, FRS (Aberystwyth: Boethius, 1990). He noted visiting John Blackburne’s garden in Lancashire, by then a fine repository of American plants.132See again Harvey, ‘A Scottish Botanist in London in 1766’, 71–2. Dr John Hope recorded a ‘Liquidamber’ (Liquidambar styraciflua) 25 feet high, and a Chionanthus virginicus, ‘12 feet on wall in fruit’. He also mentions Thomas Knowlton, by then gardener to the duke of Devonshire. See also the catalogue published by Adam Neal, A Catalogue of the Plants in the Garden of John Blackburne, Esq. at Orford, Lancashire (Warrington, 1779), in which Callicarpa americana is listed as a ‘greenhouse’ plant. Knowlton had known Blackburne, who lived at Orford Hall in Lancashire, since the mid-1730s.133See John Edmondson and Gordon Rowley, ‘John Blackburne of Orford Hall and his Cultivated Succulents’, Bradleya, XVI (1998), 14–24. John Edmondson has pointed out to me, in a personal communication of January 2012, that a palm (later named Sabal blackburniana and introduced from the West Indies by Wager) was a stove plant that reached Blackburne through Lord Petre. He followed the progress of his hothouse plants, including ‘plantain’ (Musa cv.). Occasionally he corresponded with him. By 1750 Peter Collinson would write in an edition of Philip Miller’s Gardeners Dictionary: ‘This gentleman spares no expense in building a variety of stoves for all species of exotics. Has by much the largest toda panna or sago palm in England.’134Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 105.

On his visit in 1770, Knowlton saw ‘ye tea tree [Camellia sinensis] for ye first time in Great good health’.135Henrey, No Ordinary Gardener, 270. Thus stove plants still maintained their cachet during this era of acclimatization; succulents found separate lodgings in the new dry stoves that James Sherard helped pioneer.136See again Laird, ‘Greenhouse Technologies and Horticulture’, 51–72. So equally, China continued to vie with America for the attention of curious collectors.137See O’Neill and McLean, Peter Collinson, 155. In 1763 (at a time when Kew was becoming an ‘Eden’, see chapter 5), Collinson wrote: ‘for some years past great Variety of seeds are brought from Chinas & many fine plants Raised, the China Mulberry I first raised Anno [1751]’. And private collectors remained strong adjuncts to the commercial nursery trade.

In Knowlton’s same letter, which is dated October 1770, he expressed regrets at the passing of his old friend Peter Collinson, who had died on 11 August 1768. Bereft of a circle of correspondents, Knowlton asked that Ellis send him a ‘Letter of Information’ now and again as a lifeline: ‘bege it as a faver in you to Indulge an old man of 80 years whom is as Great a Lover perhaps as any now yt is Living’.138Henry, Thomas Knowlton, 271.

Afterlife: Living Donations, the Endurance of Trees and the Bountiful Giver

After death — and beyond names, pictures and sermons — there was one way that favours lived on. Four years before he died, and at the age of seventy, Peter Collinson wrote to Cadwallader Colden (the virtuoso physician, farmer, botanist and acting governor of New York) from his home at Mill Hill about the trees that summoned up recollections of his network of collectors and gardeners:

As often as I survey my Garden & Plantations it reminds Mee of my Absent Friends by their Living Donations . . . Look Yonder at the Late Benevolent Duke of Richmond, His Everlasting Cedars of Lebanon will Endure when you & I & He is forgot. See with what Vigor they Tower away, how their Stems enlarge & their Branches extend . . . That Gentle Tree so like a Cypress looks uncommon, that’s the Syrian Cedar. The Seed was gave me by Sir Charles Wager first Lord of the Admiralty . . .

But those Balm Gilead Firrs grow at a surprising rate. It is pleasant to see, but they renew a concern for my Dear Friend Lord Petre. They came young from his Nurserys, with all the species of Virginia Pines & Cedars . . . [pl. 144]139Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 256.

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Description: White spruce fir and black spruce fir, detail by Ehret, Georg Dionysius

144. Georg Dionysius Ehret, ‘white spruce fir’ and ‘black spruce fir’, detail of fol. 12 of small album ‘Drawings (G. D. Ehret) 1746’, watercolour over graphite with ink writing, 6 × 8 ½ in. (16 × 21.5 cm). © The Natural History Museum, London

When depicting the black and the white spruce of ‘Newfoundland’ (Picea mariana and P. glauca), Ehret memorialized collectors by their trees in much the same way as Collinson, in a letter of 1764, viewed trees as recollections of his past collectors. In writing to Cadwallader Colden, Collinson mentioned that the ‘Balm Gilead Firrs’ (Abies balsamea) reminded him of the prematurely deceased Lord Petre. By contrast, Ehret, making links to the living, noted how the duke of Richmond’s black spruce at Goodwood bore cones, and how Peter Collinson sent him the sprig of white spruce with male flowers from the duke of Argyle’s garden at Whitton in April 1747.

By the 1760s the improving climate was favouring the American plants of the new ‘theatrical’ shrubberies as much as wheat harvests. In the same letter of 25 February 1764, Collinson commented to Cadwallader Colden: ‘It seems a Paradox (considering our Latitude) to tell Foreigners that Vegitation never ceases in England.’140Ibid., 254. Such ceaseless spring, which Evelyn had observed in the evergreen ground flora of the grove, required artificial climate to become the perpetual spring of the stove. Yet, after the setbacks of the summer of 1725 and the winter of 1739–40, a new vision of spotless spring came to the fore. As it seemed to Collinson in smiling springtime, the four quarters of the globe were being co-opted from the physic garden to the pleasure ground in an assembly of flowers and shrubs:

With a Pious Mind filled with admiration I contemplate the Glorious Constellations above, and the Wonders in the Vegitable Tribes below. I have an Assemblage of Rare Plants from all quarters, the Industrious collection of forty years. Some or other of them all the year round & all the Seasons through are delighting my Eyes, for in the Depth of our Winter, the plants from the Alps, Siberia & the mountains of Asia exhibit their pretty flowers and anticipate the Spring . . .

I am this Instant come in from seeing your Skunk Weed (arum Beta fol.) [Symplocarpus foetidus, pl. 145]. Its early appearance & its singularly spotted flowers attracts the notice of Everyone. It hath been now a month in flower. By this you may Guess the difference of seasons with you & Us.141Ibid., 254–5.

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Description: Tree frog (Hyla cinerea cinerea) and skunk cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus) by...

145. Mark Catesby, Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands (1729–47), vol. II, pl. 71: tree frog (Hyla cinerea cinerea) and skunk cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus), hand-coloured engraving. © Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Rare Book Collection, Washington, DC

To accompany another skunk cabbage drawing executed for Hans Sloane, Mark Catesby noted: ‘The Introduction of this most curious Plant with innumerable others, is owing to the indefatigable Attachment of Mr. Collinson, who in the Year 1735, received it from Pensilvania, and in the Spring following it displayed itself in this Manner at Peckham.’ Catesby probably drew the plant from cultivated specimens in Collinson’s garden. In February 1764 Collinson could remark on its being in flower since late January.

It was such benign and extended seasonality that gave rise to visions, for the first time around 1730, of a new acclimatized flora, for example, the ‘Skunk Weed’, along with Christmas rose and winter-flowering aconite, that Collinson observed on 25 February 1764. Jacobus van Huysum, with some artistic licence, showed that a perpetual spring was becoming possible outdoors: laurustinus, hazel catkins, hellebores, Daphne mezereum and some bulbs coinciding in January, even with frost and ice still about (pl. 146). Most significantly, he demonstrated in his portrait of September that the American late bloomers — Mark Catesby’s introduction Aster grandiflorus of 1720, for example — could, with the warm autumns of the late 1720s and early 1730s, make a significant contribution alongside the coxcomb, stock and lion’s ear (Leonotis leonurus) (pl. 147).

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Description: January, detail by Huysum, Jacob van

146. Jacobus van Huysum, ‘January’ (detail) from The Twelve Months of Flowers, circa 1733–5, oil on canvas, 30 ⅛ × 25 ¼ in. (76.5 × 64 cm). © The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Van Huysum’s twelve paintings are less well known than Robert Furber’s illustrated nursery catalogue, Twelve Months of Flowers (1730). Both represent visions of perpetual spring, with Van Huysum’s being more for the ‘curious’ collector than commercial. In Furber’s ‘January’, hothouse succulents and greenhouse citrus are mixed with winter aconite, snowdrop, hellebore, cyclamen, filbert and some evergreens from outdoors. Van Huysum, by contrast, putting aside exotics under glass, depicts Daphne mezereum, snowdrop, winter aconite, Viburnum tinus, Helleborus foetidus, holly, hazel and stored pears. Since polyanthus, iris, viola, Ranunculus asiaticus and crocus were all unlikely to bloom in mid-winter, Van Huysum clearly used artistic licence to lengthen seasonality.

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Description: September, detail by Huysum, Jacob van

147. Jacobus van Huysum, ‘September’ (detail) from The Twelve Months of Flowers, dated 1733, oil on canvas, 30 × 25 in. (76.2 × 63.4 cm). © The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

The dates on three of Van Huysum’s twelve canvases (1733, 1734 and 1735) place his Twelve Months in the period of warm summers and autumns before the cold calendar year of 1740. The paintings were long held by the Lords Petre of Thorndon Hall, Essex. Two flowers that were first introduced by the duchess of Beaufort appear in ‘September’: Leonotis leonurus and Polygonum orientale. The central Michaelmas daisy, given the size of the flower heads, could be Mark Catesby’s introduction of 1720: Aster grandiflorus. Another American late bloomer, Rudbeckia hirta (centre), first grown in England in 1714, would light up the duchess of Portland’s Bulstrode garden into late autumn in the 1760s with its yellow radial flowers. Such late-blooming flower gardens were favoured by the warm seasons of the 1730s to 1760s.

In contrast to the bitter winter of 1739–40, the winter of 1763–4 was exceptionally mild and warm (though dry), and flowers abounded. Yet in February, with that mildness, came rain and ‘Hurricane Winds’, as Collinson wrote; it was ‘so beclouded it was rare to see the face of the Sun’, and the ‘consequence of such Inclement Weather hath been more Shipwrecks & Inundatins then ever was known in One Winter. It is very affecting to read the very Deplorable accounts from Time to Time.’ It was as though a Carolina tempest were blowing off the coast at Cowes; here was a small reminder of the precariousness of human life, which depended on the trade across the Atlantic.

Collinson went on to link the flooding to the loss of sheep and cattle. Like the sailors of ‘Carolina Rice Ships’, livestock was drowned in the storms. Nevertheless, despite this diluvial calamity (and the poor harvest of 1763), such were the advances in agriculture in the golden decades of mid-century that ‘Bread keeps under 12d a pecke Loaf’. Furthermore, a ‘Surplus’ meant ‘Wee have been able to supply vast Quantities to our Indigent Neighbours.’ The famine of the previous century, when Polish wheat was imported from Danzig, was gradually being replaced by the ‘cornucopia’ years of the 1740s to 1760s. With help from the ‘Bountiful Giver’ — that ‘Lord of the Universe’ who had taken away the Magnolia and, in untimely fashion, the ‘Phoenix’ of his age, Lord Petre — the giving of exports seemed to triumph over the taking of imports, and, what is more, to almost everyone’s profit.

1 See John Prest, The Garden of Eden: The Botanic Garden and the Re-Creation of Paradise (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981). »

2 Developments in planting are covered extensively in Mark Laird, The Flowering of the Landscape Garden: English Pleasure Grounds, 1720–1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). Chapter 2 provides the background to John Bartram’s export of American plants through Peter Collinson in London, and how Lord Petre as the main sponsor used these plants in the new ‘theatrical’ style. »

3 Quoted from Joyce E. Chaplin, ‘Mark Catesby: A Skeptical Newtonian in America’, in Empire’s Nature: Mark Catesby’s New World Vision, ed. Amy R. W. Meyers and Margaret Beck Pritchard (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 77. »

4 For some background here, see the standard work by Bryant Lillywhite, London Coffee Houses: A Reference Book of Coffee Houses of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1963). John Brewer gives a good overview of the coffee-house club in The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London: HarperCollins, 1997), 34–40. For a more recent survey of the literary culture of the eighteenth-century coffee house, see Markman Ellis, ed., Eighteenth-century Coffee-House Culture, 4 vols (London and Brookfield, VT: Pickering & Chatto, 2006). »

5 A misrepresentation of the ‘club’ of ‘forty members’ in a thesis of 1950 by George Pasti, Jr (and followed by many scholars) is now comprehensively reconsidered within a D.Phil. thesis by Margaret Riley, ‘ “Procurers of Plants and Encouragers of Gardening”: William and James Sherard, and Charles du Bois: Case Studies in Late Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-century Botanical and Horticultural Patronage’, School of Humanities in the University of Buckingham, September 2011. »

6 Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination, 50. »

7 For an early discussion of the question, see Mark Laird, ‘Exotics and Botanical Illustration’, in Sir John Vanbrugh and Landscape Architecture in Baroque England, 1690–1730, ed. Christopher Ridgway and Robert Williams (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton, 2000), 97–9. This was developed further in Mark Laird, ‘The Culture of Horticulture: Class, Consumption and Gender in the English Landscape Garden’, in Bourgeois and Aristocratic Cultural Encounters in Garden Art, 1550–1850, ed. Michel Conan (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2002), 240–44. For a more recent authoritative study of the club at the Temple Coffee House, see Margaret Riley, ‘The Club at the Temple Coffee House Revisited’, Archives of Natural History, XXXIII/1 (2006), 90–100. Her essay also appears in complement to Mark Laird, ‘The Congenial Climate of Coffee-House Horticulture: Jacobus van Huysum’s Paintings for John Martyn’s Historia Plantarum Rariorum (1728–1737) and for the Society of Gardeners’ Catalogus Plantarum (1730)’, in The Art and History of Botanical Painting and Natural History Treatises, ed. Amy Meyers and Therese O’Malley (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2007). »

8 Part of the impetus for the Catalogus plantarum was to demonstrate which plants were hardy. The parallel incentive was to eliminate nomenclatural confusion in pre-Linnaean taxonomy. As the authors explained in the preface, nurserymen were being branded by their elite clients as ‘either a Knave or a Blockhead’ for appearing to sell a product under a false name. »

9 Laird, ‘Exotics and Botanical Illustration’, 248; see also David Coombs, ‘The Garden at Carlton House of Frederick, Prince of Wales, and Augusta, Princess Dowager of Wales: Bills in their Household Accounts, 1728–1772’, Garden History, XXV/2 (Winter 1997), 153–77. »

10 John Harvey, Early Nurserymen (London and Chichester: Phillimore, 1974), 76. See also Michael Leapman, The Ingenious Mr Fairchild: The Forgotten Father of the Flower Garden (London: Headline, 2000). Harvey, Early Nurserymen, 76. »

11 Leapman, The Ingenious Mr Fairchild, 215. »

12 At 22 guineas (£23 2s. 0d.) for the complete work, Catesby’s Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands was beyond the reach of Linnaeus as a professor in a Swedish university. Yet possible access to copies owned by Charles De Geer and Queen Ulrika Eleonora may help to explain Catesby’s influence on Linnaeus. See Charles E. Jarvis, ‘Linnaeus and the Influence of Mark Catesby’s Botanical Work’, in The Curious Mister Catesby: A ‘Truly Ingenious’ Naturalist Explores New Worlds, ed. E. Charles Nelson and David J. Elliott (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 2015). »

13 See Henrietta McBurney, with an introductory essay by Amy R. W. Meyers, Mark Catesby’s Natural History of America: The Watercolours from the Royal Library, Windsor Castle (London: Merrell Holberton, 1997); see also Meyers and Pritchard, eds, Empire’s Nature; and Nelson and Elliott, eds, The Curious Mister Catesby, with an appendix by James L. Reveal. For the background to the Reveal identifications, see James L. Reveal, ‘Identification of the Plant and Associated Animal Images in Catesby’s Natural History, with Nomenclatural Notes and Comments’, Rhodora, III/947 (2009), 273–388, and ‘Identification of the Plants and Animals Illustrated by Mark Catesby for his Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands’, Phytoneuron, VI (2013), 1–55. »

14 See Jean O’Neill and Elizabeth P. McLean, Peter Collinson and the Eighteenth-century Natural History Exchange (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2008). The authors of this work use the term ‘exchange’ to describe the way Collinson (and some in his network) shared information and plants without necessary expectation of repayment. For example, plants were exchanged between John Power at Dyrham House and Collinson over decades (47); and Lord Petre responded to Collinson’s upset on one occasion by saying he was ‘sorry if my having taken the Liberty of Presenting you with those few things, should have been misunderstood’ (69). The authors point out, in the gardeners’ age-old system of exchange, Collinson was generous within the network. »

15 Blanche Henrey, No Ordinary Gardener: Thomas Knowlton, 1691–1781 (London: British Museum [Natural History], 1986). »

16 Cited in Mark Laird, ‘Greenhouses and Great Storm: John Evelyn on the Workings of God and Man in the Garden’, in A Celebration of John Evelyn: Proceedings of a Conference to Mark the Tercentenary of his Death, ed. Mavis Batey (Sutton, Surrey: Surrey Gardens Trust, 2007), 110. »

17 This is discussed in Martin Brayne, The Greatest Storm (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton, 2002), 211–12. »

18 Ibid., 227. »

19 Mark Catesby, The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands, 2 vols (London, 1731–43 [1729–47]*), II, 45 (brown viper) and ‘An Account’ at the end of II, vii. See again Chaplin, ‘Mark Catesby’, 74.

* Catesby’s Proposals of 1728 to 1729 led to the presentation of parts I–V (vol. I) between 1729 and 1732 (though the title page is dated 1731). Parts VI–X (vol. II) followed between 1734 and 1743, with the appendix in 1747, and hence the full span of the publication is 1729–47. »

20 For the background to Quakers in natural science and mercery (with connections in Maryland and Pennsylvania), and for Collinson’s early years, see O’Neill and McLean, Peter Collinson, chapter 1. »

21 See Alan W. Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden . . . ’: Selected Letters, 1725–1768, of Peter Collinson, FRS (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2002), 4. O’Neill and McLean, Peter Collinson, 14. »

22 Quoted from Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 77. »

23 O’Neill and McLean, Peter Collinson, especially chapter 6. »

24 See E. Charles Nelson, ‘“The Truly Honest, Ingenious, and Modest Mr. Mark Catesby, F.R.S.” — Documenting his Life’, in Nelson and Elliott, eds., The Curious Mister Catesby, for background biographical information and discussion of the first voyage of 1712–19. »

25 The catalogue of 1722 coincides with the earliest extant record of Collinson’s first link to horticulture through John Power, gardener at Dyrham Park, and with Sloane’s lease of land on a peppercorn rent to Chelsea Physic Garden in return for fifty specimens presented to the Royal Society each year. See O’Neill and McLean, Peter Collinson, 22, 47. The catalogue of 1722 was amended after Collinson’s move from Peckham to Mill Hill and given the date 1752. It was later bound into his copy of the 7th edition of Philip Miller’s Gardeners Dictionary and called ‘Hortus Collinsonianus’ (142). »

26 See Mark Laird, ‘Sayes Court Revisited’, in John Evelyn and his Milieu, ed. Frances Harris and Michael Hunter (London: British Library, 2003), 115–44. Avernus — a lake in Campagna, Italy — was thought in the ancient world to give off an effluvium that killed over-flying birds. »

27 This list, in the form of three letters sent to Richard Bradley’s journal, A General Treatise of Husbandry and Gardening, with its Monthly Register, is reproduced in transcription in Harvey, Early Nurserymen, appendix IV, 150. »

28 See Hubert H. Lamb, Climate, History and the Modern World, 2nd edn (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 244, and Mike Hulme and Elaine Barrow, eds, Climates of the British Isles: Present, Past and Future (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 272 and 404–8. »

29 Lamb, Climate, History and the Modern World, 243–4. »

30 See Michael Dukes and Philip Eden, ‘ “Phew! What a Scorcher”: Weather Records and Extremes’, in Climates of the British Isles, ed. Hulme and Barrow, 266, and appendix D for the complete air temperature record. While 1733 is tied with five other years (including 1995) as the third warmest year on record (1659– 1996), the autumns of 1729, 1730 and 1731 rank as a sequence of the three warmest. The winters of 1734, 1737 and 1739 were exceptionally mild (and equivalent to some in the 1990s), while the summers of 1726, 1727, 1728, 1731, 1733 and 1736 were all very warm. »

31 Philip Miller’s account in The Gardeners Dictionary of 1768 supports this view (entry ‘Amorpha Fruticosa’): ‘The seeds of this plant were sent to England from Carolina, by Mr. Mark Catesby, FRS in 1724, from which many plants were raised in the gardens near London; these were of quick growth, and many of the plants produced flowers in three years.’ It is interesting that, by 1768, Miller associated Amorpha uniquely with the ‘shrubbery’, a term he otherwise avoided in favour of the old term ‘wilderness’. »

32 The title is Catalogus Plantarum, Tum Exoticarum tum Domesticarum, quae in Hortis haud procul a Londino Sitis in Venditionem propagantur/A Catalogue of Trees, Shrubs, Plants, and Flowers, both Exotic and Domestic, Which are propagated for Sale, In the Gardens near London. Divided, according to their different Degrees of Hardiness, into particular Books, or Parts . . . (London, 1730). »

33 This is discussed in Laird, ‘The Culture of Horticulture’, 247–8. »

34 The early history of Tropaeolum majus, after its introduction to the Dutch Republic from Peru in 1684, is discussed in 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), 76–7. »

35 Wilfrid Blunt, The Art of Botanical Illustration [1950], ed. William T. Stearn (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1994), 150. Robert Furber described it in 1732: ‘This Plant we lately received from Holland, but it was first raised in Italy, and many Contrivances were used before it could be brought to Holland; it first bore a great Price, and was esteem’d as a great Rarity, and by planting it of Cuttings it is now become pretty plentiful.’ Charles Nelson added the following observations by personal communication in September 2012 to describe the culture of this chance mutation: ‘The present opinion suggests that T. majus (double) is a spontaneous hybrid. It is a sterile mutation of an annual plant. Being sterile it cannot reproduce by seed, and is only perpetuated with the intervention of a gardener. It had to be kept “alive” by taking and rooting cuttings. Not an easy task with a rather fleshy annual — indeed contrary to logic as annuals should perish after flowering. So it is a great tribute to the skill of the gardener, who first noticed the mutant, that it ever entered cultivation so widely. It was a “difficult” plant, and having it year upon year demonstrated your skill. It also had to be overwintered in a glasshouse.’ »

36 See again Laird, ‘The Congenial Climate of Coffee-House Horticulture’. See also Warren D. Allmon, ‘The Evolution of Accuracy in Natural History Illustration: Reversal of Printed Illustrations of Snails and Crabs in Pre-Linnaean Works Suggests Indifference to Morphological Detail’, Archives of Natural History, XXXIV/1 (April 2007), 174–91. Reversal in printing does not appear to make a difference with plants, but, as Allmon points out, Catesby’s reversed printing of the asymmetrical crab is significant. Kirkall had probably used an engraving tool known as a roulette wheel to create tone on certain areas of the printing plate, rather than a rocker, the traditional tool used in true mezzotint to incise an overall dot pattern on the surface of the plate. »

37 Henrey, No Ordinary Gardener, 102. »

38 Ibid., 106. »

39 Ibid. I am grateful to Therese O’Malley for introducing me to the idea of gift giving and reciprocity (including the naming of plants as a favour). See her essay ‘Cultivated Lives, Cultivated Spaces: The Scientific Garden in Philadelphia, 1740–1840’, in Knowing Nature: Art and Science in Philadelphia, 1740–1840, ed. Amy R. W. Meyers (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011), 44–9. See also William Stearns, ‘Historical Survey of the Naming of Cultivated Plants’, Acta horticulturae, CLXXXII (1986): International Symposium on Taxonomy of Cultivated Plants in Wageningen, Netherlands, July 1986. Linneaus wrote about naming plants after people, for example. »

40 Henrey, No Ordinary Gardener, 118. »

41 See Harvey, Early Nurserymen, 77; Leapman provides a full transcription of the will, but it should be noted that his ‘wonderful world’ does not match Harvey’s transcription ‘wonderfull works’. The ‘Vegetable Sermon’ continued in Shoreditch until 1981, when, under the auspices of the Worshipful Company of Gardeners, it transferred to St Giles, Cripplegate. In 2012 the lecture was given by Rabbi Dr Abraham Levy in the Bevis Marks Synagogue in the City. »

42 Henrey, No Ordinary Gardener, 121. »

43 Ibid., 123. »

44 This is discussed in Todd Longstaffe-Gowan, The London Town Garden, 1700–1840 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), 154. »

45 See again Riley, ‘The Club at the Temple Coffee House Revisited’, 90–100, for a discussion of satire and the ‘Club’. »

46 See Blanche Henrey, British Botanical and Horticultural Literature before 1800 (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), II, 213. »

47 O’Neill and McLean, Peter Collinson, 58. »

48 Henrey, No Ordinary Gardener, 123. »

49 His role as a central ‘encourager’ after William Sherard’s death in 1728 is discussed in David R. Brigham, ‘Mark Catesby and the Patronage of Natural History in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century’, in Empire’s Nature, ed. Meyers and Pritchard, 115–18. »

50 Henrey, No Ordinary Gardener, 125. »

51 Ibid., 35. »

52 O’Neill and McLean, Peter Collinson, 36, 52–3. See appendix B, 169, for Collinson’s list of trees that Knowlton saw with mistletoe, and appendix C, 170–71, for a list of Collinson orchids, which includes Ophrys insectifera found in Middlesex in July 1757 after a visit to Bulstrode. »

53 Henrey, No Ordinary Gardener, 125. »

54 In the 1738 edition of Albin’s A Natural History of English Song-Birds, not even 20 of the 122 subscribers were women. These included aristocrats, such as Lady Hartford and Lady Northampton, and women of lower rank, such as Mrs Besswick. »

55 Eleazar Albin, A Natural History of English Insects (London, 1720; here in the 1724 edition), first page of the preface. »

56 Henrey, No Ordinary Gardener, 135–6. »

57 Jean O’Neill and Elizabeth McLean point out that Peter Collinson sported a ‘coat of arms’ in the company of other Quakers (from John Fothergill to John Bartram). It appeared in the dedicated plate in Moses Harris’s The Aurelian in 1766: a squirrel, three tomahawks and two stars. These motifs also appear in the Historia plantarum rariorum plate of ‘Helleborine Americana’ (Bletia purpurea) sponsored by Collinson. See O’Neill and McLean, Peter Collinson, 36. »

58 Thomas Knowlton’s ‘Account of the culture of the coffee plant’ — dated at ‘Petworth in Sussex, Feb. 4. 1725–6’ — is reproduced in Henrey, No Ordinary Gardener, 46–7. After William Sherard brought over a coffee tree from the physic garden in Amsterdam in 1723, Knowlton cultivated it at James Sherard’s Eltham garden. See Mark Laird, ‘Greenhouse Technologies and Horticulture: The 1st Duchess of Beaufort’s Badminton Florilegium (1703–5) and J. J. Dillenius’s Hortus Elthamensis (1732)’, in Technology and the Garden, ed. Michael G. Lee and Kenneth I. Helphand (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2014), 51–72. »

59 Riley, ‘ “Procurers of Plants and Encouragers of Gardening” ’, 390: evidence of Dillenius drawing plants as early as November 1722 and well before the date of 1724 given in the preface. »

60 Henrey, No Ordinary Gardener, 42–3. See again Riley, ‘ “Procurers of Plants and Encouragers of Gardening” ’, 343–4. »

61 Henrey, No Ordinary Gardener, 133. »

62 Riley, ‘ “Procurers of Plants and Encouragers of Gardening” ’, 391–2. »

63 Quoted ibid., 395. »

64 Ibid., 310–21, for the significance of Hortus Elthamensis, and the falling out with John Martyn. »

65 I am grateful to Margaret Riley for this transcription of the letter from Dillenius to Brewer, 28 December 1727. »

66 Henrey, No Ordinary Gardener, 142. »

67 Ibid., 234–6. Knowlton referred in his letter to James Gordon having the paper tree by 1755. For background on the introduction of Broussonetia papyrifera (along with Ailanthus altissima) through Père D’Incarville in Nanjing in 1751, see O’Neill and McLean, Peter Collinson, 133–4. »

68 For G. D. Ehret’s portrait of the plant named after Englebert Kaempfer, Kaempferia, see Enid Slater, ‘From the Archives: Kaempferia, the Painting by G. D. Ehret in the Linnean Society’, The Linnean, XVII (2001), 18–26. »

69 Henrey, No Ordinary Gardener, 142. »

70 Ibid., 168 and 138. »

71 Ibid., 168–9. Part 8 of Catesby’s Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands was reviewed in the Philosophical Transactions for April, May and June 1736, but Knowlton got his copy of this part 8 only by early 1738. For the chronology of publishing parts 1–5 (vol. I, May 1729, January 30, November 1731 and November 1732), and parts 6–10 (vol. II, 1734–43), see Leslie K. Overstreet, ‘The Publication of Mark Catesby’s The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands’, in The Curious Mister Catesby: A ‘Truly Ingenious’ Naturalist Explores New Worlds, ed. E. Charles Nelson and David J. Elliott (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 2015). »

72 Henrey, No Ordinary Gardener, 169. »

73 O’Neill and McLean, Peter Collinson, chapters 5 and 6, give important background on ‘colonial exchange’, which Collinson claimed to bring him ‘no profit’ (79). Collinson traced the ‘Connection’ back to ‘anno 1733’ (103) and referred to 1740 as the year the exchange became a ‘settled Trade & Business’ (114). »

74 Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 29. »

75 Ibid., 59. O’Neill and McLean, in Peter Collinson, 12, 80–84, give a good account of how Sir Charles Wager, William Byrd II and John Custis formed a network extending from England to Virginia. »

76 Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 64. Drugget was a coarse woven fabric suitable for plain folk. »

77 Cited in O’Neill and McLean, Peter Collinson, 106. »

78 Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 80. For further information on John Clayton, whom Collinson called the ‘Greatest Botanist of American’, see O’Neill and McLean, Peter Collinson, 86–7. »

79 O’Neill and McLean, Peter Collinson, 83–4, characterize Custis as having a ‘jaundiced view of life’, in contrast to Collinson’s largely sunny disposition. »

80 Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 81. »

81 Quoted from Daniel A. Baugh, ‘Wager, Sir Charles (1666–1743)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online edition: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/28393 [accessed 1 October 2013]. »

82 Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 129. »

83 Ibid., 256. The letter was written to the physician virtuoso in the province of New York, Cadwallader Colden, on 25 February 1764, associating trees and shrubs with ‘Absent Friends’: the duke of Northumberland, duke of Richmond, duke of Argyle, Lord Petre, Sir Henry Trelawny, John Bartram, John Clayton and Thomas Lamboll of South Carolina. The identity of ‘Syrian Cedar’ as Cedrus libani is yet to be verified. In 1770 John Fothergill reported in his Some Account of the Late Peter Collinson (London, 1770) that Wager was: ‘a most generous and fortunate contributor to [Sir Hans Sloane’s] vast treasure of natural curiosities; omitting nothing, in the course of his many voyages, that could add to its magnificence, and encouraging the commanders under him, who were stationed in different parts of the globe, to procure whatever was rare and valuable in every branch of natural history. To this he was strongly excited by Peter Collinson; for whom and his family Sir Charles had a very singular esteem, and continued it to the last moments of his life.’ Quoted from Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 79. »

84 O’Neill and McLean, Peter Collinson, 46. »

85 For the complicated histories of Acer saccharinum and A. rubrum, see Mark Laird, ‘Mark Catesby’s Plant Introductions and English Gardens of the Eighteenth Century’, and Charles E. Jarvis, ‘Linnaeus and the Influence of Mark Catesby’s Botanical Work’, in The Curious Mister Catesby, ed. Nelson and Elliott. »

86 Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 54. »

87 Riley, ‘ “Procurers of Plants and Encouragers of Gardening” ’, chapters 2 and 6. »

88 Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 76. The full letter quoted below is 76–9. »

89 Philip Miller, The Gardeners Dictionary (London, 1731), entry for ‘Magnolia’. »

90 See Laird, ‘Mark Catesby’s Plant Introductions’ [forthcoming]. »

91 Gerta Calmann, Ehret: Flower Painter Extraordinary (Boston, MA: New York Graphic Society/Little, Brown, 1977). »

92 See Amy R. W. Meyers, ‘ “The Perfection of Natural History”: Mark Catesby’s Drawings of American Flora and Fauna in the Royal Library, Windsor Castle’, introductory essay in McBurney, Mark Catesby’s Natural History of America, 23–4. I am indebted to Charles Nelson for allowing me to consult his definitive account before publication: E. Charles Nelson, ‘Georg Dionysius Ehret, Mark Catesby and Sir Charles Wager’s Magnolia grandiflora: An Early Eighteenth-century Picture Puzzle Resolved’ in Rhododendrons, Camellias and Magnolias, 65 (2014), 36–51. »

93 For a number of Ehret’s drawings of Magnolia grandiflora, including his vellum of 1744, see Sandra Knapp, Potted Histories: An Artistic Voyage through Plant Exploration (London: Scriptum, 2003), ‘Magnolias’: 130–45. »

94 Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi, An Oak Spring Flora: Flower Illustration from the Fifteenth Century to the Present Time (Upperville, VA: Oak Spring Garden Library, 1997), 190–92. »

95 See again Chaplin, ‘Mark Catesby’, 79. »

96 Henrey, No Ordinary Gardener, 181–2. »

97 Ibid., 182. »

98 Aster grandiflorus appears as plate 17 — ‘Aster virginiana’ — in John Martyn’s Historia plantarum rariorum. »

99 Harvey, Early Nurserymen, 150–59; see also John H. Harvey, ‘The English Nursery Flora, 1677–1723’, Garden History, XXVI/1 (Summer 1998), 60. »

100 Harvey, Early Nurserymen, 150. »

101 Lamb, Climate, History and the Modern World, 244. All subsequent statistics in this paragraph are drawn from ibid., 230 and 244. »

102 Ibid., 230. See also Hulme and Barrow, eds, Climates of the British Isles, 408: since 1979, the winter of 1988–9 at 6.5°C (43.7°F) and the winter of 1989–90 at 6.2°C (43.2°F) have proved slightly warmer still. »

103 Eric L. Jones, Seasons and Prices: The Role of the Weather in English Agricultural History (London: Allen & Unwin, 1964), 137. »

104 See Mark Laird, ‘From Callicarpa to Catalpa: The Impact of Mark Catesby’s Plant Introductions on English Gardens of the Eighteenth Century’, in Empire’s Nature, ed. Meyers and Pritchard, 190. »

105 Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 84. »

106 Ibid., 95; the quotes below are also on this page. »

107 Ibid., 99. »

108 Ibid. »

109 O’Neill and McLean, Peter Collinson, 64–70, provide background on the Collinson–Petre exchange. For Hill’s time with Lord Petre at Thorndon Hall, see George Rousseau, The Notorious Sir John Hill: The Man Destroyed by Ambition in the Era of Celebrity (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, and Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), 16–17. »

110 Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 101. »

111 Ibid., 102. »

112 Ibid. »

113 Ibid., 104–5. The letter is also valuable in explaining that many American seeds lie in the ground ‘till the Third Summer before they will come up, in pticular the Fringe Tree’. John Blackburne did not end up subscribing to Mark Catesby’s Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands. »

114 Ibid., 133. »

115 O’Neill and McLean, Peter Collinson, 56; Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 100. »

116 Quoted in Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 100. »

117 See O’Neill and McLean, Peter Collinson, 54–6, and especially the tribute Collinson paid to Gordon in 1763; Riley, ‘ “Procurers of Plants and Encouragers of Gardening” ’, 345–7, quotes John Ellis’s opinion of Gordon: ‘He has more knowledge in vegetation than all the gardeners and writers on Gardening in England put together.’ »

118 Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 129. »

119 In 1739, when Collinson learned that Collinsonia was the name Linnaeus gave to a North American perennial, he commented to the great Swedish botanist: ‘Something, I think, was due to me from the Commonwealth of Botany . . . and you have been so good as to pay it, by giving me a species of eternity, botanically speaking; that is, a name as long as men and books endure.’ See James Edward Smith, ed., A Selection of the Correspondence of Linnaeus and Other Naturalists (London, 1821), 5. »

120 Henrey, No Ordinary Gardener, 208–9. »

121 Ibid., 257. »

122 Ibid., 255. »

123 Ibid., 256. »

124 Cited in O’Neill and McLean, Peter Collinson, 148–9. »

125 Quoted from Henrey, No Ordinary Gardener, 256. »

126 Royal Society, Sherard letters II:178, Mark Catesby to William Sherard, 16 August 1724. »

127 Henrey, No Ordinary Gardener, 256. »

128 O’Neill and McLean, Peter Collinson, 147. »

129 John H. Harvey, ‘A Scottish Botanist in London in 1766’, Garden History, IX/1 (Spring 1981), 59. »

130 O’Neill and McLean, Peter Collinson, 153. »

131 See E. Charles Nelson, Aphrodite’s Mousetrap: A Biography of Venus’s Flytrap with Facsimiles of an Original Pamphlet and the Manuscripts of John Ellis, FRS (Aberystwyth: Boethius, 1990). »

132 See again Harvey, ‘A Scottish Botanist in London in 1766’, 71–2. Dr John Hope recorded a ‘Liquidamber’ (Liquidambar styraciflua) 25 feet high, and a Chionanthus virginicus, ‘12 feet on wall in fruit’. He also mentions Thomas Knowlton, by then gardener to the duke of Devonshire. See also the catalogue published by Adam Neal, A Catalogue of the Plants in the Garden of John Blackburne, Esq. at Orford, Lancashire (Warrington, 1779), in which Callicarpa americana is listed as a ‘greenhouse’ plant. »

133 See John Edmondson and Gordon Rowley, ‘John Blackburne of Orford Hall and his Cultivated Succulents’, Bradleya, XVI (1998), 14–24. John Edmondson has pointed out to me, in a personal communication of January 2012, that a palm (later named Sabal blackburniana and introduced from the West Indies by Wager) was a stove plant that reached Blackburne through Lord Petre. »

134 Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 105. »

135 Henrey, No Ordinary Gardener, 270. »

136 See again Laird, ‘Greenhouse Technologies and Horticulture’, 51–72. »

137 See O’Neill and McLean, Peter Collinson, 155. In 1763 (at a time when Kew was becoming an ‘Eden’, see chapter 5), Collinson wrote: ‘for some years past great Variety of seeds are brought from Chinas & many fine plants Raised, the China Mulberry I first raised Anno [1751]’. »

138 Henry, Thomas Knowlton, 271. »

139 Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 256. »

140 Ibid., 254. »

141 Ibid., 254–5. »

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