4. Cornucopia: Georg Dionysius Ehret, Thomas Robins the Elder and the Paragon of Meadow and Grove​

Laird, Mark

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4. Cornucopia: Georg Dionysius Ehret, Thomas Robins the Elder and the Paragon of Meadow and Grove

Mark Laird

A Natural History of English Gardening: 1650–1800

The shrubbery, with its ‘theatrical’ structure, was the fitting outcome of a shift from Edenic-scientific collecting in seventeenth-century physic gardens to decorative-scientific collecting...

Author

Mark Laird

PublisherPaul Mellon Centre

Related print edition pages: pp.171-224

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-32114

Chapter subject tags:Ehret, Georg Dionysius, 1708-1770Robins, Thomas, 1715?-1770Gardens, English--History--18th centuryWalpole, Horace, 1717-1797Bampfylde, Coplestone Warre, 1720-1791Art and natural history--Great Britain--History--18th centuryBotanical illustration--England--18th centuryGarden ecology--Great Britain--HistoryCoppice forestsDelany, Mrs. (Mary), 1700-1788Women artists--Great Britain--18th centuryGreat Britain--Climatic factors--History

4. Cornucopia: Georg Dionysius Ehret, Thomas Robins the Elder and the Paragon of Meadow and Grove

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Description: Reconstruction as perspective elevation of Horace Walpole's shrubbery at Strawberry...

148. Mark Laird, reconstruction as perspective elevation of Horace Walpole’s shrubbery at Strawberry Hill (as modified by the 1780s, and re-interpreted here as a conjectural replanting). The foreshortened view is taken as though from the edge of his shady grove and shows an ideal late-June florescence. Pencil, watercolour and crayon, 2014

Both Horace Walpole at Strawberry Hill and Coplestone Warre Bampfylde at Hestercombe had gardens in which groves were more important than shrubberies. The painting of Walpole’s villa garden by Paul Sandby (circa 1769, see pl. 165) shows how his extensive groves offered flowery effects beyond the shrubbery’s short-lived June peak. One effect was a summery ‘garnishing’ of honeysuckle in his lime grove. To cleverly extend seasonality in his over-mature shrubbery, Walpole added a lattice fence: fronted, first, with tubs of orange trees in niches; and later, with a flower border (here filled with summer Dianthus). His latticework planting — a synthesis of styles and sensory effects — resembles what Thomas Robins the Elder shows in his Pan’s Lodge view (see pl. 161). The artifice of Walpole’s Picturesque plantings around and adjacent to his villa also owes something to the earlier Baroque practices of pls 59 and 112: displaying conservatory tubs and pots outdoors in summer or ‘garnishing’ tree stems in the manner of ‘festoons’.

This plate is dedicated by Mark Laird in memory of Mavis Batey and Kath Clark, and to Karen Bridgman

The shrubbery, with its ‘theatrical’ structure, was the fitting outcome of a shift from Edenic-scientific collecting in seventeenth-century physic gardens to decorative-scientific collecting in eighteenth-century pleasure grounds. All along, however, the ‘sacred grove’ held advantage over the shrubbery.1See John Evelyn’s addition to Sylva of 1706, ‘An Historical Account of the Sacredness and Use of standing Groves’ (John Evelyn, Silva; or, A Discourse of Forest-Trees, London, 1706). It drew upon classical as well as scriptural authority, and it offered shade (pl. 148). With a pedigree stretching back to Plato, it would outlive the transplantation of American trees and shrubs that completed ‘theatrical’ collections. Perpetual spring — the classical Ver perpetuum — proved to have an enduring future: whether in spring or summer or winter, perennial greens continued to embroider the shady grove. The effect was likened to a carpet, enamel and embroidery, since flecks of colour patterned the sward or pasture or tree trunk.

Coplestone Warre Bampfylde (1720–1791, pl. 150) was one who remained committed to this classical ideal. Having spent formative years amid the elm groves of St John’s College, Oxford, he inherited the estate of Hestercombe in Somerset in 1750.2Bampfylde matriculated in 1737. For a discussion of his life and work, see Philip White, A Gentleman of Fine Taste: The Watercolours of Coplestone Warre Bampfylde (1720–1791), exhibition catalogue (Hestercombe, Somerset, 1995). See also Kim Sloan, ‘A Noble Art’: Amateur Artists and Drawing Masters, c. 1600–1800 (London: British Museum Press, 2000), 83 and 100. Already primed for a life of painting and gardening, he went on to plant his own, less regimented, groves. They were modelled in part on William Shenstone’s The Leasowes. Bampfylde’s Arcadian Hestercombe naturalized — in the shape of a pleasure ground’s informal ‘circuits’ — what had been the stiff concourse of college allées.3For the implications of the ‘circuit’ of house and garden, see Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978), chapter 7: ‘The Social House, 1720–70’. For previous research documenting how the ‘grove’ or ‘wilderness’ evolved into the mid-eighteenth-century ‘shrubbery’, see Mark Laird, The Flowering of the Landscape Garden: English Pleasure Grounds, 1720–1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). In short, finding that the grove was adaptable to new ways of gardening, he largely resisted the contemporary urge for a shrubbery.

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Description: Portrait of Coplestone Warre Bampfylde as Colonel of the Somerset Militia by...

150. Thomas Gainsborough, Portrait of Coplestone Warre Bampfylde as Colonel of the Somerset Militia, circa 1758, oil on canvas, 29 ½ × 24 ⅜ in. (75 × 62 cm). Private Collection. Photograph courtesy of Philip White

Educated at St John’s College, Oxford, Bampfylde was an accomplished artist at thirty when he inherited Hestercombe in Somerset. Painting his earliest known watercolour that same year (1750), he achieved lasting fame for his views of Stourhead (1753 onwards). Thereafter he laid out Hestercombe’s Arcadian groves. His links to Henry Hoare, William Shenstone and Richard Graves place him at the centre of Georgian artistic and literary circles. He is thus a bridge between Stourhead and The Leasowes and their rival planting styles: shrubbery versus grove, lawn versus meadow, and exotic versus native.

The grove, embroidered with violets and cowslips, would always steal a march on the shrubbery’s early summer florescence. Yet the incidence of rainfall or drought was what determined how grove and meadow fared when shrubbery and flowerbed were in their summer prime. Extreme summer dryness could be a scourge for the shrubbery gardener, though a boon for the wheat farmer. Thus the intricate pattern of mid-eighteenth-century gardening was textured by the meteorological and the seasonal, the Pastoral and the Georgic, and all the effects linked to sward, hay and natural and artful ‘embroidery’.

Two painters — the first English-born, the other of German stock — are witnesses to such texturing. Thomas Robins the Elder (circa 1716–1770), ‘Limner of Bath’, is celebrated for his Rococo garden views of the 1740s and 1750s. John Harris’s Gardens of Delight (1978) first brought attention to Robins and it remains the authoritative basis for discussion here; more recent work by Cathryn Spence adds a better understanding of Robins’s topographical art, notably in Dorset.4For Thomas Robins the Elder, see John Harris and Martyn Rix, Gardens of Delight: The Rococo English Landscape of Thomas Robins, the Elder (London: Basilisk Press, 1978); see also Cathryn Spence, ‘Thomas Robins and the Dorset Sketches’, Georgian Group Journal, XXI (2013), 30–46. I am grateful for access to the latter article before publication. For the best discussion of the limner, see Sloan, ‘A Noble Art’, chapter 2: ‘Learning to Limn’. In 1755 Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language defined a limner as simply any ‘painter’ or ‘picture-maker’, but the original derivation of the word from luminare — to give light — may be important, since Thomas Robins’s art can be considered a form of ‘illumination’. Yet, by contrast, Robins’s later botanical art remains relatively unexplored. The 108 folios of flowers at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge constitute some of the finest botanical studies of natives and exotics from the Georgian era. (Spence has questioned whether some folios could be by Robins’s sons, even raising doubts about Cornucopia at the heart of this chapter. My study has to rely on current attributions, treating the body of botanical studies as certain works of the Robins family.)5Cathryn Spence raised these doubts in a personal communication of February 2013. So equally, the masterful Georg Dionysius Ehret (1708–1770, pl. 151), drawn to England by exotics, retained an interest in the natives that were denizens of grove and meadow, pond and bog, heath and uplands. Their work complements the topographical art of painters like Bampfylde, who had little concern with botany as such.

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Description: Georg Dionysius Ehret by James, George

151. George James, Georg Dionysius Ehret, circa 1765, oil on canvas, 35 × 26 ¼ in. (89 × 66.6 cm). By permission of the Linnean Society of London

This portrait shows G. D. Ehret, aged about fifty-seven, with a specimen of Cestrum diurnum, an exotic sweet-scented jasmine of the West Indies. A second likeness (a self-portrait of circa 1750, see pl. 178) hangs at Chelsea Physic Garden. No equivalent portraits exist of Thomas Robins the Elder, who, as well as being a distinguished topographical artist, produced exquisite flower portraits of both natives and exotics. The German-born Ehret, though best known for his magnificent paintings of exotics, remained devoted to portraying the native flowers and fungi of English field and grove.

Despite Bampfylde’s painterly record of his own property, today’s decorative re-plantings at Hestercombe rely heavily on affinities to The Leasowes.6John Phibbs of the Debois Landscape Survey Group produced a survey report entitled ‘Analysis of the Combe at Hestercombe’ in June 2001. This unpublished report contains a comprehensive review of documentation for Hestercombe, including discussion of ‘enamelling in literature’ (Chaucer, Milton, Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser). I am greatly indebted to him for sharing his knowledge. Today the Laird-Phibbs proposal for replanting Hestercombe remains only partly implemented. It is thus to the writer and garden-maker William Shenstone (1713–1763) — or other opinionated voices like Walpole’s — that the historian turns for information not disclosed by the celebrated painter’s work. In May 1749, for example, just as Shenstone wrote of ‘shrubbery’, he still expressed the judicious art of dressing up nature: the artful embroidery of his ‘Grove’. To Lady Luxborough (1699–1756) he declared: ‘I have been embroidering my Grove with Flowers, till I almost begin to fear it looks too like a garden.’7Marjorie Williams, The Letters of William Shenstone (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1939), 193. Note also Shenstone’s comment in a letter of 6 June 1749, 199: ‘I have two or three Peonies in my grove, yt I have planted amongst Fern and brambles in a gloomy Place by ye Water’s side. You will not easily conceive how good an Effect they produce, & how great a stress I lay upon them.’ Lady Luxborough wrote back about natural embroidery: ‘The Coppice has the advantage at present; for Nature has embroidered it thick with all kinds of wild flowers.’8Lady Luxborough (Henrietta Saint-John Knight), Letters Written by the Late Right Honourable Lady Luxborough to William Shenstone Esq. (London, 1775), 200. In this sense, the coppice as a type of grove represented a rival ideal to the shrubbery. Likewise the meadow, in counterpoint to the lawn, was a paragon in the rivalry of art and nature.9John Phibbs has pointed out that one of Lady Luxborough’s letters of 14 March 1750 (p. 196) refers to a rough ‘Service Walk’ that separates the ‘Shrubbery’ from the ‘Coppice, which is also a kind of shrubbery’. This implies a fluid terminology that resists modern attempts to establish distinctions. For a comparison of work by Ehret and Robins, see Wilfrid Blunt, The Art of Botanical Illustration [1950], ed. William T. Stearn (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1994), 170. Remarking on his ‘modernity of technique’ and ‘exceptionally sensitive and delicate’ drawing style, Wilfrid Blunt placed Robins up with the commanding ‘genius’ of Georg Dionysius Ehret. He commented: ‘It is interesting to compare Robins’s study of auriculas with Ehret’s more finished painting of the same subject; each is, in its own way, perfect.’ Hence the ‘paragon’ of the chapter title refers as much to the rival excellence of the two artists as to the rivalry of nature and art, or, more specifically, of grove and shrubbery.

An understanding of the entire fabric of planting in the middle decades of the eighteenth century thus requires more than a mere primer on ‘theatrical’ shrubbery. Ideal structures — the vertical grove, the diagonal shrubbery and the horizontal meadow — grew each spring, summer and autumn, and each season the weather painted textures of varied hues. Lady Luxborough’s rivalry with Shenstone — the merits of spring over autumn10Laird, The Flowering of the Landscape Garden, 113 and n. 33. — meant, within the rivalry of art and nature (or the rivalry of coppice and shrubbery), a cyclical and exponential proliferation. The growth of ideal structures by average seasonal patterns was altered by extreme variation within yearly cycles: from drought to deluge. Thus the basic structures ramified in predictable and unpredictable patterns. Those patterns may be reconstructed through text and image: from William Shenstone’s writings to the increasingly elaborated jottings of Gilbert White (1720–1793); and from the topographical and botanical art of Thomas Robins the Elder to S. H. Grimm’s drawings of Gilbert White’s haycocks, featured as the chapter concludes in the late 1770s. Georg Dionysius’s botanical art, comprehensively surveyed in Gerta Calmann’s book Ehret: Flower Painter Extraordinary (1977), leaves scope for considering anew his place in the history of gardening and natural history in England.11Gerta Calmann, Ehret: Flower Painter Extraordinary (Boston, MA: New York Graphic Society/Little, Brown, 1977).

The year 1748 provides a moment to enter the world of G. D. Ehret and Thomas Robins the Elder.12By comparison with Ehret, who has a short entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, the life and work of Thomas Robins remains poorly covered, despite John Harris’s exemplary study of his topographical art. In the absence of an ODNB entry, Cathryn Spence, ‘Thomas Robins and the Dorset Sketches’, provides an authoritative biographical sketch: his training under Jacob Portret, which explains the ‘Chinese’ look of Robins’s motifs and figures; his life in Bath, with July to September for topographical art and autumn–winter for teaching art and pursuing his off-season botanical studies; and his circle of clients and patrons, notably Henry Seymer (1714–1785), the Dorset naturalist-artist, with an interest in shells and butterflies. Seymer copied several images from Robins’s flower album in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, for his ‘Butterflies and Plants’. See also R. I. Vane-Wright and H.W.D. Hughes, The Seymer Legacy: Henry Seymer and Henry Seymer Jnr of Dorset and their Entomological Paintings, with a Catalogue of Butterflies and Plants, 1775–1783 (Cardigan: Forrest Text, 2005). By 1748 Ehret would take the notation of Linnaeus’s sexual classification of plants to develop a trompe-l’oeil Tabella. It described the plants with their characters presented in his Plantae et papiliones rariores published that year (pl. 152). Text, symbols and icons lie adjacent and on top of each other. In the seasons from 1748 to 1758, Thomas Robins the Elder found another way to represent layers in his topographical views of Painswick (pl. 153 and cf. pl. 159 and 161). With canvas and frame, he illustrated entire environments of grove, meadow and shrubbery. His art shows, just as in Ehret’s work, how native flowers and animals were valued alongside exotics. Indeed, Robins’s topographical work goes further in suggesting the interdependence of culture and nature through arable and pastoral farming in years of drought and deluge. In turn, the droughts of 1781 and 1783 would prove — even as the shrubbery appeared ascendant — the enduring appeal of Bampfylde’s groves.

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Description: Characteres Plantarum rariorum by Ehret, Georg Dionysius

152. Georg Dionysius Ehret, ‘Characteres Plantarum rariorum’, from Plantae et papiliones rariores (London, 1748–59), Tab. VIII, hand-coloured etching, 1748. © Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Rare Book Collection, Washington, DC

Plantae et papiliones rariores was self-published by Ehret as fifteen plates between 1748 and 1759. Plates IV and VIII are presented as tables with minute drawings of various plant characteristics according to the Linnaean sexual system. Effectively conveying a layering of knowledge, Ehret attached to the table in trompe l’oeil a drawing of the ‘Abutilon’ together with its male and female states. That same ‘Abutilon’ appears in full on Tabella VII (see pl. 168), thus amplifying the information presented on Tabella VIII.

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Description: Prospect of Pan's Lodge, Panswyke (Painswick House), Gloucestershire by Robins,...

153. Thomas Robins the Elder, Prospect of Pan’s Lodge, Panswyke [Painswick House], Gloucestershire, 1757, watercolour and bodycolour on vellum, 19 ½ × 23 ¼ in. (49.5 × 59 cm). Private Collection. Photograph courtesy of Dan Brown

This painting, recording the rural retreat and teahouse in Colbourne Grove across the valley from Painswick, is one in a set of five of Benjamin Hyett’s properties in Gloucestershire. The frame provides a complementary iconographical layer to the dance of Pan, Silenus and satyrs (lower right). Inhabitants of the oak, hazelnut and beech groves include the native red squirrel, magpie, barn owl and sparrowhawk. Robins thus found an alternative to the trompe l’oeil to convey layers of meaning and a layering of information.

PART I
The Fruitful Season of 1748: From Verdure to Vintage

The year 1748 was prodigious in natural and artful productions. In that season of Painswick and Papiliones, Lady Luxborough discussed ‘shrubbery’ with William Shenstone. Henrietta Knight (née St John), Lady Luxborough — half-sister to the gardening Henry, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke, correspondent with Shenstone and the creator of a garden at Barrells in Warwickshire — was well placed to offer literary comments on seasonality. In turn, the countess of Hertford told Lady Luxborough about the ‘the strongest Verdure I ever saw’.13Thomas Hull, Select Letters between the Late Duchess of Somerset, Lady Luxborough . . . , 2 vols (London, 1778), 1, 68. I am indebted to John Phibbs for this reference. For an account of Lady Luxborough’s friendship with Frances, countess of Hertford, see Jane Brown, My Darling Heriott: Henrietta Luxborough, Poetic Gardener and Irrepressible Exile (London: Harper, 2006). Dr Dillenius had died the previous spring from apoplexy, as his scarlet-cheeked portrait seemed to foretell (pl. 155); being hot-tempered as well as portly, the warmth of the 1740s seasons flushed his cheeks.14See G. S. Boulger, ‘Dillenius, Johann Jakob (1687–1747)’, entry revised by D. J. Mabberley, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online edition: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/7648 [accessed 1 October 2013]: ‘Dillenius was somewhat corpulent and, in March 1747, was seized with apoplexy, from which he died in Oxford on 2 April’. Much wine had been produced in 1747 after ‘a long dry, warm Summer & Autumn’.

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Description: Johann Jacob Dillenius, First Sherardian Professor of Botany in Oxford

155. Anonymous artist, Johann Jacob Dillenius, First Sherardian Professor of Botany in Oxford, before 1747, oil on canvas, 29 ½ × 24 ⅜ in. (75 × 62 cm). Oxford University Herbaria, Department of Plant Sciences, University of Oxford

This portrait of J. J. Dillenius is twinned with a later copy that hangs at the Linnean Society in London. His scarlet cheeks, which match the Sprekelia formosissima to which he is pointing, seem to point to his death from apoplexy in 1747. The flower appears in one of Thomas Robins’s paintings of Painswick. William Sherard made the German Dillenius central to English botany, much as the German-born Ehret was at the heart of English botanical art.

On 27 March 1748 Peter Collinson, while suffering from ‘a Gouty Humor’ that made him irritable, reproached Carl Linnaeus in a letter: ‘It is a General Complaint that Dr Linnaeus Receives all & Returns nothing.’15Alan W. Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden . . . ’: Selected Letters, 1725–1768, of Peter Collinson, FRS (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2002), 144. For the failure of European friends — notably Linnaeus — to respond to Collinson’s letters, see Jean O’Neill and Elizabeth P. McLean, Peter Collinson and the Eighteenth-century Natural History Exchange (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2008), 124–5. Yet, by 25 August he appeared refreshed in a letter to Cadwallader Colden, the virtuoso in the colony of New York:16For Cadwallader Colden, see O’Neill and McLean, Peter Collinson, 88–90. ‘Wee have, thanks to the Bountifull Giver, a year of great plenty of all Sorts & Grain & fruits & a fine Harvest.’17Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 148. That prodigal summer after a verdant spring gave a return of ‘Rare Fruits and Seeds Collected and Drawn by G. D. Ehret 1748’. Along with tropical fruits in greenhouse cultivation, Ehret depicted the fruiting of two species of yellow jasmine (Jasminum fruticans and Jasminum humile, pl. 157). Since the time of John Evelyn’s Sylva, J. fruticans and J. humile had been recognized as hardy plantation shrubs, so Ehret was clearly recording a fruiting outdoors.

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Description: Rare Fruits and Seeds Collected and Drawn by G. D. Ehret, 1748, fol. 4 by Ehret,...

157. Georg Dionysius Ehret, album entitled ‘Rare Fruits and Seeds Collected and Drawn by G. D. Ehret 1748’, fol. 4, watercolour on graphite with ink writings, 11 ½ × 17 in. (29.2 × 43.2 cm). © The Natural History Museum, London

Along with the tropical passion fruit, the fruiting of the yellow jasmines (Jasminum fruticans and J. humile) forms a focus of Ehret’s sketch. Working on another sketch on 18 July 1748, he depicted the American candleberry myrtle with berries. The year 1748 was a vintage one in England for fruits, wheat and grapes — part of the warming trend of the late 1740s. Much wine was produced in 1747 after ‘a long dry, warm Summer & Autumn’. The year 1748 yielded a bumper crop as a ‘Cornucopia’ (horn of plenty) in England.

On 18 July 1748 Ehret depicted the candleberry myrtle with berries. These must have formed early in that warm summer. All in all, 1748 was a cornucopia year: an immaculate spring gave way to the first of all summer shrubberies and the last in a short run of good vintages. The ‘horn of plenty’ of 1748 may be taken figuratively, then, to suggest the layered art of both Robins and Ehret. Indeed, as the first part of this chapter draws to a close, it becomes clear how their work overlaps in the late 1760s; for it is possible that both were coincidentally under the sway of the duchess of Portland’s patronage at Bulstrode. Giving came in different manners; the return was plentiful.

The prevailing hot, dry summers of the late 1740s produced more than just a fine crop of wheat and a good vintage or vendange.18See here E. L. Jones, Seasons and Prices: The Role of the Weather in English Agricultural History (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1964), 139–40. The peak in grain exports in 1749 and 1750 rounded off a decade end with many good to excellent harvests. Talk of the weather brought Collinson to an unexpected natural phenomenon that resulted from the high-pressure system. He wrote that ‘a remarkable thing has happen’d, a Long Series of Easterly Winds the beginning of this Month has brought a Swarm of Locusts amongst us. They fell very much in and about the Citty.’19Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 148. George Edwards, in volume IV of his A Natural History of Uncommon Birds (1751), devoted plate 208 to ‘The Great Brown Locust’ (Locusta migratoria migratoria, pls 156a and b).20See Judith A. Marshall and E.C.M. Haes, Grasshoppers and Allied Insects of Great Britain and Ireland (Colchester: Harley, 1988), 146–7: ‘The majority of migrants to Britain are of the northern subspecies, L. m. migratoria, usually arriving here during August and September from mainland outbreaks which have arisen in the Danube delta area by the Black Sea.’ While specimens are apparently recorded from 1693, the most impressive invasions were in 1748 and the 1840s. The swarms in Europe of 1745–54 reached the British Isles in 1748 as a result of the prevailing east winds of that hot summer. See also J. M. Richie and D. E. Pedgley, ‘Desert Locusts Cross the Atlantic’, Antenna (Bulletin of the Royal Entomological Society of London), XIII/1 (January 1989), 10–12. He stated that, ‘On the fourth Day of August, 1748, vast Numbers of the Great Brownish spotted Locusts settled in all Parts of the City of London.’21George Edwards, A Natural History of Uncommon Birds . . . , vol. IV (London, 1751), pl. 208. The capital was overrun with transient insects just as it emptied itself of polite society: ‘This is the Time of the Long Vacation. Every one is retreated to their Country Abodes so that Wee have Little Stirring of any things thats Curious.’22Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 148. All the action was on the land, where the hot weather had an adverse impact on the short-blooming roses around the June peak of the shrubbery.

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Description: The Great Brown Locust by Edwards, George

156a. George Edwards, A Natural History of Uncommon Birds, vol. IV (London, 1751), pl. 208: ‘The Great Brown Locust’, hand-coloured engraving. From the collections of the Ernst Mayr Library, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University

These locusts (Locusta migratoria migratoria), which Edwards described as the ‘destroying’ kind, spread to most parts of England including London. They came on easterly winds — part of the prevailing high pressure that brought hot weather from central southern Europe. Collinson, writing on 25 August 1748 (‘I wish they Lay not their Eggs & become a future pest Here’) was premature in his anxiety. Once the locusts had moved on, harvests proved good. The bumper crop of 1748 came very close to that of 1747.

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156b. George Edwards, A Natural History of Uncommon Birds, vol. IV (London, 1751), pl. 208: ‘The Great Brown Locust’, hand-coloured engraving. From the collections of the Ernst Mayr Library, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University

Lady Luxborough, commenting on William Shenstone’s ferme ornée, reported dolorously of her ferme negligée: ‘the roses, &c., are all faded, and give an ugly aspect to my shrubbery; which waits your directions to be new modelled’.23Lady Luxborough, Letters, 38. By April the following year (1749), Shenstone had obliged in a manner that was more about receiving than giving: ‘I have sent your Ladyship a Book of Gardening, which I borrowed, about five Years ago, of a Neighbour. If it will be of any Service to you, in modelling the crooked Walks in your Shrubbery, I shall be glad; and you may return it at your Leisure, as I do.’24Williams, The Letters of William Shenstone, 188. Batty Langley was the author of this book. Whatever her ‘shrubbery’ at Barrells amounted to (before and after the remodelling of 1750), one thing was clear: it would never eclipse the coppice embroidery in springs to come.25The difficulties in reconstructing the physical layout of the ‘shrubbery’ at Barrells is apparent in Jane Brown’s book on Lady Luxborough, in which the plan of the garden and ferme ornée is ‘drawn chiefly from information in her Letters to William Shenstone’. See Brown, My Darling Heriott, 162. The flowering of many shrubs was short-lived rather than perpetual, and shrubberies, unlike groves, were especially vulnerable to dry spells. Above all, waiting for a shrubbery to flower in late spring, when the coppice was so ‘embroidered’, tested the patience of even the most ardent garden lovers.

The Seasons of Thomas Robins: Natives of Meadow and Grove, and the Lawn from Verdure to Savannah

Thomas Robins the Elder, painting outdoors in the summer of 1748, depended on fine weather. Over autumn and winter, he left off plein-air pursuits. Instead, teaching art in fashionable Bath circles, he painted still-life studies and modish fans in shop or studio.26See Cathryn Spence, ‘For True Friends: Jerry Peirce’s Patriot Whig Garden at Lilliput Castle’, Bath History, XII (2011), 6. His ‘bouquet’ — now in the Oak Spring collection — represents an off-season nosegay (pl. 158). It was of a piece with Lady Luxborough’s description, in a letter to Shenstone of 1753, of a cold April that held back the shrubbery:

At this season me thinks my Shrubbery ought to invite you; but to myself it is unknown; and all the intelligence I have from it is by a few snowdrops and polyanthuses, which are daily sent as ambassadors into my chamber, tied up in a nosegay, but in no ways inviting, though joined with the kind laurestinus, who is indeed a friend in distress, (as you called him) and is most welcome in winter.27Lady Luxborough, Letters, 331–2.

Robins’s undated nosegay is tied with a pink ribbon. There is an intimate and vernacular tone to the work that is the opposite of Ehret’s grandiloquent Magnolia grandiflora (see pl. 133); hence the work has been labelled a study of ‘wildflowers’. This is deceiving. An exotic Canary Island bellflower (Canarina canariensis) is part of the posy, so these flowers were not plucked from the wayside but assembled from a garden and greenhouse. Is Robins’s work constructed as a Dutch still-life painting, then? Or is it an accurate rendering of seasonality? And, if so, how is accuracy measured? Answers may come by understanding the garden as contingent on the particulars of a given season. Fortunately for the historian of the blooming garden, the late 1740s to the late 1760s offered many variations in spring and summer flowering.

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Description: Wildflowers, a Butterfly and a Fly, detail by Robins, Thomas, the Elder

158. Thomas Robins the Elder, Wildflowers, a Butterfly and a Fly (detail), circa 1760 and possibly painted in winter 1757–8, watercolour and bodycolour on paper, 11 ¾ × 8 ⅝ in. (29.8 × 22 cm). Collection of Rachel Lambert Mellon, Oak Spring Garden Library, Upperville, Virginia

This posy stands comparison with Jacobus van Huysum’s ‘January’ in his Twelve Months of Flowers of circa 1733–5 (see pl. 146). Robins depicts the cultivated flowers of wintertime: Christmas rose, snowdrops, winter aconites and hepaticas. Since one autumn Chrysanthemum coronarium is also depicted, Robins may have chanced upon a late-cum-early blooming that resulted from the mild winters of the mid-eighteenth century. By contrast, the Canary Island bellflower (right centre) must have come from a greenhouse. Artifice is thus dissimulated in this ‘wildflower’ posy with tortoiseshell butterfly (Aglais urticae).

Thomas Robins earned his summer living by topo-graphical commissions. In the cornucopia year of 1748, he completed the well-known prospects of Painswick (pl. 159) and Marybone Park in Gloucestershire (pl. 160).28For the background to Robins’s topographical work, see again Harris and Rix, Gardens of Delight. They provide an accurate record of the architecture and garden layouts that followed Benjamin Hyett’s marriage to Frances Snell in 1744. (Son of Charles Hyett MP, Benjamin had inherited Painswick House in 1738.) These topographical scenes are not divorced from their pictorial frames (nor from the still-life work in the off-seasons). The surrounds are indeed their milieu. The dense framing of flowers, fruits, birds and shells seems to recall a book of hours. The dark tone resembles scagliola, Florentine pietre dure or japanned work. While the shells are exotic, the flowers, fruits and birds are English. Hence they allude to the countryside. For example, the larkspur of the Marybone House frame, now rare, was once common in the cornfields that surrounded Gloucester. The chaffinch on the barley stem was a useful songster. Not so welcome was the bullfinch perched on a cherry near a greengage. It could nibble at least thirty fruit buds a minute. Farmers and gardeners killed them, or they were trapped as songbirds for townsfolk returning to London for the winter.

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Description: Prospect of Buenos Aires the seat of Benjamin Hyett Esq. near Panswyke (Painswick...

159. Thomas Robins the Elder, Prospect of Buenos Aires the seat of Benjamin Hyett Esq. near Panswyke [Painswick House], Gloucestershire, 1748, watercolour and bodycolour on vellum, 18 ¾ × 23 ¾ in. (47.6 × 60.3 cm). Private Collection. Photograph courtesy of Dan Brown

This topographical view is accurate in recording many architectural details. Its depiction of groves and meadows at haymaking is equally accurate. In the warm summer of that ‘Cornucopia’ year of 1748, when Robins signed and dated the painting, the artist saw a landscape turning the colours of gold and ochre just as the hay was cut and the wheat ripened. In Painswick’s large kitchen garden, fruit was equally blessed by that hot season.

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Description: Prospect of Marybone Park, Gloucestershire, from the South West by Robins, Thomas,...

160. Thomas Robins the Elder, Prospect of Marybone Park, Gloucestershire, from the South West, 1748, watercolour and bodycolour on vellum, 18 ½ × 23 ½ in. (46.9 × 59.6 cm). Private Collection. Photograph courtesy of Dan Brown

As a first recorded depiction of a pagoda in English gardens, this view has great architectural significance. Equally significant is the frame, for it depicts the fruits, flowers and birds of the surrounding countryside: the ripening greengages, gooseberries, cherries and currants; the larkspur, now rare but once common in cornfields around Gloucester; and a Convolvulus arvensis or field convolvulus binding a wheat stem. Like bullfinches, which were a pest, field convolvulus was the farmer’s scourge.

Thomas Robins’s view of Pan’s Lodge, looking towards Painswick, is dated 1758 (pl. 161). In contrast to the dark scagliola frames of the Painswick prospect painted ten years earlier, open treillage supports an exotic community. Before the lodge, Pan presents the view to guests, while troubadours serenade with lute and flute. It is a concert champêtre. The right side is dominated by a Jacobean lily (Sprekelia formosissima, also appearing in Dillenius’s portrait, see pl. 155). A danaid butterfly alights from above. Below are tropical or tender annuals — morning glories and a striped marvel of Peru. The gilded feathers of exotic pheasants ornament the lower right side, and jasmine and tender pelargonium embrace above. The Canary Island bellflower — the one in Robins’s pink-ribbon nosegay — dominates the left side.29See O’Neill and McLean, Peter Collinson, 47–9, for tracing Canarina canariensis back, through Peter Collinson, to Dyrham and the duchess of Beaufort at Badminton. They leave open a question about why Collinson referred to it as bright blue rather than burnt orange. It is adorned with a white-and-black butterfly. This is an African Precis. For all the topo-graphical and botanical exactitude, this is a splendid pastoral in the mode of Giorgione, Titian or Watteau. It is thus both accurate and Arcadian.

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Description: Prospect of Panswyke from Pan's Lodge, Gloucestershire by Robins, Thomas, the Elder

161. Thomas Robins the Elder, Prospect of Panswyke from Pan’s Lodge, Gloucestershire, 1758, watercolour and bodycolour on vellum, 19 × 23 ¾ in. (48.2 × 60.3 cm). Private Collection. Photograph courtesy of Dan Brown

Thomas Robins shows in this view, which is taken from Pan’s Lodge, the hilly countryside opposite Painswick House. Signed and dated 1758, it represents, a decade later than his early views (see pls 159 and 160), a new melding of frame and topographical scene. Exotics rather than natives predominate: Sprekelia formosissima (which appears in Dillenius’s portrait, see pl. 155) and the Canary Island bellflower (Canarina canariensis) of Robins’s pink-ribbon bouquet (see pl. 158).

Some Precis have the odd characteristic that their coloration depends on the season of hatching: a lighter form is associated with the dry season; the rainy season produces a darker variant. They are seasonally dimorphic. The exotic butterfly is thus emblematic of the 1740s to 1760s, the three decades in England that witnessed remarkable variation from summer drought to summer deluge. The year 1748, within a run of hot and dry summers, produced a good harvest and vintage; 1758, within a set of ten warm, wet summers, turned up a good crop despite a soggy autumn. The two paintings of 1748 and the one of 1758 thereby convey seasonal prodigality within the Georgic and Pastoral of field and grove.

Robins’s other views of the 1750s (Davenport House and Honington Hall, see pls 203–5) show that groves of the Painswick type grew alongside shrubberies. His views of Richard Bateman’s flower gardens complete the full span. Variously, then, within the pleasure ground, there coexisted differentiated plantings. All were at the mercy of the seasons, which simultaneously affected the farm landscape that was their ambience.

Lawn culture, contingent on the seasons, was equally differentiated. It is easy to think of Robins’s lawns as a relief to shrubbery or grove. Lawns seem no more than a blank page — the paper that surrounds a flower portrait. In practice, the verdure of grove and field was, as much as shrubbery itself, the vellum on which the spring showers and summer droughts of mid-century painted a distinctive seasonal portrait. Mild winters and springs in 1748 and 1750 brought lush green grass and spectacular embroidered meadows. A very late spring in 1753 caused spring-coppice embroidery to coincide with early summer shrubbery. The rainy hot summer of 1756 favoured American plants. The gentle autumn of 1757 kept goldenrods, Michaelmas daisy and Chrysanthemum coronarium going until Christmas Day. Above all, the arid Continental winds of 1762 and 1765 turned parkland lawns into parched ground (just as the hot wind of August 1748 had brought locusts to London). Hence, like the colour variations of the seasonally dimorphic African Precis, the wet summer of 1763 was emerald, while the dry summers of 1762 and 1765 were in the hues of ochre and rust — almost a ‘savannah in Africa’.

Verdure, Embroidery and Garnishing the Grove

The art of verdure amounts, in short, to winter, spring and summer embroidery, long celebrated in poetry and art (pls 162a and b and 163).30For a discussion of the ‘enamelled mead’ of the Middle Ages and beyond, see Jan Woudstra, ‘The Enamelled Mead: History and Practice of Exotic Perennials Grown in Grassy Swards’, Landscape Research, XXV/1 (2000), 29–47. Traditionally, a lawn was composed of various grasses mixed with other low-growing plants, some of which had colourful flowers.31For an analysis of the floristic composition of an eighteenth-century lawn, see Oliver Gilbert, ‘The Ancient Lawns at Chatsworth’, in Naturschutz und Denkmalpflege: Wege zu einem Dialog im Garten, ed. Ingo Kowarik, Erika Schmidt and Brigitt Sigel (Zurich: VDF Hochschulverlag AG an der ETH, 1998), 217–20. In addition, it might be consciously planted with flowers to produce the ‘embroidered’ effect that was often likened to ‘enamel’. Thus, for example, the countess of Hertford wrote to Lady Luxborough on 15 May 1748 from her estate of Percy Lodge, describing the scene as modulations in the rivalry of nature and art:

. . . before it [the Shepherd’s Hut] there is an irregular Piece of Turf, which was spared for the Sake of some old Oaks and Beeches, which are scattered upon it; and as you are sitting down there, you have, under these Boughs, a direct View of Windsor Castle. There are Sweet-Williams, Narcissus’s, Rose-Campions, and such Flowers as the Hares will not eat, in little Borders, round the Foot of every Tree; and I almost flatter myself, that you would not be displeased with the rural Appearance of the whole. The Rains have given us the strongest Verdure I ever saw, our Lawns and Meadows are enamelled with a Profusion of Daisies and Cowslips, and we have the greatest Appearance of Fruit that has been seen these many years.32See again Hull, Select Letters, 1, 68.

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Description: Book of Hours (the Warburg Hours), detail of border by Unknown

162a. Detail of border from a Book of Hours (the Warburg Hours), circa 1500, illumination on vellum. Library of Congress, Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Washington, DC

The three-leafed daisy and violet, and the wild strawberry with its triad leaf, are symbols attached to the image of Christ in Majesty in this illusionistic border decoration. They also represent the natural and artful ‘embroidery’ of lawn as it survived into the eighteenth century from its origins in the ‘flowery mead’ of the Middle Ages. Thomas Robins the Elder drew upon this painterly lineage for the frames of his topographical art.

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162b. Detail of border from a Book of Hours (the Warburg Hours), circa 1500, illumination on vellum. Library of Congress, Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Washington, DC

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Description: Vase of Wild Flowers on a Ledge, detail by Ring, Ludger tom, the younger

163. Detail from Ludger tom Ring the Younger, Vase of Wild Flowers on a Ledge, circa 1565, oil on panel, 24 ⅛ × 16 ⅛ in. (61.3 × 41 cm). Collection of Teresa Heinz

The range of native plants described and depicted by botanists of the sixteenth century — notably Leonhart Fuchs and Rembert Dodoens — expanded the repertoire of herbs and flowers represented in floral still life, including flowers of a wheatfield. Corn poppy and corn cockle, among wild flowers, still ‘enamelled’ English arable land when Thomas Robins the Elder drew landscapes mid-century and when William Curtis described them at century’s end in Flora Londinensis.

While the daisies and cowslips in sward came largely from nature’s hand, the ‘Sweet-Williams’, daffodils and rose campions were actively cultivated. Other choices were dictated by hares, since there was no point in planting flowers they would eat. The appearance of a lawn in a grove thus depended on a strategy for dealing with animals, as well as on the whims of the season.

The year 1748 — when Lady Luxborough fell into discussion with William Shenstone on shrubbery improvements at Barrells — was perfect in coppice as well as verdure. The following year was much the same. In a letter dated 4 June 1749, she commented: ‘You seem destined never to see the embroidery Nature bestows upon my Coppice in Spring; where we had even this year great variety of cowslips, primroses, ragged-robins, wild hyacinths [bluebells] both white and blue, violets, &c. &c.’33Lady Luxborough, Letters, 98. Even in a mild spring following a winter of extreme mildness, she wrote on 25 April 1750: ‘there is not . . . variety enough in the Shrubbery to invite you as yet; but there will be ere Long. The Coppice has the advantage at present; for Nature has embroidered it thick with all kinds of wild flowers.’34Ibid., 200.

Unlike the drought of a dry summer, a dry winter brought an embroidered sward equivalent to a wet spring. Peter Collinson’s letter of 10 March 1750 elaborates on the notion of dry-winter verdure as opposed to the wet-spring verdure of 1748. The letter is addressed to Arthur Dobbs, later governor of North Carolina.35O’Neill and McLean, Peter Collinson, 87–8. It begins with talk of a dozen boxes ordered from John Bartram for English clients (including Charles Hamilton of Painshill, who later planted shrubberies): ‘so you may see how the Laudable Spirit of planting prevails’. A few paragraphs on, Collinson turns from American exotics (the beginnings of the mania for shrubbery) to the habitual topic of the weather:

Wee have had as Well as you No Winter Except a few frosty Mornings at Xmas. All has been Mild & Warm Since to Surprising Degree & Wee have had the least Rain fell Since June Last that Ever was remembered & No Snow. The Barges could not come down the Rivers, Wells was Empty, & our ponds wants filling, but our fields have had all this Winter the most Deleghtfull Verdure as in May & the Grass in our Rich Grounds is higher then I have known Some years in April & May. The Corn of all kinds is very prosperous. Wether God Intends this for a Blessing or a Scourge time well Shew, for if Late Frosts & Blasts Should Ensue all our Hopes will Vanish. We had a Specimen the Last Day of Feby, So Smart a Frost happen that it is Said there was not So thick Ice any Time this Winter. A Second Night would have demolishd, but delightfull Weather has been ever Since.36Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 152.

He had no need to worry. On 25 April 1750 — the same day that Lady Luxborough praised the thick embroidery of wildflowers — Collinson still reported the mildest spring: ‘Our Apricots and Peaches are sett Like ropes of Onions, and the Face of plenty smiles Every Where.’37Ibid., 154. Indeed, 1750 produced another bumper wheat crop — the peak of wheat exports over several seasons.38Wheat exports hit a dramatic peak in 1750. This spike was rivalled in the course of the eighteenth century only by the peak of good harvests in the 1730s, and by the solid yields in the first half of the 1760s. In short, the look of the garden was linked to yields in husbandry. Infestations and rot, late frosts, dry spells and inundation were among the scourges that could afflict gardener and farmer alike. Yet, whether nature was prodigal or niggardly was often a case of divergent interests.39Chapters 1 and 2 of Jones’s Seasons and Prices — ‘The Seasons and Economic Affairs’ and ‘The Seasons and Rural Life’ — provide a good summary of divergent interests among farmers, and of the complexity of weather-induced variations in different branches of farming, for example, in the production of honey. He wrote: ‘What was favourable weather for one might not be favourable for another, a complexity which introduced endless permutations of shades of difference into the state of the economy’ (p. 22). The divergent experience of farmers on heavy and light land is discussed in chapter 9, ‘The Improvement of Agriculture’, 113–14. And, just as a topographical artist cursed poor weather, the populace as a whole feared the spectre of bread shortages.40Ibid., 141 and 147. Usually grain shortages resulted from poor summers, as in 1752 and 1756. There were food riots in 1753, for example, and again in 1756, when the government prevented grain exports. In 1780 and 1781, however, intense heat brought mildewed wheat and a light crop. See p. 48, where Jones argues that each historical instance must be considered in context and on a case-by-case basis — an approach that applies equally well to gardening; see also p. 54, where he wrote: ‘During three or four black seasons of the eighteenth century a tiny margin of the English poor was starved to death.’ When smiling weather prevailed in June, July and August, everyone was happy: for the aesthete, the wheatfields were spangled with flowers; for the farmer and town dweller alike, the prospect of plentiful grain meant a famine held at bay.

These embroidered groves and meadows of poetry and prose had a long pedigree stretching back to John Evelyn and the duchess of Beaufort, and even beyond. It is thus the art of earlier centuries that represents ‘enamelling’ at its best (see again pl. 163). Along with the medieval ‘flowery mede’,41See Jan Woudstra and James Hitchmough, ‘The Enamelled Mead: History and Practice of Exotic Perennials Grown in Grassy Swards’, Landscape Research, XXV/1 (2000), 29–47. the embroidered grove drew upon classical and sacred texts. John Evelyn pointed out in ‘An Historical Account of the Sacredness and Use of standing Groves’ that the grove was the natural home of Adam and Solomon. It was a place of contemplation and learning:

The Sum of all is, Paradise it self was but a kind of Nemorous Temple, or Sacred Grove, Planted by God himself . . . Solomon was a great Planter of them, and had an House of Pleasure or Lodge in one of them for Recess . . .

. . . our Blessed Saviour did frequently retire into the Wilderness, as Elijah and St. John Baptist did before him, and divers other Holy Men

. . . and we read that Plato entertained his Auditors amongst his Walks of Trees . . .42Evelyn, Silva (1706), 329–36. The fourth book is entitled ‘Dendrologia’ and contains the section ‘An Historical Account of the Sacredness and Use of standing Groves, &’.

Evelyn recounted that there was a special association of trees with the founding of St John’s College, Oxford, in the name of John the Baptist:

Such another Foundation was caus’d by a tripple Elm, having three Trunks issuing from one Root: Near such a Tree as this was Sir Thomas White, Lord Mayor of London, warn’d by Dream to erect a College for the Education of Youth, which he did; namely, St. John’s in Oxford, which with the very Tree, still flourishes in that famous University.43Ibid., 330.

In ‘Elysium Britannicum’, Evelyn included the helle-bore, winter aconite, crocus, daisy and hepatica among the ‘evergreen’ plants that helped make up the grove’s ‘Verdures, Perennial-greenes, and perpetuall Springs’.44For a discussion of Evelyn and evergreens, see Mark Laird, ‘Parterre, Grove and Flower Garden: European Horticulture and Planting Design in John Evelyn’s Time’, 195–200, and John H. Harvey, ‘The Plants in John Evelyn’s “Elysium Britannicum” ’, 223, in John Evelyn’s ‘Elysium Britannicum’ and European Gardening, ed. Therese O’Malley and Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1998). The writer Cassandra Willoughby (1670–1735, daughter of Francis Willoughby FRS and the duchess of Chandos at Canons) recorded in the duchess of Beaufort’s Badminton wilderness: ‘Ye earth is covered with a variety of plants and primroses, periwinkle, etc.’ And at Wrest Park she noted: ‘to run up ye bodys of ye Trees are planted Honeysuckles and Sweet Brire’.45Quoted from David Jacques and Arend Jan van der Horst, The Gardens of William and Mary (London: Christopher Helm, 1988), 160–61. This dressing up a tree would survive the shift from Baroque to Picturesque and acquired the label ‘garnishing’. Batty Langley — a ‘poor illiterate Fellow’ in Shenstone’s terms, but still useful as a model for Lady Luxborough in 1749 — described Item 9 of his ‘General Directions’ as follows: ‘That all the Trees of your shady Walks and Groves be planted with Sweet-Brier, White Jessamine, and Honey-Suckles, environ’d at Bottom with a small Circle of Dwarf-Stock, Candy-Turf and Pinks’.46Batty Langley, New Principles of Gardening (London, 1728), 196.

This effect is evident in an anonymous painting of Richard Bateman’s garden at Grove House, Old Windsor, which appears to date from the 1730s (pl. 164). Arthur Devis painted honeysuckle entwining itself round a tree stem in a portrait of 1761 (see pl. 202). Mrs Delany wrote of trees ‘embroidered with woodbine and the “flaunting eglantine” ’.47Cited in Ruth Hayden, Mrs Delany and her Flower Collages, 2nd edn (London: British Museum Press, 1992), 64. Mary Delany to Anne Dewes, 11 June 1745, in Lady Llanover, ed., The Autobiography and Correspondence of Mary Granville, Mrs Delany, 6 vols (London: Bentley, 1861–2), II, 361. And Paul Sandby’s views of Strawberry Hill show the effect sustained through the 1760s (pl. 165). Hence in 1765 Horace Walpole could speak of honeysuckles dangling from every tree in ‘festoons’.48For Grove House and Strawberry Hill, see Laird, The Flowering of the Landscape Garden, 185 and pl. 107, and 164 and figs 94 and 95, respectively. This was the art of ‘garnishing’, a term publicized by William Chambers. In his manuscript in the Royal Academy library, Chambers highlighted everlasting pea, nasturtium and sweet briar as all ‘fit for Garnishing Stems of Trees’.49For a discussion of this manuscript, ibid., 285–90, and in particular 289.

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Description: Temple Flower Garden of Richard Bateman's Grove House, Old Windsor, Berkshire

164. Anonymous, ‘Temple Flower Garden’ of Richard Bateman’s Grove House, Old Windsor, Berkshire, 1730s, mixed media on paper. Private Collection

This view conforms to what Batty Langley wrote in New Principles of Gardening in 1728 about planting a grove. Langley mentioned grove and allée trees embellished with honeysuckles and wild roses, and encompassed by a small circular planting of pinks and candytuft. In 1748 Lady Hertford described her grove trees as encircled with the cultivated rose campion and ‘Sweet-Williams’. The use of honeysuckles to ‘garnish’ tree stems was widespread in mid-eighteenth-century gardening.

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Description: South Front of Strawberry Hill, detail by Sandby, Paul

165. Paul Sandby, detail from South Front of Strawberry Hill, circa 1769, watercolour on laid paper with wash-line mount, 15 ⅜ × 30 in. (39 × 76.1 cm). Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University

Paul Sandby’s two views of Strawberry Hill, one from the south and one from the east, suggest continuities between Baroque and Picturesque groves (compare pls 112 and 148). In 1765 Horace Walpole wrote of honeysuckles dangling from every tree in ‘festoons’. From Batty Langley to William Chambers, similar advice was given. Just as the native honeysuckle was trained up tree trunks in Langley’s account, so in Chambers’s jottings, everlasting pea, nasturtium and sweet briar were also ‘fit for Garnishing Stems of Trees’.

As described by Chambers, garnishing and embroidering were thus, in their respective ways, every bit as important to English pleasure grounds as the ‘theatrical’ shrubbery (see again pl. 148). In his Dissertation on Oriental Gardening of 1772, he made shrubs incidental to grove; and, while his gardening was ‘Chinese’, the flowers were mostly local kinds or acclimatized English cultivars:

Some of these groves are composed of evergreens, chiefly of pyramidal forms, thinly planted over the surface, with flowering shrubs scattered amongst them: others are composed of lofty spreading trees, whose foliage affords a shady retreat during the heat of the day. The plants are never crowded together; sufficient room being left between them for sitting or walking upon the grass; which, by reason of its shady situation, retains a constant verdure; and, in the spring, is adorned with a great variety of early flowers, such as violets, crocus’s, polianthus’s and primroses; hyacinths, cowslips, snow-drops, daffodils and daisies. Some trees of the grove are suffered to branch out from the very bottom of the stem upwards; others, for the sake of variety, have their stems bare: but far the greater number are surrounded with rose-trees, sweet-briar, honeysuckles, scarlet beans, nasturtiums, everlasting and sweet-scented peas, double-blossomed briar, and other odoriferous shrubs, which beautify the barren parts of the plant, and perfume the air.50William Chambers, A Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (London, 1772), 86.

In essence, the shady grove had the advantage over ‘theatrical’ shrubbery of remaining green through the heat of the summer. Perfumes were sustained until autumn. Given all circumstantial evidence, then, and assuming Shenstone’s sway over Hestercombe, Coplestone Warre Bampfylde’s ‘Cascade Lawn’ (cf. pl. 201) was the paragon that perpetuated spring embroidery into summer garnishing: a peony (in Shenstone’s terms) amid the wild-strawberry-enamelled grass; and honeysuckles in festoons on trees (as Walpole or Chambers advised) under the cooling foliage of the grove.

Mrs Delany’s accounts of her garden at Delville in Ireland are mirrored in her drawings (pl. 166). Both embroider on the notion of an ‘enamelled’ grove. Here was the grove in opposition to the Brownian shrubbery (the shrubbery she would encounter in the ‘modernized’ Longleat of 1760).51‘There is not much alteration in the house, but the gardens are no more! they are succeeded by a fine lawn, a serpentine river, wooded hills, gravel paths meandering round a shrubbery all modernized by the ingenious Mr. Brown!’, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, III, 611. In March 1746 she viewed her garden as a sensory ensemble and a natural concert champêtre:

Our garden is now a wilderness of sweets. The violets, sweet briar, and primroses perfume the air, and the thrushes are full of melody and make our concert complete. It is the pleasantest music I have heard this year, and refreshes my spirits without the alloy of a tumultuous crowd, which attends all the other concerts. Two robins and one chaffinch fed off D.D.’s hand as we walked together this morning. I have been planting sweets in my ‘Pearly Bower’ — honeysuckles, sweet briar, roses and jessamine to climb up the trees that compose it, and for the carpet, violets, primroses, and cow[s]lips.52Ibid., II, 432.

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Description: The Beggar's Hut in the Gardens of Delville, Dublin by Delany, Mary Granville

166. Mary Delany, A View of ye Beggars hut in Delville garden, 1745, pen and grey ink and wash over graphite on paper, 10 ⅜ × 14 ½ in. (26.3 × 36.7 cm). © National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin

On 29 March 1746 Mary Delany wrote to her sister about her garden at Delville on the outskirts of Dublin. She referred to the tree trunks of her ‘Pearly Bower’ being planted with honeysuckle, sweet briar, roses and jasmine. Her lawn, which she called a ‘carpet’, was patterned with violets, primroses, and cowslips. A ‘carpet’, defined as close-cut lawn by John Evelyn in ‘Elysium Britannicum’, was still the term used for the naturally and artfully embroidered lawns of the grove in mid-eighteenth-century gardening.

Sarah, wife of Matthew Fetherstonhaugh of Uppark, Sussex, painted a watercolour of flowers and animals around 1750–60 (pl. 167). As a capriccio, it captures something of the imaginative power of the enamelled grove, and especially for women, who spent more time in the garden than men.53See Mark Laird, ‘Mrs Delany’s Circles of Cutting and Embroidering in Home and Garden’, in Mrs Delany and her Circle, ed. Mark Laird and Alicia Weisberg-Roberts (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009).

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Description: Carolina Brown Squirrel with Birds, Butterflies and Flowers by Fetherstonhaugh,...

167. Sarah Fetherstonhaugh, Plants and Animals in a Landscape, circa 1750–60, watercolour on parchment. National Trust, Uppark, Sussex

This capriccio combines elements at once native and exotic: the English red admiral (Vanessa atalanta, to the left of a hazel with catkin and nut) is depicted amid cultivated garden flowers (auricula, heartsease and Convolvulus tricolor). The butterfly is thus removed from its larval host plant, the nettle (see pl. 109). A chipmunk faces a squirrel with a nut. This is not the native red squirrel of Robins (see pl. 153), and some creatures are copied from George Edwards’s A Natural History of Uncommon Birds (1743–51), while butterflies and plants are copied from Benjamin Wilkes’s English Moths and Butterflies (1749).

The Seasons of Georg Dionysius Ehret: Plantae et Papiliones Rariores and the Patronage of Ladies

Sarah Fetherstonhaugh was cleverly creating an artifice by translating scientific and decorative works into the genre of female accomplishment. She copied from George Edwards’s A Natural History of Uncommon Birds (1743–51) and Benjamin Wilkes’s English Moths and Butterflies (1749). How Ehret came to play a role in influencing the accomplishments of women involves two things: first, a public engagement with an exotic book, Plantae et papiliones rariores (1748), and second, a private pursuit as drawing tutor to the aristocracy. His best pupils — young genteel women like Mary Forbes (née Capel) and Ann Hamilton (née Heathcote) — would find a way, different from that of Sarah Fetherstonhaugh, to go beyond subscribing to books on flowers and butterflies or copying from them indis-criminately. They expressed themselves through copying particular images by Ehret.

In 1748 Ehret was hoping that exotic butterflies and exotic plants would be a recipe for financial success. His Plantae et papiliones rariories was aimed at the taste of the ‘general world’ just as the shrubbery was becoming a ‘general fashion’. He was ‘Proprietor’ of the whole, thus owning the product and profits (pl. 168).54See, for example, Tabella V, which states: ‘Published by G. D. Ehret, the Proprietor, July 7, 1748’. His sketchbooks of ‘1746–8’ contain some of the first ideas for the Plantae et papiliones rariores. His meteoric rise to a fashionable figure around London follows the period circa 1737 when he was engaged with Magnolia grandiflora in his daily treks from Chelsea to Parsons Green (see pls 132 and 133).

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Description: Plantae et papiliones rariores, Tab. VII by Ehret, Georg Dionysius

168. Georg Dionysius Ehret, Plantae et papiliones rariores (London, 1748–59), Tab. VII, hand-coloured engraving. © Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Rare Book Collection, Washington, DC

The ‘Abutilon folio’, which was drawn dissected in the trompe-l’oeil Tabella VIII (see pl. 152), appears in its full glory here, entwined with a morning glory (Ipomoea sp.). The ‘Abutilon’ is the glade mallow (Napaea dioica), found still, but in decreasing populations, in the northern states of the US Midwest. Ehret signed himself as the engraver and ‘Proprietor’ of the work, thus protecting the proceeds of all sales.

Today, the small sketchbooks, along with large sketch folios, are in the Botany Library of the Natural History Museum in London. Much of the work was done at Chelsea Physic Garden, where Ehret had links to Philip Miller. The sketchbooks are labelled ‘1746’, ‘1747’ and ‘1748’, respectively, but individual sketches are dated otherwise, frequently in years after these start dates. Thus, in the ‘1746’ sketchbook he jotted down on folio 12 (depicting the black and the white spruce of ‘Newfoundland’, Picea mariana and P. glauca) a few facts pointing to 1747: that the duke of Richmond’s black spruce at Goodwood bore cones; and that the sprig of white spruce with male flowers was sent to him by Peter Collinson from the duke of Argyle’s garden at Whitton in April 1747 (see pl. 144). By contrast, on folio 21 there is an expressive ‘Oswego tea’ (Monarda didyma) drawn in Peter Collinson’s garden in July 1746 (pl. 169).

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Description: Leonurus Canadensis..., detail by Ehret, Georg Dionysius

169. Georg Dionysius Ehret, detail of ‘Leonurus Canadensis . . .’, detail of fol. 21 of album ‘Drawings (G. D. Ehret) 1746’, watercolour over graphite and ink on paper, 6 × 8 ½ in. (16 × 21.5 cm). © The Natural History Museum, London

Monarda didyma, which Ehret drew in flower in Peter Collinson’s garden in July 1746, was introduced to English gardens by John Bartram in 1744. Known from the collecting location as ‘Oswego tea’, this handsome red-crested perennial was portrayed by Ehret as a finished study, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. By the 1760s it grew in English flower gardens such as that of the duchess of Portland at Bulstrode.

The ‘1747’ sketchbook presents a dazzling sequence: for example, on folio 4, an exquisite pencil drawing of Egyptian mignonette (Reseda odorata, noted in German as smelling like raspberry); on folio 10, a delicately detailed ‘Ludwigia’ (Ludwigia alternifolia, pl. 170); on folio 17, a lovely ‘Aster Carolinianus’ (Inula conyza) with touches of yellow and green watercolour on graphite (pl. 171); and on folio 21, a fine study of ‘Pisum Magellanicum’ (Lord Anson’s pea, Lathyrus nervosus), which flowered in June 1748. In the slightly larger ‘1748’ sketchbook, some of the flowers go right to the margins of the folio. From the ‘Lobelia (cardinalis)’ (Lobelia cardinalis) of North America on folio 24 to the ‘Arctotis’ (Arctotis aureola) of the Cape of Good Hope on folio 34 (which was flourishing at Chelsea Physic Garden in May 1750), the geographical range is contained in theatrical compendium — but only just (pls 172 and 173). Ehret’s sketches, bursting with his evident relish, convey the potential of the exotic shrubbery and exotic flower garden around 1750.

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Description: Ludwigia...Linn Hort. Cliff, detail by Ehret, Georg Dionysius

170. Georg Dionysius Ehret, detail of ‘Ludwigia . . . Linn Hort. Cliff.’, detail of fol. 10 of album ‘Drawings (G. D. Ehret) 1747’, watercolour over graphite on paper, 6 × 8 ½ in. (16 × 21.5 cm). © The Natural History Museum, London

This appears to be Ludwigia alternifolia. Known as ‘Seedbox’, it grows in swamps and wet soil in New England south to Florida. The ‘Seedboxes’ bear a distinctive, boxlike, fruit — square on top and filled with many seeds, just as Ehret showed. Unlike Monarda didyma, now called scarlet beebalm or bergamot as well as Oswego tea, Ludwigia species never became commonly sold among English nurserymen.

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Description: Aster Carolinianus..., detail by Ehret, Georg Dionysius

171. Georg Dionysius Ehret, detail from ‘Aster Carolinianus . . .’, fol. 17 in album ‘Drawings (G. D. Ehret) 1747’, watercolour over graphite on paper, 6 × 8 ½ in. (16 × 21.5 cm). © The Natural History Museum, London

Ehret’s sketch conveys the mastery of the great artist as scientist, for the ‘petalum’ is carefully dissected and described (top right). ’Aster Carolinianus pilosus Conyzae’ (J. Mynde’s hand-coloured engraving after Ehret’s drawing) was published as plate LVII in Philip Miller’s Figures of the Most Beautiful, Useful, and Uncommon Plants described in the Gardener’s Dictionary (London, 1760). Now known as Inula conyza, it was introduced from Maryland but it never became a common plant in English gardens.

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Description: Lobelia (Cardinalis)..., detail by Ehret, Georg Dionysius

172. Georg Dionysius Ehret, detail from ‘Lobelia (Cardinalis) . . .’, fol. 24 of album ‘Drawings (G. D. Ehret) 1748’, watercolour over graphite on paper, 7 ½ × 12 ¼ in. (19 × 31 cm). © The Natural History Museum, London

Lobelia cardinalis, introduced to English gardens from North America by 1629, was well stocked in the nursery trade by 1723. Twenty years before, Henry Wise had already listed it as one of the flowers still in bloom in early autumn. Despite its depiction in two collages by Mary Delany (in 1773 and 1780), it does not appear to have become a commonplace flower of mid-eighteenth-century English flower borders.

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Description: Arctotis..., detail by Ehret, Georg Dionysius

173. Georg Dionysius Ehret, ‘Arctotis . . .’, fol. 34 of album ‘Drawings (G. D. Ehret) 1748’, watercolour over graphite with writing in ink on paper, 7 ½ × 12 ¼ in. (19 × 31 cm). © The Natural History Museum, London

Arctotis aureola was introduced from the Cape of Good Hope by 1710. This specimen was flourishing at Chelsea Physic Garden in May 1750, as Ehret noted in his sketchbook. Since it is a tender plant, it would have been cultivated in a greenhouse.

It might be assumed that the appearance of the Plantae et papiliones rariores helped foster, especially among women, this new taste for shrubbery display, just as Robert Furber’s Twelve Months of Flowers (1730) had set a vogue for flowers a generation earlier. Yet Ehret’s engravings for Plantae et papiliones rariores came out as only fifteen plates, and sporadically from 1748 to 1759.55Tabellas I–IV, 1748; V–VI, July 1748; VII, 1 December 1748; VIII, 1748; IX–X, 12 June 1749; XI–XII, November 1749; XIII, 1755; XIV, 1757; XV, 1759. (Three smaller plates were actually published in 1762, but are often considered separate.) Just as the engravings flow directly out of his personal sketches, so they appear to have remained in private distribution, perhaps mostly on display as framed prints.56See Blanche Henrey’s entry on Plantae et papiliones rariores in British Botanical and Horticultural Literature before 1800, 3 vols (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), III, 38. Only three copies are listed in British and Irish libraries, and all are in London: one in the British Library, another in the Botany Library of the Natural History Museum, and the third in the Royal Horticultural Society. For example, in the ‘1748’ sketchbook, folio 12 shows ‘Martynia perennis’ (Gloxinia perennis), which may be compared to the engraved version in Tabella IX of Plantae et papiliones rariores (cf. pls 174 and 175).57See Calmann, Ehret, pls 76 and 79 for sketch and finished Tabella of Martynia annua. See also Richard H. Hevly, ‘Nomenclatural History and Typification of Martynia and Proboscidea (Martyniaceae)’, Taxon, XVIII/5 (October 1969), 527–34. The Ceratocephalus is easily mistaken for the North American Coreopsis verticillata, first mentioned in Philip Miller’s Gardeners Dictionary in 1759. Miller’s Dictionary, widely distributed but not lavishly illustrated, did more, by words, to promote exotics among gardeners than Ehret’s work. With its Latin title, the Plantae et papiliones rariores never achieved distribution at large.

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Description: Martynia perennis Lin. by Ehret, Georg Dionysius

174. Georg Dionysius Ehret, ‘Martynia perennis Lin.’, fol. 12 of album ‘Drawings (G. D. Ehret) 1748’, watercolour over graphite with writing in ink on paper, 7 ½ × 12 ¼ in. (19 × 31 cm). © The Natural History Museum, London

In 1754 Linnaeus described the perennial and annual ‘Martynia’. Both appear in Ehret’s Plantae et papiliones rariores. The genus Martynia was founded on the annual species discovered near Vera Cruz, Mexico, by a Scottish naval surgeon, William Houstoun. Houstoun named this species ‘Martynia’ after John Martyn, who was the first to describe and illustrate it as plate 42 of his Historia plantarum rariorum (1728–37).

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Description: Plantae et papiliones rariores, Tab. IX by Ehret, Georg Dionysius

175. Georg Dionysius Ehret, Plantae et papiliones rariores (London, 1748–), Tab. IX, 12 June 1749, hand-coloured engraving. © Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Rare Book Collection, Washington, DC

Martynia perennis, now Gloxinia perennis, was named by Linnaeus in 1753. Linnaeus made Martynia foliis serratis the basis of M. perennis. M. perennis was subsequently made the basis of the genus Gloxinia by L’Héritier in 1784, leaving in the genus Martynia that taxon on which the genus was initially described. Ehret’s sketches and engravings thus bring to life the intricacies of Linnaean taxonomy. The genera Ceratocephalus and Nerine (Narcissus) are also represented.

It is also easy to assume from Ehret’s greatest paintings of exotics that wild flowers did not feature in his output. Yet his Deliciae botanicae of 1732, painted in Regensburg just ahead of meeting his future patron Christoph Jakob Trew, contains many indigenous European species (pl. 176). These were used in pharmaceutical practice as well as in decorative gardening. Ehret retained this dedication to such useful plants, especially through the duchess of Portland’s ‘English herbal’ (see pl. 183). Though he would disengage himself from medico-botanical studies, he remained grounded in broad scientific pursuits — the preoccupations of C. J. Trew, Peter Collinson and Benjamin Franklin — and this would lead him to the duchess of Portland at Bulstrode. Peter Collinson was at the centre of exchanges of ideas and objects, and his letters reveal how Ehret made the shift from a precarious commercial venture (Plantae et papiliones rariores) to the highly lucrative sphere of female accomplishment.

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Description: Deliciae botanicae, frogbit (Hydrocharis morsus-ranae) by Ehret, Georg Dionysius

176. Georg Dionysius Ehret, Deliciae botanicae, frogbit (Hydrocharis morsus-ranae), watercolour on paper, 13 ½ × 8 ¼ in. (34.5 × 21.1 cm). © National Museums Liverpool

Ehret’s Deliciae botanicae of 1732 is made up of hundreds of portraits of plants that grew in the neighbourhood of Regensburg, Germany. These drawings were seen by Dr Christoph Jakob Trew (1695–1769), a wealthy Nuremberg physician who recognized Ehret’s talents and became a lifelong patron. Ehret’s interest in native plants was furthered through the duchess of Portland’s commission of an ‘English herbal’. She became Ehret’s leading patron in Britain.

Writing at the time of Ehret’s publishing venture, it appeared to Collinson that the blessings of those cornucopia years — the harvests coming from hot summers — promoted a natural seismic jolt and a heavenly display equal to the fireworks of the pleasure garden of Ranelagh. In his letter to Arthur Dobbs, recounting the delightful verdure of winter 1750, Collinson continued:

No Doubt but you heard of our Earth quake. The Shock was Very Violent. Multitudes ran out of their Houses thinking them falling. It was preceded with Distant rumbling Noise. Some Slight Damages happen’d to Old Houses & Chimnies. Before & Since has been auroras, one to the South & Two to the North.58Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 152.

Electricity had been in the air since 1745, when Collinson sent to the Library Company of Philadelphia an account of new German experiments (pl. 177a).59See O’Neill and McLean, Peter Collinson, 29. On 12 April 1748 Collinson wrote to Benjamin Franklin: ‘Great Numbers of Ingenious Men are very Earnestly Engaged in Electrical Experiment in applying them to various purposes’ (see pl. 290).60Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 146. Collinson returned to the topic in a letter to Franklin of 5 February 1750, mentioning that the earthquake was not perceptible at Mill Hill: ‘Your very Curious pieces relateing to Electricity and Thunder-gusts have been read before the [Royal] Society.’61Ibid., 149. In his letter to Franklin of 25 April 1750, he rehearsed some theories yoking the quake to drought as much as electricity. Lack of ground water, and a build-up of air in ‘the Caverns’, had perhaps ‘putt the Beds of pyri[tes] in Ferment’.62Ibid., 154. Whether it was locusts invading London in 1748, or earthquakes shaking London in 1750, it seemed reasonable to speculate on causes and consequences. In that cornucopia era, warm summers seemed the catalyst for almost everything.

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177a. Glass rod for Benjamin Franklin’s electrical experiments, length 18 in. (45 cm), circumference 3 ½ in. (8.89 cm). The Library Company of Philadelphia

On 20 May 1746 Peter Collinson wrote to Joseph Breitnall (a Quaker merchant and secretary of the Library Company of Philadelphia, 1731–46): ‘As the Account of Electrical Experiments was not published when I sent the other Books & Pamphlets, I have sent one . . . which will give you some Hints in that Phenomena & how to proceed in Experiments, if the Glass Tube in the Trunk of Books come safe to your Hands’. One used by Franklin is safely preserved at the Library Company today. Lightning rods came to protect fashionable London homes from lightning strikes around 1760.

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Description: A View of Grosvenor Square, London by Bowles, Thomas

177b. Thomas Bowles, A View of Grosvenor Square, London, 1751, engraving and etching, 9 ⅞ × 15 ¾ in. (25.6 × 40 cm), British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings (1880,1113.4566). © Trustees of the British Museum

Electricity would eventually lead to what the ‘Grand Conjurer Doctor Franklin’ recommended to neutralize a thunderstorm. In the hot, dry summer of 1762, Collinson wrote to Henry Fox, 1st Baron Holland: ‘Would you think it Possible that a Pointed Iron Rod fixed to the highest part of an House should disarme a Cloud pregnant with distruction, ready to burst on Some lofty Building or Towering Oake?’63Ibid., 239. Builders and gardeners had a new weapon in their arsenal: a lightning conductor. Indeed, Fox’s friend Charles Hamilton of Painshill had ‘an apparatus of this sort erected upon an high and greatly-exposed building’, as the Philosophical Transactions reported in 1765.64Philosophical Transactions [London], LIV (1765), 202. I am very grateful to Jan Clark for this reference.

The application had surfaced as early as November 1752, when Collinson wrote to Ehret’s patron, Christoph Jakob Trew of Erlangen: ‘You see by the French Papers how farr the French have verified Mr. Franklins doctrine of Points, to unload a Thunder Cloud, of all Its combustable Matter, for they have Erected Iron Rods Pointed on their Churches, Towers & Magazines, for that purpose.’65Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 161.

The summer of 1752, within the set of ten ‘warm and wet’ ones (1751–60, as defined by climate historians), which followed the dry, bumper-crop year of 1750, had been very wet. Hence Trew’s copy of John Hill’s work (a ‘wretched performance’66Ibid., 160. This was presumably John Hill’s General Natural History of 1748–52; 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), 221, for Collinson’s concerns that Hill was unqualified to assess the Linnaean method. in Collinson’s opinion) got soaked in transit. In November 1752 Collinson wrote to Trew: ‘As I said before Wee had a very Wet summer but for Two Months past have had the finest Warm, dry Weather ever known, our Harvest good & great plenty of Every Thing.’67Ibid., 161. Thus any harvest (notably 1752 and 1756) could recover from rain very late in the season — just like his gouty humour. (His humour was tested to the extreme when he failed to get letters back from Trew, who has ‘not been True to Old friendship’.68See O’Neill and McLean, Peter Collinson, 128–9.) The patterns of husbandry proved as complex as the moods of the garden, or indeed as the fickle traits of human nature.69The anecdotal evidence of a good late harvest has to be qualified by the broad historical evidence of a ‘poor harvest’. See Jones, Seasons and Prices, 140.

In the same letter of 1752, Collinson mentioned in passing: ‘I believe Mr Ehret is Well but he lives at the Court-End of our great Citty, above 3 Miles from Mee. He is fully Employed in teaching Painting & drawing.’70Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 161. The ‘3 Miles’ must refer to the distance between Ehret’s home and Peter Collinson’s trade office in Gracechurch Street in the City of London. See O’Neill and McLean, Peter Collinson, 140–41, for an account of the shift in 1748 from his first home and garden in Peckham to his later home and garden, Ridgeway House in Mill Hill. This was in Park Street near Grosvenor Square in London (pl. 177b). By the middle of the eighteenth century, after a troubled stint in Oxford, Ehret had become a popular figure in London society (pl. 178). Patronage came not from medico-botanists, or from one aristocrat or one royal figure, or indeed from a commercial paying public, but from the ‘highest nobility in England’. As he himself put it: ‘If I could have divided myself into twenty parts, I could still have had my hands full.’71Quoted from Blunt, The Art of Botanical Illustration, ed. Stearn, 162. Ehret’s pupils were in London from January to June. After June (entering ‘the Time of the Long Vacation’), Ehret moved around the country estates, notably to the duchess of Portland’s Bulstrode. Thus, on 10 December 1753 Mary Delany wrote about the duchess’s daughter: ‘You would be surprised to see the improvement Lady Betty Bentinck has made in her drawing: I think she comes very near Ehret.’72Quoted from Calmann, Ehret, 82. Llanover, ed., Autobiography and Correspondence, III, 254.

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Description: Self-Portrait by Ehret, Georg Dionysius

178. Georg Dionysius Ehret, Self-Portrait, circa 1750, graphite on laid, handmade paper laminate with watermarks, 12 ¼ × 15 in. (31 × 38 cm). Chelsea Physic Garden

Around the time of this portrait, Ehret had become a popular figure in London society, living near Grosvenor Square (see pl. 177b). He was ‘fully Employed in teaching Painting & drawing’ to young aristocratic women, who were in London over the winter, and in the country all summer long. As he put it: ‘If I could have divided myself into twenty parts, I could still have had my hands full.’

In his memoir, Ehret listed his ‘Scholahren’, who make up an impressive group.73See again Calmann, Ehret, 81–2: Catherine, duchess of Norfolk; Mary, duchess of Leeds; two daughters of the duchess of Bridgewater; two daughters of Margaret, duchess of Portland; Bridget, wife of James Douglas, 14th earl of Morton and daughter of Sir John Heathcote of Normanton in Rutland; two daughters of the duke of Kent; two daughters of the earl of Pomfret; Lucy, daughter of the 1st earl of Guilford; Lady Carpenter; Lady Frances Spencer, daughter-in-law of the earl of Carlisle; and Lady Parker, daughter-in-law of the earl of Macclesfield. See Amanda Vickery, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 151, for Ehret’s role in helping foster ‘enlightened interest in nature, history, ingenuity and curiosity’ at Bowood, having tutored the countess of Shelburne (née Lady Sophia Carteret): ‘Her careful book of flowers still survives’. On 5 April 1755 Collinson reported to Trew: ‘Master Ehret gives his Humble Service. He has More Business than He can do in Teaching the Young Nobility to Draw & paint Flowers &c which is now a Great Fashion with us.’74Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 183. Among his clients, Ehret mentioned the three daughters of the earl of Essex, one being Mary (1722–1781), who married Admiral John Forbes in 1758. Her drawings are now in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. Fifty-one gouaches are signed ‘M.C.’ (Mary Capel), and others carry her married name, Mary Forbes (pl. 179). How Ehret imparted his knowledge of native flora is apparent by comparing his original study to that of the pupil who added a ‘Pheasant Eye’ (Adonis annua) and a peacock butterfly to the master’s model (cf. pls 180a and b).

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Description: A Cabbage-Leaf Filled with Field-Flowers by Forbes, Mary

179. Mary Forbes (née Capel), A Cabbage-Leaf Filled with Field-Flowers, 1764, watercolour, bodycolour and some white on a white prepared ground on vellum, 9 ¾ × 7 ¼ in. (25 × 18.3 cm). © The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

When Ehret mentioned the three daughters of the 3rd earl of Essex among his many young aristocratic pupils, he must have considered one of them, Mary Capel (1722–1781), moderately talented and a little wayward. A large body of her work is kept in the Fitzwilliam Museum. Descended from the same family as the duchess of Beaufort, she was married to Admiral John Forbes in 1758. This quaint and untutored work evokes the flowery ‘enamel’ of grove, meadow and hedgerow banks.

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Description: Lathyrus nissolia, Chrysanthemum leucanthemum, Linum perenne, Lysimackia nemorum by...

180a. Georg Dionysius Ehret, Study of English Wildflowers of Field and Wood, 1767, graphite and watercolour and bodycolour on vellum, 10 × 6 ¾ in. (25.3 × 17.1 cm). © The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

The four native flowers depicted could have been gathered from any meadow or grove during June 1767, when Ehret resumed teaching Mary Forbes at her country home: grass vetchling (Lathyrus nissolia), ox-eye daisy (Chrysanthemum leucanthemum), blue flax (Linum anglicum) and yellow pimpernel (Lysimachia nemorum). By contrast, the native pheasant’s eye (Adonis annua), which Mary added to her copy the following season, was flowering throughout the summer in wheatfields, where the summer generation of peacocks (Inachis io) abounded.

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Description: A spray of Lathyrus nissolia, Chrysanthemum leucanthemum, Linum perenne, Lysimachia...

180b. Mary Forbes (née Capel), copy of Ehret’s Study, with ‘Pheasant Eye’ and a peacock butterfly added, 1768, watercolour and bodycolour on vellum, 10 ¼ × 7 ½ in. (26 × 19.1 cm) © The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Two other albums of wild-flower and garden-flower studies are kept in the Oak Spring Library in Upperville, Virginia. The first, with its 150 paintings in bodycolour on vellum, is anonymous and includes, significantly, some folios dedicated to paintings of English natives such as the corn marigold, Chrysanthemum segetum (pl. 181). The second, containing 161 bodycolour studies, has been labelled at a later stage: ‘Drawings by Dame Ann Hamilton Née Heathcote’.75See Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi, An Oak Spring Flora: Flower Illustration from the Fifteenth Century to the Present Time (Upperville, VA: Oak Spring Garden Library, 1997), 208. The paintings in both albums bear a striking resemblance, such that ‘they almost seem to be by the same hand’. This would appear to be one of four (out of five) daughters of Sir John Heathcote of Normanton in Rutland who received instruction from Ehret. (Bridget, wife of James Douglas — 14th earl of Morton and president of the Royal Society from 1764 — was another instructed pupil.) Five of the sheets in the second album are dated 1752, 1753, 1753, 1765 and 1766, respectively. It is known that Ehret was at Normanton in August 1758, because he recorded that Peter Collinson had sent him the ‘Pyrola’, which he sketched around the 15th of that month.

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Description: Corn Marigold and Butterfly

181. Anonymous artist, album of garden- and wild-flower studies, 150 bodycolour paintings on vellum, Corn Marigold and Butterfly, 10 × 7 ⅞ in. (25.5 × 20 cm). Collection of Rachel Lambert Mellon, Oak Spring Garden Library, Upperville, Virginia

The confident style of these paintings shows them to be the work of a pupil considerably more talented than Mary Forbes. Here the pupil has chosen to contrast the yellow flowers with the black, white and deep blue wings of a male exotic butterfly from the tropics, the polymorphic danaid eggfly (Hypolimnas misippus). Females of that species mimic other butterflies. The corn marigold (Chrysanthemum segetum) would have flowered in cultivated fields in England during summer as an element of natural embroidery.

It seems that Ehret was already enticed to Normanton in 1751, when Professor Humphrey Sibthorp in Oxford complained that the artist had failed to collect seed at the right time in the Oxford Physic Garden. And so the studies of 1752 and 1753 are evidence of how his tutoring quickly produced competent female followers. Ehret’s exquisite study of a native meadow thistle (Cirsium dissectum) is inscribed: ‘Drawn at Normanton in Rutland Shire July 1, 1752’. It indicates Ehret’s continued interest in native flora. He would come to devote special attention to English water-loving plants such as Butomus umbellatus and Sagittaria sagittifolia under the influence of the duchess of Portland (pl. 183).

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Description: Butomus umbellatus by Ehret, Georg Dionysius

183. Georg Dionysius Ehret, Butomus umbellatus, 1763, gouache on vellum, 10 ⅛ × 6 ⅞ in. (25.7 × 17.5 cm). © Copyright The Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

It is likely that this painting of the English native flowering rush (Butomus umbellatus) can be traced back to the Portland Museum sale of 1786, having been painted by Ehret for the duchess of Portland. Growing along stream and pond edges on the Bulstrode estate, it was thus probably one of the water plants in the duchess of Portland’s ‘English herbal’. Mrs Delany found Ehret’s collective representations of native water plants especially beautiful. His portrait may be compared to Marshal’s of the same species (see pl. 84).

So in demand was Ehret that tutoring proved the undoing of his publishing venture. Hence, on 12 May 1756 Collinson wrote to Linnaeus:

Mr Ehret is fully Employed with teaching the Noble Ladys to paint Flowers, has not time to Spare has only published the Beveria being what at Paris is named Butneria. It is a Charming subfrutex (little shrub) & grows in my Garden in the Open Air or en plein Terre as the French call it, & bears flowers abundantly every year.76Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 197.

The ‘Beveria’ or ‘Butneria’ was the North American Calycanthus floridus. A hand-coloured engraving had just appeared in Ehret’s Plantae et papiliones rariores as Tabella XIII of 1755 (pl. 182). The plate was dedicated to Lord Macclesfield of the Royal Society (though it also commemorated Ehret’s friend ‘Joh. Ambrosii Bevrer [Beurer]’, who was an apothecary in Nuremberg). Since Ehret taught botanical drawing to the earl of Macclesfield’s daughter-in-law, a connection between tutoring and publishing is clear. Yet Ehret failed to capitalize on the marketplace by getting women to subscribe to plates that might have helped him make up a more substantial Plantae et papiliones rariores.

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Description: Plantae et papiliones rariores, Tab. XIII by Ehret, Georg Dionysius

182. Georg Dionysius Ehret, Plantae et papiliones rariores (London, 1748–59), Tab. XIII, 1755, hand-coloured engraving. © Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Rare Book Collection, Washington, DC

This ‘Beveria’ was the North American Calycanthus floridus. The plate was dedicated to Lord Macclesfield of the Royal Society, just as another plate was dedicated to the duchess of Portland. Since Ehret taught botanical drawing to the earl of Macclesfield’s daughter-in-law, it is clear that his publishing venture — the unsponsored Plantae et papiliones rariores — overlapped with his tutoring business at Bulstrode and beyond.

By contrast, women were drawn to subscribe in great numbers to Benjamin Wilkes’s English Moths and Butterflies of 1749 (a copy of which clearly fell into the hands of Lady Fetherstonhaugh, see pl. 167). Among the nearly 25 per cent of female subscribers were ‘The Right Honourable the Lady Featherstone’, ‘Her Grace the Duchess of Portland’ and ‘The Right Honourable the Lady Diana Spencer’. So equally, wives (for example, ‘Lady Charlott [sic] Townshend’, Baroness Ferrers and Lady Ecklin) were joining husbands in commercially sponsoring butterfly plates in Moses Harris’s The Aurelian of 1766 (see pl. 306). Peter Collinson and Richard Bateman of Grove House also helped to sustain Harris’s venture in the commercial marketplace (see pl. 131), and surely would have done the same for Ehret’s venture.

Instead, following his tutoring of Lady Betty Bentinck in 1753, Ehret gravitated to private patronage. The dedication of Tabella XIV of Plantae et papiliones rariores commemorates this. The plate records that, in the Portland greenhouse at Bulstrode, the ‘Amomum’ or ‘Zingiber’ (Zingiber zerumbet) was induced to flower in September 1754. How the duchess’s private patronage sustained Ehret’s love of natives, and how that support may have extended to Thomas Robins the Elder, becomes clear in a sequence of links after the mid-1750s. (That patronage also forms the background to Mary Delany’s engagement with the Bulstrode flowers, which is explored extensively in chapter 6.)

In the shrubbery, Calycanthus floridus (‘Butneria’ or ‘Beveria’) was not alone among American plants in enjoying the generally warm, and sometimes wet, summers of the 1750s. On 17 September 1756 Collinson wrote to the Dutch botanist John Frederick Gronovius, mentioning that Magnolia virginiana and M. tripetala had flowered (cf. pls 140 and 141). They were followed in June by Robinia hispida:

Wee have had a very Rainey Summer which if it had continued would have spoiled all our Corn, but it pleased God most graciously at the Very Critical Time when our Harvest begins to send us Three Weeks continued Fine Weather, so now Wee have all Cause to be very Thankfull. The Harvest is over in the South parts of England and Hay in such plenty & the Grass so Strong that for 3 Weeks past Wee are mowing a Second Crop almost as good as the First Crop of Haye.

This moist year our American Trees & plants grow wonderfully. I had the Giant Pensilvania Martigon figur’d by Mr Ehret [Lilium superbum L., circa 1748] that grew Eight foot five Inches high with 12 Flowers on it which made a Glorious Show.77Ibid., 201. Collinson’s account appears to contradict the evidence of a poor harvest with grain riots presented in Jones, Seasons and Prices, 141.

The following year 1757 — a ‘jubilee Summer’ as Horace Walpole called it78Cited in Jones, Seasons and Prices, 141. W. S. Lewis, ed., The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, 48 vols in 49 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937–83), XXI, 121. He claimed it came only once in fifty years. — also proved conducive to fruiting. It sustained the flowering of the American Michaelmas daisy and goldenrod until the end of 1757. On Christmas Day, Collinson began a letter to Linnaeus that he concluded on 27 December:

The Extraordinary Heat of our Summer Has ripened all Sorts of Fruits to perfection and Wee had plenty.

In two Gardens I saw (this year) Pomegranates against South Walls without any Art ripened beyond what can be imagined in so Northern a Climate. They look extreamly Beautifull and of the size of some that is brought from abroad.

Our Autumn has been Long, Dry & Warm & so continues, for a few Slight Frosts has not strip’d the Garden of Flowers. At Christmas Day Wee have 4 sorts of Aster & Virga aurea [Solidago spp.] in Flower & plenty of Leucojums [wallflowers], double and single, Chrysanthemums [perhaps Chrysanthemum coronarium], &c.79Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 210.

On this occasion, and around the shortest day of the year, the prolonged summer and autumn flowering fused with the early spring embroidery of grove and meadow:

The Winter Scene is not closed before Spring Flowers begin, for there are plenty of Narcissus polyanthus Viola, Pansies and sweet Violets, Primula veris, Polyanthus, Aconite, Hepatica, Anemonies both double and single, and Laurustinus.

My dear friend, you would have been Delighted & surprized to see the Large Nosegays that was all Flowers gathered out of the open Garden without any Art, December 27, 1757.80Ibid.

While it is clear that Thomas Robins’s pink-bowed nosegay (see pl. 158) was completed over several weeks or months, and took advantage of greenhouse ‘Art’, it conveys precisely this effect of prodigal ‘Nature’: the ‘Winter closed / Spring open’ effect of 1757–8.

Dance of Silenus: Thomas Robins’s Topographical and Botanical Art in the Cornucopia Seasons of 1757–1769

Thomas Robins’s prospect of Pan’s Lodge at Painswick in Gloucestershire, dated 1757, seems redolent of that hot season (see pl. 153). After a sweltering June and July, a delicate autumn brought a good vintage, ripe pomegranates and a nosegay of the last and first flowers. The hostile vantage point of the gardener or farmer — bullfinches must be destroyed — is removed from this idyll. Instead, Pan and Silenus and the satyrs frolic in the foreground, establishing the pastoral mood. At the same time, Robins alludes gently to combat in nature: the blackbird watches over its nestlings, for raptors are present. In this reverie, the dark scagliola frame breaches its line, melding oak and hazel filigree with the canopy of grove. To the top left, a sparrowhawk perches on an oak sprig. Alongside, a red squirrel feeds on hazelnuts. The magpie on a larch stem, left, scolds the barn owl below. Indeed, with another barn owl on a beech stem, right, the deep tones are rather crepuscular, yet without any hint of the predation that dark would bring.

One exotic has found its way into the frame: the Rubus odoratus of North America that thrived in the shade of cultivated groves (see see pl. 153). This is the same raspberry that Thomas Robins painted in a single portrait (fol. 55) in the Fitzwilliam album. Among the 108 studies that make up what may be called the ‘Robins Florilegium’, it was just one among a number of fashionable American exotics. These exotics — for example, Clethra alnifolia on folio 69 — were then shaping the shrubbery. Folio 53, which is labelled ‘Katesby’s Basteria’, equates with the ‘Beveria’ or ‘Butneria’ of Ehret (Calycanthus floridus, see pl. 182). The late-flowering American perennial Physostegia virginiana makes an appearance on folio 4. Since one of the studies of American flowers is dated 1762, the album was clearly produced during the ascendant years of the shrubbery and reflects the ‘rage of taste’ for the shrubbery’s American exotics. The album also marks the ebb and flow of Robins’s career: part topographical artist and part botanical artist. It was the latter role that would be continued by his son, Thomas Robins the Younger (1743–1806).

Continuities between Robins’s early and late career are evident in two ways. First, the many sketches of Bath extend from circa 1754 to 1765 and were undertaken mainly from April to June, when the fashionable visitors were not in residence.81Spence, ‘Thomas Robins and the Dorset Sketches’. Second, and most significantly here, Robins’s native plants of the topographical prospects of 1748–58 also appear in the album. Folio 10, for example, is an exquisite Rococo-Chinoiserie rendering of native rose hips and spindle berries (pl. 185). Folio 24 is dedicated to two native water plants: ‘Sagittaria or Arrowhead Bush. Sparganium or Burr Read’ (pl. 186). Folio 67 depicts the ‘Salvia Wild Clary and Vetch’. And folio 74 illustrates the ragged robin that Lady Luxborough mentioned in her spring coppice (pl. 187).

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Description: Euonymus (Celastraceae) and Rose Hips (Rosa canina) by Robins, Thomas, the Elder

185. Thomas Robins the Elder, flower album, 1760s, fol. 10, graphite, watercolour and gum arabic with white bodycolour highlights on laid paper, 10 ¼ × 8 ⅛ in. (26 × 20.7 cm). © The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

The native spindle (Euonymus europaeus), which produces beautiful lobed pink fruits encasing an orange aril, is shown in its autumn coloration, well ripened by a warm mid-eighteenth-century summer. What appear to be the hips of the dog rose (Rosa canina) provide a delicate foil to the spindle. Robins brought a Rococo-Chinoiserie artistic sensibility — derived from his work as a fan painter — to his depictions of the natural productions of the English countryside.

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Description: Sagittaria, or Arrowhead Bush and Sparganium or Burr Reed by Robins, Thomas, the...

186. Thomas Robins the Elder, flower album, 1760s, fol. 24, graphite with watercolour and bodycolour with white bodycolour on paper. 11 ¼ × 7 ⅞ in. (28.5 × 20.1 cm). © The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Robins’s juxtaposition of two native plants of ponds and stream margins — arrowhead (Sagittaria sagittifolia), flowering from July to August, and the summer-flowering branched bur-reed (Sparganium erectum) — possesses a spontaneous (if slightly awkward) beauty to compare with Ehret’s exquisite posed formality: his native flowering rush of 1763 (see pl. 183).

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Description: Ragged Robin?, Red Campion? and a Campion? (Silene?) by Robins, Thomas, the Elder

187. Thomas Robins the Elder, flower album, 1760s, fol. 74, graphite, watercolour and bodycolour with white bodycolour highlights on laid paper 9 ⅛ × 5 ½ in. (23.2 × 13.9 cm). © The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Robins depicted pink and white Silene as species or hybrids. The white flower is a female plant with five prominent styles and is probably the bladder campion (Silene vulgaris). The pink flower is hard to identify. The two are shown with ragged robin (Lychnis flos-cuculi), which Lady Luxborough mentioned in her coppice on 4 June 1749. Such natives formed a natural ‘embroidery’, easily heightened by the addition of cultivated plants.

The provenance and purpose of the Fitzwilliam album remain uncertain. Was it for Robins’s private leisure? Or, as has been suggested by several scholars, was it prepared for the duchess of Portland, who had in mind the generation of composite drawings?82David Scrase, Flower Drawings, Fitzwilliam Museum Handbooks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 60; see also Blunt, The Art of Botanical Illustration, ed. Stearn, 170. The name ‘Robins’ appears in the Catalogue of the Portland Museum (1786), but this is more likely Thomas Robins the Younger, since he has been given tentative credit for some of the drawings of fungi.83Cathryn Spence, in personal communication (19 November 2012), confirms a possible attribution to Thomas Robins the Younger of two fungi drawings that appear under ‘Thomas Robins the Elder’ on WorldGallery.co.uk. In the Catalogue, lot 2638 is entitled ‘Six various drawings of Fungi, very highly finished, by Robins’; and lots 2639 to 2646 add up to another forty-five drawings under his name and probably in the category ‘fungi’.

Folio 39 in the album shows, unlike the 107 other discrete flower studies, a carefully contrived bouquet of hollyhocks, cranesbill, sweet William, yellow jasmine and an orange blossom. This bouquet is developed further in two full-blown paintings of flower bunches that are dated 1768 and 1769, respectively. In the painting now entitled A Bunch of Ornamental Flowers Tied with a Ribbon, Surrounded by Moths and Butterflies, the signature at bottom left is ‘T:Robins pinxt 1769’ (pl. 188). Both were clearly intended for display rather than study. Some decorative English butterflies — red admiral, white admiral and brimstone — are mixed in with moths amid the bouquet of exotic flowers to heighten the decorative qualities of the whole. Interestingly, the Citrus blossom and Corydalis species seem to be drawn from folios 32 and 12, respectively, of the album of 108 flower studies.

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Description: A Bunch of Ornamental Flowers Tied with a Ribbon, Surrounded by Moths and...

188. Thomas Robins the Elder, A Bunch of Ornamental Flowers Tied with a Ribbon, Surrounded by Moths and Butterflies, signed and dated in brown ink, bottom left: ‘T: Robins pinxt 1769’, watercolour and bodycolour with gum arabic over graphite on paper, 18 ¼ × 14 in. (46.6 × 35.7 cm). © The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Possibly painted for display at the duchess of Portland’s Bulstrode, Robins’s bouquet shows to advantage cultivated exotic flowers encircled by native butterflies and moths. The flowers include a magnificent striped tulip, sweet William (Dianthus barbatus), lemon blossom (double, Citrus limon), a deep blue double larkspur (Delphinium syn Consolida sp.), cyclamen (Cyclamen sp.) and a gentian (Gentiana sp.). The Corydalis and Citrus appear modelled on folios 12 and 32 respectively among the 108 drawings in the Fitzwilliam flower album (here called the ‘Robins Florilegium’). The British moths and butterflies are (clockwise from lower left): red admiral (Vanessa atalanta), orange tip (Anthocharis cardamines), white admiral (centre, Ladoga camilla), purple emperor, male (Apatura iris), six-spot burnet (Zygaena filipendulae), cream spot tiger moth (Arctia villica), emperor moth (Saturnia pavonia), purple emperor, female (Apatura iris) and brimstone (Gonepteryx rhamni).

Cornucopia, though undated, completes the set of three (pl. 189). It too has links to the flower album. One study previously attributed to Ehret appears the model for the American honeysuckle (cf. pl. 190); and the Jacobean lily of Cornucopia is very close in character to the one in the Painswick frame of 1758 (see pl. 161). Cornucopia brings together thus a wealth of exotic shrubs and flowers including Hibiscus syriacus, Lonicera sempervirens and the Sprekelia formosissima of Robins’s Pan’s Lodge view of 1758. Summer’s full abundance is concentrated in this horn of plenty. In the three studies — varying his fidelity to art and nature — Robins transformed the album’s cumulative sense of discrete moments (all ‘drawn from nature’) into an artificial plenitude.

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Description: Cornucopia by Robins, Thomas, the Elder

189. Thomas Robins the Elder, Cornucopia, undated but probably circa 1769, watercolour and bodycolour with gum arabic over graphite on vellum, 21 ⅞ × 17 ¾ in. (55.5 × 45.2 cm). © The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Among the notable exotics in this grand Cornucopia is the Jacobean lily (Sprekelia formosissima), which appears in the frame to Robins’s Pan’s Lodge painting of 1758 (see pl. 161).

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Description: Study of trumpet honeysuckle (Lonicera sempervirens), carnation King of Prussia...

190. Attributed to Thomas Robins the Elder, study of trumpet honeysuckle (Lonicera sempervirens), carnation ‘King of Prussia‘ (Dianthus caryophyllus), black false hellebore (Veratrum nigrum), circa 1767, bodycolour on paper, watercolour on vellum, laid on paper, 12 × 7 ½ in. (30.4 × 19 cm). Licence granted courtesy of The Rt Hon. The Earl of Derby 2013

This flower study was previously considered the work of G. D. Ehret. Yet the representations of the honeysuckle (Lonicera sempervirens) and the striped carnation (Dianthus cv.) — comparing study and Cornucopia (pl. 189) — makes an attribution to Robins much more plausible.

When, by chance, he jotted down a date on a single portrait — folio 61, ‘Chelone from Virginia, Octr 12 1762’ — Robins recorded the extension of summer’s lease through American perennials. While most exotics wilted in the torrid year of 1762, this one American turtlehead persisted. Amid the paucity of a wet or dry season, Cornucopia expressed, then, an ideal of plenty that came from the ‘Bountifull Giver’. It was indeed the horn of Achelous that the Naiads picked up and filled with fruit and flowers. Whether in a dance of Silenus or concert champêtre or floriferous cornucopia, Robins skilfully drew upon garden mythologies: satyric pastoral or Dionysian idyll (and with some ‘Chinese’ traits borrowed from fan painting too).84Spence, ‘Thomas Robins and the Dorset Sketches’. Yet his Pastoral and Georgic art also recorded how the sun, rain and wind shaped actual leisure and labour on the land. Actuality is best represented in layers, or by the framework of view and context. Material circumstance — a shower or a dry spell — aided the perennially fecund imagination of this topographical artist.

PART II
The Blessings and Scourges of Absolute Summer: From the Verdure of 1758 to the Sunburnt Fields of 1765

Topographical art may furnish clues to meteorological patterns. Take Richard Wilson’s view of Croome Court in Worcestershire (pl. 191). Set in deep olive-yellow sward, limpid waters reflect a saturated blue sky. Mounting cumulus clouds, which may signify rain, break the azure. The 6th earl of Coventry paid Wilson for the canvas in November 1758.85See John Harris, The Artist and the Country House: From the Fifteenth Century to the Present Day (London: Sotheby’s, 1995), 96. Since the spring and early summer had been dry (leaving the ground ‘more scorch’d than even in summer 1757’, as Gilbert White recorded), the painting could date from the early summer of that year. According to White, ‘great rains’ set in on 1 July, continuing until 10 September.86Francesca Greenoak, ed., The Journals of Gilbert White, 3 vols (London: Century, 1986–9) [vol. I: 1751–73; vol. II: 1774–83; vol. III: 1784–93], 1, 70–71. Actualities are thus material to an idealized vision.

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Description: View from the South West of Croome Court, Worcestershire, Seen Across the Lake by...

191. Richard Wilson, View from the South West of Croome Court, Worcestershire, Seen Across the Lake, signed and dated 1758, oil on canvas, 50 ⅞ × 65 ¼ in. (129.2 × 165.8 cm). Reproduced by kind permission of the Croome Estate Trustees

The earl of Coventry paid Wilson for this work in November 1758. It shows the early major landscaping commission of Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown. Wilson’s style had first emerged at Bourne Park, Kent, and at Wilton, Wiltshire, circa 1756–8. Though Arcadian in atmosphere, the work is remarkable for combining topographical precision (excepting an insertion of Brown’s church, which came later in 1763) with what appears to be meteorological realities. Before the return of lush verdure during the rains of late summer, an early-summer drought prevailed.

Richard Wilson’s painting of Moor Park in Hertfordshire makes the point more forcefully (pl. 192). It is dated 1765. That summer, with easterly winds prevailing, a chalky sky would yield little but spectral moisture. Since completing the work at Croome Court, Wilson had become progressively preoccupied with atmospherics. The architectural record gave way to the particularities of weather and the diurnal shifts of light and moisture.87See Harris, The Artist and the Country House, 98. Yet the haze that fudges the scene is more than a stylistic ploy. It appears to show the moment on a blistering day of heat inversion, when parkland grass was turning pallid like the sunburned pastures of Spain. Sir Lawrence Dundas, seated in his sulky, is taking companions on a tour of the estate. They are wisely in a shaded zone. The middle ground is yellow and the sky bleached. Only the birds rising on the thermals break the heaviness of the stifling air.

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Description: Sir Lawrence Dundas in a Sulky with Companions at Moor Park, Hertfordshire by...

192. Richard Wilson, with (?)Johan Zoffany, Sir Lawrence Dundas in a Sulky with Companions at Moor Park, Hertfordshire, signed and dated 1765, oil on canvas, 58 × 72 in. (147.3 × 182.8 cm). The Zetland Collection

Richard Wilson demonstrated an increasing interest in atmospherics — a scene experienced at a particular time of day or in different weathers. The atmospheric style is, however, more than simply an artistic ploy. The yellowed grass in hazy light comes from heat during a summer drought. Thus ‘Capability’ Brown’s many designs of the 1750s must have been affected by some extremely dry summers during the 1760s. The most notable droughts were in 1762 and 1765.

This was a summer well documented. It began dry (but still promising) back in June. In a letter to George Montagu, dated 10 June 1765, Horace Walpole described his ‘enchanted little landscape’ at Strawberry Hill at a peak moment of grove florescence:

I am just come out of the garden in the most oriental of all evenings, and from breathing odours beyond those of Araby. The acacias, which the Arabians have the sense to worship, are covered with blossoms, the honeysuckles dangle from every tree in festoons, the syringas are thickets of sweets, and the newcut hay of the field in the garden tempers the balmy gales with simple freshness, while a thousand sky-rockets launched into the air at Ranelagh or Marybone illuminate the scene and give it an air of Haroun Alraschid’s paradise.88Lewis, ed., The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, X, 156.

In the full light of day, however, the lawn’s dying green — far from the verdure that Johann Heinrich Müntz captured in one wet summer of the 1750s89The painting by Müntz is reproduced in Laird, The Flowering of the Landscape Garden, pl. 25. — overshadowed Walpole’s evening reverie. He reflected: ‘I was not quite so content by daylight: some foreigners dined here, and though they admired our verdure, it mortified me by its brownness; we have not had a drop of rain this month to cool the tip of our daisies.’90Ibid., 156.

This was the start of a long and very dry summer (though not an exceptionally warm summer, despite Peter Collinson recording high temperatures).91In the ‘Central England’ mean surface air temperature chart, the summer of 1765 averaged only 14.9°C (58.8°F), as compared to 16.7°C (62.1°F) in 1762. According to Gilbert White, his lawns at Selborne returned to green only in mid-August. He charted that recovery:

August 1. This day the drought has lasted 14 weeks . . .

August 3. A plentiful rain for five hours & an half with a great deal of thunder & lightening. It soaked things thoro’ly to the roots, & fill’d many ponds.

August 12. Vast showers: very little wheat carry’d. The rains have restored a fine verdure, to the grass-walks that seemed to be burnt to death for many weeks.

August 14. . . . Ten showery days restore a verdure.92Greenoak, ed., The Journals of Gilbert White, I, 158–9.

Back on 1 May, Peter Collinson, writing to Carl Linnaeus, had felt little premonition of what was to come after a spotless spring:

Now is the Delightful Season. Flora appears Bedecked with Great Variety of Beautifull Attire, altogether Charming. The Long approaches of our Spring Make our Gardens very Entertaining, for Vegetation never Ceases in our Temperate Climate.93Armstrong, ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 262.

By 20 July, however, he was complaining to Charles Lyttelton, bishop of Carlisle:

I doubt it is well with you but wee are burnt up I don’t Remember the like, our fields are brown Russet no after Hay can be expected, when the Fields from Day to Day from morning to night scorch when a burning Sun & piercing Easterly Wind, in 2 months but 3 rainey Days, yett the Town & Country is very Healthy.94Ibid., 263.

Hot weather clearly benefited farmers and city-dwellers, but less so deer and livestock and reapers, as Collinson elaborated in another letter to the bishop:

London, August 30, 1765

Just as I returned from a Hott Dusty Disagreeable Journey From Goodwood in Company with the Duke of Argyle . . .

The Country & Parks are so burnt up & Exhausted that there is not a Verdant Spott to be seen, but all looks like the Sunburnt fields of Asia. The Distress is great. In some places they have no food, nor Water, for their Cattle. The Parks at Goodwood are so Russet & Bare that the Duke ordered them to Cutt Green Boughs to sustain the Deer. So you may believe Venison this year is not overloaded with Fatt, but then you are compensated with better Flavour.

But under this General Distress Wee had the Great Consolation to see every Where such plantifull Crops of Wheat, the Ears Pendant with heavy Grains. The Harvest began last Week reaping Wheat & Some Corn had been Carried In & high harvest Weather continues, a Long Day of Burning Sun without Clouds to screen the fainting Reaper. Must be Intolerable, but the Cooling East Wind is some refreshment. Its Excessive Hott, Birds Thermometer was up at 80 to Day.

In our Journey Wee saw not a bad Crop of Barley & Oats all ripe for the Sicle, for this constant Weather hurries on Harvest at Great Rate, so I hope Corn will soon come to market to relieve the Poor & Lower the price of Bread.95Ibid., 264.

In other words, there were some benefits to humans in corn harvests, health and succulent meat. Yet drought was not a pure blessing for the reaper, the pastoral farmer and the gardener, or for the poor in town looking for the byproducts of barley.96See again Jones, Seasons and Prices, 143. In 1765, for example, barley fared less well in the drought than wheat and was very dear by Michaelmas. The year 1766 was more complex still, with poor hay yields and loss of sheep through inundation and sheep rot, yet with a late harvest of wheat (in Wiltshire at least) that helped offset the losses. When poor yields of hops or barley coincided with a fall in apple yields, the poor were left with less to drink in the way of beer and cider.

The letter moves to another form of desiccation: an exact account of how to press flowers to form a hortus siccus. Collinson used, as he wrote, ‘Whited brown paper’ rather than a brown paper that ‘spoils the plants’. A ‘Large folio Book or Two’ was as good as a weight; and it was necessary to replace the damp paper with dry, especially if the plants were ‘very Succulent’.97Armstrong, ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 264. The exact account of the paper replacement is: ‘Next Day Look at It & see if any of the Leaves &c wants rectifieing, & the Third Day Change the plants into Fresh Paper, Drying the Other well, & the fifth Day return them to the first paper, & then they will keep to any Time, unless the plants are very Succulent, then they may require another Changing.’ (This was one aspect of how the duchess of Beaufort managed to press an Aeonium arboreum — see chapter 2 — though her specimen was made up of parts and might have involved dropping those parts into boiling water first.) On 17 September Collinson corresponded with Linnaeus once again. The topic of plants that retained water led him into a further account of the drought of 1765:

You, my Dear Friend, Surprise Mee with telling Mee of your Cool & Wet summer, whereas our Summer has been so much on the Extreams the Other Way. For all May, June & July was excessive Hot & Dry, but 6 or 7 Rainey Days in 3 Months, so that all our Grass fields Looks like the Sunburnt Countrys of Spain & Africa. Our Fahrenheits Thermometer frequently 84 and 85 in the Shade in the Open Air, but in my Parlor frequently at 95.

I do assure you I have had Little pleasure of my Life this summer, for I cannot bear Heat. I have longed to be on Lapland Mountains.98Ibid., 265.

It seems that Gilbert White’s account of the re-greening of his lawns had been premature. The recovered verdure was not sustained beyond August, at least in Collinson’s London. He continued his letter to Linnaeus of 17 September:

The beginning of August Wee had some fine Rains, but that did not recover our Usual Verdure, (Since) to this present writeing, Hott & Dry Weather, not a drop rain for 14 days past. Our Hay is very Short & Oats & Barley but a Midlin Crop, but Wheat which Wee Most Wanted, Good Providence has favoured Us with a plentifull Crop, & a Good Harvest, which began Two Weeks Sooner then in Common Years. Peaches, Nectarines, Figgs & Grapes, Pears, &c. are Early ripened, and are Richly Flavoured, & many Exotic Shrubs & plants flower finely this year.

My Garden is now a Paradise of Delight, with a Variety of Flowers & plenty of Roses now in Bloom, as if in May & June.

But to obtain all this pleasure, great pains have been taken to keep the Garden continual Water’d every Evening.99Ibid., 265–6.

On this occasion, as in the warm summers of the 1730s and in the ‘jubilee Summer’ of 1757, fruiting and flowering were favoured as much as wheat (pl. 193). Given a reservoir of water in the garden, the interests of the gardener could overlap with those of the corn farmer. Much to everyone’s surprise, roses were induced to bloom a second time in September rather than in the once-only show of Lady Luxborough’s June shrubbery.

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193. Robert Furber, ‘August’, from Twelve Plates with Figures of Fruit (London, 1732), hand-coloured engravings based on paintings by Pieter Casteels. © Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Rare Book Collection, Washington, DC

In the manner of Twelve Months of Flowers, Robert Furber produced an illustrated catalogue representing which fruits were ripening each month. Excepting the cold summer of 1740, many summers during the 1730s–1760s were warm. In the drought summer of 1765, Collinson wrote how even the peaches, nectarines, figs and grapes ripened early and with good flavour, just as exotic shrubs were laden with flowers.

Summers: A Statistical and Anecdotal Overview, 1751–1765

If Wilson’s pictorial exactitude in 1758 and 1765 seems to represent a genuine meteorological reality, this is not reflected in the broad climatological record. The climate historian, using statistical data, places the two years together within two sets of above-average ‘wet’ summers (1751–60 and 1763–72), clearly distinct from the preceding ones.100See H. H. Lamb, Climate History and the Modern World (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 246. Statistically, the late 1740s were characterized by warm summers with low rainfall (supported in Collinson’s report to Linnaeus of 1747: ‘The Vine yards turn to good profit’).101Ibid., 244: ‘The mostly warm summers and autumns which followed in the 1740s and 1750s, and the low rainfall of those years, made this an easier and pleasanter time in the experience of people then living in the countryside of England.’ By contrast, from 1751 to 1760 there were ten wet summers in a row. They averaged 127 per cent of the modern mean (that is, about a quarter more than during a comparable period now). A second sequence of ten summers, 1763 to 1772, were also slightly wetter than average. Of these ten, 1763 and 1768 were both remarkably wet — respectively 181 per cent and 164 per cent of the modern mean.102Data from ibid., 246. See also Michael Dukes and Philip Eden, ‘Weather Records and Extremes’, in Climates of the British Isles: Present, Past and Future, ed. Mike Hulme and Elaine Barrow (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 278. In this book, the England and Wales Precipitation series, created by the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, was used. It has the advantage of greater consistency or homogeneity, but a defect for the historian is that it begins only with the year 1766. Measured by data from 1766 to 1995, 1768 was the fifth wettest summer and the entire year ranks as the second wettest, with 1247.3 mm of rain. They entered the record books as the second and sixth wettest, respectively, in the whole gauge record (effectively from 1697).

Although this warm, prevalently wet, pattern had variable consequences for painters, farmers and poor alike, it seems to have consistently aided Peter Collinson in getting American exotics to flower well. This was important for the shrubbery. Yet, when the hot, dry summer of 1762 came along, the grove would prove its worth. Hence a complex and discriminating picture begins with the anecdotal record. Notable is Gilbert White’s increasingly scientific record of one Hampshire parish. His growing attentiveness to temperature and rainfall — and their environmental ramifications — helps to define variation within statistical averages. His data for 1768, for example, confirm the statistical mean — data organized for the first time that year in the columns of White’s Naturalist’s Journals. More importantly for the garden historian, however, is the way his still sporadic weather records for 1763 show how averages deceive.

Take his summary for the year 1768, which is simple enough: ‘A wet season began about the 9th of June, which lasted thro’ haymaking, harvest, & seed time, & did infinite mischief to the country.’103Greenoak, ed., The Journals of Gilbert White, 1, 268. This local record is supported by data from the Midlands. He wrote: ‘It appears from my Brother Barker’s instrument, with which he measures the quantity of rain, that more water fell in the county of Rutland in the year 1768 from Jan: the 1 to Decr: 31 than in any other Calendar year for 30 years past; viz: 30 in: 9/10.’104Ibid.

Take 1763, by contrast, which appears to average out as a wet summer within another very wet year. White claims that it was slightly wetter than 1768: Barker’s instrument measured a little over 32 inches from 1 February 1763 to 31 January 1764. And yet — most significantly for the gardener — the summer began with drought. There were five weeks without rain around the middle of June. It was only the five weeks of very wet weather in July and the ‘vast rains’ in early August that turned it into the second wettest on record.105Ibid., 131. Hence the particular patterns of each season, with consequences for gardener and farmer, prove as important as generalized graphs or statistics. Paradoxically, also, the wet 1763, unlike the grain dearth of 1768, yielded a ‘plentiful harvest’ despite the late-season deluge.106Jones, Seasons and Prices, 142 and 144.

The first season of Gilbert White’s detailed (but not yet statistical) recording, 1751, points to a needed discrimination. It had a similar mix of dry heat followed by sustained wet. Overall, it proved one of the wettest years. According to White, however, ‘Part of May, & all June were very dry, & burning’ before the heavy rains of July and August.107Greenoak, ed., The Journals of Gilbert White, 1, 21. The year 1755 witnessed hot, dry weather up to the middle of July before a cooler break came, which then lasted through much of the remaining year. The following year, 1756, remained cold into May: snow, hail and ice all appeared on the night of 11 May. Then, from 15 May into early June, White recorded ‘Three weeks and three days drought’.108Ibid., 1, 43. Thereafter, an easterly air stream gave way to wet weather from the west.109See Jones, Season and Prices, 141: ‘Very wet spring and the “wettest summer in memory of man” (Baker) yielded a deficient harvest. A year of scarcity.’ The year 1758 was initially more drought-afflicted than the summer before (and perhaps Thomas Robins’s view of Pan’s Lodge reflects that summery mood). Yet it recovered rather faster than 1757 and proceeded to turn ‘wet’. Gilbert White’s summary of 1757 (Walpole’s ‘jubilee Summer’) conveys the complexity of a single season, when ‘drought’ was occasionally broken by intermittent heavy rain.110Ibid., 57: ‘The spring & summer 1757 were remarkably hot & dry. The dry weather began in passion-week, & continued-on without any Interruption except ye 29 May ’till the 20th of July. The air was rather cold in April & May: but the sun, shining all day from a cloudless skie for many weeks, dryed the ground in a very uncommon manner: & the heats of June, & July quite burnt it to dust. I observed that our wet clay withstood the drought very well for many weeks: but when once it was thoro’ly parched (as it was more than spit deep) vegetation suffered more than in the gravelly soils. The barley, oats, & pease, having no rains to bring ym: up, did not yield half a crop: but the wheat (which is never known to be injured by dry weather) turned-out very well. On ye twentieth of July fell a very heavy, & extensive thunder-shower: after which there were moderate rains, that restored a little verdure to the grass-fields. From the 16 of August set-in a very wet season for 15 or 16 days, which made people in some pain for the wheat that began to grow. About the beginning of Septemr: began the most delicate Autumn, & lasted quite into Novemr: with very little or no frost quite to the Close of the Year.’

The year 1759 followed a similar pattern of warm spells with intermittent heavy rain: for example, the ‘Furious hot summer weather’ that White recorded on 19 June.111Ibid., 81. His entry for 6 June 1760 — ‘Moist, hot, growing weather’ — characterized the following summer, which was warm or even sultry after a spring drought.112Ibid., 87. It coincided with a letter from Peter Collinson to John Bartram, describing his garden on 6 June: ‘I am Charm’d, nay in Extasie to See the White Calceolus Marina Thou sent Mee in flower with Mountain Laurel, Red Acacia & Fringe Tree & all spice of Carolina, all in flower together.’113Edmund Berkeley and Dorothy Smith Berkeley, eds, The Correspondence of John Bartram, 1734–1777 (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1992), 485, postscript dated 10 June 1760. There were also fine early displays of American exotics, notably rhododendrons and magnolias, in 1761 and 1762, yet July and August 1761 left the ground parched. In 1762 sustained drought took over from early June until early August. Thus, unlike the previous ten summers, these two — 1761 and 1762 — could be characterized as warm and humid summers, but with very consistent dry spells. The year 1762, by contrast to 1761, inclined to persistent and devastating drought. Franklin’s lightning rods, rarely activated in English summers, were probably inactive throughout the arid summer of 1762. Hence Peter Collinson reported to John Bartram on 5 October 1762: ‘your weather has remarkable vicissitudes Ours has been more certain for all our summer has been a constant Hott dry season, all burnt up longer than ever I knew. Plants languishing and perishing for want of rains & many totally killed.’114Ibid., 571.

In contrast to the dry, but not exceptionally hot summer of 1765, that of 1762 proved how Collinson was not able to keep up with watering to save his ‘Paradise of Delight’. Gilbert White confirmed that his grass walks had been deplorably parched by the ‘vehement hot summer’ (though on 8 September 1762 he noted: ‘The fields abound with grass as if there had been no drought this summer’).115Greenoak, ed., The Journals of Gilbert White, 1, 116, 118. Entry for 5 July 1762: ‘The Country is burnt-up in a most deplorable manner, beyond what any middle-aged person remembers’.

Some time in early summer 1762 Johan Zoffany came to paint David Garrick’s Hampton Wick, the companion Thames-side garden to Horace Walpole’s ‘enchanted little landscape’ of Strawberry Hill. He accurately recorded a sun-drenched lawn alongside the River Thames. In his various views of the Hampton House garden (pl. 194), the air seems as stultifying as in Richard Wilson’s Moor Park of 1765. In fact, statistically, 1762 easily beat the dry 1765 for consistent heat.116The year 1765, in spite of the temperatures that Collinson alluded to on occasion, was not so much consistently hot as consistently dry. Surprisingly, the mean surface temperature in the ‘Central England’ record comes in at 14.9°C (58.8°F), which is on the cool side of average. It proved the fourteenth hottest summer on record with an average (day and night) temperature of 16.7ºC (62.1ºF).117Data from Lamb, Climate History and the Modern World, 230. The long-term average (day and night) for summer (June, July and August) from 1850 to 1950 was 15.2°C (59.4°F). The average of 16.7°C (62.1°F) in 1762 is comparable to the average of 17.0°C (62.6°F) in 1781, which Gilbert White noted as a very hot summer, and very close to the average of 16.9°C (62.4°F) in 1975 (the first of two modern drought summers). Until the recent sequence of very hot, dry summers, 1976 stands out in living memory as a benchmark for drought — the second hottest summer in central England (for the years 1659–1979). An average of 17.8°C (64.0°F) was registered in summer 1976. On that occasion, the countryside resembled the plains of Africa. The year 1995 then entered the records as the third hottest summer — at 17.4°C (63.3°F), just behind 1826 and 1976 — and August 1995 was the hottest yet recorded by 1997. (These averages include night-time temperatures.) There is a good discussion of the summer of 1995 in Dukes and Eden, ‘Weather Records and Extremes’, 262–8. On this occasion, the statistical, anecdotal and pictorial records all converge. The consequences, however, were remarkably divergent. Dry heat made for a good wheat harvest, but left gardeners and farmers with poor lawns and hay. With the failure of the hay and turnip crops, a scarcity of fodder and an abundance of acorns meant the early slaughter of failing livestock and prematurely fattened hogs.118Jones, Seasons and Prices, 142.

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Description: David Garrick and his wife Eva Maria Garrick (née Veigel) by his Temple to...

194. Johan Zoffany, David Garrick and his Wife by his Temple to Shakespeare, Hampton, 1762, oil on canvas, 43 ¼ × 53 in. (109.9 × 134.6 cm). Paul Mellon Collection, Yale Center for British Art

The actor David Garrick, who had acquired Hampton House in the early 1750s, employed ‘Capability’ Brown to design this modest Thames-side garden. Zoffany (who seems to have helped Richard Wilson with the figures in the view of Moor Park, 1765, see pl. 192) recorded the garden in a number of paintings that hint at the extreme drought summer of 1762. In one companion painting — A View of the Grounds of Hampton House with Mr and Mrs Garrick Taking Tea — the yellowing green of the lawn already betrays the early desiccation of that long, hot summer.

The Summers of 1763 and 1765 in Gilbert White’s Selborne

Thus the days and nights of a single summer add up to more than odd, disconnected moments. They form a narrative. Yet the character of the narrative differs from one narrator to another: for example, the sanguine reflections of a seasoned observer, Gilbert White, complement the dreamings of a young woman, who was green in the world, Catherine Battie. Together, their accounts form a local history of some consequence.

During the 1760s, on the lines of his complete record of 1757, Gilbert White became a painstaking meteorologist. The summer of 1763, which began mild, ended up ‘very mild’ and very wet. Over June and July he made diligent entries in his Garden-Kalendar. The breathless diary of his young visitor, Catherine Battie, fills in the missing lines: what White got up to between jottings in her ‘happy Valley’.119It is entitled in full: ‘A little Journal of some of the Happiest days I have had in The happy Valley in the year 1763’. On 4 June the three young cousins of Mrs Etty, wife of the Revd Andrew Etty, vicar of Selborne, had arrived at the Selborne vicarage. Catherine came with her two sisters, Anne and Philadelphia. They were the daughters of the distinguished Dr William Battie, president of the Royal College of Physicians.120See Akihito Suzuki, ‘Battie, William (bap. 1703, d. 1776)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, online edition: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/1715 [accessed 1 October 2013]. Battie was a pioneer in a more humane treatment of the insane. The arrival of the ‘Three Graces’ from London brought mirth to a corner of Hampshire.

On 5 June White recorded: ‘The fields & gardens begin to suffer by the long dry season.’121Greenoak, ed., The Journals of Gilbert White, 1, 128. This presaged a hot, dry summer. The previous one, the arid 1762, had been one of the very hottest on record. June 1763 looked set the same way:

June 13. Only a few showers that did not lay the dust.

June 14. Hot burning weather again.

June 15. Vast rain at Alton; but only a small sprinkling here.

The Cantaleupes set apace.

June 25. This is now the sixth week of the dry weather. A small shower this evening that has not laid the dust.122Ibid., 129.

On 22 June Gilbert White took time off from sowing, watering and cutting grass. He had erected a tent-like pavilion near Wakes in the field known as the Lythe. Catherine Battie recorded the afternoon tea, the singing and the going to bed ‘between twelve & one o Clock’. Then on 23 June there was ‘mirth & jollity’ to celebrate the Ettys’ wedding day. She wrote:

The morn was spent at the Harpsicord a Ball at night began minuets at half an hour after seven then danced country dances till near eleven went to supper after supper sat some time sung laugh’t talk’d & then went to dancing again danced till 3 in the morn: at half an hour after four the company all went away we danced 30, danced, never had I such a dance in my life before nor ever shall I have such a one again I believe.123See Richard Mabey, Gilbert White: A Biography of the Author of The Natural History of Selborne (London: Century, 1986), 88–94. See also Rashleigh Holt-White, ed., The Life and Letters of Gilbert White, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1901), 1, 129–38, and in particular 130.

The following day they all had energy enough to climb the zigzag path up the Hanger to have tea in the Hermitage. They walked around the High Wood. Later they viewed the romantic prospects of the Hermitage by lamplight. Catherine noted in her diary: ‘Never shall I forget the happiness of this day which exceeded any I ever had in all my Life.’124Holt-White, ed., The Life and Letters of Gilbert White, 1, 131. On 25 June — Harry’s thirtieth birthday — Gilbert White noted: ‘This is now the sixth week of the dry weather.’125Greenoak, ed., The Journals of Gilbert White, 1, 129.

Just after cutting the grass in the meadow on the 28th, the rains began on 29 June. By the 30th, the vast showers and thunder and hail had ‘damaged the zigzag a good deal’.126Ibid., 130. During July, as the rains continued, the melons faltered, and the hay was in ‘a miserable way’ by the 29 July. White had jotted down on 19 July:

Finished planting-out 6 trenches of Celeri, & a second plot of Endive.

Cut the first Succade.

Very wet weather.127Ibid.

Catherine Battie would remember the day differently:

Tuesday 19 [July] after breakfast Mr. W. [Gilbert White] came in to ask us to go out a Riding we drest and went over to his house but the weather grew so bad that it prevented our going We spent the morn together with much mirth & cheerfulness we were all weigh’d to see how much we were worth. I weigh 134 lb oh monstrous . . .128Holt-White, ed., The Life and Letters of Gilbert White, 133.

In those wet July days, the girls ‘toss’d the hay about a little’, rode in intervals between showers, and listened to recitals of ‘Thomsons Seasons’.129Ibid., referring to James Thomson’s The Seasons (London, 1730). On 27 July White noted that he divided out and planted ‘M:rs Snooke’s fine double Pheasant-ey’d-pinks’;130Greenoak, ed., The Journals of Gilbert White, 1, 131. Catherine noted being ‘electrified’.131Holt-White, ed., The Life and Letters of Gilbert White, 134. This was a new parlour trick that involved standing on a stool whose legs were insulated by rubber, and having one’s hair brushed until it stood on end (see pl. 290).

On just one occasion the two narratives converge. White observed human rather than animal activities in an uncharacteristic entry for 28 July: ‘Drank tea 20 of us at the Hermitage: the Miss Batties, & the Mulso family contributed much to our pleasure by their singing, & being dress’d as shepherds, & shepherdesses. It was a most elegant evening; & all parties appear’d highly satisfy’d. The Hermit appear’d to great advantage’ (pl. 195).132Greenoak, ed., The Journals of Gilbert White, 1, 131.

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Description: Drawing for Gilbert White’s Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne by...

195. Samuel Hieronymus Grimm, Drawing for Gilbert White’s Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, 1776, Indian ink and watercolour. Houghton Library, Harvard University (MS Eng 731.11)

On 25 June 1763 Gilbert White recorded that there had been six weeks of the dry weather and that a small shower that day had done little to ease the drought. The previous day, the party of visiting Battie girls had climbed the zigzag walk from White’s home for tea in the Hermitage. Gilbert White’s brother Harry appeared as the hermit of the Hermitage later that summer. By 29 June the great rains of summer began and the zigzag was damaged while the melons languished.

When the girls departed on 3 August, the ‘rainy season’ had already lasted for five weeks. But White was able to harvest a ‘fine-looking Cantaleupe’ as a gift for their father in London.133Ibid. That rainy season continued for twelve weeks, yet there was a late recovery in terms of harvests. On 24 October he recorded: ‘Tolerable grapes in plenty. Hares or some vermin have gnawed almost all the fine Pheasant-eyed pinks, & the new-planted cabbages.’134Ibid., 132–3. Back in 1748 the countess of Hertford had got around the depredations of the Percy Lodge hares; here the hares got the upper hand. By early 1764 White would sigh over the few short intervals in the prolonged wet that had begun on 29 June 1763.

If the wetness of 1763 affected his gardening, it was the drought of 1765 that helped shift Gilbert White from gardening to botany. On 6 July 1765, with his ground ‘strangely dry’d, & burnt’ from mid-June, he described what he had observed on the ride from Fyfield:

There have been fine rains round Andover & Salisbury: the verdure on the Downs is very delicate, & the sheep ponds are full of water. But when I came on this Side Alresford I found all the ponds without one drop of water; & the turf & Corn burnt-up in a very deplorable manner . . .

The downs between Alresford & Andover are full of Burnet: so full in many places that it is almost the only herb that covers the Ground: & is eaten down very close by the sheep, who are fond of it.135Ibid., 154.

He concluded that burnet seemed ‘to abound most in the poorest, & shallowest chalkey soil’ and that it was ‘a plant tenacious of life’.136Ibid., 154–5.

A general shift was under way between 1765 and 1766, which resulted from White’s study of Benjamin Stilling-fleet’s Tracts (1759 and 1762).137This transition is discussed in great detail in Paul G. M. Foster: Gilbert White and his Records: A Scientific Biography (London: Christopher Helm, 1988). Thus his ‘Garden-Kalendar’ became ‘A Calender of Flora & the Garden’ from 9 August 1765 onwards. In 1766 he ran the Flora Selbornensis concurrently with the Kalendar. The new botany remained, however, linked to the garden and husbandry. Ahead of the renaming of his calendar to include ‘flora’, White also began to record birds and insects. The elaborate account of the field cricket in May 1761 already suggests something of the complexity of his mental geography (see Introduction). The acquisition of Stilling-fleet’s Tracts, most likely in the summer of 1765, effectively consolidated a coordinating of data from botany, natural history and meteorology. While he never abandoned the records of gardening and farming, his new ‘co-incidents’ allowed for affective response as well as scientific accuracy. Early in 1765 he had reported the gardener’s viewpoint, plain and simple: ‘Destroyed 24 bullfinches, which lay very hard on the Cherry-trees, & plum-trees, & had done a great deal of Mischief’.138Greenoak, ed., The Journals of Gilbert White, 1, 147, entry for 20 February 1765. On 12 July the tone was different: ‘The Swallows & martins are bringing-out their young.’139Ibid., 155. And on 21 July 1765 he wrote more expansively:

The Glow-worms no longer shine on the Common:

In June they were very frequent.

I once saw them twinkle in the South hams of Devon as late as the middle of Septem:r

The Redbreast just essays to sing.140Ibid., 157.

On 28 July there followed an affecting account, in which the notes of bird and insect alternate in a pitch and sonority that is the orchestral score of Selborne:

The Martins begin to assemble round the weather-cock; & the Swallows on the wallnut-trees.

Dry hot weather still, with a N: wind.

The Goldfinch, Yellow-hammer, & sky-lark are the only birds that continue to sing. The red-breast is just beginning. The field-crickets in the Lythe cry no longer.141Ibid.

The meadow had become more than the enamelled field of fresh scents wafted into the garden. The Lythe was the home of the field cricket, chirping all night as well as all day from May to July. The birds were more than mere Picturesque songsters, or a nuisance, or the hunter’s quarry, or objects in Mary Bampfylde’s embroidery (see pl. 200). ‘The yellow-hammer continues to sing’ was the refrain of August. Then, all of a sudden, it stops: the yellowhammer ‘seems to have done singing’ on the 27th of that month.142Ibid., 160–61.

The meadow at Wakes is brought to life through the art of Samuel Hieronymus Grimm, who came calling more than a decade later. He arrived on 8 July 1776, just as White was turning ‘the hack-cocks which are in a bad state’.143Greenoak, ed., The Journals of Gilbert White, II, 138. The entry, including a note of the temperature at 59°F (15°C), reads: ‘Mr Grimm, my artist, came from London to take some of our finest views.’ He stayed twenty-eight days, leaving on 5 August. He worked very hard on twenty-four of those days, ‘and shewed good specimens of his genius, assiduity, and modest behaviour’.144Mabey, Gilbert White, 166. The fee appears to have been 2½ guineas a week. During the month, White recorded how the hay, at first in ‘a bad way’, was cut and ricked. The days became ‘sweet’ and then ‘sultry’. On 3 August, after a spell over 70°F (21.1ºC), it was ‘all finished-off in most delicate condition’ (pl. 196).145Greenoak, ed., Journals of Gilbert White, II, 141.

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Description: Unpublished drawing of Hay Meadow for Gilbert White’s Natural History and...

196. Samuel Hieronymus Grimm, unpublished drawing of Hay Meadow for Gilbert White’s Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, 1776, Indian ink and watercolour. Houghton Library, Harvard University (MS Eng 731.11)

Unlike July 1763, when rain left hay in ‘a miserable way’ (following the early summer warmth), the summer of 1776 went from wet to dry. Grimm painted Selborne over twenty-four days as the weather turned fine. During July 1776, White recorded how the hay, at first in ‘a bad way’, was cut and ricked. Then the days became ‘sweet’ and ‘sultry’. On 3 August, after a spell over 70°F (21.1ºC), hay-making was at an end. Grimm thus made an idyll out what White considered that final ‘delicate condition’.

By then it was hard to recall the early months of 1776, which had been exceptionally bitter. Back on 14 January 1776 White had noted ‘Rugged Siberian weather’.146Ibid., 119. The birds took refuge in the house, only to be caught by the cats. His account from his journal would become Letter 62 to Daines Barrington in The Natural History of Selborne.

Collinson had expressed pity for the ‘fainting Reaper’ who worked through August 1765, and for the poor who could not afford bread. Gilbert White would extend compassion to the birds (perhaps even his foe the bull-finch), who — ‘in a very pitiable and starving condition’ — suffered through perishing cold. Even the hare, which the countess of Hertford had tried to outwit in her grove in 1748 (but which White still saw as tantamount to ‘vermin’ in a cabbage patch in 1763), was viewed with pity: ‘The hares also lay sullenly in their seats, and would not move till compelled by hunger; being conscious, poor animals, that the drifts and heaps treacherously betray their footsteps, and prove fatal to numbers of them.’147Gilbert White, The Natural History of Selborne [1789], ed. Paul Foster (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 241; and Greenoak, ed., The Journals of Gilbert White, II, 120. It is interesting to compare this compassionate account with the more neutral entries in his Journal: Thursday, 18 January 1776, for example: ‘Cats catch all the birds that come-in for shelter from the cold’; and Saturday, 20 January: ‘Hares, compelled by hunger, come into my garden, & eat the pinks. Lambs fall, & are frozen to the ground.’

Nothing of this is evident in Grimm’s pictures of Wakes, which sustain the pastoral mood of Thomas Robins’s view of Pan’s Lodge: a tent on the lawn, the hermit on the Hanger, and figures lazily raking up the hay into hay-cocks. The ‘mirth & jollity’ of Catherine Battie’s account prevails over the ‘miserable’ hay of White’s journal of 1763. Gilbert White would have to find, through his own art and science, how to represent these layers of reality, so that the scourges of a winter could coexist with the blessings of a summer, all within the cover of a single work: The Natural History of Selborne (1789).

Hestercombe and its ‘Noble Groves’ in the Hot Summers of 1781 and 1783

In The Natural History of Selborne, Gilbert White began Letter 64 to Daines Barrington:

As the effects of heat are seldom very remarkable in the northerly climate of England, where the summers are often so defective in warmth and sun-shine as not to ripen the fruits of the earth so well as might be wished, I shall be more concise in my account of the severity of a summer season, and so make a little amends for the prolix account of the degrees of cold, and the inconveniencies that we suffered from some late vigorous winters.148White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Foster, 245–6. All subsequent quotes from this letter, 246.

The summers of 1781 and 1783 were singled out as ‘unusually hot and dry’. So sultry was 1783 that the ‘effluvia of flowers in fields and meadows’ made the air ‘impregnated’ with scent..149Ibid., 246. Statistically, over three centuries, 1781 was the fourth hottest summer on record. Yet, for heat alone, 1762 was not far behind. More significantly, White’s Garden-Kalendar documented how drought was commonplace — especially in the early summers of the 1750s and 1760s. It amounts to a litany: desiccation as a scourge for gardeners (though a blessing for wheat farmers). The year 1763 proved wet, by contrast, but only the summer of 1767 marked a general shift towards wetter seasons — the run-up to the soggy summer of 1768, when a poor wheat harvest led to exorbitant food prices.150Jones, Seasons and Prices, 144. After the freak wetness of 1763 and 1768 came three cold, and moderately wet summers, 1769–71; there were also very wet autumns in 1770 and 1772.151See again Hulme and Barrow, eds, Climates of the British Isles, 405, for the ‘Central England’ mean surface temperature table (1659–1996), and 409, for the ‘England and Wales Precipitation’ table (1766–1996). Thus combined, these wet seasons would offset all the droughts within the statistics of that general cycle.

What this means in gardening terms is that, as shrubberies began to replace groves, many a scorched lawn resulted where once the grass had been protected by a canopy (pls 197 and 198). The engraving of the St John’s College garden by M. A. Rooker that appeared in the Oxford Almanac in 1783 was based on a painting from the torrid summer of 1781. It points to the value of old elms against the exposure to sun. Back in 1748 Thomas Salmon had suggested that only cold and wet weather prevented society gathering in the ‘outer and inner Groves’. Yet in 1781 boiling heat might have been an equal deterrent. White recorded that the rind of the peaches and nectarines of his wall trees were ‘scalded’ and that his apples were ‘coddled’ on the twig.152It seems unlikely that he meant that codling moth infestation came with the heat. He linked ‘coddled’ to the ‘lack of quickness of flavour’, making the fruit similar to the ‘vapid and insipid’ apples of southern climes.

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Description: St John's College and Gardens by Williams, William

197. William Williams, ‘St John’s College and Gardens’, from Oxonia depicta (London, 1732–3). Houghton Library, Harvard University (pf Typ 705.32.878)

Thomas Salmon described the allées of St John’s in the warm season of 1748 as ‘the general Rendezvous of Gentlemen and Ladies every Sunday Evening in Summer’. Acquiring their formal disposition around the time of Celia Fiennes’s visit circa 1694, these allées had remained intact for some eight decades and through Bampfylde’s years at the college. In its stiff, geometric disposition, the college garden consisted in the ‘outer grove’ with elms (left) and the ‘inner grove’ with terrace arbour (right).

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Description: St. John's College garden, detail by Rooker, Michael

198. M. A. Rooker, detail from an engraving of the St John’s College garden published in the Oxford Almanac in 1783. The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford

This view, based on a painting completed in the hot summer of 1781, points to the value of the shade provided by a few old elms that were retained from the ‘outer grove’. Horace Walpole wrote in 1778 how there were only ‘five loose trees’ left from the ‘comely’ allées and how the rage for shrubbery amounted to ‘three yards of serpentine shrubs’. Description and depiction thus suggest how the grove was losing ground to the new shrubbery, which was ornamented with exotic trees and shrubs from North America.

Thomas Salmon had described the formal college allées in that warm season of 1748 as ‘the general Rendezvous of Gentlemen and Ladies every Sunday Evening in Summer’.153Thomas Salmon, The Foreigner’s Companion through the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford (1748), quoted from The Canterbury Quadrangle, 1636–1986: An Anthology, ed. Howard Colvin and Keith Thomas (Oxford: St John’s College/Bocardo Press, 1986), 23. The full account is: ‘In the . . . [outer grove] the Walks are planted with Dutch Elms, and the Walls covered with Ever-greens: The inward Garden has every thing almost that can render such a Place agreeable, as a Terrass, a Mount, Wilderness, and well-contriv’d Arbours; but, notwithstanding this is much more admired by Strangers than the other, the outer Garden is become the general Rendezvous of Gentlemen and Ladies every Sunday Evening in Summer: Here we have an Opportunity of seeing the whole University together almost, as well as the better Sort of Townsmen and Ladies, who seldom fail of making their Appearance here at the same time, Unless the Weather prevents them.’ Acquiring their formal disposition around the time of Celia Fiennes’s visit circa 1694,154Mavis Batey, Oxford Gardens: The University’s Influence on Garden History (Amersham: Avebury, 1982), 117. these allées had remained intact for some eighty years, through the Bampfylde years at St John’s (pl. 197). Eventually, in 1774, Robert Penson — a nurseryman and gardener to the college — proposed remodelling the groves that had by then taken on the slightly unkempt look of J. B. Malchair’s view.155The view by John Baptist Malchair is dated July 1776 and pre-dates the landscape improvements. As illustrated in the Oxford Almanac (pl. 198), the finalized layout of 1777–8 retained a few elms, but only as part of an entirely new shrubbery. Shrubbery taste had finally prevailed in Oxford, as Horace Walpole wrote to Lady Ossory in 1778:

I forgot to mention what taste has penetrated to Oxford. At St John’s College they have demolished a comely old square garden of about an acre, and bestowed upon it three yards of serpentine shrubs, five loose trees that are hopping about between four walls; and I suppose will have an irregular lake of a hogshead of water — when the brewing season is over!156Lewis, ed., Walpole’s Correspondence, XXXIII, 57. The letter is dated 27 September 1778.

The St John’s redesign thus sums up neatly a generalized shift in taste: the regimented rows of an allée giving way to the serpentine ranks of the ‘theatrical’ shrubbery with its fashionable American plants. While Walpole succeeded at Strawberry Hill in reconciling the two tastes (groves and shrubbery), most jumped on the bandwagon of shrubbery improvement. In this light, Walpole expressed his dismay on seeing Alexander Pope’s garden in Twickenham ‘modernized’ by the new owner, Sir William Stanhope. Sir William, who had bought the numinous spot on the Thames, was evidently following the advice of his son-in-law in cutting down the poet’s sacred groves. Walpole wrote indignantly to Sir Horace Mann on 20 June 1760:

Sir William . . . has hacked and hewed these groves, wriggled a winding gravel walk through them with an edging of shrubs, in what they call the modern taste. . . . Now I am talking of modern improvements, I have wondered, with the rage of taste that reigns, that nobody has laid a plan before the Society for the Reformation of Manners, with a proposal for altering and improving the new Jerusalem [including] . . . shrubberies planted of all kind of exotics from the Chinese Hyssop to the Cedar of Lebanon — 157Ibid., XXI, 417–18. Walpole was clearly having fun modernizing Solomon’s wisdom to the point of inventing the ‘Chinese Hyssop’. The biblical version in 1 Kings 4, 33 goes: ‘And he spake of trees, from the cedar tree that is in Lebanon even unto the hyssop that springeth out of the wall.’ It is interesting to find William Shenstone resorting to the same conceit, when he wrote to Lady Luxborough on 14 May 1749: ‘I have bought Miller’s book of gardening very elegantly bound; so you may expect me e’er long to talk like Solomon of all manner of Plants: from ye Cedars upon mount Lebanon, to the Hyssop yt groweth against ye wall’. See Williams, The Letters of William Shenstone, 193.

This was a common sentiment, expressed by William Cowper and Richard Graves.158William Cowper spoke for a generation when he wrote of ‘Capability’ Brown as the ‘omnipotent magician’ who made ‘Woods vanish’. See Laird, The Flowering of the Landscape Garden, 244. Richard Graves of Mickleton, Gloucestershire — a close friend of William Shenstone from Oxford days — included a poem in The Festoon that epitomized the resentment at any tree being felled: ‘On Dr. Evans’s cutting down a Row of Trees, at St. John’s-College, Oxon.’

INDULGENT nature on each kind bestows

A secret instinct to discern its foes:

The goose, a silly bird, yet shuns the fox;

Lambs fly from wolves; and sailors steer from rocks.

Evans, the gallows, as his fate foresees,

And bears the like antipathy to trees.159Richard Graves, The Festoon: A Select Collection of Epigrams (London, 1766), 42. I am very grateful to John Phibbs for providing this reference. John Edmondson traces a version of these lines back to an inscription in the 2nd edition of John Evelyn’s Sylva (1670), but the sentiments remained fresh a hundred years later.

In effect, Bampfylde’s Hestercombe, just as much as Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, represents all those gardens in which Art — mimicking festoons of interior decor or embroidery of dresses — displayed itself in Nature through the texture of groves and meadows.160See again Laird, ‘Mrs Delany’s Circles’. In each, shrubbery was relegated to a subsidiary side display.

It was not only the weather, then, that painted the grove in varied hues. More to the point, it was how the canvas of lawn or coppice was artfully primed before showers applied the finishing touches. Literature, as well as fine art, provided the primer for the landscaper, and knowing visitors recognized the associations. Thus Coplestone Warre Bampfylde drew his own sylvan settings while illustrating literary works such as Euphrosyne (alluding to Mirth among the Three Graces). The arrival of guests, adventitious or invited — flowers of the field as well as the flower of womanhood — went on to complete scenes recalling Giorgione, Titian or Watteau. Even Milton’s Eve, stalked by Satan in Paradise Lost — ‘Among thick-woven arborets and flowers / Embordered on each bank’ — might have been recalled by the city-dwelling guest coming upon the ‘smell of grain, or tedded grass’ in such meadowlands.161Quoted from John Dixon Hunt, ed., The Oxford Book of Garden Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 48. For the quote from Spenser below, ibid., 18. The three mirthful Battie girls, gracing the parish of Selborne in the summer of 1763, were just such welcome guests from their father’s homes in Great Russell Street and Twickenham.

With literary associations supported by painterly allusions, the scent of hay was best enjoyed from the cool of the grove. In the warmth of June 1750, for example, Mrs Delany took the trappings of interior artifice out into the garden at Delville on the edge of Dublin (cf. pl. 166):

We have discovered a new breakfasting place under the shade of nut-trees, impenetrable to the sun’s rays, in the midst of a grove of elm, where we shall breakfast this morning: I have ordered cherries, strawberries and nosegays to be laid on our breakfast table, and have appointed a harper to be here to play to us during our repast.162Ibid., 558.

The grove, retaining its nemorous associations, thus proved its domestic worth. Lacking the pedigree of association with God, Solomon, Elijah, John the Baptist, Plato and Eve herself, how could the shrubbery compete? Georgian ladies liked the shade as much as any Dryad.

In 1781 Coplestone Warre Bampfylde was sixty and suffering from the gout that had afflicted Peter Collinson before him. In January 1782 he wrote to Sir Charles Tynte how he hoped to be ‘firmly stout upon my trotters, which have been too long fettered by the gouty humour’.163Quoted from White, A Gentleman of Fine Taste, 13. He had recently completed drawings for Shenstone’s Oxford friend Richard Graves, illustrating Euphrosyne in 1776 and Columella in 1779. He went on to provide the frontispieces to Graves’s Eugenius, which appeared in two volumes in 1785. Using the conceit of artistic rivalry, Graves praised Mrs Bampfylde’s needlework embroidery in Euphrosyne — ‘Her glowing tints surpass the pencil’s art’.164Ibid., 10. A silk embroidery, Pheasant and Lapwing and Yellow Ham — sent to Henry Hoare at Stourhead in 1771 — confirms a talent that Arthur Young called the ‘lady’s genius’ (pls 199 and 200).165Arthur Young, The Farmer’s Tour Through the East of England, 4 vols (London, 1771), IV, 10. Employing a similar device of art’s rivalry with nature, Graves celebrated Bampfylde’s landscape in Columella: ‘a most beautiful cascade, or rather wild cataract . . . shaded by a gloomy scene of old trees and wild shrubs’.166Richard Graves, Columella; or, The Distressed Anchoret (London, 1779), 127–8. Later, he made reference in his Particulars in the Life of William Shenstone (1788) to the influence on Bampfylde of the poet’s ‘Arcadian scene’: Shenstone had ‘conducted the Naiads through his groves’.167Richard Graves, Particulars in the Life of William Shenstone (London, 1788), 61. Graves’s encomium ‘on some exquisite Needlework, by Mrs. B—’, placed Mary in ‘Hastercomb’s Arcadian groves / Amidst her falling rills’.168Richard Graves, Euphrosyne; or, Amusements on the road of life . . . (London, 1776), 127.

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Description: Portrait of Mary Bampfylde, Hestercombe by Phelps, Richard

199. Possibly by Richard Phelps, Portrait of Mary Bampfylde, Hestercombe, circa 1770, oil on canvas, 28 ¾ × 24 in. (73 × 61 cm). Private Collection. Photograph courtesy of Philip White

Mary Bampfylde (née Knight), who married Coplestone Warre Bampfylde of Hestercombe in 1755, suffered from ill health for much of her life. Bampfylde himself was later prone to indifferent health, and by 1780 he was increasingly plagued by gout. Mary occupied herself by making exquisite silk pictures. Admired by Arthur Young, the silks were ‘touched with a spirit and liveliness that do honour to the lady’s genius’.

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Description: Pheasant, Lapwing, and Yellow Ham Still Life by Bampfylde, Mary

200. Mary Bampfylde, Pheasant, Lapwing and Yellow Ham Still Life, circa 1771, silk embroidery. National Trust, Stourhead, Wiltshire

Mary Bampfylde busied herself with accomplishments. In November 1771 Henry Hoare wrote: ‘Mrs Bampfylde has sent me some of Her work a Pheasant & Lapwing & Yellow Ham . . . most wonderfully fine’. Yellowhammers (Emberiza citrinella) sing alone in the heat of summer afternoons, while lapwings or peewits (Vanellus vanellus) gather in flocks over winter stubble fields, having spent — as Gilbert White’s Selborne documents — time on the ‘downs and sheep-walks’ in the post-breeding season.

Bampfylde, thus ‘partly indebted’ to the Leasowes, made his cascade ‘amidst the shade of laurels and other elegant shrubs’.169White, A Gentleman of Fine Taste, 61. When he drew it himself, possibly in 1781, he looked from the vantage of shade on a sun-soaked lawn (pl. 201). Arthur Young wrote in 1771 how the visitor came upon the scene ‘that will rivet you to the spot with admiration’. He continued:

The accompanyment [to the cascade] is as happy as the principal: a gloomy wood, whose branches bend about with all the ease of nature, and exclude every thing but the sun beams, which sparkle on the falling water: the floor of this sequestered dell is a small lawn, in which the water is lost.170Young, The Farmer’s Tour Through the East of England, IV, 5.

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Description: The Cascade at Hestercombe by Bampfylde, Copplestone Warre

201. Coplestone Warre Bampfylde, Cascade at Hestercombe, circa 1780–81, watercolour over graphite, 13 ¾ × 9 ⅞ in. (35 × 25 cm). Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Bampfylde’s painting has a slightly parched look, which could mean that it was painted in the hot summer of 1781. Whatever the particular season, the cooling effect of water is evident. Arthur Young described the water in 1771 as sparkling while falling in the midst of ‘a gloomy wood’. Gilbert White pointed to the value of ‘the vast effluvia’ of woodlands in moderating temperatures during the hot summers of 1781 and 1783.

Gilbert White made a telling point when he observed the value of grove and wood in keeping temperatures down in his parish: ‘the vast effluvia from our woodlands temper and moderate our heats’.171White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Foster, 247. For the gout-ridden Bampfylde, it must have been a boon, following the winter season in Bath, to go into his combe at odd moments throughout the rest of the year, even on the hottest day of July or August. What these views of the cascade convey is the effect of sustained verdure benefitting from the cool exhalation of water and wood. What they do not reveal is the ‘effluvia’ of meadow flowers and wilderness weeds, wafted by the Zephyr winds of Arcady.

Coda: A Moment in Thomas Robins’s Embroidered and Garnished View

It remains an inconvenient truth that topographical views — including Bampfylde’s own — consistently fail to show fine lawn embroidery: that which Nature offered Lady Luxborough in her spring coppice, or that which Art brought to William Shenstone’s grove in early summer. Mid-eighteenth-century topographical art emphasized plain grass, and, only occasionally, did artists render the patterns of hay in the surrounding summer fields. More commonly, artists such as Arthur Devis produced exquisite views of genteel folk on expansive green lawns that include only an odd tree ‘garnished’ with the embroidery of honeysuckle (pl. 202). It was Thomas Robins the Elder, in evoking the embroidered Pastoral of poems, who ventured closer than any artist to rendering the thick fabric of groves and meadows.

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Description: Sir John Shaw and his Family in the Park at Eltham Lodge, Kent by Devis, Arthur

202. Arthur Devis, Sir John Shaw and his Family in the Park at Eltham Lodge, Kent, 1761, oil on canvas, 52 ¾ × 78 ⅜ in. (134.3 × 199.1 cm). Gift of Emily Crane Chadbourne, The Art Institute of Chicago (1951.206)

The year 1761, when Devis painted this canvas, was one of some drought, but, unlike 1762 (as Gilbert White noted), the lawns recovered their verdure. Devis depicts figures on expansive green lawns, with Eltham Lodge (designed by Hugh May, 1663–4) in the background. Seated by shady allées near a tent, Sir John and his elder son are shown reading. Near the boy, the foremost allée tree shows most clearly the honeysuckle ‘garnishing’ that resembles the effect Batty Langley described in 1728 for wilderness trees (see pl. 112).

His views of Honington Hall in Warwickshire, completed on 3 August 1759, are framed by Rococo scrolls that record moments of flowering within that run of very hot summers (pl. 203). One view places a fête champêtre on an embroidered lawn (pl. 204). It resembles Mary Delany’s account of a petit déjeuner sur l’herbe, but here the flowers are not artificially strewn on the breakfast table; indeed, the grass appears studded with cyclamen or other late summer blooms. White had jotted in his Garden-Kalendar:

June 19. . . . Furious hot summer weather.

July 23. . . . Unusual hot summer-weath[er] for three weeks past. Wheat-harvest is begun in some places.172Greenoak, ed., Journals of Gilbert White, 1, 78–82.

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Description: Prospect of Honington Hall, Warwickshire by Robins, Thomas, the Elder

203. Thomas Robins the Elder, Prospect of Honington Hall, Warwickshire, dated 3 August 1759, pen and ink and watercolour with bodycolour, and graphite and bodycolour, 13 ¼ × 19 ¼ in. (33.5 × 49 cm). Private Collection

The Rococo frame is entwined with wild flowers of pasture, wheatfield and hedgerow. Spiny restharrow (right, Ononis spinosa), fashioned in the Rococo-Chinoiserie style of Robins’s spindle and rosehips (see pl. 185), flowers from June to September. All the framing flowers, such as ragwort (left, Senecio sp.), would have ‘enamelled’ the countryside as Robins completed this painting in the early August heat of 1759. The exotic raspberry (Rubus odoratus, lower left) would have flowered in the shade of the groves.

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Description: Prospect of Honington Hall, Warwickshire, detail showing the Chinese Pavillion by...

204. Thomas Robins the Elder, Prospect of Honington Hall, Warwickshire (detail showing the Chinese Pavilion), pen and ink, watercolour over graphite and bodycolour, 13 × 19 ¼ in. (33 × 49 cm). Private Collection

Sanderson Miller, working for Joseph Townsend (1755–60), laid out the river in 1755. Overlooking the river, the Townsend family is shown enjoying their fête champêtre in the shade of a grove. A family member seems to be gathering flowers in a basket. The naturalized cyclamen (Cyclamen hederifolium) of the Rococo frame grows in shaded grass, flowering from August to September. It is thus among a group of flowers, native as well as naturalized, that could have embroidered meadows into autumn: from saffron (Colchicum autumnale) to the naked autumn crocus (Crocus nudiflorus).

By the end of July White noted ‘great rain after several weeks drought’. Yet the ‘Prodigious hot, sunny weather’173Ibid., 1, 83. continued in early August, when Thomas Robins painted himself into one Arcadian view of Honington. It was a gesture of considerable moment: labour as leisure (pl. 205).

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Description: Prospect of Honington Hall, Warwickshire, detail by Robins, Thomas, the Elder

205. Thomas Robins the Elder, Prospect of Honington Hall, Warwickshire (detail), dated 3 August 1759, pen and ink and watercolour with bodycolour, and graphite and bodycolour, 13 ¼ × 19 ¼ in. (33.5 × 49 cm). Private Collection

When Thomas Robins painted himself into this Arcadian view of Honington, his labour became the leisure of fêtes champêtres. The red-headed Robins (fancifully seated next to his wife, or more probably the owner’s wife, Mrs Townsend) rejoices in the shade of a honeysuckle-garnished pine. One dog enjoys the lady’s lap, while another prances. Spring ‘embroidery’ is here sustained during hot summer months by enamelled verdure under canopy, and by sweet honeysuckles beautifying the bare trunk.

The red-headed Robins is seated by his wife (or more probably the owner’s wife Mrs Townsend) on the lawn by a clump of trees. Honeysuckle ‘garnishes’ a pine stem. A dog prances. There is some new shrubbery near the house, but otherwise this is a garden of groves. The Rococo frame recalls — as in some Georgic verse — the fields of labour. In that precocious harvest of 1759, the toiling reaper’s sickle would cut corn enamelled with poppy (Papaver rhoeas). The reaper rested in the shade of the hedgerow on a bank embroidered with yellow meadow vetchling (Lathyrus pratensis) and tufted vetch (Vicia cracca). He walked home through fields studded with scarlet pimpernel (Anagallis arvensis) and spiny restharrow (Ononis spinosa). Meanwhile, leisured folk would take refuge in the dark groves, where the exotic raspberry (Rubus odoratus) shared the shade with festoons of honeysuckle. As White observed, one bird would continue to call through the heat of the afternoon: what Mary Bampfylde called the ‘Yellow Ham’ (Emberiza citronella). The yellowhammer sang his cheerful, repetitive song all day long, all summer through, until the naturalist or artist came along with a gun, or until some bird-catcher ensnared him for an aviary in town. The avian Grim Reaper came in many guises.

1 See John Evelyn’s addition to Sylva of 1706, ‘An Historical Account of the Sacredness and Use of standing Groves’ (John Evelyn, Silva; or, A Discourse of Forest-Trees, London, 1706). »

2 Bampfylde matriculated in 1737. For a discussion of his life and work, see Philip White, A Gentleman of Fine Taste: The Watercolours of Coplestone Warre Bampfylde (1720–1791), exhibition catalogue (Hestercombe, Somerset, 1995). See also Kim Sloan, ‘A Noble Art’: Amateur Artists and Drawing Masters, c. 1600–1800 (London: British Museum Press, 2000), 83 and 100. »

3 For the implications of the ‘circuit’ of house and garden, see Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978), chapter 7: ‘The Social House, 1720–70’. For previous research documenting how the ‘grove’ or ‘wilderness’ evolved into the mid-eighteenth-century ‘shrubbery’, see Mark Laird, The Flowering of the Landscape Garden: English Pleasure Grounds, 1720–1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). »

4 For Thomas Robins the Elder, see John Harris and Martyn Rix, Gardens of Delight: The Rococo English Landscape of Thomas Robins, the Elder (London: Basilisk Press, 1978); see also Cathryn Spence, ‘Thomas Robins and the Dorset Sketches’, Georgian Group Journal, XXI (2013), 30–46. I am grateful for access to the latter article before publication. For the best discussion of the limner, see Sloan, ‘A Noble Art’, chapter 2: ‘Learning to Limn’. In 1755 Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language defined a limner as simply any ‘painter’ or ‘picture-maker’, but the original derivation of the word from luminare — to give light — may be important, since Thomas Robins’s art can be considered a form of ‘illumination’. »

5 Cathryn Spence raised these doubts in a personal communication of February 2013. »

6 John Phibbs of the Debois Landscape Survey Group produced a survey report entitled ‘Analysis of the Combe at Hestercombe’ in June 2001. This unpublished report contains a comprehensive review of documentation for Hestercombe, including discussion of ‘enamelling in literature’ (Chaucer, Milton, Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser). I am greatly indebted to him for sharing his knowledge. Today the Laird-Phibbs proposal for replanting Hestercombe remains only partly implemented. »

7 Marjorie Williams, The Letters of William Shenstone (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1939), 193. Note also Shenstone’s comment in a letter of 6 June 1749, 199: ‘I have two or three Peonies in my grove, yt I have planted amongst Fern and brambles in a gloomy Place by ye Water’s side. You will not easily conceive how good an Effect they produce, & how great a stress I lay upon them.’ »

8 Lady Luxborough (Henrietta Saint-John Knight), Letters Written by the Late Right Honourable Lady Luxborough to William Shenstone Esq. (London, 1775), 200. »

9 John Phibbs has pointed out that one of Lady Luxborough’s letters of 14 March 1750 (p. 196) refers to a rough ‘Service Walk’ that separates the ‘Shrubbery’ from the ‘Coppice, which is also a kind of shrubbery’. This implies a fluid terminology that resists modern attempts to establish distinctions. For a comparison of work by Ehret and Robins, see Wilfrid Blunt, The Art of Botanical Illustration [1950], ed. William T. Stearn (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1994), 170. Remarking on his ‘modernity of technique’ and ‘exceptionally sensitive and delicate’ drawing style, Wilfrid Blunt placed Robins up with the commanding ‘genius’ of Georg Dionysius Ehret. He commented: ‘It is interesting to compare Robins’s study of auriculas with Ehret’s more finished painting of the same subject; each is, in its own way, perfect.’ Hence the ‘paragon’ of the chapter title refers as much to the rival excellence of the two artists as to the rivalry of nature and art, or, more specifically, of grove and shrubbery. »

10 Laird, The Flowering of the Landscape Garden, 113 and n. 33. »

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

12 By comparison with Ehret, who has a short entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, the life and work of Thomas Robins remains poorly covered, despite John Harris’s exemplary study of his topographical art. In the absence of an ODNB entry, Cathryn Spence, ‘Thomas Robins and the Dorset Sketches’, provides an authoritative biographical sketch: his training under Jacob Portret, which explains the ‘Chinese’ look of Robins’s motifs and figures; his life in Bath, with July to September for topographical art and autumn–winter for teaching art and pursuing his off-season botanical studies; and his circle of clients and patrons, notably Henry Seymer (1714–1785), the Dorset naturalist-artist, with an interest in shells and butterflies. Seymer copied several images from Robins’s flower album in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, for his ‘Butterflies and Plants’. See also R. I. Vane-Wright and H.W.D. Hughes, The Seymer Legacy: Henry Seymer and Henry Seymer Jnr of Dorset and their Entomological Paintings, with a Catalogue of Butterflies and Plants, 1775–1783 (Cardigan: Forrest Text, 2005). »

13 Thomas Hull, Select Letters between the Late Duchess of Somerset, Lady Luxborough . . . , 2 vols (London, 1778), 1, 68. I am indebted to John Phibbs for this reference. For an account of Lady Luxborough’s friendship with Frances, countess of Hertford, see Jane Brown, My Darling Heriott: Henrietta Luxborough, Poetic Gardener and Irrepressible Exile (London: Harper, 2006). »

14 See G. S. Boulger, ‘Dillenius, Johann Jakob (1687–1747)’, entry revised by D. J. Mabberley, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online edition: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/7648 [accessed 1 October 2013]: ‘Dillenius was somewhat corpulent and, in March 1747, was seized with apoplexy, from which he died in Oxford on 2 April’. »

15 Alan W. Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden . . . ’: Selected Letters, 1725–1768, of Peter Collinson, FRS (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2002), 144. For the failure of European friends — notably Linnaeus — to respond to Collinson’s letters, see Jean O’Neill and Elizabeth P. McLean, Peter Collinson and the Eighteenth-century Natural History Exchange (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2008), 124–5. »

16 For Cadwallader Colden, see O’Neill and McLean, Peter Collinson, 88–90. »

17 Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 148. »

18 See here E. L. Jones, Seasons and Prices: The Role of the Weather in English Agricultural History (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1964), 139–40. The peak in grain exports in 1749 and 1750 rounded off a decade end with many good to excellent harvests. »

19 Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 148. »

20 See Judith A. Marshall and E.C.M. Haes, Grasshoppers and Allied Insects of Great Britain and Ireland (Colchester: Harley, 1988), 146–7: ‘The majority of migrants to Britain are of the northern subspecies, L. m. migratoria, usually arriving here during August and September from mainland outbreaks which have arisen in the Danube delta area by the Black Sea.’ While specimens are apparently recorded from 1693, the most impressive invasions were in 1748 and the 1840s. The swarms in Europe of 1745–54 reached the British Isles in 1748 as a result of the prevailing east winds of that hot summer. See also J. M. Richie and D. E. Pedgley, ‘Desert Locusts Cross the Atlantic’, Antenna (Bulletin of the Royal Entomological Society of London), XIII/1 (January 1989), 10–12. »

21 George Edwards, A Natural History of Uncommon Birds . . . , vol. IV (London, 1751), pl. 208. »

22 Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 148. »

23 Lady Luxborough, Letters, 38. »

24 Williams, The Letters of William Shenstone, 188. »

25 The difficulties in reconstructing the physical layout of the ‘shrubbery’ at Barrells is apparent in Jane Brown’s book on Lady Luxborough, in which the plan of the garden and ferme ornée is ‘drawn chiefly from information in her Letters to William Shenstone’. See Brown, My Darling Heriott, 162. »

26 See Cathryn Spence, ‘For True Friends: Jerry Peirce’s Patriot Whig Garden at Lilliput Castle’, Bath History, XII (2011), 6. »

27 Lady Luxborough, Letters, 331–2. »

28 For the background to Robins’s topographical work, see again Harris and Rix, Gardens of Delight. »

29 See O’Neill and McLean, Peter Collinson, 47–9, for tracing Canarina canariensis back, through Peter Collinson, to Dyrham and the duchess of Beaufort at Badminton. They leave open a question about why Collinson referred to it as bright blue rather than burnt orange. »

30 For a discussion of the ‘enamelled mead’ of the Middle Ages and beyond, see Jan Woudstra, ‘The Enamelled Mead: History and Practice of Exotic Perennials Grown in Grassy Swards’, Landscape Research, XXV/1 (2000), 29–47. »

31 For an analysis of the floristic composition of an eighteenth-century lawn, see Oliver Gilbert, ‘The Ancient Lawns at Chatsworth’, in Naturschutz und Denkmalpflege: Wege zu einem Dialog im Garten, ed. Ingo Kowarik, Erika Schmidt and Brigitt Sigel (Zurich: VDF Hochschulverlag AG an der ETH, 1998), 217–20. »

32 See again Hull, Select Letters, 1, 68. »

33 Lady Luxborough, Letters, 98. »

34 Ibid., 200. »

35 O’Neill and McLean, Peter Collinson, 87–8. »

36 Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 152. »

37 Ibid., 154. »

38 Wheat exports hit a dramatic peak in 1750. This spike was rivalled in the course of the eighteenth century only by the peak of good harvests in the 1730s, and by the solid yields in the first half of the 1760s. »

39 Chapters 1 and 2 of Jones’s Seasons and Prices — ‘The Seasons and Economic Affairs’ and ‘The Seasons and Rural Life’ — provide a good summary of divergent interests among farmers, and of the complexity of weather-induced variations in different branches of farming, for example, in the production of honey. He wrote: ‘What was favourable weather for one might not be favourable for another, a complexity which introduced endless permutations of shades of difference into the state of the economy’ (p. 22). The divergent experience of farmers on heavy and light land is discussed in chapter 9, ‘The Improvement of Agriculture’, 113–14. »

40 Ibid., 141 and 147. Usually grain shortages resulted from poor summers, as in 1752 and 1756. There were food riots in 1753, for example, and again in 1756, when the government prevented grain exports. In 1780 and 1781, however, intense heat brought mildewed wheat and a light crop. See p. 48, where Jones argues that each historical instance must be considered in context and on a case-by-case basis — an approach that applies equally well to gardening; see also p. 54, where he wrote: ‘During three or four black seasons of the eighteenth century a tiny margin of the English poor was starved to death.’ »

41 See Jan Woudstra and James Hitchmough, ‘The Enamelled Mead: History and Practice of Exotic Perennials Grown in Grassy Swards’, Landscape Research, XXV/1 (2000), 29–47. »

42 Evelyn, Silva (1706), 329–36. The fourth book is entitled ‘Dendrologia’ and contains the section ‘An Historical Account of the Sacredness and Use of standing Groves, &’. »

43 Ibid., 330. »

44 For a discussion of Evelyn and evergreens, see Mark Laird, ‘Parterre, Grove and Flower Garden: European Horticulture and Planting Design in John Evelyn’s Time’, 195–200, and John H. Harvey, ‘The Plants in John Evelyn’s “Elysium Britannicum” ’, 223, in John Evelyn’s ‘Elysium Britannicum’ and European Gardening, ed. Therese O’Malley and Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1998). »

45 Quoted from David Jacques and Arend Jan van der Horst, The Gardens of William and Mary (London: Christopher Helm, 1988), 160–61. »

46 Batty Langley, New Principles of Gardening (London, 1728), 196. »

47 Cited in Ruth Hayden, Mrs Delany and her Flower Collages, 2nd edn (London: British Museum Press, 1992), 64. Mary Delany to Anne Dewes, 11 June 1745, in Lady Llanover, ed., The Autobiography and Correspondence of Mary Granville, Mrs Delany, 6 vols (London: Bentley, 1861–2), II, 361. »

48 For Grove House and Strawberry Hill, see Laird, The Flowering of the Landscape Garden, 185 and pl. 107, and 164 and figs 94 and 95, respectively. »

49 For a discussion of this manuscript, ibid., 285–90, and in particular 289. »

50 William Chambers, A Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (London, 1772), 86. »

51 ‘There is not much alteration in the house, but the gardens are no more! they are succeeded by a fine lawn, a serpentine river, wooded hills, gravel paths meandering round a shrubbery all modernized by the ingenious Mr. Brown!’, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, III, 611. »

52 Ibid., II, 432. »

53 See Mark Laird, ‘Mrs Delany’s Circles of Cutting and Embroidering in Home and Garden’, in Mrs Delany and her Circle, ed. Mark Laird and Alicia Weisberg-Roberts (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009). »

54 See, for example, Tabella V, which states: ‘Published by G. D. Ehret, the Proprietor, July 7, 1748’. »

55 Tabellas I–IV, 1748; V–VI, July 1748; VII, 1 December 1748; VIII, 1748; IX–X, 12 June 1749; XI–XII, November 1749; XIII, 1755; XIV, 1757; XV, 1759. »

56 See Blanche Henrey’s entry on Plantae et papiliones rariores in British Botanical and Horticultural Literature before 1800, 3 vols (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), III, 38. Only three copies are listed in British and Irish libraries, and all are in London: one in the British Library, another in the Botany Library of the Natural History Museum, and the third in the Royal Horticultural Society. »

57 See Calmann, Ehret, pls 76 and 79 for sketch and finished Tabella of Martynia annua. See also Richard H. Hevly, ‘Nomenclatural History and Typification of Martynia and Proboscidea (Martyniaceae)’, Taxon, XVIII/5 (October 1969), 527–34. »

58 Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 152. »

59 See O’Neill and McLean, Peter Collinson, 29. »

60 Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 146. »

61 Ibid., 149. »

62 Ibid., 154. »

63 Ibid., 239. »

64 Philosophical Transactions [London], LIV (1765), 202. I am very grateful to Jan Clark for this reference. »

65 Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 161. »

66 Ibid., 160. This was presumably John Hill’s General Natural History of 1748–52; 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), 221, for Collinson’s concerns that Hill was unqualified to assess the Linnaean method. »

67 Ibid., 161. »

68 See O’Neill and McLean, Peter Collinson, 128–9. »

69 The anecdotal evidence of a good late harvest has to be qualified by the broad historical evidence of a ‘poor harvest’. See Jones, Seasons and Prices, 140. »

70 Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 161. The ‘3 Miles’ must refer to the distance between Ehret’s home and Peter Collinson’s trade office in Gracechurch Street in the City of London. See O’Neill and McLean, Peter Collinson, 140–41, for an account of the shift in 1748 from his first home and garden in Peckham to his later home and garden, Ridgeway House in Mill Hill. »

71 Quoted from Blunt, The Art of Botanical Illustration, ed. Stearn, 162. »

72 Quoted from Calmann, Ehret, 82. Llanover, ed., Autobiography and Correspondence, III, 254. »

73 See again Calmann, Ehret, 81–2: Catherine, duchess of Norfolk; Mary, duchess of Leeds; two daughters of the duchess of Bridgewater; two daughters of Margaret, duchess of Portland; Bridget, wife of James Douglas, 14th earl of Morton and daughter of Sir John Heathcote of Normanton in Rutland; two daughters of the duke of Kent; two daughters of the earl of Pomfret; Lucy, daughter of the 1st earl of Guilford; Lady Carpenter; Lady Frances Spencer, daughter-in-law of the earl of Carlisle; and Lady Parker, daughter-in-law of the earl of Macclesfield. See Amanda Vickery, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 151, for Ehret’s role in helping foster ‘enlightened interest in nature, history, ingenuity and curiosity’ at Bowood, having tutored the countess of Shelburne (née Lady Sophia Carteret): ‘Her careful book of flowers still survives’. »

74 Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 183. »

75 See Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi, An Oak Spring Flora: Flower Illustration from the Fifteenth Century to the Present Time (Upperville, VA: Oak Spring Garden Library, 1997), 208. The paintings in both albums bear a striking resemblance, such that ‘they almost seem to be by the same hand’. »

76 Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 197. »

77 Ibid., 201. Collinson’s account appears to contradict the evidence of a poor harvest with grain riots presented in Jones, Seasons and Prices, 141. »

78 Cited in Jones, Seasons and Prices, 141. W. S. Lewis, ed., The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, 48 vols in 49 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937–83), XXI, 121. He claimed it came only once in fifty years. »

79 Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 210. »

80 Ibid. »

81 Spence, ‘Thomas Robins and the Dorset Sketches’. »

82 David Scrase, Flower Drawings, Fitzwilliam Museum Handbooks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 60; see also Blunt, The Art of Botanical Illustration, ed. Stearn, 170. »

83 Cathryn Spence, in personal communication (19 November 2012), confirms a possible attribution to Thomas Robins the Younger of two fungi drawings that appear under ‘Thomas Robins the Elder’ on WorldGallery.co.uk. »

84 Spence, ‘Thomas Robins and the Dorset Sketches’. »

85 See John Harris, The Artist and the Country House: From the Fifteenth Century to the Present Day (London: Sotheby’s, 1995), 96. »

86 Francesca Greenoak, ed., The Journals of Gilbert White, 3 vols (London: Century, 1986–9) [vol. I: 1751–73; vol. II: 1774–83; vol. III: 1784–93], 1, 70–71. »

87 See Harris, The Artist and the Country House, 98. »

88 Lewis, ed., The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, X, 156. »

89 The painting by Müntz is reproduced in Laird, The Flowering of the Landscape Garden, pl. 25. »

90 Ibid., 156. »

91 In the ‘Central England’ mean surface air temperature chart, the summer of 1765 averaged only 14.9°C (58.8°F), as compared to 16.7°C (62.1°F) in 1762. »

92 Greenoak, ed., The Journals of Gilbert White, I, 158–9. »

93 Armstrong, ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 262. »

94 Ibid., 263. »

95 Ibid., 264. »

96 See again Jones, Seasons and Prices, 143. In 1765, for example, barley fared less well in the drought than wheat and was very dear by Michaelmas. The year 1766 was more complex still, with poor hay yields and loss of sheep through inundation and sheep rot, yet with a late harvest of wheat (in Wiltshire at least) that helped offset the losses. When poor yields of hops or barley coincided with a fall in apple yields, the poor were left with less to drink in the way of beer and cider. »

97 Armstrong, ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden’, 264. The exact account of the paper replacement is: ‘Next Day Look at It & see if any of the Leaves &c wants rectifieing, & the Third Day Change the plants into Fresh Paper, Drying the Other well, & the fifth Day return them to the first paper, & then they will keep to any Time, unless the plants are very Succulent, then they may require another Changing.’ »

98 Ibid., 265. »

99 Ibid., 265–6. »

100 See H. H. Lamb, Climate History and the Modern World (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 246. »

101 Ibid., 244: ‘The mostly warm summers and autumns which followed in the 1740s and 1750s, and the low rainfall of those years, made this an easier and pleasanter time in the experience of people then living in the countryside of England.’ »

102 Data from ibid., 246. See also Michael Dukes and Philip Eden, ‘Weather Records and Extremes’, in Climates of the British Isles: Present, Past and Future, ed. Mike Hulme and Elaine Barrow (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 278. In this book, the England and Wales Precipitation series, created by the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, was used. It has the advantage of greater consistency or homogeneity, but a defect for the historian is that it begins only with the year 1766. Measured by data from 1766 to 1995, 1768 was the fifth wettest summer and the entire year ranks as the second wettest, with 1247.3 mm of rain. »

103 Greenoak, ed., The Journals of Gilbert White, 1, 268. »

104 Ibid. »

105 Ibid., 131. »

106 Jones, Seasons and Prices, 142 and 144. »

107 Greenoak, ed., The Journals of Gilbert White, 1, 21. »

108 Ibid., 1, 43. »

109 See Jones, Season and Prices, 141: ‘Very wet spring and the “wettest summer in memory of man” (Baker) yielded a deficient harvest. A year of scarcity.’ »

110 Ibid., 57: ‘The spring & summer 1757 were remarkably hot & dry. The dry weather began in passion-week, & continued-on without any Interruption except ye 29 May ’till the 20th of July. The air was rather cold in April & May: but the sun, shining all day from a cloudless skie for many weeks, dryed the ground in a very uncommon manner: & the heats of June, & July quite burnt it to dust. I observed that our wet clay withstood the drought very well for many weeks: but when once it was thoro’ly parched (as it was more than spit deep) vegetation suffered more than in the gravelly soils. The barley, oats, & pease, having no rains to bring ym: up, did not yield half a crop: but the wheat (which is never known to be injured by dry weather) turned-out very well. On ye twentieth of July fell a very heavy, & extensive thunder-shower: after which there were moderate rains, that restored a little verdure to the grass-fields. From the 16 of August set-in a very wet season for 15 or 16 days, which made people in some pain for the wheat that began to grow. About the beginning of Septemr: began the most delicate Autumn, & lasted quite into Novemr: with very little or no frost quite to the Close of the Year.’ »

111 Ibid., 81. »

112 Ibid., 87. »

113 Edmund Berkeley and Dorothy Smith Berkeley, eds, The Correspondence of John Bartram, 1734–1777 (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1992), 485, postscript dated 10 June 1760. »

114 Ibid., 571. »

115 Greenoak, ed., The Journals of Gilbert White, 1, 116, 118. Entry for 5 July 1762: ‘The Country is burnt-up in a most deplorable manner, beyond what any middle-aged person remembers’. »

116 The year 1765, in spite of the temperatures that Collinson alluded to on occasion, was not so much consistently hot as consistently dry. Surprisingly, the mean surface temperature in the ‘Central England’ record comes in at 14.9°C (58.8°F), which is on the cool side of average. »

117 Data from Lamb, Climate History and the Modern World, 230. The long-term average (day and night) for summer (June, July and August) from 1850 to 1950 was 15.2°C (59.4°F). The average of 16.7°C (62.1°F) in 1762 is comparable to the average of 17.0°C (62.6°F) in 1781, which Gilbert White noted as a very hot summer, and very close to the average of 16.9°C (62.4°F) in 1975 (the first of two modern drought summers). Until the recent sequence of very hot, dry summers, 1976 stands out in living memory as a benchmark for drought — the second hottest summer in central England (for the years 1659–1979). An average of 17.8°C (64.0°F) was registered in summer 1976. On that occasion, the countryside resembled the plains of Africa. The year 1995 then entered the records as the third hottest summer — at 17.4°C (63.3°F), just behind 1826 and 1976 — and August 1995 was the hottest yet recorded by 1997. (These averages include night-time temperatures.) There is a good discussion of the summer of 1995 in Dukes and Eden, ‘Weather Records and Extremes’, 262–8. »

118 Jones, Seasons and Prices, 142. »

119 It is entitled in full: ‘A little Journal of some of the Happiest days I have had in The happy Valley in the year 1763’. »

120 See Akihito Suzuki, ‘Battie, William (bap. 1703, d. 1776)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, online edition: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/1715 [accessed 1 October 2013]. Battie was a pioneer in a more humane treatment of the insane. »

121 Greenoak, ed., The Journals of Gilbert White, 1, 128. »

122 Ibid., 129. »

123 See Richard Mabey, Gilbert White: A Biography of the Author of The Natural History of Selborne (London: Century, 1986), 88–94. See also Rashleigh Holt-White, ed., The Life and Letters of Gilbert White, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1901), 1, 129–38, and in particular 130. »

124 Holt-White, ed., The Life and Letters of Gilbert White, 1, 131. »

125 Greenoak, ed., The Journals of Gilbert White, 1, 129. »

126 Ibid., 130. »

127 Ibid. »

128 Holt-White, ed., The Life and Letters of Gilbert White, 133. »

129 Ibid., referring to James Thomson’s The Seasons (London, 1730). »

130 Greenoak, ed., The Journals of Gilbert White, 1, 131. »

131 Holt-White, ed., The Life and Letters of Gilbert White, 134. »

132 Greenoak, ed., The Journals of Gilbert White, 1, 131. »

133 Ibid. »

134 Ibid., 132–3. »

135 Ibid., 154. »

136 Ibid., 154–5. »

137 This transition is discussed in great detail in Paul G. M. Foster: Gilbert White and his Records: A Scientific Biography (London: Christopher Helm, 1988). »

138 Greenoak, ed., The Journals of Gilbert White, 1, 147, entry for 20 February 1765. »

139 Ibid., 155. »

140 Ibid., 157. »

141 Ibid. »

142 Ibid., 160–61. »

143 Greenoak, ed., The Journals of Gilbert White, II, 138. The entry, including a note of the temperature at 59°F (15°C), reads: ‘Mr Grimm, my artist, came from London to take some of our finest views.’ »

144 Mabey, Gilbert White, 166. The fee appears to have been 2½ guineas a week. »

145 Greenoak, ed., Journals of Gilbert White, II, 141. »

146 Ibid., 119. »

147 Gilbert White, The Natural History of Selborne [1789], ed. Paul Foster (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 241; and Greenoak, ed., The Journals of Gilbert White, II, 120. It is interesting to compare this compassionate account with the more neutral entries in his Journal: Thursday, 18 January 1776, for example: ‘Cats catch all the birds that come-in for shelter from the cold’; and Saturday, 20 January: ‘Hares, compelled by hunger, come into my garden, & eat the pinks. Lambs fall, & are frozen to the ground.’ »

148 White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Foster, 245–6. All subsequent quotes from this letter, 246. »

149 Ibid., 246. »

150 Jones, Seasons and Prices, 144. »

151 See again Hulme and Barrow, eds, Climates of the British Isles, 405, for the ‘Central England’ mean surface temperature table (1659–1996), and 409, for the ‘England and Wales Precipitation’ table (1766–1996). »

152 It seems unlikely that he meant that codling moth infestation came with the heat. He linked ‘coddled’ to the ‘lack of quickness of flavour’, making the fruit similar to the ‘vapid and insipid’ apples of southern climes. »

153 Thomas Salmon, The Foreigner’s Companion through the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford (1748), quoted from The Canterbury Quadrangle, 1636–1986: An Anthology, ed. Howard Colvin and Keith Thomas (Oxford: St John’s College/Bocardo Press, 1986), 23. The full account is: ‘In the . . . [outer grove] the Walks are planted with Dutch Elms, and the Walls covered with Ever-greens: The inward Garden has every thing almost that can render such a Place agreeable, as a Terrass, a Mount, Wilderness, and well-contriv’d Arbours; but, notwithstanding this is much more admired by Strangers than the other, the outer Garden is become the general Rendezvous of Gentlemen and Ladies every Sunday Evening in Summer: Here we have an Opportunity of seeing the whole University together almost, as well as the better Sort of Townsmen and Ladies, who seldom fail of making their Appearance here at the same time, Unless the Weather prevents them.’ »

154 Mavis Batey, Oxford Gardens: The University’s Influence on Garden History (Amersham: Avebury, 1982), 117. »

155 The view by John Baptist Malchair is dated July 1776 and pre-dates the landscape improvements. »

156 Lewis, ed., Walpole’s Correspondence, XXXIII, 57. The letter is dated 27 September 1778. »

157 Ibid., XXI, 417–18. Walpole was clearly having fun modernizing Solomon’s wisdom to the point of inventing the ‘Chinese Hyssop’. The biblical version in 1 Kings 4, 33 goes: ‘And he spake of trees, from the cedar tree that is in Lebanon even unto the hyssop that springeth out of the wall.’ It is interesting to find William Shenstone resorting to the same conceit, when he wrote to Lady Luxborough on 14 May 1749: ‘I have bought Miller’s book of gardening very elegantly bound; so you may expect me e’er long to talk like Solomon of all manner of Plants: from ye Cedars upon mount Lebanon, to the Hyssop yt groweth against ye wall’. See Williams, The Letters of William Shenstone, 193. »

158 William Cowper spoke for a generation when he wrote of ‘Capability’ Brown as the ‘omnipotent magician’ who made ‘Woods vanish’. See Laird, The Flowering of the Landscape Garden, 244. »

159 Richard Graves, The Festoon: A Select Collection of Epigrams (London, 1766), 42. I am very grateful to John Phibbs for providing this reference. John Edmondson traces a version of these lines back to an inscription in the 2nd edition of John Evelyn’s Sylva (1670), but the sentiments remained fresh a hundred years later. »

160 See again Laird, ‘Mrs Delany’s Circles’. »

161 Quoted from John Dixon Hunt, ed., The Oxford Book of Garden Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 48. For the quote from Spenser below, ibid., 18. »

162 Ibid., 558. »

163 Quoted from White, A Gentleman of Fine Taste, 13. »

164 Ibid., 10. »

165 Arthur Young, The Farmer’s Tour Through the East of England, 4 vols (London, 1771), IV, 10. »

166 Richard Graves, Columella; or, The Distressed Anchoret (London, 1779), 127–8. »

167 Richard Graves, Particulars in the Life of William Shenstone (London, 1788), 61. »

168 Richard Graves, Euphrosyne; or, Amusements on the road of life . . . (London, 1776), 127. »

169 White, A Gentleman of Fine Taste, 61. »

170 Young, The Farmer’s Tour Through the East of England, IV, 5. »

171 White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Foster, 247. »

172 Greenoak, ed., Journals of Gilbert White, 1, 78–82. »

173 Ibid., 1, 83. »

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