Discovery and innovation in the English garden

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The Making of the English Gardener: Plants, Books and Inspiration, 1560–1660

By Margaret Willes

Though often overlooked in favour of the 18th century, the century from the accession of Queen Elizabeth I to the restoration of King Charles II are among the most interesting in England’s horticultural history.  A new spirit of scientific enquiry, the rise of vernacular publishing and the expansion of the empire combined to create a period of unprecedented discovery and innovation.  The relative peace and prosperity of Elizabeth’s reign allowed courtiers, scholars, merchants and scientists to weave across the continent absorbing ideas and acquiring materials. 

Despite the regicide and the so-called ‘long winter’ of the Commonwealth that followed, England continued to play a major role on the European horticultural stage. With the exploration of the Americas, the Levant and – after the establishment of the British East India Company in 1600 – the Indian subcontinent, England was besieged with exciting new plants and flowers. 

While these imports clearly changed the look of English gardens, they also affected cuisine, medicine, cosmetics, perfume and drinking habits.   In 1577, the chronicler William Harrison gleefully exclaimed:

 how many strange herbs, plants and unusual fruits are daily brought unto us, from the Indies, Americas, Tabrobane (Ceylon), Canarie Isles and all parts of the world!’   

Indeed one of the great pleasures of this book is charting the initial suspicion, gradual adoption and ultimate commodification of many plant introductions.  One of the first Europeans to encounter coffee in the Ottoman cafes described it as:

almost as black as Ink, and very good in illness, chiefly that of the Stomach; of this they drink in the Morning early in the open places before everybody, without any fear or regard, out of China cups, as hot as they can, they put it often to their Lips but drink little at a time. 

A few decades later London had created its own coffee houses, which soon became so popular that they were considered hotbeds of sedition.  Indeed Charles II attempted, unsuccessfully, to suppress them, claiming they were ‘places where the disaffected met and spread scandalous reports concerning the conduct of His Magesty’. 

Willes, formerly the publisher for the National Trust, is a diligent scholar and a delightful literary companion. She presents old material with a new and vibrant twist and looks beyond the grand garden makers to explore the lives of those who actually made, and maintained, the grand gardens.  Even when duly referencing the Tradescants, John Gerard, Thomas Hill, Francis Bacon, et al. Willes always adds a few insights. While John Evelyn is possibly best known for his Silva or a Discourse of Forest Trees, Willes tells us of his fascination with the Duc d’Orleans’ tortoises and his ‘Conservatory for Snow’ – presumably an icehouse.   She gives us the familiar story of Lord Dudley’s attempts to woo the Virgin Queen with his garden at Kenilworth Castle, but puts this attempt into context by explaining that Dudley spent the equivalent of a million pounds for that short, and ultimately unsuccessful, royal visit. Dudley’s rival – for the Queen’s attention if not her hand – the High Treasurer Lord Burghley, spent the equivalent of nearly a quarter of a million pounds in a single year on his estate at Theobalds, demonstrating that horticulture really was the bling of the Elizabethan age.

Sadly, little remains of these, or any of the grand gardens of the era, notwithstanding the National Trust’s heroic recreation of Kenilworth.  In the absence of physical evidence however, Willes, a brilliant bibliophile, makes excellent use of written material, of which there is a plethora – from the then recently instituted public records, which allowed her to chart all levels of society through birth, marriage and death, to the diaries of Royalists who discreetly sat out the interregnum by touring the continent; from the classical texts that inspired England’s garden philosophers, to the radical vernacular herbals that eschewed traditional Latin to appeal to the common householder;  from the proud catalogues listing their gardens’ prized exotics, to the mundane household accounts with their tantalizing references to wallers, masons, weeders and ‘earth bearers’. 

Willes also scours contemporary literature; she finds references to the Kenilworth debacle in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Philip Sidney’s Old Arcadia, and Edmund Spencer’s  Shepheard’s Calendar, demonstrating that long before News International the British public delighted in observing the humiliation of the rich and famous.

The book is richly illustrated with plates, plans, portraits and paintings, all attesting to the importance of gardens in 16th- and 17th-century English culture.  It also has an extensive bibliography for scholars keen to follow up arcane references.  With its easy erudition and elegant style, this book would be a delight to any amateur or professional historian, garden historian, or anybody interested in the cultural life of Elizabeth and Stuart England.

The Making of the English Gardener: Plants, Books and Inspiration, 1560–1660 by Margaret Willes is published by Yale University Press, 2011. 299pp., 80 mono, 24 colour illus, £25.00. ISBN: 9780300163827