Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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The English Garden in 1660 and 2020
“The World’s a Garden; Pleasures are the Flowers”
In 1664, Captain Leonard Gurle, a nurseryman who was later to become the king’s gardener, received an order for sixty-five fruit trees. In pride of place were twenty different varieties of peach and five of nectarines, in which Gurle specialized, but there were also apricots, figs, plums, and grapevines. Gurle’s nursery, where the young trees were growing, was not, as one might expect, deep in the English countryside, but in Shoreditch, only a few hundred feet outside the old walls of the City of London. It covered 12 acres of what is now the Brick Lane or Banglatown area of east London, with its South Asian restaurants and shops selling brightly coloured saris.
Peaches and nectarines were recent introductions to English orchards and the walls of kitchen gardens. Shakespeare, writing between 1590 and 1612, does not mention “peach” except as a colour, but some of the other plants that Gurle supplied were the luxuries that Queen Titania, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ordered her fairies to give to her enchanted lover, Bottom, with his ass’s head:
Feed him with apricocks and dewberries,
With purple grapes, green figs and mulberries.
Gurle’s trees were to be supplied, however, to a more mundane customer, William Alington, 3rd Baron Alington, for his new house, Horseheath Hall, in Cambridgeshire. Alington, whose family hadowned land there since 1397, as well as manors in several other English counties, was rebuilding his mansion. He and his father had kept a low profile during the English Civil War of 1642–51 and the following Interregnum and had escaped the fines or confiscation of lands that affected other royalist aristocrats more openly loyal to the throne. Now, with the restoration of Charles II in 1660, Alington clearly felt confident enough to embark on a major building project, for which he engaged the aristocratic architect Sir Roger Pratt.
The house was “on a grand scale with a 500-foot frontage, the most imposing in the country of that date”; in 1670 the diarist and garden writer John Evelyn dined there and remarked waspishly that Alington had “newly built a house at great cost, little less than twenty thousand pounds . . . standing in a park with a sweet prospect and stately avenue, but water still defective. The house also has its infirmities.” Evelyn says nothing else about the lake or the rest of the garden, of which little remains, but it seems to have been on an equally grand scale; there was a “great terrace” between the house and a slightly sunken garden, with flanking walled areas for fruit and vegetables. The stately avenue was more than a mile long, and the garden was divided into elaborate compartments.
The family’s fortune rested on land and the rents from it, although Alington also held lucrative government posts and served as constable of the Tower of London from 1679. Whatever its source, his wealth was enough to afford a very costly new house and garden. Gurle’s trees for the orchard or kitchen garden represented a small fraction of that cost, at £8 and 3 shillings. However, each specimen of the most expensive varieties of peach, a Province, a Lion, a Violett Muscatt, and a Persian Peach, cost 5 shillings, a large sum at the time. Gurle’s customers were of the highest quality, and he ended his career as the royal gardener at St. James’s, the King’s palace in central London, so Alington was clearly buying from the best—or, at least, the most expensive.
THE GARDEN INDUSTRY
Alington and Gurle were part of the garden industry. We do not normally think of gardening as an industry; it is a hobby, a pastime, a search for beauty, even an obsession. But, as well as these, it is something on which we spend money: it employs people; it uses tools and machinery; it occupies land, from the smallest patio to the largest park; it constructs hedges and pergolas, temples, fountains and waterfalls. It is an unusual industry because many of its customers are also its workers, its designers, and its entrepreneurs, but it is an industry nonetheless and one that has consumed great amounts of economic resources of all kinds—land, labour, and money—for many centuries.
This book is about the myriad trades, professions, institutions, firms, and people that have, over more than three centuries, interacted with their tens of millions of customers to create and maintain England’s gardens. They have all acted within the society and economy of their time, and their achievements can only be understood in that context. The book covers the gardens, parks, and landscapes that were created for pleasure or to provide flowers, fruit, and vegetables for personal consumption. It therefore includes the nurseries, such as Gurle’s, which produced the plants for domestic gardens and parks, and all those who designed or provided the expertise, tools and machinery, but not—except as an aside when discussing kitchen gardens—what the English call “market gardens” and the Americans “truck gardens,” growing vegetables, fruit or flowers for sale.
