Kate Colquhoun - A Thing in Disguise - The Visionary Life of Joseph Paxton

Paxton had soon roused the men to a flurry of activity. Despite the mess created by the building work, principal paths had to be maintained and smartly gravelled; there was trenching, digging of beds, raking of leaves and clearing of cuttings to be done, and pots had to be washed and stacked ready for the needs of constant transplanting. In the summer, the more tender plants were carted from their shelter and planted out into beds; hedges and grass-edges had to be clipped, trees tied back, soil or dung carted to where it was needed. Everything had to be managed carefully, lest the Duke should decide to arrive at any moment.

He did indeed return to Chatsworth from Russia in early December and he noted in his daily journal: ‘Chatsworth, che gioya! I found great progress.’ The next day, having looked over his property, he noted, ‘I am enchanted … My new gardener too, Paxton, has made a great change.’

Throughout 1827 the Duke was preoccupied with his duties as Lord Chamberlain to the Royal Household – duties he cared little for but could not happily decline – and by his place in the House of Lords, where great electoral reform was being debated as a result of the wars in Europe and the growing, predominantly urban unrest at home. Socially, Devonshire House and Chiswick occupied his attention in all but the shooting season when he returned to Chatsworth, and was again delighted by the progress he saw.

That year the Duke appointed Benjamin Currey as his London solicitor and auditor with direct responsibility for all his affairs and accounts. This was indicative not only of the aristocrat’s lethargy when it came to accountable expenditure, but also an increasing movement towards professionalism in the running of large estates. Currey was not a landowner himself as had always been the case in the past, but a member of the professional upper middle class. All the agents on the Duke’s various estates reported to Currey.

Quietly, Paxton worked away in the gardens. Gradually all the fountains were repaired and improved, iron pipes replacing lead. In the west garden, an ornamental wall was constructed, drains were repaired or replaced and parts of the garden newly laid out, with new walks added to the pleasure grounds. With his own eye for structural detail, Paxton began to work with Wyatt to amend the architect’s orangery designs. The Duke, in his own words now ‘bit by gardening’, conceived it as a conservatory to join the sculpture gallery to the new wing. He wanted it quickly and he purchased orange trees from the Empress Josephine’s collection at Malmaison, an expensive Rhododendron arboreum from Knight’s exotic plant nursery in the King’s Road, and an Altingia excelsa which came to be particularly admired. Paxton must have been thrilled with the Duke’s growing interest in plants and in the changes he was hurrying forth.

The following year, Paxton’s attention turned to the kitchen garden. A new orchard was added to it and the wire fence around the flower garden was removed. On a modest scale, he turned his attention to glass. A number of famous glass buildings had recently been constructed in England including those at Syon House in Brentford, Hungerford Market in London, the upper terrace garden of Covent Garden Market and a surprising conical glasshouse at Bretton Hall designed by Loudon and Baileys. At Chatsworth, Paxton repaired the existing pineapple and peach houses and then started to build and experiment with the design of a number of new greenhouses and stoves in which to cultivate and force all manner of fruit and vegetables.

When later asked to describe the process of design and construction of the Crystal Palace, built for the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park in 1851, Paxton was at pains to emphasise a process of years of experimentation with glass buildings, a logical development which had led him to that point. In his first reading of a paper in public, he noted that ‘in 1828 … I first turned my attention to the building and improvement of glass structures’. He found the various forcing houses at Chatsworth were made from coarse, thick glass and heavy woodwork, which rendered the roofs dark, gloomy and ill-suited for the purpose for which they were built. So he bevelled off the sides of the rafters and sash bars, lightening them considerably and discovering that the buildings lost no structural stability in the process. Frustrated by putty which failed to withstand the extremes of sun, rain and frost and which disintegrated and allowed water to drip constantly inside the houses in rainy weather, he also contrived a new, lighter sash bar, with a groove to hold the glass, obviating the need for putty altogether.

While Paxton thought that the popular, modern metallic glasshouses espoused by Loudon were graceful in appearance, he concluded that wooden structures were preferable. One advantage was that wood was less expensive than iron. More importantly, he understood that, as the iron in the sash bars and rafters expanded and contracted according to the outside temperature, the glass was prone to breakage. In addition, iron corroded and was far more complicated to repair, whereas a wooden roof needed only a common carpenter. As the debate was revisited in the pages of the Gardeners Magazine , and as his own experiments proceeded, Paxton became increasingly convinced of the superiority of treated wood over iron, experimenting with finer and finer sashes and rafters to admit the greatest amount of light into the house. Within a very short time, the new glasshouses he built yielded fruit and vegetables in perfection, and a profusion of flowers capable of filling the house.

Nine months after their marriage, on 5 December 1827, Paxton and Sarah’s first daughter, Emily, had been born. She was baptised twelve days later in the local village of Edensor. Sarah quickly became pregnant again and their first son, William, was born in January 1829.

The Duke had spent much of 1828 away from Chatsworth, returning only in September and October and noting again the great progress there. He began to take a closer interest in his gardener, visiting the kitchen garden and asking Paxton to thin the woods – showing a confidence in his new man which no doubt put the regular woodsman’s nose out of joint. In early 1829, the Duke walked out in the snow with Paxton to see the woods and sought him out on several occasions to discuss the management of his trees. He returned again in April, when an entry in his diary reveals the growing regard he held for the gardener who was transforming the park before his eyes: ‘I went to woods, much pleased – poor Paxton has been very unwell.’ Paxton rarely complained of illness, whereas the Duke was something of a hypochondriac, beset with hayfever, flu, inflamed eyes, stiffness and a multitude of other, often minor, afflictions which could cause him to be bedridden for weeks at a time. He had a peculiar tenderness for another man’s health.

This was a particularly happy year for the Duke. His sister Georgiana’s daughter, Blanche – his adored, adoring and favourite niece – announced her engagement to William Cavendish, Lord Burlington, the son of the Duke’s cousin, and his appointed heir. He, meanwhile, was busy with Wyatt, with politics and with parties in London, leaving Paxton to embark on his first great landscape scheme for the park and one of the earliest of those curiously Victorian garden features – the pinetum.

Pinetum is the name given to a collection of one or more of each variety of conifer worthy of cultivation. With tens of new varieties now being introduced to Britain, the formation of one offered satisfaction of the collector’s instinct on a grand scale. Here, Paxton’s early experience at Chiswick combined with the Duke’s own strong arboreal interests to create a startling miniature world. It is still there, a place of surprising and extraordinary tranquility, a group of trees strikingly foreign compared to the native hardwoods in the Stand Wood higher on the slope. In spring, swathes of daffodils and piercing birdsong delight in the sunlight filtered by the cool green branches.