At Home

by Bill Bryson

  The ultimate expression of folly building was surely at Chiswick, then a village west of London, where the third Earl of Burlington (and yet another Kit-Cat member) built Chiswick House, which was not a house at all and never intended to be lived in, but a place to look at art and listen to music, a kind of glorified summer house, built on a literally palatial scale. This was the property from which, you may just recall, the eighth Duke of Devonshire stepped out and had his happy first encounter with Joseph Paxton.

  Meanwhile, Charles Bridgeman and his successors were extensively reworking whole landscapes. At his masterpiece grounds, Stowe in Buckinghamshire, everything was done on a monumental scale. One of the ha-has stretched for four miles. Hills were reshaped, valleys flooded, temples of marbled magnificence strewn about almost carelessly. Stowe was unlike anything that had ever been built before. For one thing, it was one of the world’s first true tourist attractions. It was the first garden in Britain to attract sightseers and the first to have its own guidebook. It became so popular that in 1717 Lord Cobham, its owner, had to buy a neighboring inn to accommodate visitors.

  In 1738, Bridgeman died and soon after was succeeded by a person so youthful that he hadn’t even been born when Bridgeman began work on Stowe. The young man’s name was Lancelot Brown, and he was exactly the man the landscape movement needed.

  Brown’s life story closely recalls that of Joseph Paxton. Both were the sons of yeoman farmers, both were exceptionally bright and hardworking, both went into gardening as boys, and both distinguished themselves swiftly in the employ of rich men. In Brown’s case, the story began in Northumberland, in the far north of England, where his father was a tenant farmer on an estate called Kirkharle. Brown was apprenticed as a gardener there at fourteen and served the full seven years, but then left Northumberland and moved south, possibly looking for a better climate for his asthma. What he did for the next period of his life is unknown, but he must have distinguished himself, for soon after the death of Charles Bridgeman Lord Cobham selected him to be the new head gardener at Stowe. He was just twenty-four years old.

  Brown found himself in charge of a staff of forty, serving as paymaster as well as head gardener. Gradually, he took on the management of the whole estate, building projects as well as gardening ones. By such means, and no doubt additional study, he acquired the skills to become a competent, if workmanlike, architect. In 1749, Lord Cobham died and Brown decided to become independent. He moved to Hammersmith, then a village west of London, and embarked on a freelance career. At the age of thirty-five he was about to become the man history knows as Capability Brown.

  His vision was sweeping. He didn’t make gardens; rather, he made landscapes. It was his habit upon seeing an estate to announce that it had capabilities, and so he acquired his famous nickname. Historians have tended to portray Brown as a mere tinkerer, an incidental improver, who did little more than arrange trees into attractive clumps. In fact, no one shifted more earth or operated on a larger scale than he did. To make the Grecian Valley at Stowe his workmen took away, in barrows, 23,500 cubic yards of soil and rock and scattered it elsewhere. At Heveningham in Suffolk he raised a large lawn by twelve feet. He happily moved fully grown trees and sometimes fully grown villages, too. To aid the former, he devised a wheeled machine that could move trees up to thirty-six feet high without harming them—a piece of horticultural engineering that was seen as almost miraculous. He planted tens of thousands of trees—ninety-one thousand in a single year at Longleat. He built lakes that covered a hundred acres of productive farmland (a fact that almost certainly gave some of his clients pause). At Blenheim Palace, a magnificent bridge crossed a piddling stream; Brown gave it a pair of lakes and made it glorious.

  He saw in his mind’s eye exactly how landscapes could look a hundred years hence. Long before anyone else thought of doing so, he used native trees almost exclusively. It is such touches that make his landscapes look as if they evolved naturally when in fact they were designed almost down to the last cow pat. He was far more of an engineer and landscape architect than he was a gardener. He had a particular gift for “confusing the eye”—by, for instance, making two lakes on different levels look like a much larger single lake. Brown created landscapes that were in a sense “more English” than the countryside they replaced, and did it on a scale so sweeping and radical that it takes some effort now to imagine just how novel it was. He called it “place-making.” The landscape of much of lowland England today may look timeless, but it was in large part an eighteenth-century creation, and it was Brown more than anyone who made it. If that is tinkering, it is on a grand scale.

  Brown provided a full service—design, provision of plants, planting, maintenance afterward. He worked hard and fast, and so he could manage a lot of commitments. It was said that an hour’s brisk tour of an estate was all it took for him to form a comprehensive scheme for improvements. A big part of the appeal of Brown’s approach was that it was cheap in the long run. Manicured grounds with their parterres and topiary and miles of clipped hedges needed a lot of maintenance. Brown’s landscapes looked after themselves by and large. He was also emphatically practical. Where others built temples, pagodas, and shrines, Brown put up buildings that looked like extravagant follies but actually were dairies or kennels or housing for estate workers. Having grown up on a farm, he actually understood farming and often introduced changes that improved efficiency. If not a great architect, he was certainly a competent one. For one thing, thanks to his work in landscaping, he understood drainage better than perhaps any other architect of his time. He was a master of soil engineering long before such a discipline existed. Unseen beneath his dozing landscapes can be complex drainage systems that turned bogs into meadows, and have kept them that way for 250 years. He might just as well have been called “Drainage Brown.”

  Brown was once offered £1,000 to do an estate in Ireland, but he declined, saying that he hadn’t done all of England yet. In his three decades of self-employment, he undertook some 170 commissions and so transformed a good portion of the English countryside. He also grew rich doing so. Within a decade of going independent, he was earning £15,000 a year, enough to put him in the top ranks of the newly emergent middle class.

  His achievements were by no means unreservedly admired by all. The poet Richard Owen Cambridge once declared to Brown: “I very earnestly wish I may die before you, Mr. Brown.”

  “Why?” asked Brown, surprised.

  “Because I should like to see heaven before you had improved it,” Cambridge answered drily.

  The artist John Constable hated Brown’s work. “It is not beauty because it is not nature,” he declared. But Brown’s most devoted antagonist was the snobbish Sir William Chambers. He dismissed Brown’s landscapes as unimaginative, insisting they “differ very little from common fields.” But then Chambers’s idea of improving a landscape was to cover it with garish buildings. It was he who designed the pagoda, mock Alhambra, and other diversions at Kew. Chambers thought Brown little more than a peasant because his speech and manners lacked refinement, but Brown’s clients loved him. One, Lord Exeter, hung a portrait of Brown in his house where he could see it every day. Brown also seems to have been just a very nice man. In one of his few surviving letters, he tells his wife how, separated from her by business, he passed the day in imaginary conversation with her, “which has every charm except your dear company, which will ever be the sincere and the principal delight, my dear Biddy, of your affectionate husband.” That’s not bad for someone who was barely schooled. They were certainly not the words of a peasant. He died in 1783 at the age of sixty-six and was much missed by many.

  II

  Just as Capability Brown was rejecting flowers and ornamental shrubs, others were finding new ones in magnificent abundance. The period that lay fifty years to either side of Brown’s death was one of unprecedented discovery in the botanical world. The hunt for plants became a huge driver of both science and commerce.

  The
person who can reasonably be said to have started it all was Joseph Banks, the brilliant botanist who accompanied Captain James Cook on his voyage to the South Seas and beyond from 1768 to 1771. Banks packed Cook’s little ship with specimen plants—thirty thousand in all—including fourteen hundred never previously recorded, at a stroke increasing the world’s stock of known plants by about a quarter. He would almost certainly have found more on Cook’s second voyage, but Banks, alas, was spoiled as well as brilliant. He insisted on taking seventeen servants this time, including two horn players to entertain him in the evenings. Cook politely demurred, and Banks declined to go. Instead he privately financed an expedition to Iceland. En route the party stopped at the Bay o’ Skaill in Orkney, and Banks did some excavating there (though he overlooked the grassy knoll that covered Skara Brae, and so just missed the chance to add one of the great archaeological discoveries of the age to his many other accomplishments).

  Meanwhile, dedicated plant hunters were fanning out across the world, not least in North America, which proved to be especially productive of plants that not only were lovely and interesting but would bloom in British soil. The first Europeans to penetrate America’s interior from the east weren’t looking for lands to settle or passages to the west. They were looking for plants they could sell, and they found wondrous new species by the score—the azalea, aster, camellia, catalpa, euphorbia, hydrangea, rhododendron, rudbeckia, Virginia creeper, and wild cherry, as well as many types of ferns, shrubs, trees, and vines. Fortunes could be made from finding new plants and getting them safely back to the nurseries of Europe for propagation. Soon the woods of North America were so full of plant hunters that it is impossible to tell now who exactly discovered what. John Fraser, after whom is named the Fraser fir, discovered either 44 new species of plant or 215, depending on which botanical history you credit.

  The dangers of plant hunting were considerable. Joseph Paxton dispatched two men to North America to see what they could find; both drowned when their heavily laden boat overturned on a foaming river in British Columbia. The son of André Michaux, a French hunter, was hideously mangled by a bear. In Hawaii, David Douglas, discoverer of the Douglas fir, fell into an animal trap at a particularly unpropitious moment: it was already occupied by a wild bull, which proceeded to trample him to death. Others got lost and starved, died of malaria, yellow fever, or other diseases, or were killed by suspicious natives. Those who succeeded, however, often acquired considerable wealth—perhaps none more notably (or more aptly named, come to that) than Robert Fortune, last encountered in Chapter VIII traveling riskily around China disguised as a native to discover how tea was produced. His introduction of tea growing to India possibly saved the British Empire, but it was the bringing of chrysanthemums and azaleas to British nurseries that allowed him to die wealthy.

  Others were driven by a simple quest for adventure—sometimes dangerously misguided, it would seem. Perhaps the most notable—and on the face of it most unlikely—in this category were the young friends Alfred Russel Wallace and Henry Walter Bates, both the sons of English businessmen of modest means. Though neither had ever even been abroad, they decided in 1848 to voyage to Amazonia to search for botanical specimens. Soon afterward, they were joined by Wallace’s brother Herbert and by another keen amateur, Richard Spruce, a schoolmaster on the Castle Howard estate in Yorkshire who had never tackled anything more challenging than an English meadow. None seemed remotely prepared for life in the tropics, and poor Herbert demonstrated as much by catching yellow fever and expiring almost as soon as he was ashore. The others, however, persevered, though for reasons unknown they elected to split up and head off in different directions.

  Wallace plunged into the jungles along the Rio Negro and spent the next four years doggedly collecting specimens. The challenges he faced were numberless. Insects made his life a torment. He broke his glasses, on which he was highly dependent, during a lively encounter with a hornets’ nest, and lost a boot in some other moment of mayhem and for some time had to clomp around the jungles half shod. He bewildered his Indian guides by preserving his specimens in jars of caxaca, an alcohol fermented from sugarcane, instead of drinking it as any sensible man would. Thinking him mad, they appropriated the remaining caxaca and melted into the forest. Undeterred—undeterrable—Wallace pressed on.

  After four years, he stumbled from the steamy jungles exhausted, his clothes in tatters, trembling and half delirious from a recurrent fever, but with a rare collection of specimens. In the Brazilian port city of Pará, he secured passage home on a barque called the Helen. Midway across the Atlantic, however, the Helen caught fire and Wallace had to scramble into a lifeboat, leaving his precious cargo behind. He watched as the ship, consumed by flames, slid beneath the waves, taking his treasures with it. Undaunted (well, perhaps just a little daunted), Wallace allowed himself a spell of convalescence, then sailed to the other ends of the Earth, to the Malay Archipelago, where he roamed ceaselessly for eight years and collected a staggering 127,000 specimens, including 1,000 insects and 200 species of birds never before recorded, all of which he managed to get safely back to England.

  Bates, meanwhile, stayed on in South America for seven years after Wallace’s departure, exploring mostly by boat on the Amazon and its tributaries, and eventually brought home almost 15,000 specimens of animals and insects, which seems a modest number compared with Wallace’s 127,000, but some 8,000 of his—more than half, a phenomenal proportion—were new to science.

  But the most remarkable of all in many ways was Richard Spruce. He stayed on in South America for a full eighteen years, exploring areas never before visited by a European and assembling vast stores of information, including glossaries of twenty-one native Indian languages. Among much else, he discovered a commercially important rubber plant, the species of coca from which is derived modern cocaine, and the variety of cinchona that produced quinine—for a century the only effective remedy against malaria and other tropical fevers, as well as the flavor in tonic water that is vital for a good gin and tonic.

  When at last he returned home to Yorkshire, he discovered that all the money he had earned from his endeavors over twenty years had been misinvested by the people to whom he had entrusted it, and he was now penniless. His health was so ruined that he spent most of the next twenty-seven years in bed, listlessly cataloging his findings. He never did find the strength to write his memoirs.

  • • •

  Thanks to the efforts of these daring men and scores of others like them, the number of plants available to English gardeners soared amazingly—from about one thousand in 1750 to well over twenty thousand a hundred years later. Newly found exotic plants became hugely prized. A small monkey puzzle tree, a decorative conifer discovered in Chile in 1782, could by the 1840s easily fetch £5 in Britain, roughly the annual cost of keeping a maid. Bedding plants, too, became a huge industry. All of this gave a mighty boost to amateur gardening.

  So, too, much more unexpectedly, did the rise of the railways. Railways allowed people to move out to distant suburbs and commute in to work. Suburbs gave homeowners greater space. More spacious properties allowed—indeed, all but required—the new breed of suburbanites to take an interest in gardening.

  But one other change was even more profoundly consequential than all others: the rise of female gardening at home. The catalyst was a woman named Jane Webb who had no background in gardening and whose improbable fame was as the author of a potboiler in three volumes called The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-second Century, which she published anonymously in 1827, when she was just twenty years old. Her description of a steam lawn mower so excited (seriously) the gardening writer John Claudius Loudon that he sought her out for friendship, thinking she was a man. Loudon was even more excited when he discovered she was a woman and rather swiftly proposed marriage even though he was at that point exactly twice her age.

  Jane accepted, and so began a touching and productive partnership. John Claudius Loudon was already a man
of great stature in the world of horticulture. Born on a farm in Scotland in 1783, the year Capability Brown died, he had passed his youth in a fever of self-improvement, teaching himself six languages, including Greek and Hebrew, and absorbing from books as much as was to be known about botany, horticulture, natural history, and all else related to the verdant arts. In 1804, at the age of twenty-one, he began to produce a seemingly endless stream of stout books with earnest, daunting titles—A Short Treatise on Several Improvements Recently Made in Hothouses, Observations on the Formation and Management of Useful and Ornamental Plantations, The Different Modes of Cultivating the Pine-Apple—all of which sold considerably better than they sound as if they ought to have. He also edited, largely wrote, and in effect single-handedly produced a string of popular gardening magazines—as many as five at once—and all this, it may be noted, despite being almost staggeringly unlucky with his health. He had a particular knack, it seems, for getting ill and then developing appalling complications. His right arm, for instance, had to be amputated because of complications arising from a bad bout of rheumatic fever. Soon afterward, his knee ankylosed, leaving him with a permanent limp. As a consequence of his chronic pains, he became for a time addicted to laudanum. This was not a man for whom life was ever easy.