the interest in and sociable attachment to botanical knowledge, which were encouraged by a medical education, meant that professional men with a reasonable disposable income and a passion for botany sought to develop and demonstrate this skill in their own private gardens. Lettsom describes his garden at Grove Hill ():
The lower extremity opens into the Arbustum, through which a walk of nearly a mile in extent is carried under the shade of upwards of one hundred fruit-trees, which not only form a pleasing shade, but likewise prove objects of beauty in their blossoms, and of profit in their product. On the borders of this walk grow about four hundred European plants, placed in succession agreeably to the Linnaean classification, and lettered in legible characters, a catalogue of which is preserved.1
In this excerpt from his guidebook, Lettsom portrayed his domestic garden as a place full of trees and plants that he considered to be both ornamental and productive, as well as a section organized scientifically using the Linnaean system of classification.
2 Pettigrew, as always a useful guide to Lettsom and his landscape, suggested that “any person, however ignorant of practical botany, might acquire a tolerably correct idea of that valuable science, by a due attention to the arrangements, &c.” of the garden at Grove Hill.
3 This arranging and labeling of plants establishes that scientifically arranged botanic collections were not only confined to university-owned spaces, but that they were also created and developed by individuals. The role of guidebooks and labels in transmitting and codifying this knowledge for others will be explored in detail in
chapter 4, but it is clear that the garden was designed as an educational and experimental space as well as a place for personal leisure.
The north view of John Coakley Lettsom’s house at Grove Hill, Camberwell. Colored engraving by Darton and Harvey after G. Samuel, 1795.
Gardens such as Grove Hill formed a crucial node within larger networks between which plants, people, and knowledge circulated. Such places were of key importance for the imperial project, acting as colonial botanic laboratories in which activities that were integral to the needs of the empire were performed.4 Londa Schiebinger argues that key to this were the royal and imperial botanic gardens that acted as experimental stations, both in terms of the acclimatization of plants so that they could be grown in various regions of the world, as well as places in which economically valuable plants could be trialed and understood.5 We can expand this group of nationally strategic institutions to include the private botanic gardens established by men such as Lettsom.6 This broader network acknowledges that within this “imperial geography of plants” there were many gardens of all types and sizes as well as numerous gardeners of all levels.7 Miles Ogborn, for example, notes that
alongside the Bath botanical garden, and often growing the same plants, were the extensive private gardens of wealthy gentlemen such as Matthew Wallen and Hinton East; the plantation gardens of horticulturalist slaveholders and overseers; and the provision grounds of the enslaved themselves. The latter have been called the “botanical gardens of the dispossessed” and were, despite the claims of other gardeners, where vital food crops were nurtured, many with African origins.8
All these gardens at home and abroad formed part of the imperial horticultural network with Britain’s keystones of national gardens, which included Kew in London as well as botanic gardens established in Saint Vincent in the West Indies, Jamaica, and Calcutta. These key imperial spaces were the foci for scientific work on plants brought in from around the globe, as well as providing the locus for the transfer of plants to other gardens and fields. This approach resulted in new economically important crops for the various colonies and, as Louise Brockway argues, “thereby altering the patterns of world trade and increasing the plant energy, and human energy in the form of underpaid labor, that the European core extracted from the tropical peripheries of the world system.”9 Private gardens like Lettsom’s can be seen to play a significant, although less official or visible, role in these networks.
Correspondingly, an interest in popular science such as botany allowed networks to flourish and develop. Shared concerns, such as botanical knowledge, were as important as the profession or position of those people involved.10 These connections could then involve patronage of those conducting activities, such as plant collecting, as well as creating ties with those of higher status, such as the landed gentry, through the circulation of seeds and plants. Private gardens, which we can also extend to include semipublic gardens and commercial nurseries, were part of wider botanical networks between which plant material, objects, knowledge, and people circulated alongside the more visible named botanic institutions.11 One early example of this, discussed by Esther Arens, illustrates the type of circulation within the wider European network. Gaspar Fagel, an adviser to William of Orange, developed his own botanic collection at his estate in Leeuwenhorst in the Netherlands.12 After his death, part of his plant collection was transferred to Hampton Court in 1689 and placed in a new “glass garden.” Not only was the plant collection moved to a royal garden, but it was accompanied by expert Dutch gardeners who were able to document the plants as well as expand the collection.13 This movement or circulation between botanic collections again underlines the important role of private gardens with larger networks and emphasizes the movement of knowledge through both the transfer of plants themselves and their accompanying expert gardeners.
This categorization of private gardens as distinct from university botanical spaces means that they have rarely been studied as locations of knowledge creation, as they are predominately viewed as spaces for pleasure and leisure.14 However, as we have already seen from Lettsom’s example, taxonomical and scientific collections could also be maintained on private estates. Private estates varied in their roles within these networks. For example, an elite landscape estate such as Bulstrode Park in Buckinghamshire, home of the avid collector and botanist the Duchess of Portland, could be viewed as “both the center and the periphery of natural history.”15 There were direct pathways between private places such as Bulstrode and the key institutions of the day involved in natural history and botanical collecting. Again, this is established by considering the wider network and activities of fundamental players, for example the Swedish naturalist and botanist Daniel Solander, who was curator of the duchess’s cabinets while simultaneously cataloging the British Museum’s natural history collections.16 This also illustrates another feature of botanic collections, which was their close and often overlapping relationship to other collections, such as museums and libraries, which will be explored further later in this book. Despite these overt scientific links, Bulstrode is almost always described by garden historians as an essentially domestic space, in comparison to institutional and national scientific enterprises. The gardens of medical practitioners, as well as those of nurserymen and other botanic collectors, with their scientific collections can also be viewed as straddling this domestic and institutional divide. It is clear that divisions such as public and private, professional and amateur, civic and domestic all intermingle in complex ways during this period in relation to scientific practice.17
As the movement of Mrs. Delany () as a visitor, albeit an elite one with privileged access, between these botanic nodes reveals, botanic spaces, whether commercial, private, or institutional, were not necessarily experienced any differently at the time. She records how “I am so busy now with rare plants from all my botanical friends, and idle visitors.”18 This denotes her situation within a large social and botanic network, revolving around the Court and also including key artistic, literary, and elite figures such as George Frideric Handel, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, and the Duchess of Portland.19 These connections and her own elite status in turn enabled her to move freely between a variety of public and private botanic spaces.
Mrs. Delany’s portrait of a woman, most likely herself, drawing from “A seat in Wood Island at Hollymount,” County Down, Ireland, where she lived with her husband, Dr. Patrick Delany. This drawing is dated June 28, 1745, and is (more...)
We can see the blurring of these spaces within her letters. On April 17, 1779, for example, she writes to her confidante Mrs. Port that “tomorrow morning we go airing to the Physic Garden at Chelsea.”20 This suggests that this botanic training garden with its collection created as an educational tool for apothecaries, which will be discussed in more detail below, could also be viewed by the visitor as a leisurely space for walking, in a similar vein to the more popular landscape gardens of the day (). In the same letter, she adds a section relating tales of her adventures, within which she records that they “return’d loaded with the spoyls of the Botanical Garden” and that her niece “was surprised at the live chameleon she saw in the hot house.”21 The collecting of plants and the spotting of an exotic live chameleon are not activities that you would normally assume to have occurred within a garden designed purely for botanical and educational purposes.
A 1751 plan of the Chelsea Physic Garden, which portrays an imagined arrival of exotic plants on boats along the river Thames, as well as the well-dressed audience on the riverbank, all underlining the fashionable interest in plants. The garden was owned (more...)
On the same trip to London she writes that she had traveled again with her niece, Georgina, and also Mrs. Port, “to Upton in Essex, 10 miles off, to Dr Fothergill’s garden, crammed my tin box with exoticks, overpowered with such variety I knew not what to chuse! Georgina delighted fluttered about like a newborn butterfly, first trying her wings, and then examining and enjoying all the flowers.”22 Here the doctor’s garden provided an exciting range of exotic introductions, which were both of scientific and pleasurable interest and from which specimens could be gathered and taken away. Whereas a trip to Lee and Kennedy’s popular plant nursery, The Vineyard in Hammersmith, was described as only offering “a pleasant tour this morning.”23 She continues: “We went to Lee’s at Hammersmith in search of flowers, but only met with a crinum, a sort of Pancratium Crinum Asiaticum.”24 Obviously she was disappointed by seeing a sole example of a flowering plant that she had not seen before. It is worth noting here that Mrs. Delany was not only an elite woman, she also had a very specific botanical interest. As an artist she developed an incredibly skillful approach to producing paper collages known as “mosaicks,” which were botanically accurate as well as beautiful, and this was no doubt related to her particular approach to seeking out new and exotic flowers.25 However, this fluidity of use of botanic collections, whether educational, private, or commercial, reflected the blurred nature of what constituted a botanic collection at this time and how they were experienced by visitors.
This circulation of plant material between these spaces and the wide-ranging networks this encompassed is also made visible in the 1778 Proposals for Opening by Subscription a Botanic Garden to be Called the London Botanic Garden, written by William Curtis, an apothecary by training.26 In this text, Curtis gives thanks to those who have supplied him with plants for his new botanic garden, which he states that he plans to fund via individual subscriptions—a membership scheme by which visitors paid a regular sum in order to access the garden and its library. In his record of thanks to those who had helped establish the garden are references to specimens donated from King George III’s royal garden at Kew, as well as the private gardens of the Earl of Bute, the Duchess Dowager of Portland, Dr. Fothergill, and Dr. Pitcairn. He also thanks the Apothecaries Company, which we can assume relates to donations from their physic garden in Chelsea, as well as a set of London-based nurserymen: “Messrs Gordon, Lee, Kennedy and Malcolm.”27 All of this again demonstrates the existence of a network that crossed private, institutional, and commercial botanical collections and one that was connected by the movement of objects, plants, seeds, knowledge, and people. It was also one in which medical practitioners played a prominent role, as we can see from Curtis’s list and which will be discussed in more detail in chapter 3.
The interconnections and movements between gardens are also illuminated by a close analysis of the gardens of Fothergill and Pitcairn. Like Lettsom, both men were key medical figures at the end of the eighteenth century, with large disposable incomes and estates on the fringes of the city, as well as busy central London medical practices. Together they funded plant-hunting expeditions and used their gardens as botanical clearinghouses as well as training grounds for apprentice gardeners.
Throughout Britain in this period, medical physicians developed gardens in which seeds and plants could be grown, observed, and circulated. In this way they formed part of larger gentry and university botanic networks, and thereby operated in similar ways to the more commercial gardens of nurserymen.28 As we have seen, private gardens with botanic collections were not unusual during this period. Other examples include the Duchess of Portland, who had “every English plant in a separate garden by themselves” at Bulstrode, and there were specially created botanical and experimental gardens at Woburn Abbey, Buckinghamshire, developed by the 6th Duke of Bedford, who was an important patron of scientific horticulture.29
This network of private gardens also extended beyond British shores. In 1768 Fothergill wrote to John Bartram, an American plant collector and exporter, exhorting him “to sow a considerable part of most of the seed thou collects, I mean the new discovered plants, in a little garden at home, and to send over young plants of two years old in boxes, several sorts of plants in one box.”30 His argument was that the young plants would survive better as “many seeds wholly miscarry with us,” which demonstrates the importance of these domestic private spaces as places for growing plants within such networks.31 In this way the private garden could act as a nursery space from which plants could make their way to other private, subscription, commercial, and institutional gardens, either at home or abroad.
Although this book is focused on the gardens created in Britain, it is important to consider that this circulation, whether of people, plants, and/or objects, was intertwined with histories of slavery and domination over indigenous people and cultures. Lettsom himself was born on Little Jost Van Dyke near Tortola, one of the British Virgin Islands, which housed a Quaker colony as well as a number of slave plantations (). Pettigrew tells us that in the 1760s, Lettsom, having been educated in Britain, returned to his native island to take possession of the property which had been left to him by his father and “which then consisted of a small portion of land, and about 50 slaves.”32 Pettigrew continues that although at this time he did not have as much as fifty pounds sterling to his name, Lettsom considered “the traffic in living blood as wicked and unlawful,” so that “he immediately emancipated them and became a voluntary beggar at the age of 23.”33 Despite such a notable early attempt at the emancipation of enslaved people, Lettsom inherited another similar plantation shortly before his death and without time to achieve a second emancipation, demonstrating the interlinking of eighteenth-century lives, whether willing and intentional or not, with the more violent elements of empire.
Representation of the house on Little Jost Van Dyke in the British Virgin Islands, where Lettsom was born in a Quaker settlement in 1744, as illustrated in Pettigrew’s Memoirs of the Life and Writings of John Coakley Lettsom, 1817.
Similarly, the seemingly benign traffic in plants from remote parts of the world was necessarily tied to the trade in people, since ships were used for more than one purpose as they crisscrossed the oceans. Kathleen Murphy, in her groundbreaking work, has traced the direct relationships between the apothecary and naturalist James Petiver’s natural history collection and the trade in human cargo across the British Atlantic.34 As she notes, “while the scale of Petiver’s efforts was extraordinary, his use of the global routes of British commerce to expand his collections was not.”35 This common use of the same global routes would also be true of the medical practitioners discussed. They may not have been directly involved in slavery—or in Lettsom’s case may have attempted to free themselves from profiting from human misery—but they all still relied on these trade routes and connections to create their collections of new and exotic plants. As James Delbourgo has argued, “Only in the last few years have scholars begun to examine the agency of the slave trade in circulating natural knowledge, suggesting the possibility of overcoming the long-standing notion that slavery and science had nothing to do with each other.”36 This relationship between slavery and science is particularly embedded in the natural history collecting networks of medical practitioners and the crucial role of ships’ surgeons, who often had extensive botanical, zoological, and medical knowledge. Almost half of the maritime men, which included a large number of surgeons, who were collecting for naturalists such as James Petiver in the Atlantic were doing so along slave trade routes.37
Given the focus on the experience and use of gardens by medical practitioners in Britain, I have not attempted to trace here the routes of plants that made their way into the various gardens, but it is clear that this history of collecting exotic species is entangled with other forms of commerce as plants traveled on the same ships that transported other cargo across the empire. There is further work needed to be done on the context of the collecting and distribution of plants in order to understand the full economic and human cost in the creation of our historic landscapes, although Tobin’s work has already made crystal clear the necessity of understanding the other histories that have led to the creation and cultural shared understandings of the exotic and its placement in our gardens.38 Underlying all these narratives of national benefit, of sending people to Africa to collect plants and trade connections with the Americas, is a darker history of violence and exploitation. This necessarily means that the mention of the “exotic” comes freighted with hidden histories of labor, both abroad and at home, which are sometimes hard to identify from the extant sources.
“A Sensual Botanist”
Taking this circulation of natural history and botanic specimens as our starting point, it is clear that these gardens were all constructed via networks on a range of scales from the global to the truly personal. Moving from the global frame to the individual, it is worth also considering the personal connections that impacted on the movement of plants across garden spaces. Having regularly frequented the estate of Dr. Fothergill () at Upton while the older physician was alive, Lettsom obtained two thousand botanical specimens, a fraction of those growing in the garden, along with their attendant greenhouses, transferring them to Grove Hill on Fothergill’s death in 1780.39 The movement of plants from one collection to another illustrates their importance both scientifically as well as emotionally, as they represented a memorial to Lettsom’s mentor, friend, and key Quaker connection.
Portrait of John Fothergill with a botanical text in his hands and sitting on a chair covered in a pineapple print, denoting his deep interest in exotic plants and botanical science and highlighting the ever-present colonial context in domestic settings (more...)
As a Quaker with a degree from Edinburgh, at a time when the Royal College of Physicians only licensed those with a degree from Oxford or Cambridge, Fothergill’s career as an unlicensed doctor in London got off to a shaky start, with him barely able to make ends meet. However, in 1744 his fortunes changed, and after being examined by the Royal College, he became the first graduate in medicine from Edinburgh to be granted a license to practice. From that point onward his career developed along a rapid upward trajectory until he became one of the richest physicians in England.40 This was in part due to the success of his treatise, An Account of the Sore-Throat Attended with Ulcers, published in 1748.41
His Edinburgh connections remained important and included his lecturers, such as the surgeon and anatomist Alexander Monro, and Charles Alston, professor of botany and materia medica (who was John Hope’s predecessor), as well as contemporaries such as the surgeon William Hunter. From later letters it is clear that Fothergill and Alston retained a botanic friendship long after he graduated.42 As well as describing his time as a young physician trying to set up business in London, Fothergill also filled his letters to Alston with whatever botanical knowledge was being discussed and circulated at the time.43 This suggests his botanical interest was fostered by his time as a medical student at Edinburgh and grew as his fortune allowed.
Other members of his network, including fellow Quaker and banker David Barclay, may also have provided encouragement for this botanical interest. It was Barclay who introduced Fothergill to Peter Collinson, a well-off Quaker merchant who traded mainly with the American colonies and the West Indies, and in 1740 Fothergill recorded his pleasure in this new friendship.44 Later in 1774, Fothergill wrote to Linnaeus that “it was our Collinson who taught me to love plants. … He persuaded me to create a garden.”45 Collinson himself was at the center of an international network of naturalists and botanists, and his own gardens, firstly in Peckham and then at Mill Hill in Hendon (both on the rural fringes of London), were used as growing grounds for new plants from around the world.46 This was a particularly important link for Fothergill, and brought him into contact with others, such as the American plant collector John Bartram, as well as Linnaeus. It is through this network that Fothergill became involved in plant collecting, particularly via Bartram in America, and his house and garden in Upton also became a repository for plants, animals, and a collection of shells, corals, and insects.47
In 1762 Fothergill purchased Admiral Elliot’s estate in Essex and established his main garden there (). Known as Upton House (now the public West Ham Park), the most extensive estimate, which is from Gilbert Thompson in 1782 just after Fothergill’s death in 1780, recorded it as “containing about sixty acres of land, and between five and six acres of garden-ground.”48 Given that Lettsom stated that the original estate when Fothergill purchased it was estimated at thirty acres, this larger estate probably included the further parcels of land Fothergill bought as he developed his landscape.49 These additional parcels were used for various tree plantations, including Portuguese oaks and Spanish chestnuts, emphasizing the arboricultural and possibly agricultural nature of the estate, as well as its role as botanic garden.50
John Fothergill’s garden at Upton, and later the birthplace of pioneering surgeon Joseph Lister, which depicts the essential team of gardeners as well as exotic plants and birds. Engraving as reproduced in A.
Logan Turner, Joseph, Baron Lister: (more...)
However, given the exotic nature of much of the plant material grown at Upton, it is not surprising that the botanic infrastructure included both hot and cold greenhouses. Lettsom, presumably based on his many visits to Fothergill’s garden, describes how they were of nearly twenty-five feet extent and that they communicated directly with the house via a glass door.51 Within these were “upwards of 3,400 distinct species of exotics,” with around another “3,000 distinct species of plants and shrubs” growing in the garden outside.52 Lettsom portrayed this delightful scene as a “perpetual spring … where the elegant proprietor sometimes retired for a few hours, to contemplate the vegetable productions of the four quarters of the globe united within his domain; where the spheres seemed transposed, and the arctic circle to be joined to the equator.”53 This Edenic flattening of the globe within the garden was both a symbolic organization similar to that discussed in the last chapter in relation to the earlier Padua botanic garden, as well as a physical manifestation of the vegetable productions of the British Empire, which was stretching ever farther across the known world. It is, therefore, perhaps unsurprising that Banks declared that “no other garden in Europe, royal, or of a subject, had nearly so many scarce and valuable plants.”54
In many ways this collecting seems in line with that taking place at other institutional gardens and at Kew. On Fothergill’s death, Banks and Solander described in a note how “the remembrance of his botanick garden at Upton will ever be fresh in the minds of all lovers of that science.”55 However, it is clear that for Fothergill his botanic collecting had more personal significance beyond that of a collection based on scientific rigor. In 1772 he wrote to William Bartram, who was collecting plants for him in South Carolina: “All fragrant shrubs or plants, or such as are remarkable for the beauty or singularity of their flowers and foliage will be most acceptable. I am not so far a systematic Botanist as to wish to have in my garden all the grasses or other less observable humble plants that nature produces. The useful, the beautiful, the singular or the fragrant are to us the most material.”56 He echoed this theme again in 1774 when he wrote to Lionel Chalmers, declaring “I call myself a sensual botanist.”57 This sensual approach, he explained, is the reason why only “plants remarkable for their form, foliage, elegant flowers, utility, are my objects. Mosses, grasses and the like I leave to others. Ferns indeed and the Polypodiae, I love. They are all elegant.”58 This is a man then who was not just collecting plants by scientific principles but also choosing them based on personal, sensory criteria. They had to be either of a pleasurable nature to be enjoyed as such or be of utilitarian value. This description acts as an important reminder of the personal pleasure to be found in plant collecting and the role of the garden as a multisensory space, even when it also had a scientific function.
This sensory approach does not mean that Fothergill’s religious relationship to nature was eclipsed. His Quaker beliefs were reflected in his letters as he urged Bartram, “in studying nature forget not its author.”59 Plant collecting could then have a very personal meaning created through an intertwining of religious feeling, desires for pleasure, and serious scientific interest. It is clear that although Fothergill was an active collector of various productions of natural history, he viewed these as an investment for later life when he expected to have far more time than his snatched few hours with a lantern to enjoy them. In 1770 he wrote to Humphry Marshall, explaining, “Perhaps thou will be surprised when I tell thee one of my principal inducements to make … collections. It is that when I grow old and am unfit for the duties of a more active life, I may have some amusement in store to fill up those hours when bodily infirmity may require some external consolations.”60 This was, therefore, a collection designed for planned future leisurely enjoyment as much as to satisfy current scientific curiosity.
The Garden as a Botanical Clearinghouse
As we have seen, Fothergill’s garden provided a place for growing plants collected from beyond British shores. Often these were the products of expeditions that were co-funded with fellow physician and botany enthusiast, Pitcairn. As noted above, royal botanic gardens such as Kew, under Banks, were already starting to provide a central “clearinghouse” where specimens as well as ideas and knowledge could be located and exchanged, but this term could also be applied to many other gardens, including those owned and developed by medical physicians.61
Like Fothergill, Pitcairn () bought a rural estate in Islington, which was then a village just outside London. There he developed a botanic garden that was well enough known for Mrs. Delany to visit it on her 1779 botanic excursions in London and to describe it as “Dr Pitcairn’s botanical garden.”62 One of the earliest accounts is recorded by John Nelson in 1811 in his History and Antiquities of the Parish of Islington, in which he wrote, “About 30 years ago, Dr. Wm. Pitcairn began a botanical garden, behind the house in which he resided (now Mr. Wilson’s), opposite Cross-street, and which he cultivated till his decease: this continues to be one of the finest gardens in Islington, and is upwards of 4 acres in extent.”63 Sadly, little evidence remains to give an indication of its design, but there have been suggestions that it was likely to have been laid out on a plan modeled on Boerhaave’s garden at Leiden.64 Given that Pitcairn attended Boerhaave’s lectures as a student, he would certainly have visited the garden as part of the botanical course, and it may well have influenced his own design and use of space.
Mezzotint of William Pitcairn as president of the College of Physicians, by J. Jones after Sir Joseph Reynolds, 1777.
This private garden in Islington was clearly of significance to those within Pitcairn’s botanical network. In his lecture on botanic gardens for his students, Hope stated, “I must mention also others, Drs Pitcairn, & Dr. Fothergill who possess Gardens the next to this Royal Garden in goodness.”65 The royal garden Hope was referring to was of course that at Kew (), and he continued to note the central role this garden played within the web of plant collectors and spaces beyond the garden: “The attention of his Majesty is not alone in contributing largely for the Botanic Gardens but also in sending Missionaries to distant parts of the world for procuring herbs and seeds. His Majesty has also missionaries to gather all plants of a rare kind.”66 In a similar manner, Pitcairn and Fothergill also funded expeditions to gather plants that in turn were grown in a range of domestic, commercial, and institutional garden spaces, including Hope’s own botanic garden in Edinburgh. Hope’s reference to them may well have also represented a polite nod to key contributors to his own teaching collection.
View of the wilderness at Kew by William Marlow, 1763, showing William Chamber’s magnificent Pagoda as well as the Alhambra and the Mosque. Here the global is clearly presented within what is generally recognized to be the domestic English landscape (more...)
Like Fothergill, Pitcairn was a major medical figure, but one who was accepted to the highest levels of the profession without the obstacles of being a religious nonconformist. He acted as the physician to the well-established Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, and was the president of the Royal College of Physicians, also based in London, from 1775 to 1785.67 Like many of the other medical professionals discussed in this book, he was also a member of the Royal Society and was elected as a fellow in May 1770. His application established his botanical expertise, stating that he was a “Gentleman very well versed in all branches of Literature and Natural History, and especially distinguished by his application to Botany and success in rearing scarce and foreign plants.”68 Among those who proposed his application were William Hunter and Fothergill, cementing his status within a network of eminent physicians and scientists.
Like other physicians, Pitcairn also participated in professional and social networks. For example, both Cullen and Pitcairn were members of elite households at the start of their careers. Cullen began his career as the Ordinary Medical Attendant to James, 5th Duke of Hamilton, and Pitcairn was private tutor to the 6th Duke. In these capacities Cullen and Pitcairn met and forged a friendship with William Hunter—all Scottish medical men with “a love of books in common.”69 The signature of Hunter on Pitcairn’s Royal Society Fellowship application signifies the importance of such networks for professional development.
The circulation of botanic specimens has always been particularly valuable for the creation and maintenance of botanic gardens. As we have already seen, Pitcairn was supplying plants to Curtis’s new botanic garden. However, his garden also provided plant material for more established teaching collections. For example, Rembert notes that Pitcairn was able to help the Chelsea Physic Garden in the 1780s when they needed assistance, along with other establishment figures. The committee of the physic garden ordered that thanks were to be “given to Sir Joseph Banks, Dr. James Smith, Mr. James Dixon of the British Museum, and Dr. Pitcairn for their plants and seeds for the use of the garden.”70
Pitcairn was also exchanging plants with John Hope at the Leith Walk botanic garden in Edinburgh. Some specimens were from his own garden, and others were obtained from local nurserymen in London. On December 22, 1777, Dr. Pitcairn wrote to Hope with a receipt of plants that he had sent, recording that “many of them are from Mr Lee for in private collections we have no numbers of trees & shrubs.”71 In the same letter he also stated that “I received your alpines which came safe & in good condition.”72 He then goes on to list the forty-one plants that he had sent to Edinburgh, and in return Hope compiled “a list of trees & shrubs wanted in the B. Garden and are to be got in the neighbourhood of London viz. from Dr Pitcairn, Messrs Lee and Malcolm.”73 Here Pitcairn’s garden provided a valuable resource for the university garden along with the nurserymen’s commercial gardens of Lee and Malcolm, between which Pitcairn acted as a broker for Hope. Again, there is no real distinction made by users themselves between the gardens, and they are all perceived as equally valuable in the circulation of material between the various spaces, although Pitcairn, perhaps in his more privileged role within the network, seems to be the one negotiating the transfer of plants from the London nurserymen to Edinburgh. As Easterby-Smith argues, London’s nurseries “contained collections of new plants that rivaled those of private amateurs and public botanical institutions. Their exclusive contents made them significant as sites of new knowledge.”74
As well as sending plants out from his botanic garden, Pitcairn was also actively involved in plant collecting. In this way his Islington garden became a botanic clearinghouse where plants were brought in from around the globe and then distributed to other places, including Edinburgh. For example, Banks described the active role of Fothergill: “In conjunction with the Earl of Tankerville, and Dr Pitcairn, and myself, he sent over a person to Africa, who is still employed upon the coast of that country, for the purpose of collecting plants and specimens.”75
This reveals a network that extended beyond that of the medical profession to the landed gentry, and one that was forged by a shared interest in botany. It also raises questions of other activities related to plant collecting, such as the elision of indigenous knowledge in this colonial plant-collecting expedition. More focused research in this area could reveal the relationship between these expeditions and other colonial activities.
Fothergill and Pitcairn worked together as collectors as early as 1768 and were involved in funding a number of expeditions to the West Indies, the Alps, and Africa with various other wealthy botany enthusiasts. Thomas Blaikie, for example, was employed by them on the Alpine collecting mission and recorded in his diary that a package including 420 seeds was sent on November 1775: “specimints (sic) and seeds sent together in one box directed to Dr. Pitcairn Warwick Court Warwick Lane London.”76 They are also recorded together as donors of several plants to Kew gardens in William Aiton’s Hortus Kewensis, which was compiled predominately by Banks’s botanical assistants, Jonas Dryander and Solander.77 The Kewensis first appeared in 1789 as a record of the newly expanding plant collection housed at Kew, and lists donors, like Pitcairn and Fothergill, but not those who actually collected the physical specimens and sent them back to British shores, nor any local knowledge acquired in the collecting process.
This may in part reflect that many of the plants and seeds that were collected would have been grown, acclimatized, and propagated before they were sent on elsewhere, often in private gardens. In 1778 Henry de Ponthieu sent a letter with a parcel of specimens from his plant-collecting expedition to the West Indies. He wrote that he had “sellected an assortment of Seeds for the Kings Garden—Dr Fothergill’s & Dr Pitcairn’s.”78 In this way these physicians and their private gardens can be seen to be facilitating the colonial botanic enterprise in a similar way to that of Kew and other more prominent botanic gardens.
This use of the garden as a botanic clearinghouse through which plants circulated can be seen vividly in this description from Lettsom of Fothergill’s garden ():
From America he received various species of Catalpas, Kalmias, Magnolias, Firs, Oaks, Maples, and other valuable productions, which became denizens of his domain, some of them capable of being applied to the most useful purposes of timber; and, in return, he transported green and bohea teas from his garden at Upton, to the southern part of that great continent, now rising into an independent empire: he endeavoured to improve the growth and quality of coffee in the West India islands; the Bamboo cane (Arundo Bambos) calculated for various domestic uses, he procured from China, and purposed to transplant it to our islands situated within the tropics.79
This undermines Fothergill’s claim that he was really a sensual botanist and wanted a garden to enjoy on his retirement from practice, a desire that was repeated in Autumn 1772 to John Bartram, when he wrote, “I look forwards, and that it is not impossible but I may live long enough to think it proper to decline all business. Then an amusement of this kind will have its use to lessen the tediousness of old age, and call me out to a little exercise when subsiding vigor prompts to too much indulgence.”
80 Despite this sentiment of looking forward to gardening at leisure, in reality he created an economic botany powerhouse, which could be financially valuable for the nation and the wider imperial project.
Colored etching by the botanical artist George Ehret, of a magnolia species with flowering stem and labeled floral segments, fruit, and seed, ca. 1737, after himself.
Bullfrogs and Tortoises
Along with the exotic plants, there was also a circulation of animals both from other countries and between British gardens. As noted earlier, there was the chameleon spotted by Mrs. Delany and her niece in the hothouse of Chelsea Physic Garden.81 Similarly, in Fothergill’s letters to Bartram he mentions exotic species such as bullfrogs and turtles. The bullfrogs () are of particular interest as they suggest how animals might circulate via private gardens in the same way or even alongside plant specimens. In 1770 Fothergill thanks Bartram for two letters as well as “the box of plants, the cast of Colocasia [a type of yellow water lily], and the Bull Frogs alive.”82 He goes on to write that
a place is not yet fixed upon for the Bull Frogs to be put in. In the meantime however they are kept in a shallow vessel of water, the bottom covered with moss, where they may either put their heads above or under the water as they like. We have now a severe frost, but when all this goes off they will be set at large somewhere and in safety. We have none of the kind in England. The King is acquainted with their arrival; also the Colocasia, and from who they come.83
A few months later, in March, Lettsom had to inform Bartram that the frogs were still alive and well but not yet delivered to the king.
84 He suggested this was due to the “present state of public affairs,” presumably the growing tensions between Britain and America, and says he would find a place for them in his own garden. Nonetheless, in 1772 he wrote again saying that although he had sent a description of the frogs to the king, he had heard nothing in return. At this point he also describes their place within the garden and the issues of trying to keep such animals captive:
In a little place where I keep a few gold fish I put the frogs and fenced it in, in such a manner as I thought they would be forthcoming whenever they were called for. A small communication, between the place I had allotted for them and a large canal, underground, and of which I was ignorant, afforded one of them the means of getting more liberty. The other is still a prisoner, is still alive, and my gardener who sees him frequently tells me he is increased in size.85
At this juncture he suggested that as he has heard nothing from the king he might let the other escape so that it might find the original escapee. However, in 1774, despite seeming to be sanguine about the runaways, he is writing again with a request:
Please let him [William] know that I received the turtle in good health, and shall be much obliged if he will procure me a male and female Bullfrog. Mine are strayed away notwithstanding my best endeavours. If they are put in a little box of wet moss, they will come safe; at least I received a little American frog, the Rana ocellata, in a box of plants, filled with moss.86
Here, then, we have a variety of frogs as well as a turtle arriving at Upton alongside parcels of plants. However, unlike the bullfrogs, which were located in the garden, the turtle may well not have been so lucky. The minutes book of the Society of Physicians has a record of members being delighted that they were able to dine on turtle soup at meetings held in the Crown & Anchor on the Strand, although the origins of that particular turtle are unknown, as is the destination of Fothergill’s own creature.
87Mark Catesby was the first to publish a natural history of North America. His watercolor, heightened with gum arabic, of an American bullfrog (Lithobates catesbeianus), 1722–1726, is likely to be of the same or a similar species as that sent to (more...)
Fothergill was not the only medical practitioner with exotic animals, particularly from America, in his garden. Lettsom, in his description of his vegetable garden, notes that “here are left to range among the vegetables several tortoises, which are become so familiar, as to attend regularly the gardeners at their meals, and eat the leaves they offer from their hands.”88 These are clearly an integral part of the garden’s living collection. Lettsom explains that the age of one of these creatures was over sixty-three years and that it had originally been sent as a gift by Humphry Marshall of West Chester, North America (). As a child Marshall had marked the tortoise himself, so when choosing in later life to send this to Lettsom, it must have had particular personal significance. Again the living elements of the garden represent substantial ties formed within a network built on the gift exchange common within natural history collecting.89
George Edwards’s 1757 image of “the small mud tortoise, smelling strong of musk, having a sharp horn poynted tayl from Pensilvania” [sic]. At least one of Lettsom’s tortoises that lived in his vegetable garden originated (more...)
Within his estate Lettsom also had more traditionally demarked areas, such as a small farm where he housed chickens and hens, as well as an aviary and a menagerie in which he kept rather more exotic animals, including squirrels, flying as well as ground squirrels, a bear, and a great white American owl.90
There are a few such tantalizing references, but with little documentary evidence, of other animals in the gardens owned by medical practitioners. The physician William Withering, for example, developed a botanic garden at Edgbaston Hall in Birmingham. Best known for his work on the foxglove (Digitalis) plant () and its role in the treatment of heart conditions, it is perhaps unsurprising that he had a botanic collection.91 However, there are also notes that he kept monkeys at the hall, while breeding cattle and dogs.92 Similarly, the surgeon John Hunter had a great variety of animals in his garden at his country retreat at Earl’s Court (). Using Hunter’s papers and other descriptions, Stephen Paget in 1897 compiled a list of animals that he believed were kept at Earl’s Court:
In a field facing his sitting room was a pond, where he kept for experiment his fishes, frogs, leeches, eels and river-mussels. … The trees dotted about the grounds served him for his studies of the heat of living plants, their movements and their power of repair. He kept fowls, ducks, geese, pigeons, rabbits, pigs, and made experiments on them; also opposums, hedgehogs and rare animals—a jackal, a zebra, an ostrich, buffaloes, even leopards; also dormice, bats, snakes and birds of prey.93
The medicinally important foxglove (Digitalis purpurea) as illustrated in William
Withering’s famous account, An Account of the Foxglove, and Some of Its Medical Uses: With Practical Remarks on Dropsy, and Other Diseases (Birmingham: Printed by (more...)
John Hunter’s house at Earl’s Court, as imagined by the rival surgeon Jesse Foot in his own extra-illustrated copy of his 1794 work The Life of John Hunter, vol. 3, 1822. Note the fantastical two-headed beast in the background on the right, (more...)
Although this was compiled a century after Hunter’s death, and some animals may have been kept in locations other than Earl’s Court or only referenced in Hunter’s work, it gives a sense of the potential range of animals that could be found in gardens of this time. A greater discussion of the distinction between exotic and domestic animals can be found in chapter 5, but this underlines the extent to which these gardens housed a variety of animal species that arrived via similar networks, and sometimes literally alongside the plant specimens, in packages from around the globe.
Like many other aspects of gardens owned by medical practitioners in this period, this inclusion of a range of creatures may have reflected the extensive menageries and aviaries constructed by members of the landed classes.94 Men such as Joshua Brookes made a lucrative living from supplying a whole range of creatures to anyone who could afford them from his Original Menagerie in London, which demonstrates the popularity of animal ownership during this period.95 In 1791, Gilbert Pidcock, a traveling showman and later part owner of the Exeter Exchange menagerie, held an exhibition at the Lyceum in London, where over four hundred animals were exhibited in the Great Room, including a lion, a condor, a silver-headed eagle, an imperial vulture, a pelican, a rattlesnake, leopards, macaws, and a hyaena.96
Many of these birds and animals would have made their way to the aviaries and menageries created within the landscape garden, which were so common by the second half of the eighteenth century that they went unrecorded.97 Among those who were keen animal collectors was Queen Charlotte, who had several collections housed at Richmond, Buckingham Gate, and Kew.98 At Kew, William Chambers remodeled much of the landscape in the 1760s. Alongside his much more famous Chinese pagoda and various other garden buildings, he also included a Chinese-style aviary (), which contained “a numerous collection of birds, both foreign and domestic.”99 There was also a menagerie, in which we are told by Chambers were “kept great numbers of Chinese and Tartarian pheasants, besides many sorts of other large exotic birds.”100 This New Menagerie (), which has since been developed and is now known as Queen Charlotte’s Cottage, also included a collection of kangaroos, with a population of nearly twenty by the time it was dispersed at the beginning of the nineteenth century, as well as cattle from Algeria and India.101 Royal taste once again seems to have influenced professionals such as Lettsom, and there is clearly a strong interrelationship between fashionable spectacle and natural history interest in the garden of this period.
Thomas Sandby’s view of the aviary at Kew gardens from William Chambers, Plans, Elevations, Sections, and Perspective Views of the Gardens and Building at Kew in Surry, 1763. Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1925, Metropolitan Museum of Art.
View of the New Menagerie at Kew, 1763, again by Thomas Sandby in William Chambers’s Plans, Elevations, Sections, and Perspective Views of the Gardens and Building at Kew in Surry, 1763. Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1925, Metropolitan Museum of (more...)
Although these may seem to be for pleasure rather than for any greater purpose, animals could also have been viewed as important scientific specimens. The work of John Hunter in comparative anatomy relied on his access to a range of specimens, although many of them were obtained as carcasses from showmen.102 He also wrote a number of papers on animal subjects for the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. One such paper, titled an “Account of an Extraordinary Pheasant,” appeared in 1780 and described his investigation of a pheasant that had been presented to him by Pitcairn, who in turn had originally received it from Sir Thomas Harris—its extraordinary nature being a “hen pheasant with the feathers of a cock,” which could not breed.103 This demonstrates how animal specimens could move between members of a network in a similar manner to plant material, and even between the same people.
This interest in both living and dead specimens located within the garden space can be illustrated by the earlier example of the physician, naturalist, and collector Hans Sloane. Within Sloane’s landscape he housed a “red-headed crane from Bengal, a blind Arctic fox from Greenland and a large greenish lizard from Malaga” as well as a beaver that probably came from the New World.104 The beaver was of interest as both a live animal when splashing in the fountain of his London garden, as well as a dead body to be understood by dissection. On its untimely passing following a series of fits and finally being attacked by a dog, the beaver was dissected by Sloane’s friend and neighbor Cromwell Mortimer. His account of the beaver in both its living and dead states was published in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions in 1733.105 The close analysis afforded by watching the beaver in Sloane’s garden over a period of three months allowed Mortimer to offer descriptions of “how her Food was Bread and Water; some Willow Boughs were given her of which she eat but little; but when she was loose in the Garden, she seem’d to like the Vines much having gnawn several of them as high as she could reach quite down to the Roots” and that “when she eats she always sate on her hind Legs, and held the Bread in her Paws like a Squirrel.”106 This scrutiny of the live animal was mirrored in the detailed account of the anatomical dissection. Similarly, the garden itself could provide the necessary space for detailed examinations of the natural world. For example, in 1720, William Stukeley and Dr. Douglas were recorded as dissecting an elephant, which had previously been shown as a spectacle in West Smithfield, on the lawn of Hans Sloane’s London residence.107 This use of the garden space for both living and dead animals is best exemplified by Hunter at Earl’s Court, and this will be discussed in more detail in chapter 5.
Overall, the evidence suggests that, as with Fothergill’s bullfrogs and Lettsom’s tortoises, such animals in the early modern period were to be found as much in the ornamental garden areas as in specific menageries. So Mortimer describes how the beaver was “turned into a Fountain with some live Flounders,” and was placed here “to bath three or four times a Week.”108 It is notable that animals, like plants, were viewed as both scientific specimens for study as well as living additions that enhanced the ornamental and decorative spaces.
Invisible Garden Hands
These gardens with their exotic residents were not just clearinghouses for plants, places of scientific inquiry, and delightful spaces for sensual botanists. They also offered opportunities for gardeners to be trained in new techniques essential for their role as custodians for these expensive, exotic, and newly arrived species. This expertise could then be used to command better-remunerated positions or travel to other parts of the empire. Christopher Smith, for example, worked as a gardener for Pitcairn in the early 1790s and via this route came to the attention of Banks.109 In 1794 he was promoted to the nurseryman for Roxburgh at the Calcutta Botanic Garden in India, one of the British botanical outposts.110 Roxburgh himself had trained as a surgeon in Edinburgh in the 1770s and would have therefore had connections with Hope and others within this influential botanic network.
In her study of commercial botanic networks during this period, Easterby-Smith has demonstrated how some gardeners, although by no means all, managed to move from lowly roles to intellectually and commercially valuable elite positions within botanic networks.111 One reason for this, she posits, was the importance of hybrid expertise to the development of botanic knowledge in the eighteenth century. She argues that for botany
“hybrid expertise” describes how knowing about the growth and living characteristics of a plant might contribute useful information to the botanical project of developing systems and classifications. Further, hybrid expertise was most likely to develop in situations where knowledge flowed in both directions: from scholars to gardeners, and from gardeners to scholars.112
The experimental nature of garden spaces then allowed some gardeners to rise through the ranks if they demonstrated this necessary hybrid expertise. In this way the vital space these gardens provided for the creation, development, and dissemination of both scientific and practical knowledge becomes apparent.
113There were also close interconnections between medical and gardening roles beyond the patronage of physicians of the role of gardeners in medical training. One key example of the blurring of these roles can be seen through the relationship of Archibald Menzies to Hope in Edinburgh, and to Fothergill and Pitcairn in London. Born in 1754 near Aberfeldy, Perthshire, into a family of gardeners, Menzies started his gardening career at Castle Menzies, owned by Sir Robert Menzies, 3rd Baronet of Nova Scotia.114 Half of the twenty-one gardeners who worked there were members of the Menzies clan, and four of Menzies’s brothers remained gardeners for the whole of their working lives.115 The familial network offered up further opportunities for Menzies as his brother William, already employed as a gardener with Hope, presumably arranged for him to work at the same Leith Walk garden in around 1770.116
As well as working in the garden, Menzies collected Scottish flora for Hope, and in 1778 he also collected plants for Pitcairn and Fothergill from the Highlands.117 This early relationship with the eminent London physicians and their botanical gardens was likely to have been brokered by Hope, who was already exchanging plants with Pitcairn, as we have seen earlier. Hope was a key figure here and clearly encouraged those who worked for him and demonstrated promise or enthusiasm to develop their own botanical and medical expertise. Like Fyfe, Menzies also attended medical lectures alongside his work as a gardener and plant collector. These classes were likely to have been subsidized by Hope and reflect both the important role of the Edinburgh botanic garden in training expert gardeners and Hope’s own role in encouraging and perhaps even funding talented men to take up medical practice.118
This early beginning established Menzies as an ideal candidate to become a ship’s surgeon, as he had both the medical and botanical expertise that would be useful on voyages to new lands. As noted above, ships’ surgeons were key actors in the collection and development of natural scientific knowledge.119 Hope’s hand can be seen in Menzies’s appointment on the Prince of Wales expedition. Writing to Banks, Hope noted that Menzies was “early acquainted with the culture of plants and acquired the principles of Botany by attending my Lectures” before serving for several years as surgeon’s mate on a naval vessel on the Halifax station, where he “paid unremitting attention to his favourite Study of Botany.”120 This combined knowledge of botany and medicine then made Menzies ideal as part of the ship’s team for exploratory voyages, as he could both treat any medical issues on board as well as collect and catalog specimens when on land.
However, even without such specialist medical training, gardeners could be employed on these trips solely for their botanic understanding. For example, David Nelson, a gardener from Kew, was employed by Banks as a “civilian supernumerary” on Captain Cook’s Discovery voyage.121 His functions were limited, but he was still considered useful for the expedition, although this may reflect Banks’s own belief in the superior nature of horticultural knowledge.122 Again, botanic networks were important in facilitating appointments. In this case James Lee, the nurseryman (), informed Banks that Nelson was “a proper person for the purpose you told me of, he knows the general run of our collection of plants about London under-stands something of botany but doe’s not pretend to much knowledge in it.”123
Stipple engraving of the nurseryman and botanist James Lee by Samuel Freeman (1810). Lee is depicted closely observing a specimen with a magnifying glass, while his hat, filled to the brim with flowers, is set to his side. Delineated from an oil portrait (more...)
As well as active roles in plant collecting and moving between gardens, ships, and the wild, gardeners played a vital role in maintaining the collections of busy physicians. Lettsom complained in 1795 of a life spent traveling around London in carriages between appointments. Writing to Dr. Watson, he bemoaned how “as I live in carriages, seldom having less than three pair of horses a day, and neglecting my meals, except once a week that I dine with my wife, I have some time to preserve my correspondence, having always, in the carriage, pen, ink, and paper, to amuse myself, if I do not amuse my correspondents.”124 In fact, the rare moments in which physicians could enjoy these private gardens or indulge their interests were highlighted by the biographer and dissenting minister Joseph Towers, in his Life of Fothergill, in which he argued that natural history “affords the greatest instruction and recreation with the least exercise of the mind: it is, therefore, well adapted to the pursuit of a medical man, whose moments of seclusion are rather snatched from time by watchful diligence, than enjoyed from actual leisure.”125
Given the busy lives of medical practitioners, gardeners were often left in charge of the botanic collections at physicians’ country estates, although in Lettsom’s case perhaps also with the oversight of his wife. According to his letters she preferred living in the country at Grove Hill, so she would have been present on the estate.126 In this case, as Briony McDonagh has discussed in detail in relation to the management by women of other landed estates, it may well be his wife who was managing Grove Hill, although given the lack of records this is currently pure speculation.127
Fothergill, however, never married and lived mainly with his sister at his London town house, spending the summer with her from 1765 onward at an even more rural estate, Lea Hall in Cheshire. In Fothergill’s obituary in The Gentleman’s Magazine, Lettsom recorded that the elder physician rarely saw his Upton estate, as “he could visit only on Saturdays during the winter, and but rarely in summer, and in which fifteen men were constantly employed.”128 Corner and Booth also note that over time Fothergill had increasingly less time to supervise the garden developments, and that he “was sometimes observed there in the dead of night, lantern in hand, viewing by its glimmer its botanical treasures.”129
In these rural estates with their absent owners, gardeners then were crucial in managing them, with or without supervision from a family member or other members of the household. As Easterby-Smith explains, finding an expert gardener who could nurture these expensive and exotic specimens was essential. She highlights how in the 1760s Peter Collinson noted with frustration that after he had supplied people with American plants, the next letter he received asked, “Pray sir, how and in what manner must I sow them … my gardener is a very ignorant fellow.”130 Horace Walpole also appears to have had problems with one of his gardeners, whom he accused of reducing “my little Eden to be as nasty and barren as the Highlands.”131
Similarly, Fothergill wrote to John Bartram in 1768 relating the problems he was having with a head gardener who was less than able. He thanked Bartram for “a box of very curious plants which I received some time ago, and which are most of them prosperous, and all of them would have been so had my gardener taken the care of them he ought for they came in a very prosperous condition.”132 Fothergill received so many plants from around the globe that he developed a procedure so that new plants were registered by gardeners on arrival with information of where they had come from, any name that came with them, and where they should be grown at Upton.133 In this way the gardeners of domestic collections performed important roles as catalogers, technicians, and expert horticulturalists, just as those working in institutional botanic gardens outlined earlier.
This importance placed on gardeners was no doubt heightened by the fact that Fothergill was rarely able to visit his own garden. He wrote to Bartram that he “ought not to think of increasing my collection for my leisure to attend to it seems to lessen every day—for on one occasion or another so many people seem to have claims to my assistance that I have less leisure than ever.”134 Presumably he had either taken on more staff or changed his head gardener due to the loss of plants, including a Pittsburgh iris sent by Bartram, as he also wrote that he now had “an able young natural gardener to take care of it, and though I see it not once a week now, yet when I do see it, it is always with so much satisfaction that I cannot relinquish it but live in hopes of enjoying it one time or another.”135 Although difficult to discover any detail regarding the gardeners themselves, it would seem that Fothergill had an expert gardener and botanist in the 1770s, one Mr. John Morrison. His death was recorded in The Gentleman’s Magazine of April 1781 as “an ingenious botanist and principal gardener to the late Dr Fothergill.”136 As already discussed with the account of Williamson at the Leith Walk garden, expert gardeners were valued for their skill, and their often-hidden labor was essential for the success of such gardens.137
There was also a continual tension between the desire to have a garden and the lack of leisure time in which to enjoy it, hence Fothergill’s often expressed desire that he was creating a space that he could enjoy in later life. Sadly, Fothergill never got the opportunity to leisurely enjoy his country estate at Upton in the way he wished, as he worked ceaselessly until his death in 1780. While he was alive, his garden, with its exotic animals and plants, of which thirty-four hundred were recorded as coming from warmer climes, reflected the ways in which colonial activities and the labor of those at home and abroad enabled such domestic collections to thrive.138
Future research will hopefully enable a fuller picture of these endeavors to emerge and reveal the ways in which our garden collections today have longer histories entwined with larger global and local narratives. By looking beyond the owners and designers of eighteenth-century landscapes and the visual appeal of their gardens with their beautiful displays of flora and fauna, we can perhaps gain a sense of their reliance on exploitative economic trade routes and less privileged human labor. Where we see the word “exotic,” we should also see the actions of a colonial power.
![Plate 10. George Edwards’s 1757 image of “the small mud tortoise, smelling strong of musk, having a sharp horn poynted tayl from Pensilvania” [sic].](/books/NBK584356/bin/ch3f11.gif)
