Greenhouses : Garden Design Style

Then who was to admire it all? A great deal of the gardening of the eighteenth century was done quite simply so that strangers should come and see it. The magnate of the eighteenth century lived in a museum, liked living in a museum, and usually made provision for visitors to come and admire it. That was all right when you knew reasonably well the quality and quantity of visitors, but times were different. At the approach of the Great Exhibition of 1851 it was reasonable to fear that `the park favourite haunt of beauty and fashion would be filled with East End rowdies who with their tobacco smoke, Waterloo crackers and practical jokes, would turn it into another Greenwich Fair with lousy and potentially murderous foreigners: and, most ominous of all, with savage heathens from the northern industrial towns. The beds would be trampled on, the flowers picked and finally the great human tide, leaving its scum behind in the devastated park, would surge out by night to pillage Belgravia and Kensington.'1 If this could be feared for Hyde Park, something like it on however diminished a scale might well be dreaded in the Dukeries. One of the effects of the Industrial Revolution had been to close the park gates and put man-traps in the woods, another was to turn the great English house back into a castle, a third was to make these vast carpets of flowers seem rather vulgar. By far the most celebrated and successful garden designer of the mid-century was Sir Joseph Paxton. It is significant that he is today remembered chiefly for his skill in designing enormous greenhouses and in flowering for the first time in England the great Victoria Regia (Victoria amazonica). Paxton was born near Woburn in 1801 and his early ideas of gardens were coloured by Repton's improvements there, some of which were still being carried out while Paxton was employed as gardener's boy under his brother at the neighbouring Brattlesden Park. By 1821 after a brief period elsewhere he returned to Brattlesden as gardener and laid out a lake.