Scots who changed the landscape
October 2009
by Cairns Craig
The most famous botanist in Europe of the late 1820s was Robert Brown, who had been a student at Marischal College, Aberdeen, in the 1780s. In August 1828 Brown paid a visit to the Chateau at Blois in the Loire valley, home to many of the kings and queens of France. Brown, who established his reputation as a botanist by his collection of plants on the Flinders expedition to Australia in 1802–05, had gained world renown for his discovery of what came to be known as ‘Brownian motion’.
His identification of this apparently random movement of particles in liquid – which was only satisfactorily explained by Einstein in the early 1900s – was the result of his unmatched expertise in the microscopic analysis of plants: it was Brown who first identified the ‘cell nucleus’ that carries the hereditary structure of plants.
Brown was no mere tourist at Blois. His visit was an act of homage to another and equally famous graduate of Marischal College, Robert Morison, a royalist exile who had worked there in the 1650s. Morison had been wounded in the Battle of Dee in 1645 and had to flee to France where he took a degree in medicine and was subsequently appointed as physician to the household of Gaston, duc d’Orléans, Louis XIV’s uncle. Medicine at that time was largely dependent on a knowledge of herbs, and Morison was the most distinguished herbalist of his time, introducing more than 300 new species to Blois and effectively turning it into a small botanic garden.
With the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, Morison was able to return to Britain as royal physician, and in 1669 was elected as the first Professor of Botany at Oxford, where his efforts to produce an effective taxonomy of plants was to inspire some of the most notable botanists of the next century, such as the Swede Carl Linnaeus, whose binomial classification of plants is still the norm today.
‘Physic gardens’
Morison and Brown were connected by more than attendance at Marischal College, for they were part of a remarkable Scottish tradition which, linking medicine, botany and gardening, was to have an enormous impact both on the landscapes and gardens of Britain and on the ecology of the territories of the British Empire. It was a meeting with Morison at Blois that encouraged an interest in ‘physic gardens’ on the part of Andrew Balfour, who was born at Denmylne, near Newburgh in Fife in 1630 and educated at St Andrews. After studying at Paris and Caen, he set up practice in Edinburgh, and together with Robert Sibbald established in 1670 what was to become Edinburgh’s botanical garden, on which Glasgow University’s was modelled in 1704.
That the passion for the study of plants was not only of interest to medical practitioners is clear from the fact that the new botanic garden was stocked by a donation of about 1,000 plants from the gardens of Patrick Murray, Laird of Livingston.
Such developments challenge traditional accounts of 17th-century Scotland as a poor and backward country, practically treeless and suffering from a climate made more hostile by the so-called ‘little ice age’. In 1683, for instance, John Reid’s The Scots Gard’ner was giving advice on how you may sow “Radish, Lettice, Parsly, Carrats, Parsneeps together, gathering each in their seasons”, and on the grafting of fruit trees, which he recommended should start “when the sap beginnes to stir in the spring; you must begin earlier with Cherries, Plumes, some later with Pears, ending with Aples”. As well as expecting a Scots gard’ner to raise “Currans, Gooseberries, Rasberries’, he recommends ‘Apricoks, and Peaches at southside of walls”.
The expertise to which Reid’s book attests was to make gardeners one of Scotland’s main exports after the Union in 1707: by 1758 Andrew Carlyle, minister of Inveresk, on a tour of English estates, “discovered the truth of what I had often heard that most of the head gardeners of English noblemen were Scotch”.
At the same time, the botanic gardens allowed the Scottish universities to produce medical practitioners with an unusually deep knowledge of botany, as a result of which many ship’s surgeons such as Archibald Menzies, who collected plants in North America, or William Roxburgh, who took charge of the botanic gardens in Calcutta, became leaders in the exploration of the plant resources of the expanding territories of the British Empire.
Menzies and Roxburgh were students of John Hope, Professor of Botany in Edinburgh from 1761 to 1786, who made the study of plants an essential component of the medical degree and made Edinburgh a centre for the exchange of plants from around the world.
Scots at the Royal Botanic
Hope worked closely with Sir Joseph Banks, who ruled from 1773 till the 1820s over the Royal Botanic Garden at Kew, an institution which, despite its English associations, was largely a Scottish creation. It was founded under the direction of John Stuart, Lord Bute, favourite of George III and prime minister in 1762–63. Bute was a keen botanist and plant collector and turned what had been a private royal garden into a major botanic garden.
In 1759 he appointed as head gardener William Aiton, who was not only a Scot (from Hamilton) but had been trained in London by another Scot, Philip Miller, who, as superintendant of the Chelsea Physic Garden and author of a famous Gardener’s Dictionary, dominated horticulture in London by the enormous numbers of new plants which he introduced into British gardening.
Indeed, Scots dominated the business of plant production in and around London. The most famous nursery of the late 18th century was the Lee & Kennedy Vineyard Nursery in Hammersmith, Lee being from Selkirk. Its role was taken over in the early 19th century by the Veitch nurseries founded by John Veitch who was born in Jedburgh, and who sent his own plant hunters across the world for new species to offer to British gardeners.
“So well does the Seriousness of a Scotch Education fit the mind of a Scotsman to the habits of industry, attention and frugality,” Joseph Banks wrote, “that they rarely abandon them at any time of life and I may say never while they are young.”
Such an opinion led Banks regularly to choose Scots like Brown for major expeditions. In 1772, for instance, he selected Aberdonian Francis Masson from among the undergardeners at Kew to be the botanist on the expedition to South Africa that brought back the first geraniums. And in 1775, in consultation with James Lee, he selected Thomas Blaikie, probably then also a gardener at Kew, to explore for plants in the Alps. Blaikie, son of a market gardener in Corstorphine, successfully brought back new alpines but was soon to return to France with plants for the Comte de Lauragais, a connection which led to Blaikie spending the rest of his life in France and becoming the country’s foremost landscape designer.
Famous for his skill in grafting trees – his technique came to be known as the greffe Blaikie – Blaikie was responsible for grafting the ‘Jardin Paysage’ (ironically more commonly known as the jardin anglais) on to French culture. Such was his prominence that he became not only a confidante of Marie Antoinette before the Revolution but, in its aftermath, worked on the design of the Empress Josephine’s favourite country retreat at Malmaison. Some of Blaikie’s work can still be seen in the Parc Monceau in Paris’s eighth arrondissement.
Among Blaikie’s correspondents in Britain was the most influential of all Scottish garden theorists, John Claudius Loudon (1783–1843), whose Gardener’s Magazine and various encyclopaedias of gardening and building design shaped the landscape of Victorian Britain.
Teaching the English
Loudon, born in Cambuslang, trained in gardening in and around Edinburgh, and attended classes in botany, chemistry and agriculture at Edinburgh University. Dr Coventry, Professor of Agriculture at Edinburgh, provided him with an introduction to Sir Joseph Banks who helped Loudon gain commissions for landscape design. Loudon advertised his methods in books such as Observations on laying out Farms in the Scotch Style adapted to England which argued that English landowners should adopt Scottish techniques.
Far from being a country of agricultural and horticultural backwardness, Scotland’s gardening traditions allowed Loudon to amass a fortune by teaching the English how to apply Scottish models.
Loudon, a phenomenon of literary productivity, produced an Encyclopaedia of Gardening in 1822, and shortly thereafter The Green-House Companion and an Encyclopaedia of Agriculture, amounting to more than 1200 pages. He founded The Gardener’s Magazine in 1826, and visited Thomas Blaikie several times in Paris in order to report on developments in French gardening.
Loudon’s Suburban Gardener and Villa Companion set the pattern for much Victorian domestic building, including the invention of the semi-detached villa, and Loudon promoted a new style of garden which he called “the gardenesque”. The novelty of the gardenesque lay in its deliberate emphasis on the artificiality of the arrangement and setting of its plants, on their ‘unnatural’ contingency, applying to ordinary gardens the arrangements found in botanic gardens.
Through Loudon’s designs, the Scottish tradition of the botanic garden reshaped the traditional pleasure garden into that collection of world plants which is still the basis of modern British gardening.
To be continued:
Cairns Craig is Glucksman Professor of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen. His recent book, Intending Scotland: Explorations in Scottish Culture since the Enlightenment (Edinburgh University Press), situates Scotland’s gardeners and botanists in the wider development of Scottish culture.
REFERENCES
1 The Autobiography of Dr Alexander Carlyle of Inveresk, Ch. 9.
2 Quoted in Patricia Banks, Thomas Blaikie, from H.C. Cameron, Sir Joseph Banks (1966), 100, fn. 52.
3 His biographer, Patricia Taylor, describes him as the ‘Capability Brown of France’ but this underestimates the extent to which the ‘jardin Anglais’ was also the ‘jardin écossais’.
4 Details from ‘A Short Account of the Life and Writings of John Claudius Loudon’, written by his wife Jane after his death, and reprinted in Gloag, Mr Loudon’s England, Appendix II, 182ff.
5 See Ann Lindsay, Seeds of Blood and Beauty: Scottish Plant Explorers (2005).
6 Keith Lamb and Patrick Bowe, A History of Gardening in Ireland (1995), 116.
7 T.C. Smout, People and Woods in Scotland (2003), 139.
8 Miscellanea, Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (London, 1923), v. 26, 79-96.
9 John Croumbie Brown, The Modern Forest Economy (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1884), vi.
10 Forbes W. Robertson, Early Scottish Gardeners and their Plants (2000), 144–5.
11 Ibid., 11.
This is an article from the October 2009 edition of Leopard Magazine. To read much more like this every month, see our subscription details.