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Show transcript
- So we are sitting here in the Walled Garden, which is quite a different environment from the park. What makes the Walled Garden special?
It was obviously one of the centrepieces of the horticulture within Staunton's tenure. Its proximity to Leigh mansion - matter of meters away really. Within the Walled Garden there is actually very little documented evidence for what was actually grown there. There is one reference to the central avenue, the central strip, which is an eglantine rose, which I believe was planted probably to help identify and symbolise the area with Hampshire...the Hampshire rose. But everything you see is really a contemporary interpretation of plants within that Staunton era.
So Staunton was born in 1781 and passed in 1859. So those are essentially imperative dates. So we do our very, very utmost not to have any plants within, not just a walled garden, but trees and anything, any plant, which was beyond 1859. And people go, "Oh, okay. So what?". But that's essentially trying to maintain, in landscape terms, the genius loci ... the spirit of the place. So the planting would be available and it would have been potentially seen by Staunton within his lifetime. I mean if I put where the obelisk is a 20th century weeping cherry tree, it would look stupendous, it would look fabulous, but the character of the landscape, which is something else to sort of get a hold of, essentially would be massively compromised. So the plants are essentially within that framework of Staunton's life.
- So anything that you see here is something that Staunton might have seen?
The vast majority. Yes.
- And how do you find that out? And that must be detective work!
It very much is. I mean, you pick up trade catalogues, wholesale online lists and it's great. You've got the genus, species, variety, cultivar, height, flowering period. Wonderful. But when you actually need to do it on a historical basis, you need to physically find out who introduced it and at what date. And what complicates matters, particularly with Staunton being an avid collector, as was his father - great, great sort of botanical collectors and and plantsmen, and the people they knew - is the fact that the plants named 200 years ago, with the wonderful taxonomists and botanists, they've since gone through a myriad of taxonomical changes. So there's 'lumpers' and 'splitters'. So there's a plant family in Staunton's day which would now be associated with something completely different with the advent of science and the marches forward. So you're looking at synonyms of plant names, which frankly are just not around anymore and they they're there, but in a completely different name. So that's the first thing to get to grips with and then finding out the date of introduction. So it does add quite a timeframe to the normal process of selection and planting.
- You talked about Staunton and his father as collectors and introducers of plants. What was happening in horticulture in that time, in terms of the development of the knowledge?
Massive, really absolutely vast leaps forward. Staunton had a very select close group of friends in all areas of science - and botany was certainly one of them. His team, I think, I believe he had 16 gardeners, he had an absolutely amazing head gardener, Alexander Scott, I believe for 40 plus years! You've got the advent in about 1804 of the RHS You had the Gardeners Chronicle. Staunton was friends, as I say, not just with the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, but other sponsors such as the famous taxonomist Robert Brown. He knew one of the plant collectors of the age Robert Fortune who indeed collected for him. Syon House in Brentford, the Duke was a regular visitor and he used to show off his plant collections to the great and the good. So, as an age of knowledge, that just shows that the vast material coming back to these shores. We've already mentioned the East India company - that was one facet - but private sponsorship, famous nurseries. It was a time and a half to be involved in any of the sciences, and botany certainly was up there!
- And why do you think that interest suddenly developed then, or was it an interest that had been been going on for centuries?
I think that with the advent of the surge in European expansion and coming back to British empire, et cetera, it was essentially an economic driving force. Botanic gardens were established in climates which could only be replicated under glass. But as I say, with countries, the Asian continent particularly, South America, Africa ... Botanic gardens were essentially mechanisms of the driving of plants. I mean, bananas, sugarcane, pineapple, tea - there's a whole story tea, Staunton in East India - China rubber from Brazil to Malaya, the Malay peninsula. I mean, vast, vast economic drivers there in terms of photosynthesis and plant growth.
