Up The Garden Path (Part 2)

To recap from Part 1 of “Up The Garden Path”, a seemingly throwaway comment by a very respected writer on the buildings of England set me a challenge. 

It is, at face value, an unfounded comment, a speculation and even the championing of a local rumour. 

I find this most out of character with the otherwise obsessively factual and no-nonsense reporting style by Pevsner which has established him as a foremost authority in his speciality. 

The sentence in question is, I quote, 

“A persistent local tradition attributes the design of the garden in 1840 to Joseph Paxton”. 

In context this is like someone finding an original music manuscript and claiming it to be by Mendelssohn, a transcript thought to be a work by Dickens or a painting by Rossetti.  

It may be possible to authenticate tangible and material masterpieces in literature and the arts with reference to Experts and precedent but not so for such a transitional thing as the domestic garden in this case. 

With such a prominent historical figure as Jospeh Paxton there is of course an abundance of biographical and reference material. I will not go into his C.V here. He is well worth a Google or Wiki Search but allow some time to wade through what was quite a remarkable lifetime of achievements. 

Compared to just a few years ago there is also a huge resource of information on-line which saves time, in contrast to having to spend hours in the local library or requesting information by e mail or in long hand letter requests. 

My own investigation into whether Joseph Paxton did indeed design the garden has been a bit unstructured. 

I have jumped about from link to link grasping at any mention of the key words and may easily have missed that Hallelujah moment of revelation of the truth. 

My main lines of enquiry have been centred on Paxton but also the specific village and its residents around the 1830’s and 40’s, the house in the garden and then spreading outwards in the local area, wider Yorkshire county and nationally. 

I have not yet found a definitive connection between the great man and the village or house. 

In the time of the alleged garden design the house was The Rectory and with a Reverend J Carter the incumbent. He appears to have been typical of the clergy of the era in having a privileged upbringing (a second or third son of gentry), and privately monied either by inheritance or marriage. 

A garden design commission by someone of the reputation of Joseph Paxton would be costly and unlikely to be a chargeable expense to Patrons or The Diocese. An ambitious Vicar or his lady wife would have to pay for such a luxury out of their own pocket. 

The garden is described as coniferous which was a pioneering speciality of Paxton under the term Pinetum whereby specimen trees were planted to emphasise their distinctive shape, form and foliage. 

The Parish Church was in the patronage of St Johns College, Oxford but my investigative trail goes no where along this particular direction. 

There is a good body of church documents in the public archives relating to maintenance and improvements to the Rectory but nothing relating to the garden and grounds. 

Paxton was a regular visitor to Yorkshire for both work and in his leisure pursuits. He has a strong association with the genteel seaside town of Scarborough and in the late 1850’s designed and built the Spa Complex and gardens which largely survive today in spite of partial destruction by fire in 1876. 

He is likely to have had earlier contacts in the wider Yorkshire region from his architectural and landscaping projects. 

Under one biographers' description of Paxton as “The busiest man in England” he certainly got around to a lot of areas of the country. He distinguished himself with the ‘Great Stove’ conservatory at Chatsworth, built between 1836 and 1840, which was the largest glass building in the world at that time. Subsequently, he designed the biggest glass-house in Europe, made up entirely using sheet-glass. His most celebrated work was of course the Crystal Palace for the 1851 Great Exhibition. 

Broadly corresponding to the time of the garden design in question (1840) Paxton was down in Derbyshire on a major commission to create, on a virgin site, the village of Edensor (pronounced Ensor) near Chatsworth. He also worked on public parks in Liverpool, Glasgow and Halifax. 

Paxton was also an astute investor and made, for the time, a small fortune by speculating on the new opportunities in the railways. I did work on a theory that he may, during a long rail journey to Scarborough have stopped off or got stranded in the village and either on a paid or philanthropic basis then modelled the Rectory garden. However, this fanciful idea falls apart as the railways in this part of Yorkshire were not built until after 1840.

The village is on a busy road route from the West Riding to the Yorkshire Coast and Paxton may have known about it from his travels by coach and horses.

There is a rather vague reference that during the 1840's, he continued to work on landscape gardening and designed various country houses and other domestic buildings. 

Could this have included the Rectory Garden? …. To be continued