At Home - Bill Bryson [143]
His achievements were by no means unreservedly admired by all. The poet Richard Owen Cambridge once declared to Brown: “I very earnestly wish I may die before you, Mr. Brown.”
“Why?” asked Brown, surprised.
“Because I should like to see heaven before you had improved it,” Cambridge answered drily.
The artist John Constable hated Brown’s work. “It is not beauty because it is not nature,” he declared. But Brown’s most devoted antagonist was the snobbish Sir William Chambers. He dismissed Brown’s landscapes as unimaginative, insisting they “differ very little from common fields.” But then Chambers’s idea of improving a landscape was to cover it with garish buildings. It was he who designed the pagoda, mock Alhambra, and other diversions at Kew. Chambers thought Brown little more than a peasant because his speech and manners lacked refinement, but Brown’s clients loved him. One, Lord Exeter, hung a portrait of Brown in his house where he could see it every day. Brown also seems to have been just a very nice man. In one of his few surviving letters, he tells his wife how, separated from her by business, he passed the day in imaginary conversation with her, “which has every charm except your dear company, which will ever be the sincere and the principal delight, my dear Biddy, of your affectionate husband.” That’s not bad for someone who was barely schooled. They were certainly not the words of a peasant. He died in 1783 at the age of sixty-six and was much missed by many.
II
Just as Capability Brown was rejecting flowers and ornamental shrubs, others were finding new ones in magnificent abundance. The period that lay fifty years to either side of Brown’s death was one of unprecedented discovery in the botanical world. The hunt for plants became a huge driver of both science and commerce.
The person who can reasonably be said to have started it all was Joseph Banks, the brilliant botanist who accompanied Captain James Cook on his voyage to the South Seas and beyond from 1768 to 1771. Banks packed Cook’s little ship with specimen plants—thirty thousand in all—including fourteen hundred never previously recorded, at a stroke increasing the world’s stock of known plants by about a quarter. He would almost certainly have found more on Cook’s second voyage, but Banks, alas, was spoiled as well as brilliant. He insisted on taking seventeen servants this time, including two horn players to entertain him in the evenings. Cook politely demurred, and Banks declined to go. Instead he privately financed an expedition to Iceland. En route the party stopped at the Bay o’ Skaill in Orkney, and Banks did some excavating there (though he overlooked the grassy knoll that covered Skara Brae, and so just missed the chance to add one of the great archaeological discoveries of the age to his many other accomplishments).
Meanwhile, dedicated plant hunters were fanning out across the world, not least in North America, which proved to be especially productive of plants that not only were lovely and interesting but would bloom in British soil. The first Europeans to penetrate America’s interior from the east weren’t looking for lands to settle or passages to the west. They were looking for plants they could sell, and they found wondrous new species by the score—the azalea, aster, camellia, catalpa, euphorbia, hydrangea, rhododendron, rudbeckia, Virginia creeper, and wild cherry, as well as many types of ferns, shrubs, trees, and vines. Fortunes could be made from finding new plants and getting them safely back to the nurseries of Europe for propagation. Soon the woods of North America were so full of plant hunters that it is impossible to tell now who exactly discovered what. John Fraser, after whom is named the Fraser fir, discovered either 44 new species of plant or 215, depending on which botanical