At Home - Bill Bryson [145]
When at last he returned home to Yorkshire, he discovered that all the money he had earned from his endeavors over twenty years had been misinvested by the people to whom he had entrusted it, and he was now penniless. His health was so ruined that he spent most of the next twenty-seven years in bed, listlessly cataloging his findings. He never did find the strength to write his memoirs.
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Thanks to the efforts of these daring men and scores of others like them, the number of plants available to English gardeners soared amazingly—from about one thousand in 1750 to well over twenty thousand a hundred years later. Newly found exotic plants became hugely prized. A small monkey puzzle tree, a decorative conifer discovered in Chile in 1782, could by the 1840s easily fetch £5 in Britain, roughly the annual cost of keeping a maid. Bedding plants, too, became a huge industry. All of this gave a mighty boost to amateur gardening.
So, too, much more unexpectedly, did the rise of the railways. Railways allowed people to move out to distant suburbs and commute in to work. Suburbs gave homeowners greater space. More spacious properties allowed—indeed, all but required—the new breed of suburbanites to take an interest in gardening.
But one other change was even more profoundly consequential than all others: the rise of female gardening at home. The catalyst was a woman named Jane Webb who had no background in gardening and whose improbable fame was as the author of a potboiler in three volumes called The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-second Century, which she published anonymously in 1827, when she was just twenty years old. Her description of a steam lawn mower so excited (seriously) the gardening writer John Claudius Loudon that he sought her out for friendship, thinking she was a man. Loudon was even more excited when he discovered she was a woman and rather swiftly proposed marriage even though he was at that point exactly twice her age.
Jane accepted, and so began a touching and productive partnership. John Claudius Loudon was already a man of great stature in the world of horticulture. Born on a farm in Scotland in 1783, the year Capability Brown died, he had passed his youth in a fever of self-improvement, teaching himself six languages, including Greek and Hebrew, and absorbing from books as much as was to be known about botany, horticulture, natural history, and all else related to the verdant arts. In 1804, at the age of twenty-one, he began to produce a seemingly endless stream of stout books with earnest, daunting titles—A Short Treatise on Several Improvements Recently Made in Hothouses, Observations on the Formation and Management of Useful and Ornamental Plantations, The Different Modes of Cultivating the Pine-Apple—all of which sold considerably better than they sound as if they ought to have. He also edited, largely wrote, and in effect single-handedly produced a string of popular gardening magazines—as many as five at once—and all this, it may be noted, despite being almost staggeringly unlucky with his health. He had a particular knack, it seems, for getting ill and then developing appalling complications. His right arm, for instance, had to be amputated because of complications arising from a bad bout of rheumatic fever. Soon afterward, his knee ankylosed, leaving him with a permanent limp. As a consequence of his chronic pains, he became for a time addicted to laudanum. This was not a man for whom life was ever easy.
Mrs. Loudon was even more successful than her husband thanks to a single work, Practical Instructions