Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [62]
As in any period, handsome grooms could lead to marital problems. Clara Middleton of Stockeld Park, Yorkshire, became infatuated with John Rose, who had been hired as the groom of the hunting stable but had became her favourite companion on rides – shades of the stories of ‘Handsome’ Macdonald.96 It ended in tears, with the Middletons’ divorce.
Every house had a head gardener responsible both for the pleasure grounds and for the kitchen gardens that supplied produce for the house. The staff under him ranged from unskilled local women, recruited to weed the gardens, to the jobbing labourer. Head gardeners sometimes went on to become independent landscape gardeners such as William Ewes, head gardener to Sir Nathaniel Curzon at Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire, between 1756 and 1760.97
Highly literate and able, some became authors in their own right. One such was William Speechly, who had worked at Castle Howard, Yorkshire, then for Sir William St Quintin, and from 1767 was employed by William, 3rd Duke of Portland, at Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire. He published Treatise on the Culture of the Pine Apple in 1779, followed by a Treatise on the Culture of the Vine in 1790.98
The scope offered to gardeners of the period had been increased by the mastery of better regulated hothouses or ‘stoves’. Using hotbeds of tanner’s bark, they could create the hot and humid conditions necessary for tropical plants. Thus by the 1730s most noblemen were the proud owners of hothouses, greenhouses and pineries for exotic fruit. This extension of responsibilities clearly put pressure on gardeners to acquire the necessary skills and experience.
Those at the top of their game were highly valued. Lord Petre, for example, employed a number of gardeners at Thorndon Hall in Essex, two of whom, John Miller and James Huntback, appear in a 1742 list of his servants as the most important in the hierarchy after the chaplain and the estate manager.99 In his later years Mr Miller fell from grace. First, Lady Petre wrote to the agent complaining of his unreliability in money matters. In April 1744, he was responsible for a failure to keep the hothouses properly supplied with tanner’s bark, so that many plants including the large melon died. He had also allowed all the pineapples to fruit so that there would be none the following year.100
A gardener was usually expected to be well mannered enough to act as a guide when showing the gardens to prestigious visitors, if required. Anthony Heasel wrote in Servants’ Book of Knowledge (1733): ‘Take every opportunity of entertaining those who come to visit your master, with a particular description of every thing in the garden, and have always some places ready for them to rest themselves on, while passing from one part to another.’101
One great gardener to an aristocratic house, Thomas Mawe, published Every Man His Own Gardener in 1769. A later writer penned a brilliant portrait of the grandeur of such gardeners. In his introduction to the second edition of John Abercrombie’s Abercrombie’s Practical Gardener, published in 1817, James Mean says: ‘When introduced to Mawe, whom he had never before seen, poor Abercrombie (as he used facetiously to narrate) encountered a gentleman so bepowdered, and so bedaubed with gold lace, that he thought he could be in the presence of no less a personage than the Duke himself.’102
Another head gardener to a noble household who rose to great national (indeed, international) prominence was Capability Brown, the son of a yeoman farmer, who first worked for Sir William Loraine at Kirkharle. He became Head Gardener at Stowe in Buckinghamshire in 1741, which involved him in major landscape excavation and remodelling. In 1751, after Lord Cobham’s death, he left Stowe and worked in his own capacity, charging impressive fees. He earned over £10,000 in 1759.103
There was a considerable preponderance of Scottish head gardeners in the eighteenth