There’s no time now, but I must seek out my copy of a book about Loddiges’ nursery of ‘Hackney, near London’ which, during the 18th and first half of the 19th centuries was the most famous nursery in Europe, and in 1831 housed the largest hothouse in the world. My inspiration? A jaunt (when I should have been in my own back yard clearing some of the detritus of a summer that never quite happened) to London’s oldest botanical garden, the Chelsea Physic Garden. It’s a microcosm of the things I love most about Kew, admittedly minus the vistas or the sheer scale of the glasshouses, but on a literally more human level, with sections devoted to the plants introduced by garden Curators since 1673 and the succession of notable botanic explorers connected with the Garden over the centuries. But there is nothing stuffy and everything delightful about the present place despite its long and erudite history. It is very much a real working garden, with plants allowed to sprawl and wilt after flowering for seed collection, rather than being cut back to within an inch of their neat and tidy lives.
There are fascinating Pharmaceutical Beds featuring medicinal plants and herbs for every ailment, including those in the Doctrine of Signatures (discredited by 1650), a “fanciful theory that some plants were ‘signed’ – marked by God – to resemble disease symptoms or parts of the body which could be cured by treatment with the plant”. There are vegetable patches, pointing out our reliance on a very small number of familiar vegetables nowadays, a much greater variety having been grown in the past. There are willow wigwams thickly twined in climbers, each topped with a tilted flowerpot finial, tender lettuces secretly growing beneath terracotta domes, filmy fronds of asparagus, box balls…then rows of dyers’ plants with names to conjure with, often defined by the appellation ‘tinctoria’. There is a relaxed informality within the formality of the walkways – and plenty of well-placed benches. But my most significant moment was coming across a large, simple wood and glass plant carrier with the inscription beneath OHMS, ‘Live plants. On Upper Deck Under Awning’.
To return to Loddiges, it’s hard to imagine that over the road from present-day Hackney Town Hall stretched a vast nursery where wisteria was first grown in Europe and where the rhododendron was introduced to Britain, where Wardian cases of plants arrived from Chile and China. The twelfth edition of Loddiges’ catalogue in 1820 carried 54 pages listing stove and greenhouse plants, hardy perennials, trees and shrubs followed by this afterword: “In an establishment of this nature, there of course must exist an ardent and continual desire of extending as well as diffusing the collection. Persons in Foreign Countries, who are animated by a similar passion, are respectfully invited to a Correspondence, which can hardly fail to become mutually advantageous. A liberal price is at all times ready to be given for fresh seeds or living plants, if new or rare, from whatever quarter of the globe they may be brought.”
There is the fascination of romance and derring-do in those worldwide quests for specimens and knowledge. And much of it is captured and lingers in the Chelsea Physic Garden. Particularly for anyone without a garden of their own, I would strongly recommend becoming a Friend and making this your bolt-hole, your sanctuary, your own adventure and seat of learning in London.