Note for the Reader

Laird, Mark

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Note for the Reader

Mark Laird

A Natural History of English Gardening: 1650–1800

The scientific information contained in this plate is as important as the dedication to Lady Mary Bruce, wife of the 3rd duke of Richmond from 1757. She joined Baroness Ferrers (see pl. 306), Lady Spencer and the countess of Berkeley among Harris’s ‘encouragers’. Women comprised no less than a quarter of subscribers to Benjamin Wilkes’s English...

Author

Mark Laird

PublisherPaul Mellon Centre

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-32109

Note for the Reader

Some readers of A Natural History of English Gardening will look for pointers on the reliability of dates and meteorological data, as well as on the accuracy of manuscript sources. After all, in a scholarly work focused on climate shifts, weather variations and the plant world between 1650 and 1800, it is important to make scientific data the bedrock that holds against the slippage of variables. For example, Brent Elliott in an essay of 2010 — ‘The Climate of the Landscape Garden’ — provides a valuable summary of what looks like one ‘confounding variable’: calendar reform. With flowering times in mind (e.g., in Philip Miller’s The Gardeners Kalendar), he wrote:

The Calendar (New Style) Act 1750 made the Gregorian calendar official in Britain, which had previously used the Julian calendar. The change was made in 1752, and eleven days were dropped out of that year (with the calendar jumping from 2nd September to 14th September). So everything after 1752 was eleven days earlier, and it is possible that some plants’ flowering times might have been propelled from one month to an earlier one purely as a result of the change. Miller, in fact, makes a great point of having revised the text of his Kalendar to account for the reform; his tenth edition (1754), the first to be published after the reform, announces on its title page that it is ‘adapted to the new style’. But hardly any plants show an altered flowering time in that edition: of the ornamental plants, only upright honeysuckle moves into an earlier month (from March to February).1Brent Elliott, ‘The Climate of the Landscape Garden’, in Painshill Park: The Pioneering Restoration of an 18th-Century Landscape Garden. The Proceedings of the Painshill Park and Beyond Conference: Painshill Park, 24–25 June 2010, ed. Patrick Eyres (Leeds: New Arcadian Press, 2010), 105–19 and especially 111–12.

Since flowering dates are not the primary focus of this book, any such minor slippage is of little concern. However, where specific flowering times do assume significance — for example, in Mary Delany’s dated collages and in Gilbert White’s corresponding records (see chapter 6) — comparisons across the Gregorian / Julian divide are not at issue, since all dates fall after 1752. It is true that White’s detailed weather recording was initiated in 1751 (as discussed in chapter 4). Yet the jump of eleven days in September 1752 does not materially affect my broad discussion of drought and precipitation, which is largely drawn from his post-1751 records. The discrepancy in the Gregorian / Julian divide (from 1650 to 1752) is relevant only when it comes to citing correspondence in continental Europe as opposed to letters or accounts in Britain. For example, Albert Seba (1665–1736), writing in Amsterdam to J. G. Volkamer II (1662–1744) in Nuremberg, referred to the violent stormy winds of 8 December 1703. His use of the Gregorian calendar contrasts with English accounts of what was the Great Storm (dated 27 November 1703 in the Julian calendar). From 1 March 1700 the difference of eleven days between the calendars accounts for this discrepancy (see chapter 2).2From 1 March 1500 to 29 February 1700, the difference was ten days. I am grateful to Florence Pieters and Brigitte Wirth for this clarification.

Paul Foster in Gilbert White and his Records (1988) reminds his readers of the other change that occurred in 1753: the year beginning on 1 January rather than the customary Lady Day, the Feast of the Annunciation (25 March, Old Style).3Paul G. M. Foster, Gilbert White and his Records: A Scientific Biography (London: Christopher Helm, 1988), 163. The dating of letters and other archival records before 1753 often reflects the intermediate status of the months of January, February and March: for example, in John Evelyn’s plan for replanting Sayes Court, which is dated 3 February 1684/5, and in a planting plan for Worksop endorsed by Lord Petre on 24 March 1737/8.4Mark Laird, The Flowering of the Landscape Garden: English Pleasure Grounds, 1720–1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), fig. 32. To avoid confusion, then, these may be standardized as New Style dates, thus making Evelyn’s plan ‘3 February 1685’.

It might be noted, in passing, that the setting of the clocks was different in Evelyn’s day, as instructions to his Sayes Court gardener make clear. In January the sun rose around 8am and set around 4pm; in June it rose before 4am and set just after 8pm. Today, on the shortest day of the year, the rising and setting of the sun remain the same; but, with today’s British Summer Time (BST), on midsummer’s day in London the sun rises just after 5am and sets just after 9pm — the hour shift from Evelyn’s era.

While climate historians have standardized records of temperatures, precipitation, etc., to make comparisons possible from one year to the next, and between now and then, the landscape historian, often reliant on informal or anecdotal records, should be aware of the unreliability of measurements prior to the second quarter of the eighteenth century. Thus, for example, this statement among the duchess of Beaufort’s papers in the British Library concerning the conservatory at Chelsea Physic Garden in the 1690s (as discussed in chapter 2) needs further interpreting: ‘Mr Watts Stoves — the weather glasse on the hottest stove was in march betwixt 8: and 9 — the weather glasse in the other stove between 6 and 7 which they say is as hott as June.’

Only with the widely adopted temperature scale of Daniel Fahrenheit (1724) and with the construction of the centigrade thermometer by Anders Celsius (1742) would temperature records from different places and at different dates prove directly comparable.5Elliott points out that the current centigrade scale, which reverses the freezing and boiling points of Celsius, was present in the engraved title plate of Linnaeus’s Hortus Cliffortianus (1737–8), but a centigrade thermometer was constructed only some years later. (To aid the reader, whether in Europe or the United States, all temperatures in this book are given in both fahrenheit and centigrade.) Peter Collinson’s record at Mill Hill of the very hot summer of 1765, for example, equates with hot summers since the 1980s: ‘Our Fahrenheits Thermometer frequently 84 and 85 [around 29°C] in the Shade in the Open Air, but in my Parlor frequently at 95 [35°C]’ (see chapter 4). On the other hand, Gilbert White’s complex temperature records, which Paul Foster has analysed as a ‘human, and not a mechanical’ documentation, point to a telling comparison. White wrote that temperatures hardly ever exceeded 80°F (26.6°C) in his parish.6Foster, Gilbert White and his Records, 99–100: ‘During discussion of some “unusually hot and dry” summers (Barrington 64), White remarks that in Selborne’s “hilly and woody district, [he has] hardly ever seen [temperatures] exceed 80; nor does it often arrive at that pitch.”’ Yet, as I write, the AccuWeather forecast for Selborne, Hampshire, for Monday, 22 July 2013 gives 82°F (27.7°C) as the daytime high, with 85°F (29.4°C) expected the following day.

This forecast followed a total of thirteen days in July that exceeded 80°F (with a boiling 89°F [31.7°C] reached on 13 and 17 July). The Met Office website notes that July 2013 was the driest July since precipitation records for England and Wales began in 1766.7The record for the driest July in England and Wales stands at 8 mm of rain in 1825, but, with only 4 mm recorded in the first half of July 2013, it may well prove the all-time driest since 1766. The reliability of White’s record keeping thus has enormous significance when it comes to the links between the frequency of extreme weather patterns occurring today and the evidence of human-induced climate change.

It is important to stress that this book is not an attempt to relate the accuracy of Gilbert White’s records to the current status of research on climate change, notably in relationship to aspects of biodiversity. For those readers interested in going beyond the occasional reference in my chapters and notes to species now extinct or endangered, or who want to know more about today’s rapid decline in meadows, two books come to mind. The first is Silent Summer, edited by Norman Maclean with a foreword by Sir David Attenborough.8Norman Maclean, ed., Silent Summer: The State of Wildlife in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Significantly, Part 1 of this book — ‘Factors Driving Changes in Wildlife’ — begins with a chapter on climate change. Amid some dispiriting data there are encouraging stories. For example, the short section ‘Orthoptera’ (grasshoppers, crickets, etc.) on pages 531–8 has information on the Species Recovery Programme for the field cricket (Gryllus campestris), which has brought it back from the brink of extinction. Targeted conservation measures have also worked for species of restricted range such as the corncrake (Crex crex), whose decline has been slowed in Ireland. Nonetheless, pressures on more widespread species of bird and butterfly that depend on meadows will require tackling the impacts of agricultural intensification. The second book greatly expands on the coverage of habitat loss in Silent Summer. This is George Peterken’s Meadows, which documents how, between 1930 and 1980, 97 per cent of Britain’s traditional hay meadows disappeared.9George F. Peterken, Meadows (Gillingham, Dorset: British Wildlife Publishing, 2013).

For those interested in further questions about the accuracy of Gilbert White’s records — for example, his late accommodation of precipitation amid his data columns (from May 1779 onwards) — there is ample coverage in Paul Foster’s book. More pertinent to my book are the questions arising from the dating of White’s letters — those addressed to Thomas Pennant and Daines Barrington in The Natural History of Selborne (1789). Once again, Foster offers guidance on how to read the raw data of White’s journals and private letters (dated by day, month and year) alongside the finished Selborne — ‘a volume subject not to the perceptible rhythms and occasions of the natural world, but beset by the vagaries of correspondence and the chances of art’.10Foster, Gilbert White and his Records, 151. For example, Letter 29 in The Natural History of Selborne sequence addressed to Pennant was given the date of ‘12 May 1770’. That date was derived from a real communication to Pennant on that specific day, which dealt with the cold spring and the late arrival of migrants. The raw data of the actual letter and its literary rendering in White’s Selborne both provide corroborating evidence of the poor seasons of 1770–71, with consequences for human as well as animal communities (including the ‘black spring’ of 1771, see chapters 5 and 6).

The second part of Letter 29, however, prepared solely for publication, and including anecdotes about the pairing of birds and on cats’ dislike of water and fondness for fish, contains a section on the shooting of an otter that comes from a passage in White’s Journal of 3 October 1784. In other words, incidences fourteen years apart are subsumed into one putative ‘Letter of 1770’.

Hence, any historian is right to be wary of citing Selborne (as opposed to the journals) as evidence of an occurrence on the specific date given in a Pennant or Barrington letter, and some of the ‘Letters’ carry no date. Four other examples of such ‘local inaccuracy’ are discussed in Foster’s appendix G and suffice to illustrate discrepancies between the real and putative letters. Yet, in the sequence of letters about the climate of Selborne (Barrington 61–6), much of the detail, even to the height of the barometer to tenths of an inch, can be confirmed by inspection of the Journal. Indeed, in Barrington 62, which gives an account of ‘the remarkable frost in January 1776’ (see chapter 6), the author was so concerned to ensure precision of his report that he informs the reader that the ‘most certain way to be exact will be to copy the passages from my journal, which were taken from time to time as things occurred’.11Gilbert White, The Natural History of Selborne [1789], ed. Paul Foster (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 240. Those climate letters (discussed at the end of chapters 4 and 7) thus offer reliable data attached to authentic dating, even while they contain miscellaneous information (for example, on his ‘electric’ parlour-cat, see p. 384) not attached to the date of the Journal entries.12Paul Foster comments in his note to the Oxford edition of 1993, 293, how these were ‘originally written as four letters; at a late editorial stage a long letter on winter weather was subdivided into three and the total became six’. My book concludes by pointing to the value of a divergent reading of The Natural History of Selborne through White’s journals, especially as the latter remains the bedrock in terms of dates and data.

A scholarly edition of the extant manuscript of Selborne, which is kept at Gilbert White’s home, ‘Wakes’ (now ‘The Wakes’), awaits its editor, who might succeed in further glossing the real and putative letters. So equally, Mary Delany’s correspondence, much of it kept in the Newport Reference Library in Wales, still requires publishing in an updated edition that tackles the omissions, excisions and ‘perorations’ of Lady Llanover’s Autobiography and Correspondence of 1861–2.13See Alicia Weisberg-Roberts, ‘Introduction (1): Mrs Delany from Source to Subject’, in Mrs Delany and her Circle, ed. Mark Laird and Alicia Weisberg-Roberts (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 15 and n. 70. Checking the manuscript letters against the letters published in the Llanover edition for all the passages cited in this book has proved just as impossible as checking all White’s real letters to Pennant and Barrington against the putative letters. Ultimately, minor discrepancies are unlikely to amount to substantial misrepresentations, whereas the inaccurate transcribing of some words and phrases in John E. Ingram’s published version of John Evelyn’s Elysium Britannicum; or, The Royal Gardens does constitute a difficulty for the historian of gardening and natural history.14John Evelyn, Elysium Britannicum; or, The Royal Gardens, ed. John E. Ingram (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). While the transcription remains a useful aid to scholarship and John Ingram’s editorial conventions are upheld (e.g., {text in wavy brackets} = interlineations by Evelyn),15For these conventions, ibid., vii. With reference to the square and angular brackets used in Esmond de Beer’s 1955 edition of Evelyn’s diary, which I have followed, see John Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. Esmond S. de Beer, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), 1, 66–7: <angle brackets> indicate editorial insertions to aid the reader; [square brackets] point to Evelyn’s marginal notes or interlineations. it does require checking against the original manuscript in the British Library. In my Natural History, all such passages cited have been checked with the aim of trying to reach the highest level of accuracy in botanical, horticultural and scientific matters.

~

Description: The Aurelian; or, Natural History of English Insects, pl. XX by Harris, Moses

Moses Harris, The Aurelian; or, Natural History of English Insects (London, 1766), pl. XX, dedicated to ‘Her Grace the Dutchess of Richmond’, hand-coloured engraving, Houghton Library, Harvard University (f *59-1499)

The scientific information contained in this plate is as important as the dedication to Lady Mary Bruce, wife of the 3rd duke of Richmond from 1757. She joined Baroness Ferrers (see pl. 306), Lady Spencer and the countess of Berkeley among Harris’s ‘encouragers’. Women comprised no less than a quarter of subscribers to Benjamin Wilkes’s English Moths and Butterflies (1749). Wilkes, whose Twelve New Designs of English Butterflies (1742) was the first ever monograph wholly devoted to entomological matters in any language, mentioned many of the traditional implements of British entomology. These included the cork setting-board, setting needle, and card ‘braces’ for setting with pins, all illustrated here. The moth that is ‘braced’ is the ‘hen’ lime hawk-moth (Mimas tiliae), with caterpillars (b and c) shown feeding on the leaves of the lime tree (Tilia sp.). Females delineated alive are at d and g, the ‘cock’ chrysalis is at e and the pinned male is at f.

1 Brent Elliott, ‘The Climate of the Landscape Garden’, in Painshill Park: The Pioneering Restoration of an 18th-Century Landscape Garden. The Proceedings of the Painshill Park and Beyond Conference: Painshill Park, 24–25 June 2010, ed. Patrick Eyres (Leeds: New Arcadian Press, 2010), 105–19 and especially 111–12. »

2 From 1 March 1500 to 29 February 1700, the difference was ten days. I am grateful to Florence Pieters and Brigitte Wirth for this clarification. »

3 Paul G. M. Foster, Gilbert White and his Records: A Scientific Biography (London: Christopher Helm, 1988), 163. »

4 Mark Laird, The Flowering of the Landscape Garden: English Pleasure Grounds, 1720–1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), fig. 32. »

5 Elliott points out that the current centigrade scale, which reverses the freezing and boiling points of Celsius, was present in the engraved title plate of Linnaeus’s Hortus Cliffortianus (1737–8), but a centigrade thermometer was constructed only some years later. »

6 Foster, Gilbert White and his Records, 99–100: ‘During discussion of some “unusually hot and dry” summers (Barrington 64), White remarks that in Selborne’s “hilly and woody district, [he has] hardly ever seen [temperatures] exceed 80; nor does it often arrive at that pitch.”’ »

7 The record for the driest July in England and Wales stands at 8 mm of rain in 1825, but, with only 4 mm recorded in the first half of July 2013, it may well prove the all-time driest since 1766. »

8 Norman Maclean, ed., Silent Summer: The State of Wildlife in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). »

9 George F. Peterken, Meadows (Gillingham, Dorset: British Wildlife Publishing, 2013). »

10 Foster, Gilbert White and his Records, 151. »

11 Gilbert White, The Natural History of Selborne [1789], ed. Paul Foster (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 240. »

12 Paul Foster comments in his note to the Oxford edition of 1993, 293, how these were ‘originally written as four letters; at a late editorial stage a long letter on winter weather was subdivided into three and the total became six’. »

13 See Alicia Weisberg-Roberts, ‘Introduction (1): Mrs Delany from Source to Subject’, in Mrs Delany and her Circle, ed. Mark Laird and Alicia Weisberg-Roberts (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 15 and n. 70. »

14 John Evelyn, Elysium Britannicum; or, The Royal Gardens, ed. John E. Ingram (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). »

15 For these conventions, ibid., vii. With reference to the square and angular brackets used in Esmond de Beer’s 1955 edition of Evelyn’s diary, which I have followed, see John Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. Esmond S. de Beer, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), 1, 66–7: <angle brackets> indicate editorial insertions to aid the reader; [square brackets] point to Evelyn’s marginal notes or interlineations. »

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