5. ‘Fair Play for their Lives’: The 2nd Duke of Richmond’s Menagerie at Goodwood and Princess Augusta’s Aviary at Kew​

Laird, Mark

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5. ‘Fair Play for their Lives’: The 2nd Duke of Richmond’s Menagerie at Goodwood and Princess Augusta’s Aviary at Kew

Mark Laird

A Natural History of English Gardening: 1650–1800

Since the publication of The Flowering of the Landscape Garden in 1999, it has become commonplace to view the pleasure ground of the English landscape garden as a collecting ground...

Author

Mark Laird

PublisherPaul Mellon Centre

Related print edition pages: pp.231-263

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-32115

Chapter subject tags:Richmond, Charles Lennox, Duke of, 1701-1750Augusta, Princess of Wales, 1719-1772Gardens, English--History--18th centuryRoyal Gardens, KewHunter, William, 1718-1783White, Gilbert, 1720-1793Chambers, William, Sir, 1723-1796Botanical illustration--England--18th centuryBotanical specimensGreat Britain--Climatic factors--HistoryCatesby, Mark, 1683-1749Art and natural history--Great Britain--History--18th centuryAviaries--History--18th centuryBartram, John, 1699-1777

5. ‘Fair Play for their Lives’: The 2nd Duke of Richmond’s Menagerie at Goodwood and Princess Augusta’s Aviary at Kew

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Description: Reconstruction as elevation of James Meader's diagram Disposition of Trees and...

206. Mark Laird, reconstruction as elevation of James Meader’s diagram ‘Disposition of Trees and Shrubs for an Evergreen Plantation’ in the Planter’s Guide (1779), watercolour, pencil and crayon, 1998 (first published 1999)

This drawing shows a third of a schematic diagram for a plantation, including the American ‘Weymouth pine’ (Pinus strobus). The diagram was designed to show off large numbers of hardy evergreens that were available from nurseries by the 1770s. With an increased diversity of exotics, the Georgian shrubbery — often still divided into a deciduous and evergreen plantation — was characterized by foliage contrasts. American shrubs, Kalmia latifolia and Rhododendron maximum, occupied the front ranks as ‘specious’ or showy exotics. They bloomed in early summer with pink or white flowers. ‘Theatrical’ shrubbery thus presented a kind of ‘Eden’ in England.

This plate is dedicated by Mark Laird to John Phibbs, and to Chris Carr and Painshill Park Trust

Since the publication of The Flowering of the Landscape Garden in 1999, it has become commonplace to view the pleasure ground of the English landscape garden as a collecting ground for American exotics. Many came from Philadelphia as part of the consumer-led trade of the early Atlantic world. Promoted by the Quaker John Bartram, that plant trade filled England with colonial pines and magnolias. London nurserymen, from Christopher Gray to James Gordon, knew how to cultivate and market such exotics. The consumer momentum is conveyed in two pithy statements by Bartram’s collaborator in London, Peter Collinson. Back in 1728 this Quaker cloth merchant had observed dismally: ‘Hitherto the laudable design of improving and cultivating exotic trees in this country meets with a number of discouragements too tedious to enumerate except one, which I think is hereditary to America, this is — great promise but slender performance.’1Quoted in Richard Gorer, The Growth of Gardens (London and Boston, MA: Faber and Faber, 1978), 51. Yet, just twenty-eight years later, writing to his faithful collector in Philadelphia, Collinson claimed that through the ‘prodigious’ influx of American plants, ‘England must be turned up side down & America transplanted Heither.’2Edmund Berkeley and Dorothy Smith Berkeley, eds, The Correspondence of John Bartram, 1734–1777 (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1992), 392.

Despite repeated setbacks, Collinson’s predictions of 1756 proved true. By the mid-1760s, in his own garden in Mill Hill, Middlesex, he regarded the ‘mountain Magnolia, Sarsifrax, Rhododendrons, Calmias & Azaleas &c &c &c’ as the ‘Bounty of my Curious Botanic Friend J. Bartram of Philadelphia’.3See Alan W. Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden . . .’: Selected Letters, 1725–1768, of Peter Collinson, FRS (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2002), 256–7. Through regular consignments of more than 100 woody species, Bartram and Collinson effectively afforested English shires with Pennsylvanian wilderness. The groves and shrubberies of the 1730s to 1770s became a new home for these exotics (pl. 206),4The manic demand for American plants and their role in generating the shrubbery are discussed extensively in Mark Laird, The Flowering of the Landscape Garden: English Pleasure Grounds, 1720–1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). such that, by the 1760s, it was possible to see the shrubbery as the Edenic counterpart to the menagerie or aviary of the Georgian pleasure ground. An American poison ivy ended up gracing a wildfowl enclosure full of turkeys.5For example, when the nurseryman William Perfect recommended shrubs to Sir Rowland Winn of Nostell Priory in February 1764, he included the American species — dogwood, guelder rose, ‘Diervilla’ and ‘Toxicodendrons’ — amongst the ‘Hardiest & most Beautiful flowering Sorts’ to embellish the netted slope alongside his exotic wildfowl enclosure. For details of this shrubbery and menagerie, see again Laird, The Flowering of the Landscape Garden, 291. Joel Fry pointed out in personal communication (July 2004) that ‘Toxicodendrons’ might mean poison oak (Rhus toxicodendron) and poison sumac (R. vernix) as well as poison ivy (R. radicans). He suggests that Rhus vernix was favoured by Bartram and hence could have been the ‘Toxicodendron’ most often cultivated in English shrubberies. Charles Nelson, countering this, suggested in a personal communication (October 2012) that Philip Miller in his Gardeners Dictionary (1751–68) had six entries under Toxicodendron, leaving room for much uncertainty.

As the 2nd duke of Richmond at Goodwood (1701–1750) joined the Bartram-Collinson syndicate in its early days, the prospect of menagerie animals partnering ‘American Grove’ trees seemed a propitious one. But there was no physical or symbolic connection. It was Sir William Chambers (1722–1796), having turned a ‘Desart’ into ‘Eden’ at Kew, who linked exotic grove to exotic creatures in his imaginative account of the Chinese way of gardening:

In all their open groves are kept young broods of pheasants, partridges, pea-fowls, turkies, and all kinds of handsome domestic birds, who flock thither, at certain times of the day, to be fed: they also retain in them, by the same method, squirrels, small monkies, crocatoos, parrots, hog deer, spotted capritos, lambs, Guinea pigs, and many other little beautiful birds and animals.6William Chambers, A Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (London, 1772), 86–7.

While Bartram undoubtedly powered the conversion of vegetative promise into horticultural performance, it is less clear what role Philadelphia played in translating a New World vision of birds and beasts into collecting at Goodwood or Kew. This chapter explores how plants and animals — both exotic and indigenous — came together in Georgian pleasure grounds, reflecting Philadelphia as a collecting centre, as well as the competing realms of West and East, from Hudson Bay to Surinam and from Chusan to Opor to. It touches on the visual culture of natural history associated with John Bartram’s son William (1739–1823), even though the growing body of scholarship on William is beyond the scope of this chapter.7See, for example, Judith Magee, The Art and Science of William Bartram (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), and Amy R. W. Meyers, ed., Knowing Nature: Art and Science in Philadelphia, 1740–1840 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011). Joel Fry in a personal communication of July 2004 suggested that the parallels between Gilbert White and William Bartram also merit further attention.

Gilbert White’s Selborne complements Richmond’s Goodwood and Princess Augusta’s Kew as a third and contrasting locus of human–biological interaction. All three instances have been researched and discussed in their own right by different scholars from different perspectives.8For Goodwood, see Douglas Chambers, The Planters of the English Landscape Garden: Botany, Trees and The Georgics (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), 95–101; and T. P. Connor, ‘Architecture and Planting at Goodwood, 1723–1750’, Sussex Archaeological Collections, CXVII (1979), 185–93. The best general history is provided by Rosemary Baird, Goodwood: Art and Architecture, Sport and Family (London: Frances Lincoln Limited Publishers, 2007). For Kew, see Ray Desmond, The History of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (London: Harvill Press/The Royal Botanic Gardens, 1995), and John Harris, ‘Sir William Chambers and Kew Gardens’, in Sir William Chambers: Architect to George III, ed. Harris and Michael Snodin (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996). And for Selborne, see Paul G. M. Foster: Gilbert White and his Records: A Scientific Biography (London: Christopher Helm, 1988); Richard Mabey, Gilbert White: A Biography of the Author of The Natural History of Selborne (London: Century, 1986); and Paul Foster and David Standing, Landscape and Labour: Gilbert White’s Garden, 1751–1793, Selborne Paper, 2 (Selborne: Gilbert White’s House & The Oates Museum, 2005). David Standing, head gardener at The Wakes, kindly gave me access to his own draft essay on Gilbert White’s garden (as yet unpublished). Yet, until now, insufficient attention has been given to the possible common ground shared by Richmond, Wales and White within colonial collecting.

Douglas Chambers argued that at Goodwood, by the early 1740s, when Peter Collinson was most active on Richmond’s behalf, the 2nd duke had abandoned his zoological garden for a botanic one.9Chambers, The Planters of the English Landscape Garden, 96. This implies a dwindling interest in animals.10This is supported by a traveller’s account of 1742–3. The Revd Jeremiah Milles related: ‘The Duke had formerly a good menagerie at Goodwood, but within these few years he has disposed of allmost all his beasts’; quoted from Timothy J. McCann, ‘ “Much troubled with very rude company” ’: The 2nd Duke of Richmond’s Menagerie at Goodwood’, Sussex Archaeological Collections, CXXXII (1994), 148. See British Library, Add. MS 15,776, fol. 246. As Chambers himself points out, however, a letter in the Goodwood archives undermines the reliability of this statement. It indicates that in 1742 the duke was acquiring a possum from Barbados. McCann (‘ “Much troubled with very rude company” ’) also referred to the duke’s correspondence with Sir Thomas Robinson, who reported from Barbados in 1744 that ‘the vessel that carrys this, will bring your Grace one of the most beautiful Civit Cats I ever saw’. As late as 1747 or 1748, however, one daughter still wrote on the ‘Catacombs’ — the menagerie tunnels, increasingly used for dead rather than living animals — and, circa 1766–73, the 3rd duke still kept moose (pl. 208). Furthermore, the early volumes of George Edwards’s A Natural History of Uncommon Birds contain entries on the 2nd duke’s London birds: for example, the ‘Black Parrot of Madagascar’ drawn in May 1742.11Edwards, A Natural History, 1, pl. 5. See also A. Stuart Mason, George Edwards: The Bedell and his Birds (London and Lavenham: Royal College of Physicians, 1992), 20: ‘The first French volume was published in 1745, dedicated to Charles Lennox, second Duke of Richmond. The second, published in 1748, was dedicated to the Duchess of Richmond.’ If some gradual shift occurred in the early 1740s, it was not due to lack of interest. Rather, it resulted from the repeated trials and tribulations of the 1730s, for which there were economic, environmental and sentimental ramifications. Luckily, the information for this story is remarkably complete, as Timothy McCann has shown. It reveals the ‘Catacombs’ as a ‘beastly’ counterpart to the duke’s ‘American Grove’.

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Description: The Moose by Stubbs, George

208. George Stubbs, The Moose, 1770, oil on canvas, 24 × 27 ¾ in. (61 × 70.5 cm). University of Glasgow, Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery (GLAHA 43823)

In 1770 William Hunter, Fellow of the Royal Society and physician to Queen Charlotte, commissioned Stubbs to paint the first bull moose to reach Great Britain: a yearling, which had been sent to the 3rd duke of Richmond by Guy Carleton, governor general of Canada. Hunter hoped to show that the antlers in the foreground were so dissimilar from those of the Irish ‘elk’ that the latter must be extinct; thus Stubbs’s picture served as a template for checking morphological characteristics among species. The dead moose inspected by Gilbert White at Goodwood in 1768 was a female. Her female companion had died the previous season in the menagerie that was known as the ‘Catacombs’.

While Rosemary Baird places Goodwood in the context of science, from Sloane to Adrian Tremblay (1710–84), Stella Tillyard suggests that the 2nd duke’s motivation in collecting was complex and ‘more than simply materialistic’,12Baird, Goodwood, chapter 5, ‘Nurturing Nature’, 61–73. Stella Tillyard, Aristocrats: Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox, 1740–1832 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1994; this edition, London: Vintage, 1995), 15–16. She wrote, for example: ‘He felt that capturing and cataloguing the beasts of the wild brought them out from disordered nature into the ambit of human rationality. By virtue of being studied, animals became almost human, and they certainly became beloved.’ Admiration was mixed with consumption and appropriation. Moreover, through engagement in decorating the Shell House or Grotto with ‘a rococo caprice that celebrated nature’s diversity’, the women of the household ‘also went on this journey of discovery and ownership’. concluding that ‘rationality and sentiment’ were co-mingled differently among different members of the family. In so far as sea creatures were gouged out of their shell homes in far-flung locations, the ladies of the household never confronted in the shell grotto such animals brutalized. It was in the ‘Catacombs’ that confrontation occurred as a shift of sensibilities led by Emily Lennox against her father. Emily’s intercession on behalf of the poor creatures in the menagerie thus raises issues of gender and sentiment.13There are, however, numerous examples cited by Thomas of men with new susceptibilities to set against Margaret Cavendish, duchess of Newcastle, who, as early as 1667, described herself as ‘tender-natured, for it troubles my conscience to kill a fly’. Take, for example, the 2nd duke of Montagu (1690– 1749), who turned Boughton into a geriatric home for old cows and horses. Ibid., 173, 190. Sally Festing maintains, for example, that ‘women were the motivating force behind more than a third of the menageries listed’, while ‘their menageries tend to have been the progressive ones’.14Sally Festing, ‘Menageries and the Landscape Garden’, Journal of Garden History, VIII/4 (October–December 1988), 108. She claims, moreover, that the appearance of the utopian novel Millenium Hall in 1762 shows how women led the way in changing sentiments with regard to exotic animals. Yet, as this chapter documents, the aviary of Princess Augusta (1719–1772) at Kew provides an instance more complicated than one driven simply by gendered sentiment. While the cult of sensibility is not the focus of this chapter, Goodwood and Kew offer comparative vignettes of ‘feeling’ vying with ‘reason’.

After the death of Frederick, prince of Wales, in 1751, Augusta’s concern was to ensure that George II did not penalize her and her children. Indeed, according to John Bullion, her manipulative skills led to her risking her reputation as a virtuous widow by masking the mentoring friendship that John Stuart, 3rd earl of Bute, had assumed with her son, the future George III.15John L. Bullion, ‘ “To Play what game she pleased without observation”: Princess Augusta and the Political Drama of Succession, 1736–56’, in Queenship in Britain, 1660–1837: Royal Patronage, Court Culture and Dynastic Politics, ed. Clarissa Campbell Orr (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 207–35; see also John L. Bullion, ‘Augusta, Princess of Wales (1719– 1772)’, in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online edition: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/46829 [accessed 1 October 2013]. The consequences — Bute’s elevation to power, his resignation as a loathed politician in 1763, and the innuendos and caricatures of his supposed affair with the dowager princess of Wales — are well covered by scholars.16See, for example, Karl Wolfgang Schweizer, ed., Lord Bute: Essays in Re-interpretation (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1988), and John Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). Yet the critical consequence for this chapter — their collaboration in the safety of garden making at Kew — needs fresh consideration. While Bute, who went on to play a significant role in the history of botany (as chapter 6 will show),17See Karl Wolfgang Schweizer, ‘Stuart, John, Third Earl of Bute (1713–1792)’, in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; online edition: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/26716 [accessed 1 October 2013]. See also Maureen H. Lazarus and Heather S. Pardoe, ‘Bute’s Botanical Tables: Dictated by Nature’, Archives of Natural History, XXXVI/2 (2009), 277–98. was the determining force at Kew, the Windsor archives also suggest input from Augusta. Her liking for songbirds gave the Aviary Flower Garden a particular tonality — a distinctive Englishness that equals her earlier promotion of English textiles against ‘French stuffs’.18Bullion, ‘Augusta, Princess of Wales’. How William Chambers designed this exotic enclosure amidst the groves of the pleasure ground also touches upon visions of China as Cathay.19Although Richard Quaintance tackles the idea of ‘China’ at Kew, he does not discuss the Chinese Aviary Flower Garden in his essay ‘Toward Distinguishing among Theme Park Publics: William Chambers’s Landscape Theory vs. his Kew Practice’, in Theme Park Landscapes: Antecedents and Variations, ed. Terence Young and Robert Riley (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2002), 25–47.

The first part of this chapter is devoted to the collections of Goodwood, while the second part considers those at Kew. The third part, using Gilbert White’s journals, offers a corresponding environmental overview. For example, the ‘American Grove’ at John Fothergill’s Upton House, described in White’s Natural History of Selborne (1789), marks how, around 1770, exotic plant collecting moved beyond the Edenic living ‘cabinets’ of Goodwood and Kew. Although both menagerie and shrubbery remained linked by issues of science, display and utility, the environment acted upon them differently, as Gilbert White makes clear. In his Upton House ‘American Grove’, Fothergill learned to protect what was failing at Selborne, while, in that parish, White used his ‘gossamer’ conversion of 1741 as a spring to seeing ‘failure’ as revelation.20Gilbert White, The Natural History of Selborne [1789], ed. Paul Foster (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), Letter 23 to Daines Barrington, 8 June 1775, 163–5; for the significance of the gossamer, see the introduction to this edition by Paul Foster, xiii. His observations allow us today to see the pheasant of the hunt become the pheasant ‘tamed by hunger’; and, above all, to compare every such pheasant to its exotic counterpart in Chambers’s ‘Eden’, which included the dowager princess of Wales’s bird collections in the aviary-cum-menagerie of Kew.

Preamble: Goodwood, Selborne and Kew in 1768

In his Natural History of Selborne, Gilbert White recounts a journey to the 3rd duke of Richmond’s menagerie at Goodwood — what evolved beyond the 2nd duke’s ‘Catacombs’. Letter 28 to Thomas Pennant, devoted to the events of 29 September 1768, is an extensive description of one ‘quadruped’ in particular. It begins:

On Michaelmas-day 1768 I managed to get a sight of the female moose belonging to the duke of Richmond, at Goodwood; but was greatly disappointed, when I arrived at the spot, to find that it died, after having appeared in a languishing way for some time, on the morning before. However, understanding that it was not stripped, I proceeded to examine this rare quadruped: I found it in an old green-house, slung under the belly and chin by ropes, and in a standing posture; but, though it had been dead for so short a time, it was in so putrid a state that the stench was hardly supportable.21Ibid., Letter 28 to Thomas Pennant, dated March 1770, 69; all subsequent quotes 69–71. For a good account of the evolution and locations of the 2nd and 3rd dukes’ menageries, see Baird, Goodwood, 62–8.

The putrefaction did not prevent White from measuring the creature: 16 hands, or 5 feet 4 inches, ‘from the ground to the wither’. The head was about 20 inches long, supporting ‘a redundancy of upper lip as I never saw before’. It caused him to reflect on how long legs and a big lip were useful in browsing on plants such as water lilies, and how this two-year-old might compare to a full-grown stag of 10 feet or more (see again pl. 208). Nevertheless, the stench, as he told Thomas Pennant in the letter, ‘precluded all farther curiosity’. He recoiled from examining the teeth, tongue, lips and hoofs.

White’s factual, yet curious, account — linking legs and lips to water lilies — informs the reader of the moose’s brief life at Goodwood and introduces a note of compassion:

This poor creature had at first a female companion of the same species, which died the spring before. In the same garden was a young stag, or red deer, between whom and this moose it was hoped that there might have been a breed, but their inequality of height must have always been a bar to any commerce of the amorous kind . . . This animal, the keeper told me, seemed to enjoy itself best in the extreme frost of the former winter . . . The noble owner of the dead moose proposed to make a skeleton of her bones.22Ibid., 70–71. For further discussion of the moose, see W. D. Ian Rolfe, ‘William Hunter (1718–1783) on Irish “Elk” and Stubbs’s Moose’, Archives of Natural History, XI/2 (1983), 263–90. See also Glyndwr Williams, ed., Andrew Graham’s Observations on Hudson’s Bay, 1767–1791 (London: Hudson’s Bay Record Society, 1969), 17. It is important to note that Stubbs’s painting (pl. 208) represents a young moose, with a pair of antlers from a full-grown animal alongside. Rolfe pointed out that the antlers of this young moose indicate a yearling, or bull spike. Since the spike antlers appear only in the second year, this moose was born in May or early June 1769. It was generally easier to capture and transport young animals. William Hunter recorded its height at the shoulder to be 4 feet 10 ¼ inches. The height of a full-grown moose reaches upwards of 6 feet. Hence Gilbert White’s reference to reports of ‘ten feet and an half’ is exaggerated (even if measured by the tip of the antlers). See also Baird, Goodwood, 104–6, for George Stubbs and the 3rd duke’s moose.

In this way, whether alive or dead, the moose was valuable as an exhibit.

That same season White encountered other matters of life and death within his parish. For example, in the month of September 1768 he made these entries in his journal:

Monday 12. Sheep die frequently on the common tho’ so wholesome a spot. Ravens flock on the hanger.

Friday 23. The whame or burrel-fly, Oestrus bovis, still lays it’s nits on the horses sides.23Francesca Greenoak, ed., The Journals of Gilbert White, 3 vols (London: Century, 1986–9) [vol. I: 1751–73; vol. II: 1774–83; vol. III: 1784–93], 1, 255, 258.

The first part of the year had been especially harsh, and colds and coughs were widespread. From 3 January until the 7th — when meat was too frozen to put on a spit and when urine iced over in chamber pots under family beds — he noted: ‘The birds must suffer greatly as there are no Haws’, and: ‘Several of the thrush-kind are frozen to death’. On 12 January he recorded how ‘A cock-pheasant appeared at the dunghill at the end of my stable; tamed by hunger.’24Ibid., 225–6.

So severe was this freeze that White devoted an entire letter of his Natural History to its impact on his garden at Selborne.25White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Foster, Letter 61, to Daines Barrington, 237–40. Just as the cold had suited the moose, so too the ‘American junipers’ (Juniperus virginiana) fared well; conversely, some Mediterranean plants in his shrubbery looked as if ‘burnt in the fire’.26Ibid., 237. His observations on snow cover were particularly acute: ‘From hence I would infer that it is the repeated melting and freezing of the snow that is so fatal to vegetation, rather than the severity of the cold.’27Ibid. The naturalist went further in associating this phenomenon with the acclimatization of plants. Without the constant covering of snow, plants from Siberia, for example, would tend to shoot too early and then be cut down by the frosts of March and April. Plants from the south-eastern parts of North America might succumb to this sun-wind damage: ‘Dr Fothergill and others have experienced the same inconvenience with respect to the more tender shrubs from North-America; which they therefore plant under north-walls. There should also perhaps be a wall to the east to defend them from the piercing blasts from that quarter.’28Ibid., 238. For further information on Dr Fothergill’s American plantings, see Laird, The Flowering of the Landscape Garden, 98. Joel Fry has pointed out (personal communication) that earlier American experiences of European exotics correspond to the English observations of Fothergill and White. For Bartram’s letters to Collinson on this topic (1755 and 1758), see Berkeley and Berkeley, eds, The Correspondence of John Bartram, 378 and 432–3.

Dr John Fothergill (1712–1780) — physician, naturalist and patron to William Bartram from 1768 — would go on to have John Miller illustrate plants growing in his Upton garden in east London. Miller published these in his Illustratio systematis sexualis Linnaei (1770–77). Yet in 1768 the Upton House ‘American Grove’ was simply a pioneering effort to garden with some environmental awareness. No equivalent was found for protecting a moose during acclimatization and possible procreation in its sterile home at Goodwood.

As the female moose languished in late September 1768, six pots of Burgundy roses — sent by the nurseryman John Williamson — arrived at Kew.29Windsor Castle, Royal Archives: RA GEO/55517. John Williamson’s invoice is dated 22 September 1768. A bird-catcher, Robert Beecham, had just received word from the royal household that his live-trapping skills were required. On 13 October he caught twelve larks. On 21 October there were fifty goldfinches and eighty-four linnets; on 2 November forty-eight redpolls were trapped. By 5 December there were ninety chaffinches.30RA GEO/55524. Robert Beecham’s invoice dated October to December 1768: ‘Her Royal Highness Princess Dowager of Wales — Her Birds Delivered at the Avery in Kew Gardens’. It seems that, in the dowager princess of Wales’s mind, songbirds and roses formed a unified vision, far removed from the exigencies of farming and gardening as described by Gilbert White. Around 1760 those fanciful and aesthetic links had been forged in the plan devised by Lord Bute and William Chambers: an aviary-cum-flower garden, with a menagerie for exotic pheasants and bigger birds next door.31For background, see Harris, ‘Sir William Chambers and Kew Gardens’, 55–67; and Desmond, The History of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 47–8. It was located within groves at Kew housing John Bartram’s American exotics.

At Selborne, honing his complex scientific viewpoint, White came to observe wild chaffinches and linnets with acuity as well as sentiment. These were the cousins of the princess’s captive songbirds. While John Evelyn had questioned the violence of ‘Italian wire’ (cages), seeing birds as akin to angels, White came to question his own violence with a gun: his Damascene conversion of 1741 (see Introduction) would turn into the fully fledged bird observations of summer 1765. In a letter to Daines Barrington in 1778, he wrote empathetically of a ‘language’ of birds:

. . . many of the winged tribes have various sounds and voices adapted to express their various passions, wants, and feelings; such as anger, fear, love, hatred, hunger, and the like. . . . The language of birds is very ancient, and, like other ancient modes of speech, very elliptical; little is said, but much is meant and understood.32White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Foster, Letter 43 to Daines Barrington dated 9 September 1778, 201–2.

PART I
Natural Curiosities: The 2nd Duke of Richmond’s Magnolias and Raptors and the Collinson–Edwards Connection

By 1730 Charles Lennox, 2nd duke of Richmond and estate master since 1723, was already building up his celebrated menagerie. It was situated in the High Wood in the pleasure ground, as shown on Thomas Bucknall’s plan, which was surveyed in 1731 (pl. 210). This plan is valuable as the only surviving map of Goodwood from the time of the 2nd duke. The fact that the estate map retained the block plan of the house, which the debt-ridden duke wished to rebuild (but never did), indicates more about hopes than reality.33Connor, ‘Architecture and Planting at Goodwood’, 185–93. Since the plan blends projected and realized landscape projects (with some features yet to appear), a reconstruction of the planting is impossible. Despite this, it is clear that Richmond pursued rare plants with zeal from 1738 onwards. Most notable were North American exotics such as Magnolia.

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Description: A Plan of Goodwood Park and Warren with the Adjacent Manors of Charlton and...

210. Thomas Bucknall, detail from A Plan of Goodwood Park and Warren with the Adjacent Manors of Charlton and Singleton Belonging to His Grace the Duke of Richmond &c., surveyed in 1731, ink, graphite and pigment on parchment, 65 × 43 in. (165.1 × 109.2 cm). The Trustees of the Goodwood Collection, West Sussex Record Office (Goodwood MS E4992)

This plan may be compared to one that appeared in Colen Campbell’s Vitruvius Britannicus in 1725 (vol. III, pls 51–2). A similarity in the structuring of the wilderness to the north-west of the planned house stands out as a commonality. The menagerie was situated in this High Wood, shown here (with brown speckled effect). In the ‘American Grove’, Magnolia species, some Catalpa and many white pines (Pinus strobus) flourished well beyond the 2nd duke’s death in 1750, and despite seedling Scotch pines being killed off by chafers in 1759.

By 1741 the duke was receiving shipments from John Bartram in Philadelphia: berries, seeds and cones of black gum (Nyssa sylvatica), sugar maple (Acer saccharum), candle-berry myrtle (Myrica cerifera) and spruce fir (Picea sp.).34Berkeley and Berkeley, eds, The Correspondence of John Bartram, 170. See Joel T. Fry, ‘America’s “Ancient Garden”: The Bartram Botanic Garden, 1728–1850’, in Knowing Nature: Art and Science in Philadelphia, 1740–1840, ed. Amy R. W. Meyers (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011), 64–5, for a discussion of the duke of Richmond’s early subscription to the Virginia collecting trip of 1738, which produced mostly herbaceous seeds and specimens. He seems to have received shipments in 1739 and 1740 as well. These were in boxes, divided among four clients: Lord Petre, the duke of Norfolk, Philip Miller and Richmond himself.35Berkeley and Berkeley, eds, The Correspondence of John Bartram, 170. Bartram sent two boxes: the first was divided into a larger section for the duke of Norfolk and a smaller one for the duke of Richmond; the second, divided between Lord Petre and Philip Miller, also contained tulip tree cones for Mark Catesby. Much else was sent besides to Collinson, Catesby and Lord Petre: roots of sassafras and witch hazel, for example; sods containing Phlox; and a box of insects for Collinson with a box of specimens for Lord Petre. A little later, Miller and Richmond were sharing rose-laurel cones (possibly Rhododendron maximum), the berries of dogwood (Cornus florida) and sassafras (Sassafras albidum), and the nuts of the butternut (Juglans cinerea).36Ibid., 208. Thereafter, Richmond acquired the typical 5-guinea seed batches from John Bartram in successive years (1742, 1743, 1744 and 1746).37London, Natural History Museum, Botany Library, MSS COL, ‘An Account of the First Introduction of American Seeds into Great Britain’ (Collinson’s notebook, circa 1767). See again Fry, ‘America’s “Ancient Garden” ’, 65–6, for a comprehensive account of the 5 guinea consignments. In 1746 white pine was divided between himself and Miller; and in 1747, along with the duke of Bedford, he received the same pine (Pinus strobus) once again (pl. 211).38Berkeley and Berkeley, eds, The Correspondence of John Bartram, 283, 292. Circumstantial evidence builds on the Collinson–Bartram exchanges: how Richmond was the recipient of many plants when Lord Petre’s collections were dismantled after 1742; how he urged Collinson to act quickly on his behalf (otherwise ‘the Dukes of Norfolk and Bedford will sweep them all away’); and how his Magnolia were among the best in England. By 1742 he had a great collection of hardy American plants and flowers, including Catalpa in flower.39See Laird, The Flowering of the Landscape Garden, 67; and Chambers, The Planters of the English Landscape Garden, 95–101; and, in particular, the letter of 28 December 1742, British Library, Add. MS 28726, fol. 128. See also Collinson’s letter to Richard Richardson in ‘ “Forget not Mee & My Garden” ’, ed. Armstrong, 102.

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Description: Pinus Americana (Pinus strobus), sketch 290 by Ehret, Georg Dionysius

211. Georg Dionysius Ehret, ‘Pinus Americana’ (Pinus strobus), sketch 290, undated, 9 ½ × 16 in. (24.5 × 40.5 cm). © The Natural History Museum, London

In 1746–7 the 2nd duke of Richmond shared in John Bartram’s shipments of American exotics, including white pine seeds (Pinus strobus). Around 1755, writing to Edward Cave (publisher of the Gentleman’s Magazine under the name ‘Sylvanus Urban’), Peter Collinson gave an account of the ‘Use of the White Pine commonly known in our Nurseries as Weymouth Pine’. Having mentioned use as ship masts, he remarked that in England they were best planted as clumps ‘or Else Surrounded with plantation of Scotch Pines or Firs to Break the Violence of the Winds’. The duke, grouping them with other pines in his ‘American Grove’, created a different effect to theatrical shrubbery (see pl. 206).

Peter Collinson’s Commonplace Book at the Linnean Society bolsters the claim to distinction: the duke ‘was extremely fond of planting and had all that Time the best Collection of Exotic hardy Trees that was then in England’.40Linnean Society, Collinson’s Commonplace Book, MS 323b, fol. 47. See again Armstrong, ed., ‘ “Forget not Mee & My Garden” ’, 222. Pococke observed that his collections were outstanding, since they included ‘thirty different kinds of oaks and four hundred different American trees and shrubs’.41Add. MS 23001. The figure of 400 suggests hyperbole. Despite the vicissitudes of weather and insect depredations (40,000 seedling Scotch pines were killed by ‘Cock-Chafers’ in 1759), Peter Collinson could return to Goodwood in 1759, a decade after the duke’s death, and find much that had prospered over several decades: ‘There were two fine Great Magnolias about 20 feet high in the American Grove that flower’d annually.’42Linnean Society, MS Sp 235A: “Notes Relating to Botany, Collected from the Manuscripts of the Late Peter Collinson by A. B. Lambert’, 1809; Peter Collinson Small Commonplace Book, fol. 52. See again Armstrong, ed., ‘ “Forget not Mee & My Garden” ’, 222. He commented in his letter to Benjamin Cook of 1 October 1759: ‘How soone nine years slides away, for so many it is Since I accompanied My Dear Friend, the old Duke of Richmond down Heither.’

Back in the 1740s, when the 2nd duke was still alive, Collinson had requested ‘a Bottle or Two of this Old Stuff’ for horticultural favours, which doubtless fell outside ordinary ‘household affairs’ assiduously managed by Sarah, duchess of Richmond.43Amanda Vickery, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 110: ‘Even titled ladies could be expected to manage accounts. The Duchess of Richmond tried to shield her husband from “household affairs” in the 1740s . . . her system spoilt, however, by minor orders made by servants on the duke’s authority.’ He wrote, for example, at 10 o’clock in the evening in the winter of 1748 (ahead of that ‘Cornucopia Summer’, see chapter 4): ‘Wee have had the Deepest Snow in London I Ever Remember . . . Yesterday I kept the Fast at a Feast at Ld Lincolns wth yr Bottle Friend Lord Harcourt — Wee toasted to you and all Lovers of Planting.’44West Sussex Record Office, Goodwood MS 108, fol. 796, dated 29 March 1748, ‘Tuesday Night’; and fol. 799, dated ‘Jany 20 Wednesday 10: at night’.

As a ‘Lover of Planting’, the duke turned to Collinson for many favours, much in the manner of Knowlton and his contemporaries, but with added aristocratic prerogative (see chapter 3).45For this aristocratic prerogative, see Beth Fowkes Tobin, The Duchess’s Shells: Natural History Collecting in the Age of Cook’s Voyages (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2014), ‘Protocols of Exchange’, 123–7. As early as 1721 Collinson had written to his Maryland friend George Robbins: ‘If you have any Shells, Curious Stones, or any other Natural Curiosity Remember Mee. I want one of your Humming Birds which you may send dry’d in its Feathers, and any Curious Insect.’46Armstrong, ed., ‘ “Forget not Mee & My Garden” ’, introduction, XXI. Indeed, over time, through supplies from John Bartram, the cloth merchant built up a creditable collection. These were mostly specimens: a rattlesnake skeleton (see pl. 215); a comb from a hornet’s nest; scallop shells; caterpillars and chrysalises (some of which hatched but did not live long); various insects, sometimes inadvertently enclosed in a shipment; a yellow wasps’ nest; a red-bellied snake in a glass bottle; various birds’ nests; and crabs.47Berkeley and Berkeley, eds, The Correspondence of John Bartram, 3, 66, 74–5, 78, 85, 87, 90, 95, 143, 185–6, 208–9, 228. His first client in the natural sciences, Lord Petre, was particularly covetous of terrapins or turtles, and Collinson was fond of them too, as letters to Bartram indicate (pl. 212). Bartram sent some in 1735, but they were stolen or died; and so the carrier Israel Pemberton gave Collinson ‘one that he had’.48Ibid., 17. On 20 October 1737 Collinson picked up a box of eggs (water-turtles or terrapins) that had begun to hatch on the voyage; all fifteen hatchlings died in London. None the less, other living ones did get to Lord Petre’s ponds as members of some brief Edenic ensemble of American creatures and American plants.49Ibid., 74, 86.

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Description: A View of the underside of the great Mud Tortoise from Pennsylvania by Bartram,...

212. William Bartram, ‘A View of the underside of the great Mud Tortoise from Pennsylvania’, [1759], watercolour over graphite, heightened with white; primary support 12 3⁄16 × 8 1⁄8 in. (32.6 × 20.7 cm). From Peter Collinson’s album of prints and drawings at Knowsley Hall. Licence granted courtesy of The Rt Hon. The Earl of Derby 2013. Photo: The Bridgeman Art Library

William Bartram began depicting turtles in 1755, aged sixteen. He worked for Peter Collinson, who regarded their ‘innocence’ (unlike snakes) as a reminder of Eden before the Fall. Collinson wrote to John Bartram in 1763: ‘It is something Singular . . . the Mud Turtle had clambered up a whole pair of Stairs out of my Hall into the next floor. Led by what Instinct I don’t know, but there was no water upstairs . . . Wee was much Diverted with It.’ Despite such ‘innocent’ moments, many of the hatchling turtles sent by John Bartram perished on the voyage, or they died on or shortly after arrival.

Despite the 2nd duke of Richmond’s prerogative in calling upon Collinson, there is scant evidence that these transactions and exchanges, which involved Lord Petre, included the exotic-loving duke. While Collinson’s name is cited frequently in the first two volumes of George Edwards’s A Natural History, it is not in association with either Richmond House or Goodwood. For example, under the black-and-white kingfisher, the entry reads: ‘Mr Peter Colinson Lent me this Bird to draw; he received it with others from Gamron in Persia.’50George Edwards, A Natural History of Uncommon Birds and of some other Rare and Undescribed Animals . . . , vol. I (London, 1743), pl. 9. It should be noted that vols II–IV (1747–51) omit ‘Uncommon’ from the title. Edwards went on to publish Gleanings of Natural History in 3 vols (1758–64). For George Edwards and his publication, see Victoria Dickenson, Drawn from Life: Science and Art in the Portrayal of the New World (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1998), especially 141–6. From the New World, Collinson acquired the eastern bluebird51Edwards, A Natural History, 1, pl. 24. — the same species that Catesby portrayed with the sarsaparilla vine (Smilax pumila).52See Henrietta McBurney, Mark Catesby’s Natural History of America (London: Merrell Holberton, 1997), 56–7; see also James L. Reveal, ‘Identification of the Plants and Animals Illustrated by Mark Catesby for his Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands’, ed. Nelson and Elliott. The red-throated hummingbird was in the Collinson collection; and the whip-poor-will (or common nighthawk) came on loan to Edwards from Catesby.53McBurney, Mark Catesby’s Natural History of America, 70–71, with background on Catesby’s confusion between the nighthawk and whip-poor-will, on which Edwards based his illustration. George Edwards, A Natural History of Uncommon Birds and of some other Rare and Undescribed Animals . . . , vol. II (London, 1747), pl. 63. There were other American birds in other collections: for example, Edwards, calling the wood duck the ‘Summer Duck of Catesby’, illustrated a specimen ‘sent me by my honour’d Friend, Sir Robert Abdy, Bart. It was shot in a Pond at the Seat of William Nicholas, Esq; a Relation of Sir Robert’s’ (pl. 213).54Edwards, A Natural History, II, pl. 101. See again McBurney, Mark Catesby’s Natural History of America, 66–7, for background on this duck.

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Description: Summer Duck of Catesby by Edwards, George

213. George Edwards, artist and engraver, ‘Summer Duck of Catesby’; hand-coloured etching in his A Natural History of Uncommon Birds and of some other Rare and Undescribed Animals . . . , 4 vols (London: College of Physicians, [1743]–51), vol. II, pl. 101. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (Sy4 +743e)

Mark Catesby, who illustrated the wood duck (Aix sponsa) in volume I, 97, of his Natural History, wrote: ‘They breed in Virginia and Carolina, and make their Nests in the Holes of tall Trees (made by Woodpeckers) growing in Water, particularly Cypress Trees.’ George Edwards’s drawing, by contrast, was taken from a specimen that had been shot at the ‘Seat of William Nicholas, Esq’ in England. The balance of living to dying among exotic creatures was thus in a different ratio from that for exotic plants. Despite losses of Magnolia grandiflora in the winter of 1739–40, North American exotics flourished (e.g., Catalpa), outnumbering those (e.g., Callicarpa americana) that died out.

Although the duke clearly coveted the North American eagles and owls that appear in his accounts (prized just as much as the North American Magnolia), Catesby and Bartram were not his suppliers. Even when Edwards’s account of the ‘Great White Owl’ provides one direct connection to Philadelphia, it is not in the form of a living bird, nor does it lead to Goodwood (pl. 214):

There is in the Hands of Mr. Peter Colinson, of London, F.R.S. an Oyl Painting of the Size of Life, done in Pensylvania by Order of - - - - Penn, Esq. from one of these Birds taken alive, and kept some Time . . . I could not do it from Life, because the Birds were sent dried from Hudson’s Bay to me by Mr Alexander Light, who has obliged me with many such Favours.55Edwards, A Natural History, II, pl. 61.

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Description: The Great White Owl by Edwards, George

214. George Edwards, artist and engraver, ‘The Great White Owl’; hand-coloured etching in his A Natural History of Uncommon Birds and of some other Rare and Undescribed Animals . . . , 4 vols (London: College of Physicians, [1743]–51), vol. II, pl. 61. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (Sy4 +743E)

George Edwards provided an account of the models for his drawing: an oil painting done from a live bird in Pennsylvania, which belonged to Peter Collinson, and a dried specimen sent by Alexander Light of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Rather than being ‘drawn from life’, as Everhard Kick practised with the duchess of Beaufort’s hothouse plants, a dead bird might have to serve the purposes of representation in ornithology.

Hudson Bay, along with Philadelphia, was the source of many American birds depicted in the first two volumes of Edwards’s Natural History. Although later on in his Gleanings of Natural History (1758–64) Edwards often referred to ‘his friend William Bartram’, their scientific collaboration did not connect Philadelphia directly to English aviaries in the way that John Bartram was linked to English shrubberies. Instead, William Bartram provided an exchange of drawings of North American plants and animals (pl. 215).56See Amy R. W. Meyers, ‘From Nature and Memory: William Bartram’s Drawings of North American Flora and Fauna’, in Knowing Nature, ed. Meyers, 128–59. Clearly, then, the mania for American woody plants was not echoed by a single-minded preoccupation with American birds or ‘quadrupeds’. The duke’s menagerie was stocked with creatures from both Indies, and from Africa and Asia, while his cabinet featured birds from South America. Only in the ‘American Grove’ did he make an exclusive New World environment, and one that prospered despite the winter of 1739–40.

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Description: The Rattle Snake taken uppon the banks of the Gr Eg harber River by Bartram,...

215. William Bartram, The Rattle Snake taken uppon the banks of the Gr Eg harber River, watercolour, 9 ¾ × 11 in. (24.9 × 28 cm). From Collinson’s album of prints and drawings at Knowsley Hall. Licence granted courtesy of The Rt Hon. The Earl of Derby 2013. Photo: The Bridgeman Art Library

In the 1751 edition of his Natural History of Uncommon Birds, George Edwards included some quadrupeds, reptiles and insects. William Bartram’s account in his Travels of how his father, John Bartram, ‘pleaded’ with their guide to spare the life of a rattlesnake that had almost bitten the son is an instance of Quaker mercy in the wild. At home in London, the Quaker Collinson exhibited a more usual detestation of snakes. In Edwards’s Gleanings of Natural History (1758–64), William Bartram was mentioned frequently, and, by 1768, Dr John Fothergill would become his patron. Fothergill agreed to support Bartram’s travels in the southern colonies (which took place 1773–6) in return for specimens, drawings and a journal of his observations.

The Demise of the 2nd Duke of Richmond’s Goodwood Menagerie

The flourishing grove of the 1740s and 1750s should be set against the declining menagerie of the 1740s. The first reference to animals among the duke’s surviving accounts is to a coat for a monkey in March 1726; the latest reference is to a present of a West Indian sow from Governor Worsley in 1733.57McCann, ‘ “Much troubled with very rude company” ’, 143. In effect, then, the late 1720s and early 1730s were the times of most intense engagement with animals — often an engagement set amongst other related or miscellaneous matters. One document, for example, reveals a typical sequence of accounts that opens with two entries on 5 March and 13 March 1726: the cost of 12s. for the monkey’s coat and the expenditure of 13s. for a ‘fustion suit for ye black boy’. The document proceeds discretely to 4s. for binding four cricket bats in 1728.58Goodwood MS 120, fols 82–167. For the duke’s role in cricket history, see Timothy J. McCann, ‘Sussex Cricket in the Eighteenth Century’, Sussex Record Society, LXXXVIII (2004). The duke was, among other things, a passionate enthusiast for the young game of fair play: cricket.

The 2nd duke of Richmond’s menagerie contained animals as various as wolf, tiger, vulture, raccoon, monkey, fox, bear, armadillo, ostrich, baboon, eagle and owl. Hence it was part ‘aviary’. The duke’s contacts included Lord Tyrawley in Lisbon, who tried to procure ‘two blue Macao’s’, and Mr Wolters in Rotterdam, who in 1738 claimed: ‘you can’t get Macows, all spoken for and too dear’.59Goodwood MS 112, fols 368, 398. Typically, the animals arrived in London by boat, and, from Deptford or Southwark, they were transported by cart. In 1730, for example, two bears were brought from Cadiz at a cost of £7 6s. 8d., then housed in London for 14s. Larger animals were kept in cages, while smaller ones were tethered outside. A cage could be an elaborate and costly venture: £93 for a 41-hundredweight tiger’s cage, 15 feet by 15 feet, built by John Montigny in 1726.60For further information on these items, see McCann, ‘ “Much troubled with very rude company” ’, 145. A tiger ate meat, while a ‘woman tygerr’ was given bread. Two tigers would eat 4 pounds of horseflesh and 4 pounds of beef a day. The total account for a day was 36 pounds of beef and 39 pounds of horseflesh, with six loaves divided among bears, raccoons, armadillo, cassowary and the ‘woman tyger’. Fowl received barley, oatmeal and — rather perversely as one of their kind — the occasional chicken. Monkeys were fed on bread and greens, with the odd apple and carrots and milk. Eagles dined on sheep’s heads, beef and bullocks’ hearts.61These provisions are discussed ibid., 145–6.

But the early 1730s were not a time of plenty for all. The letters of the menagerie keeper, Henry Foster, to Richmond’s London secretary, Peter L’abbe, make for curious and, at times, raw reading. On 7 May 1730, for example, he begins by mentioning the winds that blew down one of the great beech trees, and proceeds: ‘i am afraid we shall have a famine a mungst ye animals’.62Goodwood MS 108, fol. 816. By 20 May the tone had turned even more desperate:

Mr Labbe
I have but very little to say, and i am sorry to have the occasion, to tell you here is very great Complaints for want of money both in town and Countrey, and for hay and straw and oats i have been ask.d so often for ye money that i am a shamed to see ye people and troubles me very much . . . it will be proper to Let his Grace know ye old Boar is dead and ye black Burd which was given to his Grace at Ester is dead also.63Goodwood MS 108, fol. 818.

By 10 June 1730 the mood was temporarily lighter as Foster wrote to L’abbe: ‘in Chichester his Grace is to play a Cricket mach Friday with Sr Will.m Gaige on Berry hill, we are all prette well here and fine weather, but a stinking air about the house’.64Goodwood MS 108, fol. 819. On 14 October, however, the mood was sombre indeed. He stated that, although the two foxes and raccoon had arrived safely: ‘i hope there is no more Creaters to com here for here is no more Roome of entertainment nor vitles enough to be got for them to eat so that ye must be obliged to faste some days in ye week but what days I cant say’.65Goodwood MS 108, fol. 822.

It is not entirely clear from these accounts whether the mounting expenditure on the menagerie was to blame for the shortages. Excepting the bitter winter of 1739–40, the seasons were favourable for crops and livestock. From 1730 to 1739 there was a sequence of ten good harvests.66See Eric Lionel Jones, Seasons and Prices: The Role of the Weather in English Agricultural History (London: Allen & Unwin, 1964), 137. The year 1733 ranks as one of the mildest on record.67See Mike Hulme and Elaine Barrow, eds, Climates of the British Isles: Present, Past and Future (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 266 and 404. The winter of 1733–4 was mild, followed by a warm spring, a decent summer and bumper wheat exports. Whatever economic or environmental conjunctions prevailed at Goodwood, the allusions to horseflesh and horse nits are reminders of stark realities, both natural and cultural. Such wretchedness contrasts strangely with the sleek, pampered racers of George Stubbs’s paintings a generation later, and with the monument to the lioness in the High Wood marking the burial place of the duke of Richmond’s favourite animal (pl. 216 and cf. pl. 217).

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Description: Racehorses Exercising at Goodwood, detail by Stubbs, George

216. George Stubbs, Racehorses Exercising at Goodwood (detail), 1760, oil on canvas, 50 ¼ × 80 ¾ in. (127.6 × 205.6 cm). Commissioned in 1759–60 by Charles, 3rd duke of Richmond, Lennox and Aubigny. Goodwood House, Chichester, West Sussex. By permission of the Trustees of the Goodwood Collection

The 3rd duke of Richmond’s exercising racehorses wear hooded sweat-covers in the Goodwood household livery: yellow bordered with red. The decorous rhythm represents something of the earlier well-regulated household of the 2nd duke, managed under the meticulous eye of his duchess. The grooming of these horses stands in counterpoint to the 1730s ‘famine’ among the menagerie animals, some of which — notably the male tiger — were fed on horsemeat.

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Description: Lion and Lioness by Stubbs, George

217. George Stubbs, Lion and Lioness, 1771, oil on canvas, 40 ½ × 50 ¼ in. (102.9 × 127.6 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, M. Theresa B. Hopkins Fund, 49.6. Photograph © 2015 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

In this painting, the tree appears blasted by the wind in a setting inspired by Creswell Crags on the Nottinghamshire–Derbyshire border. The lions were drawn from ones owned by Lord Shelburne at his villa on Hounslow Heath. Stubbs captures the characteristic watchfulness of the lioness in contrast to the lion’s drowsiness. Hedge bindweed (Calystegia sepium) in the foreground is a foil to the North American Rubus odoratus in shade. At Goodwood, the diet of meat for male carnivores and bread for females implies that they were caged apart rather than enjoying this familial contentment in the wild. After the caging and confinement of the ‘Catacombs’, the duke, touched by the death of his favourite lioness, created a memorial to her in the High Wood.

Many of the dead animals went on to be examined by Sir Hans Sloane in London. In death, the exotic could be useful to science and medicine. Yet it would be misleading to suggest by this that a menagerie, made up of expendable beasts, was closer to a mortuary. Indeed, there were odd moments when an animal was entirely at home. Tom Hill mentioned in October 1730 that ‘your Bear for instance: during the cold rainy weather we have had, has been in the utmost delight’.68Goodwood MS 103, fol. 215. Nor would it be correct to paint the menagerie as simply a private indulgence. For it is clear from Henry Foster’s letter of 8 April 1730 that it was open to the public on certain occasions. He told Peter L’abbe:

we are very much troubled with very Rude Company to see ye animals Sunday Last we had about 4 or 5 hundred Good and bad but I cant say which was ye greatest number, of ye two, but ye pull down ye peals [pales?] treds ye Coals all to dust and gets into ye Grove two or 3 hundred and to say anything goes for nothing.69Goodwood MS 108, fol. 815.

Nevertheless, for all the amusement of ‘Rude Company’, a macabre mood hung over the ‘Catacombs’ that is entirely absent from the ‘American Grove’. While the loss of American exotics in the hard winter of 1739–40 was a setback, the plantations recovered and prospered. In contrast, the repeated distress occasioned by the loss of so many animals surely altered the duke’s initial enthusiasm of the early 1730s. It was costing him dearly in one sense or another.

Philanthropon: The Beasts of Goodwood in 1747 and Man’s Fellow Feeling in Millenium Hall (1762)

From these accounts, it is easy to see that the worker struggled along with the beasts. Such comparisons were not lost at the top of the chain. On 11 November 1732 Lord Hervey wrote to the duke: ‘As to the account of the loves, courtship and marriages of your beasts, it seems to me not so much a literal description of Goodwood dens as an allegorical epitome of the whole matrimonial world.’ He continued:

If you would follow the example of Aesop, and write fables upon your birds and beasts, I have a notion that without going out of your own park you might characterise the persons, tempers and occupations of all your acquaintances. The marriages of your bears, tigers, wolves and monkeys would certainly do for a representation of half the conjugal performances in England.70Quoted from McCann, ‘ “Much troubled with very rude company” ’, 143.

This flippant conceit contrasts with a different fable narrated by the 2nd duke of Richmond’s old tutor, Tom Hill. On 30 October 1730 Hill wrote affectively:

Your Grace has heard without doubt, and wept the misfortune of the poor elephant that was burnt with the vessel he came in. I assure you I should not have been more touched, perhaps not so much had I heard his Master the King of Siam had perished the same way. I have a particular value for that creature, not so much for its being an exotic, as that it is said to be an animal (philanthropon). As for your misanthropon whether beasts or men, I care not what becomes of them.71Quoted from ibid., 145.

In the case of one of the duke’s daughters, Emily Lennox, an early progression to animal ‘philanthropy’ is apparent from the exchange of letters with her father (pls 218 and 219). As a young girl she wrote sentimentally: ‘Mama, begs you would send here an account of her Pea Chicks and Canary Birds, and that you wou’d order Buckner to make Lavender Bags.’72Goodwood MS 102, fol. 51. Yet, by the age of fifteen or sixteen and as the new countess of Kildare at Carton, she could interrogate her father, albeit in an elliptical way. Little was said, but much was meant. Without ceremony, she launched herself in a letter dated 18 August 1747 or 1748:

I can’t help owning my Dear Papa that I have often thought that since these catacombs have been in fashion at Goodwood my poor Birds have decreased daily and that I had even some suspition of these not having had fair play for their lives, however since you assure me you had no hand in their deaths I am persuaded it was a natural one, not but that I am sure you have so much good nature that if you saw them suffer you wou’d put them out of their pain.73Goodwood MS 102, fol. 67.

At the end of the letter, she signed off: ‘I will say no more on this subject but that poor Wanns esteems himself very happy to be out of the way while this rage of burying reigns.’74Goodwood MS 102, fol. 67. By 8 October 1747 or 1748 she felt impelled to return to the topic, slipping easily from the fate of humans to that of pets and menagerie animals:

You can’t imagine how concerned I am for Poor Cheale, who I hope you will watch when you have him at Goodwood and prevent his drinking Drams in a morning which I am afraid will soon carry him off, & as I am afraid you cou’d not bury him in the Catacombses you would have nothing to comfort you for the loss of him, I remember Poor little Aliss very well, I find the fate of all the unlucky animals that come to Goodwood is to be burying them in the Catacombs and an Epitaph by Sam Chandler.75Goodwood MS 102, fol. 70.

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Description: The 2nd Duke and Duchess of Richmond and Lennox, detail by Richardson, Jonathan, the...

218. Jonathan Richardson, The 2nd Duke and Duchess of Richmond and Lennox (detail), circa 1726, oil on canvas, 39 × 46 in. (99 × 117 cm). Goodwood House, Chichester, West Sussex. By permission of the Trustees of the Goodwood Collection

Charles Lennox — from 1723, 2nd duke of Richmond — loved animals, plants, cricket and his adored wife, Sarah. Horace Walpole found nothing to gossip about in the duke’s familial contentment, writing in November 1741 of a ball where the duke sat by his wife all night ‘kissing her hand and gazing at his beautiful daughters’. By then, the duke’s passion for his menagerie was waning under economic, environmental and sentimental pressures. Just a year or two later, his collection of American plants was flourishing after the setback of the bitter winter of 1739–40.

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Description: Lady Emily Lennox in Masquerade Costume by Hoare, William

219. William Hoare of Bath, Lady Emily Lennox in Masquerade Costume, pastel, 23 ½ × 17 ¼ in. (60 × 40 cm). Goodwood House, Chichester, West Sussex. By permission of the Trustees of the Goodwood Collection

The duke’s second daughter, Emily, had turned fifteen in February 1747, when her marriage with Lord Kildare was celebrated at Richmond House, London. Within a year, she was writing to her father in a scolding tone: she harboured the suspicion that the birds and beasts of the Goodwood ‘Catacombs’ had not had ‘fair play for their lives’. As she put it forthrightly to her father: ‘since these catacombs have been in fashion at Goodwood my poor Birds have decreased daily’.

These letters anticipate a general shift in attitudes to animals in the period 1730 to 1780, in which the novel Millenium Hall (1762) played a recognized role.76It was published as Millenium Hall rather than Millennium Hall. See Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800 (London: Allen Lane, 1983), especially 173–91. Bound up with that shift were the many evolutions in thought and social practice that resulted in the cult of sensibility and a ‘cult of tender-heartedness’. Recent scholarship points to the rise of Methodism, on the one hand, and, on the other, to changes in medical theory about the nervous system and gender differences as influences.77See G. J. Barker-Benfield, Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), especially chapters 1 and 2, and 266–73; see also 231–5, which takes up Thomas’s discussion of the ‘cult of tender-heartedness’ in respect to animals. Yet Millenium Hall stands out as especially relevant here, since it is the one comprehensive vision of estate management written by a woman in the period when Emily, countess of Kildare, was in her prime, her early thirties (see pl. 219).

The author Sarah Scott, clearly influenced by Rousseau, depicted the shrubbery of the ‘asylum’ estate as a place to plant ‘sweet and pleasing’ rather than rare, exotic things.78[Lady Barbara Montagu and Sarah Scott], A Description of Millenium Hall . . . by a Gentleman on His Travels (London, 1762), 14, 24. In their virtue, the lady proprietors are ‘free from that littleness of mind, which makes people value a thing the more for its being possessed by no one but themselves’.79Ibid., 14. Likewise, foreshadowing Chambers, their menagerie contains pheasants, wild turkeys, squirrels and hares, which ‘live so unmolested, that they seem to have forgot all fear’.80Ibid., 20–21. Because man should be the ‘preserver’, not the ‘merciless destroyer’, the ladies shun the enslavement of exotic tigers and lions, using the flower garden enclosure as an asylum instead for tyrannized dwarfs and giants (a man only 3 feet tall, a woman about 7 feet tall). This odd vision of the ‘enfranchised company’81Ibid., 25. allows the ladies to express compassion for the less fortunate in society. Behind the shrubbery in a wood are neat cottages inhabited by those rescued from the penury of working for ‘two ‘Squires’.82Ibid., 15. Given the actual conditions of work and pay for casual labourers, ‘liberation’ was at issue for those at the bottom of the chain as much as for those creatures kept in chains.

Although fanciful in construction, the author’s vision promoted a rival version of community to the metropolitan lifestyle of her sister, Mrs Montagu. While her sister’s world was full of ostentation and extravagance, Sarah’s own was based on frugality and charitable giving.83See Betty Rizzo’s arguments in ‘Two Versions of Community: Montagu and Scott’, in Reconsidering the Bluestockings, ed. Nicole Pohl and Betty A. Schellenberg (Pasadena: Huntington Library, 2003), 193– 214. Elizabeth Montagu, in managing the Denton Colliery, provided a school for boys. She then planned to train girls in ‘spinning, knitting and sewing’. Her charity thus combined duty with pragmatic good management. Her annual feasts for London chimney sweeps, visible to passers-by on the front lawn of Montagu House, were an ostentatious celebration of charity. For arguments on charity and luxury, including Montagu’s assisting ‘merit in distress’ by patronage, see Elizabeth Eger, ‘Luxury, Industry and Charity: Bluestocking Culture Displayed’, in Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires and Delectable Goods, ed. Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 190–204. Ostentation led to animal exploitation. For example, the sister, Elizabeth Montagu, would go on to create a feather room inspired by the duchess of Portland.84Discussed in ibid., 190–204. Mrs Montagu’s guests first met at her Hill Street home, famous for its ‘Chinese room’. Between 1781 and 1791 the feather screens were assembled at Montagu House from feathers of every bird: ‘From ye gaudy peocock to ye solemn raven, we collect whatever we can’,85San Marino, CA, Huntington Library, MS MO 3517, 25 September 1781. so wrote Mrs Montagu to Elizabeth Carter in 1781. The feathers represented flowers and animals, worked up by Montagu’s forewoman, Betty Tull: ‘Maccoas she has transformed into Tulips, Kings fishers into blue bells by her so potent art.’86Huntington Library, MS MO 2975, Elizabeth Montagu to Elizabeth Charlton Montagu, 17 December 1788. James Barrington was one collaborator:

I will collect all the Peacocks feathers, as well as the others for Mrs Montagu; it is the only comfort I have at the death of a beautiful bird, to think that their plumage will have the honour of shining as a Constellation in the exalted situation of Mrs Montagu’s Palace at Portman Square.87Huntington Library, MS MO 156, James Barrington to Elizabeth Montagu, 16 December 1790.

In the light of these rival visions, the collecting of birds and plants at Princess Augusta’s Kew offers a picture of an actual estate at the time that Millenium Hall was published. It brings together the skills of an English bird-catcher and those of the American plant hunter, John Bartram. The aviary, it turns out, was quite different from the menagerie at Goodwood. It would prove only reactively a place for the development of affective compassion.

PART II
Princess Augusta’s Carlton House and Kew, and Lord Bute as the ‘Most Knowing in the Kingdom’

Charles Lennox, 2nd duke of Richmond, died in August 1750. The previous May he had enjoyed the ‘200 water mines, 20 air balloons, 200 fire trees, 5000 water rockets, 5000 sky rockets, 100 fire showers, 20 suns and a hundred stars’ of a firework display on the Thames at Richmond House, Whitehall (pl. 220). There was peace in Europe, and his family was united. On 8 August 1750, although prescribed wormwood (Artemisia absinthium) for a fever while travelling, he suddenly began to languish in his lodgings in Godalming. Ten days later Dr Middleton was opening up his body for an autopsy, rummaging around in his cold intestines. The doctor found an irritated bladder, inflamed like a small balloon, but no trace of stones. All ‘Lovers of Planting’ mourned the loss.

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Description: A View of Fire-Works and Illuminations at his Grace the Duke of Richmond's at...

220. George Vertue, ‘A View of the Fire-Works and Illuminations at his Grace the Duke of Richmond’s at Whitehall, etc.’, 1749, hand-coloured engraving. Private Collection. The Bridgeman Art Library

The duke of Richmond’s fireworks of 1749 celebrated peace in Europe and harmony in the family (which had seen its moments of discord). Richmond House stands to the left, while the family stands on the terrace and the king is in the royal barge with a crown on its roof. Charles Frederick, Controller of His Majesty’s Fireworks, organized the show. At the end of 1749 Richmond wrote to Henry Fox, his son-in-law: ‘There is a cursed hard frost which is very hard upon fox hunters and planters.’ Despite the cold snap, there were excellent vintages and harvests to celebrate in the seasons of the late 1740s. After the dismal year of 1739–40, the duke’s ‘American Grove’ enjoyed a sustained run of good seasons that had begun in the 1730s and continued throughout the 1750s.

On 20 March 1751 Frederick, prince of Wales died unexpectedly in his early forties. A few weeks before, when supervising the gardeners at Kew, he was caught in a sudden storm. A post-mortem established that the death, following pleurisy, was caused by ‘the sudden breaking of a large abscess under the sternum bone, where it had been gathering for two or three years past’. Legend suggests that this abscess came from the blow of a cricket ball.88Cited in Desmond, The History of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 28. See Matthew Kilburn, ‘Frederick Lewis, Prince of Wales (1707–1751)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; online edition: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/10140 [accessed 1 October 2013].

Peter Collinson lamented the loss of the prince of Wales as much as the duke of Richmond. He wrote to John Bartram: ‘Gardening and planting have lost their best friend and encourager; for the Prince had delighted in that rational amusement a long while: but lately, he had the laudable and princely ambition to excel all others.’89Cited in Desmond, The History of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 29. Princess Augusta’s decision to burn her deceased husband’s papers for political reasons may have destroyed evidence of his gardening activities in the 1730s and 1740s. George Vertue gave the fullest account of a visit to Kew on 12 October 1750, in which he mentioned Frederick’s direction of plantings and his new ‘Chinesia Summer hous’ (presumably the House of Confucius, attributed variously to Joseph Goupy or William Chambers). The bill for £216 for the purchase of trees and shrubs for Kew in May 1750 confirms Vertue’s report that the prince had planted ‘many curious & forain trees [and] exotics’.90Ibid., 27.

It seems that, before his death, Frederick had developed some form of menagerie at Kew. George Edwards drew a quagga there in 1751 (pl. 221). The prince of Wales also received a giant tortoise. It remains unclear, however, where such creatures would have been housed. Perhaps they were in sheds in his fields.91I am very grateful to Ray Desmond for this information by personal communication, 7 September 2005. George Stubbs’s portrait of 1763 of the closely related zebra adds a further dimension in the realm of the quagga (though beyond the scope of this chapter, for the zebra belonged to Que en Charlotte, who sustained the idea of a menagerie at Kew into the late eighteenth century, pl. 222).92The later history of the menagerie is discussed in Mark Laird, ‘This Other Eden: The American Connection in Georgian Pleasure Grounds, from Shrubbery and Menagerie to Aviary and Flower Garden’, in Knowing Nature, ed. Meyers, 120–21. The fact that Stubbs chose to place the mountain zebra in a grove (as opposed to the menagerie enclosure implied in Edwards’s background) parallels the direction William Chambers would take between the publicizing of Kew in 1763 and the publication of his Dissertation on Oriental Gardening of 1772. That direction has complex origins, beginning with Carlton House under the dowager princess of Wales.

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Description: Gleanings of Natural History, pl. 223 by Edwards, George

221. George Edwards, Gleanings of Natural History (London, 1758), pl. 223 opposite pp. 28–30. From the collections of the Ernst Mayr Library, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University

In his account of the quagga, Edwards wrote: ‘This curious animal was brought alive, together with the male, from the Cape of Good Hope: the male dying before they arrived at London, I did not see it; but this female lived several years at a house of his Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, at Kew . . . It seemed to be of a savage and fierce nature: no one would venture to approach it, but a gardener in the Prince’s service, who was used to feed it, and could mount on its back.’ The quagga — striped only from head to forequarters — was thought by many to be a distinct species. Yet recent studies of the DNA of this extinct quadruped suggest that it was a sub-species of the plains zebra.

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222. George Stubbs, Zebra, 1763, oil on canvas, 40 ½ × 50 ¼ in. (103 × 127.5 cm). Paul Mellon Collection, Yale Center for British Art (B1981.25.617)

Stubbs’s portrait of the only zebra then known to science — the mountain zebra (Equus zebra) — shows its particular characteristics: a narrow body marked by closely spaced black stripes that widen horizontally. It is placed in a grove-like setting in England, thus far from the hilly or mountain terrain of southern Africa, where its steep hooves equip it for sure-footed movement. The zebra of Stubbs’s magnificent portrait belonged to Queen Charlotte.

After Frederick’s death in 1751, Princess Augusta’s household accounts reveal a sustained interest in Kew: ‘A Antelope Ground’ (1752), a ‘Guernsey Partridge House’ and ‘Indian pheasants’ (1753). Yet the context is missing. It was at this point that Lord Bute and William Chambers entered the scene, providing a bridge between the princess’s homes and gardens at Carlton House and Kew. Chambers was familiar with William Kent’s groundbreaking composition of temple and trelliswork exedras. Thus Chambers’s treillage Aviary Flower Garden at Kew seems a direct offspring of the earlier work by Kent at Carlton House.93Harris, ‘Sir William Chambers and Kew Gardens’, 55–67, and especially 57. Such links are strengthened by the supervision that the head gardener, John Dillman, exercised over Carlton House and Kew until 1752–3.94Sir George Lee’s Papers, Buckinghamshire Record Office, D/LE/C6/1–24. See here D/LE/C6/2, ‘John Dillmans Agreement for keeping 46 Acres of Garden from Lady Day 1752’, which includes the charge ‘to compleat all that part of the Garden at Kew that is not yet finished in the manner proposed by the Plan and to keep all that is now finished, which together is computed at 35 Acres’. The gardens at Carlton House and Leicester House amounted to an additional 11 acres. In June 1752 Dillman was contracted ‘to compleat all that part of the Garden at Kew that is not yet finished in the manner proposed by the Plan’.95Cited in Desmond, The History of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 30.

By June 1753 a division of duties had occurred. This was following a dispute over Dillman’s disbursement of £700 per annum,96Sir George Lee’s Papers, D/LE/C6/4 and 7. There is a discussion of the contrasting costs of London versus country rates. but it also involved matters of garden design. From 23 June 1753 the garden designer Robert Greening was put in charge of ‘keeping Kew Pleasure Gardens’ for £315 per annum. He was also to ‘find & provide all the seeds for raising flowers to ornament & Beautify the Borders of the said Garden’.97Sir George Lee’s Papers, D/LE/C6/5. While John Dillman had his contract of 30 June 1753 renewed for Carlton House and Leicester House, he was relegated at Kew to the kitchen garden, melon grounds and orangery. That division (reducing overall costs from £700 to £660) remained in effect in 1755, when £315 was allocated to Greening and £345 to Dillman. In 1757, 400 guineas went to Greening, who thereafter took on Dillman’s remaining duties at Kew.98For the sequence of contracts and expenditures, see Sir George Lee’s Papers, D/LE/C6/6–15. Desmond, The History of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 34, states: ‘In 1756 John Dillman resigned from Princess Augusta’s service, having received a legacy of £300 from Lady Elizabeth St André.’ Within such financial stringencies, it was tough on the plain gardener to make do with less.

At this point, designs were beginning to emerge under the influence of Lord Bute. For example, in 1757 Greening drew up an estimate for converting the nursery at Kew into a wilderness (pl. 223).99Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS North b.15, fols 17–20v. This was a roughly 10-acre plot that required 50,000 plants (some apparently dug up and replanted from existing stocks). Given the quantity of gravel and sand specified, it seems likely that this was the wilderness around the Pagoda. Robert Greening’s memorandum to Lord Bute (requesting his advice on whether to plant standards ‘at Equal Distance from the walk’, or as though they ‘grew there by accident’, and whether to stretch the budget for ‘standard Carolina Poplars’ at 3s. per tree from Williamson’s nursery) reveals a collaboration that was carried forward after Greening’s death in 1758 by Bute’s new man, John Haverfield.100Bodleian Library, MS North d.9, fol. 160.

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Description: A Plan of the Gardens at Kew by Chambers, William

223. William Chambers, A Plan of the Gardens at Kew, 1763, watercolour, 51 ¼ × 22 in. (130 × 56 cm). © The British Library Board (Maps K.Top.40.46.m)

Two areas of ‘wilderness’ lie around the Temple of the Sun and the Pagoda. The latter was probably where Greening planted trees in 1757 on advice from Lord Bute. The Great Stove and the Physic and Exotic Gardens were put under William Aiton, who was hired from Chelsea Physic Garden in 1759.

Author’s key: (1) White House, (2) Orangery, (3) Temple of the Sun in the Arboretum, (4) Great Stove, (5) Physic and Exotic Gardens, (6) Flower Garden, (7) Menagerie, (8) Temple of Bellona (subsequently moved), (9) Temple of Pan, (10) Temple of Eolus, (11) Smeaton’s Water Pump, (12) House of Confucius, (13) Lake and Island, (14) Theatre of Augusta, (15) Temple of Victory, (16) Ruined Arch, (17) Alhambra, (18) Pagoda, (19) Mosque, (20) Gothic Cathedral, (21) Gallery of Antiques, (22) Temple of Arethusa? (subsequently moved), (23) Palladian Bridge, (24) Temple of Solitude?, (25) Great Lawn

If Haverfield continued Greening’s role in the pleasure ground, it was William Aiton who brought new expertise to the ‘Physic and Exotic Gardens’ (see pl. 223). He was hired from Chelsea Physic Garden in 1759. In 1770 Haverfield was on £700 and Aiton on £120 per annum (while doubtless unskilled labourers eked out a bare living below £20 a year).101See Desmond, The History of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 34–5, for background on Aiton’s arrival. What role the physician and naturalist John Hill (1714–1775) played is uncertain (just as the evidence of Hill’s involvement with the duke of Richmond — moving to Goodwood from Thorndon Hall, and well before his Kew years — is patchy).102Ibid., 38. See George Rousseau, The Notorious Sir John Hill: The Man Destroyed by Ambition in the Era of Celebrity (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, and Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), 17–29: ‘By 1739, when Hill had been resident at Thorndon for about two years and already acquired Richmond’s confidence, and when Petre’s death would soon lead to the auctioning off of his American tree collection, Hill was instrumental in placing Richmond’s generous bid first. This was the acquisition enabling Richmond to expand his own groves at Goodwood’; and ‘Hill collected plants and animals on the nearby Downs’. The conversion of a ‘Desart’ into an ‘Eden’103William Chambers, Plans, Elevations, Sections, and Perspective Views of the Gardens and Buildings at Kew (London, 1763). in the space of a mere six years, which must be attributed primarily to Bute under the patronage of Princess Augusta — with respective inputs from Chambers, Greening, Haverfield and Aiton — doubtless involved John Hill.104In The Letters and Papers of Sir John Hill, 1714– 1775, ed. George S. Rousseau (New York: Ams Press, 1982), Hill’s background as apothecary and as collector of specimens for Lord Petre and the 2nd duke of Richmond (1738–43) is summarized. Letter 80 of summer 1758 is addressed to Lord Bute and mentions a ‘book of plants’ (not a work in print). See also Rousseau, The Notorious Sir John Hill, 205–6, on the influence of Hill’s Eden (1757) on Bute; and 242, on Hill’s gradual demise: ‘Hill was marginalized — but not entirely . . . [he] worked in various gardening capacities assisting Bute, his main task to increase the number of species at Kew. He did this with ferocious industry, and by 1768 their number reached 3,400.’ The novelty of creating a self-contained enclosure for exotic plants and birds — three loosely linked spaces, within but distinct from the pleasure ground — carries the imprint of Bute. Richard Richardson’s letter of 1758 suggests that Lord Bute was in correspondence with ‘asia africa america Europe & Everywhere’. He added: ‘my Ld is ye most Knowing of any in this Kindome by much of any in it such is his great ability there in’.105Bodleian Library, MS Radcliffe Trust c.12, fol. 45v. Peter Collinson’s letters make Lord Bute the prime mover. One, dated 29 October 1761, is of particular significance because written to Bute:

The King was so Indulgent to hint to Mee (I may say ask’d Mee) to see Kew Gardens & the Princess of Wales favoured Mee with a particular Invitation.

So when your Lordship will please to Honour Mee with a Note, when it would be suiteable, I shall with pleasure see your wonderful operations & the Improvement those Gardens have rec’d from your great Skill in Every Branch of Science.106Linnean Society, Peter Collinson Small Commonplace Book, fol. 182, here quoted from ‘ “Forget not Mee & My Garden” ’, ed. Armstrong, 229. Armstrong points out that at the foot of the draft Collinson wrote a further note, including the phrase: ‘From His Lordships great knowledge in the Science of Botany the Gardens at Kew have been furnish’d with all the Rare Exotick Trees & Flowers that could be procured.’

By 1766 the physician and botanist John Hope (1725–1786), on a visit from Edinburgh where he supervised both the royal garden and the botanical gardens, was overwhelmed by the results, putting Kew amongst the top collecting-grounds for exotics.

Princess Augusta’s Chinese Aviary, Eleazar Albin’s Natural History and William Chambers’s Dissertation (1772)

The royal accounts at Windsor reveal a renewed burst of activity in the season 1768–9. The twenty-three visits that William Chambers made in 1768 alone are significant.107Harris, ‘Sir William Chambers and Kew Gardens’, 67. His continued involvement at Kew is supported by these accounts, many of which itemize repair work to structures. But just what occasioned the flurry in a horticultural or botanical sense, with the arrival of English songbirds captured by Robert Beecham, is less clear. The aviary was already populated after completion in 1760 (pl. 224). A bill from a supplier called Thiselton in January 1763 covers bird food for 1762 — millet seed, canary seed, rape seed, hemp, etc. — and itemizes ‘A Cage for Bullfinch’ at 2s.108Windsor Castle, Royal Archives, RA GEO/55482. Similar provisions appear throughout 1768–9.109See RA GEO/55522, 55525–55527, 55548, 55558–55560, 55593–55595, 55626–55628 and 55649–55651. Eddie & Dupin, seedsmen at the Woolpack and Crown, were the suppliers of rape, hemp and canary seed.110RA GEO/55526. From October to December 1768 bread was fed to birds, flour to pheasants, oatmeal to small birds and peas to the ‘Barbery pigeons’.111RA GEO/55527. This coincided with Beecham’s trapping of larks and chaffinches (pl. 226), which must have occurred during the wet autumn of the exceptionally wet year of 1768.112See again Hulme and Barrow, eds, Climates of the British Isles, 409.

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Description: View of Flower Garden and Aviary at Kew by Sandby, Thomas

224. Thomas Sandby, View of Flower Garden and Aviary at Kew, 1763, watercolour, sheet: 11 × 17 11⁄16 in. (28 × 45 cm); leaf 39 in Sir William Chambers’s album of drawings, ‘Plans, Elevations, Sections, and Perspective Views of the Gardens and Buildings at Kew’. Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1925, © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (25.19.39) / Art Resource, NY

Around 1760 Chambers designed a Chinese-style aviary to house the dowager princess of Wales’s collection of small native and foreign birds. The petal-like radial symmetry of the layout took inspiration from specialized flower gardens, notably Pierre Morin’s floricultural garden in mid-seventeenth-century Paris, which had inspired John Evelyn’s ‘Morin Garden’ (see pl. 1). Princess Augusta apparently desired that the flowerbeds — radiating from the quatrefoil pool stocked with goldfish — be furnished with florists’ flowers: fashionable double hyacinths in spring and staked carnations in summer.

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Description: A Plan of the Gardens at Kew, detail by Chambers, William

225. William Chambers, A Plan of the Gardens at Kew (detail of pl. 223), 1763, watercolour, 51 ¼ × 22 in. (130 × 56 cm). © The British Library Board (Maps K.Top.40.46.m)

At 6 is the Flower Garden, with the Chinese Aviary, housing English songbirds as well as pheasants and rare birds (see pl. 224). At 7 is the menagerie for exotic pheasants and larger birds, goldfish and waterfowl. Situated at its centre was Chambers’s octagonal Chinoiserie pavilion.

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Description: Chaffinch, Cock, Hen, and Egg by Albin, Eleazar

226. Eleazar Albin, artist and engraver, Chaffinch, Cock, Hen, and Egg; hand-coloured etching in his A Natural History of English Song-Birds and Such of the Foreign as are usually brought over and esteemed for their singing, 2nd edn (London, 1741), between pp. 24 and 25. © The British Library Board (7294.aaa.19)

Ninety chaffinches were among the English songbirds trapped late in 1768 by the bird-catcher Robert Beecham for Princess Augusta’s flower garden aviary. In the Windsor Castle accounts, these were recorded as: ‘Delivered at the Avery in Kew Gardens’ (and paid for by January 1769). In Letter 13 to Thomas Pennant, dated 22 January 1768, Gilbert White wrote of the ‘vast flocks’ of chaffinches congregating towards Christmas in the fields around Selborne. He was ‘amazed to find that they seemed . . . to be almost all hens’, which he linked to a possible migration pattern established by Linnaeus.

Whether entirely new or just replacements, these English songbirds recall the ones depicted in Eleazar Albin’s A Natural History of English Song-Birds. It was first published in 1737, and a second edition came out in 1741. An enlarged edition was published in Edinburgh in 1754 under the title of A Natural History of Singing Birds: And particularly, That Species of them most commonly bred in scotland.113Since Albin appears to have died well before the Edinburgh publication, this must be a posthumous edition. See Peter Osborne, ‘Albin, Eleazar (d. 1742?)’, entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; online edition: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/279 [accessed 1 October 2013]. Albin was the first to create coloured plates of birds. Since the three volumes of Albin’s ‘hist. of Birds’, which Bute bought in July 1758 along with George Edwards’s Natural History and Gleanings, were for the princess’s perusal, it seems quite likely that she consulted A Natural History of English Song-Birds;114RA GEO/55456. its pictures and practical tips on bird care were an inducement to consider the ‘sweet Choristers of the Woods’.115Eleazar Albin, A Natural History of English Song-Birds and Such of the Foreign as are usually brought over and esteemed for the singing [1737], 2nd edn (London, 1741): ‘To the Reader’, 2. The bird-catcher’s bill for a total of 498 birds — larks, goldfinches, linnets, ‘redpoles’ (redpolls), ‘twiets’ (twites), yellowhammers, chaffinches, ‘Green Birds’ (greenfinches?) and ‘Reed Sparrows’ (reed buntings?) — cost the royal household £8 19s. 2d.116RA GEO/55524. John Haverfield picked up Beecham’s bill for trapping, along with Eddie & Dupin’s bill for bird feed and materials for the ‘Exotic Garden’, and passed them on to the royal household for payment by January 1769. He thus exercised overall control of expenditures. Haverfield passed on the expense to the princess along with miscellaneous bills.

Beecham might well have caught adult or juvenile birds in nets as described and depicted in the 1754 edition.117Eleazar Albin, A Natural History of Singing Birds: And particularly, That Species of them most commonly bred in SCOTLAND (Edinburgh, 1754), opposite 153. Albin had explained in his 1741 edition: ‘Linnets are taken with Clap-Nets in June, July and August; and likewise Flight-Birds about Michaelmas in great Plenty, by laying the Nets near where the Birds come to drink, or feed, or any Spot of Ground they frequent’; but it was the 1754 edition that provided graphic instruction (pl. 227).118Albin, Natural History of English Song-Birds, 36. Gilbert White’s Letter 13 to Thomas Pennant of 22 January 1768, referring to a multitude of chaffinches around Christmas, contains the remarks: ‘We have, in the winter, vast flocks of the common linnets; more, I think, than can be bred in any one district.’119White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Foster, Letter 13 to Thomas Pennant, dated 22 January 1768, 37. Netting a flock in autumn or early winter was thus an alternative to going after ‘Branchers’ during the summer with hawk and net. These fledglings (on branches) would then be only two or three months old, and each bird had to be individually ensnared. They, and the younger ‘Nestlings’ — just ten days and over — had, of course, the advantage of receptiveness to other songs. Yet that sometimes led to abuse. Albin gave a disturbing account of the plight of some chaffinches:

’Tis a Custom among the Bird-men, when they want to learn the Chaffinch a Song, to blind him when he is about three or four Months old; which is done by closing up his Eyes with a Wier made almost red-hot, because, as they say, he will be more attentive, and learn the better . . .120Albin, Natural History of English Song-Birds, 25.

Since Albin went on to describe the practice as ‘exceedingly barbarous’,121Ibid. the princess and her advisers might well have opted for confinement without undue cruelty: chaffinches, linnets and yellowhammers brought fully fledged to the Chinese Aviary.

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Description: A Natural History of Singing Birds, etc., pl. opposite page 153 by Albin, Eleazar

227. Eleazar Albin, A Natural History of Singing Birds, etc. (Edinburgh, 1754), pl. opposite page 153. Edinburgh and Scottish Collection, Central Library, Edinburgh (QL 690 [G80355])

The diagram of ‘Clap-Nets’ shows how the two main nets (A) should be erected and staked at both ends (B and C). The bird-catcher, using tools and instruments, including mallet and ‘knitting needles’, positions himself at the end of ropes to pull the nets over the top of the unsuspecting songsters. Netting a flock in autumn or early winter was an alternative to going after young birds during the summer with hawk and net.

Albin explained that the linnet was generally a ‘very healthful Bird’122Ibid., 34. and might live many years in captivity, but it was prone to various diseases: ‘Melancholy, occasioned from a Swelling at the End of his Rump’, or ‘Scouring’ and other distempers including the ‘white clammy’.123Ibid., 34–5. The bird-keeper had to be vigilant and administer cures. The swelling on the rump could be pierced with a needle and rubbed with an ointment of butter and capon grease; a special diet of lettuce and beet greens with seed of melon chopped up was beneficial. ‘You may put into his Water a Blade of Saffron, and white Sugar-Candy for a Week or more’, wrote Albin, ‘till you perceive the Bird to be entirely recovered.’124Ibid., 35. In other words, on a very different basis to Goodwood, the ratio of cruelty to cosseting required a new calculation of costs — affective as well as effective cost analysis.

If George Edwards’s account of the ‘Green Gold-Finch’ is any indicator, the princess loved exotic songbirds as much as indigenous ones.125Edwards, A Natural History, III, pl. 128. But whether sentimental inclination turned the collectable into the companionable — a pet with a human name — remains less clear.126See again Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 114, for a discussion of human names for pets as an indication of the intimacy of the bond. After her singing finch died, the princess had it stuffed, set on a perch and given to Mrs Kennon, who was the royal midwife. Unlike the moose, then, death was not just an opportunity for science, but also a chance for giving to one who had brought life. In this respect, it is just conceivable that the princess shared sentiments with Emily Lennox and the author of Millenium Hall. But it would be a mistake to assume that progressive sensibilities, any more than the ‘bird language’ of Gilbert White’s compassionate science, lay behind the vision for the aviary. While still heir to John Bartram’s colonial collecting, that vision did not represent the Quaker’s progressive attitude to the natural world, or his gardening by natural habitats. Indeed, John Bartram’s feelings for wild animals stand out, by contrast, as quirks for the time, not shared by his correspondent in London, the Quaker Collinson. For example, William Bartram’s account in his Travels of how his father ‘pleaded’ to their guide to spare the life of a rattlesnake that had almost bitten the son is perhaps the most compelling instance of the act of being merciful in the wild (see again pl. 215).127See, for example, a letter to Peter Collinson in The Correspondence of John Bartram, ed. Berkeley and Berkeley, 357.

Collinson had once admitted to Bartram that encounters with rattlesnakes alone would be enough to ‘curb my Ardent Desires to see vegitable Curiosities’.128Berkeley and Berkeley, eds, The Correspondence of John Bartram, 18. In this spirit, and anticipating the fanciful visions of Cathay (Chambers) and Elysée (Rousseau), the aviary and menagerie enclosures seem far removed from the realities of bird netting in English shires or plant hunting in the Pennsylvanian wilderness. It was easy from afar to view China and America as parallels: a pagoda naturalized among idyllic Italianate groves, and amid shrubberies full of American exotics; a Chinese ‘Peacock Pheasant’ of Cathay representing a harmonious relationship of humans to the natural world (pls 228 and 229).129See Janice Neri, ‘Cultivating Interiors: Philadelphia, China and the Natural World’, in Knowing Nature, ed. Meyers, 180–209. Yet a trapped and caged English chaffinch, separated from its flock, does not sit so well with Chambers’s sacro-idyllic account of the groves of Cathay full of ‘all kinds of handsome domestic birds, who flock thither, at certain times of the day, to be fed’.130Chambers, A Dissertation on Oriental Gardening, 86–7.

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Description: Kew Gardens: The Pagoda and Bridge by Wilson, Richard

228. Richard Wilson, Kew Gardens: The Pagoda and Bridge, 1762, oil on canvas, 18 ¾ × 28 ¾ in. (47.6 × 73 cm). Paul Mellon Collection, Yale Center for British Art

This topographical panorama, painted in the hot and dry summer of 1762, epitomizes the vision of Kew as ‘Eden’. The pagoda evokes the imaginary land of Cathay (China), while the scene is in Wilson’s Italianate style. On the right is the west perimeter walk, bounded by a peripheral shrubbery — a place for displaying American exotics in ‘theatrical’ arrangements. William Gilpin gave a favourable account of that walk, which was shaded towards dusk. Close by the Palladian Bridge, he sketched a view in another hot summer, 1765, looking over the park to the Temple of Victory on the east side.

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Description: Peacock Pheasant from China by Edwards, George

229. George Edwards, artist and engraver, ‘Peacock Pheasant from China’, hand-coloured etching in his A Natural History of Uncommon Birds and of some other Rare and Undescribed Animals . . . , 2nd edn (London, 1747), vol. II, pl. 67. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (Sy4 +743E)

Placed on a branch of flowering Camellia japonica, an idealized Chinese ‘Peacock Pheasant’ (Polyplectron bicalcaratum) suggests the majesty of the Orient as seen by Europeans. Chambers described the open groves of China thus: ‘young broods of pheasants, partridges, pea-fowls, turkies, and all kinds of handsome domestic birds, who flock thither, at certain times of the day, to be fed’. He conjured up thereby the imaginary Cathay, suggesting the harmonious relationship of humans to the natural world. Yet this Eden at Kew was far removed from the actualities of English estate management at the time: rearing pheasants for the ritual shoot, netting partridges and trapping songbirds.

A further ambiguity concerns the flowers of the Aviary Flower Garden. This floricultural arena appears distinct from, rather than adjunct to, the botanical collections (Aiton’s ‘Physic and Exotic Gardens’). The petal-like radial symmetry had long been associated with specialized flower gardens, notably Pierre Morin’s garden in Paris (which had been reinterpreted as a parterre by John Evelyn, see pl. 1 and chapter 1).131See Laird, The Flowering of the Landscape Garden, 202. Thomas Sandby recorded iron supports used to prop up fashionable carnations — the treasures of indigenous flower-craft. In this sense, ‘exoticism’ seems less to do with colonial importation and more closely tied to the ‘curiosities’ of domestic floriculture. And yet, whatever the symbolic meaning, the winning combination of bird song and flower scent is easy to conjure up. One single bill for Kew from Edward Cross at the Orange Tree on Fleet Street points in that direction. It is dated 12 September 1768, and itemizes 150 hyacinths at 1s. 6d. each (probably the fashionable and pricey doubles), 50 mixed hyacinths at 6d. each and 100 narcissus at 2d. each.132RA GEO/55557. The bill was paid by John Haverfield once again on the princess dowager’s behalf. Hyacinths would benefit from the little sunhats that secured them from the heat. Vernal perfume and mating chorus would coincide.

Nursing ‘Americans’ at Kew and Upton House

Outside the Aviary Flower Garden much was happening during the season 1768–9. If Aiton’s ‘Physic and Exotic Gardens’ remained the powerhouse of the scientific project, the shrubberies and groves amounted to the final testing ground. Just as the ‘American Grove’ at Goodwood demonstrated acclimatization, so, by 1757, Bute’s ‘wilderness’ at Kew was ready to accommodate ‘Carolina poplars’ among American exotics. The influx of those American plants continued throughout the 1760s. For example, on 16 February 1768 Dr John Cree, a former Kew gardener who was collecting plants in the Carolinas, dispatched an impressive consignment of plants for £6 0s. 6d. Some of the plants were designated ‘new’ or ‘unknown’. The ‘new Styrax’, for instance, appears to be Styrax americana or S. grandiflora. Since these were tender shrubs listed by Aiton as ‘introductions’ of 1765,133RA GEO/55512. The list includes ‘Nine plants unknown’ (undifferentiated). See here the entry on ‘Styrax’ in William Aiton, Hortus Kewensis, 3 vols (London, 1789), in which he credits the introduction to John Cree in 1765. The year ‘1765’ (or ‘1775’ on one occasion) is repeated throughout Aiton’s three volumes, yet the close correspondence of the bill of 1768 to some Cree attributions suggests ‘1768’ as the true date for the following species: ‘Three new Andromedas’ (Andromeda axillaris, A. coriacea and A. acuminata), ‘Two new Asters’ (Aster tardiflorus), ‘Two new shrubby Vacciniums’ (Vaccinium diffusum and V. amoenum), ‘Two new Agaves’ (Agave virginica) and ‘A new Sideroxyllon’ (Sideroxylon tenax). This merits further analysis. it seems likely that John and William encountered one or both species in their trip through the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida in 1765–6. Hence it is quite likely also that they sent seeds or living specimens to England ahead of John Cree’s consignment of 1768.

From 28 January to 14 December 1768 William Aiton paid £9 for repeated deliveries from Gordon’s nursery, from other suppliers in Dorset, Cambridge, Wales, Oxford and Yorkshire, as well as from various overseas locations — France, Oporto in Portugal, and Switzerland.134RA GEO/55519. Likewise, in 1769, Aiton was gathering material from John Blackburne at Orford Hall, from Rotterdam, from Lord Coventry’s Croome Court, from Lord Exeter, and from his trusted correspondents abroad, Carolina to Germany.135RA GEO/55645. John Busch of Hackney supplied a Pelargonium from the Cape among other rarities.136RA GEO/55544. James Gordon delivered one rather significant batch of plants in August 1768 for £4 11s. 6d.137RA GEO/55546. A ‘Rhexia’ (Rhexia mariana or R. virginica) headed the list at the very high price of 10s. 6d. Circumstantial evidence makes John Bartram the likely source of both species — first introduced by 1759 — and perhaps thereafter, the regular supplier of seed to nurseries.138Philip Miller, in his Gardeners Dictionary, 8th edn (London, 1768), claims that Rhexia virginica was first introduced by John Banister, though it had died out by the early eighteenth century. Both this species and Rhexia mariana made their first appearance in the 1759 edition of the Gardeners Dictionary, but Miller gives no indication of who collected the seed. On the other hand, Rhexia virginica is specimen 51 of vol. XI of Lord Petre’s hortus siccus in the Sutro Library, San Francisco; and this was most probably collected by Bartram, thereby increasing the chances that he also sent living materials. Miller indicates that seed of both was sent annually from North America. For the confused history of Mark Catesby’s possible collecting of Rhexia mariana herbarium specimens, see Stephen A. Harris, ‘The Plant Collections of Mark Catesby in Oxford’, in The Curious Mister Catesby: A ‘Truly Ingenious’ Naturalist Explores New Worlds, ed. E. Charles Nelson and David J. Elliott (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 2015).

The invoice of one carrier, Thomas Layton, illustrates how in the space of a single year, February 1768 to March 1769, nine consignments were brought from James Gordon, five from Philip Miller at Chelsea Physic Garden, four from John Hill, and one each from Peter Collinson and John Ellis.139RA GEO/55562. Again, in the course of 1769, Layton provided the same service, sometimes also bringing plants from a Dutch ship or the customs house.140RA GEO/55648. William Malcolm and William Watson were other suppliers in the spring of 1769.141RA GEO/55624, 55625. The order from the nurserymen Kennedy and Lee in March 1769 was especially weighted towards North American plants: for example, two magnolias costing £1 4s., two Iteas (Itea virginica) for 6s. and two rose acacia (Robinia hispida) for 3s.142RA GEO/55584. On 9 April 1769 Aiton paid 12s. for carriage & a ‘box of plants from Carolina’.143RA GEO/55645. Significantly, when Bute’s protégé John Hill brought out a special edition in 1773 entitled Twenty-Five New Plants, rais’d in the Royal Garden at Kew, sixteen were of North American provenance. They included Stokesia laevis and Filipendula rubra (pls 230 and 231). The former has been credited as a Bartram introduction.144See John Fisher, The Origin of Garden Plants (London: Constable, 1982), 139. This needs verification, since in the same paragraph the author attributes the introduction of Chelone obliqua to Bartram, whereas Philip Miller in his Gardeners Dictionary (1768) clearly names Clayton as the source. Aiton names James Gordon as the first to cultivate Stokesia laevis (cyanea) in 1766. Joel Fry is currently tracking any evidence of a Bartram link to Stokesia and the other American plants listed among Hill’s twenty-five. John Bartram can be considered without question the original exporter of the latter.145Berkeley and Berkeley, eds, The Correspondence of John Bartram, 512, 538 and 613. It first appears in the Bartram–Collinson correspondence in 1761 as ‘purple ulmaria’. It was probably gathered in south-western Virginia in October 1759 on a collecting trip with his son John.

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Description: Carthamus laevis by Hill, John

230. Attributed to John Hill, artist and engraver, ‘Carthamus laevis’, hand-coloured engraving in John Hill, Twenty-Five New Plants, rais’d in the Royal Garden at Kew (London, 1773), pl. 5, 18 3⁄8 × 10 ¾ in. (46.6 × 27.5 cm). Kew Library (linnean-col, qhil). © Copyright The Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

William Aiton in Hortus Kewensis (1789) named James Gordon as the first to cultivate Stokesia laevis (S. cyanea) in 1766. It has yet to be determined whether John Bartram was the collector of the species, but the circumstantial evidence points in that direction.

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231. Attributed to John Hill, artist and engraver, ‘Spirea rubra’, hand-coloured engraving in John Hill, Twenty-Five New Plants, rais’d in the Royal Garden at Kew (London, 1773), pl. 6, 18 3⁄8 × 10 ¾ in. (46.6 × 27.5 cm). Kew Library (linnean-col, qhil). © Copyright The Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

The Collinson–Bartram correspondence, and especially Bartram’s letter of 11 November 1763, indicates a collecting location between the Potomac and James River in tidewater Virginia. Hortus Collinsonianus confirmed the link and gave the year 1762 for the introduction of the ‘Ulmaria with a fine bright red flower’ (Filipendula rubra). This seems to rule out James Alexander, also mentioned in the letter of 11 November 1763, as an alternative source and supports the role of the Bartrams as suppliers to royalty.

The fact that Peter Collinson, writing in July 1768 (just a month before his death), noted that John Bartram’s ‘Grassy Starr of Bethlehem’ had bloomed at Kew is fitting tribute to their collaboration: ‘There & with us most of your flowers & plants thrive wonderfull in our black Bog Earth.’146Berkeley and Berkeley, eds, The Correspondence of John Bartram, 705. See again Fry, ‘America’s “Ancient Garden” ’, 69, for a full account of Xerophyllum asphodeloides. This plant from the New Jersey Pine Barrens — Xerophyllum asphodeloides or Turkey-beard — had a long-documented connection to John Bartram dating back to the early 1740s. It is reasonable to attribute the Kew plant to his efforts.

In short, the case histories of Styrax, Rhexia sp., Filipendula rubra and Xerophyllum asphodeloides all give substance to Aiton’s cryptic entries in Hortus Kewensis (1789). Together, they show Bartram’s influence sustained not just by proxy — through the diverse nurseries itemized above — but also fundamentally still through direct importation.147See Aiton, Hortus Kewensis, for the following introductions of the 1760s and 1770s that are attributed directly to John Bartram: Salvia coccinea (1774), Collinsonia scabriuscula, Mitchella repens (circa 1761), Campanula americana (1763), Rhus aromatica (1772), Sarothra gentianoides (1768), Pyrola umbellata (1762), Aristolochia sipho (1763) and Asplenium rhizophyllum (circa 1764). Nevertheless, in the latter capacity, others, notably John Cree, had arisen as significant competitors.

Dr John Hope’s journal makes clear that by 1766, ahead of Cree’s batch of 1768, Kew was already at the forefront of exotic collecting. Bute’s contacts with the four continents had paid off. For example, the purple beech (Fagus sylvatica purpurea), which had arrived from Germany in 1760, was noted as a ‘small plant’.148John H. Harvey, ‘A Scottish Botanist in London in 1766’, Garden History, IX/1 (Spring 1981), 53. African bulbs were over-wintered in frames beneath the hothouse. The ‘Ficus bengalensis’ was outgrowing the ‘Middle House’.149Ibid., 51. While the four quarters of the globe were thus amply represented, it was the American plants that particularly caught Hope’s attention: the 12-foot-high Gymnocladus dioica transplanted from the duke of Argyll’s celebrated collections at Whitton Place, Middlesex; a Stewartia (S. malacodendron) that had recently flowered; Chamaedaphne calyculata that bloomed in February; the superlative perennials — Eupatorium purpureum, Veronicastrum virginicum (the duchess of Beaufort’s introduction) and Phlox maculata; and an 8-foot-tall Gleditsia aquatica in the pleasure ground, unharmed by the frosts of 1765–6.150Ibid., 50, 54, 55.

Hope’s jottings and sketches are especially attentive to the techniques and stratagems for dealing with acclimatization. Intensive care went into looking after the wards of the wild. Hope described the double-flowered Gardenia as ‘the most difficult plant yet introduced’,151Ibid., 53. requiring much watering and air. He explained how Aiton enriched the sandy, acid soil by application of rotten dung every second year. And he commented on ‘a circle of roten tan in an arbor wh is open’d atop for American seeds’.152Ibid., 51. After noting the ‘very beautiful’ Clematis crispa and Wisteria frutescens, and the 12-foot-high Halesia carolina in fruit, he added a note: ‘evry thing in the open ground’.153Ibid., 50. On an east aspect, Robinia hispida was protected by coppicing: ‘cut like a willow shortened autumn & spring’.154Ibid., 54. Yet some hardy American plants still required a ‘bed cover’d with musci & black earth skreened from the Sun by a wall’. So equally, ‘Rodadendrons, Kalmias, Azaleas, Vaccinium, Andromedas &c do best especially when coverd wth baskets to the West.’155Ibid., 52. This was akin to Dr Fothergill’s ‘American Grove’ at Upton House, protected from the midday sun. In short, there was no limit (of money or time) when it came to ensuring the welfare of all the wards.

The value of grove foliage in sustaining ‘verdure’ was one argument put forward by Chambers (see again chapter 4). But the protection afforded American plants — shade in summer and screening from wind in winter — was another reason for preferring a canopied grove to a shrubbery without canopy. As Fothergill recalled, looking back to the hot summer of 1762:

I have a little wilderness, which, when I bought the premises was full of old yew trees, laurels and weeds. I had it cleared, well dug and took up many trees, but left others standing for shelter. Among these I have planted Kalmias, Azaleas, all the Magnolia’s, and most other hardy American shrubs.156Quoted in Richard Gorer, The Flower Garden in England (London and Sydney: B.T. Batsford, 1975), 54–5.

When Gilbert White wrote in his Natural History of the need to protect American plants from the sun-wind scorching of winter, he had in mind Fothergill’s ‘American Grove’ and Fothergill’s experiments at Upton House along the north border where fern cover was applied. This was the hands-on science that John Bartram practised in the simulated habitats of his Philadelphia garden. In short, whether in shrubbery or grove, gardeners had become attentive, as with the cosseting of aviary birds, to every whim of every American shrub.

In the midst of miscellaneous notes on Kew, Hope provides one revealing comment. In describing ‘a fine oval bed of Chionanthus under a grove’,157Harvey, ‘A Scottish Botanist in London in 1766’, 53. he provides a vignette of Chionanthus virginicus ‘liberated’ from the intensive care and confinement of Aiton’s ‘Physic and Exotic Gardens’. In effect it was naturalized, albeit in an artful bed, beneath the canopy of Haverfield’s groves (pl. 232). The dream of naturalization that Catesby had publicized and Bartram fostered was realized in the protective realm of Kew’s pleasure ground. Whether the grove ever approximated to Chambers’s dreams of Cathay, actually housing the creatures of the Dissertation of 1772 — from turkeys and guinea pigs to cockatoos — is far less clear.158I am grateful for the following observations by Alison Hardie (personal communication, 20 January 2014). She pointed out that Chambers’s time in Canton might have been relevant to his vision, but the keeping of birds and animals in gardens, as Chambers describes it, was rather different from the Buddhist practice of releasing living creatures (fangsheng). It is possible, she suggests, that in the eighteenth century the area around Canton was wilder and more abundant in wildlife than the intensively cultivated Yangtze delta area. There, at least in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and probably later, it was common to keep deer and cranes (for their association with Taoist immortals), and sometimes peacocks, as well as to welcome wild birds. ‘Liberation’ in the sense of the ‘unmolested’ birds and quadrupeds of Millenium Hall remained more of a fantasy than a reality, though wild creatures doubtless took advantage of the pleasure ground’s asylum in the midst of parks and fields where slaughter reigned, whether for ritual or for eradication.

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Description: A View of the Pagoda, the Mosque, Alambra, & Ruins from the Temple of Victory...

232. Attributed to Joshua Kirby or William Kirby, A View of the Pagoda, the Mosque, Alhambra, & Ruins from the Temple of Victory, 1758, graphite, pen and ink, and wash, bound in George Ritso, Kew Gardens: A Poem (1763). The Royal Library, Windsor Castle (RL 16961). Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2013

This view dates from the period in which an ‘Eden’ emerged from a ‘Desart’. The viewer is looking, as though from the Temple of Victory (15 on pl. 223), towards the Ruined Arch (16 on pl. 223), Alhambra, Pagoda and Mosque (17, 18 and 19 on pl. 223). A fence keeps the grazing cattle away from the immature plantations of the pleasure ground. The plantings consisted of a wilderness around the pagoda, a peripheral shrubbery (left and right) and groves of exotic trees and shrubs (foreground). Plants acclimatized in the ‘Physic and Exotic Gardens’ were liberated experimentally in these groves.

PART III
Wild, Trapped or ‘Tamed by Hunger’: Gilbert White on the Plight of Animals and Humans after the ‘Black Spring’ of 1771

William Chambers, bolstering his ‘Chinese’ vision, would later refer to the fruitless ‘nursing’ required to keep American plants alive. His prognosis proved true for Callicarpa americana and a few other southern shrubs, which perished in England; others again, notably the dogwood (Cornus florida), never flowered well in English conditions.159Chambers, A Dissertation on Oriental Gardening, 79–80. See Mark Laird, ‘From Callicarpa to Catalpa: The Impact of Mark Cateby’s Plant Introductions on English Gardens of the Eighteenth Century’, in Empire’s Nature: Mark Catesby’s New World Vision, ed. Amy R. W. Meyers and Margaret Beck Pritchard (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 190–92, 225. By and large, however, American plants prospered: from Catalpa to Magnolia. Meanwhile, the moose of North America (Alces alces) languished, even in the cooler seasons of 1768 to 1771. This was not surprising. A captured young moose could have been laden with parasites, causing or hastening its death. Other causes of death might have been an inadequate or incorrect diet. Since a moose needed to eat aquatic plants (‘water lilies’, as Gilbert White put it), a diet of hay or field grasses would have caused deficiencies.

The care that went into a plant ‘nursery’, or into ‘nursing’ English songbirds, stands in stark contrast to the brutalities of human-biological existence in the late 1760s, including the often-beastly conditions endured by the labourer, or by women and children employed in weeding.160For the poor pay of labourers, see Trevor Lummis and Jan Marsh, The Woman’s Domain: Women and the English Country House (London: Viking, 1990), 82. From 1766, as his botanical, meteorological and environmental sensitivity increased,161For a meticulous account of White’s gradual maturation as a naturalist, see Foster, Gilbert White and his Records. Paul Foster is currently working on a critical edition of the Flora Selbornensis of 1766. Gilbert White recorded both the blessings of nature and the tenuous hold that all creatures had on life, especially those at the mercy of the elements or at the bottom of the chain. He could describe Thursday, 19 October 1769, when the temperature rose to 58ºF (14.4ºC), as a ‘Soft sweet day’. A large flock of goldfinches were about, and the air was full of spiders’ webs. The next day, linnets, chaffinches and yellowhammers congregated. A skylark was singing sweetly and glow-worms appeared. The following week, on Tuesday, 24 October, a vivid aurora borealis ‘stretched across the welkin from East to West’.162Greenoak, ed., The Journals of Gilbert White, 1, 300–01.

By 23 February 1770, however, a ‘blue mist’ had settled over the parish.163Ibid., 313. This was not the soft coastal fog of October but London’s toxic sea-coal smoke brought down by north-easterly winds, passing over Kew to the villages of Hampshire. By 6 June 1770 chafers had appeared in the woods, stripping the oaks bare. The oaks greened up again and remained fresh until late November; but that autumn heavy rains swept the country, causing fields to remain unsown.164Hulme and Barrow, eds, Climates of the British Isles, 278 and 409: the record precipitation of 1768, 1247 mm, was not matched until 1872, but the wetness of autumn 1770 (402 mm) just surpassed that of autumn 1768 (399 mm), making it the fourth wettest on record (for the years 1766–1995). Autumn 1772 (400.6 mm) enters the records as the fifth wettest. The year 1771 would prove the ‘black spring’.165Hulme and Barrow, eds, Climates of the British Isles, 357, White quoting from Dr Johnson’s account of the Island of Skye. On 31 March 1771 White noted: ‘The face of the earth naked to a wonderful degree. Wheat hardly to be seen & no signs of any grass: turneps all gone, & sheep in a starving way.’166Greenoak, ed., The Journals of Gilbert White, 1, 358. With a dry, hot summer in 1772, the hay and wheat were plentiful and nasturtiums bloomed within a few days of Christmas. Yet the heat encouraged the turnip flies, and they destroyed the crop. By 8 March 1773, after a wet autumn in 1772, seed barley was selling at 38s. per quarter — ‘a price never heard of before’.167Ibid., 442. In London, on 26 April, White recorded: ‘Whooping coughs have been general among children the winter thro’: & now putrid sore throats begin to be common among young people of the female sex.’168Ibid., 450. In June there was a ‘Measles epidemic to a wonderful degree: whole families down at a time. Several children that had been reduced by the whooping cough dyed of them.’169Ibid., 455. The swallow brood was late, and by 22 July wheat had reached ‘17pds per load, & very little left in the kingdom’.170Ibid., 459.

While partridges and hares abounded, pheasants were scarce. By October 1773 the gentry in some counties even refrained from the ritual killing to preserve stocks, as White noted on the 9th of the month, adding: ‘Rains ever since the first of Sepr:’.171Ibid., 470. Given the meteorological (rather than technological)172See Tom Williamson’s account of improvements in firearm technology that ensured larger numbers of pheasants were killed: Polite Landscapes: Gardens and Society in Eighteenth-century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), especially 133–4. odds tipped against it, the starving ‘wild’ pheasant was inescapably worse off than the captive exotic at Kew (pls 233 and 234 and compare pl. 229). The administrations of saffron water to sick linnets, the provision of sunhats for double hyacinths,173See Laird, The Flowering of the Landscape Garden, 207. and the ‘good nursing’ that went into the care of North American exotics — fern cover in winter, liberal watering in summer — sometimes meant that the curator of shrubbery and menagerie, aviary and flower garden, ended up shielding wards from Nature itself.

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Description: Pheasant by Shenstone, William

233. William Shenstone, ‘Pheasant’, circa 1754, pen, ink and watercolour, 6 7⁄8 × 4 1⁄8 in. (17.5 × 10.5 cm). Special Collections, Margaret Clapp Library, English Poetry Collection (1620), Wellesley College Library

The pheasant (Phasianus colchicus), which became the preferred quarry for shooting on British estates in the second half of the eighteenth century, was introduced from Asia through ancient Greece. It had reached Britain by the eleventh century. Because of the history of introductions from various parts of Asia, ‘wild’ pheasants can be seen in a number of colour variations that resulted from its breeding.

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Description: A Repose after Shooting, detail by Stubbs, George

234. George Stubbs, A Repose after Shooting (detail), 1770, oil on canvas, 40 ¼ × 50 ½ in. (102.2 × 128.3 cm). Given by Paul Mellon in memory of his friend James Cox Brady, Yale College, Class of 1929, Yale Center for British Art (B1976.7.88)

Far from the ritual slaughter of game birds by aristocrats, this scene depicts men of lower rank with two pointers. One hunter with a gun rests in the shade of some large trees in an area identified as near Creswell Crags, Nottinghamshire. The game is made up of a hare and diverse birds, including a cock pheasant. Pheasants were shot in large numbers on the wing after new developments in gun technology. The other hunter holds the lifeless body of a hare. Late in the poor season of 1773, as Gilbert White recorded, pheasants became increasingly scarce, though partridges and hares still abounded. By October that year the gentry in some counties refrained from the ritual kill.

Princess Augusta’s Death and Care or Cruelty in Domestication

Princess Augusta died from cancer of the throat on 8 February 1772 (pl. 235).174Desmond, The History of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 62. During her final week, unable to speak or eat, she had herself dressed to receive the king and queen properly at Carlton House.175Bullion, ‘Augusta, Princess of Wales’. According to Gilbert White, snow had covered the ground for twenty-one days in Hampshire, and hence the London she departed was a frigid zone.176Greenoak, ed., The Journals of Gilbert White, 1, 395. Given the snow, the bloom of the American Chamaedaphne calyculata was surely retarded but at least protected. By contrast, little protection was afforded the dowager princess of Wales. Augusta was just fifty-two, and for sixteen years ‘she had led a relatively secluded life at Carlton House and Kew’. Through her association with Lord Bute (her presumed lover, pl. 236), she was regarded by the populace as a ‘scandalous woman who sought to rule the country by secret influence. Under these circumstances Augusta preferred to keep her charitable donations to the poor anonymous.’177Bullion, ‘Augusta, Princess of Wales’. Her funeral was an opportunity for pickpockets to prey upon official mourners, and for a hostile public to tear black bunting from the bier, not realizing that, as a champion of British ‘stuffs’, Augusta would not have wanted the extended mourning period to rob textile workers of a spring trade in English coloured silks.

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Description: Augusta von Sachsen-Gotha, Princess Dowager of Wales by Ramsay, Allan

235. Allan Ramsay, Augusta von Sachsen-Gotha, Princess Dowager of Wales, 1769, oil on canvas, 56 3⁄10 × 45 2⁄5 in. (143 × 115.3 cm). S. K. H. Erbprinz Ernst August von Hannover / Herzog zu Braunschweig und Lüneburg

While a full-length portrait of circa 1764 (see pl. 16) had been commissioned by Lord Bute, this three-quarter-length portrait of 1769 was commissioned by Princess Augusta for the Brunswick court. Ramsay was paid a handsome 50 guineas (a sum that may be compared to the £120 paid to William Aiton in annual wages). The sitting for Ramsay coincides with the period of intense activity in the Aviary Flower Garden at Kew, when 498 English songbirds were delivered by Robert Beecham for a fee of close to £9.

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Description: Scotch Paradice a View of the Bute-full Garden of Eden borough by Sumpter, Edward

236. After Jefferyes Hammett O’Neale (attributed), published by Edward Sumpter, ‘Scotch Paradice a View of the Bute-full Garden of Eden borough’, 1763, etching on paper, 9 3⁄8 × 11 ¾ in. (23.7 × 30 cm). © Trustees of the British Museum (J,1.41AN365275)

On Frederick’s death, Augusta had his papers burned to destroy evidence of her past participation in opposition politics. She secured George II’s goodwill, but kept the prince of Wales (future George III) confined to Leicester House under the moral mentoring of Lord Bute. At the height of Bute’s unpopularity in the 1760s, obscene caricatures used Scottish symbols and the ‘boot’ (Bute) as icons to blacken her reputation as his presumed lover. She withdrew from public life, giving to the poor as a benefactress and directing her private resources to Kew, caricatured as Eden with its ‘Laird of the Golden Pippins’.

Towards the end of her life she visited Kew briefly on Tuesdays and Saturdays, breakfasting with her eldest son, George III, and Queen Charlotte.178Desmond, The History of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 62. On 29 August 1769 William Sparrow — ‘cage maker and wire worker’ — had constructed a ‘Neat Wainsc.t Cage wir’d with brass wire . . . for [Butter]Flyes’.179RA GEO/55640. Given the scores of lampoons, her searing pain and her seclusion, the dowager princess of Wales was trapped. In her imagination, though, she continued to listen to music beyond field and grove, poring over the scores of ‘Bach Concertos’ purchased on 6 June 1771 (as the Windsor archives reveal).180RA GEO/55661. This must have been a liberating flight for one who, to avoid public insult, had stopped attending the theatre and concerts long ago, perhaps listening to her caged bullfinch instead (pl. 237a).

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Description: The Graham Children, detail of a caged goldfinch by Hogarth, William

237a. Detail of a caged goldfinch from William Hogarth, The Graham Children, 1742, oil on canvas, 63 1⁄8 × 71 ¼ in. (160.5 × 181 cm). © The National Gallery, London (NG4756) / Art Resource, NY

Whether at home or from abroad, birds were traded, alive and dead, and English songbirds ended up in caged confinement. Those who traded in the skins of exotic birds often cut off the feet to make the transportation of the all-important feathers that much easier. This gave rise to the myth that birds of paradise never landed but slept on the wing. The watercolour (237b) suggests the effect of perpetual flight in contrast to the snug nesting of the hummingbird. The life of a well-tended domestic songbird (such as the goldfinch, 237a) thus ensured a measure of comfort often denied in the wild.

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Description: Bird of Paradise and Humming Birds by Rymsdyk, Jan van

237b. Jan van Rymsdyk, ‘Bird of Paradise and Humming Birds’, probably from Hans Sloane’s collection, watercolour on paper, 18 5⁄8 × 11 5⁄8 in. (47.3 × 29.5 cm), later engraved as an illustration for Jan and Andreas van Rymsdyk’s Museum Britannicum (London, 1778). British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings (1948,1118.38). © Trustees of the British Museum

On 13 February 1772 a Mr Fitzwilliam, writing to ‘Mrs. Port of Ilam’, who was Mrs Delany’s niece, documented the impact of Princess Augusta’s death:

The whole town is to put on sable for the Princess Dowager, in whom the poor and needy have lost a real, generous, humane, and most benevolent friend. She gave away annually in the most private charities eleven thousand pound a year, and she had gone thro’ a most painfull illness with the utmost magnanimity and fortitude.181Lady Llanover, ed., The Autobiography and Correspondence of Mary Granville, Mrs Delany, 6 vols (London: Bentley, 1861–2), IV, 146.

The extent and generosity of Princess Augusta’s gifts became widely known only when newspapers reported the sums at the time of the funeral. That winter remained snowy enough for Mrs Delany to write of being trapped by the ‘impassibility’ of icy London streets. It was cold enough to feel like ‘Lapland’.182Ibid., IV, 398–9. Even a moose might be at home for a month or so. Whether it suited the duchess of Portland’s East Indian bull, which Mrs Delany had drawn at Bulstrode in 1755, is less clear. Letters from the duchess to her eldest son recount constant problems with cold, predators and thieves. Near her menagerie, however, described by Richard Pococke in 1757 as a ‘dairy adorned with a Chinese front’,183Quoted from Festing, ‘Menageries and the Landscape Garden’, 111. the pacific beasts and fowl gathered to be fed by hand in relative freedom and with the most solicitous care. Like the duchess of York’s mixed menagerie at Oatlands, the Bulstrode menagerie came closest to realizing the dream of Millenium Hall’s asylum or William Chambers’s fanciful idyll in the Chinese manner.

When, a few years later on 22 January 1776, Gilbert White recorded another ‘Laplandian-scene’ in London, he noted the carriage wheels running without the ‘least noise’. This conveyed to him ‘an uncomfortable idea of desolation’.184White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Foster, Letter 62 to Daines Barrington, 241–2. The Thames was frozen over and ice formed in pans beneath beds. The thrushes, blackbirds and partridges suffered once more and died. Yet, after the thaw, some organisms emerged unscathed. Mrs Delany saw humans coming out of their dens: ‘The thaw has let loose everybody, and everybody is running everywhere; eno’ to turn one’s sober brains!’185Llanover, ed., Autobiography and Correspondence, V, 194. Swarms of little insects were ‘frisking and sporting in a court-yard in South Lambeth’, wrote White, while the ‘turnips came forth little injured’ in Hampshire, which was beneficial for the rural community. Above all, his evergreens came out verdant — ‘not half the damage sustained that befell in January 1768’.186White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Foster, Letter 62 to Daines Barrington, 242–3. On this occasion, nature proved its incomparable worth through a protective quilt of snow. Protection was like a bed of eiderdown.

If, in the final reckoning, White saw nothing amiss in the moose venture (and the efforts to breed it with a red deer), this was because domestication from the wild brought improvements on beneficent (but imperfect) Nature. Back in the forests of colonial North America — though unbeknownst to White — ticks could irritate and weaken moose, which reacted by rubbing off hair needed in winter while trying to alleviate the discomfort.187For a good discussion of the moose in its habitat and all the things that might afflict it in the wild, see John O. Whitaker, Jr, and William J. Hamilton, Jr, Mammals of the Eastern United States, 3rd edn (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1998), 541–7. Domestication took different forms. At the top of the chain was the groomed and rubbed-down racehorse (pl. 238), while, at the bottom, there was always room for the turtle or other reptiles. For example, White’s aunt’s pet — the tortoise Timothy — had come to Selborne in 1780, and, through White’s solicitous science, it was elevated from ‘abject reptile’ to a sentient being of ‘solemn deportment’.188White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Foster, Letter 50 to Daines Barrington, 21 April 1780, 219. See Verlyn Klinkenborg, Timothy; or, Notes of an Abject Reptile (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 159. So equally, a voyage across the Atlantic must have seemed a good arrangement for a large ruminant quadruped. As Benjamin Rush put it, ‘we multiply life, sensation and enjoyment’.189Quoted from Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 20. After all, when it came down to it, since sheep and horses and pheasants and Mediterranean shrubs and children could die together with the whims of the seasons, it made apparent sense to experiment with the natural world, and to try, sometimes bartering care against cruelty, to work for humankind against nature’s often ‘barbarous’ ways.

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238. George Stubbs, Racehorses Exercising at Goodwood (detail), 1760, oil on canvas, 50 ¼ × 80 ¾ in. (127.6 × 205.6 cm). Commissioned in 1759–60 by Charles, 3rd duke of Richmond, Lennox and Aubigny. Goodwood House, Chichester, West Sussex. By permission of the Trustees of the Goodwood Collection

This detail of a large canvas (see also pl. 216) shows a racehorse that belonged to the 3rd duke of Richmond being rubbed down with care after exercise. The groom in ducal livery — possibly the head groom William Budd — steadies the horse by its head. Budd’s nephew Christopher Budd may be one of the two small stable-lads handling the straw. Many of the servants came from the neighbouring village of Charlton. Though they enjoyed the benefit of good harvests in the 1760s (around the time Stubbs painted the scene), some poor seasons from 1768 to 1773 raised staple prices. Children would die from widespread whooping cough and measles in 1773. The balance of living and dying was precariously poised for children, animals and exotic plants.

1 Quoted in Richard Gorer, The Growth of Gardens (London and Boston, MA: Faber and Faber, 1978), 51. »

2 Edmund Berkeley and Dorothy Smith Berkeley, eds, The Correspondence of John Bartram, 1734–1777 (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1992), 392. »

3 See Alan W. Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden . . .’: Selected Letters, 1725–1768, of Peter Collinson, FRS (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2002), 256–7. »

4 The manic demand for American plants and their role in generating the shrubbery are discussed extensively in Mark Laird, The Flowering of the Landscape Garden: English Pleasure Grounds, 1720–1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). »

5 For example, when the nurseryman William Perfect recommended shrubs to Sir Rowland Winn of Nostell Priory in February 1764, he included the American species — dogwood, guelder rose, ‘Diervilla’ and ‘Toxicodendrons’ — amongst the ‘Hardiest & most Beautiful flowering Sorts’ to embellish the netted slope alongside his exotic wildfowl enclosure. For details of this shrubbery and menagerie, see again Laird, The Flowering of the Landscape Garden, 291. Joel Fry pointed out in personal communication (July 2004) that ‘Toxicodendrons’ might mean poison oak (Rhus toxicodendron) and poison sumac (R. vernix) as well as poison ivy (R. radicans). He suggests that Rhus vernix was favoured by Bartram and hence could have been the ‘Toxicodendron’ most often cultivated in English shrubberies. Charles Nelson, countering this, suggested in a personal communication (October 2012) that Philip Miller in his Gardeners Dictionary (1751–68) had six entries under Toxicodendron, leaving room for much uncertainty. »

6 William Chambers, A Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (London, 1772), 86–7. »

7 See, for example, Judith Magee, The Art and Science of William Bartram (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), and Amy R. W. Meyers, ed., Knowing Nature: Art and Science in Philadelphia, 1740–1840 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011). Joel Fry in a personal communication of July 2004 suggested that the parallels between Gilbert White and William Bartram also merit further attention. »

8 For Goodwood, see Douglas Chambers, The Planters of the English Landscape Garden: Botany, Trees and The Georgics (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), 95–101; and T. P. Connor, ‘Architecture and Planting at Goodwood, 1723–1750’, Sussex Archaeological Collections, CXVII (1979), 185–93. The best general history is provided by Rosemary Baird, Goodwood: Art and Architecture, Sport and Family (London: Frances Lincoln Limited Publishers, 2007). For Kew, see Ray Desmond, The History of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (London: Harvill Press/The Royal Botanic Gardens, 1995), and John Harris, ‘Sir William Chambers and Kew Gardens’, in Sir William Chambers: Architect to George III, ed. Harris and Michael Snodin (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996). And for Selborne, see Paul G. M. Foster: Gilbert White and his Records: A Scientific Biography (London: Christopher Helm, 1988); Richard Mabey, Gilbert White: A Biography of the Author of The Natural History of Selborne (London: Century, 1986); and Paul Foster and David Standing, Landscape and Labour: Gilbert White’s Garden, 1751–1793, Selborne Paper, 2 (Selborne: Gilbert White’s House & The Oates Museum, 2005). David Standing, head gardener at The Wakes, kindly gave me access to his own draft essay on Gilbert White’s garden (as yet unpublished). »

9 Chambers, The Planters of the English Landscape Garden, 96. »

10 This is supported by a traveller’s account of 1742–3. The Revd Jeremiah Milles related: ‘The Duke had formerly a good menagerie at Goodwood, but within these few years he has disposed of allmost all his beasts’; quoted from Timothy J. McCann, ‘ “Much troubled with very rude company” ’: The 2nd Duke of Richmond’s Menagerie at Goodwood’, Sussex Archaeological Collections, CXXXII (1994), 148. See British Library, Add. MS 15,776, fol. 246. As Chambers himself points out, however, a letter in the Goodwood archives undermines the reliability of this statement. It indicates that in 1742 the duke was acquiring a possum from Barbados. McCann (‘ “Much troubled with very rude company” ’) also referred to the duke’s correspondence with Sir Thomas Robinson, who reported from Barbados in 1744 that ‘the vessel that carrys this, will bring your Grace one of the most beautiful Civit Cats I ever saw’. »

11 Edwards, A Natural History, 1, pl. 5. See also A. Stuart Mason, George Edwards: The Bedell and his Birds (London and Lavenham: Royal College of Physicians, 1992), 20: ‘The first French volume was published in 1745, dedicated to Charles Lennox, second Duke of Richmond. The second, published in 1748, was dedicated to the Duchess of Richmond.’ »

12 Baird, Goodwood, chapter 5, ‘Nurturing Nature’, 61–73. Stella Tillyard, Aristocrats: Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox, 1740–1832 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1994; this edition, London: Vintage, 1995), 15–16. She wrote, for example: ‘He felt that capturing and cataloguing the beasts of the wild brought them out from disordered nature into the ambit of human rationality. By virtue of being studied, animals became almost human, and they certainly became beloved.’ Admiration was mixed with consumption and appropriation. Moreover, through engagement in decorating the Shell House or Grotto with ‘a rococo caprice that celebrated nature’s diversity’, the women of the household ‘also went on this journey of discovery and ownership’. »

13 There are, however, numerous examples cited by Thomas of men with new susceptibilities to set against Margaret Cavendish, duchess of Newcastle, who, as early as 1667, described herself as ‘tender-natured, for it troubles my conscience to kill a fly’. Take, for example, the 2nd duke of Montagu (1690– 1749), who turned Boughton into a geriatric home for old cows and horses. Ibid., 173, 190. »

14 Sally Festing, ‘Menageries and the Landscape Garden’, Journal of Garden History, VIII/4 (October–December 1988), 108. »

15 John L. Bullion, ‘ “To Play what game she pleased without observation”: Princess Augusta and the Political Drama of Succession, 1736–56’, in Queenship in Britain, 1660–1837: Royal Patronage, Court Culture and Dynastic Politics, ed. Clarissa Campbell Orr (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 207–35; see also John L. Bullion, ‘Augusta, Princess of Wales (1719– 1772)’, in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online edition: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/46829 [accessed 1 October 2013]. »

16 See, for example, Karl Wolfgang Schweizer, ed., Lord Bute: Essays in Re-interpretation (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1988), and John Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). »

17 See Karl Wolfgang Schweizer, ‘Stuart, John, Third Earl of Bute (1713–1792)’, in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; online edition: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/26716 [accessed 1 October 2013]. See also Maureen H. Lazarus and Heather S. Pardoe, ‘Bute’s Botanical Tables: Dictated by Nature’, Archives of Natural History, XXXVI/2 (2009), 277–98. »

18 Bullion, ‘Augusta, Princess of Wales’. »

19 Although Richard Quaintance tackles the idea of ‘China’ at Kew, he does not discuss the Chinese Aviary Flower Garden in his essay ‘Toward Distinguishing among Theme Park Publics: William Chambers’s Landscape Theory vs. his Kew Practice’, in Theme Park Landscapes: Antecedents and Variations, ed. Terence Young and Robert Riley (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2002), 25–47. »

20 Gilbert White, The Natural History of Selborne [1789], ed. Paul Foster (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), Letter 23 to Daines Barrington, 8 June 1775, 163–5; for the significance of the gossamer, see the introduction to this edition by Paul Foster, xiii. »

21 Ibid., Letter 28 to Thomas Pennant, dated March 1770, 69; all subsequent quotes 69–71. For a good account of the evolution and locations of the 2nd and 3rd dukes’ menageries, see Baird, Goodwood, 62–8. »

22 Ibid., 70–71. For further discussion of the moose, see W. D. Ian Rolfe, ‘William Hunter (1718–1783) on Irish “Elk” and Stubbs’s Moose’, Archives of Natural History, XI/2 (1983), 263–90. See also Glyndwr Williams, ed., Andrew Graham’s Observations on Hudson’s Bay, 1767–1791 (London: Hudson’s Bay Record Society, 1969), 17. It is important to note that Stubbs’s painting (pl. 208) represents a young moose, with a pair of antlers from a full-grown animal alongside. Rolfe pointed out that the antlers of this young moose indicate a yearling, or bull spike. Since the spike antlers appear only in the second year, this moose was born in May or early June 1769. It was generally easier to capture and transport young animals. William Hunter recorded its height at the shoulder to be 4 feet 10 ¼ inches. The height of a full-grown moose reaches upwards of 6 feet. Hence Gilbert White’s reference to reports of ‘ten feet and an half’ is exaggerated (even if measured by the tip of the antlers). See also Baird, Goodwood, 104–6, for George Stubbs and the 3rd duke’s moose. »

23 Francesca Greenoak, ed., The Journals of Gilbert White, 3 vols (London: Century, 1986–9) [vol. I: 1751–73; vol. II: 1774–83; vol. III: 1784–93], 1, 255, 258. »

24 Ibid., 225–6. »

25 White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Foster, Letter 61, to Daines Barrington, 237–40. »

26 Ibid., 237. »

27 Ibid. »

28 Ibid., 238. For further information on Dr Fothergill’s American plantings, see Laird, The Flowering of the Landscape Garden, 98. Joel Fry has pointed out (personal communication) that earlier American experiences of European exotics correspond to the English observations of Fothergill and White. For Bartram’s letters to Collinson on this topic (1755 and 1758), see Berkeley and Berkeley, eds, The Correspondence of John Bartram, 378 and 432–3. »

29 Windsor Castle, Royal Archives: RA GEO/55517. John Williamson’s invoice is dated 22 September 1768. »

30 RA GEO/55524. Robert Beecham’s invoice dated October to December 1768: ‘Her Royal Highness Princess Dowager of Wales — Her Birds Delivered at the Avery in Kew Gardens’. »

31 For background, see Harris, ‘Sir William Chambers and Kew Gardens’, 55–67; and Desmond, The History of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 47–8. »

32 White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Foster, Letter 43 to Daines Barrington dated 9 September 1778, 201–2. »

33 Connor, ‘Architecture and Planting at Goodwood’, 185–93. »

34 Berkeley and Berkeley, eds, The Correspondence of John Bartram, 170. See Joel T. Fry, ‘America’s “Ancient Garden”: The Bartram Botanic Garden, 1728–1850’, in Knowing Nature: Art and Science in Philadelphia, 1740–1840, ed. Amy R. W. Meyers (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011), 64–5, for a discussion of the duke of Richmond’s early subscription to the Virginia collecting trip of 1738, which produced mostly herbaceous seeds and specimens. He seems to have received shipments in 1739 and 1740 as well. »

35 Berkeley and Berkeley, eds, The Correspondence of John Bartram, 170. Bartram sent two boxes: the first was divided into a larger section for the duke of Norfolk and a smaller one for the duke of Richmond; the second, divided between Lord Petre and Philip Miller, also contained tulip tree cones for Mark Catesby. Much else was sent besides to Collinson, Catesby and Lord Petre: roots of sassafras and witch hazel, for example; sods containing Phlox; and a box of insects for Collinson with a box of specimens for Lord Petre. »

36 Ibid., 208. »

37 London, Natural History Museum, Botany Library, MSS COL, ‘An Account of the First Introduction of American Seeds into Great Britain’ (Collinson’s notebook, circa 1767). See again Fry, ‘America’s “Ancient Garden” ’, 65–6, for a comprehensive account of the 5 guinea consignments. »

38 Berkeley and Berkeley, eds, The Correspondence of John Bartram, 283, 292. »

39 See Laird, The Flowering of the Landscape Garden, 67; and Chambers, The Planters of the English Landscape Garden, 95–101; and, in particular, the letter of 28 December 1742, British Library, Add. MS 28726, fol. 128. See also Collinson’s letter to Richard Richardson in ‘ “Forget not Mee & My Garden” ’, ed. Armstrong, 102. »

40 Linnean Society, Collinson’s Commonplace Book, MS 323b, fol. 47. See again Armstrong, ed., ‘ “Forget not Mee & My Garden” ’, 222. »

41 Add. MS 23001. The figure of 400 suggests hyperbole. »

42 Linnean Society, MS Sp 235A: “Notes Relating to Botany, Collected from the Manuscripts of the Late Peter Collinson by A. B. Lambert’, 1809; Peter Collinson Small Commonplace Book, fol. 52. See again Armstrong, ed., ‘ “Forget not Mee & My Garden” ’, 222. »

43 Amanda Vickery, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 110: ‘Even titled ladies could be expected to manage accounts. The Duchess of Richmond tried to shield her husband from “household affairs” in the 1740s . . . her system spoilt, however, by minor orders made by servants on the duke’s authority.’ »

44 West Sussex Record Office, Goodwood MS 108, fol. 796, dated 29 March 1748, ‘Tuesday Night’; and fol. 799, dated ‘Jany 20 Wednesday 10: at night’. »

45 For this aristocratic prerogative, see Beth Fowkes Tobin, The Duchess’s Shells: Natural History Collecting in the Age of Cook’s Voyages (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2014), ‘Protocols of Exchange’, 123–7. »

46 Armstrong, ed., ‘ “Forget not Mee & My Garden” ’, introduction, XXI. »

47 Berkeley and Berkeley, eds, The Correspondence of John Bartram, 3, 66, 74–5, 78, 85, 87, 90, 95, 143, 185–6, 208–9, 228. »

48 Ibid., 17. »

49 Ibid., 74, 86. »

50 George Edwards, A Natural History of Uncommon Birds and of some other Rare and Undescribed Animals . . . , vol. I (London, 1743), pl. 9. It should be noted that vols II–IV (1747–51) omit ‘Uncommon’ from the title. Edwards went on to publish Gleanings of Natural History in 3 vols (1758–64). For George Edwards and his publication, see Victoria Dickenson, Drawn from Life: Science and Art in the Portrayal of the New World (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1998), especially 141–6. »

51 Edwards, A Natural History, 1, pl. 24. »

52 See Henrietta McBurney, Mark Catesby’s Natural History of America (London: Merrell Holberton, 1997), 56–7; see also James L. Reveal, ‘Identification of the Plants and Animals Illustrated by Mark Catesby for his Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands’, ed. Nelson and Elliott. »

53 McBurney, Mark Catesby’s Natural History of America, 70–71, with background on Catesby’s confusion between the nighthawk and whip-poor-will, on which Edwards based his illustration. George Edwards, A Natural History of Uncommon Birds and of some other Rare and Undescribed Animals . . . , vol. II (London, 1747), pl. 63. »

54 Edwards, A Natural History, II, pl. 101. See again McBurney, Mark Catesby’s Natural History of America, 66–7, for background on this duck. »

55 Edwards, A Natural History, II, pl. 61. »

56 See Amy R. W. Meyers, ‘From Nature and Memory: William Bartram’s Drawings of North American Flora and Fauna’, in Knowing Nature, ed. Meyers, 128–59. »

57 McCann, ‘ “Much troubled with very rude company” ’, 143. »

58 Goodwood MS 120, fols 82–167. For the duke’s role in cricket history, see Timothy J. McCann, ‘Sussex Cricket in the Eighteenth Century’, Sussex Record Society, LXXXVIII (2004). »

59 Goodwood MS 112, fols 368, 398. »

60 For further information on these items, see McCann, ‘ “Much troubled with very rude company” ’, 145. »

61 These provisions are discussed ibid., 145–6. »

62 Goodwood MS 108, fol. 816. »

63 Goodwood MS 108, fol. 818. »

64 Goodwood MS 108, fol. 819. »

65 Goodwood MS 108, fol. 822. »

66 See Eric Lionel Jones, Seasons and Prices: The Role of the Weather in English Agricultural History (London: Allen & Unwin, 1964), 137. »

67 See Mike Hulme and Elaine Barrow, eds, Climates of the British Isles: Present, Past and Future (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 266 and 404. »

68 Goodwood MS 103, fol. 215. »

69 Goodwood MS 108, fol. 815. »

70 Quoted from McCann, ‘ “Much troubled with very rude company” ’, 143. »

71 Quoted from ibid., 145. »

72 Goodwood MS 102, fol. 51. »

73 Goodwood MS 102, fol. 67. »

74 Goodwood MS 102, fol. 67. »

75 Goodwood MS 102, fol. 70. »

76 It was published as Millenium Hall rather than Millennium Hall. See Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800 (London: Allen Lane, 1983), especially 173–91. »

77 See G. J. Barker-Benfield, Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), especially chapters 1 and 2, and 266–73; see also 231–5, which takes up Thomas’s discussion of the ‘cult of tender-heartedness’ in respect to animals. »

78 [Lady Barbara Montagu and Sarah Scott], A Description of Millenium Hall . . . by a Gentleman on His Travels (London, 1762), 14, 24. »

79 Ibid., 14. »

80 Ibid., 20–21. »

81 Ibid., 25. »

82 Ibid., 15. »

83 See Betty Rizzo’s arguments in ‘Two Versions of Community: Montagu and Scott’, in Reconsidering the Bluestockings, ed. Nicole Pohl and Betty A. Schellenberg (Pasadena: Huntington Library, 2003), 193– 214. Elizabeth Montagu, in managing the Denton Colliery, provided a school for boys. She then planned to train girls in ‘spinning, knitting and sewing’. Her charity thus combined duty with pragmatic good management. Her annual feasts for London chimney sweeps, visible to passers-by on the front lawn of Montagu House, were an ostentatious celebration of charity. For arguments on charity and luxury, including Montagu’s assisting ‘merit in distress’ by patronage, see Elizabeth Eger, ‘Luxury, Industry and Charity: Bluestocking Culture Displayed’, in Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires and Delectable Goods, ed. Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 190–204. »

84 Discussed in ibid., 190–204. Mrs Montagu’s guests first met at her Hill Street home, famous for its ‘Chinese room’. »

85 San Marino, CA, Huntington Library, MS MO 3517, 25 September 1781. »

86 Huntington Library, MS MO 2975, Elizabeth Montagu to Elizabeth Charlton Montagu, 17 December 1788. »

87 Huntington Library, MS MO 156, James Barrington to Elizabeth Montagu, 16 December 1790. »

88 Cited in Desmond, The History of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 28. See Matthew Kilburn, ‘Frederick Lewis, Prince of Wales (1707–1751)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; online edition: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/10140 [accessed 1 October 2013]. »

89 Cited in Desmond, The History of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 29. »

90 Ibid., 27. »

91 I am very grateful to Ray Desmond for this information by personal communication, 7 September 2005. »

92 The later history of the menagerie is discussed in Mark Laird, ‘This Other Eden: The American Connection in Georgian Pleasure Grounds, from Shrubbery and Menagerie to Aviary and Flower Garden’, in Knowing Nature, ed. Meyers, 120–21. »

93 Harris, ‘Sir William Chambers and Kew Gardens’, 55–67, and especially 57. »

94 Sir George Lee’s Papers, Buckinghamshire Record Office, D/LE/C6/1–24. See here D/LE/C6/2, ‘John Dillmans Agreement for keeping 46 Acres of Garden from Lady Day 1752’, which includes the charge ‘to compleat all that part of the Garden at Kew that is not yet finished in the manner proposed by the Plan and to keep all that is now finished, which together is computed at 35 Acres’. The gardens at Carlton House and Leicester House amounted to an additional 11 acres. »

95 Cited in Desmond, The History of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 30. »

96 Sir George Lee’s Papers, D/LE/C6/4 and 7. There is a discussion of the contrasting costs of London versus country rates. »

97 Sir George Lee’s Papers, D/LE/C6/5. »

98 For the sequence of contracts and expenditures, see Sir George Lee’s Papers, D/LE/C6/6–15. Desmond, The History of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 34, states: ‘In 1756 John Dillman resigned from Princess Augusta’s service, having received a legacy of £300 from Lady Elizabeth St André.’ »

99 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS North b.15, fols 17–20v. »

100 Bodleian Library, MS North d.9, fol. 160. »

101 See Desmond, The History of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 34–5, for background on Aiton’s arrival. »

102 Ibid., 38. See George Rousseau, The Notorious Sir John Hill: The Man Destroyed by Ambition in the Era of Celebrity (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, and Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), 17–29: ‘By 1739, when Hill had been resident at Thorndon for about two years and already acquired Richmond’s confidence, and when Petre’s death would soon lead to the auctioning off of his American tree collection, Hill was instrumental in placing Richmond’s generous bid first. This was the acquisition enabling Richmond to expand his own groves at Goodwood’; and ‘Hill collected plants and animals on the nearby Downs’. »

103 William Chambers, Plans, Elevations, Sections, and Perspective Views of the Gardens and Buildings at Kew (London, 1763). »

104 In The Letters and Papers of Sir John Hill, 1714– 1775, ed. George S. Rousseau (New York: Ams Press, 1982), Hill’s background as apothecary and as collector of specimens for Lord Petre and the 2nd duke of Richmond (1738–43) is summarized. Letter 80 of summer 1758 is addressed to Lord Bute and mentions a ‘book of plants’ (not a work in print). See also Rousseau, The Notorious Sir John Hill, 205–6, on the influence of Hill’s Eden (1757) on Bute; and 242, on Hill’s gradual demise: ‘Hill was marginalized — but not entirely . . . [he] worked in various gardening capacities assisting Bute, his main task to increase the number of species at Kew. He did this with ferocious industry, and by 1768 their number reached 3,400.’ »

105 Bodleian Library, MS Radcliffe Trust c.12, fol. 45v. »

106 Linnean Society, Peter Collinson Small Commonplace Book, fol. 182, here quoted from ‘ “Forget not Mee & My Garden” ’, ed. Armstrong, 229. Armstrong points out that at the foot of the draft Collinson wrote a further note, including the phrase: ‘From His Lordships great knowledge in the Science of Botany the Gardens at Kew have been furnish’d with all the Rare Exotick Trees & Flowers that could be procured.’ »

107 Harris, ‘Sir William Chambers and Kew Gardens’, 67. »

108 Windsor Castle, Royal Archives, RA GEO/55482. »

109 See RA GEO/55522, 55525–55527, 55548, 55558–55560, 55593–55595, 55626–55628 and 55649–55651. »

110 RA GEO/55526. »

111 RA GEO/55527. »

112 See again Hulme and Barrow, eds, Climates of the British Isles, 409. »

113 Since Albin appears to have died well before the Edinburgh publication, this must be a posthumous edition. See Peter Osborne, ‘Albin, Eleazar (d. 1742?)’, entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; online edition: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/279 [accessed 1 October 2013]. »

114 RA GEO/55456. »

115 Eleazar Albin, A Natural History of English Song-Birds and Such of the Foreign as are usually brought over and esteemed for the singing [1737], 2nd edn (London, 1741): ‘To the Reader’, 2. »

116 RA GEO/55524. John Haverfield picked up Beecham’s bill for trapping, along with Eddie & Dupin’s bill for bird feed and materials for the ‘Exotic Garden’, and passed them on to the royal household for payment by January 1769. He thus exercised overall control of expenditures. »

117 Eleazar Albin, A Natural History of Singing Birds: And particularly, That Species of them most commonly bred in SCOTLAND (Edinburgh, 1754), opposite 153. »

118 Albin, Natural History of English Song-Birds, 36. »

119 White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Foster, Letter 13 to Thomas Pennant, dated 22 January 1768, 37. »

120 Albin, Natural History of English Song-Birds, 25. »

121 Ibid. »

122 Ibid., 34. »

123 Ibid., 34–5. »

124 Ibid., 35. »

125 Edwards, A Natural History, III, pl. 128. »

126 See again Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 114, for a discussion of human names for pets as an indication of the intimacy of the bond. »

127 See, for example, a letter to Peter Collinson in The Correspondence of John Bartram, ed. Berkeley and Berkeley, 357. »

128 Berkeley and Berkeley, eds, The Correspondence of John Bartram, 18. »

129 See Janice Neri, ‘Cultivating Interiors: Philadelphia, China and the Natural World’, in Knowing Nature, ed. Meyers, 180–209. »

130 Chambers, A Dissertation on Oriental Gardening, 86–7. »

131 See Laird, The Flowering of the Landscape Garden, 202. »

132 RA GEO/55557. The bill was paid by John Haverfield once again on the princess dowager’s behalf. »

133 RA GEO/55512. The list includes ‘Nine plants unknown’ (undifferentiated). See here the entry on ‘Styrax’ in William Aiton, Hortus Kewensis, 3 vols (London, 1789), in which he credits the introduction to John Cree in 1765. The year ‘1765’ (or ‘1775’ on one occasion) is repeated throughout Aiton’s three volumes, yet the close correspondence of the bill of 1768 to some Cree attributions suggests ‘1768’ as the true date for the following species: ‘Three new Andromedas’ (Andromeda axillaris, A. coriacea and A. acuminata), ‘Two new Asters’ (Aster tardiflorus), ‘Two new shrubby Vacciniums’ (Vaccinium diffusum and V. amoenum), ‘Two new Agaves’ (Agave virginica) and ‘A new Sideroxyllon’ (Sideroxylon tenax). This merits further analysis. »

134 RA GEO/55519. »

135 RA GEO/55645. »

136 RA GEO/55544. »

137 RA GEO/55546. »

138 Philip Miller, in his Gardeners Dictionary, 8th edn (London, 1768), claims that Rhexia virginica was first introduced by John Banister, though it had died out by the early eighteenth century. Both this species and Rhexia mariana made their first appearance in the 1759 edition of the Gardeners Dictionary, but Miller gives no indication of who collected the seed. On the other hand, Rhexia virginica is specimen 51 of vol. XI of Lord Petre’s hortus siccus in the Sutro Library, San Francisco; and this was most probably collected by Bartram, thereby increasing the chances that he also sent living materials. Miller indicates that seed of both was sent annually from North America. For the confused history of Mark Catesby’s possible collecting of Rhexia mariana herbarium specimens, see Stephen A. Harris, ‘The Plant Collections of Mark Catesby in Oxford’, in The Curious Mister Catesby: A ‘Truly Ingenious’ Naturalist Explores New Worlds, ed. E. Charles Nelson and David J. Elliott (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 2015). »

139 RA GEO/55562. »

140 RA GEO/55648. »

141 RA GEO/55624, 55625. »

142 RA GEO/55584. »

143 RA GEO/55645. »

144 See John Fisher, The Origin of Garden Plants (London: Constable, 1982), 139. This needs verification, since in the same paragraph the author attributes the introduction of Chelone obliqua to Bartram, whereas Philip Miller in his Gardeners Dictionary (1768) clearly names Clayton as the source. Aiton names James Gordon as the first to cultivate Stokesia laevis (cyanea) in 1766. Joel Fry is currently tracking any evidence of a Bartram link to Stokesia and the other American plants listed among Hill’s twenty-five. »

145 Berkeley and Berkeley, eds, The Correspondence of John Bartram, 512, 538 and 613. It first appears in the Bartram–Collinson correspondence in 1761 as ‘purple ulmaria’. It was probably gathered in south-western Virginia in October 1759 on a collecting trip with his son John. »

146 Berkeley and Berkeley, eds, The Correspondence of John Bartram, 705. See again Fry, ‘America’s “Ancient Garden” ’, 69, for a full account of Xerophyllum asphodeloides. »

147 See Aiton, Hortus Kewensis, for the following introductions of the 1760s and 1770s that are attributed directly to John Bartram: Salvia coccinea (1774), Collinsonia scabriuscula, Mitchella repens (circa 1761), Campanula americana (1763), Rhus aromatica (1772), Sarothra gentianoides (1768), Pyrola umbellata (1762), Aristolochia sipho (1763) and Asplenium rhizophyllum (circa 1764). »

148 John H. Harvey, ‘A Scottish Botanist in London in 1766’, Garden History, IX/1 (Spring 1981), 53. »

149 Ibid., 51. »

150 Ibid., 50, 54, 55. »

151 Ibid., 53. »

152 Ibid., 51. »

153 Ibid., 50. »

154 Ibid., 54. »

155 Ibid., 52. »

156 Quoted in Richard Gorer, The Flower Garden in England (London and Sydney: B.T. Batsford, 1975), 54–5. »

157 Harvey, ‘A Scottish Botanist in London in 1766’, 53. »

158 I am grateful for the following observations by Alison Hardie (personal communication, 20 January 2014). She pointed out that Chambers’s time in Canton might have been relevant to his vision, but the keeping of birds and animals in gardens, as Chambers describes it, was rather different from the Buddhist practice of releasing living creatures (fangsheng). It is possible, she suggests, that in the eighteenth century the area around Canton was wilder and more abundant in wildlife than the intensively cultivated Yangtze delta area. There, at least in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and probably later, it was common to keep deer and cranes (for their association with Taoist immortals), and sometimes peacocks, as well as to welcome wild birds. »

159 Chambers, A Dissertation on Oriental Gardening, 79–80. See Mark Laird, ‘From Callicarpa to Catalpa: The Impact of Mark Cateby’s Plant Introductions on English Gardens of the Eighteenth Century’, in Empire’s Nature: Mark Catesby’s New World Vision, ed. Amy R. W. Meyers and Margaret Beck Pritchard (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 190–92, 225. »

160 For the poor pay of labourers, see Trevor Lummis and Jan Marsh, The Woman’s Domain: Women and the English Country House (London: Viking, 1990), 82. »

161 For a meticulous account of White’s gradual maturation as a naturalist, see Foster, Gilbert White and his Records. Paul Foster is currently working on a critical edition of the Flora Selbornensis of 1766. »

162 Greenoak, ed., The Journals of Gilbert White, 1, 300–01. »

163 Ibid., 313. »

164 Hulme and Barrow, eds, Climates of the British Isles, 278 and 409: the record precipitation of 1768, 1247 mm, was not matched until 1872, but the wetness of autumn 1770 (402 mm) just surpassed that of autumn 1768 (399 mm), making it the fourth wettest on record (for the years 1766–1995). Autumn 1772 (400.6 mm) enters the records as the fifth wettest. »

165 Hulme and Barrow, eds, Climates of the British Isles, 357, White quoting from Dr Johnson’s account of the Island of Skye. »

166 Greenoak, ed., The Journals of Gilbert White, 1, 358. »

167 Ibid., 442. »

168 Ibid., 450. »

169 Ibid., 455. »

170 Ibid., 459. »

171 Ibid., 470. »

172 See Tom Williamson’s account of improvements in firearm technology that ensured larger numbers of pheasants were killed: Polite Landscapes: Gardens and Society in Eighteenth-century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), especially 133–4. »

173 See Laird, The Flowering of the Landscape Garden, 207. »

174 Desmond, The History of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 62. »

175 Bullion, ‘Augusta, Princess of Wales’. »

176 Greenoak, ed., The Journals of Gilbert White, 1, 395. »

177 Bullion, ‘Augusta, Princess of Wales’. »

178 Desmond, The History of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 62. »

179 RA GEO/55640. »

180 RA GEO/55661. »

181 Lady Llanover, ed., The Autobiography and Correspondence of Mary Granville, Mrs Delany, 6 vols (London: Bentley, 1861–2), IV, 146. »

182 Ibid., IV, 398–9. »

183 Quoted from Festing, ‘Menageries and the Landscape Garden’, 111. »

184 White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Foster, Letter 62 to Daines Barrington, 241–2. »

185 Llanover, ed., Autobiography and Correspondence, V, 194. »

186 White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Foster, Letter 62 to Daines Barrington, 242–3. »

187 For a good discussion of the moose in its habitat and all the things that might afflict it in the wild, see John O. Whitaker, Jr, and William J. Hamilton, Jr, Mammals of the Eastern United States, 3rd edn (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1998), 541–7. »

188 White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Foster, Letter 50 to Daines Barrington, 21 April 1780, 219. See Verlyn Klinkenborg, Timothy; or, Notes of an Abject Reptile (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 159. »

189 Quoted from Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 20. »

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