6. Virtù: The Natural Pleasures of Mary Delany at the Duchess of Portland’s Bulstrode​

Laird, Mark

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6. Virtù: The Natural Pleasures of Mary Delany at the Duchess of Portland’s Bulstrode

Mark Laird

A Natural History of English Gardening: 1650–1800

Edmund Burke called Mrs Delany (née Mary Granville, 1700–1788) ‘the highest bred woman in the world, and the woman of fashion of all ages’.Quoted in Ruth Hayden, Mrs Delany and her Flower Collages, 2nd edn (London: British Museum Press, 1992), 129, citing what Dr Johnson heard Edmund Burke say. See also Lady Llanover, ed., The Autobiography and Correspondence of Mary Granville, Mrs Delany, 6 vols (London: Bentley, 1861–2), V, 12. Already recognized in her own times, she continued to attract admirers after Lady Llanover brought out a complete ‘autobiography and correspondence’ in the...

Author

Mark Laird

PublisherPaul Mellon Centre

Related print edition pages: pp.267-325

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-32116

Chapter subject tags:Delany, Mrs. (Mary), 1700-1788Gardens, English--History--18th centuryWomen artists--Great Britain--18th centuryBotanical illustration--England--18th centuryArt and natural history--Great Britain--History--18th centuryBulstrode (England)Banks, Joseph, 1743-1820Ehret, Georg Dionysius, 1708-1770Sandby, Paul, 1731-1809

6. Virtù: The Natural Pleasures of Mary Delany at the Duchess of Portland’s Bulstrode

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Description: Reconstruction of original flower combinations, based on the faded flowers on the...

239. Mark Laird, reconstruction of original flower colour combinations, based on the faded flowers on the back petticoat panel of the court dress designed by Mary Pendarves, 1740–41, silk embroidery on satin, 41 3⁄8 × 69 1⁄4 in. (105 × 176 cm). This composition is imagined as if drawn by Pendarves on paper for professional embroidery by a worker as skilled as a Phoebe Wright or Jenny Clegg. Pencil, watercolour and crayon, 2008

Unlike the pristine colours of the front panel (see pls 241 and 333), the flowers of the back panel (later re-used as a fire-screen and exposed to light) no longer reveal their intended hues. But today the accuracy of the botanical embroidery still permits identifications to aid a virtual reconstruction (top left to bottom right in four rows): opium poppy (here ‘Danebrog’), love-in-a-mist, auricula, myrtle, anemone; sweet pea, poppy, anemone, lily-of-the-valley, anemone, stock; harebells / stock / anemone, pink, sweet pea, auricula / tulip, tuberose / anemone; and polyanthus, hollyhock, auricula, poppy, hollyhock, orange blossom, geranium (Pelargonium inquinans), myrtle and poppy. Sprigs or single flowers of lily-of-the-valley, anemone, apple blossom, sweet pea and auricula are also strewn throughout.

This plate is dedicated by Mark Laird to Amy Meyers, Therese O’Malley and Yale University Press, London

Edmund Burke called Mrs Delany (née Mary Granville, 1700–1788) ‘the highest bred woman in the world, and the woman of fashion of all ages’.1Quoted in Ruth Hayden, Mrs Delany and her Flower Collages, 2nd edn (London: British Museum Press, 1992), 129, citing what Dr Johnson heard Edmund Burke say. See also Lady Llanover, ed., The Autobiography and Correspondence of Mary Granville, Mrs Delany, 6 vols (London: Bentley, 1861–2), V, 12. Already recognized in her own times, she continued to attract admirers after Lady Llanover brought out a complete ‘autobiography and correspondence’ in the 1860s.2Llanover, ed., Autobiography and Correspondence. Alicia Weisberg-Roberts provides a history of Mrs Delany’s legacy in her introduction to Mrs Delany and her Circle, ed. Mark Laird and Alicia Weisberg-Roberts (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009). More recently, Ruth Hayden’s Mrs Delany: Her Life and her Flowers, first published in 1980, documented her art of depicting flowers in hundreds of pieces of coloured paper.3Ruth Hayden, Mrs Delany: Her Life and her Flowers (London: British Museum Press, 1980). The second edition of 1992 was retitled Mrs Delany and her Flower Collages, and it will be referred to throughout this chapter. These nearly one thousand collages, now kept in the British Museum, are often referred to as ‘paper mosaicks’ or Mrs Delany’s hortus siccus.4The total number falls short of an intended 1,000: the first nine volumes, containing 100 collages each, amount to 900, and, with 79 listed in the tenth volume, 979 was reached by 1782. See A Catalogue of Plants Copyed from Nature in Paper Mosaick, finished in the Year 1778 . . . , which is in the British Library and attributed to Mary Delany. In July 1779 Mrs Delany wrote an introduction to her hortus siccus, which was placed at the beginning of the first volume and headed: ‘Plants, Copied after Nature in paper Mosaick begun in the year 1774’. See Hayden, Mrs Delany and her Flower Collages, 155. See Llanover, ed., Autobiography and Correspondence, V, 48, letter of 28 October 1774, which refers to her ‘hortus siccus’, and V, 213, letter of 29 April 1776, which refers to her ‘herbal’. They constitute the crowning glory of a long life devoted to exquisite embroidery, shellwork, gardening, flower painting, landscape sketching and the cutting of images in paper more generally. Her close association with Mary Cavendish Bentinck (1715–1785), wife of the 2nd duke of Portland — and the circle of scientists and artists who gathered at Bulstrode in Buckinghamshire — is central to that story. Such associations of kinship and friendship, helping to elevate her extraordinary female accomplishments, were the subject of an exhibition in 2009 entitled Mrs Delany and her Circle (pls 239 and 241).5On view at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, from 24 September 2009 to 3 January 2010, and at Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, from 18 February to 1 May 2010.

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Description: Left half of the front petticoat panel, detail by Delany, Mary Granville

241. Detail from left half of the front petticoat panel designed by Mary Pendarves, 1740–41, silk embroidery on satin, 41 3⁄8 × 69 ¼ in. (105 × 176 cm). Private Collection

Mary Pendarves was a seasoned widow, aged forty, when she created her court dress. It was probably worn during a ball in February 1741 at Norfolk House, St James’s Square, the residence of Frederick, prince of Wales. Cultivated flowers are represented here, but lesser bindweed (Convolvulus arvensis) entwined around a thistle is a weed of arable lands. The understated exquisiteness of the black petticoat epitomizes Mary’s highly personal interpretation of conventional fashions. Designed, but not embroidered, by her, it elevated female accomplishment as the passionate art of first widowhood. Her collages represent the peak of accomplishment in a long and productive second widowhood.

The duchess of Portland herself has never been the focus of an equivalent comprehensive study. Perhaps this is because the productions of art and nature that made up her life were dispersed soon after her death. In 1976 David Allen recognized her pre-eminence as a patron and collector of natural history. He suggested in The Naturalist in Britain that Bulstrode was probably more significant than the British Museum as a ‘museum’ of plants and animals, both living and dead, and of minerals, including the duchess’s beloved shells: ‘This supreme example of private patronage, a source of comfort and encouragement to a very wide circle of naturalists at a period when organized, cooperative endeavour hardly existed, was the unintentional outgrowth of a purely private passion fed by a distinctly bowerbird mentality.’6David Elliston Allen, The Naturalist in Britain: A Social History [1976], 2nd edn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 25. A decade later, Sally Festing discussed aspects of her life such as the celebrated ‘Portland Rose’;7Sally Festing, ‘Rare Flowers and Fantastic Breeds: The 2nd Duchess of Portland and her Circle, I’, Country Life (12 June 1986), 1684–6; Festing, ‘Grace without Triviality: The 2nd Duchess of Portland and her Circle, II’, Country Life (19 June 1986), 1772–4; Festing, ‘The Second Duchess of Portland and her Rose’, Garden History, XIV/2 (Autumn 1986), 194–200; Festing, ‘Menageries and the Landscape Garden’, Journal of Garden History, VIII/4 (October–December 1988), 104–17. and an exhibition on the duchess and her collections opened at Welbeck in 2006.8Rebecca Stott, Duchess of Curiosities: The Life of Margaret, Duchess of Portland, exhibition catalogue (Welbeck: Pineapple Press/Harley Gallery, 2006). Most significantly, Beth Tobin’s studies of the duchess as a shell-collecting naturalist demonstrate that she was more than simply a patron and indiscriminate collector.9See Beth Fowkes Tobin, ‘The Duchess’s Shells: Natural History Collecting, Gender and Scientific Practice’, in Material Women, 1750–1950: Consuming Desires and Collecting Practices, ed. Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2009), 244–63. See also 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). It seems timely, then, to re-evaluate the life of these two ladies within their circle of sharp-minded women. This chapter builds on the exhibition volume Mrs Delany and her Circle (2009), which led, in turn, to Clarissa Campbell Orr’s much-anticipated biography of Delany.10Laird and Weisberg-Roberts, eds, Mrs Delany and her Circle. I have benefitted greatly from Clarissa Campbell Orr’s authorial and editorial contributions to this exhibition catalogue and from her further commentaries on this and other chapters while in manuscript. The pursuit at Bulstrode of natural knowledge through virtù (as Mrs Delany called the study of natural productions) proves just as important as the duchess’s patronage that grew with an acquisitive urge.11For the background to this usage of virtü or virtù, see Kim Sloan, ‘A Noble Art’: Amateur Artists and Drawing Masters, c. 1600–1800 (London: British Museum Press, 2000), chapter 1: ‘Virtue, Virtuosi and Views’, 11–39, and especially 11–12. For the moral sense of vertu — a constancy of effort or will towards goodness — see the entry in Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie (Paris, 1751).

An early instance of the two women’s shared passion occurred during Mrs Delany’s second, and very happy, marriage of twenty-five years to Dr Patrick Delany, dean of Down in Ireland (pl. 242b). On 9 May 1754 she and the duchess of Portland (pl. 243b) visited a Mr Deard, jeweller in Pall Mall, London, to see ‘a curious collection of shells. There were ten small drawers full . . . the price set on them is three hundred pounds!’12Llanover, ed., Autobiography and Correspondence, III, 271. Mrs Delany went on to create at Bulstrode a grotto ornamented with shells, using materials collected by friends and relatives in Cornwall and Derbyshire. After the death of the 2nd duke of Portland in 1762, and immediately following the dean’s death in 1768, the two widows became inseparable in their pursuits in London and at Bulstrode. They dedicated themselves to ‘philosophy and rational amusements’, pondering the ‘wonders of the four elements’.13Mary Delany to Mary Port, 18 November 1774, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, v, 65.

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Description: Mary Pendarves (Delany) by Barber, Rupert

242a. Attributed to Rupert Barber, Mary Pendarves (Delany), pre-1743, enamel on copper. Private Collection

In 1743 the widow Pendarves married Dr Patrick Delany, a widower himself. They settled at Delville, just north of Dublin. For the twenty-five years of companionate marriage, she was able to concentrate on artistic works: sketching, gardening and creating shellwork. The ties with England, and especially with the duchess of Portland at Bulstrode, remained an enduring constant: from the young women’s passions of the 1730s, notably Delany’s ‘new madness’ for shells, to the endeavours in virtù of their joint widowhood (1768–85).

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Description: Dr Patrick Delany by Barber, Rupert

242b. Attributed to Rupert Barber, Dr Patrick Delany, recto dated 1740, verso dated 1768, enamel on copper, 1 7⁄8 × 1 ½ in. (4.8 × 3.8 cm). National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin (3728)

This chapter takes impetus from the moment when Joseph Banks (1743–1820) returned from Captain Cook’s Endeavour voyage in July 1771, bringing the plants and shells of the South Seas. It moves in the realms of earth and water, fire and air, before drawing to a close with the sale of the duchess’s collections in spring 1786, which were dispersed in 4,156 lots.14See Peter Dance, A History of Shell Collecting, revised edn (Leiden: Brill, 1986), for a broad discussion of the duchess. See also Janice Neri, ‘Mrs Delany’s Natural History and Zoological Activities: “A Beautiful Mixture of Pretty Objects” ’, in Mrs Delany and her Circle, ed. Laird and Weisberg-Roberts, 183 and pl. 181, illustrating Cymbiola aulica aulica (Voluta aulica). Beth Tobin’s The Duchess’s Shells illustrates Voluta aulica, pl. 5, one of only three shells that can be traced with any certainty from the sale catalogue. This chapter also discusses Mrs Delany’s ‘paper garden’, whose mosaic flowering vividly recalls the living museum of plants at Bulstrode.15The term ‘paper garden’ I have borrowed from Molly Peacock’s creative non-fiction biography of Mary Delany: The Paper Garden: Mrs Delany [Begins her Life’s Work] at 72 (Toronto: McClelland & Steward, 2010).

In the autumn of 1772, stimulated by encounters with Banks and Georg Dionysius Ehret (pl. 243a), and aided by the duchess’s ‘botanical master’, the Revd John Lightfoot (1735–1788), Mrs Delany, aged seventy-two, found her métier. She turned her precocious talent with knife and scissors and her deep horticultural knowledge into a ‘new way of imitating flowers’ — the collages.16Mary Delany to Mary Port, 4 October 1772, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, IV, 469. What she came to call the hortus siccus took up the next ten years. She began locally with the duchess’s English and foreign plants. By 1776 she was beginning to branch out, falling increasingly under the sway of the exotics in the royal collections at Kew. Both ladies were loosely attached to the Bluestocking circle. These ‘brilliant women’ congregated at gatherings in London, to which prominent naturalists associated with Bulstrode (e.g., Daniel Solander, 1733–1782) were invited.17Elizabeth Eger and Lucy Peltz, Brilliant Women: 18th-century Bluestockings (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2008). Hester Chapone, who knew Gilbert White at Selborne, was one member to disperse their influence beyond the metropolis.18See letter from Hester Chapone to Mrs Delany, 13 June 1773, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, IV, 515, with a second letter, ‘The Autumn of 1773’, ibid., 549.

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Description: Georg Dionysius Ehret, detail by James, George

243a. George James, detail of Georg Dionysius Ehret, circa 1765, oil on canvas, 35 × 26 ¼ in. (89 × 66.6 cm). By Permission of the Linnean Society of London

The young duchess of Portland had already demonstrated a liking for gardening and botanizing. By 1752, having launched his Plantae et papiliones rariores in 1748, Ehret found employment with the ‘highest nobility in England’. His most significant noble patron from the early 1750s was the duchess at Bulstrode. By 1753 the duchess’s daughter, Lady Elizabeth, was producing accomplished botanical drawings under his tutelage. During the 1760s Ehret’s role included work on the duchess’s ‘English herbal’, which was nearing completion when the newly widowed Delany joined the Bulstrode circle in autumn 1768.

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Description: Margaret, Duchess of Portland by Zincke, Christian Friedrich

243b. C. F. Zincke, Margaret, Duchess of Portland, circa 1755–62, enamel miniature, 1 3⁄4 × 1 3⁄8 in. (4.6 × 3.5 cm). Private Collection

Having truck with the world of fashion and conversation in London, Mrs Delany also flourished in the intimacy of the country estate. Exchanges of letters — among blood relatives, Bluestockings and ‘blue blood’ in general — punctuated the alternation between city and country, always contingent on the seasons and shifting weather. From these letters comes a vivid sense of a peripatetic life and the cut and thrust of talk. A geographical and social propinquity, as explored by Clarissa Campbell Orr and Lisa Ford in respective essays in Mrs Delany and her Circle, is crucial to the conversations.19Clarissa Campbell Orr, ‘Mrs Delany and the Court’, and Lisa Ford, ‘A Progress in Plants: Mrs Delany’s Botanical Sources’, in Mrs Delany and her Circle, ed. Laird and Weisberg-Roberts, 40–65 and 204–23. Topics ranged from the Macaronis at the Pantheon in 1772 to the meteor and air balloons of 1783.

The year 1783 was the one of the ‘European weather panic’, arrestingly recounted by Richard Hamblyn in his book Terra (2009). This was brought into startling reality by the eruptions in Iceland and the travel disruptions throughout Europe in 2010.20Richard Hamblyn, Terra: Tales of the Earth: Four Events that Changed the World (London: Picador, 2009), 65–121. Movement through the air accelerated the perceptions of the peripatetic. By contrast, Gilbert White, ascertaining the ‘conversation of animals’, provided a viewpoint on events in the natural and cultural world that was grounded and solitary.21See note 288. All the while, his sedentary observations matched Mrs Delany’s observing, cutting and pasting within the intercourse of society. Both, at their most productive, left a memento vivere of each day. It was akin to the ‘industry and affection’ of the migratory but home-building swallows.22Gilbert White, The Natural History of Selborne [1789], ed. Paul Foster (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), Letter 18 to Daines Barrington, 146. Mrs Delany’s devotional-scientific work, using the colonial collections of Bulstrode and Kew, can thus be viewed as a botanical conversation within the close-knit milieux of town and country. Through her ‘paper mosaicks’, she produced an album amicorum, which is a counterpart to White’s ‘secret, private parish inside each one of us’.23For the idea of an ‘album amicorum’, see Kim Sloan, ‘Mrs Delany’s “Paintings of Drawings” ’, in Mrs Delany and her Circle, ed. Laird and Weisberg-Roberts, 115. See also Allen, The Naturalist in Britain, 44.

PART I
Bulstrode as a Noble School: Joseph Banks and the Twilight Years of Ehret

On 17 December 1771 Mrs Delany wrote from her London home to her brother, Bernard Granville of Calwich, Staffordshire:

We were yesterday together at Mr. Banks’s to see some of the fruits of his travels, and were delighted with paintings of the Otaheitie plants, quite different from anything the Duchess ever saw, so they must be very new to me! . . . there is one in particular (the name I cannot recollect), that bears vast flowers, larger and somewhat of the appearance of the largest poppy when full blown, the leaves all fungid; the petals that are like threads, are at the calyx white, by degrees shaded with pale purple, ending with crimson.24Mary Delany to Bernard Granville, 17 December 1771, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, IV, 384.

Mrs Delany had incomparable skill — more applied than academic — in digesting the new in nature. In this highly visual account of the ‘very new’, she seized upon the textures and coloration of leaf and flower. It was as if plants were produced by art as well as nature. That the leaves should have struck her as fungoid is scarcely surprising given the pictorial studies of ‘curiosities in a fungus way’ conducted by Georg Dionysius Ehret at Bulstrode. That the petals reminded her of threads was inevitable for a lady so versed in needlework. And that the flowers seemed to graduate from white, through pale purple, to crimson was precisely the gradation that she, as a versatile artist, would replicate in silk or watercolour, and eventually in the ‘paper mosaicks’. She relished all that was new. And the duchess of Portland, as a consummate collector, had access to the very newest. These included the novelties and nondescripts of the South Seas brought back by the rising star Joseph Banks (pls 245a and b).

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Description: Syzgium suborbiculare (Eugenia suborbiculare) by Parkinson, Sydney

245a. Sydney Parkinson, ‘Syzgium suborbiculare’ (Eugenia suborbiculare), made on Lizard Island, Queensland, 1770, graphite and watercolour, 14 ½ × 21 in. (37 × 53 cm). Colour note on the verso: ‘flower & artery white’. © The Natural History Museum, London, Cook Collection (A3/143)

Mary Delany saw the ‘paintings of the Otaheitie plants’ (including this Australian plant) in London in 1771. They were some of 269 watercolours (among 942 botanical drawings) that Sydney Parkinson completed on the Endeavour voyage with Captain Cook and Joseph Banks. By the mid-1780s Banks had 753 engraved copper plates and a full text for the early part of the voyage, yet he came to withdraw his florilegium. With publication in the 1980s of 100 sets of coloured prints, the project was finally made complete.

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Description: Painted version of Sydney Parkinson's field sketch by Nodder, Frederick Polydor

245b. Frederick Polydore Nodder, painted version of Parkinson’s field sketch, 1777, watercolour, 14 ¼ × 20 ½ in. (36 × 51.5 cm). © The Natural History Museum, London, Cook Collection (A3/143)

In 1768 Banks had joined Captain Cook’s Endeavour expedition. The Royal Society and Admiralty organized the expedition to observe the transit of Venus on Tahiti and to explore ‘Terra Australis Incognita’.25Mark Laird, Sir Joseph Banks: Botanist, Horticulturist and Plant Collector: Associations with Chelsea Physic Garden (London: Chelsea Physic Garden, 1988). Banks and his botanist, Daniel Solander, having observed the transit on 3 June 1769, returned from New Zealand and Australia in July 1771. They were given a triumphant reception. Linnaeus wrote to Banks addressing him as ‘vir sine pare’. Banks proceeded to allocate £10,000 for publishing a flora from the voyage. Although 753 copper plates were made, the ‘Florilegium’ never materialized in his lifetime.26The drawings were eventually published as hand-coloured prints in Banks’ Florilegium, 743 plates in 35 Solander boxes (London: Alecto, 1980–88). See also Joel Gascoigne, Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment: Useful Knowledge and Polite Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Perhaps the memory of these paintings of ‘Otaheitie plants’ came back to Mrs Delany’s needle-sharp mind as she happened upon a ‘new way of imitating flowers’ in the autumn of 1772.

The observations from Tahiti dazzled Europeans. In September 1769, when Mrs Delany noted seeing a routine astronomical occurrence, it shone a little weaker in the wake of the transit of Venus. She wrote: ‘Are you not all gazing at the Comet, and what are your observations? We have seen it twice, but had not Mr. Lightfoot assured me it was a comet, I should have taken it for a stream of the northern lights.’27Mary Delany to Mary Dewes, 3 September 1769, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, IV, 237. Twice during the 1760s Venus passed over the face of the sun. The transits of 6 June 1761 and 3 June 1769 would have dramatic consequences for science, exploration and natural history. Accounts and images from 1761 and 1769 proliferated. For example, the drawings of Captain Cook and Charles Green recorded the ‘black-drop effect’ that had bedevilled measurements of the distance from the earth to the sun.28See Jay M. Pasachoff, Glen Schneider and Leon Golub, ‘The Black-Drop Effect Explained’, in Transits of Venus: New Views of the Solar System and Galaxy, ed. D. W. Kurtz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 242–53. Captain Cook’s journals, published in 1773, recorded the setting up of ‘the Fort’ on 1 May 1769. He described 3 June itself as cloudless: ‘It was ne[a]rly calm the whole day and the Thermometer expose’d to the Sun about the middle of Day rose to a degree of heat 119[ºF = 48.3ºC] we have not before met with.’29Cook’s Endeavour Journal: The Inside Story (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2008), 70–71. The impact of the South Pacific shells, the cargo of Cook’s first voyage, is discussed in Tobin, The Duchess’s Shells, notably in chapter 4.

By 1769 Mrs Delany, first married off at seventeen to a much older man, had outlived two husbands.30The background to Mary Granville’s marriages to Alexander Pendarves and Patrick Delany is discussed in Alicia Weisberg-Roberts, ‘Introduction (1): Mrs Delany from Source to Subject’, and Clarissa Campbell Orr, ‘Mrs Delany and the Court’, in Mrs Delany and her Circle, ed. Laird and Weisberg-Roberts, 3–4 and 6–8, 46–7 and 54–6. Beginning her second widowhood in May 1768, she was asked by the dowager duchess of Portland to spend long visits at Bulstrode in Buckinghamshire. The duchess wrote pointedly to Mrs Delany’s niece, Mary Dewes:

DEAR MADAM,

I have this moment received your letter, and though it is too late for the post I cannot help telling you how extremely I suffer for my dearest dear friend, who I am sure, is in the greatest affliction. I am glad to hear she has cried a good deal, and wish that may be encouraged, as it may prevent the bad consequences to her health. . . .

I think it very proper Mrs. Delany should have a house of her own, but beg she will not determine immediately, nor can I see any reason for her settling at Bath. Why not have a house in London? that would certainly be the most advisable; she would then be amongst her friends and relations, and she could spend every summer with her friends [at Bulstrode], who would be so happy to have her company.31The duchess of Portland to Mary Dewes, ‘May 1768’, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, IV, 146.

And so it was that Mrs Delany came to travel to and fro from London to Bulstrode, spending large parts of every early summer to late autumn in the countryside. Although these sojourns consolidated the endeavours in virtù of a joint widowhood, they also continued the pattern established early on: the visits to Bulstrode during her first widowhood, and the frequent returns from Ireland, which allowed Delany to sketch menagerie animals or plan grotto-work with the duchess (see pls 257 and 258).

On Tuesday, 6 September 1768 Delany gave an account to her niece of the arrival in Buckinghamshire. After the months of rain that had contributed to dampening her spirits (already grievously low in London), Bulstrode offered a tonic:

We came here on Saturday. At Uxbridge we were obliged to get out of our chaize, the waters were so high, and the bridge that is now building not yet finished, but only a foot bridge. I suppose the newspapers have informed you of the extraordinary inundations occasioned by only one night’s rain on Thursday last. The Virginia water broke head [pl. 246] and is entirely gone, fish and all, and a house in its way carried off as clear as if no house had ever been built there! . . .

We found Bulstrode in the height of beauty within and without.32Mary Delany to Mary Dewes, 6 September 1768, ibid., IV, 159–60.

This was the very wet summer of 1768. Yet Bulstrode — located in the hills — was largely immune to flooding (pl. 247). That Tuesday’s letter, begun at 8am, was continued at noon:

We have just breakfasted, and the little Jonquil parrot with us; it is the prettiest good-humoured little creature I ever saw . . .

I am just returned from our circuit: it would take up a quire of paper to tell you what I have seen this morning only in a cursory way; but nothing pleased me more than the gold and silver fish I have seen in shoals, thousands I am sure, all swimming up in a body to the Duchess, who fed them with bread . . .33Ibid., IV, 161–2.

The following day Mrs Delany wrote further about the caged birds indoors (distinguished from the free birds of the menagerie), and the duchess’s enjoyment of all her ‘possessions’, though she was ‘ready to give every other place its due’.34Mary Delany to Mary Dewes, 7 September 1768, ibid., IV, 163.

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Description: The Great Bridge over Virginia Water by Sandby, Thomas

246. Thomas Sandby, The Great Bridge over Virginia Water, circa 1754, pen and grey ink and grey wash, with watercolour on paper, 7 ½ × 14 ¼ in. (19.1 × 36.2 cm). British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings (1904,0819.428). © Trustees of the British Museum

On a visit to Windsor in June 1757, Mrs Delany remarked on the workmanship of Henry Flitcroft’s wooden bridge: ‘Carriages of all sorts go over it every day, but it is desperately steep.’ Its high profile allowed the duke of Cumberland’s pleasure boats to sail beneath it on Virginia Water. The torrential rainfall in 1768 hastened its demise, as Delany reported in a letter to her niece of 6 September 1768. This wooden arc was replaced by a stone bridge in the early 1780s, to the designs of Thomas Sandby.

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Description: The Working Rough Map of the estate of Bulstrode, detail by Dowland, James

247. Detail from James Dowland’s ‘The Working Rough Map’ of the estate of Bulstrode, 1784. Buckinghamshire Record Office (D/RA/3/76)

The gold and silver fish that Mary Delany saw at Bulstrode were in circular pools within the groves of the pleasure ground. These were retained from an earlier geometric layout attributed to George London. This pleasure ground was some 40 acres of the total of 736 acres in the dowager duchess of Portland’s possession. Widowed in 1762, the duchess chose to reside at Bulstrode, leaving to her son the seat at Welbeck in Nottinghamshire. She gave him power of attorney to receive rents, and, from 1777, a tenancy for life, for which he paid £16,622 annually.

Mrs Delany made a chair ‘seat back’ of the Jonquil parrot ‘Caton’ in chenille with sprays of ‘purple astres’.35Mary Delany to Mary Dewes, 17 September 1769, ibid., IV, 240. It was just one among a dozen ways that she expressed her feeling for the natural world through handicraft and art; and, in this, she demonstrated the breadth and heights that women’s amateur accomplishments could achieve at their fullest.36See, in particular, Amanda Vickery, ‘The Theory and Practice of Female Accomplishment’, in Mrs Delany and her Circle, ed. Laird and Weisberg-Roberts, 94, and more generally chapters in that book by Clare Browne, Kim Sloan, Maria Zytaruk and Mark Laird. Her skill with paper-cuts had been noticed when she was only eight. Later she advised her sister Anne on taking ‘more pains’ in cutting paper.37Quoted in Hayden, Mrs Delany and her Flower Collages, 51. A 4-inch-diameter view of deer at Bulstrode Park set a standard.38Ibid., 52. The silhouettes of family members at leisure at Longleat are just as finely characterized.

In the autumn of 1768 Mrs Delany had no paper-flower project in mind, but the seeds of it were already germinating at Bulstrode by contact with the resident Ehret. Indigenous plants were the focus of the duchess’s ‘English herbal’. As Mrs Delany explained in Wednesday’s continuation of the letter: ‘Mr. Ehret is here, and she [the duchess] is very busy in adding to her English herbal; she has been transported at the discovery of a new wild plant, a Helleboria [probably Epipactis sp., a helleborine]’.39Mary Delany to Mary Dewes, 7 September 1768, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, IV, 163. By October 1768 Ehret had completed more than 150 portraits of English plants, which Mrs Delany found beautiful beyond compare, ‘particularly the water plants’ (see pl. 183).40Mary Delany to Mary Dewes, 4 October 1768, ibid., IV, 173. He began to complain about eyestrain that had come from looking at dissected plants through a microscope. Despite this, his work continued unrelentingly through 1769 until his death on 9 September 1770.

It is surely significant that Mary Delany began an English adaptation of William Hudson’s Flora anglica (1762) on 18 October 1769 (translating the Latin, and adding to it observations of her own to form a manuscript, now kept at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC).41This is discussed in Mark Laird, ‘Mrs Delany’s Circles of Cutting and Embroidering in Home and Garden’, in Mrs Delany and her Circle, ed. Laird and Weisberg-Roberts, 159; John Edmondson’s chapter, ‘Novelty in Nomenclature: The Botanical Horizons of Mary Delany’, 188, places Hudson’s Flora anglica in its scientific context. After all, she was surrounded by the productions of the natural world: plants, birds, butterflies, rocks, shells and — transported inland far from their home — batches of small sea creatures. Within this ‘Hudson’ manuscript are notes of local collecting: for example, on page 466, verso — under ‘The Fir coned Hydnum’, a fungus — ‘this was found at Bulstrode on fir-cones, in November 1769’ (cf. pls 250a and b).42See Llanover, ed., Autobiography and Correspondence, IV, 243, and Hayden, Mrs Delany and her Flower Collages, 188. The manuscript is now at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC. I am grateful to Therese O’Malley for drawing my attention to its location. She wrote to her niece on 4 October 1768 (just a year before the work on Hudson):

Surely an application to natural beauties must enlarge the mind? Can we view the wonderful texture of every leaf and flower, the dazzling and varied plumage of birds, the glowing colours of flies, &c. &c., and their infinite variety, without saying, ‘Wonderful and marvellous art thou in all thy works!’ And this house, with all belonging to it, is a noble school for such contemplations!43Mary Delany to Mary Dewes, 4 October 1768, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, IV, 173.

The ‘noble school’ was thus the place of religious and scientific virtù; the flora of England and English fungi were subjects for virtuous study. A visit to Richard Bateman’s Grove House, Old Windsor, rounded off a first autumn season at Bulstrode. Before settling in Thatched House Court in London over the winter, Mrs Delany dispatched a letter to Mary Dewes with the cryptic note: ‘The funguses are found, they were snug in a portfolio that was overlooked.’44Mary Delany to Mary Dewes, 28 December 1768, ibid., IV, 198. Only the very cold spring and early summer of 1769 checked the progress of the next season, still wet and cold in mid-June (when Mary’s visit to St James’s made it ‘a little dabby’ from rain).45Mrs Boscawen wrote to Mrs Delany from Hatchlands on ‘Midsummer Day, 1769’ complaining: ‘The weather is so dull, and the rain unwearied’, ibid., IV, 219 (216–17 for the account of the ‘dabby’ conditions in London). But the weather would pick up in early July. Just as all was at its most beautiful, Mrs Delany wrote about being pulled back to London: ‘leaving Bulstrode and its million of charms, in the midst of hay-making, botanizing, roses and Mr. Lighfoot too’.46Mary Delany to Viscountess Andover, 1 July 1769, ibid., IV, 221. It was a new-found Elysium, where the sun always seemed to shine.

The rains of 1768 and 1769 brought compensation in mushroom time. This furthered virtù for all those reassembling at Bulstrode in early August. Thus Mrs Delany wrote to her niece of enjoying Bulstrode in early September 1769:

Mr. Lightfoot and botany go on as usual; we are now in the chapter of Agaricks and Boletus’s, &c. &c., this being the time of their perfection, and her Grace’s breakfast-room, which is now the repository of sieves, pans, platters, and filled with all the productions of that nature, are spread on tables, windows, chairs, which with books of all kinds, (opened in their useful places), make an agreeable confusion; sometimes, notwithstanding twelve chairs and a couch, it is indeed a little difficult to find a seat! but your inquiries are indefatigable, and I don’t know whether they sit or stand!

Years later, the frontispiece to John Lightfoot’s A Catalogue of the Portland Museum (1786) would convey (despite his undying devotion on the duchess’s behalf to Linnaean classification) something of the accumulations of ‘promiscuous’ natural objects in the ‘agreeable confusion’ of the breakfast room (pl. 248).47Discussed by Maria Zytaruk, ‘Mary Delany: Epistolary Utterances, Cabinet Spaces and Natural History’, in Mrs Delany and her Circle, ed. Laird and Weisberg-Roberts, 135, and imaginatively reconstructed by Jane Wildgoose in Promiscuous Assemblage (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 2009). See also Tobin, The Duchess’s Shells, 53–7, who corrects the misinterpretation of the duchess as a ‘chaotic’ or disorderly collector. How the study of natural knowledge took place in a domestic setting is further transmitted as the letter continues:

Mr. Lightfoot, poor man, immersed in law, was obliged yesterday to leave virtu for lawyers, so we laid our plan for the day. . . . There were pot pouris to be made, great preparations for the garden room, and the many little matters which our happy leisure would allow us, to fill up chinks. We sat down comfortably to dinner, first course ended — second almost — when said her Grace, looking most earnestly at the road in the park, with a countenance of dismay, — ‘A coach and six! My Lord Godolphin — it is his livery, and he always comes in a coach and six, take away the dinner — will you have any apricot tart? What will they think of all these great puff balls?’48Mary Delany to Mary Dewes, 3 September 1769, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, IV, 238–9.

Later in September 1769 Mrs Delany returned to the theme of fungus:

Mr. Lightfoot has deserted us. The briars of the law have laid hold of him when he would much rather pursue the briars of the hedges! but next week we hope will restore our botanical master; en attendant we have Mr. Ehret, who goes out in search of curiosities in the fungus way, as this is now their season, and reads us a lecture on them an hour before tea, whilst her Grace examines all the celebrated authors to find out their classes. This is productive of much learning and of excellent observations from Mr. Ehret, uttered in such a dialect as sometimes puzzles me (though he calls it English) to find out what foreign language it is.49Mary Delany to Mary Dewes, 17 September 1769, ibid., IV, 240–41.

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Description: Portland Museum, detail by Grignion, Charles, I

248. Charles Grignion after Edward Francis Burney, detail from frontispiece to John Lightfoot, A Catalogue of the Portland Museum (London, 1786). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (X348 S620 1786/4/24)

The frontispiece shows naturalia and artificialia presented for auction as a ‘Promiscuous Assemblage’. Despite John Lightfoot’s best efforts in the Catalogue to hold with the Linnaean system (and with what he called the ‘Methodists’), it was the promiscuity of commerce that undid the systematic ordering of the collections during the duchess’s lifetime. The image conveys, then, an ordering that came out of the promiscuity of the natural world. Delany described a scrambling to find order: the ‘repository of sieves, pans, platters, and filled with all the productions . . . spread on tables, windows, chairs, which with books of all kinds, (opened in their useful places, makes an agreeable confusion)’.

Ehret had become interested in fungi in the wet summer of 1763. His large folio sketches in the Botany Library of the Natural History Museum in London contain studies that are delightful and informative, notably ‘Fungus Pulverulentus’ (probably of 1762, since another version is inscribed ‘G.D. Ehret pinxit 1762’; pl. 249). Less odd looking were two Hydnum species: the first found at Randalls, near Leatherhead, ‘seat of the late Lord Tyrconnel’ and dated ‘August 6 1763’; the second, a ‘Hydnum I found at Badminton in the Garden of his Grace the Duke of Beaufords’, was dated ‘August 14 1763’ (pls 250a and b). It was located under a fir tree. He added: ‘This was also figured by the Right Honble Lady Henrietta Somerset.’ In the album, there follow studies of the genus Tremella at Fisherwick Park in December 1768 (pl. 251).

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Description: Sketch no. 222 by Ehret, Georg Dionysius

249. Georg Dionysius Ehret, sketch no. 222, watercolour over graphite with ink writing, 6 ¼ × 5 ¼ in. (16 × 13.5 cm). © The Natural History Museum, London

Ehret’s interest in fungi is evident from a series of sketches made during the 1760s at different locations. Samuel Doody’s 1696 named ‘Fungus pulverulentus’ (now Myriostoma coliforme) is a pepperpot earthstar. Ehret’s other portrait of the same species in the Morgan Library, New York, is dated 1762. The summer of 1762 was hot and dry, and thus not an especially good season for fungi. By contrast, the wet summer of 1763 and the wet summer and autumn of 1768 were very favourable to such natural productions. While doing his rounds as tutor to the daughters of the aristocracy, Ehret took advantage of the mushrooming of both wet seasons: a plethora of fungi at Randalls, Badminton and Fisherwick.

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Description: Sketch no. 220 by Ehret, Georg Dionysius

250a. Georg Dionysius Ehret, sketch no. 220, watercolour over graphite with ink writing, 12 ½ × 7 ½ in. (31.5 × 19 cm). © The Natural History Museum, London

Ehret wrote (250a): ‘This Hydnum I found at Badminton in the Garden of his Grace the Duke of Beaufords — August 14, 1763. It Grew in the Shade under a Firr-tree.’ He noted two other things. The first was that the ‘Echinated’ inside of this Hydnum was the same as the one he found on 6 August 1763 at Randals, Surrey (‘Seat of the late Lord Tyrconnel’); it was not apparently found in John Ray’s Synopsis. The second was that Lady Henrietta Somerset — daughter of the 4th duke of Beaufort — drew it at Badminton. Ehret’s influence as tutor to aristocratic daughters thus extended from Bulstrode to Badminton.

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Description: Sketch no. 221 by Ehret, Georg Dionysius

250b. Georg Dionysius Ehret, sketch no. 221, dated 5 August 1763, graphite with ink writing, 12 ½ × 7 ½ in. (31.5 × 19 cm). © The Natural History Museum, London

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Description: Sketch no. 224 by Ehret, Georg Dionysius

251. Georg Dionysius Ehret, sketch no. 224, watercolour over graphite with ink writing, 6 ¼ × 8 ¼ in. (16 × 20.5 cm). © The Natural History Museum, London

In December 1768 Ehret drew four species of the genus Tremella at Fisherwick Park (from 1758, the seat of Lord Donegal). Fisherwick was landscaped by ‘Capability’ Brown from 1766 and was eventually noted for vast plantations (more than 60,000 oaks); in 1779, Lord Donegal was awarded a silver medal by the Society of Arts. The first species of Tremella was white inside the bark and orange outside. Ehret found this, as well as the purple and black Tremella, ‘upon a decayd Trunck of an Oak’.

Ehret devoted particular attention to the stinkhorn (Phallus impudicus), a mushroom that resembles a phallus, which he drew at Bulstrode on 12 November 1763 (pl. 252). Mr Achard, an expert on fungi, tipped him off as to its whereabouts. In his notes (Ehret Sketch 231 at the Natural History Museum), Ehret recorded the height of the whole ‘Plant or Penis’ as ‘near 10 Inches long’. The inside of the base was of a ‘Gelatinous Substance of a brownish yellow, covered with a Thin Membrane’. The outside of the fungus was of a ‘snow white colour of a soft fleshy Substance full of holes’. He noted that Ray and other authors had described it under the name ‘Phallus penem imaginen referens’, but that Mr Achard felt the resemblance to the penis of the god Priapus meant another polynomial was more appropriate. A final observation on the sheet opposite the drawing was that the whole plant ‘emitted a strong foetid smell like unto a Carcass’.

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Description: Phallus Found at Bulstrode Nov. 12 1763 (Sketch 229/230) by Ehret, Georg Dionysius

252. Georg Dionysius Ehret, Sketch 229/230, watercolour over graphite, 12 ¼ × 15 ¾ in. (31 × 40.5 cm). © The Natural History Museum, London

Ehret wrote in the text opposite this drawing of a stinkhorn (Phallus impudicus): ‘The whole plant was seen by the D.c L. Ed. Cap. Bent[inck] and Mr Achard a Gentlem well knowing’. Mr Achard alerted Ehret as to what appeared to be this ‘uncommon’ sight: ‘The great Cup (Testicles) (or Swelling) which encloses part of the Penis) was an intire Lump of flesh of a Gelatinous Substance’. He noted further for Fig. b: ‘This figure represents a longitudinal Section of the Testicles.’

The dowager duchess took as much interest in fungi as in other natural productions. Among the papers of ‘Margaret Bentinck, Duchess of Portland’, at the University of Nottingham are entries in the field of mycology: for example, item 63 includes ‘Fungi of the different Genera which do not seem to be described either by Ray or Linnaeus’.50University of Nottingham, Portland Welbeck Collection, PWE: it includes, for example, the ‘Garlick Agaric, with reference to Hudson pp. 691 no. 43, which was found in ‘Mount Hill Wood Septr & Octbr 1783’. PWE 63/2 is a list of fungi beginning with ‘Agaricus purpureus’ and dated 1778. PWE 63/3b begins with the ‘Brown Top’d Agaric in Oct.br upon the Grass frequent’ and includes the ‘Irregular Boletus out of the Grass in the American Grove at Bullstrode Octbr 1781’. Two species of Hydnum are dated 1769. Among the other papers at Nottingham the following are worth mentioning: PWE 64/4, ‘Mr Lightfoot brought True Man Orchis . . . planted in Duck Island’, etc.; PWE 64/2, ‘Pyrola’ and ‘Dwarf Willow’ among other plants in the ‘Bog Mould by Seat Next Grove’, etc.; PWE 7/a, sixty-four plants growing on Duck Island; PWE 69, J. Bolton’s sketches of lichen of 13 January 1770; a list of English plants by Ehret ‘finished by Taylor’, dated 1778, etc.; and extensive lists of native plants in general. Indeed, her encouragement of the study of fungi is celebrated in the handwritten preface to James Bolton’s Icones fungorum, dated 21 September 1784. By then, having visited Bulstrode in 1779, and (it is surmised) having taught Mrs Delany’s grandniece,51For a reference to a ‘Mr Bolton’ and her great-niece, see Mary Delany’s letters to Mary Port, 27 February and 6 March 1779, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, V, 410 and 413. This ‘Mr Bolton’ seems to have been more of a generalist, and there is no reference to drawing. See E. Charles Nelson, ‘James Bolton’s Botanical Paintings and Illustrations, and his Association with Georg Ehret’, The Naturalist, CVI (1981), 141–7, and especially n. 1. Bolton could complete the first fascicle:

with a view of Laying it at the Feet of the greatest and best Judge, and the noblest and most generous enco[u]rager of Natural History now alive in Great Britain . . . would afford the Greatest and most sincere Happiness to him, who is not further ambitious, than to make Himself serviceable to the Noble Duchess Dowager of Portland.52Quoted in John Edmondson, James Bolton of Halifax (Liverpool: National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside, 1995), 40. See also Nelson, ‘James Bolton’s Botanical Paintings and Illustrations’.

The decorative second title page of volume II of Icones fungorum, signed ‘by James Bolton at Halifax, 1786’, has the Phallus displayed on a ribbon among eleven different fungi (including Agaricus and Boletus) (pl. 253). This is emblematic of the drawing-room learning that took place amid Bulstrode’s handicrafts and entertainments.

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Description: Decorative second title page of vol. II of Icones fungorum circa Halifax sponte...

253. James Bolton, decorative second title page of vol. II of Icones fungorum circa Halifax sponte nascentis, 1786 ([Halifax, England], 1784–92). Special Collections, National Agricultural Library, Washington, DC

The duchess of Portland was a patron of James Bolton. In summer 1784 Bolton worked on the first fasciculus and dedicated it to her as the ‘most generous enco[u]rager of Natural History now alive in Great Britain’. Representative specimens of the genera — Hydnum and Phallus (top left) — hang on a decorative ribbon suggestive of the breakfast-room accomplishments of the duchess of Portland and Mrs Delany at Bulstrode.

Entertainments as Virtù: From John Lightfoot’s ‘Philosophical Cabinet’ to ‘a new way of imitating flowers’

May 1770 found Ehret working on a sketch of Epigaea repens at Kew. It was one of his last works. In June 1770 Horace Walpole and Richard Bateman spent a few hours of ‘hurry and admiration’ at Bulstrode.53Mary Delany to Lady Andover, 24 June 1770, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, IV, 272. The duchess’s estate included by then the ‘American grove’, a flower garden (with fish pool), the park (with grotto or ‘Cave’ and menagerie), and a botanic garden of native and exotic plants. Local ‘swamps and bogs’ were attractions too.54Frances Boscawen to Mary Delany, [unknown] 1770, ibid., IV, 261. The pleasure grounds had taken decades to develop after the mansion was remodelled in the years 1744–9.55See Audrey M. Baker, ‘The Portland Family and Bulstrode Park’, Records of Buckinghamshire, XLIII (2003), 159–78. I am indebted to John Harris for this reference and to Margaret Riley for sending me a copy of the article. Howard Colvin, A Biographical Dictionary of English Architects, 1600–1840, 3rd edn (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), 492, 603, 953, 1119, provides crucial information on the architectural transformations at Bulstrode: beginning with William Talman’s work in 1706–7 (with George London’s landscaping); moving to Stiff Leadbetter’s repairs and alternations for the 2nd duke, 1744–9, and to James Wyatt’s reconstruction of the west wing, circa 1806–9 (with further work aborted on the 3rd duke’s death in 1809); and culminating in the rebuilding of Bulstrode by Benjamin Ferrey in 1862. Dowland’s survey of the estate of 1784 — ‘The Working Rough Map’ — provides the best record of the park and pleasure ground as Mrs Delany knew them. This plan is complemented by views by S. H. Grimm of circa 1780–81 (pls 254 and 255 and see again pl. 247).

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254. Detail from James Dowland’s ‘The Working Rough Map’ of the estate of Bulstrode, 1784. Buckinghamshire Record Office (D/RA/3/76)

The visitor’s approach to Bulstrode was described by Richard Pococke on 17 April 1757, when he observed the re-landscaping of the old geometric layout of steeply descending terraces. Those terraces and a geometric grove were replaced by parkland ‘forming into grass with a gentle descent; behind the house is a wood with walks through it & round it; & a parterre is forming in one part & in another a shrubbery’. That ‘wood with walks’ (including the ‘American grove’) is apparent to the left, while the parkland slope dominates the right. The dairy and menagerie are to the bottom left.

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Description: Bulstrode by Grimm, Samuel Hieronymus

255. Samuel Hieronymus Grimm, Bulstrode, circa 1780–81, ink wash on paper, 6 7⁄8 × 10 3⁄8 in. (17.4 × 26.3 cm). © The British Library Board (K. Top Vol. 8, 11.1.a)

This view is from near the approach drive to the house. In contrast to the grazed parkland, the groves of the pleasure ground are visible as a backdrop to the architecture. Like the duke of Richmond’s Goodwood and Dr Fothergill’s Upton House, there was a shady ‘American grove’ within the wooded pleasure ground. Grimm was responsible for a large body of work recording English estates, towns and the countryside. In August 1776 he was asked by Gilbert White to document the parish of Selborne in Hampshire (cf. pls 195 and 196).

The bird’s-eye perspective of Bulstrode by Willson and Bowles, published in Vitruvius Britannicus in 1739, shows the geometric layout that Margaret Cavendish, daughter of Edward Harley of Wimpole, had taken over on marrying the 2nd duke of Portland in 1734; parts of its structure survived the major re-landscaping of 1757. Richard Pococke’s account of a visit in April 1757 evokes the transformation, which may have benefitted from advice from Philip Miller, or, much more likely, from a first and many repeated visits of Peter Collinson:56Philip Miller visited in 1754 and Peter Collinson in 1757, then again in 1762 and 1763.

There was a long avenue to the house which was taken away & a kitchen gardens near it {is} removed; to the left was a lawn to which there was a steep descent of several feet, all which is now forming into grass with a gentle descent; behind the house is a wood with walks through it & round it; & a parterre is forming in one part & in another a shrubbery. At the further end of it is a Canal covered with wild duck; from this there is a descent to the left, to the Dairy and Menagerie, in which several Sorts of birds & fowls are kept & breed, particularly Chinese Pheasants of both kinds.57British Library, Add. MS 23000, fols 34–5.

The descent to the dairy and menagerie is apparent on Dowland’s map (pl. 256). The menagerie was situated between two ponds. Like the orchard and the new kitchen garden, it was on the periphery of the park. Even in 1784 they all remained fully within the dowager duchess’s control: her 736 acres (versus the 380 acres owned by her son, the 3rd duke of Portland).58See David Wilkinson, The Duke of Portland: Politics and Party in the Age of George III (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 60–62: ‘The dowager Duchess chose to reside at Bulstrode in Buckinghamshire, leaving to Portland the seat at Welbeck in Nottinghamshire. But she retained control of the maternal estates, merely granting him power of attorney to receive rents. It was not until 1777 that Portland became her tenant for life, paying £16,622 annually for the privilege.’ Back in 1755 Mrs Delany had produced portraits of a ‘Fort St Davids Bull’ (a zebu, pl. 257) and a ‘Java Hare’ in the duchess’s menagerie. It is recorded that the birds ranged from Java sparrow to Numidian crane.59See Neri, ‘Mrs Delany’s Natural History and Zoological Activities’, 184–5; see also Festing, ‘Menageries and the Landscape Garden’, 111 and 114, for a list of the many avian inhabitants of the Bulstrode menagerie. Mrs Montague wrote: ‘The Dss is eager on collecting animals as if she foresaw another deluge and was assembling every creature after its kind to preserve the species.’60Quoted in Baker, ‘The Portland Family and Bulstrode Park’, 170. Pococke described the dairy nearby as ‘adorn’d with a Chinese front, as a sort of open Summer house’, but no visual representations of the menagerie / dairy area survive. The location of the grotto — supposedly at the end of the ‘long water’ or canal, but perhaps closer to the menagerie complex (pl. 258) — is not confirmed on the Dowland map. The Grimm views remain the only pictorial record. Documentation of the wooded pleasure ground with its ‘American grove’, flower garden and botanic garden remains insubstantial.61See Mark Laird, The Flowering of the Landscape Garden: English Pleasure Grounds, 1720–1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 222–4.

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256. Detail from James Dowland’s ‘The Working Rough Map’ of the estate of Bulstrode, 1784. Buckinghamshire Record Office (D/RA/3/76)

Richard Pococke, on his visit to Bulstrode in April 1757, described the descent to the ‘Dairy and Menagerie, in which several Sorts of birds & fowls are kept & breed, particularly Chinese Pheasants of both kinds’. Situated between two ponds, the menagerie — with dairy yard and cow yard — is labelled as a discrete zone away from the mansion. The dairy was adorned with a ‘Chinese front’. Since the grotto was clearly situated in the parkland (from the evidence of tree guards in Grimm’s drawing, see pl. 258), the location could be indicated by the circular cell-like structure near to the dairy.

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Description: Fort St Davids Bull—drawn from the Life by MRS Delany at Bulstrode 1755 by...

257. Mary Delany, Fort St Davids Bull — drawn from the Life by MRS Delany at Bulstrode 1755, 1755, ink on paper. Private Collection

Bulstrode’s menagerie — located on lower ground at the estate boundary (see pl. 256) — housed exotic quadrupeds. Delany’s sketches of a zebu and a ‘Java Hare’ date from 1755 (her only other drawing of an exotic creature was at Kenwood and dates from 1773, see pl. 311a). An enclosure to the front of the greenhouses that formed a wing at Bulstrode must have housed exotic birds such as cranes or ‘Grues’ (Grus species); these were routinely fed on short garden walks. In 1770, for example, Delany wrote: ‘This morning, after a hasty breakfast, I hurried into the garden; called on the Grues by the way; no Grues appeared; only a few cackling bantums and screaming guineas.’

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Description: Grotto in the Park at Bulstrode by Grimm, Samuel Hieronymus

258. Samuel Hieronymus Grimm, Grotto in the Park at Bulstrode, circa 1780–81. © The British Library Board (Add. MS 15537 10, fol. 14)

In a letter of 9 December 1743, the newly married Mrs Delany wrote of an idea for a grotto for her friend the duchess of Portland. Years later, bereft of the companionate marriage of twenty-five years, she completed the work, which was decorated with shells and corals and called the ‘Cave’. Following the model of William Kent’s three-arched structures topped with alpine spruce and pine, the grotto had a backdrop of conifers. Newly planted deciduous trees are visible to the right, with guards to keep off livestock.

Mary’s early involvement with Bulstrode as the widowed Mrs Pendarves — notably a sketch of 1741 — would continue intermittently on becoming Mrs Delany in June 1743. It was in a letter from Bulstrode on 9 December 1743 that the ‘honeymooning’ Mrs Delany indicated an intimate collaboration with the duchess — the grotto (later ‘Cave’): ‘I am just come from showing D.D. [Dean Delany] the Park; we borrow’d the Duchess’s chaise; she intends to build a grotto in the hollow that you have a sketch of, and I am to design the plan for it.’62Mary Delany to Mary Dewes, 9 December 1743, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, II, 238.

Years later, bereft of the companionate marriage of twenty-five years, Mrs Delany had time to complete the project. The grotto was ornamented with shells and minerals from different parts of Britain. On 14 June 1770 she wrote of the gardener / stonemason: ‘I am just returned from three hours attendance on Mr. Davies, who is an excellent taskmaster for the exercise of patience, and is duller than the rocks he hammers up.’63Mary Delany to Mary Dewes, 14 June 1770, ibid., IV, 270.

On 8 July 1770 she commented: ‘I went yesterday morning, as soon as breakfast was over, &c., to the cave, attended diligently till one, was then visited by the enchantress of the grotto; received her approbation!’64Mary Delany to Mary Dewes, 8 July 1770, ibid., IV, 274. And in the middle of the month she reported:

Thursday, Friday, Saturday, virtü went on as usual. Mr. Lightfoot here, and whilst the Duchess and he pursued their philosophical tracks I followed my own business. All the difficult part of the cave is finished, and now there can, I think, no blunder be made in our absence, though my friend Davis is as liable to such a misfortunate as any man alive!65Mary Delany to Mary Dewes (part of a letter of [July] 1770), ibid., IV, 284–5.

On 22 July she informed her niece: ‘The cave goes on briskly, and now it draws near a conclusion my zeal to get it finished increases . . . I am entertained with the blackbird of the grott that comes to feed its young . . . I have finished the Lowry [sic].’66Mary Delany to Mary Dewes, 22 July 1770, ibid., IV, 289–90; she had also written on 15 July (iv, 281): ‘The cave goes on amain; a month more I think will complete it.’ According to Llanover, the duchess’s lory, a type of parrot, was painted by Ehret on vellum and worked in chenille as a chairback by Mrs Delany. Mrs Boscawen wrote from Heligan, Cornwall, on 3 September 1770, asking Mrs Delany whether, if the grotto were not yet finished, she should send ‘ores, spars, Cornish diamonds, &c.’ as ‘a cargo by sea’ (ibid., IV, 300). The alternation between crafting outdoors and indoors, between observing wild or exotic birds and working in chenille the ‘Lowry’ (i.e., lory or lorikeet, an arboreal parrot), began to articulate the rhythms of each day. There were moments of the senses as well as the mind: the approbation of the duchess at the grotto led to an invitation to inhale the cutting of a meadow:

She invited me to take a tour in her chaise to smell her sweet hay in her farm-fields; all our senses were regaled. The weather so fine and the prospects so enlivened by the haymakers. We called at the Lodge on the lawn; went into the house to settle the plan of transforming it into a Gothic mansion; inspected some old trees, (for botanic inquiries are never neglected).67Mary Delany to Mary Dewes, 8 July 1770, ibid., IV, 274.

Those botanic enquiries, which Ehret had initiated with the duchess of Portland, were amplified as ‘philosophic studies’ of her wider possessions. John Lightfoot became the presiding philosopher in country and town (pl. 259). Those pursuing virtù were admitted into his ‘Philosophical Cabinet’.68Mary Delany to Mary Dewes, 15 July 1770, ibid., IV, 282. See Zytaruk, ‘Mary Delany: Epistolary Utterances’, 141–3, for a good discussion of the ‘philosophical cabinet’ in public and private contexts. Jenny A. Bryant, Linda M. Irvine and Emma Ruffle, ‘Insights into the Life and Work of the Rev. John Lightfoot (1735–1788), with Particular Reference to his Algal Herbarium and its Conservation’, The Linnean, XXVIII/1 (2012), 26–43. At Bulstrode, the rhythms of daily excursions after breakfast or dinner involved interactions with birds and other creatures as well as work on the grotto. Delany’s letters are peppered with accounts of strolls after meals: ‘This morning, after a hasty breakfast, I hurried into the garden; called on the Grues by the way; no Grues appeared; only a few cackling bantums and screaming guineas; sauntered to the American grove; no gold pheasants, no silver pheasants; not a hare or a squirrel, or even the little mouse.’69Mary Delany to Mary Dewes, 8 July 1770, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, IV, 277. In the same letter, she continued: ‘After dinner we went to the flower-garden to admire the acacia in flower, and feed the fish; we were caught in a smart shower of rain; hurried home.’70Ibid., IV, 278.

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Description: The Revd John Lightfoot by Unknown

259. Artist unknown, The Revd John Lightfoot, undated, oil on canvas, 50 × 40 in. (127 × 102 cm). By permission of the Linnean Society of London (C12939)

The Revd John Lightfoot was the dowager duchess of Portland’s botanist chaplain and owed his living at Uxbridge to her patronage. His significance today is as author of Flora Scotica (1777). Lightfoot’s work as botanist and author is suggested by the large quill on the desk and by the flower and fern leaf in his hand. He presided as ‘natural philosopher’ in town and country over the ‘Philosophical Cabinet’ at Bulstrode and shell arrangements at the duchess’s Whitehall home. Following her death in 1785, he helped write the catalogue for the sale of the Portland Museum in April 1786.

Natural history studies continued in town over the winter, especially when ‘the little philosopher, Mr. Lightfoot’ was around: ‘the science of shells went on prosperously’.71Mary Delany to Viscountess Andover, 21 January 1771, ibid., IV, 326. The University of Oxford sent a copy of Martin Lister’s work on shells (3rd edn, 1770) to the duchess of Portland in July 1770; ibid., IV, 275. See Tobin, The Duchess’s Shells, pl. 54, for a view of the duchess’s Whitehall home and museum, and pp. 92–3 for discussion of shell displays at Bulstrode and Whitehall. But the nasty weather of early 1771 (the ‘black spring’ of Gilbert White’s account) made for wintery confinement with cabinets and conchology; a visit from Lady Mary Capel Forbes was ‘neither expected nor desired’.72Mary Delany to Mary Port, 4 February 1771, ibid., IV, 329. Sharing an interest in botanical art (as taught to both by Ehret) did not appear to encourage a friendship. On the other hand, the visit to Bulstrode on 6 June 1779 of Lady Mary Forbes with Admiral Forbes and two children was greeted more warmly (ibid., V, 434). From January to May Mrs Delany referred to the duchess having a cold or the cramp, and on 28 February 1771 she wrote: ‘we have been choked with fogs, stunned with noise, and the streets swimming with puddle water’.73Mary Delany to Viscountess Andover, 28 February 1771, ibid., IV, 330. By 3 May, still wearing ‘three tier of cloaks’, she could finally get away from the ‘overflowings and inundations’ that came with a ‘December’ in ‘May’.74Mary Delany to Viscountess Andover, 3 May 1771, ibid., IV, 336. As she put it to Viscountess Andover just after arriving at Bulstrode:

This letter was begun last winter, that is three days ago, and now the sun shines, the birds sing, the lambs bleat, and the face of the country is entirely changed . . . Tonight or tomorrow we shall be illuminated by the two celebrated philosophers — Mr. Pennant and Mr. Lightfoot, and virtû will be in its full glory.75Mary Delany to Viscountess Andover, 3 May 1771, ibid., IV, 337.

In this way, the projects of the duchess of Portland and Mrs Delany, varying in degrees of mutual interest, were alternately pursued in town and country. They were also sustained away from Bulstrode (usually on a pattern of the duchess travelling to Weymouth and Portland Bill in July or August [pl. 260], while Mrs Delany stayed with friends such as the dowager Countess Gower at Bill Hill near Reading).76Mary Delany to Mary Dewes, 22 July 1770, ibid., IV, 289; see also Mary Delany to the Viscountess Andover, 6 June 1772, ibid., IV, 430, for the season of 1772. Sometimes they communicated by letters. Thus the duchess of Portland, on her travels in Derbyshire in 1771, wrote to Mary Delany, who awaited the birth of her niece’s child at nearby Ilam:

The bell will ring in a minute, and I must send this. A thousand thanks for the giant throatwort; it is gone to London with a large cargo from hence. I fancy I left the umbilicated lichen at Ilam. Will you be so good to let me know, for I can’t find it, which I am very sorry for. My dearest friend, will you be so kind to get me some more? It grows on the rocks in the caves.77Duchess of Portland to Mary Delany, 12 September 1771, ibid., IV, 358–9. Mary Ann Port was born just four days later.

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Description: View of Portland Bill, Dorset by Grimm, Samuel Hieronymus

260. Samuel Hieronymus Grimm, View of Portland Bill, Dorset, 1790, ink wash on paper, 11 × 7 ½ in. (28 × 19 cm). © The British Library Board (Add. MS 15537, fol. 184)

During the 1770s the dowager duchess of Portland travelled to Weymouth near Portland Bill, Dorset, every July or August. In 1772 she collected fossils and butterflies from the naturalist Henry Seymer of Hanford, near Blandford Forum. She wrote to Mary Delany: ‘I have been packing twenty kinds of sea-plants, besides sea-weeds.’ In August 1776, while her assistant Mrs Le Cocq searched for shells, butterflies and plants, Lightfoot roamed all across Portland Bill, becoming ‘very sea-sick’, only to find no new plants of note. Grimm’s view shows an empty country road best travelled in dry conditions.

Bulstrode, with its cultivated ‘Cave’, remained the headquarters of studies in natural history. Mrs Delany conveyed in one letter to her niece of 19 November 1771 how strenuous these ‘philosophical’ studies were. They had to be relieved by a bit of spinning:

I cannot tell you how busy we have been in examining the varieties of stalactites, selenites, ludus helmontii, &c. &c. Much learning I have heard, some of which I hope I have retained; the Duchess of Portland has fine acquisitions of pictures, sparrs, minerals, &c., which have enriched her dressing-room and cabinets . . . In the midst of her philosophical studies she used to start up and go to her wheel for a quarter of an hour’s relaxation . . .78Mary Delany to Mary Port, 19 November 1771, ibid., IV, 371. Mary Dewes, Mrs Delany’s niece, was married at Bulstrode on 4 December 1770 to John Port of Ilam, and thus became Mary Port.

Some of the fossils of Ilam were placed in the ‘Cave’ at Bulstrode, which was soon to be graced by a new plantation of trees. These fossils were greatly admired, as Delany wrote on 20 November 1771: ‘especially the great rock which is covered with coral, scientifically called Madrepores’.79Mary Delany to Mary Port, 19 November 1771, continued on 20 November, ibid., IV, 374.

Back in London by 7 December 1771, Mrs Delany was busy with decorating her new home in St James’s Place (pl. 261); she reported on her bullfinch Tony, who sang better in London than at Bulstrode.80Mary Delany to Mary Port, 7 December 1771, ibid., IV, 381. The ensuing winter turned cold (just as Mrs Delany pored over Banks’s South Sea plants and compared ‘Otaheite dress’ to ‘our compounded dress’ [pl. 262]).81Mary Delany to Mary Port, 18 December 1771, ibid., IV, 387. Her mood was rather gloomy at that usual time of ‘mirth and joy’; the death of her friend Mrs Forth had cast her spirits lower.82Mary Delany to Mary Port, 28 December 1771, and Mary Delany to Mary Port, 31 December 1771, ibid., IV, 391 and 394. By 2 January 1772, after a Christmas season of ‘roast pork and hashed venison’, ‘Cottingham cheeses’ and ‘sturgeon and anchovies’,83Mary Delany to Mary Port, 28 December 1771, ibid., IV, 392–3. she wrote of the ‘impassibility’ of icy London streets. It was cold enough for London to feel like ‘Lapland’.84Mary Delany to Mary Port, 2 January 1772, ibid., IV, 398–9. Still confined to her home in late January, she was kept going by ‘providers’, including ‘a perigot pie from Duchess of Portland on the road’.85Mary Delany to Mary Port, 27 January 1772, ibid., IV, 407. She arranged shells, displayed fossils and read Thomas Pennant’s A Tour in Scotland in MDCCLXIX.

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Description: A Numerical Register of all His Majesty's Leasehold Houses...Between St. James's...

261. Detail from Zachary Chambers, ‘A Numerical Register of all His Majesty’s Leasehold Houses . . . Between St. James’s Street and Green Park, etc. 10 April 1769’. The National Archives, Kew (MR 1/271)

In 14 October 1768 Mary Delany mentioned looking at a house off ‘Catherine-wheel Lane’, and, from February 1769, her letters were headed ‘T.H.C.’ (‘Thatchd House Court’, lower centre). Delany moved from Thatched House Court to her new London home in St James’s Place in late July 1771. She was still busy with the decor in December 1771, when she reported that her bullfinch ‘Tony’ responded to the beau monde in London even more than to the duchess at Bulstrode. It was from her new home that she set off with the duchess on 17 December 1771 to examine the paintings of Banks’s ‘Otaheitie plants’.

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Description: Otaheite dress by Delany, Mary Granville

262. ‘Otaheite dress’ sketched by Mary Delany in a letter dated 18 December 1771. Newport Community Learning and Libraries, Newport Reference Library, Wales

In a letter of 18 December 1771, Mary Delany wrote of being ‘last Monday at Mr. Banks’s house in New Burlington Street’. She commented on ‘the Otaheite dress, something more simple but not so well suited to our climate, as our compounded dress’. She then drew a thumbnail sketch to delineate the ‘mantle’ that hangs from the neck as a piece of cloth almost to the ground. The arm is shown bare and the hair ‘tied up in a knot’. This account coincided with the increasingly cold winter weather that required extra layers of dress and that had made London streets impassable by 2 January 1772.

On 13 February 1772 Mr Fitzwilliam, having visited Mrs Delany in her ‘cleverly-arranged house in St. James’s Place’,86John Fitzwilliam to Mary Port, 13 February 1772, ibid., IV, 416. Mrs Delany moved from Thatched House Court, St James’s, to St James’s Place in the summer of 1771; ibid., IV, 341, 353 and 380–81. wrote to ‘Mrs. Port of Ilam’ (Mrs Delany’s married niece, Mary Dewes): ‘The whole town is to put on sable for the Princess Dowager.’87Ibid., IV, 416. The previous November, Mrs Boscawen had written to Mrs Delany that the dentist Ruspini had cleaned the dowager princess of Wales’s teeth, reporting that ‘nothing ailed her mouth’.88Frances Boscawen to Mary Delany, 21 November 1771, ibid., IV, 377. She was by then only months away from dying in a snow-bound London.

Shortly after the death of Princess Augusta, life in town resumed its unflagging pursuit of pleasures. Letters refer to the Pantheon masquerade (pls 263a and b), the Macaronis, and lottery tickets around 12 or 13 shillings.89Mary Delany wrote to her nephew, the Revd John Dewes, on 9 May 1772, mentioning how gentlemen, as well as ladies, were the recipients of nosegays as the ‘politest present’: ‘Apropos, have you seen “the address to a Macaroni behind his nosegay and before his looking-glass?” ’, ibid., IV, 423–4; and IV, 425, for the lottery tickets. Still in London in late May 1772, Mrs Delany wrote of ‘Diversions, rouge, and every fantastick fashion in male and female daily multiply. Those who have mediocre fortunes grumble at the dearness of everything, and the poor are in a miserable plight.’90Mary Delany to the Revd John Dewes, 21 May 1772, ibid., IV, 426–7. These were years of the ‘frigid zone’.91Mary Delany to Viscountess Andover, 16 August 1772, ibid., IV, 447. The price of wheat and barley climbed. The harvest of a warmer 1772 offered only temporary respite.

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Description: A Masquerade Scene at the Pantheon, detail by White, Charles

263a. Charles White, A Masquerade Scene at the Pantheon (detail), 1773, etching and engraving, 14 ½ × 19 ¾ in. (36.8 × 50.2 cm). British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings (1862,1217.569). © Trustees of the British Museum

In a letter of 23 February 1772, Mary Delany gave an account to her niece of the masquerade at the Pantheon: ‘The lighting of the Pantheon and brilliant eclat on going in, they say, was beyond all description.’ Delany then wrote to her nephew, the Revd John Dewes, on 9 May 1772, mentioning how gentlemen, as well as ladies, were the recipients of nosegays as the ‘politest present’. She continued: ‘Apropos, have you seen “the address to a Macaroni behind his nosegay and before his looking-glass”?’

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Description: The Macaroni, a real character at the late masquerade, Pantheon Macaroni by Dawe,...

263b. Philip Dawe, The Macaroni, a real character at the late masquerade, ‘Pantheon Macaroni’, mezzotint, 13 ¾ × 9 7⁄8 in. (35.1 × 25 cm). British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings (J,5.42AN100871). © Trustees of the British Museum

By June, the summer of 1772 was already turning hot and dry. It would remain so into August. Mrs Boscawen wrote to Mrs Delany, now at Bulstrode, complaining of the ‘odious’ dust of London streets. She continued the letter of 20 June:

It us’d to be a great relief to me to walk or sit in Kew Gardens, or to go to buy my own peas in the King’s Road, sitting under a spreading apple-tree, while they ty’d me up a nosegay: but now all these rural amusements are deny’d, by the clouds of dust.92Frances Boscawen to Mary Delany, 20 June 1772, ibid., IV, 433.

In the middle of July, London was — according to her — ‘déserté’,93Frances Boscawen to Mary Delany, 14 July 1772, ibid., IV, 442. with brick kilns adding to the heat and dust. Meanwhile, the duchess of Portland was in Weymouth, from where she collected fossils and butterflies from the naturalist Henry Seymer of Hanford, near Blandford.94For Henry Seymer, see R. I. Vane-Wright and H. W. D. Hughes, The Seymer Legacy: Henry Seymer and Henry Seymer Jnr of Dorset and their Entomological Paintings, with a Catalogue of Butterflies and Plants, 1775–1783 (Cardigan: Forrest Text, 2005). For Henry Seymer’s place in the duchess’s circles of shell-collecting, see Tobin, The Duchess’s Shells. The duchess wrote to Mary Delany on 19 July: ‘I have been packing twenty kinds of sea-plants, besides sea-weeds, so that I am as busy as possible.’95Duchess of Portland to Mary Delany, 19 July 1772, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, IV, 445.

The hot weather led to a litany of complaints in London. Mrs Boscawen (pl. 264) was Delany’s principal supplier of metropolitan news in June or July, before the period of the ‘Long Vacation’ in August (as Collinson had called it). It is probable that Mary Delany had first met Frances Boscawen (née Glanville, 1719–1805) in 1742 through court circles. By her kinship to her great-great-uncle John Evelyn and to the Leveson-Gower and Somerset families (through two daughters), Frances epitomized, in country as well as town, familial propinquity: an extended cousinhood that meant much to Delany.96For cousinhood, see Orr, ‘Mrs Delany and the Court’, pl. 42: ‘Family Tree’. Boscawen could furnish letters from estates such as Badminton, home of her daughter Elizabeth, who married the 5th duke of Beaufort. Frances Glanville had married Admiral Boscawen in December 1742 and their residence was in George Street, Hanover Square (later replaced by a home in Audley Street). During four years of peacetime (1750–54) they were able to enjoy the benefits of a country estate, Hatchlands Park in Surrey. Edward Boscawen’s long absences at sea, however, fostered Frances’s interior life, reflected in a journal, numerous letters and her doings with the Bluestockings. Thus, on her husband’s premature death in 1761, she entered a long widowhood as the most sociable period of her life, and Mary Delany was one of the beneficiaries of her generosity as a model letter writer and conversationalist. After searching for rental villas in 1772, Boscawen found Glan Villa, a cottage in Enfield, as a summer and autumn resort from 1773 onwards.

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Description: Frances Boscawen by Ramsay, Allan

264. Allan Ramsay, Frances Boscawen, 1747, oil on canvas, 53 ¼ × 42 ½ in. (135 × 109 cm). Private Collection. Trustees of the Titsey Foundation

Mary Delany probably first met Frances Boscawen (née Glanville) in 1742 — the year she married Admiral Boscawen (who later gave the Bluestockings their moniker based on Stillingfleet’s blue worsted stockings). Mrs Boscawen was an enthusiastic gardener who had inherited her great-great-uncle John Evelyn’s penchant for horticulture. The cabbage leaf with fruit seems a rather suggestive icon, but perhaps it simply denotes rest after gathering fruit in the garden. It is comparable to Mary Forbes’s childlike image of 1764 of wild flowers strewn in a cabbage leaf (see pl. 179).

And so it was that, in August 1772, Mrs Boscawen wrote to Mrs Delany: ‘This dry summer has made good roads where there used to be bad ones.’ Sometimes this was achieved by dint of watering the dust.97Frances Boscawen to Mary Delany, 28 June 1772 and 21 August 1772, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, IV, 437 and 450. Mrs Boscawen was encouraging Mrs Delany to take the route of ‘one hour and 3 quarters’ to her rented villa: ‘You go to Portland Street, so to Islington Town, to Tottenham High Cross, to Edmonton; there where the roads divide en fourchette, a friendly post says to Bushhill and Enfield Town, follow it, aim at the church . . . asking for Mrs. Boscawen may do’ (pls 265a and b).98Frances Boscawen to Mary Delany, 28 June 1772, ibid., IV, 437. But Boscawen was not the only one vying for Delany’s company. Just a day later, the dowager Countess Gower at Bill Hill was awaiting Mary Delany’s arrival, via Staines, where the two lived ‘tranquilly’ for the first three weeks of July.99Mary Delany to Viscountess Andover, 9 July 1772, ibid., IV, 440. On occasion, and notably in August 1776, Lightfoot would accompany the duchess on a summer expedition, for example, to Portland Bill. At other times, as in autumn 1774, the duchess supported his independent excursions to Cornwall, as well as to Wales and Scotland. A pattern of summer sojourn was thus set, with great consequence for the future collages.

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Description: Map of routes from London to Luton Hoo by Unknown

265a. One among the set of maps of routes from London to Luton Hoo, 1767. © The British Library Board (Add. MS 74215)

Mary Delany’s friend Frances Boscawen escaped from the ‘odious’ dust of London streets by renting villas to the north of the city. The journey time was close to two hours. Boscawen recommended leaving via Portland Street, and heading up through the villages of Islington and Tottenham to a ‘fork in the road’. Once en route to Enfield, ‘asking for Mrs. Boscawen may do’. In 1773 Boscawen shifted to Glan Villa near Colney Hatch (beyond Highgate), where she noted that it was best to avoid the ‘wicked Barnet races’.

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Description: Twenty-Five Miles Round London, detail by Palmer, William

265b. Detail from William Palmer, ‘Twenty-Five Miles Round London’, in The Ambulator; or, The stranger’s companion in a tour round London . . . , 3rd edn (London, 1787). © The British Library Board

In August 1772 the hot roads led John Lightfoot northwards to a cool Scotland: ‘The Dss. of Portland has not this summer been edified by Mr. Lightfoot’s lectures; he is sailing over lakes, traversing islands; clambering rocks, &c. &c., among the Western Isles of Scotland, in order to lay his prizes at her Grace’s feet next Michaelmass.’100Mary Delany to Viscountess Andover, 16 August 1772, ibid., IV, 448.

At a time when the duchess of Portland was already experimenting with what would grow in water or on rocks, the weather proved one determinant. As Mrs Boscawen pointed out in her letter to Mrs Delany of 21 August 1772 (a wet day in a dry summer): ‘I believe I may present my congratulations on the heavy rain now falling, it will do good to the plants. Swamps are quite out of the question I should think, and only the families wch delight in rocks can thrive.’101Frances Boscawen to Mary Delany, 21 August 1772, ibid., IV, 451.

Meanwhile, it was a bite of a gnat or ‘something more venemous’ that incommoded Mrs Delany on a September visit to Wroxton, seat of the earl of Guilford.102Mary Delany to the Revd John Dewes, 5 September 1772, ibid., IV, 454. She resorted to a ‘large slipper’ instead of a shoe. The ‘hurricane’ of 24 September and ‘much rains’ impeded outdoor walks.103Frances Boscawen to Mary Delany, 30 September 1772, ibid., IV, 461 and 465. While working at Bulstrode on a few ‘bagatelles’ of needlework (and enjoying improved weather), she let slip casually in a letter to her niece: ‘I have invented a new way of imitating flowers.’104Mary Delany to Mary Port, 4 October 1772, ibid., IV, 469. Though the art of ‘cutting’ did not come out of the blue, this letter of 4 October 1772 registered the invention of a new artistic genre: botanical collage.105Back in October 1771, Mary Delany in a letter to Mary Port had alluded to her cutting paper on a dark ground, which Lady Llanover described as ‘a book of very stiff dark blue paper, of a kind not now known, on each leaf of which she pasted groups of figures, houses, animals and trees, cut out in white paper in the most beautiful manner’; ibid., IV, 365. The book had ‘unaccountably disappeared’ before 1862.

The composite ‘Scarlet Geranium & Lobelia Cardinalis’ is thought to be her first ‘paper mosaick’ (pl. 266). It is pasted on shiny black paper. (The characteristic matt paper came in 1774.) Inscribed on the verso is ‘Bulstrode 1773’. The notation refers to a ‘first Essay’ and the number ‘5’ has been erased and replaced with ‘1’. Hence this may be the final (perhaps fifth) version of ‘essays’ that began in October 1772. As Mrs Delany recalled later, she was sitting in her bedroom at Bulstrode.106See Hayden, Mrs Delany and her Flower Collages, 131. See also Llanover, ed., Autobiography and Correspondence, v, 215, note following letter of Mary Delany to Mary Port, 29 April 1776. She noticed the similarity of colour between the flower and a piece of red paper. That led her to pick up some scissors, forming a picture as a collage of different papers. Only three other early trials survive: the composite ‘Radbeckia laciniata w.th a yellow flower and 2 varieties of China Aster’ of 1773 (Rudbeckia laciniata and Callistephus chinensis, pl. 267), a portrait of Geranium macrorrhizum of 1773 and an undated collage of love-in-a-mist (Nigella damascena, see pl. 269). The subsequent early portraits are numbered on the back up to 52, but lack other specifics. Thereafter Mrs Delany began noting the month and year, and eventually a precise date of the collage completion, with the location of the work and a provenance for the plant specimen.107Charles Nelson was the first to point out in editorial comments for Mrs Delany and her Circle that the dates on the collages do not always correspond to the initial making of some ‘paper mosaicks’. This is discussed in greater detail below in the survey of the collages of October 1777.

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Description: Scarlet Geranium & Lobelia Cardinalis by Delany, Mary Granville

266. Mary Delany, ‘Scarlet Geranium & Lobelia Cardinalis’, 1773, collage of coloured papers, with bodycolour and watercolour, 11 ¼ × 7 ¼ in. (28.7 × 18.3 cm). British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings (1897,0505.529*). © Trustees of the British Museum

Inscribed on the verso is ‘first Essay’ and ‘Bulstrode 1773’. The number ‘5’ has been erased and replaced with ‘1’. Hence this may be the final version of the ‘essays’ that began in October 1772. ‘Scarlet Geranium’ is probably a cultivar of the South African Pelargonium fulgidum. Delany presented it again in a collage dated July 1775. This may be contrasted with the other scarlet species then cultivated in England: Pelargonium inquinans, appearing in her court dress of 1740–41 and in a collage of 1778 (see pls 283a and b).

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Description: Radbeckia laciniata with a yellow flower and 2 varieties of China Aster by Delany,...

267. Mary Delany, ‘Radbeckia laciniata w.th a yellow flower and 2 varieties of China Aster’, 1773, collage of coloured papers, with bodycolour and watercolour, 12 ½ × 7 ¼ in. (31.7 × 18.6 cm). British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings (1897,0505.101). © Trustees of the British Museum

The influence of Mary Delany’s prior accomplishment — flower embroidery — is apparent in early collages. As on the petticoat panels of her court dress (see pl. 241), the flowers are ‘strewn’ and the colours offer visual contrast. The China aster (Callistephus chinensis) had been developed as ‘varieties’ — both in terms of doubles and parti-coloration — since its introduction to England by 1732 (see pl. 125).

In other words, the ten-year project began tentatively, and only with real momentum from 1774. Mary Delany awaited the duchess’s ‘approbation’, as she had done with the ‘Cave’. As the gentle autumn of 1772 declined into winter, nothing more is revealed of the ‘imitating flowers’. Instead, as the mild season lasted into October, she resumed her habit of walking ‘abroad’.108Mary Delany to Mary Port, 4 October 1772, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, IV, 469. Frances Boscawen, alternating between her Audley Street home (with visits to relatives at Badminton) and her rented villa at Enfield, drew attention to the constraints of walking in her letter of 19 October 1772: ‘I don’t think you have been reduc’d lately to take yr exercise in the gallery, but do it discreetly out of doors, and never go without clogs (tho’ they should pinch you), nor stand still when you are warm with walking.’109Frances Boscawen to Mary Delany, 19 October 1772, ibid., IV, 473. By 14 September 1772 Mrs Boscawen, who had summered at the family home of Hatchlands in Surrey until it was sold in 1770, was looking for a new rental villa. In her letter of that date, Mrs Delany referred to ‘Mrs. and Miss Boscawen’ searching for a house in Uxbridge Common; see Mary Delany to Mary Port, 14 September 1772, ibid., IV, 455. A new villa at Colney Hatch first receives attention in a letter of 7 May 1773, and it is her summer address in a letter of 14 July 1773, in which she refers to this ‘nut-shell’. Fashion and comfort required that silk shoes be protected against wet by an overshoe, which was known as a ‘clog’.110See Lucy Pratt and Linda Woolley, Shoes (London: V&A Publications, 1999).

Just as the project had taken root by October 1772, so too the generation of future collage specimens may be traced back to that mild autumn. The Dowager Countess Gower, for example, who had her favourite Magnolia grandiflora immortalized in Mrs Delany’s collage of 26 August 1776 (see pl. 275), wrote on 28 October from Bill Hill:

I hope Mr. Lightfoot is hapyly ariv’d and yt virtu meets wth no interuptions. Pray tell ye Ds on examining ye layers of my large blooming magnola [sic] I found one remarkably vigorous, wch I have dedicated to her Grace. Ye man yt takes care of my garden advis’d me to put I in ye stove, to make it strike root ye better.111Lady Gower to Mary Delany, 28 October 1772, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, IV, 475. On 27 September 1773 Lady Gower wrote of her Magnolia grandiflora: ‘tis all perfection’, ibid., IV, 548.

Everything seemed to revolve around the duchess: Mrs Boscawen was even sending sheet cows (cf. the Belted Galloway of today) to the ‘noble mistress’ or ‘sovereign of yr Elizeum’.112Frances Boscawen to Mary Delany, 30 October 1772 and 12 June 1773, ibid., IV, 476 and 513. Gift-giving cemented amity in the same way that favours oiled the machinery of commerce. Yet Mrs Delany was already building her own alliances, which were friendships of kinsfolk and propinquity, but largely without instrumental intention.113See Keith Thomas, The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 190–93. Indeed, cultivated over decades, such friendships, though useful to her work, derived their meaning from pure affection. John Lightfoot had assumed the role of her ‘faithfull guide and fellow-labourer’.114Frances Boscawen to Mary Delany, 13 November 1772, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, IV, 479. And, though she felt her ‘brain . . . petrified like a fossil’, crushed by the torrents of sublime science, she recognized her ability to draw upon the ‘dew of common sense’.115Mary Delany to Viscountess Andover, 20 November 1772, ibid., IV, 480.

By December 1772, in a warm season of floods and plentiful woodcock and partridge, Mrs Delany was back in London.116John Dewes of Welsbourn wrote to his son, the Revd John Dewes, on 31 January 1773 of the ‘greatest plenty of woodcocks this year that I ever knew’, ibid., IV, 495. And by 2 January 1773 she was hearing of Banks’s and Solander’s tour of Staffa and Iceland, which had taken place the previous summer, from the Revd Lightfoot in person: how they threw a dead partridge into the Icelandic geyser, ‘which was very well boyled in seven minutes’.117Mary Delany to Mary Port, 2 January 1773, ibid., IV, 491. She was busy with the round of domestic and social events. As the duchess of Portland put it in a letter of 25 February 1773 to Mrs Delany’s niece: ‘The town, as usual, are full of entertainments. Besides the constant plays, operas, and oratoria’s assemblys, there are concerts, balls, and masquarades’ (see again pl. 263a).118Duchess of Portland to Mary Port, 25 February 1773, ibid., IV, 496. On 1 March that spring, Mrs Delany reported to her niece: ‘I have gallop’d about this week, and I flutter in the sun like a butterfly!’119Mary Delany to Mary Port, 1 March 1773, ibid., IV, 498. Yet late that May, incessant rain affected excursions in and out of town.120Mary Delany to the Revd John Dewes, 25 May 1773, ibid., IV, 503, for the reference to the ‘appearance of land after the Deluge’. Mrs Delany joked in a letter of 25 May from London that Lady Clermont’s invitation ‘to drink tea and walk in the park’ should have read ‘to eat rusks and drink milk under the cow’, and that ‘umbrellas were provided in case of rain’.121Ibid., IV, 504. The poor seasons, driving up the price of barley seed and wheat, were accompanied by a spate of illnesses — whooping cough, measles and scarlet fever. These did not spare the well off. Mrs Delany wrote on 17 June 1773 from Bulstrode: ‘I have heard no news but in the melancholy strain — Lord and Lady Baghot’s loss of 3 children out of 4 of the putrid sore throat!’122Mary Delany to the Revd John Dewes, 17 June 1773, ibid., IV, 519.

Despite intermittent indisposition, the duchess of Portland did not allow colds or worse to distract her from projects that summer: Mr Sheffield, ‘keeper of the Museum at Oxford’ was going to Ireland to study plants — ‘natives of the place’;123Paul Foster noted in a personal communication of January 2012 that Sheffield visited White at Selborne and edited their brief correspondence about a specimen of the crag martin from Gibraltar. and the Revd Lightfoot’s expedition with Banks to Snowdonia and Anglesey was in the offing.124Mary Delany to John Dewes, 17 June 1773, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, IV, 518. She would dine with Mrs Delany at Kenwood, where they viewed the ‘louri’ and ‘secretary’ bird (see pl. 311a),125Mary Delany to the Revd John Dewes, 22 July 1773, ibid., IV, 528. and she was expecting plants from J. J. Rousseau.126Mary Delany to Mary Port, 13 August 1773, ibid., IV, 532. At the end of the summer she went to Weymouth. Mrs Delany, instructed by Mrs Boscawen at Colney Hatch to avoid the ‘wicked Barnet races’ of late August, waited until 2 September to visit Lady Gower at Bill Hill.127Frances Boscawen to Mary Delany, 15 August 1773, ibid., IV, 532. Delany did eventually drop in at Colney Hatch for one day during her September sojourn out of London; see Mary Delany to John Dewes, 1 September 1773, ibid., IV, 538. Thus Delany’s short itinerant season consolidated a pattern that would be reflected in the provenance of the plants collected from 1776 to 1782. These alliances of kinship and amity were not new ones, so much as old ones given new meaning in widowhood. Furthermore, new enterprises arose where old ones had faded: Princess Augusta’s patronage of Bute at Kew, for example, was replaced by Lord Bute’s botanizing in his own right at Luton Park.128See Maureen H. Lazarus and Heather S. Pardoe, ‘Bute’s Botanical Tables: Dictated by Nature’, Archives of Natural History, XXXVI/2 (2009), 277–98.

Bute’s withdrawal from public life in the 1760s had benefitted not merely the ‘Eden’ of Kew (see chapter 5), but also, by the early 1770s, botany and gardening more generally. For example, the Swiss botanist, anatomist and physiologist Albrecht von Haller dedicated his Bibliotheca botanica of 1771–2 to Bute, who, in tandem with the work at Kew, was patron to Sir John Hill’s The Vegetable System. The first of Hill’s proposed twenty-six volumes was published in 1759, but his death in 1775 put an end to the project. In time, Bute decided to prepare his own work, Botanical Tables (1785), in order to explain his view of Linnaeus’s system of taxonomy. It was composed with the ‘Fair Sex’ in mind, and seven of the twelve privately printed and illustrated sets went to women, including the duchess of Portland, by then at the very end of her life. Immediately on publication, her copy went posthumously to her daughter, Elizabeth, mistress of the great house of Longleat.

Back in the early 1770s Bulstrode remained the hub of Delany’s enterprise. Even compared to Lord and Lady Bute’s Luton Park, which Mrs Delany visited for two days in September 1773, Bulstrode retained its central place, unrivalled in the firmament. Especially when John Lightfoot was in residence, it was ‘among ten thousand eminently bright, exclusive of ye star, that adds so much to its lustre’.129Mary Delany to Viscountess Andover, 14 September 1773 [wrongly given as ‘1774’], in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, IV, 542. By October the Revd Lightfoot returned to the duchess at Whitehall to continue the arduous task of putting Linnaean names on all the ‘treasures of the ocean’.130Mary Delany to Mary Port, 14 October 1773, ibid., IV, 562. At Bulstrode from ‘Wednesdays to Saturday’, he pursued natural curiosities to everyone’s delight: ‘Virtü flourishes, and his Welsh expedition has added to his knowledge and our entertainment’.131Mary Delany to Mary Port, ‘Oct. 1773’, ibid., IV, 566.

Entertainments, Merchandise and Natural Pleasures

All was not perfect, however, in that lustrous place. For one thing, the duchess was embroiled in a lawsuit over a ‘right of way’ through her property. Mrs Boscawen feared the ‘Bostonian distemper’ might incline a jury against ‘rank’ and ‘right’.132Frances Boscawen to Mary Delany, 14 July 1774, ibid., V, 13. She felt that the Buckinghamshire jury might be infected by the neighbouring jury in Middlesex, which had long been averse to ‘superiority of rank or merit, or even right and law’. On 4 July 1774 Mrs Delany wrote to her niece of her alloyed enjoyment of Bulstrode that summer:

The reviewers that were to have come here to inspect the road, wh her Grace’s graceless neighbours dispute with her about, is deferred to next week, and she goes to be out of the way; but I shall stand my ground secure and unmolested in my own delightful apartment. I have now not only the hares, the sheep, and the peacocks, &c., and their usual companions, but a thousand little pheasants running upon the lawn . . . I walk most mornings an hour before breakfast; a profusion of sweets, added to all its other charms, makes it charming indeed, tho’ the recollections of pains and pleasures occupy my mind . . .

Even worse, by the middle of July she was robbed of comfortable strolls by a repeat encounter with an insect. As she wrote to her brother: ‘a little accident by the bite of a venemous fly on my ancle, just above my shoe, has made me a prisoner for a fortnight past — and very cautious of walking’.133Mary Delany to Mary Port, 4 July 1774, ibid., V, 11; Mary Delany to Bernard Granville, 17 July 1774, ibid., v, 14. She suggested that the livestock and wildlife had a stake in the lawsuit, which was all about their livelihood: ‘It wd be vexatious to have her fine verdure at the mercy of wheels and scampering horses, and all her happy creatures disturbed in their quiet possessions.’134Mary Delany to Bernard Granville, 17 July 1774, ibid., V, 15. Later in July, however, the matter was resolved in the duchess’s favour.135See the letter written by Mary Delany to Viscountess Andover, 22 July 1774, ibid., IV, 526. She could depart for Weymouth in good spirits on 8 August; Mr Lightfoot had already set off for Cornwall. That left Mrs Delany preparing for her ‘progress’ (visitations) of three weeks, though still contending with the troublesome ankle:

I have made myself a pair of thin leathern stockings, or rather boots, and dare not set abroad without them. I have this morning had a refreshing walk; as I can’t bear the heat of the day abroad, I make it a rule to walk an hour before breakfast, which is from 9 to 10.136Mary Delany to Bernard Granville, 1 August 1774, ibid., V, 22. See letter of 5 August 1774, ibid., V, 24, for the reference to her ‘progress’.

A ‘sad alloy of happiness’ had shifted like a cloud over Mrs Boscawen, who had just lost a second son.137Mary Delany to Bernard Granville, 1 August 1774, ibid., V, 21. The eldest son died at Spa, Belgium, in 1774 following the death of the middle son in Jamaica. At this point, the youngest son set sail for America — ‘so one may say she is deprived of all her sons’ — though he returned safely. Her eldest daughter, Frances Leveson-Gower, died in July 1801, while her remaining daughter, Elizabeth, duchess of Beaufort, wife of the 5th duke, lived on in widowhood from 1803. See Elizabeth Eger, ‘Boscawen, Frances Evelyn (1719–1805)’, in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online edition: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/47078 [accessed 27 August 2012].

By 4 September 1774, after travelling to London and staying at Bill Hill (and just ahead of a four-day excursion to Luton), Mrs Delany could report to her brother in better spirits:

. . . the Dss of Portland met me from Weymouth, I thank God in good health. She had fine weather for her expedition, and found great benefit from it. She brought some extraordinary vegetable animals from the sea-side of the polipus kind, and she has had some three years that she keeps in basins of sea-water (which she is supplied with from time to time), and they have increased since she had them. She has a green worm something like a centipede, but of a much greater length than any I ever saw, and not broader than a straw, and a little red animal about the size and shape of a shrimp, that has four branches, which it puts out at pleasure, of a fine scarlet; and also throws out to a great length fine red strings with little roots at the end of each, so slender that you can but just discern them without a glass. These with some new sea plants has been this year’s merchandise.138Mary Delany to Bernard Granville, 4 September 1774, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, V, 29.

The references to ‘vegetable animals’ and ‘sea plants’ point to the duchess’s marine interests beyond shells. In addition to funding Lightfoot’s and Thomas Pennant’s trip to Scotland and the Hebrides in 1772, she was patron to John Ellis. Ellis had a particular interest in zoophytes (animals that resemble plants), and he made important contributions to the debates about the nature of these creatures. ‘Sea-Shrubs’, such as the ‘Bare-Headed Gorgonia’ that belonged to the duchess, ended up illustrated in his posthumous work (completed by Daniel Solander): The Natural History of Many Curious and Uncommon Zoophytes of 1786 (pls 268a and b). Ellis also mentioned the madrepore, or coral, of the duchess’s cabinet and grotto as another specimen of nature’s exotic ‘merchandise’.139For a fuller discussion of zoology, see Neri, ‘Mrs Delany’s Natural History and Zoological Activities’, 180–81.

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Description: The Natural History of Many Curious and Uncommon Zoophytes..., tab. 4 by Ellis,...

268a. Tab. 4 from John Ellis, The Natural History of Many Curious and Uncommon Zoophytes . . . (London: B. White and Son, 1786). Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Photograph courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library

John Ellis’s Zoophytes was completed after Ellis’s death by Daniel Solander, working for the duchess of Portland. Their text mentioned specimens in a ‘superb’ cabinet at Bulstrode, featuring the ‘Bare-Headed Gorgonia’. The figure d was drawn, using a microscope, from a live specimen on the coast of Sussex by Ehret in June 1754. Some of the algae collected by John Lightfoot in Scotland survive in his algal herbarium at the Natural History Museum, London, which give a lively impression today of the Bulstrode cabinets of living seaweeds.

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Description: Fucus palmatus. P. 933, Pl. xxvii by Lightfoot, John

268b. Pl. xxvii of ‘Fucus palmatus. P. 933’ from John Lightfoot, Flora Scotica; or, A Systematic Arrangement, in the Linnaean Method of the Native Plants of Scotland and the Hebrides, vol. II (London: B. White, 1777). California Academy of Science. Photograph courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library

Mrs Delany’s letter continues with reference to the plants and minerals of Cornwall: ‘Mr. Lightfoot will soon return with his harvest from the west. He boasts of some new plants, but has been disappointed as to minerals, as there are no considerable mines at work at present.’140Mary Delany to Bernard Granville, 4 September 1774, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, V, 29. Pleasure in new acquisitions did not always come easily to the duchess or Portland, who had ailments, or to Mrs Delany, who needed to make do with leftover ‘acquisitions’. The damp seasons had worked up rheumatism in the duchess; she had to be content with a window view of the ‘20 or 39 hares’ supping at ease on the lawn. In a letter to her brother of 10 October, Delany had other laments:

I believe I wrote you word that Mr. Lightfoot was returned from Cornwall, from whence he has brought several curious wild plants; but much disappointed with not having been able to get any of the curious minerals; and so was I, for he told me if he succeeded I should come in for a little share: no amusement gives me so much pleasure as my shells and fossils, and every acquisition, tho’ ever so small, if good of its kind, adds to my pleasure.141Mary Delany to Bernard Granville, 10 October 1774, ibid., V, 39–40.

Pious at all times, she hoped that she was drawn only to beauty and variety — signs of the ‘great Author of nature’.142Ibid., V, 40. The marketplace, however, demanded ‘enormous price’, and hence she depended on the duchess’s bounty or the Revd Lightfoot’s largesse, which she still linked to ‘the works of God’; her niece was also cajoled into writing and sending the ‘brilliant heat of the Derbyshire coal’.143Mary Delany to Mary Port, 14 October 1774, ibid., V, 41. The Revd John Lightfoot’s role at Bulstrode, after prayers and philosophy, was to arrange ‘all the Dss of Portland’s insects and fossils, which afford great entertainment, and I think it is impossible to consider the formation of the meanest worm without its having the effect of praise and admiration for the great Creator’.144Mary Delany to Bernard Granville, 31 October 1774, ibid., V, 50. Mary Delany was unsentimental enough, however, to know of the ichneumon fly ‘that gets into the chrysalis of the poor innocent caterpillar, and devours its vitals’ (see pl. 107).145Mary Delany to Mary Port, 21 October 1774, ibid., V, 46.

An exacting (and at times moralizing) sense of material, visual, social, scientific and intellectual grasp — and the give-and-take of giving — is summed up in a letter of thanks that Mrs Delany wrote to her niece on 28 October 1774:

Well, the box is come, and all its pretty and curious contents safe and welcome. The sparr (or rather chrystalization) and mundic in the coal is very curious and much admired . . . The fossils are good in their kind; the Dss having all those kinds, I keep them for my own little cabinet, but shall delight in them more for the sake of the giver than the gift. But tho’ I have (or meant to have) made our acknowledgements, I have not done with the subject; for you must inform us of their birth and parentage, particularly of some brown moss-like substance that was pack’d into the largest cockle, and a little brassish, coperish, goldish thread-like stuff adhering to a bit of slate or coal, and which has puzzled even Mr. Lightfoot to find out without you inform us where they were found, whether on rock or tree, or bog? you must be very minute in your account; nothing less can satisfye such accurate enquirers.146Mary Delany to Mary Port, 28 October 1774, ibid., V, 47.

Minerals, like people, had pedigree — with familial associations — and hence the placement of a natural production in a cabinet reflected social status as well as its stature in science.147This is elaborated in Zytaruk, ‘Mary Delany: Epistolary Utterances’, 134–5. (Delany’s brother’s ‘scarlet geranium’ likewise graced the duchess’s ‘kitchen garden’.148Mary Delany to the Revd John Dewes, 8 May 1775, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, V, 124.) It was a matter of social and scientific decorum.

Mrs Delany was just as punctilious, anxious and generous when it came to merchandise sent to her nephew in May 1775: she felt that the Indian sweetmeats were not tender enough, the quince too sweet, yet Smith’s orange marmalade was perfectly tender and sharp. She hoped the ‘essence of lavender was right’, and that (perhaps most importantly) her brother approved of the silver cup that cost ‘5l. 18s. 0d.’.149Ibid. Ultimately, though, she turned to industry, cordial company, faith and nature itself for the ‘divine elixer contentment’.150Mary Delany to Mary Port, 10 March 1775, ibid., V, 113. As she reflected to her brother in June 1775 in the context of the duchess’s attention to her ‘botanical garden’ (as it happens, just six days before Bernard’s death on 6 July): ‘How happy would it be for the world if they delighted more in natural pleasures, which lye open to everybody, instead of racking their brains and time to invent irrational entertainments.’151Mary Delany to Bernard Granville, 26 June 1775, ibid., V, 139.

Settling to Work: Early Collages and Scintillating Company

The making of the paper mosaics gained momentum in 1774. Writing an introduction to the volumes of the hortus siccus in 1779, Mrs Delany headed it: ‘Plants, Copied after Nature in paper Mosaick begun in the year 1774’. Presumably, then, the first three collages of 1773 (and the early undated ‘Nigella Damascena’, pl. 269) were considered trials, though kept in volumes of what Delany would sometimes call her ‘herbal’. The strewn flowers at first resembled embroidery (cf. pls 239 and 267); only with the love-in-a-mist (Nigella damascena) would distinctive collage portraiture emerge.

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Description: Nigella Damascena by Delany, Mary Granville

269. Mary Delany, ‘Nigella Damascena’, no date, collage of coloured papers, with bodycolour and watercolour, 11 1⁄8 × 8 ¼ in. (28.3 × 21.0 cm). British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings (1897,0505.603). © Trustees of the British Museum

This collage of love-in-a-mist represents an early attempt at a single portrait with little three-dimensional modelling. The background is a shiny black created out of a water-based, carbon black paint. During the course of 1774, Delany shifted to a matt water-based paint. In its small, seemingly naive way, it is a charming composition, as refined as her embroidery designs.

All the portraits dated ‘1774’ were produced at Bulstrode; one coincided with the letter of 28 October 1774, when Mrs Delany wrote to her niece of ‘being in haste to finish a flower for my hortus siccus’.152Mary Delany to Mary Port, 28 October 1774, ibid., V, 48. Some initial portraits reflected the duchess’s project — the ‘English herbal’ — but most were not English plants. Among those natives dated ‘1774’ are monkshood, common ox-eye daisy, lesser centaury, Welsh poppy and sea campion, and included also is St Dabeoc’s heath from Ireland. The sea-campion (Silene uniflora) and lesser centaury (Centaurium pulchellum) could have been brought home with the duchess’s spoils from Weymouth; and the ‘Papaver Cambricum’, the Welsh poppy (Meconopsis cambrica), could have come from the Revd Lightfoot’s expeditions to Wales or Cornwall. Just as likely, though, all were already growing in the collections of the Bulstrode garden.

The reference to the duchess’s botanical garden raises the question of whether these British and Irish plants were kept in order beds or ‘naturalized’. As early as 13 July 1769 Mrs Lybbe Powys had commented on how the duchess had ‘every English plant in a separate garden by themselves’.153Emily J. Climenson, ed., Passages from the Diaries of Mrs Lybbe Powys (London, 1899), 121. It is clear that Ehret had already sketched Daboecia cantabrica ‘at B.’ (at Bulstrode, possibly) in September 1766;154This is reproduced in Sandra Knapp, Potted Histories: An Artistic Voyage through Plant Exploration (London: Scriptum, 2003). and it is documented that Collinson, getting seed from Spain, had St Dabeoc’s heath in flower at Mill Hill in 1765.155Alan W. Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden . . . ’: Selected Letters, 1725–1768, of Peter Collinson, FRS (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2002), 266. In fact, it had been already introduced to English gardens by 1763.156Jean O’Neill and E. C. Nelson, ‘Introduction of St Dabeoc’s Heath from Ireland’, Yearbook of the Heather Society (1995), 27–32; see also E. Charles Nelson, Hardy Heaths of the Northern Hemisphere (London: Kew Publishing, 2011). Whether considered by the duchess and Delany as native or exotic, then, the collage labelled ‘Andromeda Dabœcia’ underlines the importance of collecting per se rather than the impetus from the ‘English herbal’. The large number of cultivated exotics among those dated ‘1774’ — Phlox carolina, Senecio elegans, Dianthus superbus, Canarina canariensis and several tender Pelargonium — points to the wide range of rare exotics at Bulstrode. Indicative of the deep roots of the North American collections are Delany’s collages of American lady’s slipper (Cypripedium reginae, pl. 270) and Phlox carolina (with its Catesby associations).

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Description: Cypripedium Purpureum by Delany, Mary Granville

270. Mary Delany, ‘Cypripedium Purpureum’, Bulstrode, 1774, collage of coloured papers, with bodycolour and watercolour, 11 ½ × 7 1⁄8 in. (29.4 × 18.2 cm). British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings (1897,0505,261). © Trustees of the British Museum

All the portraits dated ‘1774’ were produced at Bulstrode, and one of them coincides with a letter of 28 October 1774 in which Mrs Delany wrote to her niece of ‘being in haste to finish a flower for my hortus siccus’. Some initial portraits reflect the duchess’s ‘English herbal’, but most are not English plants, as this American lady’s slipper (Cypripedium reginae) indicates.

Those dated ‘1775’ make up a much larger group. The lack of a specified source or donor at this point in Mrs Delany’s work complicates matters. Among the unspecified exotics that may be taken as Bulstrode plants are the ‘Lily Daffodil’ (Amaryllis belladonna) and ‘Scarlet Geranium’ (Pelargonium fulgidum). For the first time, her London home in St James’s Place is registered as a locus operandi (but just for a handful of collages). For example, a double snowdrop, primrose, oxlip and cowslip were assembled there and dated April 1775; and the undated portrait of almond blossom (Prunus communis) must have come from a London garden early that spring. Essentially, then, Bulstrode remained (albeit intermittently) the centre of operations from May to November.

Among the works dated ‘May 1775’ (and sometimes with a specific day) appear native plants, including the odd marsh or water plant. These best convey the allied scope of the duchess’s ‘English herbal’, including, for example, collage ‘52’ of marsh marigold (Caltha palustris). Dated 13 May 1775 is the English lady’s slipper (Cypripedium calceolus), while collage ‘50’, dated ‘18 May 1775’, shows water violet (Hottonia palustris, pl. 271b). The remaining ‘May 1775’ collages are without specific days: barrenwort (Epimedium alpinum), spindle in flower (Euonymus europaeus), bastard balm (Mellitis melissophyllum), bogbean or water trefoil (Menyanthes trifoliata, pl. 271a), white wood sorrel with a rose-coloured variant (both Oxalis acetosella), the composite collage labelled ‘Saxifraga granulata & Potentilla Alba cinquefoil’ (Oxalis acetosella and Potentilla sp.), greater stitchwort (Stellaria holostea) and ‘Trientalis Europæa’, a plant of Scottish or northern highlands known as chickweed wintergreen (Trientalis europaea).

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Description: Meneanthes Trifoliata by Delany, Mary Granville

271a. Mary Delany, ‘Meneanthes Trifoliata’, Bulstrode, May 1775, collage of coloured papers, with bodycolour and watercolour, 10 ½ × 6 7⁄8 in. (26.7 × 17.5 cm). British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings (1897,0505.575). © Trustees of the British Museum

Water violet (Hottonia palustris) grows in ponds and ditches, flowering in May to June. Whether the specimen depicted by Delany came from a pond or ditch at Bulstrode is unclear; English native plants were also being cultivated in the ‘English garden’ at Bulstrode. In 1769 Lybbe Powys had already commented on the fact that the duchess ‘has every English plant in a separate garden by themselves’. Delany’s depiction of the native bogbean (Menyanthes trifoliata) of wet meadows stands comparison with its portrait in William Curtis’s Flora Londinensis (see pl. 300).

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Description: Hottonia Palustris by Delany, Mary Granville

271b. Mary Delany, ‘Hottonia Palustris’, Bulstrode, 18 May 1775, collage of coloured papers, with bodycolour and watercolour, 10 7⁄8 × 6 7⁄8 in. (27.6 × 17.5 cm). British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings (1897,0505.432). © Trustees of the British Museum

What this amounts to is a selective, but quite wide-ranging, representation of the flora of Great Britain; indeed, the water plants confirm what Delany found compelling in Ehret’s studies for the duchess’s ‘herbal’ (see again pls 271a and b). With some plants outside their habitat, flowering times would have been altered. Thus, for example, chickweed wintergreen (Trientalis europaea) flowers on high moors from June to July, not May. Just how the duchess made them comfortable in her ‘botanical garden’ is not clear. Since that botanical garden was reported as prospering in late June 1775, however, Lightfoot might well have brought city know-how to Bulstrode.157Mary Delany to Bernard Granville, 26 June 1775, referring to the ‘botanical garden’ and ‘natural pleasures’ at Bulstrode; Llanover, ed., Autobiography and Correspondence, V, 139. Chelsea Physic Garden was leading the way with rock and swamp plants.

Born into a Quaker family in Alton, Hampshire — not far from Gilbert White’s village of Selborne — William Curtis (1746–1799) had become demonstrator of plants and Praefectus Horti at Chelsea Physic Garden in 1772.158See Mark Laird, William Curtis: Demonstrator of Plants at Chelsea Physic Garden, 1772–1777 (London: Chelsea Physic Garden, 1987). In 1773 he constructed the rockwork that would later support alpine plants. It was composed in part of Icelandic lava brought back from Joseph Banks’s expedition to the volcanic island. By then a pool had been transformed into an irregularly shaped pond or bog for American or ‘swamp’ plants.159See Mark Laird, ‘From Callicarpa to Catalpa: The Impact of Mark Catesby’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), 199 and fig. 41. In 1774–5 Curtis was launching his Flora Londinensis, which was meant to illustrate, through life-size portraits, plants growing within 10 miles of London, for example, in the flower-rich meadows of Battersea. The first of the hand-coloured engravings were, it seems, by William Kilburn, though some are not clearly signed in fascicle 1, no. 1, which appeared in May 1775.160In fascicle 1, pls 2, 6–8, 11, 12, 14, 17, 19, 22, 29–32, 34, 35, 38, 39, 44, 53, 55, 56, 58, 60 and 70–72 are clearly signed. Kilburn’s drawing of the bee orchid (Ophrys apifera), as just one example, exhibits a ‘faultless precision’ that is a hallmark of his work.161Wilfrid Blunt, The Art of Botanical Illustration [1950], ed. William T. Stearn (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1994), 218–19. It may be compared to Mrs Delany’s collage of the same orchid in June 1779 (both reproduced in Mrs Delany and her Circle). The one is a professional master-work, the other a remarkable amateur accomplishment.

The ‘curiosity of Florists’ was beginning to threaten the survival of some species around London, according to Curtis in his entry on the bee orchid.162‘The great resemblance which the flower bears to a Bee, makes it much sought after by Florists, whose curiosity indeed, often prompts them to exceed the bounds of moderation, rooting up all they find, without leaving a single specimen to chear the heart of the Student in his botanic excursions.’ William Curtis, Flora Londinensis; or, Plates and Descriptions of Such Plants as Grow Wild in the Environs of London, 2 vols (London, 1775–98), s.v. ‘Ophyrs apifera’. Possession had become a compulsion. This was of concern to Curtis as an apothecary, for whom botanical excursions — from ‘Simpling Day’ to ‘General Herbarizing’ — had been a key to learning.163See Allen, The Naturalist in Britain, 5–7. Such learning built on printed as well as oral and visual knowledge, going back to the first published local flora: the catalogue by Thomas Johnson of the plants growing on Hampstead Heath, Enumeratio plantarum in ericeto Hampstediano (1632).164See also John Edgington, ‘A Plant List of 1633: Annotations in a Copy of Thomas Johnson’s Iter plantarum’, Archives of Natural History, XXXIV/2 (October 2007), 272–92. From a wild plant’s supposed medical value had come the notion of value attached to natural history. In this respect, Flora anglica (1762) — the work of the London apothecary William Hudson — followed Ray as well as the scientists now bringing Linnaeus’s methods to an English audience, notably Benjamin Stillingfleet. Stillingfleet’s Miscellaneous Tracts of 1759 had been the main introduction to Linnaean knowledge (with the 1762 edition, which incorporated comparative calendars, having a momentous influence on Gilbert White’s ‘Flora Selborniensis’ of 1766).165Allen, The Naturalist in Britain, 37. Not least, publications in English brought taxonomy to ‘Ladies’.166See Edmondson, ‘Novelty in Nomenclature’, 188–90. The duchess of Portland’s ‘English herbal’ was thus part of a much wider movement. She was caught up in the desire to know as much as by the compulsion to possess.

The duchess subscribed to Curtis’s Flora Londinensis (as is discussed in chapter 7). The apothecary in turn thanked her in his catalogue of 1783 for donating plants to his botanic garden at Lambeth in south London. Lord Bute was part of this venture, being a subscriber to the botanic garden and to Flora Londinensis, whose publication he helped finance when Curtis was in difficulties. Hence Curtis dedicated the first volume to Bute.167I am grateful to the late Kath Clark for this information. See W. Hugh Curtis, William Curtis, 1746–1799 (Winchester: Warren, 1941). See Blanche Henrey, British Botanical and Horticultural Literature before 1800: Comprising a History and Bibliography of Botanical and Horticultural Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland from the Earliest Times until 1800, 3 vols (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), II, 65–70, III, 28–9; and, for the complicated history of the publication of the Flora Londinensis, see Jane Quinby, ed., Catalogue of Botanical Books in the Collection of Rachel McMasters Miller Hunt, vol. II, part 2: Printed Books, 1701–1800, ed. Allan Stevenson (Pittsburgh: Hunt Botanical Library, 1961), 389–412. See also M. Walpole, ‘Notes on Flora Londinensis by William Curtis’, Journal of the Society for the Bibliography of Natural History, VII (1976), 489–507. John Lightfoot exchanged letters with Curtis, promising plants and seeds that the duchess had in her collection. Lightfoot thus acted as an intermediary of knowledge and materials, doubtless bringing the works of Hudson and Stillingfleet to the Bulstrode circle.

Benjamin Stillingfleet (pl. 272) was indirectly responsible for the name that attached to the group of women — the Bluestockings — to which Mrs Delany and the duchess were loosely affiliated. They met from around 1750 under the ‘Queen of the Blues’, Elizabeth Robinson Montagu (1720–1800).168See Eger and Peltz, Brilliant Women. Horace Walpole referred to their parties as ‘petticoteries’.169For the role of the court after the accession of George III, see Allen, The Naturalist in Britain, 38; for Walpole’s use of the term ‘petticoteries’, see 43. Yet their significant support of natural history paralleled the enthusiasm that Princess Augusta and Queen Charlotte both exhibited, and it had a public dimension.170See Mark Laird, ‘This Other Eden: The American Connection in Georgian Pleasure Grounds, from Shrubbery and Menagerie to Aviary and Flower Garden’, in Knowing Nature: Art and Science in Philadelphia, 1740–1840, ed. Amy R. W. Meyers (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011), 120–21. When Stillingfleet regularly came to talk to the group, he wore the informal daywear counterpart to the black silk stockings of evening dress: blue worsted. Hence Admiral Boscawen, husband to Frances Boscawen, was prone to call the ladies the ‘blue stockings’. Mrs Boscawen was part of the group herself, but Mrs Delany was an infrequent visitor. As she put it in 1769: ‘I went by invitation to Mrs. M., the witty and the lean and found a formidable circle! I had a whisper with Mrs. Boscawen, another with Lady Bute, and a wink from the Duchess of Portland — poor diet for one who loves a plentiful meal of social friendship.’171Mary Delany to Mary Dewes, ‘Feb., 1769’, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, IV, 204–5. Clarissa Campbell Orr pointed out in a personal communication of January 2012 that the close friendship with Elizabeth Montagu dated back to the 1730s, when she was Elizabeth Robinson, and is commemorated by the ‘friendship box’ of circa 1740. Contact dwindled in the 1750s. The comment on Mrs Montagu’s assembly in 1775 was clearly sarcastic, suggesting that large groups inhibit real conversation.

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Description: Benjamin Stillingfleet by Zoffany, Johann

272. Johan Zoffany, Benjamin Stillingfleet, circa 1761, oil on canvas, 36 × 27 7⁄8 in. (91.3 × 70.7 cm). National Portrait Gallery, London (NPG 6477)

The portrait was probably painted for Stillingfleet’s close friend Robert Marsham. It shows Stillingfleet with a volume of Linnaeus’s Species plantarum (1753). This work first defined the Linnaean system of classification, championed by Stillingfleet in his Miscellaneous Tracts (1759). Stillingfleet introduced the writings of Linnaeus to William Hudson, inspiring Hudson’s Flora anglica (1762). Mary Delany would adapt that Flora as an English manuscript in 1769. The impact on Gilbert White of Stillingfleet’s 1762 edition of Miscellaneous Tracts (with ‘Calendar of flora’) was momentous. Stillingfleet’s Observations of Grasses explains the iconography: grass stems on the table. He was buried in St James’s, Piccadilly — home also to Delany’s commemorative plaque.

‘Social friendships’ — entailing intimate conversations — were cultivated in London and at Bulstrode during the early years of widowhood. For example, Lady and Miss Howard, Lady Bute, Lady Wallingford and Mrs Dashwood gathered in February 1772, conversing on the masquerade at the Pantheon. In December 1774 Mrs Delany had a group to dinner at St James’s Place, including the duchess herself, Mrs Montagu of Hanover Square, her son Mr Frederick Montagu and Mr Mason — the poet William Mason: ‘Mrs. Montagu’s sprightly and inoffensive humour unfolded the poet’s reserve, and they play’d an excellent trio till nine.’172Mary Delany to Mary Port, 20 December 1774, ibid., V, 79. Yet the intellectual tenor of those bluestocking parties rubbed off in the exchange of ideas in letters. For example, when Mrs Boscawen wrote to Mrs Delany in December 1772 about her status at Bulstrode, she couched it terms of a teasing political discourse:

I have always heard that arbitrary government is the best, provided one cou’d be sure that the Sovereign wou’d still be wise and good. Now, as I am very sure yours is both, my dear madam, I have only to congratulate you upon your chains, which are ornamental, and your submission, which is voluntary.173Frances Boscawen to Mary Delany, 5 December 1772, ibid., IV, 486.

That October Mrs Boscawen had organized for a ‘sheet cow’ (so named from the white banding, like a Belted Galloway) to be walked from Enfield to Bulstrode by a ‘conductor’ to add to the ‘perfection’ of the duchess of Portland’s estate.174Frances Boscawen to Mary Delany, 30 October 1772, ibid., IV, 476. Thus the exchange of objects was as witty as the thrust of conversation. In May 1774 Mrs Boscawen was teasing Mrs Delany again in a letter from her villa: ‘I do assure you it is very fashionable to come and visit me, wch must certainly recommend it to a lady who sees masks and makes party’s for the Pantheon! jesting apart, I shall hope for the honour and pleasure of your visit when the north-east wind concludes his.’175Frances Boscawen to Mary Delany, 13 May 1774, ibid., IV, 589.

Mary Delany kept up with current works coming out of the Bluestocking circle: for example, Hester Chapone’s Letters on the Improvement of the Mind (1773), written for the perusal of Chapone’s fifteen-year-old niece to cultivate rational understanding through systematic study of the Bible, history, natural history and literature.176Eger and Peltz, Brilliant Women, 35–6. An exchange of letters followed the publication, which built on family connections. Hester Chapone (née Mulso, sister of Gilbert White’s close friend John Mulso) was related through marriage to Mrs Delany’s goddaughter Sally Sandford (née Chapone).177Mary Delany to the Revd John Dewes, 25 May 1773, and Hester Chapone to Mary Delany, 13 June 1773, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, IV, 504–5 and 515–17; see also the application of Hester Chapone’s teachings, ibid., V, 55–7. Thus familial friendships often generated Mary Delany’s efforts at improvement and self-fashioning; and, despite the diminishments of old age, confidence in her pedigree through cousinhood stood her in good stead. When she returned to Mrs Montagu’s Hill Street home in January 1775, however, she felt dazzled by the ‘brilliancy of her assembly’: ‘My eyesight grew dimmer, my ears more dunny, my tongue faultered, my heart palpitated, and a few moments convinced me that the fine world was no longer a place for me.’ She had to escape, and only the duchess’s ‘all-healing conversation, and a dish of good tea’ could refresh her.178Mary Delany to Mary Port, 19 January 1775, ibid., V, 97.

Delany poked fun at her own attempts at formal learning. She knew full well that her application to art and science came from applied workings. As she put it to her niece in June 1774: ‘I have walk’d an hour in the garden, read an account of the Fête Champetre in the newspaper, puzzled my head wth 10 pages of philosophy, eat my breakfast, and now am going to settle to work.’179Mary Delany to Mary Port, 12 June 1774, ibid., IV, 596. Over the seasons of 1774 and 1775 she kept working on the collages, still confined to her London home and Bulstrode. She was secure in the glowing encouragement of the duchess of Portland. However, with her collages of two natives — water forget-me-not and bramble — she took a first step on her own: dated July 1775, they were apparently undertaken while on a visit to her brother-in-law at Wellesbourne.180See Ford, ‘A Progress in Plants’, 207. Only in 1776 do other names of acquaintances appear as an extension of the project beyond that inner circle where she deferred in her botanical knowledge to the duchess and her chaplain naturalist. It was a sign of growing self-confidence at large.

The collages dated ‘1775’ increasingly had days as well as months attached. For example, the ‘Scarlet sage nondescript’ was dated ‘29 September 1775’. Perhaps the most interesting collage of the season was the ‘Chinese Saxifrage’ (Saxifraga stolonifera), which carries a label in Chinese on the recto (pl. 273). On the verso is written: ‘A Chinese Plant — the name written by Whang at Tong [Huang Ya Dong]’. In a letter to her niece of 11 June 1775 she mentioned ‘an extraordinary visitor here: Mr. Whang at Tong’, providing the spelling in Chinese.181Mary Delany to Mary Port, 11 June 1775, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, V, 134. On this occasion, then, the making of the collage was tied to a particular moment in the social calendar; and a portrait drawn by George Dance, said to be Huang Ya Dong, can be found today in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum.

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Description: Saxifraga stolonifera by Delany, Mary Granville

273. Mary Delany, ‘Saxifraga stolonifera’, 1775, collage of coloured papers, with bodycolour and watercolour, and with a leaf sample, 10 7⁄8 × 7 1⁄8 in. (27.5 × 18.1 cm). British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings (1897,0505.778). © Trustees of the British Museum

On the verso of the collage, the label states: ‘A Chinese Plant — the name written by Whang at Tong [Huang Ya Dong] The China man as he call’d himself’. On the recto, the plant is labelled in Chinese characters. Latin — the universal language of botany — was able to assimilate names from many other languages, as was the case with some of Thunberg’s Japanese discoveries. But, from the time of the duchess of Beaufort onwards, as this representation confirms, Chinese names proved especially difficult to handle.

Up to and throughout November 1775, the work continued assiduously at Bulstrode: for example, she created bittersweet (Solanum dulcamara), dated 13 November, and holly (Ilex aquifolium), dated the 24th. Mild weather prevailed. On 2 December 1775 Mrs Boscawen wrote to Mrs Delany, still at Bulstrode, of the two ‘summer days as yesterday and this fair morning’.182Frances Boscawen to Mary Delany, 2 December 1775, ibid., V, 179. But by 21 December, back in London, the weather was turning cold, and Mary Delany, like others, had a touch of influenza. It was the beginning of a Siberian month ahead.

In his journal entry for 1 February 1776, and in Letter 62 of the Natural History, Gilbert White noted a ‘sort of Laplandian-scene’ in London, which was ‘very wild and grotesque indeed’:

Snow now lying on the roofs for 26 days! Thames frozen above & below bridge: crouds of people running about on the ice. The streets strangely encumbered with snow, which crumbles & treads dusty, & looks like bay-salt. Carriages runs without any noise of clatter.183Francesca 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], II, 121, where he dates the thaw to 2 or 3 February: ‘Now swarms of little tipulae frisking at S: Lambeth’.

Yet a thaw (which Gilbert White dated from 1 February 1776) followed. Then came great rains and flooding too. By March, just as the first flowers were peeping out, Delany was busy with collages once again. On 29 April she wrote to her niece:

Since I wrote last I had a visit from the Dss. of Gordon, she is beautiful indeed. Lady Bute brought her here under a pretence of showing her my herbal on purpose to treat me with her beauty . . . the spring flowers now supply me with work, for I have already done since the beginning of March twenty plants.184Mary Delany to Mary Port, 29 April 1776, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, V, 213–14.

Here was a first instance of prodigious production, with a second to follow in October 1777. A sequence of most of all the ‘twenty plants’ can be reconstructed from one day to the next; they were composed at St James’s Place. She began with a variety of Narcissus, dated 7 March 1776. Since Mrs Delany appears to have made two collages of Narcissus tazetta during the deep freeze of 1776 (‘Narcissus Tazetta a variety’, dated 20 January, and ‘Narcissus tazetta var: Polyanthos Narcisse’, dated 22 January), she probably worked from forced bulbs growing in soil or water in decorative vessels. The practice of growing bulbs indoors in a water-filled carafe had become fashionable after George Voorhelm’s publication of 1752.185George Voorhelm, Traité sur la jacinthe (Haarlem, 1752). See Mark Laird, ‘Theatres of Flowers: The Art and Science of Eighteenth-century Floral Displays’, in Text of the Clusius Lectures, 1997, ed. Gerda van Uffelen and Erik de Jong (Leiden: Clusiusstichting, 1997), 5. Her tender paperwhite (Narcissus papyraceus), dated 11 March (like the white Narcissus of 7 March), was also blooming indoors, despite the milder weather of the ensuing six weeks.

One of her few portraits of blue flowers — ‘Cynoglossum omphalodes hounds tongue’ (Omphalodes cappadocica), dated 1 April 1776 — was clearly depicted from a bloom outdoors. It probably came from a London garden. Where the specimens came from for wildflowers — ‘Sagina erecta’ (Moenchia erecta), dated 25 April 1776 (see pl. 322), and water crowfoot (Ranunculus aquatilis), dated 26 April 1776 — is unclear.186See Allan Stevenson, Catalogue of Botanical Books in the Collection of Rachel McMasters Miller Hunt, vol. II, part 2 (Pittsburgh, PA: Hunt Botanical Library, 1961), 397. Uncertain too is why these two plants that generally flower after April would have been flowering so early in a season that had turned wet after the frigid spell.187The flowering of the water crowfoot (Ranunculus aquatilis) in late April is not impossible, but Moenchia erecta usually flowers from May to June.

‘Natural Plants’, ‘Foreigners’ and the Summits of Collecting beyond Bulstrode

It was June 1776, and the summer began cool. Rain was falling ‘desperately’ on the 16th. Collages — the ‘bungled out’ horse-chestnut bloom, dated 6 June 1776, and the ‘Phlox suaveolens’ of the 10th (see pl. 310a) — were being composed at Bulstrode (where the duchess ‘set at liberty’ nightingales brought to her in a cage).188Mary Delany to Viscountess Andover, 9 June 1776, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, V, 224. Then, despite an unchanging weather, there was one sudden change: a first collage recorded from a Kew specimen — ‘Eryngium alpinum’ (pl. 274). It is dated 24 June 1776. This was six weeks before the visit of the king and queen to Bulstrode on 5 August. They arrived from Windsor in a low chaise. They came with the duchess’s daughter, Lady Weymouth, who was Queen Charlotte’s lady-in-waiting. Mrs Delany wrote to her niece: ‘They were so gracious, as to desire me to bring my book of flowers’;189Mary Delany to Mary Port, 5 August 1776, ibid., V, 249. and to Lady Andover, she recorded how charmed and pleased she was by the request and the approbation: ‘Lady Weymouth was sent by the Queen to desire I would bring the hortus-siccus.’190Mary Delany to Viscountess Andover, 12 August 1776, ibid., V, 251.

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Description: Eryngium alpinum by Delany, Mary Granville

274. Mary Delany, ‘Eryngium alpinum’, 24 June 1776, collage of coloured papers, with bodycolour and watercolour, 12 5⁄8 × 8 7⁄8 in. (32.1 × 22.4 cm), British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings (1897,0505.318). © Trustees of the British Museum

This collage is dated 24 June 1776 — six weeks before the visit of George III and Queen Charlotte to Bulstrode on 5 August 1776. Perhaps, on seeing its Kew provenance, the queen encouraged Mary Delany to approach her gardeners for more specimens. Five months would elapse before Kew assumed a dominant influence in Delany’s hortus siccus.

Perhaps the ‘Eryngium alpinum’ from the specimen growing in the royal gardens at Kew impressed Queen Charlotte, and perhaps she encouraged Joseph Banks to supply exotics. But it was not until November that Delany returned to work on a further eight Kew specimens, including the ‘Erica coccinea?’ (Erica cf. cruenta) dated 5 November 1776. Nothing of Kew appears in the summer letters: Mrs Delany is simply reporting that she is ‘pretty well’; and Mrs Boscawen is trying to coax Mrs Delany to Colney Hatch to take advantage of ‘more moderate weather’ in July (that same month when Grimm worked at Gilbert White’s Selborne, seeing the wet meadows turn to splendid dry hay by early August).

During August, while the weather remained as ‘African’191Frances Boscawen to Mary Delany, 16 July 1776, ibid., V, 239: Mrs Boscawen writing on ‘this hot Thursday, July 16th, 1776’ used the term ‘African weather’ in her letter. Her first reference to the drought was earlier that July, when she looked in vain for a ‘generous shower’ to restore the green grass (232). By the end of July her flowers were ‘all drooping, and the very leaves sere and yellow’ (243). On 2 August 1776 she wrote from Bill Hill: ‘Hot! very hot!’ (245), and on 18 August, writing from Badminton, she still made allusions to ‘the hottest hour of the hottest day’ (253). as in July (and the duchess was at the seaside), Mrs Delany visited Lord and Lady Bute at Luton Park. She had got better acquainted with Luton on a longer visit with the duchess in September 1774, when she wrote in a diffident way to her brother: ‘I thank God I performed my part tolerably well.’ Trepidations aside, she gave an opinionated account of recent landscape improvements: ‘They have opened a view to the river, and the ground and plantations are fine. It would be better if there was a greater command of the river, and if MR. BROWN had not turn’d all the deer out of the park; they are beautiful enliveners of every scene.’192Mary Delany to Bernard Granville, 16 September 1774, ibid., V, 33–4.

In branching out, Luton, rather than Kew, appears to have been Delany’s catalyst, even if royal approbation in early August was an encouragement against diffidence. While at Luton, she completed collages of two exotics from the Cape of Good Hope: scarlet blood flower (Haemanthus coccineus), dated 19 August 1776, and ‘crinum africanum’ (Agapanthus cf. africanus), dated 20 August 1776. The Luton specimen for the ‘Fumaria Fungosa new species Climbing fumitory’ (Adlumia fungosa) was taken away in a tin box. At Bill Hill near Reading, home of her faithful correspondent Lady Gower, she turned it into a portrait dated 23 August 1776. Travelling with her materials in another box, she was thus in a position to undertake the ‘paper mosaicks’ en route. While flour-paste glue and ‘wallpaper’193See Peter Bower, ‘An Intimate and Intricate Mosaic: Mary Delany and her Use of Paper’, in Mrs Delany and her Circle, ed. Laird and Weisberg-Roberts, 237. might have been readily available at any country estate, the paints, coloured papers and tools (scissors, knife and bodkin) had to be portable by coach. For short stretches, she seems to have relied upon the post-chaise of others, notably that sent out by Lady Gower to collect her at Staines; but at other times she must have been in her own ‘brisk equipage’ (perhaps a chaise provided by the duchess, as mentioned in a letter of 12 May 1778).194For further discussion of this, see Ford, ‘A Progress of Plants’, 207–8.

On 23 August she also completed a collage of Lathyrus sativus, a sprig of the blue chichling pea brought in the tin box (or vasculum) from Luton Park. This was followed by the splendid study of the North American Magnolia grandiflora, dated 26 August 1776 (pl. 275). Lady Gower, enthusiastic back in 1772, dispensed Magnolia offspring to all and sundry. On 9 November 1773 she brought one to Mrs Boscawen in her ‘chaize’, just as Boscawen was throwing ‘a spud’ at a tortoiseshell cat that threatened her almond-fed robin.195Frances Boscawen to Mary Delany, 9 November 1773, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, IV, 570. It went into the Glan Villa greenhouse at Colney Hatch. On 23 June 1774 Lady Gower wrote to Mrs Delany: ‘Mag. ye great had two blooms almost ready to blow before I came away. I shall be much disappointed if her children do not inherit her blooming charms.’196Lady Gower to Mary Delany, 23 June 1774, ibid., V, 6.

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Description: Magnolia grandiflora by Delany, Mary Granville

275. Mary Delany, ‘Magnolia grandiflora’ (detail), 26 August 1776, collage of coloured papers, with bodycolour and watercolour, 13 ¼ × 9 ¼ in. (33.8 × 23.4 cm). British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings (1897,0505.557). © Trustees of the British Museum

The lineage or pedigree of this magnolia extends back to autumn 1772, when, at Bill Hill, the Dowager Countess Gower was ‘layering’ some ‘mother plants’ in her stove to give as ‘children’ to all and sundry, including the duchess of Portland. Mrs Boscawen’s gift of offspring went into the Glan Villa greenhouse at Colney Hatch. It was one of the mother plants blooming at Bill Hill that was used as the model for this striking collage.

On 30 June 1776 Lady Gower was writing again to Mrs Delany: ‘Mother Magnolia has more buds yn I can count, her daughters are all fruitfull.’197Lady Gower to Mary Delany, 30 June 1776, ibid., V, 230. By 2 August, when Mrs Boscawen visited Bill Hill and found the dowager as cool as a ‘Salamander’ and the eclipsed moon a ‘tortoiseshell’ colour, she reported further blooming: ‘Magnolias innumerable perfume the air and delight the eye at the greenhouse; 23 have blown.’198Frances Boscawen to Mary Delany, 2 August 1776, ibid., V, 246. In her letter of 18 August 1776, Frances Boscawen mentioned how Lady Gower walked around in the hottest part of those hot summer days, having given up riding ‘on account of the flies’ (ibid., V, 253). Hence Delany must have anticipated the possibility of working on the collage of Magnolia when she set off from Bulstrode for Bill Hill via Luton. Credit should thus go to Lady Gower, as well as to Lord and Lady Bute, in aiding Mrs Delany’s expanding horizons as she assembled the collages into what was eventually her ‘Flora Delanica’.

It was a highly charged political moment: the American colonies declared their independence and hostilities ensued. For all that, American plants would retain their cachet, even with a republic distancing itself from Great Britain. The perennial verdure and opulent flowers of Magnolia grandiflora reigned supreme. Delany would never miss such a golden opportunity, though it was not with her ‘sovereign’ at Bulstrode.

In this way, Mrs Delany took advantage of the duchess’s trip to the seaside (see again pl. 260). She remained in touch, as the duchess’s letter from Weymouth dated 23 August 1776 indicates:

The other day I was on the beach, the wind blew a brisk gale; I got into a little sand grotto, and read your charming letter over and over while Mrs. Le Cocq was travelling about in search of shells, butterflys, and plants. Mr. Lightfoot desires his best compts; he goes away on Monday, and I hope to set out next Thursday. He has traversed all the island of Portland in search of plants, but has met with nothing new, neither animals nor vegetables — and has been very sea-sick.199Duchess of Portland to Mary Delany, 23 August 1776, ibid., V, 253–4.

Beyond the exchange of letters and plants (and Boscawen’s ‘sheet cow’), there was the gift of a special book. None could be more significant to Frances Boscawen than the new edition of John Evelyn’s Sylva. Written by her ‘great-great uncle’, it was reissued by Dr Alexander Hunter in 1776 with illustrations by S. H. Grimm (among others). ‘Do you admire the prints, my dear madam?’ wrote Boscawen to Delany, adding: ‘Methinks if you had cut them, they wou’d have been more exactly the plant they represent.’200Frances Boscawen to Mary Delany, 21 September 1776, ibid., V, 256. The fact that Hunter had solicited ‘a noble list of subscribers’ and that Mrs Leveson gave her copy to Lady Gower suggests a continuation of subscription publishing of the 1720s and 1730s, when women were co-opting other female subscribers and sharing gifts. Evelyn’s work was clearly still relevant. Grimm’s picture of the ‘Green Dale Oak’ on the duke of Portland’s Welbeck estate offers a further link to the duchess of Portland (pls 276a and b), as well as to White at Selborne, who had employed Grimm that season.

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Description: A South East View of the Green Dale Oak near Welbeck by Grimm, Samuel Hieronymus

276a. Samuel Hieronymus Grimm, ‘A South East View of the Green Dale Oak near Welbeck’ in 1775, in Alexander Hunter’s edition of John Evelyn’s Sylva, 3rd edn (1801), vol. 2, 210. University of Pittsburgh Library. Photography courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library

The duchess’s son, the 3rd duke of Portland, lived at Welbeck. The estate contained significant plantations, recorded in Hunter’s edition of Evelyn’s Sylva. Boscawen, descended from Evelyn and owning (among women subscribers) this new edition, wrote to Delany: ‘Do you admire the prints, my dear madam?’ She added: ‘Methinks if you had cut them, they wou’d have been more exactly the plant they represent.’ In 1781 Boscawen wrote of Delany’s oak collage: ‘I congratulate you on completing your admirable 9th vol.: their duration will be equal to that of the oak, with which you close them so properly.’

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Description: Quercus Robur by Delany, Mary Granville

276b. Mary Delany, ‘Quercus Robur’, Bulstrode, 9 September 1781, collage of coloured papers, with bodycolour and watercolour, and with leaf sample, 13 × 9 ¼ in. (33.2 × 23.6 cm). British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings (1897,0505.721). © Trustees of the British Museum

The close of the season in 1776 — a long autumn, with ‘very good weather’ — found Mrs Delany, the duchess and the Revd Lightfoot ‘busy as bees’ at Bulstrode. Mrs Boscawen was ‘ranging’ geraniums and a yellow carnation with other potted plants in a semicircular theatrical display in her greenhouse at Colney Hatch. In November the news from America was still good, and Lady Gower’s second-best Magnolia was still producing blooms the size of a turkey egg. Only the usual spate of mortal illnesses — and a coincidence of the suicides of Lady Gower’s cook and the duchess of Portland’s servant, a Mr Cuttle — made for an ‘alloy of private concern’.201Mary Delany to Viscountess Andover, 25 September 1776, ibid., V, 260; Frances Boscawen to Mary Delany, 8 October 1776 and 5 November 1776, ibid., V, 264–5 and 269. Boscawen’s offer of ‘India paper’ on 20 November 1776 fed into the busyness of that autumn, which saw the production of the following collages: the native grass-of-Parnassus (Parnassia palustris), dated 13 September 1776 (see pl. 339a); the red-flowered strawberry tree (Arbutus unedo f. rubra), dated November 1776; and, above all, the clutch of Kew plants depicted at Bulstrode during November and December.

Compared to the roughly 55 collages dated 1775 (and an average of 80–100 from 1778 to 1781), the approximately 135 dated 1776 constitute a significant upswing. That spurt was consolidated by the just over 140 in 1777, with the record of around 30 in the month of October 1777 alone. Mounting these summits was aided by contact with Luton and Bill Hill, and thereafter Kew. While, by 1776–7, the balance of natives to exotics was shifting, Mrs Delany never forgot the ideal of a complete ‘theatrical’ compendium of natives and exotics. For example, portraits of English bulbs followed close on the heels of being confined indoors by the weather during late February 1777; these would have been readily available in London gardens. On 19 February she had completed a winter aconite from Wimbledon. On 28 February she was working on a single snowdrop (Galanthus nivalis, pl. 277). As she wrote to Mrs Ann Viney on 1 March of her struggles to remain dry indoors: ‘On the night of the thaw, which was the day before [21 February], I was obliged to quit my bed at midnight and go into the room prepared for Mrs. P.; for the melting of the snow penetrated into my room in every part of the ceiling.’202Mary Delany to Ann Viney, 1 March 1777, ibid., V, 289.

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Description: Galanthus nivalis by Delany, Mary Granville

277. Mary Delany, ‘Galanthus nivalis’, St James’s Place, 28 February 1777, collage of coloured papers, with bodycolour and watercolour, 9 ½ × 7 in. (24.2 × 17.9 cm). British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings (1897,0505.345). © Trustees of the British Museum

This snowdrop in bloom came at the end of a short, but sharp, winter spell. The thaw can be dated to 21 February 1777 — around the time that the winter aconite was flowering through the remnants of snow. The collage date of 28 February 1777 may represent, then, the actual day this snowdrop bloomed rather than a (post quem) completion date.

She was gradually enlarging her albums with plants from other collections. That exploration continued throughout 1777. For example, while still in London in May, she worked on ‘Arctotis calendulacea Marigold-like Arctotis’ (Arctotis venusta), the depiction of a specimen from Dr Pitcairn in Islington. William Pitcairn (1712–1791), a physician, set up his ‘botanic garden’ in Islington in 1775. That spring, with the physician-cum-horticulturist Dr John Fothergill, he had commissioned Thomas Blaikie to journey to the Swiss Alps in search of plants.203Patricia Taylor, Thomas Blaikie (1751–1838): The ‘Capability’ Brown of France (East Linton, East Lothian: Tuckwell Press, 2001). Albrecht von Haller’s Historia stirpium indigenarum Helvetiae inchoata of 1768 was one stimulus to the expedition.204See A. Cook, ‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Copy of Albrecht von Haller’s Historia stirpium indigenarum Helvetiae inchoata (1768)’, Archives of Natural History, XL/2 (April 2003), 149–56. Joseph Banks gave Blaikie his terms of employment. By November 1775 hundreds of seed packets had been dispatched to London. Of these, more than forty introductions were later credited in William Aiton’s Hortus Kewensis (1789) to ‘Pitcairn / Fothergill’ or ‘Blaikie’. Mary Delany completed a collage labelled ‘Lepidium Alpinum’ (Hornungia alpina) on 14 October 1777 from a Kew specimen that was one of the Pitcairn / Fothergill introductions of 1775.205Taylor, Thomas Blaikie, 232.

The interest in cultivating alpine plants thus developed in tandem with William Curtis’s construction of rockwork. It was just one of many new directions in collecting and cultivating specialized floras, but still within a universalizing ‘theatre’. Pitcairn was growing exotics from North America, Africa and Asia. For example, the date of 8 May 1777 is inscribed on Mrs Delany’s collage of Mitella diphylla, a North American plant that came from Pitcairn’s Islington garden. His Chinese plant was the model for her collage ‘Olea odoratissima Soland.’ (Osmanthus fragrans), dated 26 May 1777.206See Edmondson, ‘Novelty in Nomenclature’, 197. Along with exotics of East and West, alpines soon spread through the nursery trade and private collections. The collage dated 26 May 1777 indicates that Mr Booth Grey provided her with the plant of the alpine rose (Rhododendron ferrugineum). This is almost certainly the Booth Grey who was the younger son of the countess of Stamford, his older brother being married to the duchess of Portland’s daughter Henrietta. He contributed specimens to Delany for another three collages between 1777 and 1779. He would resurface in another capacity as the man behind the ‘98 Plants’ — an album of collages in imitation of Delany’s paper mosaics, dated to the 1790s (see chapter 7).207For Booth Grey, see Kohleen Reeder, 'The "Paper Mosaick" Practice of Mrs Delany and her Circle', in Mrs Delany and her Circle, ed. Laird and Weisberg-Roberts, 225.

No collections in London, however, could rival those at Kew. In October 1777 Mrs Delany acknowledged how access to the queen’s rare exotics was changing her venture: ‘I am so plentifully supplied with the hothouse here [Bulstrode] and from the Queen’s garden at Kew, that natural plants have been a good deal laid aside this year, for foreigners, but not less in favr.’208Mary Delany to Mary Port, 20 October 1777, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, V, 326.

As Mrs Delany acknowledged the impact of Kew, she also wrote of her undiminished productivity:

Now I know you smile, and say what can take up so much of A. D.’s time? No children to teach or play with; no house matters to torment her; no books to publish; no politicks to work her brains? All this is true, but idleness never grew in my soil, tho’ I can’t boast of any very useful employments, only such as keep me from being a burthen to my friends, and banish the spleen; and therefore, are as important for the present use as matters of a higher nature.209Ibid., V, 327.

October 1777 proved her most productive month: almost one portrait daily throughout a month that began with serene weather and ended tempestuously. Apart from the one letter of 20 October, Mrs Delany directed her energies away from letter writing; it was Lady Gower’s letter to her that mentioned the ‘fine weather’ in the middle of the month. On 1 October, and into the second week of the month, the days were mild, as Gilbert White’s journals indicate. He recorded the ‘vast broken rock-like clouds’, asking himself the question: ‘What becomes of those mossy clouds that often incumber the atmosphere in the day, & yet disappear in the evening. Do they melt down into dew?’210Greenoak, ed., The Journals of Gilbert White, vol. II, 191. By the end of the month, as the leaves turned yellow, storms would bring down the thatch in villages and chimneys in London. Gilbert White, whilst harvesting the fine grapes of a long autumn, noted the trees and hedges broken around him.

Aster cordifolius was probably in bloom at Bulstrode on 2 October 1777, the date on Delany’s collage. Other plants that provided models for collages in early October were Aster dumosus, Stokesia laevis (cf. pl. 230), Amberboa moschata, Potentilla recta and Verbesina occidentalis (pl. 278). Likewise, Gordonia lasianthus was apparently in flower on 6 October 1777, but this was under glass. Indeed, most of the remaining collage plants were ‘hothouse’ species (excepting the ‘Painted Lady’ sweet pea). For example, the aubergine (Solanum melongena) appears to have fruited on 8 October, although its blossoms were probably depicted earlier. Madagascar periwinkle (Catharanthus roseus) seems to have flowered under glass on the 9th. As the fog lifted to ‘sweet’ days around 10 and 11 October, and plants arrived from Kew, the swallows began to leave Selborne (though they would be seen in Cambridge late into the month).211Ibid., 192–3. The redwings appeared, and insects retreated into White’s roof. The naturalist came upon a death’s-head moth that made a ‘stridulous’ noise in his cupped hands (pl. 279).

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Description: A selection of details of four studies: A: Aster Dumosus; B: Potentilla recta; C:...

278a–d. Mary Delany, a selection of details of four studies dated October 1777, collages of colour papers, with bodycolour and watercolour: (A) ‘Aster Dumosus’, 12 × 8 ¾ in. (30.5 × 22.2 cm), (B) ‘Potentilla recta’, 9 7⁄8 × 7 ½ in. (25 × 19.2 cm), (C) ‘Sigesbeckia occidentalis’, 13 ¼ × 9 in. (33.9 × 22.9) and (D) ‘Centaurea moschata’, 12 ¾ × 8 ¾ in. (32.5 × 22.2). British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings (1897,0505.69; 1897,0505.694; 1897,0505.805; 1879,0505.179). © Trustees of the British Museum

At the age of seventy-seven, Delany had reached the peak of performance, creating (or completing) around thirty collages in as many days. Aster dumosus, Verbesina occidentalis (‘Sigesbeckia occidentalis’) and Amberboa moschata (‘Centaurea caeruleus’ and ‘Centaurea moschata’) all flower in the autumn. Yet Potentilla recta is a summer-flowering species and does not normally bloom later than September. Delany probably initiated the collage before October, then, though she gave it a completion date in October. Many commented on her productivity, even when visitors were around; October 1777 proved her most productive month.

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Description: Two representations of the death's-head hawk-moth (Acherontia atropos) with...

279. After F. Rösel von Rosenhof (1626–circa 1700) and J. A. Rösel von Rosenhof (1705–circa 1759), two representations of the death’s-head hawk-moth (Acherontia atropos) with caterpillar and brassy beetle, circa 1760–70, engraving print on laid paper. Victoria and Albert Museum, London (29638:227)

Gilbert White’s entry in his journal for October 1777 reads: ‘Found the Sphinx atropos [syn. Acherontia atropos], a death’s-head moth, a noble insect, of vast size: it lays it’s eggs on the Jasmine. When handled, it makes a little, stridulous noise.’ Though the weather was mild and ‘sweet’ enough for many flowers to bloom, it was the time of year when insects began retreating into White’s roof at Wakes in Selborne. Unlike most moths that collect nectar from flowers, the death’s-head hawk-moth is well adapted to raiding honeybee colonies and sucking honey directly from the comb.

One plant arriving from Kew by 10 October 1777 was Plectranthus japonicus.212See Edmondson, ‘Novelty in Nomenclature’, 201. Others arriving from the royal collections in the course of the month ranged from Blaikie’s alpine (Hornungia alpina), dated 14 October, to a southeastern Asian plant (Leucas zeylanica), dated 31 October. Bulstrode offered equally contrasting riches: for example, Delany’s portrait of Passiflora rubra (a tropical) is dated 17 October, while the ‘Rubus Cæsius’ (the native dewberry) is dated the 21st; the ‘Phlomis Leonurus’ (the Cape of Good Hope lion’s tail, Leonotis leonurus) was composed on an unrecorded day that month.

Here the four continents — laying their goods at the feet of Britannia (in the manner of John Hill’s Eden frontispiece) — were artificially compressed by cutting and pasting into a single month of blooming. The frenzied burst of art seemed to fend off the squalls of late October and the ‘cutting winds’ of November. ‘I do my best to fill up the time (still spared me) in the best manner I can’, wrote Mary Delany to her niece on 20 October. But, by 16 November, on the news of a young relative’s death by duel in America (‘The cause of the quarrel, a song’), Mrs Delany’s tone revealed a greater disquiet: ‘What a furious animal is man without principles to check him.’213Mary Delany to Mary Port, 16 November 1777, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, V, 327.

The illusion of perpetual flowering achieved in October 1777 turns out to be somewhat deceptive. Hornungia alpina, Rubus caesius and Potentilla recta do not usually bloom in October. Hence the first must surely have been initiated before the autumn. The second was clearly composed over the summer when the flowers were out, and it was completed only once the fruit was formed in October. And the third might have been started in September, for it does not normally bloom beyond that month. Here is circumstantial evidence, then, that the inscribed date is more likely the date of completion (post quem) than the date of composition.

None the less, even accepting that a few of the approximately thirty collages of the month were substantially composed before October 1777, Delany’s productivity remains exceptional. That she also worked industriously, despite visitors, is obvious from the inscription on ‘Physalis cretica’ (Physalis angulata), based on a Kew specimen and dated 13 October 1777. That was the day when Lady Gower, whose name is inscribed on the verso, paid a social visit. Mrs Delany’s letter of 20 October and Lady Gower’s letter of 17 October both confirm the visit. Mrs Dash-wood had been of the company too. (After that, Delany and the duchess were indeed ‘quite alone’, though by no means ‘unkit’, that is, without kith or kin, for the thirty or so hares and other ‘guests’ turned up for a supper at the duchess’s ‘bountiful hand’.214Mary Delany to Mary Port, 20 October 1777, ibid., V, 325; see also Lady Gower to Mrs Delany, 17 October 1777, ibid., V, 324.) In short, the evidence of an intensity of working on a single day supports what Dr Delany had once called an industry between the ‘coolings of her tea’.

Widening Orbits: The Late Collages, Private Collectors and London Nurserymen

In the seasons of 1778 and 1779 Mrs Delany’s project gained in reputation, though her productivity waned. She widened the orbits of her summer excursions: ‘I have for some weeks past been a sort of rambler in a little compass; trying my wings for a longer flight, if my strength will allow me’, she wrote to her nephew on 9 July 1778.215Mary Delany to the Revd John Dewes, 9 July 1778, ibid., V, 363. She enjoyed the ‘Paradise’ of Luton in June 1778, practicing virtù, as at Bulstrode; in July the Swedish virtuoso Clas Alstroemer came to Bulstrode with Dr Solander, who brought a flower called ‘the Stuartia’ (Stewartia malacodendron) from Kew. It was the American shrub named after the 3rd earl of Bute.216Mary Delany to Mary Port, 27 July 1778, ibid., V, 365–6. The collage is dated July 1778. Later that summer an itinerary was planned: Bill Hill, Wroxton, Wellesbourne and Lord Willoughby’s Compton Verney. The earl of Guilford coaxed a rather weakened Mrs Delany with the promise of two young men and three kinds of lilies in bloom at Wroxton. Plants were sent to her from hither and yon. Thus the season of 1778 is represented by the ‘Calla æthiopica’, dated 6 March 1778 and provided by Sir John Boyd of Danson Hill, Kent; or by the ‘Dianthus caryophyllus / 2 varietys’, dated 3 June 1778 and given by Mrs Dashwood. The season of 1779 included the ‘Mimosa arborea’ (Albizia julibrissin), dated 28 September 1779 and associated with ‘Mr. Bateman’ at Old Windsor, and ‘Clethra Virginia’ (Clethra alnifolia), dated 1 September 1779 and growing at Lady Gower’s Bill Hill.

The intensive action was shifting to London and its environs (pl. 280). As the circle of contributors expanded within London (Mrs Astley at Barnes, Lord Mansfield at Kenwood, Lord Dartmouth at Blackheath, etc.), Pitcairn extended his offerings to an eventual twenty-six specimens. Kew and Chelsea Physic Garden continued their central role: the former providing 76 out of a total of 190 plants recorded with provenance, and the latter eventually supplying 19 specimens. Thus, for example, on 5 June 1778 Mrs Delany completed at St James’s Place the ‘Fothergilla of Solander’ (Fothergilla gardenii) that came from the Physic Garden. Dr Fothergill himself became a contributor in April 1779, supplying six specimens.

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Description: Twenty-Five Miles Round London by Palmer, William

280. William Palmer, ‘Twenty-Five Miles Round London’, in The Ambulator; or, The stranger’s companion in a tour round London . . . , 3rd edn (London, 1787). © The British Library Board

Inside the 25-mile circle inscribed around London, several of Delany’s collecting grounds can be identified: at 35 WNW was Bulstrode, just to the north of Windsor; at 30 ESE was Sir John Boyd’s Danson Hill in Kent, not far from the settlement of Eltham where James Sherard built his plant collections in the 1720s. Inside the ‘Penny Post’ boundary (the wiggly pink line), lay the following gardens: Mrs Astley’s Barnes (just before Kew and Richmond, SW); Mrs Boscawen’s Glan Villa (near Enfield, N); Dr Fothergill’s Upton (near West Ham, E); the earl of Mansfield’s Kenwood (between Hampstead and Highgate, WNW) and James Lee’s nursery at Hammersmith (W of Kensington). Luton and Bill Hill lay just outside the map’s circle.

In spring 1779 Mrs Delany’s niece’s daughter — christened Mary Ann but called Georgina — was staying at St James’s Place (during a difficult time for her parents), and she remained there until mid-May. She participated in excursions to private botanic gardens and nurserymen in the vicinity of London. On 17 April 1779, for example, Delany wrote:

I am so busy now with rare specimens from all my botanical friends, and idle visitors and my little charge must have a share of my time . . . that it generally drives my writing to candlelight, which does not suit my age-worn eyes. Well, now a word or two journal wise. Last Tuesday . . . I took my little bird and Mrs. Pott to Upton in Essex, 10 mile off, to Dr Fothergill’s Garden, crammed my tine box with exoticks, overpowered with such variety I knew not what to chuse!217Mary Delany to Mary Port, 17 April 1779, ibid., V, 421–2.

Pitcairn’s botanical garden was visited on 17 May 1779. On 22 May Mary Delany was passing a ‘melancholly day’ after her great-niece had departed. That did not prevent her finishing ‘the flower I began yesterday’ (the closest being the ‘Gorteria rigens’ [Gazania rigens], dated 27 May 1779 and cut from a Pitcairn specimen, pl. 281).218Mary Delany to Georgina Port, 22 May 1779, ibid., V, 429. Only a return to the ‘Elisium’ of Bulstrode in June 1779 improved her mood, for the estate was caught in the highest beauty. She would later describe the estate to Georgina:

. . . woods, and groves, and lawns, and terrasses . . . all enliven’d with such a variety of animals . . . beautiful deer, oxen, cows, sheep of all countrys, bufalos, mouflons, horses, asses; all in their proper places . . . The great lawn before the house is the nursery of all sorts of pheasants, pea fowl and Guinea fowl, beside interlopers of Bantam pigeons . . . [all under] the diligent eye of their sovereign lady.219Mary Delany to Georgina Port, 1 August 1779, ibid., V, 448–9.

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Description: Gorteria rigens (Gazania rigens) by Delany, Mary Granville

281. Mary Delany, ‘Gorteria rigens’ (Gazania rigens), St James’s Place, 27 May 1779, collage of coloured papers, with bodycolour and watercolour, 13 × 8 7⁄8 in. (32.9 × 22.5 cm). British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings (1897,0505.399). © Trustees of the British Museum

Dr Pitcairn supplied the specimen for this collage from his garden in Islington. It was one among twenty-six he contributed to the hortus siccus, notably Osmanthus fragrans from China. Pitcairn was a physician at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, and he employed collectors in both the West and East Indies. With John Fothergill, he also sponsored collecting in the European Alps.

After Georgina’s departure in spring 1779, Mrs Delany kept up the tutelage through exchange of letters. In 1780, for example, she was reading her great-niece’s letter in the grotto at Bulstrode. On 21 September 1780 Great-Aunt Delany wrote back: ‘I have done some rare flowers, and the Dss has been very busy, and Mr. Lightfoot . . . ranging the birds’ nests and eggs in their proper cabinet.’220Mary Delany to Georgina Port, 21 September 1780, ibid., V, 563. Everything had to be properly ordered at Bulstrode as the decorum of taxonomy and manners dictated.

Dr Solander, who had observed the transit of Venus with Joseph Banks back in 1769, was central to the taxonomic efforts at Kew. He acted as liaison between Kew and his duties for the duchess. Daniel Solander was Banks’s librarian and field assistant, while acting as curator of the duchess’s shell and insect cabinets. Many of the new plants carry his name: for example, her ‘Philadelphus aromaticus Solander’ (the New Zealand ‘Manuka’, Leptospermum scoparium), dated June 1778.221Edmondson, ‘Novelty in Nomenclature’, 191, 199 and 195, where he explains some developments in nomenclature through this collage. Leptospermum scoparium occurs in Australia as well as New Zealand. On Australian plants cultivated in England, see E. C. Nelson, ‘Australian Plants Cultivated in England before 1788’, Telopea, II (1983), 347–53, and Nelson, ‘ “And flowers for our amusement . . . ”: The Early Collecting and Cultivation of Australian Plants in Europe and the Problems Encountered by Today’s Taxonomists’, in History of Systematic Botany in Australasia, ed. P. Short (Melbourne: Australian Systematic Botany Society, 1990), 285–96. Plants from across the seven seas were being added to the original compendium of the four continents.

On occasions, Mary Delany’s dating of a given collage correlates with her account of a visit to a specific place. This was the case with the portrait of Crinum asiaticum, dated 12 May 1780. It added a plant of the Far East to the compendium. Delany explained how she came upon it at the nursery of James Lee, which now rivalled Kew for exotics (and eventually supplied her with more than forty specimens). She wrote to her niece of a visit there on 11 May with her great-niece, Georgina, who was resident again in London:

I am just returned from a pleasant tour this morning with yr dear child. . . . We went to Lee’s at Hammersmith, in search of flowers, but only met with a crinum, a sort of Pancratium; from thence returned to Kensington, bought cheesecakes, buns, &c. a whole 18 pennyworth; from thence to a lane that leads to Brompton, bought nosegays; and are now came home hungry as hawks . . .222Mary Delany to Mary Port, 11 May 1780, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, V, 519.

On that occasion, domestic matters held up the composition until the day after the nursery visit. Otherwise, nothing stopped the flow of work.223This is well covered in Ford, ‘A Progress in Plants’, 214–16. Eventually, Miss Jennings ‘a pupil of mine in the paper mosaic work (and the only one I have hopes of )’ would help when infirmities set in.224Mary Delany to Mary Port, 3 November 1780, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, V, 571–2. Delany’s work shifted increasingly into the public realm, engaging wider social circles. On 7 December 1778 Mrs Boscawen wrote: ‘Many plants have been immortaliz’d, I suppose, since I paid my tribute of admiration to them.’225Frances Boscawen to Mary Delany, 7 December 1778, ibid., V, 399. She had contributed her own ‘Bloody Wall-flower’ from Glan Villa on 2 May 1778: ‘Cheiranthus cheiri’ (Erysimum cheiri cv.). On 17 September 1781 Boscawen returned to the theme of posterity: ‘I congratulate you on completing your admirable 9th vol.: their duration will be equal to that of the oak, with which you close them so properly [see pl. 276b], and so like a good English woman. If English women (in return) were but like you!’226Frances Boscawen to Mary Delany, 17 September 1781, ibid., VI, 52.

As a corollary of increased public attention came a change of name. When the king and queen visited Bulstrode on 12 August 1778, Mrs Delany referred to His Majesty’s request to see the ‘book of flowers’; and on the royal visit of October 1779 a ‘volume of the plants’ was mentioned. In July 1779, as Lady Bute invited Mrs Delany to Luton again, the terms ‘Paper Mosaick’ and ‘an imitation of an hortus siccus’ were still in use, and ‘paper mosaic’ surfaced again in a letter to Mrs Anne Viney.227See the letter of the countess of Bute to Mary Delany, 5 July 1779, and the notes following, ibid., V, 441–4; see also V, 481. But on 3 May 1781 Mrs Delany wrote to her niece about ‘4 visitors that come this morning to visit Flora Delanica’.228Mary Delany to Mary Port, 3 May 1781, ibid., VI, 17. So too Mrs Delany became conscious of commemorating her closest encourager. Among the final works was the collage of Portlandia grandiflora, dated 9 August 1782 (pl. 282a). It came from a Kew specimen. Named after the duchess of Portland, it was the associative plant par excellence within the ten volumes making up, through such associations, her album amicorum. In the same way, a pale yellow double hollyhock (Alcea rosea cv.), given by the Revd Lightfoot, became a beautiful collage on 11 September 1782 (pl. 282b).

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Description: Portlandia grandiflora by Delany, Mary Granville

282a. Mary Delany, ‘Portlandia grandiflora’, 9 August 1782, collage of coloured papers, with bodycolour and watercolour, 13 5⁄8 × 9 ¾ in. (34.5 × 24.6 cm). British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings (1897,0505.692). © Trustees of the British Museum

Kew supplied the specimen of Portlandia grandiflora in the genus named after the duchess of Portland. The specimen of the double yellow hollyhock was supplied by John Lightfoot, perhaps from his own garden in Uxbridge. It is among the very last of the collages undertaken by Delany at the age of eighty-two. Although this is a double variety, it closely resembles the representation of hollyhocks in her court dreess, designed amd embroidered over forty years before (see pls 239 and 241).

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Description: Alcea Rosea by Delany, Mary Granville

282b. Mary Delany, ‘Alcea Rosea’, Bulstrode, 11 September 1782, collage of coloured papers, with bodycolour and watercolour, 13 5⁄8 × 9 ¾ in. (34.7 × 25 cm). British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings (1897,0505.905). © Trustees of the British Museum

Above all, recalling the inspiration of the duchess’s ‘English herbal’, Mary Delany did not forget English plants: the ‘Tomentilla reptans’ (9 October 1782) was the last fully dated collage. Sustaining a ten-year devotion to a potential 1,000-collage collection in ten volumes had run its course. Her stamina gave out short of that mark, but probably beyond the 970 British Museum collages (since there are missing ones and some went to the royal collections). ‘Budleja capitata globosa. Hort. Kewensis’ (Buddleja globosa) is inscribed on the verso of the collage: ‘begun in St James’s Place / finished at Bulstrode 12 August 1782’. Thus the effort to complete the work was proving harder and harder, and Miss Jennings, who had contributed plants to the hortus siccus from 1779, took over on three occasions (with her name inscribed on the verso). Miss Jennings and Sir George Howard had both offered species of indoor geranium (pl. 283a). Delany’s contribution to the representation of plants that were to form the genus Pelargonium proved a sustained endeavour: from her mantua petticoat onwards (pls 239 and 283b). A new generation of botanical collage makers would include The Honourable Booth Grey with his album of ‘98 Plants’ produced in the 1790s (see pls 308b and 310b).

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Description: Geranium Inquinans, detail by Delany, Mary Granville

283a. Detail of Mary Delany, ‘Geran:m Inquinans’, 21 October 1778, collage of coloured papers, with bodycolour and watercolour, 13 ½ × 9 3⁄8 in. (34.2 × 23.7 cm). British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings (1897,0505.372). © Trustees of the British Museum

A continuity of accomplishment is apparent in the depiction of the same species in two different media nearly forty years apart. What is now Pelargonium inquinans was first cultivated in Britain before 1713 by Bishop Compton in his Fulham garden. It is also depicted in Robert Furber’s Twelve Months of Flowers (1730) in the ‘June’ plate.

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Description: Geranium and auricula, from the right half of the front petticoat panel, detail by...

283b. Detail, showing ‘Geranium’ and auricula, from the right half of the front petticoat panel, designed by Mary Pendarves, 1740–41, silk embroidery on satin, 41 3⁄8 × 69 ¼ in. (105 × 176 cm). Private Collection

PART II
Dimmed Eyesight and Occluded Sun in the Season of Fire and Ice

Like Ehret before her, Mrs Delany complained of eye trouble. It was September 1782. She could still cut the odd flower on black, but her eyes were dazzled by the white paper of letters.229Mary Delany to Mary Port, 29 September 1782, ibid., VI, 114. In her eighty-third year, her eyesight deteriorated, though it never failed. She laid down scissors and knife. Despite this, she kept receiving letters, occasionally sending a short note too. A daily regimen of walking, oyster eating and liberal conversing continued at Bulstrode until winter. It resumed the following summer. On 31 July 1783 she happened to be back in London. She wrote to her great-niece, Georgina: ‘I miss you in every corner from morning to night, and instead of meeting with comforters, every one belonging to my house is in the same case; yet I must say I rejoyce you are gone of this hot unwholesome city (pl. 284).’230Mary Delany to Georgina Port, 31 July 1783, ibid., VI, 132. A few days later, the countess of Bute wrote to Delany of the ‘deplorable condition’ of the countryside around Sheffield. The rivers were so low that the mills had stopped grinding corn; the cattle were ‘almost famished for want of pasture’.231Countess of Bute to Mary Delany, 5 August 1783, ibid., VI, 135.

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Description: St. James's Park, detail by Bunbury, Henry William

284. After Henry William Bunbury, St. James’s Park (detail), 1783, etching, 15 3⁄4 × 25 3⁄4 in. (40.2 × 65.3 cm). British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings (1880, 1113.2346) © Trustees of the British Museum

Published in November 1783, this satirical print suggests how promenaders contended with that hot summer. The central group consists of those watching a lady meeting an elderly beau. A young woman holding a small parasol stands between them. On the extreme left, a stout man carrying his wig and suffering from the heat, walks in profile to the right.

Through these insalubrious months, Mrs Delany was undeterred, keeping up visits: for example, an excursion to Lord Guilford’s Wroxton in July 1783. As her waiting woman Mrs Astley reported to her niece, ‘your worthy aunt is much better in health than I expected after being so much affected at parting with you, together with the hot weather’.232Anne Astley to Mary Port, undated [July 1783], ibid., VI, 133. In his journal, Gilbert White recorded every moment of that summer as it turned from the ‘ten dripping days’ in mid-June to the ‘Burning sun’ of early August. From late June to early September there was ‘Red sun-shine’, the sun resembling the full moon: ‘The country people look with a kind of superstitious awe at the red louring aspect of the sun thro’ the fog’, he noted.233Greenoak, ed., The Journals of Gilbert White, II, 465, 466, 472.

Two letters in The Natural History of Selborne, based on White’s journals, were devoted to the ‘rust-coloured ferruginous’ light of that season.234White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Foster, Letters 64 and 65 to Daines Barrington, undated. On 11 July, when the thermometer reached 80ºF (26.6ºC), he recorded: ‘The heat overcomes the grass-mowers, & makes them sick’; the honeysuckles had become ‘loathsome objects, being covered with aphides, & viscous honeydews’.235Greenoak, ed., The Journals of Gilbert White, II, 468. He shot the marauding blackbirds and dipped hazel twigs in birdlime to kill wasps on his gooseberries. Insects were becoming plaguesome. As he put it in the Natural History: ‘All the time the heat was so intense that butchers’ meat could hardly be eaten on the day after it was killed; and the flies swarmed so in the lanes and hedges that they rendered the horses half frantic, and riding irksome.’236White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Foster, Letter 65, undated. William Cowper wrote of the ‘portentous’ days in The Task;237Richard Hamblyn provides a good account of William Cowper’s correspondence with the Revd John Newton, referring to the ‘Boeotian atmosphere’, to the sun setting with the ‘face of a red hot salamander’ and to ‘the day of Judgement’ at hand. See Hamblyn, Terra, 70. and Horace Walpole found June ‘abominable as any one of its ancestors in all the pedigree of the Junes’.238Quoted in Richard Hamblyn, The Invention of Clouds: How an Amateur Meteorologist Forged the Language of the Skies (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 68. ‘Britain’s Oldest Man’ stated from Dover that never had France disappeared from view for so long in all his hundred years.239See Gentleman’s Magazine, LIII/2 (1783), 620.

As the smell of sulphur lingered and the incidence of lightning strikes and bronchial deaths increased, it was left to Benjamin Franklin to restore reason.240Hamblyn, Terra, 86–7: research at the University of Cambridge has identified 11,500 anomalous deaths between August and September 1783 that can be attributed to the pollutant haze and the unusually high temperature that summer. Suspicion had turned to comets, meteors, sunspots and eclipses, as well as to astrological conjunctions or divine displeasure. For example, John Wesley in Witney, Oxfordshire, witnessed one of a dozen electrical storms that came from deep lows during June and July. He concluded on 16 July: ‘the grace of God came down in a manner never before known’. Franklin simply suggested that William Cowper’s ‘unexampled, unexplained’ weather had geological causes. By 1784 he went on to attribute the severe cold of the winter of 1783–4 to the possible effects of the prolonged global haze — a first identification of an agency in climate change. He put forward a momentous supposition in a paper submitted to the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society: might the alteration in the weather of 1783 have been precipitated by volcanic activity?

Today, the link to a specific volcanic eruption can be confirmed through recorded data, including the fivefold increase in mortality rates in the county of Bedfordshire.241See Clive Oppenheimer, Eruptions that Shook the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), chapter 12: ‘The Haze Famine’. The Icelandic volcano Laki began to erupt on 8 June 1783 and, with the single greatest-known lava flow over eight months in the last millennium, it ceased only on 7 February 1784. It created a veil of dust over Europe, which compounded the climatic impact of a worldwide volcanic sequence (pl. 285).242Hamblyn, The Invention of Clouds, 78–9.

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Description: Om Jordbranden paa Island i Aaret 1783, map of Laki lava flow by Holm, Saemund...

285. Saemund Magnussen Holm, Om Jordbranden paa Island i Aaret 1783 (Copenhagen, 1784), map of Laki lava flow. From the collections of the Ernst Mayr Library, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University

In Iceland, the offshore island volcano of Reykjaneshryggur erupted in early May 1783. It was followed by the larger Laki basalt fissure, which began to erupt on 8 June, continuing for eight months. This topographical map, with a vignette of the eruption (lower right), documented Laki as the single greatest lava flow of the last millennium. The 200 megatons of sulphuric acid aerosols that went into the atmosphere were then distributed across the northern hemisphere, dropping ash on the Scottish Highlands. The veil of dust and gas served to trap re-radiated summer heat, leading to the oppressive conditions recorded in southern England by observers Gilbert White and William Cowper.

Mary Delany had ceased her collage making on 9 October 1782. Her letter writing had become intermittent throughout 1783, as all suffered from the choking weather and volcanic dust. It was left to Mrs Boscawen to discuss garden matters: second-hand reports of Mrs Delany’s ‘expeditions’, including two visits to Kew; Boscawen’s own stay at Longleat, ‘the very finest place I ever saw in my life’; and an excursion to Mr Hoare’s Stourhead, which ‘had many pretty opera scenes in it’. For Boscawen, Longleat stole the limelight in every respect, including the menagerie (perhaps reflecting a bias occasioned by Longleat’s links to the duchess of Portland and Delany’s family before that): ‘Out of the green wood sally’d so many golden birds, so many that had white muslin cloaks over their mourning cloaths . . . especially Carolina ducks, wch I judg’d to be the Summer duck, so rare and beautiful’ (cf. pl. 213).243Frances Boscawen to Mary Delany, 25 September 1783, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, VI, 139–42. Written on 25 September 1783, the letter referred to the ‘air being as warm as June and as sweet as May’. White’s journals, noting ‘Red sun-shine’ turning to rain by 4 September, confirmed on 22 September: ‘After three weeks wet, this vivid rainbow preceded . . . a lovely fit of weather’.244Greenoak, ed., The Journals of Gilbert White, II, 477–80. Evidently the unwholesome summer was well and truly over, though the ‘haze famine’ had sustained effects in Iceland since eruptions continued into early 1784.245Oppenheimer, Eruptions that Shook the World, 283–9.

Whatever the extremes of summer weather, the blooming of the English orchids remained steady. In the vacancy left by Mrs Delany, White kept his eye on flowering times: the bird’s-nest orchid (Neottia nidus-avis) appeared on the Hanger, the hillside above Wakes, on 12 June (cf. Delany’s ‘Ophris nidus avis’, dated June 1779); the lady’s tresses (Spiranthes spiralis) blew in September (cf. Delany’s ‘Orphris Spiralis’, dated 14 September 1776, pl. 286).246The broad helleborine (Epipactis helleborine) was perhaps forward, by contrast, beginning its flowering on 13 June. Delany’s ‘Serapias Latifolia’, dated 27 July 1779, may reflect the more usual flowering months of July and August in an average summer. On Monday, 18 August 1783 White had gone about his business as usual, dependable as the orchids. He noted that the temperature was just over 65ºF (18.3ºC); the wind was from the south-west; the autumn crocuses were blooming; and the oats were housed. That evening, at about a quarter past nine, something odd entered the sky from the north-west, becoming visible in Selborne along a north-by-north-west trajectory. The line of the trajectory stretched from Edinburgh to Ostend. He was not alone in astonished observation of the meteor, as twilight had descended and a fireball rushed across the welkin.

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Description: Orphris Spiralis by Delany, Mary Granville

286. Mary Delany, ‘Orphris Spiralis’, Bulstrode, 14 September 1776, collage of coloured papers, with bodycolour and watercolour, 9 7⁄8 × 6 ¾ in. (25.5 × 17.1 cm). British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings (1897,0505.622). © Trustees of the British Museum

After Mrs Delany ceased her collages late in 1782, a record of flowering was sustained by Gilbert White. Her dated representations were matched by the data gathered in his journals. Despite the strange summer and early autumn weather in the volcanic year of 1783, several orchids bloomed on time. White noted that these lady’s tresses (Spiranthes spiralis) blew in September as usual, corresponding to the date of 14 September 1776 attached to the Delany collage of the same species.

The same evening a group was standing on a terrace at Windsor Castle, and on alignment of the meteor’s path. In the company were Dr James Lind (royal physician), Dr Lockman (canon of St George’s, Windsor), Dr Tiberius Cavallo (a leading authority on electricity), the artist / surveyor Thomas Sandby, and two women (one of them possibly Ann Lind, who made observations with Herschel).247See Stephen Daniels, ‘Great Balls of Fire: Envisioning the Brilliant Meteor of 1783’, in Envisioning Landscapes, Making Worlds: Geography and the Humanities, ed. Stephen Daniels et al. (London and New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis, 2011), 162–3. The observations of the phenomenon led to a pictorial study, which has been attributed to Thomas Sandby’s brother, Paul Sandby (pl. 287). Despite the complicated authorship of the watercolour (and several complementary studies, including an aquatint dedicated to Sir Joseph Banks), it is clear that both brothers were involved. Cavallo gave an account in the Philosophical Transactions for the following year: ‘we observed a very extraordinary meteor in the sky. Mr Sandby’s watch was seventeen minutes past nine nearest; it does not mark seconds.’248See Jane Roberts, Views of Windsor: Watercolours by Thomas and Paul Sandby (London: Merrell Holberton, 1995), 68–9. The report continued: ‘As soon as the meteor emerged behind the cloud, its light was prodigious. Every object appeared very distinct, the whole face of the country . . . being instantly illuminated.’249Quoted in Daniels, ‘Great Balls of Fire’, 163–4.

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Description: The meteor of Aug. 18th 1783, as it appeared... by Sandby, Paul

287. Paul Sandby, The meteor of Aug. 18th 1783, as it appeared . . . , print made by Paul Sandby, 1783, etching / aquatint, 13 × 19 3⁄8 in. (33 × 49.3 cm). British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings (1872,0713.481). © Trustees of the British Museum

A number of versions of the same scene exist under the authorship of Thomas as well as Paul Sandby. The track of the meteor ran from over the Shetlands through eastern England, making a trail from Edinburgh to Hull. The collective reporting of the fireball recalled the eyewitness reportage of the Great Storm of 1703. Since the evening was sultry that hazy summer, many were out and about and witnessed the phenomenon. Its illumination gave clarity to an otherwise occluded landscape and put remarkable colours into the sky.

According to Cavallo, the meteor ‘divided & formed a long train of small luminous bodies each having a trail’.250Roberts, Views of Windsor, 68. Just five days later, Frances Boscawen was writing to Mary Delany from Badminton (after a visit to Lady Gower at Bill Hill). It was as though nothing could disturb this seasoned observer during that ‘portentous’ season:

Your picture of yourself is delightfull. I see you in your morning walk. The weather is not weary of being fine, bright, and shining; tho’ you are in no danger from yr foe Apollo while the friendly wood protects you. Did the meteor so much talk’d of visit Bulstrode? if it was at Bill Hill I saw it not, but was playing at back gammon with my lady . . .251Frances Boscawen to Mary Delany, 23 August 1783, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, VI, 136.

In December 1783, as Mrs Delany’s eyesight worsened, she had a Miss Mary Hamilton join her from Queen Charlotte’s court. Mary read letters and newspapers at Bulstrode and became an indispensable companion in the month before Christmas. The niece of Sir William Hamilton of Naples, she is remembered today in association with the Portland Vase that passed from the ambassador to the duchess. But her diary of daily doings at Bulstrode is just as notable. Producing virtual ‘field notes’, she became the naturalist of Mrs Delany in her habitat. For example, on 10 December she noted that Mr Lightfoot ‘staid a little in ye gallery, looking over some new fungus’s ye gardener had found’; on 12 December:

No prayers to-day, as Mr. L. had ye toothache. Dr. Lind brought ye Dss some shells and fossils; we look’d ym over; and placed them in drawers, &c. Conversation, air balloons; Dr. Lind made a drawing of one, and of ye first great meteor wch he saw from ye Terrace at Windsor.252Miss Hamilton’s Diary, ibid., VI, 170, 172.

This was not the first time that air balloons had slipped into Mary Hamilton’s diary. On Thursday, 4 December (a day of white frost at Selborne) she began an entry with weather:

ye morning heavenly, ye sun bright — took a most delightful ride; met Mrs. D., who was going to take ye air, stop’d and offered her to go on in ye carriage; she wd not let me; pursued my ride; came in 20 min. after 12; Mrs. D. promised to come to me in my room; told me she had walk’d for half an hour, &c. I came to my room, found upon my table a work bag, wth a paper upon it, importing it ‘came by ye air balloon from Paris;’. . .253Ibid., VI, 153.

Thus the first manned balloon flight in November 1783 teased the European imagination (pl. 288a).254For the background to this, see Robert Friedel, A Culture of Improvement: Technology and the Western Millennium (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2007), 255–63; see again, Hamblyn, The Invention of Clouds, 110–11 It is said that 400,000 people, half the population of Paris, turned out to see the Robert brothers’ hydrogen-filled balloon ascend from the Tuileries on 1 December. ‘Never before’, Franklin observed, ‘was a philosophical experiment so magnificently observed.’255Friedel, A Culture of Improvement, 261. In turn, 1784 would become the British year of the balloon (pl. 288b).

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Description: The Balloon ascending from the Thuillieres at Paris with Messrs. Robert &...

288a. Unknown, ‘The Balloon ascending from the Thuillieres at Paris with Mess.rs Robert & Charles’, circa 1783, etching. Victoria and Albert Museum, London (E. 2830-1962)

Two French brothers, Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Etienne Montgolfier, pioneered hot-air balloon ascents. The first manned balloon flight took place in November 1783, and by December 1783 the ascent from the Tuileries in Paris led to further representations that were widely distributed. Jean-Pierre Blanchard’s October 1784 ascent in Chelsea ended in Romsey, Hampshire, thus flying over Gilbert White’s home in Selborne. A satire on Blanchard’s second ascent of December 1784, when the Prince of Wales and the duchess of Devonshire were present, alludes to politics, fashion and cross-channel commerce.

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Description: British Balloon, and D***** Aerial Yacht by Dent, William

288b. William Dent, ‘British Balloon, and D***** Aerial Yacht’, 1784, etching, 13 1⁄4 × 9 in. (33.5 × 23 cm). British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings (1868, 0808.5390) © Trustees of the British Museum

Though Mrs Delany was sometimes unwell and suffered from dimmed eyesight, and though she was aware of ‘an awful time’ approaching, there were pleasantries and jollity (pl. 289). On 5 December, for example, after oysters at 2pm and dinner at 4.30pm, they came out of the dining room to a ‘hearty laugh and run a race!’256Miss Hamilton’s Diary, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, VI, 156. Even the Numidian cranes — among the ‘tame and sociable’ — had a habit of ‘jumping and dancing when they are pleased; it is really quite laughable to see the odd capers wch they cut’.257Miss Hamilton’s Diary, ibid., VI, 158, 160. Dinner conversation ranged over Mrs Siddons and former actors, the attachment of dogs, the Hell Fire Club and Mr Lowther — a ‘perfect Lothario’.258Ibid., VI, 163. One evening the ‘converse was relative to beggars; ye Dss said how wrong it was to encourage those poor who beg’d in ye streets in London’.259Ibid., VI, 154. Another evening, Mrs Delany turned to spinning, while the duchess worked a carpet. Private conversations went back to early family life and her first marriage to Mr Pendarves. Many mornings, as the fog or frost dispersed, Mary Hamilton and Mary Delany took a walk together: to the greenhouses that formed one wing of the house; to the enclosure in front of them that housed exotic birds; and to the grotto. Thus, on 13 December, a Saturday, Mary Hamilton wrote: ‘Mrs Delany came to me; it was a delightful clear day; we took a long walk in the gardens, shrubery [sic], flower-garden, botanick-garden, &c., fed the grews and other birds.’260Ibid., VI, 173. On the following Thursday, it was time to leave for London:

I got up early to pack up my papers, &c. Mrs. Astley came to assist me in dressing; Mrs. Delany came to me when my hair was doing, and staid a little time. Dear dear woman! . . . Mrs D. came to me and took a most tender leave of me; she wept, and said kind things yt went to my heart . . . Mr. Lightfoot came to ye chaise door to take leave of me. Mrs. Astley and I set out at 11; it was a fine morning and we had a very pleasant drive; we pass’d a wedding, a burial, and an air balloon . . .261Ibid., VI, 184–5.

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Description: Mary Delany (née Granville) by Opie, John

289. John Opie, Mary Delany, 1782, oil on canvas, 29 ½ × 24 ½ in. (74.9 × 62.2 cm). National Portrait Gallery, London (1030)

Horace Walpole, designing a frame for this portrait, enrolled one of Mrs Delany’s collages among the ‘works of genius at Strawberry Hill by Persons of Rank and Gentlemen not Artists’. Such was her reputation on ceasing work on the ‘Flora Delanica’ in 1782, around the time of this likeness, that visitors Gilpin and Walpole continued to call on Mrs Delany at her grace-and-favour home in Windsor in her final years, 1785–8.

The Hail, the ‘Aironaut’ and the ‘Boundless Depths of the Atmosphere’

After the summer of 1783, it must have seemed impossible that nature would have another trump card to play. Yet, as Gilbert White recorded in Letter 66 (the account that concludes The Natural History of Selborne), 5 June 1784 was a day for the annals:

. . . the thermometer in the morning being at 64, and at noon 70, the barometer at 29 — six tenths one-half, and the wind north, I observed a blue mist, smelling strongly of sulphur, hanging along our sloping woods, and seeming to indicate that thunder was at hand. . . . It began with vast drops of rain, which were soon succeeded by round hail, and then by convex pieces of ice, which measured three inches in girth. . . . We were just sitting down to dinner; but were soon diverted from our repast by the clattering of tiles and the jingling of glass. . . . Those that saw the effect of the great hail had on ponds and pools say that the dashing of the water made an extraordinary appearance, the froth and spray standing up in the air three feet above the surface.262White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Foster, Letter 66, 249–50.

The bells of an electric machine in south Lambeth, London, where brother Thomas lived, rang repeatedly, and sparks flew. For those, like Mary Delany, who recalled the heyday of electricity experiments around 1745–50, the shock of jingling glass and ringing bells was scarcely new, reminding them of the levity of old parlour tricks (pl. 290).

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Description: Recueil de traité sur l'electricité, traduits de l'Allemand & de...

290. Sebastian Jorry, Recueil de traité sur l’electricité, traduits de l’Allemand & de l’Anglois (Paris, 1748), including the translation of William Watson’s ‘An Account of the Experiments Made by Some Gentlemen of the Royal Society’ and the plate of the ‘electrical boy’. Rare Books Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library

The ‘electrical boy’ was a favourite eighteenth-century experiment. A rotating crank generated electricity, which was transferred to the shoes of a boy suspended on silk ropes. The boy in turn transmitted a gentle shock to the girl standing on a tar-covered barrel. Her other hand was probably extended to attract feathers or small pieces of paper. Watson also invented a parlour trick he called the ‘electrical mine’. The recollection of a pleasurable frisson of electric tricks at Wakes in July 1763 perhaps came back to those dining with Gilbert White during the electrical storm of June 1784.

It had already turned warm that spring, as Mrs Delany indicated in letters to Miss Hamilton of 9 May and 23 May 1784. (It reached 68ºF and 73ºF [20º and 23.7ºC], respectively, on those days at Selborne.) Yet, later in June, Mrs Boscawen wrote of ‘bespoke’ weather: ‘your foe Apollo keeps his distance’.263Frances Boscawen to Mary Delany, ‘Sunday evening, June, 1784’, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, VI, 217. And the duchess, writing from Margate on 31 July 1784 about having birds shot and stuffed by a ‘friseur’ (which is ‘quite a curioso’), referred to ‘so much rain’ in London.264Duchess of Portland to Mary Delany, 31 July 1784, ibid., VI, 223. The rest of the summer was uneventful (though rainfall totals for Selborne continued high in August). The niceties of nature gave way to the niceties of culture. The Mulso family, including ‘Hecky Mulso’ (Hester Chapone), came to visit Gilbert White on 27 July 1784. Lord Harcourt invited Their Majesties to visit his flower garden at Nuneham Courtenay. The Right Hon. Frederick Montagu picked up on this in his letter to Mrs Delany of 22 October 1784. He poked fun at the poet William Mason:

MY DEAR MADAM,

I want very much to know all the particulars of the royal visit at Nuneham, as I hear that our poetical friend was there. Did he say grace? Did he repeat verses? Did he read prayers? Or what did he do? If one was wicked enough an excellent account might be given of what functions he perform’d at Nuenham! Could not you get your friend Mr. Smelt to write it?

On his estate of Papplewick in Nottinghamshire, Montagu continued writing:

I entirely agree with you (against Burke) about air balloons. I am tir’d of reading about them in the papers, tho’ I am out of the way of them; tho’, indeed, if I could mount one and breakfast with you at Bullstrode, and return to look at my building here before dinner, I might be reconciled to them.265Frederick Montagu to Mary Delany, 22 October 1784, ibid., VI, 235.

He was referring to Jean-Pierre Blanchard’s ascent of 16 October 1784, which began at Chelsea in London and ended in Romsey in Hampshire. He would have to endure more accounts of flights in 1785. The first aerial flight across the Channel occurred in January that year. It resulted in the first airmail delivery. Airopaidia, published in 1786, was a narrative of one flight over Chester in September 1785. Dedicated to the ‘aironaut’, the narrator tells of the ‘palpable’ pressure upwards, of the ‘reddish vapour’ in the mouth of the balloon, of the ‘inverted firmament’ of the earth, of glittering ponds and of the sun reflected like ‘red Lead’ in the River Dee (pl. 291). There was one entirely new perspective: ‘a vast Assemblage of Thunder-Clouds: each Congeries consisting of whole Acres in the densest Form’. He attempted a likeness in words:

Their Form was, as if Pieces of Ordnance were discharged perpendicularly upwards into the Air: and that the Smoke had consolidated, at the Instant of Explosion, into Masses of Snow or Hail: had penetrated thro’ the upper Surface of white Floor of common Clouds, and there remained visible, and at Rest.

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Description: A Balloon Prospect from Above the Clouds by Baldwin, Thomas

291. Thomas Baldwin, Airopaidia: containing the narrative of a balloon excursion from Chester, the eighth of September, 1785 . . . (London and Chester, 1786), pl. facing p. 154 with the title ‘A Balloon Prospect from Above the Clouds’. Houghton Library, Harvard University (*EC75.B1938.786a)

This view was subtitled: ‘Chromatic View of the Country between Chester, Warrington and Rixton-Moss in Lancashire: shewing the whole Extent of the aërial Voyage; with the meandering Track of the Balloon throu’ the Air’. The ‘Aironaut’, in the air for just over two hours and tracing the equivalent of 30 miles on the ground, was unsure where he had landed, but realized later that he had been over a broad branch of the River Mersey. The sky above was ‘unvaried deep cerùlean and pellucid Azure’; the colour of the rivulet was a full sunset red; and he was amazed at the ‘doublings’ of the upper reaches of the river.

Gilbert White, who was used to watching clouds from the ground, left a surprisingly short account of Blanchard’s flight over Selborne on 16 October 1784. It followed his entries of 15 and 16 October — abundant potatoes and carrots, Timothy retreating under the laurel hedge, poor walnuts on his best tree: ‘Mr Blanchard passed by us in full sight at about a quarter before three P.M. in an air balloon!!!’266Greenoak, ed., Journals of Gilbert White, III, 58. Confessing, however, to more emotion in a letter to his younger sister, Anne, he wrote that the passengers might be ‘lost’ within the ‘boundless depths of the atmosphere’. He also pasted in a cutting from a newspaper or journal. It was an extract of a gentleman’s letter, dated 21 October:

To my eye the balloon appeared no bigger than a large tea-urn. . . . I was wonderfully struck with the phaenomenon, and, like Milton’s ‘Belated Peasant’, felt my heart rebound with joy and fear at the same time. After a time I surveyed the machine with more composure, without that concern for two of my fellow creatures; for two we then supposed there were embarked in that aerial voyage. At last seeing how securely they moved, I considered them as a group of cranes or storks intent on the business of emigration . . .267See ibid., III, 59, for the full account, including: ‘That day I was not content to call at the houses, but I went out to the plowman and labourers in the fields, and advised them to keep an eye at times to the N. and N.E. But about one o’clock there came up such a haze that I could not see the hill; however, not long after the mist cleared away in some degree, and people began to mount the hill. I was busy in and out till a quarter after two, and in taking my last walk observed a long cloud of London smoke hanging to the N. and N.N.E. This appearance encreased my expectation. At twenty minutes before three there was a cry that the balloon was come. We ran into the orchard, where we found twenty or thirty neighbours assembled, and from the green bank at the end of my house, saw a dark blue speck at a most prodigious height dropping as it were out of the sky, and hanging amidst the regions of the air between the weather-cock of the Tower and the Maypole; at first it did not seem to make any way, but we soon discovered that its velocity was very considerable, for in a few minutes it was over the Maypole, and then over my chimney, and in ten minute more behind the wallnut-tree. The machine looked mostly of a dark blue colour, but sometimes reflected the rays of the sun. With a telescope I could discern the boat and the ropes that supported it.’

‘Decay of my Faculties’ and the Dispersal of the Duchess of Portland’s Possessions

It was as though the sky went black and the stars stopped twinkling. The duchess of Portland died unexpectedly in July 1785. On 14 July Mrs Boscawen had comforted Mrs Delany on the ‘progress’ of the ‘dear Duchess’s health’. Yet, on 19 July Horace Walpole mentioned to Mrs Dickenson (the former Miss Hamilton) how he heard ‘the Duchess of Portland is dead! . . . you will forgive me therefore for troubling you with inquiring about poor Mrs. Delany!’268Horace Walpole to Mary Dickenson, 19 July 1785, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, VI, 262. It turns out that Delany had been with the duchess at Bulstrode for ten days, ‘when the sad event of her Grace’s death happened’. The day was Sunday, 17 July.269Mr W. Sandford to Mrs Frances Hamilton, 24 July 1785, ibid., VI, 264. It was a warm day of sunshine and showers. Gilbert White noted in his journal:

Honeydew.

Fine refreshing rains. Vivid rain-bow.270Greenoak, ed., The Journals of Gilbert White, III, 95.

With the loss of her close companion, Mary Delany had to accept that the Bulstrode summers of dancing cranes had come to an end. Fortunately, though, the king offered her a little ‘grace-and-favour’ house on St Alban’s Street in Windsor, to which she moved in September 1785.271For discussion of these circumstances, see Orr, ‘Mrs Delany and the Court’, 61. It was a ‘very pleasant and very honourable situation’ (pl. 292).272Frederick Montagu to Mary Delany, 24 September 1785, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, VI, 288. From there she wrote to her niece in December 1785: ‘I dayly feel a decay of my faculties.’273Mary Delany to Mary Port, 21 December 1785, ibid., VI, 324. Yet her enthusiasms were not dimmed. She followed the slow ‘gestation’ of William Gilpin’s Observations Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty, whose copperplate printing was held back by the cold of January 1786. (The second volume, published in 1789, included the fullest account of Delany’s collage making at Bulstrode.274See the Revd William Gilpin to Mary Delany, 25 January 1786, ibid., VI, 340. The account is quoted fully in Weisberg-Roberts, ‘Introduction (1): Mrs Delany from Source to Subject’, 10.) After the Gilpins had visited her in May 1786 (as the Portland Museum was being auctioned off), he wrote how she had ‘strewed flowers in our way over the barren scenes of Bagshot Heath’.275Revd William Gilpin to Mary Delany, 8 May 1786, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, VI, 349. His letter of 8 May turned to an account of Sir Ashton Lever’s room of birds in ‘white boxes’. This gave rise to an interesting analogy:

Not that I should array a room full of birds (as you do the flowers) in black, tho’ I am now fully convinced that black is the best ground you could have chosen; and as your flowers are exhibited one after another, the ground on which you place them cannot injure the eye; yet I doubt whether it would not appear too dismal if they were spread like Lever’s boxes over the whole superficies of a room —276Ibid., VI, 350. For a discussion of this, see Zytaruk, ‘Mary Delany: Epistolary Utterances’, 144–5.

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Description: The North Terrace, looking west by Sandby, Paul

292. Paul Sandby, The North Terrace Looking West, with a Seated Mother and Children in the Foreground, circa 1790, watercolour with pen and ink over graphite, 12 ¼ × 16 7⁄8 in. (31.1 × 43 cm). Royal Library, Windsor Castle (rl 14524). Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2013

After the duchess of Portland’s death in 1785, Mary Delany spent the final three years of her life between a grace-and-favour residence in Windsor and her home in St James’s Place, London. She would take the air for an hour or two after breakfast and following time in the chapel. She might have looked out over the Thames northwards to Bulstrode, perhaps watching the swallows overhead as they migrated southwards.

The sale of the duchess of Portland’s collections began on 24 April 1786. It was a ‘museum’ of 4,156 lots that took thirty-eight days to disperse.277See Jane Wildgoose, Promiscuous Assemblage, Friendship and the Order of Things (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 2009). See Tobin, The Duchess’s Shells, chapter 6, for a careful analysis of the duchess’s estate and the dispersal of her collections by auction. The sale realized a total of £11,546 14s. (of which more than £1,000 came from the Portland Vase alone). Lightfoot was responsible for the catalogue entries. Most consisted of shells and other marine productions. The frontispiece to the catalogue shows the boxes of insects, the pieces of coral and the drawers of shells, as well as the antiquities that made up the collection. The duchess’s shell cabinet was the finest in England and rivalled the best in Europe. By 1771 she had been adding shells from the Endeavour voyage, which rejuvenated shell collecting in general. On 7 January 1778 Solander began work for her every Tuesday, describing the shells and naming the nondescripts. As with the Banks ‘Florilegium’, the work never reached publication before Solander’s death in May 1782. Both patrons of Solander, the duchess and Banks disagreed on how to proceed.278Neri, ‘Mrs Delany’s Natural History and Zoological Activities’, 183. Tobin, The Duchess’s Shells, 209–13. Solander’s descriptions and new names, as well as Lightfoot’s additions and emendations, did not find their way into a scientific monograph on conchology; instead, they became part of the auction catalogue. The duchess might have called the shells ‘all my beauties’,279Allen, The Naturalist in Britain, 25. but she also treasured her scientifically significant collection of mollusks as an expert in Linnaean systematics.

Afterglow: The ‘Unwearied Industry and Affection’ of Ladies and Hirundines

As the dispersal of the duchess’s ‘possessions’ concluded, Mrs Delany wrote of being in ‘too low a state’ to receive visits from all and sundry (pl. 293).280Mary Delany to Mary Dickenson, 29 May 1786, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, VI, 356. The routines of her winter and summer were reduced at Windsor: taking the air for an hour or two after Chapel and breakfast; receiving letters and ‘particular friends’ (including Gilpin); resting in the afternoon; and taking tea with the king and queen between six and seven in the evening. Her diary entries for January and February 1786 allude to ‘an indifferent night’ and ‘Very much out of order’, but the list of visitors remains impressive, including Mr Walpole and Miss Burney.281Mrs Delany’s Diary, ibid., VI, 328, 340–41.

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Description: Portrait of Mrs Delany, born Granville by Lawrence, Thomas;Hoppner, John;Opie,...

293. Thomas Lawrence, Portrait of Mrs Delany, 1786–8, graphite and black chalk, 14 5⁄16 × 11 1⁄8 in. (36.4 × 28.2 cm). Victoria and Albert Museum, London (E.580–1929)

Thomas Lawrence, whose talents were noted by Fanny Burney by 1780, worked at Windsor in the late 1780s. His sensitive portrait of Mrs Delany in extreme old age dates from this time — months before John Lightfoot’s death early in 1788 — when Delany wrote of being in ‘too low a state’ or ‘out of order’. The day after Mary Delany died, 16 April 1788, Gilbert White noted the first swallow’s arrival at Selborne.

Over the winter St James’s Place in London remained an occasional address. It was there that she received word of the Revd Lightfoot’s ‘sudden death’ on 21 February 1788. Evidently Dr Lind from Windsor had been summoned to no avail. Mrs Astley reported that Mrs Delany was in ‘very good health’ but ‘much affected’ by the loss of the ‘botanical master’ of Bulstrode.282Anne Astley to Daniel Sandford, 4 March 1788, ibid., VI, 475. Gilbert White, for whom John Lightfoot was still an occasional correspondent in 1785, noted that the 21st was cold and without wind. He was quite unaware of Lightfoot’s death that day:

Rain, rain, rain . . .

Turned the dung for the cucumber-bed.283Greenoak, ed., The Journals of Gilbert White, III, 213.

Back in 1772, as Mrs Delany chanced on a new way of imitating flowers at Bulstrode, Lightfoot had travelled by horseback to Scotland with Thomas Pennant, Gilbert White’s correspondent since 1767. Lightfoot’s Flora Scotica, published in 1777, was dedicated to the duchess of Portland. In 1773 Lightfoot had gone to Wales with Joseph Banks. At this time, Pennant would request White’s help, among others, in revising the fourth edition of his British Zoology. Meanwhile, the monograph that White wrote for Daines Barrington on the house martin was read at the Royal Society in February 1774. By April 1774 White had sketched out for the first time the scope of The Natural History of Selborne, which was addressed to his brother, former chaplain in Gibraltar but then in Blackburn. The expedition and the letter, made easier by better roads, were steps to a universal communication. After much procrastination, Gilbert White finally completed his work for publication in 1788–9.

Neither Pennant nor Barrington ever came to White’s home, Wakes in Selborne. Nor did Banks, despite the high hopes of his accompanying them. White wrote a letter of regret to the rising star: ‘I must plod on by myself, with few books and no soul to communicate my doubts or discoveries to.’284Quoted in Paul G. M. Foster, Gilbert White and his Records: A Scientific Biography (London: Christopher Helm, 1988), 88. He resigned himself to industry at home. It has been suggested that meeting, or failing to meet, the famous traveller acted as a negative spur: ‘To tour the world might lead to astonishing collections, but the real work of a faunist must be to ascertain the life and conversation of animals.’285Ibid., 90.

Virtù had flourished at Bulstrode when the duchess of Portland, Mrs Delany and the Revd Lightfoot congregated each summer, migrating northwards after the southerly migration to the winter metropolis. In town and country, by the exchange of ideas and letters, science was promoted in ‘conversations or conversazioni’.286Allen, The Naturalist in Britain, 43. As Delany put it herself in a letter to her niece of April 1775:

In this fluctuating world we cannot always settle down just in the spot and in the neighbourhood we wish — that is out of our power, but the endeavour to be contented with our lot, to delude the absence by the intercourse of letters that speed the sweet intercourse between soul and soul, to scheme for meeting . . . these are in our power, tho’ it will cost us some pains and trouble.287Mary Delany to Mary Port, 27 April 1775, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, V, 121. White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Foster, Letter 10 to Thomas Pennant, 29.

By contrast, Gilbert White made a virtue of applying himself, among ‘stationary men’, to his one spot of earth.288Allen, The Naturalist in Britain, 44, refers to White as ‘Static Man’, but White’s own use of ‘stationary men’ is preferable in implying men who, by virtue of their circumstances, live for a long period in a single neighbourhood, but who also have extensive communications far and wide; see White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Foster, Advertisement, 7. There were occasional times of conversation and jollity at Wakes, and White exchanged letters. Most days, however, he had a conversation in the field with himself. As he lamented modestly:

It has long been my misfortune never to have had any neighbours whose studies have led them towards the pursuit of natural knowledge: so that, for want of a companion to quicken my industry and sharpen my attention, I have made but slender progress in a kind of information to which I have been attached since my childhood.289Quoted in Allen, The Naturalist in Britain, 18.

It was after a visit to the royal domain of Kew in March 1788 that Mrs Delany caught a chill that developed into pneumonia. She died at 11 o’clock, the evening of Tuesday, 15 April 1788, just a month short of her eighty-eighth birthday. That day Gilbert White had ‘pronged’ the asparagus beds and put some perennials in the ‘cold ground’. There had been white frost on the lawns where the hares supped. He noted the evening produced a red sunset. The following day, he spotted the first swallow arriving at Selborne.

In The Natural History of Selborne, Letter 18 to Daines Barrington is devoted to the swallow. It begins: ‘The house-swallow, or chimney-swallow, is undoubtedly the first comer of all the British hirundines; and appears in general on or about the thirteenth of April’ (pl. 294). The letter continues: ‘All the summer long is the swallow a most instructive pattern of unwearied industry and affection.’290White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Foster, Letter 18 to The Hon. Daines Barrington. In that first summer after Mrs Delany’s death, White recorded in his journal: ‘Sunday 13 July: Young swallows out’. Then again on Friday, 22 August: ‘The swallows are very busy skimming & hovering over a fallow that has been penned: probably the dung of the sheep attracts many insects.’ Their passions were intelligible, their virtues unerring, as White began to intimate on Monday, 22 September. He had lit fires in the parlour the day before, when it dipped below freezing overnight: ‘The swallows seem to be distressed for food this cold, wet weather, & hawk up & down the street among the houses for flies with great earnestness.’291Greenoak, ed., The Journals of Gilbert White, III, 242.

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Description: Swallow and Swift by Pennant, Thomas

294. Swallow and swift from Thomas Pennant, British Zoology, 4th edn (London, 1776), p. 398, pl. LVIII. From the collections of the Ernst Mayr Library, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University

Back in 1772, as Mrs Delany chanced on a new way of imitating flowers, Lightfoot had travelled by horseback to Scotland with White’s correspondent since 1767, Thomas Pennant. Pennant would request White’s help, among others, in revising his fourth edition of British Zoology (1776). Pennant wrote ‘Of the Disappearance of Swallows’ (406–8): ‘There are three opinions among naturalists concerning the manner the swallow tribe dispose of themselves after their disappearance . . . the first has the utmost appearance of probability; which is, that they remove nearer the sun, where they can find a continuance of their natural diet.’ Sir Charles Wager and Peter Collinson were cited, as was Gilbert White’s ‘ocular proof’ of migration, witnessed on ‘Michaelmas day’ 1768 (on his way to the Goodwood moose, see chapter 5).

By mid- to late October the swallows would be gone. White recorded in his journal for Wednesday, 15 October 1788 that it was a day of deep fog, vast dew and a full moon:

No Hirundines. Vast quantities of gossamer; the fields are covered with it:

. . . slow thro’ the air

The gossamer floats; or stretch’d from blade to blade

The wavy net-work whitens all the fields.

In that first autumn after Mrs Delany’s death, the swallows — leaving home for the south — made their yearly transit of the earth under the light of the sun and moon. As the sun set, they etched black trails across the surface of the whitened ground (pls 295a and b).

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Description: The North Terrace, looking west, detail by Sandby, Paul

295a. Detail from Paul Sandby, The North Terrace Looking West, with a Seated Mother and Children in the Foreground, circa 1790; watercolour with pen and ink over graphite, 12 ¼ × 16 7⁄8 in. (31.1 × 43.0 cm). Royal Library, Windsor Castle (rl 14524). Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2013

Sometimes imperfections in a sheet of paper became evident to the artist only at the moment of applying paint. Paul Sandby was quick to turn the staining that resulted from one such imperfection into birds in flight over Windsor (left, detail of sky in pl. 292). Sandby’s view was painted a year or two after Mrs Delany’s death in 1788. In creating her nearly one thousand collages from 1773 to 1782, Delany had been just as expert in using the textures of the wire profiles in the collage papers to add contrast to the different leaves (right). Thus the element of chance played out in art in significant ways.

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Description: Liriodendron Tulipifera, detail by Delany, Mary Granville

295b. Detail of Mary Delany’s ‘Liriodendron Tulipifera’, 1776, collage of coloured papers, with bodycolour and watercolour, 13 ¼ × 9 in. (33.8 × 23 cm). British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings (1897,0505.521). © Trustees of the British Museum

1 Quoted in Ruth Hayden, Mrs Delany and her Flower Collages, 2nd edn (London: British Museum Press, 1992), 129, citing what Dr Johnson heard Edmund Burke say. See also Lady Llanover, ed., The Autobiography and Correspondence of Mary Granville, Mrs Delany, 6 vols (London: Bentley, 1861–2), V, 12. »

2 Llanover, ed., Autobiography and Correspondence. Alicia Weisberg-Roberts provides a history of Mrs Delany’s legacy in her introduction to Mrs Delany and her Circle, ed. Mark Laird and Alicia Weisberg-Roberts (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009). »

3 Ruth Hayden, Mrs Delany: Her Life and her Flowers (London: British Museum Press, 1980). The second edition of 1992 was retitled Mrs Delany and her Flower Collages, and it will be referred to throughout this chapter. »

4 The total number falls short of an intended 1,000: the first nine volumes, containing 100 collages each, amount to 900, and, with 79 listed in the tenth volume, 979 was reached by 1782. See A Catalogue of Plants Copyed from Nature in Paper Mosaick, finished in the Year 1778 . . . , which is in the British Library and attributed to Mary Delany. In July 1779 Mrs Delany wrote an introduction to her hortus siccus, which was placed at the beginning of the first volume and headed: ‘Plants, Copied after Nature in paper Mosaick begun in the year 1774’. See Hayden, Mrs Delany and her Flower Collages, 155. See Llanover, ed., Autobiography and Correspondence, V, 48, letter of 28 October 1774, which refers to her ‘hortus siccus’, and V, 213, letter of 29 April 1776, which refers to her ‘herbal’. »

5 On view at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, from 24 September 2009 to 3 January 2010, and at Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, from 18 February to 1 May 2010. »

6 David Elliston Allen, The Naturalist in Britain: A Social History [1976], 2nd edn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 25. »

7 Sally Festing, ‘Rare Flowers and Fantastic Breeds: The 2nd Duchess of Portland and her Circle, I’, Country Life (12 June 1986), 1684–6; Festing, ‘Grace without Triviality: The 2nd Duchess of Portland and her Circle, II’, Country Life (19 June 1986), 1772–4; Festing, ‘The Second Duchess of Portland and her Rose’, Garden History, XIV/2 (Autumn 1986), 194–200; Festing, ‘Menageries and the Landscape Garden’, Journal of Garden History, VIII/4 (October–December 1988), 104–17. »

8 Rebecca Stott, Duchess of Curiosities: The Life of Margaret, Duchess of Portland, exhibition catalogue (Welbeck: Pineapple Press/Harley Gallery, 2006). »

9 See Beth Fowkes Tobin, ‘The Duchess’s Shells: Natural History Collecting, Gender and Scientific Practice’, in Material Women, 1750–1950: Consuming Desires and Collecting Practices, ed. Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2009), 244–63. See also 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). »

10 Laird and Weisberg-Roberts, eds, Mrs Delany and her Circle. I have benefitted greatly from Clarissa Campbell Orr’s authorial and editorial contributions to this exhibition catalogue and from her further commentaries on this and other chapters while in manuscript. »

11 For the background to this usage of virtü or virtù, see Kim Sloan, ‘A Noble Art’: Amateur Artists and Drawing Masters, c. 1600–1800 (London: British Museum Press, 2000), chapter 1: ‘Virtue, Virtuosi and Views’, 11–39, and especially 11–12. For the moral sense of vertu — a constancy of effort or will towards goodness — see the entry in Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie (Paris, 1751). »

12 Llanover, ed., Autobiography and Correspondence, III, 271. »

13 Mary Delany to Mary Port, 18 November 1774, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, v, 65. »

14 See Peter Dance, A History of Shell Collecting, revised edn (Leiden: Brill, 1986), for a broad discussion of the duchess. See also Janice Neri, ‘Mrs Delany’s Natural History and Zoological Activities: “A Beautiful Mixture of Pretty Objects” ’, in Mrs Delany and her Circle, ed. Laird and Weisberg-Roberts, 183 and pl. 181, illustrating Cymbiola aulica aulica (Voluta aulica). Beth Tobin’s The Duchess’s Shells illustrates Voluta aulica, pl. 5, one of only three shells that can be traced with any certainty from the sale catalogue. »

15 The term ‘paper garden’ I have borrowed from Molly Peacock’s creative non-fiction biography of Mary Delany: The Paper Garden: Mrs Delany [Begins her Life’s Work] at 72 (Toronto: McClelland & Steward, 2010). »

16 Mary Delany to Mary Port, 4 October 1772, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, IV, 469. »

17 Elizabeth Eger and Lucy Peltz, Brilliant Women: 18th-century Bluestockings (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2008). »

18 See letter from Hester Chapone to Mrs Delany, 13 June 1773, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, IV, 515, with a second letter, ‘The Autumn of 1773’, ibid., 549. »

19 Clarissa Campbell Orr, ‘Mrs Delany and the Court’, and Lisa Ford, ‘A Progress in Plants: Mrs Delany’s Botanical Sources’, in Mrs Delany and her Circle, ed. Laird and Weisberg-Roberts, 40–65 and 204–23. »

20 Richard Hamblyn, Terra: Tales of the Earth: Four Events that Changed the World (London: Picador, 2009), 65–121. »

21 See note 288. »

22 Gilbert White, The Natural History of Selborne [1789], ed. Paul Foster (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), Letter 18 to Daines Barrington, 146. »

23 For the idea of an ‘album amicorum’, see Kim Sloan, ‘Mrs Delany’s “Paintings of Drawings” ’, in Mrs Delany and her Circle, ed. Laird and Weisberg-Roberts, 115. See also Allen, The Naturalist in Britain, 44. »

24 Mary Delany to Bernard Granville, 17 December 1771, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, IV, 384. »

25 Mark Laird, Sir Joseph Banks: Botanist, Horticulturist and Plant Collector: Associations with Chelsea Physic Garden (London: Chelsea Physic Garden, 1988). »

26 The drawings were eventually published as hand-coloured prints in Banks’ Florilegium, 743 plates in 35 Solander boxes (London: Alecto, 1980–88). See also Joel Gascoigne, Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment: Useful Knowledge and Polite Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). »

27 Mary Delany to Mary Dewes, 3 September 1769, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, IV, 237. »

28 See Jay M. Pasachoff, Glen Schneider and Leon Golub, ‘The Black-Drop Effect Explained’, in Transits of Venus: New Views of the Solar System and Galaxy, ed. D. W. Kurtz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 242–53. »

29 Cook’s Endeavour Journal: The Inside Story (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2008), 70–71. The impact of the South Pacific shells, the cargo of Cook’s first voyage, is discussed in Tobin, The Duchess’s Shells, notably in chapter 4. »

30 The background to Mary Granville’s marriages to Alexander Pendarves and Patrick Delany is discussed in Alicia Weisberg-Roberts, ‘Introduction (1): Mrs Delany from Source to Subject’, and Clarissa Campbell Orr, ‘Mrs Delany and the Court’, in Mrs Delany and her Circle, ed. Laird and Weisberg-Roberts, 3–4 and 6–8, 46–7 and 54–6. »

31 The duchess of Portland to Mary Dewes, ‘May 1768’, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, IV, 146. »

32 Mary Delany to Mary Dewes, 6 September 1768, ibid., IV, 159–60. »

33 Ibid., IV, 161–2. »

34 Mary Delany to Mary Dewes, 7 September 1768, ibid., IV, 163. »

35 Mary Delany to Mary Dewes, 17 September 1769, ibid., IV, 240. »

36 See, in particular, Amanda Vickery, ‘The Theory and Practice of Female Accomplishment’, in Mrs Delany and her Circle, ed. Laird and Weisberg-Roberts, 94, and more generally chapters in that book by Clare Browne, Kim Sloan, Maria Zytaruk and Mark Laird. »

37 Quoted in Hayden, Mrs Delany and her Flower Collages, 51. »

38 Ibid., 52. »

39 Mary Delany to Mary Dewes, 7 September 1768, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, IV, 163. »

40 Mary Delany to Mary Dewes, 4 October 1768, ibid., IV, 173. »

41 This is discussed in Mark Laird, ‘Mrs Delany’s Circles of Cutting and Embroidering in Home and Garden’, in Mrs Delany and her Circle, ed. Laird and Weisberg-Roberts, 159; John Edmondson’s chapter, ‘Novelty in Nomenclature: The Botanical Horizons of Mary Delany’, 188, places Hudson’s Flora anglica in its scientific context. »

42 See Llanover, ed., Autobiography and Correspondence, IV, 243, and Hayden, Mrs Delany and her Flower Collages, 188. The manuscript is now at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC. I am grateful to Therese O’Malley for drawing my attention to its location. »

43 Mary Delany to Mary Dewes, 4 October 1768, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, IV, 173. »

44 Mary Delany to Mary Dewes, 28 December 1768, ibid., IV, 198. »

45 Mrs Boscawen wrote to Mrs Delany from Hatchlands on ‘Midsummer Day, 1769’ complaining: ‘The weather is so dull, and the rain unwearied’, ibid., IV, 219 (216–17 for the account of the ‘dabby’ conditions in London). »

46 Mary Delany to Viscountess Andover, 1 July 1769, ibid., IV, 221. »

47 Discussed by Maria Zytaruk, ‘Mary Delany: Epistolary Utterances, Cabinet Spaces and Natural History’, in Mrs Delany and her Circle, ed. Laird and Weisberg-Roberts, 135, and imaginatively reconstructed by Jane Wildgoose in Promiscuous Assemblage (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 2009). See also Tobin, The Duchess’s Shells, 53–7, who corrects the misinterpretation of the duchess as a ‘chaotic’ or disorderly collector. »

48 Mary Delany to Mary Dewes, 3 September 1769, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, IV, 238–9. »

49 Mary Delany to Mary Dewes, 17 September 1769, ibid., IV, 240–41. »

50 University of Nottingham, Portland Welbeck Collection, PWE: it includes, for example, the ‘Garlick Agaric, with reference to Hudson pp. 691 no. 43, which was found in ‘Mount Hill Wood Septr & Octbr 1783’. PWE 63/2 is a list of fungi beginning with ‘Agaricus purpureus’ and dated 1778. PWE 63/3b begins with the ‘Brown Top’d Agaric in Oct.br upon the Grass frequent’ and includes the ‘Irregular Boletus out of the Grass in the American Grove at Bullstrode Octbr 1781’. Two species of Hydnum are dated 1769. Among the other papers at Nottingham the following are worth mentioning: PWE 64/4, ‘Mr Lightfoot brought True Man Orchis . . . planted in Duck Island’, etc.; PWE 64/2, ‘Pyrola’ and ‘Dwarf Willow’ among other plants in the ‘Bog Mould by Seat Next Grove’, etc.; PWE 7/a, sixty-four plants growing on Duck Island; PWE 69, J. Bolton’s sketches of lichen of 13 January 1770; a list of English plants by Ehret ‘finished by Taylor’, dated 1778, etc.; and extensive lists of native plants in general. »

51 For a reference to a ‘Mr Bolton’ and her great-niece, see Mary Delany’s letters to Mary Port, 27 February and 6 March 1779, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, V, 410 and 413. This ‘Mr Bolton’ seems to have been more of a generalist, and there is no reference to drawing. See E. Charles Nelson, ‘James Bolton’s Botanical Paintings and Illustrations, and his Association with Georg Ehret’, The Naturalist, CVI (1981), 141–7, and especially n. 1. »

52 Quoted in John Edmondson, James Bolton of Halifax (Liverpool: National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside, 1995), 40. See also Nelson, ‘James Bolton’s Botanical Paintings and Illustrations’. »

53 Mary Delany to Lady Andover, 24 June 1770, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, IV, 272. »

54 Frances Boscawen to Mary Delany, [unknown] 1770, ibid., IV, 261. »

55 See Audrey M. Baker, ‘The Portland Family and Bulstrode Park’, Records of Buckinghamshire, XLIII (2003), 159–78. I am indebted to John Harris for this reference and to Margaret Riley for sending me a copy of the article. Howard Colvin, A Biographical Dictionary of English Architects, 1600–1840, 3rd edn (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), 492, 603, 953, 1119, provides crucial information on the architectural transformations at Bulstrode: beginning with William Talman’s work in 1706–7 (with George London’s landscaping); moving to Stiff Leadbetter’s repairs and alternations for the 2nd duke, 1744–9, and to James Wyatt’s reconstruction of the west wing, circa 1806–9 (with further work aborted on the 3rd duke’s death in 1809); and culminating in the rebuilding of Bulstrode by Benjamin Ferrey in 1862. »

56 Philip Miller visited in 1754 and Peter Collinson in 1757, then again in 1762 and 1763. »

57 British Library, Add. MS 23000, fols 34–5. »

58 See David Wilkinson, The Duke of Portland: Politics and Party in the Age of George III (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 60–62: ‘The dowager Duchess chose to reside at Bulstrode in Buckinghamshire, leaving to Portland the seat at Welbeck in Nottinghamshire. But she retained control of the maternal estates, merely granting him power of attorney to receive rents. It was not until 1777 that Portland became her tenant for life, paying £16,622 annually for the privilege.’ »

59 See Neri, ‘Mrs Delany’s Natural History and Zoological Activities’, 184–5; see also Festing, ‘Menageries and the Landscape Garden’, 111 and 114, for a list of the many avian inhabitants of the Bulstrode menagerie. »

60 Quoted in Baker, ‘The Portland Family and Bulstrode Park’, 170. »

61 See Mark Laird, The Flowering of the Landscape Garden: English Pleasure Grounds, 1720–1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 222–4. »

62 Mary Delany to Mary Dewes, 9 December 1743, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, II, 238. »

63 Mary Delany to Mary Dewes, 14 June 1770, ibid., IV, 270. »

64 Mary Delany to Mary Dewes, 8 July 1770, ibid., IV, 274. »

65 Mary Delany to Mary Dewes (part of a letter of [July] 1770), ibid., IV, 284–5. »

66 Mary Delany to Mary Dewes, 22 July 1770, ibid., IV, 289–90; she had also written on 15 July (iv, 281): ‘The cave goes on amain; a month more I think will complete it.’ According to Llanover, the duchess’s lory, a type of parrot, was painted by Ehret on vellum and worked in chenille as a chairback by Mrs Delany. Mrs Boscawen wrote from Heligan, Cornwall, on 3 September 1770, asking Mrs Delany whether, if the grotto were not yet finished, she should send ‘ores, spars, Cornish diamonds, &c.’ as ‘a cargo by sea’ (ibid., IV, 300). »

67 Mary Delany to Mary Dewes, 8 July 1770, ibid., IV, 274. »

68 Mary Delany to Mary Dewes, 15 July 1770, ibid., IV, 282. See Zytaruk, ‘Mary Delany: Epistolary Utterances’, 141–3, for a good discussion of the ‘philosophical cabinet’ in public and private contexts. Jenny A. Bryant, Linda M. Irvine and Emma Ruffle, ‘Insights into the Life and Work of the Rev. John Lightfoot (1735–1788), with Particular Reference to his Algal Herbarium and its Conservation’, The Linnean, XXVIII/1 (2012), 26–43. »

69 Mary Delany to Mary Dewes, 8 July 1770, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, IV, 277. »

70 Ibid., IV, 278. »

71 Mary Delany to Viscountess Andover, 21 January 1771, ibid., IV, 326. The University of Oxford sent a copy of Martin Lister’s work on shells (3rd edn, 1770) to the duchess of Portland in July 1770; ibid., IV, 275. See Tobin, The Duchess’s Shells, pl. 54, for a view of the duchess’s Whitehall home and museum, and pp. 92–3 for discussion of shell displays at Bulstrode and Whitehall. »

72 Mary Delany to Mary Port, 4 February 1771, ibid., IV, 329. Sharing an interest in botanical art (as taught to both by Ehret) did not appear to encourage a friendship. On the other hand, the visit to Bulstrode on 6 June 1779 of Lady Mary Forbes with Admiral Forbes and two children was greeted more warmly (ibid., V, 434). »

73 Mary Delany to Viscountess Andover, 28 February 1771, ibid., IV, 330. »

74 Mary Delany to Viscountess Andover, 3 May 1771, ibid., IV, 336. »

75 Mary Delany to Viscountess Andover, 3 May 1771, ibid., IV, 337. »

76 Mary Delany to Mary Dewes, 22 July 1770, ibid., IV, 289; see also Mary Delany to the Viscountess Andover, 6 June 1772, ibid., IV, 430, for the season of 1772. »

77 Duchess of Portland to Mary Delany, 12 September 1771, ibid., IV, 358–9. Mary Ann Port was born just four days later. »

78 Mary Delany to Mary Port, 19 November 1771, ibid., IV, 371. Mary Dewes, Mrs Delany’s niece, was married at Bulstrode on 4 December 1770 to John Port of Ilam, and thus became Mary Port. »

79 Mary Delany to Mary Port, 19 November 1771, continued on 20 November, ibid., IV, 374. »

80 Mary Delany to Mary Port, 7 December 1771, ibid., IV, 381. »

81 Mary Delany to Mary Port, 18 December 1771, ibid., IV, 387. »

82 Mary Delany to Mary Port, 28 December 1771, and Mary Delany to Mary Port, 31 December 1771, ibid., IV, 391 and 394. »

83 Mary Delany to Mary Port, 28 December 1771, ibid., IV, 392–3. »

84 Mary Delany to Mary Port, 2 January 1772, ibid., IV, 398–9. »

85 Mary Delany to Mary Port, 27 January 1772, ibid., IV, 407. »

86 John Fitzwilliam to Mary Port, 13 February 1772, ibid., IV, 416. Mrs Delany moved from Thatched House Court, St James’s, to St James’s Place in the summer of 1771; ibid., IV, 341, 353 and 380–81. »

87 Ibid., IV, 416. »

88 Frances Boscawen to Mary Delany, 21 November 1771, ibid., IV, 377. »

89 Mary Delany wrote to her nephew, the Revd John Dewes, on 9 May 1772, mentioning how gentlemen, as well as ladies, were the recipients of nosegays as the ‘politest present’: ‘Apropos, have you seen “the address to a Macaroni behind his nosegay and before his looking-glass?” ’, ibid., IV, 423–4; and IV, 425, for the lottery tickets. »

90 Mary Delany to the Revd John Dewes, 21 May 1772, ibid., IV, 426–7. »

91 Mary Delany to Viscountess Andover, 16 August 1772, ibid., IV, 447. »

92 Frances Boscawen to Mary Delany, 20 June 1772, ibid., IV, 433. »

93 Frances Boscawen to Mary Delany, 14 July 1772, ibid., IV, 442. »

94 For Henry Seymer, see R. I. Vane-Wright and H. W. D. Hughes, The Seymer Legacy: Henry Seymer and Henry Seymer Jnr of Dorset and their Entomological Paintings, with a Catalogue of Butterflies and Plants, 1775–1783 (Cardigan: Forrest Text, 2005). For Henry Seymer’s place in the duchess’s circles of shell-collecting, see Tobin, The Duchess’s Shells. »

95 Duchess of Portland to Mary Delany, 19 July 1772, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, IV, 445. »

96 For cousinhood, see Orr, ‘Mrs Delany and the Court’, pl. 42: ‘Family Tree’. »

97 Frances Boscawen to Mary Delany, 28 June 1772 and 21 August 1772, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, IV, 437 and 450. »

98 Frances Boscawen to Mary Delany, 28 June 1772, ibid., IV, 437. »

99 Mary Delany to Viscountess Andover, 9 July 1772, ibid., IV, 440. »

100 Mary Delany to Viscountess Andover, 16 August 1772, ibid., IV, 448. »

101 Frances Boscawen to Mary Delany, 21 August 1772, ibid., IV, 451. »

102 Mary Delany to the Revd John Dewes, 5 September 1772, ibid., IV, 454. »

103 Frances Boscawen to Mary Delany, 30 September 1772, ibid., IV, 461 and 465. »

104 Mary Delany to Mary Port, 4 October 1772, ibid., IV, 469. »

105 Back in October 1771, Mary Delany in a letter to Mary Port had alluded to her cutting paper on a dark ground, which Lady Llanover described as ‘a book of very stiff dark blue paper, of a kind not now known, on each leaf of which she pasted groups of figures, houses, animals and trees, cut out in white paper in the most beautiful manner’; ibid., IV, 365. The book had ‘unaccountably disappeared’ before 1862. »

106 See Hayden, Mrs Delany and her Flower Collages, 131. See also Llanover, ed., Autobiography and Correspondence, v, 215, note following letter of Mary Delany to Mary Port, 29 April 1776. »

107 Charles Nelson was the first to point out in editorial comments for Mrs Delany and her Circle that the dates on the collages do not always correspond to the initial making of some ‘paper mosaicks’. This is discussed in greater detail below in the survey of the collages of October 1777. »

108 Mary Delany to Mary Port, 4 October 1772, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, IV, 469. »

109 Frances Boscawen to Mary Delany, 19 October 1772, ibid., IV, 473. By 14 September 1772 Mrs Boscawen, who had summered at the family home of Hatchlands in Surrey until it was sold in 1770, was looking for a new rental villa. In her letter of that date, Mrs Delany referred to ‘Mrs. and Miss Boscawen’ searching for a house in Uxbridge Common; see Mary Delany to Mary Port, 14 September 1772, ibid., IV, 455. A new villa at Colney Hatch first receives attention in a letter of 7 May 1773, and it is her summer address in a letter of 14 July 1773, in which she refers to this ‘nut-shell’. »

110 See Lucy Pratt and Linda Woolley, Shoes (London: V&A Publications, 1999). »

111 Lady Gower to Mary Delany, 28 October 1772, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, IV, 475. On 27 September 1773 Lady Gower wrote of her Magnolia grandiflora: ‘tis all perfection’, ibid., IV, 548. »

112 Frances Boscawen to Mary Delany, 30 October 1772 and 12 June 1773, ibid., IV, 476 and 513. »

113 See Keith Thomas, The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 190–93. »

114 Frances Boscawen to Mary Delany, 13 November 1772, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, IV, 479. »

115 Mary Delany to Viscountess Andover, 20 November 1772, ibid., IV, 480. »

116 John Dewes of Welsbourn wrote to his son, the Revd John Dewes, on 31 January 1773 of the ‘greatest plenty of woodcocks this year that I ever knew’, ibid., IV, 495. »

117 Mary Delany to Mary Port, 2 January 1773, ibid., IV, 491. »

118 Duchess of Portland to Mary Port, 25 February 1773, ibid., IV, 496. »

119 Mary Delany to Mary Port, 1 March 1773, ibid., IV, 498. »

120 Mary Delany to the Revd John Dewes, 25 May 1773, ibid., IV, 503, for the reference to the ‘appearance of land after the Deluge’. »

121 Ibid., IV, 504. »

122 Mary Delany to the Revd John Dewes, 17 June 1773, ibid., IV, 519. »

123 Paul Foster noted in a personal communication of January 2012 that Sheffield visited White at Selborne and edited their brief correspondence about a specimen of the crag martin from Gibraltar. »

124 Mary Delany to John Dewes, 17 June 1773, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, IV, 518. »

125 Mary Delany to the Revd John Dewes, 22 July 1773, ibid., IV, 528. »

126 Mary Delany to Mary Port, 13 August 1773, ibid., IV, 532. »

127 Frances Boscawen to Mary Delany, 15 August 1773, ibid., IV, 532. Delany did eventually drop in at Colney Hatch for one day during her September sojourn out of London; see Mary Delany to John Dewes, 1 September 1773, ibid., IV, 538. »

128 See Maureen H. Lazarus and Heather S. Pardoe, ‘Bute’s Botanical Tables: Dictated by Nature’, Archives of Natural History, XXXVI/2 (2009), 277–98. »

129 Mary Delany to Viscountess Andover, 14 September 1773 [wrongly given as ‘1774’], in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, IV, 542. »

130 Mary Delany to Mary Port, 14 October 1773, ibid., IV, 562. »

131 Mary Delany to Mary Port, ‘Oct. 1773’, ibid., IV, 566. »

132 Frances Boscawen to Mary Delany, 14 July 1774, ibid., V, 13. She felt that the Buckinghamshire jury might be infected by the neighbouring jury in Middlesex, which had long been averse to ‘superiority of rank or merit, or even right and law’. »

133 Mary Delany to Mary Port, 4 July 1774, ibid., V, 11; Mary Delany to Bernard Granville, 17 July 1774, ibid., v, 14. »

134 Mary Delany to Bernard Granville, 17 July 1774, ibid., V, 15. »

135 See the letter written by Mary Delany to Viscountess Andover, 22 July 1774, ibid., IV, 526. »

136 Mary Delany to Bernard Granville, 1 August 1774, ibid., V, 22. See letter of 5 August 1774, ibid., V, 24, for the reference to her ‘progress’. »

137 Mary Delany to Bernard Granville, 1 August 1774, ibid., V, 21. The eldest son died at Spa, Belgium, in 1774 following the death of the middle son in Jamaica. At this point, the youngest son set sail for America — ‘so one may say she is deprived of all her sons’ — though he returned safely. Her eldest daughter, Frances Leveson-Gower, died in July 1801, while her remaining daughter, Elizabeth, duchess of Beaufort, wife of the 5th duke, lived on in widowhood from 1803. See Elizabeth Eger, ‘Boscawen, Frances Evelyn (1719–1805)’, in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online edition: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/47078 [accessed 27 August 2012]. »

138 Mary Delany to Bernard Granville, 4 September 1774, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, V, 29. »

139 For a fuller discussion of zoology, see Neri, ‘Mrs Delany’s Natural History and Zoological Activities’, 180–81. »

140 Mary Delany to Bernard Granville, 4 September 1774, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, V, 29. »

141 Mary Delany to Bernard Granville, 10 October 1774, ibid., V, 39–40. »

142 Ibid., V, 40. »

143 Mary Delany to Mary Port, 14 October 1774, ibid., V, 41. »

144 Mary Delany to Bernard Granville, 31 October 1774, ibid., V, 50. »

145 Mary Delany to Mary Port, 21 October 1774, ibid., V, 46. »

146 Mary Delany to Mary Port, 28 October 1774, ibid., V, 47. »

147 This is elaborated in Zytaruk, ‘Mary Delany: Epistolary Utterances’, 134–5. »

148 Mary Delany to the Revd John Dewes, 8 May 1775, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, V, 124. »

149 Ibid. »

150 Mary Delany to Mary Port, 10 March 1775, ibid., V, 113. »

151 Mary Delany to Bernard Granville, 26 June 1775, ibid., V, 139. »

152 Mary Delany to Mary Port, 28 October 1774, ibid., V, 48. »

153 Emily J. Climenson, ed., Passages from the Diaries of Mrs Lybbe Powys (London, 1899), 121. »

154 This is reproduced in Sandra Knapp, Potted Histories: An Artistic Voyage through Plant Exploration (London: Scriptum, 2003). »

155 Alan W. Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden . . . ’: Selected Letters, 1725–1768, of Peter Collinson, FRS (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2002), 266. »

156 Jean O’Neill and E. C. Nelson, ‘Introduction of St Dabeoc’s Heath from Ireland’, Yearbook of the Heather Society (1995), 27–32; see also E. Charles Nelson, Hardy Heaths of the Northern Hemisphere (London: Kew Publishing, 2011). »

157 Mary Delany to Bernard Granville, 26 June 1775, referring to the ‘botanical garden’ and ‘natural pleasures’ at Bulstrode; Llanover, ed., Autobiography and Correspondence, V, 139. »

158 See Mark Laird, William Curtis: Demonstrator of Plants at Chelsea Physic Garden, 1772–1777 (London: Chelsea Physic Garden, 1987). »

159 See Mark Laird, ‘From Callicarpa to Catalpa: The Impact of Mark Catesby’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), 199 and fig. 41. »

160 In fascicle 1, pls 2, 6–8, 11, 12, 14, 17, 19, 22, 29–32, 34, 35, 38, 39, 44, 53, 55, 56, 58, 60 and 70–72 are clearly signed. »

161 Wilfrid Blunt, The Art of Botanical Illustration [1950], ed. William T. Stearn (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1994), 218–19. »

162 ‘The great resemblance which the flower bears to a Bee, makes it much sought after by Florists, whose curiosity indeed, often prompts them to exceed the bounds of moderation, rooting up all they find, without leaving a single specimen to chear the heart of the Student in his botanic excursions.’ William Curtis, Flora Londinensis; or, Plates and Descriptions of Such Plants as Grow Wild in the Environs of London, 2 vols (London, 1775–98), s.v. ‘Ophyrs apifera’. »

163 See Allen, The Naturalist in Britain, 5–7. »

164 See also John Edgington, ‘A Plant List of 1633: Annotations in a Copy of Thomas Johnson’s Iter plantarum’, Archives of Natural History, XXXIV/2 (October 2007), 272–92. »

165 Allen, The Naturalist in Britain, 37. »

166 See Edmondson, ‘Novelty in Nomenclature’, 188–90. »

167 I am grateful to the late Kath Clark for this information. See W. Hugh Curtis, William Curtis, 1746–1799 (Winchester: Warren, 1941). See Blanche Henrey, British Botanical and Horticultural Literature before 1800: Comprising a History and Bibliography of Botanical and Horticultural Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland from the Earliest Times until 1800, 3 vols (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), II, 65–70, III, 28–9; and, for the complicated history of the publication of the Flora Londinensis, see Jane Quinby, ed., Catalogue of Botanical Books in the Collection of Rachel McMasters Miller Hunt, vol. II, part 2: Printed Books, 1701–1800, ed. Allan Stevenson (Pittsburgh: Hunt Botanical Library, 1961), 389–412. See also M. Walpole, ‘Notes on Flora Londinensis by William Curtis’, Journal of the Society for the Bibliography of Natural History, VII (1976), 489–507. »

168 See Eger and Peltz, Brilliant Women. »

169 For the role of the court after the accession of George III, see Allen, The Naturalist in Britain, 38; for Walpole’s use of the term ‘petticoteries’, see 43. »

170 See Mark Laird, ‘This Other Eden: The American Connection in Georgian Pleasure Grounds, from Shrubbery and Menagerie to Aviary and Flower Garden’, in Knowing Nature: Art and Science in Philadelphia, 1740–1840, ed. Amy R. W. Meyers (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011), 120–21. »

171 Mary Delany to Mary Dewes, ‘Feb., 1769’, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, IV, 204–5. Clarissa Campbell Orr pointed out in a personal communication of January 2012 that the close friendship with Elizabeth Montagu dated back to the 1730s, when she was Elizabeth Robinson, and is commemorated by the ‘friendship box’ of circa 1740. Contact dwindled in the 1750s. The comment on Mrs Montagu’s assembly in 1775 was clearly sarcastic, suggesting that large groups inhibit real conversation. »

172 Mary Delany to Mary Port, 20 December 1774, ibid., V, 79. »

173 Frances Boscawen to Mary Delany, 5 December 1772, ibid., IV, 486. »

174 Frances Boscawen to Mary Delany, 30 October 1772, ibid., IV, 476. »

175 Frances Boscawen to Mary Delany, 13 May 1774, ibid., IV, 589. »

176 Eger and Peltz, Brilliant Women, 35–6. »

177 Mary Delany to the Revd John Dewes, 25 May 1773, and Hester Chapone to Mary Delany, 13 June 1773, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, IV, 504–5 and 515–17; see also the application of Hester Chapone’s teachings, ibid., V, 55–7. »

178 Mary Delany to Mary Port, 19 January 1775, ibid., V, 97. »

179 Mary Delany to Mary Port, 12 June 1774, ibid., IV, 596. »

180 See Ford, ‘A Progress in Plants’, 207. »

181 Mary Delany to Mary Port, 11 June 1775, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, V, 134. »

182 Frances Boscawen to Mary Delany, 2 December 1775, ibid., V, 179. »

183 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], II, 121, where he dates the thaw to 2 or 3 February: ‘Now swarms of little tipulae frisking at S: Lambeth’. »

184 Mary Delany to Mary Port, 29 April 1776, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, V, 213–14. »

185 George Voorhelm, Traité sur la jacinthe (Haarlem, 1752). See Mark Laird, ‘Theatres of Flowers: The Art and Science of Eighteenth-century Floral Displays’, in Text of the Clusius Lectures, 1997, ed. Gerda van Uffelen and Erik de Jong (Leiden: Clusiusstichting, 1997), 5. »

186 See Allan Stevenson, Catalogue of Botanical Books in the Collection of Rachel McMasters Miller Hunt, vol. II, part 2 (Pittsburgh, PA: Hunt Botanical Library, 1961), 397. »

187 The flowering of the water crowfoot (Ranunculus aquatilis) in late April is not impossible, but Moenchia erecta usually flowers from May to June. »

188 Mary Delany to Viscountess Andover, 9 June 1776, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, V, 224. »

189 Mary Delany to Mary Port, 5 August 1776, ibid., V, 249. »

190 Mary Delany to Viscountess Andover, 12 August 1776, ibid., V, 251. »

191 Frances Boscawen to Mary Delany, 16 July 1776, ibid., V, 239: Mrs Boscawen writing on ‘this hot Thursday, July 16th, 1776’ used the term ‘African weather’ in her letter. Her first reference to the drought was earlier that July, when she looked in vain for a ‘generous shower’ to restore the green grass (232). By the end of July her flowers were ‘all drooping, and the very leaves sere and yellow’ (243). On 2 August 1776 she wrote from Bill Hill: ‘Hot! very hot!’ (245), and on 18 August, writing from Badminton, she still made allusions to ‘the hottest hour of the hottest day’ (253). »

192 Mary Delany to Bernard Granville, 16 September 1774, ibid., V, 33–4. »

193 See Peter Bower, ‘An Intimate and Intricate Mosaic: Mary Delany and her Use of Paper’, in Mrs Delany and her Circle, ed. Laird and Weisberg-Roberts, 237. »

194 For further discussion of this, see Ford, ‘A Progress of Plants’, 207–8. »

195 Frances Boscawen to Mary Delany, 9 November 1773, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, IV, 570. »

196 Lady Gower to Mary Delany, 23 June 1774, ibid., V, 6. »

197 Lady Gower to Mary Delany, 30 June 1776, ibid., V, 230. »

198 Frances Boscawen to Mary Delany, 2 August 1776, ibid., V, 246. In her letter of 18 August 1776, Frances Boscawen mentioned how Lady Gower walked around in the hottest part of those hot summer days, having given up riding ‘on account of the flies’ (ibid., V, 253). »

199 Duchess of Portland to Mary Delany, 23 August 1776, ibid., V, 253–4. »

200 Frances Boscawen to Mary Delany, 21 September 1776, ibid., V, 256. »

201 Mary Delany to Viscountess Andover, 25 September 1776, ibid., V, 260; Frances Boscawen to Mary Delany, 8 October 1776 and 5 November 1776, ibid., V, 264–5 and 269. »

202 Mary Delany to Ann Viney, 1 March 1777, ibid., V, 289. »

203 Patricia Taylor, Thomas Blaikie (1751–1838): The ‘Capability’ Brown of France (East Linton, East Lothian: Tuckwell Press, 2001). »

204 See A. Cook, ‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Copy of Albrecht von Haller’s Historia stirpium indigenarum Helvetiae inchoata (1768)’, Archives of Natural History, XL/2 (April 2003), 149–56. »

205 Taylor, Thomas Blaikie, 232. »

206 See Edmondson, ‘Novelty in Nomenclature’, 197. »

207 For Booth Grey, see Kohleen Reeder, 'The "Paper Mosaick" Practice of Mrs Delany and her Circle', in Mrs Delany and her Circle, ed. Laird and Weisberg-Roberts, 225. »

208 Mary Delany to Mary Port, 20 October 1777, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, V, 326. »

209 Ibid., V, 327. »

210 Greenoak, ed., The Journals of Gilbert White, vol. II, 191. »

211 Ibid., 192–3. »

212 See Edmondson, ‘Novelty in Nomenclature’, 201. »

213 Mary Delany to Mary Port, 16 November 1777, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, V, 327. »

214 Mary Delany to Mary Port, 20 October 1777, ibid., V, 325; see also Lady Gower to Mrs Delany, 17 October 1777, ibid., V, 324. »

215 Mary Delany to the Revd John Dewes, 9 July 1778, ibid., V, 363. »

216 Mary Delany to Mary Port, 27 July 1778, ibid., V, 365–6. »

217 Mary Delany to Mary Port, 17 April 1779, ibid., V, 421–2. »

218 Mary Delany to Georgina Port, 22 May 1779, ibid., V, 429. »

219 Mary Delany to Georgina Port, 1 August 1779, ibid., V, 448–9. »

220 Mary Delany to Georgina Port, 21 September 1780, ibid., V, 563. »

221 Edmondson, ‘Novelty in Nomenclature’, 191, 199 and 195, where he explains some developments in nomenclature through this collage. Leptospermum scoparium occurs in Australia as well as New Zealand. On Australian plants cultivated in England, see E. C. Nelson, ‘Australian Plants Cultivated in England before 1788’, Telopea, II (1983), 347–53, and Nelson, ‘ “And flowers for our amusement . . . ”: The Early Collecting and Cultivation of Australian Plants in Europe and the Problems Encountered by Today’s Taxonomists’, in History of Systematic Botany in Australasia, ed. P. Short (Melbourne: Australian Systematic Botany Society, 1990), 285–96. »

222 Mary Delany to Mary Port, 11 May 1780, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, V, 519. »

223 This is well covered in Ford, ‘A Progress in Plants’, 214–16. »

224 Mary Delany to Mary Port, 3 November 1780, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, V, 571–2. »

225 Frances Boscawen to Mary Delany, 7 December 1778, ibid., V, 399. »

226 Frances Boscawen to Mary Delany, 17 September 1781, ibid., VI, 52. »

227 See the letter of the countess of Bute to Mary Delany, 5 July 1779, and the notes following, ibid., V, 441–4; see also V, 481. »

228 Mary Delany to Mary Port, 3 May 1781, ibid., VI, 17. »

229 Mary Delany to Mary Port, 29 September 1782, ibid., VI, 114. »

230 Mary Delany to Georgina Port, 31 July 1783, ibid., VI, 132. »

231 Countess of Bute to Mary Delany, 5 August 1783, ibid., VI, 135. »

232 Anne Astley to Mary Port, undated [July 1783], ibid., VI, 133. »

233 Greenoak, ed., The Journals of Gilbert White, II, 465, 466, 472. »

234 White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Foster, Letters 64 and 65 to Daines Barrington, undated. »

235 Greenoak, ed., The Journals of Gilbert White, II, 468. »

236 White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Foster, Letter 65, undated. »

237 Richard Hamblyn provides a good account of William Cowper’s correspondence with the Revd John Newton, referring to the ‘Boeotian atmosphere’, to the sun setting with the ‘face of a red hot salamander’ and to ‘the day of Judgement’ at hand. See Hamblyn, Terra, 70. »

238 Quoted in Richard Hamblyn, The Invention of Clouds: How an Amateur Meteorologist Forged the Language of the Skies (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 68. »

239 See Gentleman’s Magazine, LIII/2 (1783), 620. »

240 Hamblyn, Terra, 86–7: research at the University of Cambridge has identified 11,500 anomalous deaths between August and September 1783 that can be attributed to the pollutant haze and the unusually high temperature that summer. »

241 See Clive Oppenheimer, Eruptions that Shook the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), chapter 12: ‘The Haze Famine’. »

242 Hamblyn, The Invention of Clouds, 78–9. »

243 Frances Boscawen to Mary Delany, 25 September 1783, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, VI, 139–42. »

244 Greenoak, ed., The Journals of Gilbert White, II, 477–80. »

245 Oppenheimer, Eruptions that Shook the World, 283–9. »

246 The broad helleborine (Epipactis helleborine) was perhaps forward, by contrast, beginning its flowering on 13 June. Delany’s ‘Serapias Latifolia’, dated 27 July 1779, may reflect the more usual flowering months of July and August in an average summer. »

247 See Stephen Daniels, ‘Great Balls of Fire: Envisioning the Brilliant Meteor of 1783’, in Envisioning Landscapes, Making Worlds: Geography and the Humanities, ed. Stephen Daniels et al. (London and New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis, 2011), 162–3. »

248 See Jane Roberts, Views of Windsor: Watercolours by Thomas and Paul Sandby (London: Merrell Holberton, 1995), 68–9. »

249 Quoted in Daniels, ‘Great Balls of Fire’, 163–4. »

250 Roberts, Views of Windsor, 68. »

251 Frances Boscawen to Mary Delany, 23 August 1783, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, VI, 136. »

252 Miss Hamilton’s Diary, ibid., VI, 170, 172. »

253 Ibid., VI, 153. »

254 For the background to this, see Robert Friedel, A Culture of Improvement: Technology and the Western Millennium (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2007), 255–63; see again, Hamblyn, The Invention of Clouds, 110–11 »

255 Friedel, A Culture of Improvement, 261. »

256 Miss Hamilton’s Diary, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, VI, 156. »

257 Miss Hamilton’s Diary, ibid., VI, 158, 160. »

258 Ibid., VI, 163. »

259 Ibid., VI, 154. »

260 Ibid., VI, 173. »

261 Ibid., VI, 184–5. »

262 White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Foster, Letter 66, 249–50. »

263 Frances Boscawen to Mary Delany, ‘Sunday evening, June, 1784’, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, VI, 217. »

264 Duchess of Portland to Mary Delany, 31 July 1784, ibid., VI, 223. »

265 Frederick Montagu to Mary Delany, 22 October 1784, ibid., VI, 235. »

266 Greenoak, ed., Journals of Gilbert White, III, 58. »

267 See ibid., III, 59, for the full account, including: ‘That day I was not content to call at the houses, but I went out to the plowman and labourers in the fields, and advised them to keep an eye at times to the N. and N.E. But about one o’clock there came up such a haze that I could not see the hill; however, not long after the mist cleared away in some degree, and people began to mount the hill. I was busy in and out till a quarter after two, and in taking my last walk observed a long cloud of London smoke hanging to the N. and N.N.E. This appearance encreased my expectation. At twenty minutes before three there was a cry that the balloon was come. We ran into the orchard, where we found twenty or thirty neighbours assembled, and from the green bank at the end of my house, saw a dark blue speck at a most prodigious height dropping as it were out of the sky, and hanging amidst the regions of the air between the weather-cock of the Tower and the Maypole; at first it did not seem to make any way, but we soon discovered that its velocity was very considerable, for in a few minutes it was over the Maypole, and then over my chimney, and in ten minute more behind the wallnut-tree. The machine looked mostly of a dark blue colour, but sometimes reflected the rays of the sun. With a telescope I could discern the boat and the ropes that supported it.’ »

268 Horace Walpole to Mary Dickenson, 19 July 1785, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, VI, 262. »

269 Mr W. Sandford to Mrs Frances Hamilton, 24 July 1785, ibid., VI, 264. »

270 Greenoak, ed., The Journals of Gilbert White, III, 95. »

271 For discussion of these circumstances, see Orr, ‘Mrs Delany and the Court’, 61. »

272 Frederick Montagu to Mary Delany, 24 September 1785, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, VI, 288. »

273 Mary Delany to Mary Port, 21 December 1785, ibid., VI, 324. »

274 See the Revd William Gilpin to Mary Delany, 25 January 1786, ibid., VI, 340. The account is quoted fully in Weisberg-Roberts, ‘Introduction (1): Mrs Delany from Source to Subject’, 10. »

275 Revd William Gilpin to Mary Delany, 8 May 1786, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, VI, 349. »

276 Ibid., VI, 350. For a discussion of this, see Zytaruk, ‘Mary Delany: Epistolary Utterances’, 144–5. »

277 See Jane Wildgoose, Promiscuous Assemblage, Friendship and the Order of Things (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 2009). See Tobin, The Duchess’s Shells, chapter 6, for a careful analysis of the duchess’s estate and the dispersal of her collections by auction. »

278 Neri, ‘Mrs Delany’s Natural History and Zoological Activities’, 183. Tobin, The Duchess’s Shells, 209–13. »

279 Allen, The Naturalist in Britain, 25. »

280 Mary Delany to Mary Dickenson, 29 May 1786, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, VI, 356. »

281 Mrs Delany’s Diary, ibid., VI, 328, 340–41. »

282 Anne Astley to Daniel Sandford, 4 March 1788, ibid., VI, 475. »

283 Greenoak, ed., The Journals of Gilbert White, III, 213. »

284 Quoted in Paul G. M. Foster, Gilbert White and his Records: A Scientific Biography (London: Christopher Helm, 1988), 88. »

285 Ibid., 90. »

286 Allen, The Naturalist in Britain, 43. »

287 Mary Delany to Mary Port, 27 April 1775, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, V, 121. White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Foster, Letter 10 to Thomas Pennant, 29. »

288 Allen, The Naturalist in Britain, 44, refers to White as ‘Static Man’, but White’s own use of ‘stationary men’ is preferable in implying men who, by virtue of their circumstances, live for a long period in a single neighbourhood, but who also have extensive communications far and wide; see White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Foster, Advertisement, 7. »

289 Quoted in Allen, The Naturalist in Britain, 18. »

290 White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Foster, Letter 18 to The Hon. Daines Barrington. »

291 Greenoak, ed., The Journals of Gilbert White, III, 242. »

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