Paddington Green is besieged by traffic. To the south it faces the confluence of the Harrow Road and the Marylebone flyover, two of central London’s busiest arteries. For much of the day and night the sound of rubber tyres on asphalt fills your ears like the thrumming of a monstrous insect. North and East, the slower-paced but equally congested Edgware Road cuts across Church Street, the Green’s other main border. These major roads and ugly modern developments have squeezed the remnants of the open space into a triangle of urban dereliction.
On the north-east corner of the green you see a red-brick mansion-block in fair condition, and next to it two shabby Victorian buildings housing St. Mary’s Hospital Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Tucked behind these buildings and abutting Church Street there is a modern doctor’s surgery and beside it a temporary car park soon to be developed as office space beside the Edgware Road. At the edge of the car park, like a set from some gritty crime film a few ancient brick sheds blackened by age and soot lie in disrepair behind a derelict snooker hall. It takes a leap of imagination to picture the area as a village whose residents once sought it out as a retreat from the metropolis.
The Green is not all ugliness. If you can shut out the noise of the traffic, the view of the tower-blocks behind and the shabby strip of buildings that line its edge, then it is just about possible to see traces of a noble past. Church Street still leads to St. Mary’s, where Sarah Siddons, the great tragedian and star of the Drury Lane, is buried. A statue of the actress, serene in her marble skin, faces the Harrow Road, a cool effigy that reveals none of the passion which a contemporary said “emanates from her breast as from a shrine”. There is still greenery, with more than a dozen London plane trees each well over a hundred years old guarding the paths criss-crossing the grass. And a plaque at one edge of the green commemorates the fact that the first London bus ran from here to the Bank of England in 1829. What the plaque does not reveal is that Paddington Green is at the heart of a botanical mystery.
At the end of the eighteenth century Paddington Green attracted minor members of the gentry; men and women of quality who could not quite afford to live in the smarter squares within the city. The Chirac family, jewellers to Queen Anne, had a decent sized house here, and there was open land not yet filled with buildings. Residents took advantage of several streams which made the area around Paddington ideal for gardening. In 1797 John Symmons of Paddington Green published a list of the plants he had grown there, including fifty-eight varieties of rose, various grasses, alpines and flowering shrubs as well as pears, cherries, plums and quinces. Symmons also boasted of exotic plants, listing among his collection the Forked Marvel of Peru, Spanish Gold of Pleasure, Job’s Tears and something he called a Toothache tree.
This was a time of intense interest in gardening, a time when all manner of new plants were coming to England from abroad. Great rivalries sprang up among the aristocracy who wanted to own them and keep them in their extravagant gardens. Having a well-planted country estate was as important as the quality of the paintings and objets d’art inside your stately home. The first great English landscape designer, ‘Capability’ Brown, had just died, having already transformed many of England’s most prominent estates including the gardens at Blenheim Palace. His successor, Humphrey Repton, would soon publish his influential Sketches and Hints on Landscape Gardening in 1795 and Observations on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening in 1803.
In about 1800 glazed roofs became readily available for the first time, allowing a rapid expansion in the numbers of gardeners able to create ‘stoves’ or ‘hothouses’ for keeping exotic plants. The technology of ‘forcing’ native plants by keeping them warm was already well known, but with the advent of glass roofs there was the possibility of more adventurous projects, and on a larger scale. Within a few years there was a spate of ‘gardening journals’, initiated by the successful launch of a publication entitled ‘Botanical Magazine, or Flower-Garden displayed’ in 1787.
One of the key features of the magazine was its attempt to accurately depict the plants described, and it made a speciality of greenhouse species from temperate and tropical regions. The publisher, William Curtis, had previously tried selling folio pictures of more unassuming plants, and found that people would not buy them. Curtis now commissioned the best known botanical artists available, men like James Sowerby and William Hooker to illustrate his magazine which proved such a success that early volumes had to be reissued to meet demand.
In 1804 another crucial event was to take place, impelled in part by the growing fascination with gardening as a suitable occupation for the well-to-do. On the 7th March, at ‘Mr. Hatchard’s House in Piccadilly’, seven men held the inaugural meeting of the ‘Society for the Improvement of Horticulture’; an organisation which half a century later would become the Royal Horticultural Society.
On that evening in March 1804, the founders of the Society included Sir Joseph Banks (then President of the Royal Society), John Wedgwood, scion of the famous pottery dynasty, and William Forsyth, gardener to King George III. Also present were William Townsend Aiton, a landscape gardener whose father had been curator of the Royal Gardens at Kew and two further botanists, Richard Anthony Salisbury and James Dickson. The seventh man in the room was one Honourable Charles Greville.
The original idea for the society can be traced back to Wedgwood, who had first suggested forming a society to Forsyth a few years earlier, urging him to ask Sir Joseph Banks to help. Banks was already in his fifties, and one of the most pre-eminent scientists of the time, having enjoyed horticultural fame since translating Linnaeus’s Philosophia Botanica into English in 1760. The Linnean system revolutionised how animals and plants were identified by giving them a generic (or genus) name and a specific epithet denoting the species. This binomial (two word) method simplified matters considerably, replacing the long and idiosyncratic Latinised descriptions employed previously. Banks also accompanied Captain Cook aboard the Endeavour on his epic voyage around the world between and 1768 and 1771. A few years later Banks was a key mover in the plan to relocate breadfruit trees from Tahiti to the West Indies as a cheap source of food for slaves, an idea that led to Captain Bligh’s notorious expedition to the South Seas aboard HMS Bounty. From 1773, Banks became the unofficial director of Kew Gardens and he was instrumental in organising the activities of many of its first plant collectors. His fame as a scientist (he was President of the Royal Society) and botanist, as well as considerable personal wealth, also gained him membership of the Privy Council from 1797 until his death in 1820.
Among the notable names that met at Hatchard’s on that evening in 1804 to form the Horticultural Society, it is Charles Greville’s which is first recorded. At that time he was living on the corner of Paddington Green and Church Street where he rented the “new built dwelling house, coach house, stables and the gardens thereto belonging.” In the archives of London’s Guildhall I found Greville’s original lease on the house, a large handwritten document with his own finely executed signature upon the paper. The lease is between Greville and the trustees of the estate to which the land belongs, namely, Sir John Frederick of Bowwood in the County of Surrey, Baronet Arthur Stanhope of Tilney St., Mayfair, Frederick Triese Morshead of Trenant Park, Cornwall, and Henry Frederick Thistlthwaite an Ensign in his Majesty’s First Regiment of Footguard. It is a fairly standard document for the time, specifying that among other things Greville may not use the land to carry on the trades of “Catgut Spinner, Hogskinner, Boiler of Horseflesh, Slaughterer, Soapmaker, Melter of Tallow or any other offensive or noisome trade.” The rent payable is “£20 of lawful British money”, a third of which was to go directly to the Bishop of London since the lands were also Church of England property.
The Hon. Charles Francis Greville, was the second son of the Earl of Warwick. Like many second sons, Greville was not wealthy, and without the prospect of inheritance he was hoping to make a suitable marriage with someone from another aristocratic family, preferably a girl with a decent fortune. What Greville lacked in cash, he made up for in connections, and he had a long standing friendship with Sir Joseph Banks who was of a similar age. Through Banks, Greville was admitted to the Royal Society, his special interest being the collection of minerals and precious stones. When Greville’s father died in 1773, his elder brother George became Earl of Warwick and Greville took over George’s seat in the House of Commons.
In the cosy and interconnected world of the eighteenth century English nobility it is easy to see how social circles perpetuated positions of power. Greville’s friendship with Banks was further reinforced by their joint membership of a circle of art lovers, known as the Society of Dilettanti. Charles Greville’s other important route to high society lay through his uncle, Sir William Hamilton, the British Ambassador to Naples. Hamilton had been appointed to the post by his friendship with George III, and Greville too was welcome at Court. Hamilton, it seems, relied on Greville to provide him with regular letters informing him on the latest news from Parliament, and at Court. It is Greville’s relationship to his uncle that links him, unfortunately and ignominiously, to one of England’s greatest heroes.
Greville was unmarried, and although he had a salary as a Member of Parliament and an annual allowance of family money, it was hardly sufficient to maintain the lifestyle he led with his society friends. It seems that as a Member of Parliament, Greville was asked to help a poor mistreated serving girl who had been made pregnant by a gentleman, possibly someone of Greville’s acquaintance. Greville employed the young woman, who called herself Emy Lyon, in the role of ‘housekeeper’ at his London residence. Emy, along with her mother and Emy’s illegitimate child, lived with Greville from around 1781. Once in London, Emy changed her name to ‘Emma Hart’, and Greville gave her money for the upkeep of the child, who was eventually sent away to relatives. Under Greville’s protection and tutelage, Emma underwent something of an Eliza Doolittle transformation, becoming a real ‘lady’. Her face was her fortune, and she was so attractive that she became a favourite subject for portraiture by the celebrated artist George Romney. In 1783, Greville’s uncle, Hamilton, paid a visit from Naples, and was similarly struck by Emma’s beauty. Knowing that Greville was short of money, and needing to find a wealthy bride, some kind of scheme was hatched whereby Emma was persuaded to travel to Naples for further education—including singing lessons.
Emma duly travelled to Naples, accompanied by her mother, believing that Greville would follow later, and that together they would return to London at some future date. It is clear that Emma had become deeply attached to Greville, and probably hoped to marry him at some stage. In fact, it seems clear that Greville passed Emma to his uncle in return for financial assistance. Several years later, Emma married Sir William Hamilton, and then went on to achieve well-documented fame as Admiral Nelson’s mistress.
Greville’s place in history has been rather overshadowed by his connection with Hamilton, and the ‘Emma’ affair, has branded him something of a cad. In fact, it seems that Emma and he enjoyed perfectly good relations after her departure for Naples, and later, Greville even became friendly with Nelson too. However, when Greville was re-elected to Parliament in 1795, Emma wrote to him, congratulating him on his success, adding: “I don’t know a better, honester or more amiable and worthy man than yourself … and I am not apt to pay compliments.” Greville never did marry, but when Hamilton died in 1803, he left him £7,000 and an estate in Wales.
In the midst of all this, Greville indulged a passion for gardening, and as a result of his involvement in the Horticultural Society his name was given to the genus Grevillea—a member of the protea family mostly found in Australia.
The attraction of the house at Paddington Green was that it had a large garden—roughly a hundred and twenty feet deep and twice as wide. There, in the greenhouse, he was able to grow numerous rare plants. At least eight species are thought to have been introduced to England by Charles Greville, including Adina globifera from China, and Diapensia lapponica from Labrador. The Journal of the RHS records that Greville and Sir Joshua Banks were in regular correspondence about gardening matters, and discussed the recruitment of suitable gardeners for their respective properties.
Sometime in 1806 or perhaps early 1807, something remarkable happened in Greville’s greenhouse at Paddington. For the first time ever in Europe, a Vanilla planifolia orchid came into flower.
The appearance of Greville’s vanilla flower was such an event that it was recorded in two of the foremost botanical works of the time. The first published, Richard Salisbury’s ‘Paradisus Londinensis’ (1807) was a comprehensive catalogue of interesting plants contained in London’s gardens. The illustration was executed by William Hooker, official artist to the Horticultural Society. Within a year, the same plant featured in Volume XVIII of Andrew’s ‘Botanical Repository’, an important work which provided hand coloured etchings of beautiful and interesting plants.
Unfortunately, these two botanical works have added greater confusion to the story of the vanilla plant. In Paradisus Londinensis, Salisbury calls the plant in Greville’s garden ‘Myrobroma fragrans’, while Andrews calls it ‘Vanilla planifolia’. Salisbury rejects the term ‘vanilla’ as a vulgar and inaccurate description, hoping to claim the generic classification Myrobroma as his own. Unfortunately Salisbury also confused what we now call Vanilla planifolia with a separate species (V. phaentha) when he decided that it merited a new genus name. Under the international rules of plant nomenclature this made Salisbury’s genus Myrobroma illegal and defunct.
Andrews named the plant Vanilla planifolia, preferring to accept the commonly used generic term derived from the original Spanish ‘vainilla’, (first used by Plumier in 1703). However, because Salisbury was technically the first to identify the variety in Greville’s garden, some botanists then continued to call the plant Vanilla but stuck with the species epithet fragrans. To add to the confusion, both Salisbury and Andrews wrongly decided that the vanilla orchid in Greville’s garden was not the ‘Mexican orchid of commerce.’ Relying on earlier inaccurate information about the origins of the plant which produced the valuable scented fruits, they chose to assume that vanilla pods came from another species. Both Salisbury and Andrews agree that Greville’s plant came from a specific source—the extensive private plant collection of George Spencer Churchill, the Marquis of Blandford.
Charles Greville’s precise connection with Blandford remains unclear. However, both men knew Sir Joseph Banks, and while Blandford’s interest in gardening was probably less scientific than Greville’s, he certainly had more money with which to indulge it. Blandford (who later became the 5th Duke of Marlborough) created an enormous and well-stocked garden at White-Knights, his estate at Reading.
The Marquis was a fanatic when it came to acquiring plants, so much so that his debts to nurserymen were a contributory cause of his eventual bankruptcy in 1819. The scale of his spending can be judged by a bill from one of his creditors, the Vineyard Nursery in London. His unpaid account with them came to more than £15,000, a fortune at a time when a domestic servant might be paid £1 a month. On one occasion, Blandford had a wall of magnolias planted in his garden—some twenty plants each costing five guineas—the equivalent of a hundred thousand pounds in today’s money. The marquis’s pride in his plants was immense, so much so that he commissioned a book detailing the extent of the collection as well as a description of the manor house in which we learn there were; “chandeliers suspended by golden chains, containing Grecian globular lamps placed upon glass plates surrounded by rich gold flowerwork, from which descend a deep fringe of pendant crystals of most exquisite lustre.” The curtains were of “purple silk intermixed with peach-blossom coloured sarcenet and tassels of gold-coloured silk.” On the walls were paintings by Caravaggio, Holbein, Rembrandt, Rubens and Titian.
Outside, White-Knights covered almost three hundred acres, and between 1798 and 1819 Blandford created a Linnaean garden with formal botanical planting, a Striped Garden with variegated foliage, the Duchess’s Garden and a formal terrace garden. He also had a “a splendid and elegant greenhouse … filled with rare and exquisitely beautiful exotics … in jars and bowls of scarce, costly and elegant china.”
In addition there was also a Long Greenhouse (stretching for more than a hundred feet), an Orangery and a Cinnarean House, a Greenhouse aquarium and Hothouse aquarium, an Elm Grove, a Cedar Grove and an Oak Grove as well as a ‘Rustic Orchestra’—a trellised enclosure “large enough to accommodate his Grace’s complete band.” Blandford, by several accounts, was a talented composer as well as a gardener.
Somewhere amongst all this, there was a vanilla vine, though no records revealing its provenance exist today. Many of Blandford’s personal papers were later destroyed to avoid family embarrassment, since he attracted a variety of scandals over the years, including a court case for adultery.
It is impossible to say how the Marquis of Blandford acquired his vanilla orchid. Several contemporary references refer to the plant as originating in the West Indies, and for many years it was assumed that Blandford’s vanilla came from Jamaica. This seems likely to be a simple mistake, since many English botanists continued to confuse several species of vanilla with the Mexican variety. However, it is also possible that Vanilla planifolia had been transplanted to the island from Mexico, perhaps when it was under Spanish occupation in the first half of the seventeenth century. Blandford certainly had a supply of plants from the West Indies, many of them sent to him by Dr. Thomas Dancer, the island botanist of Jamaica. In 1798 Blandford wrote to a fellow collector that he had just “had notice of between 200 and 300 plants having left Jamaica from Dr. Dancer; a great many new genera. I shall be happy to show them to you, as well as all my others.”
Although the Marquis of Blandford is now credited with bringing Vanilla planifolia into England for the first time, it may be fairer to say that he re-introduced it. There were vanilla plants listed in the collections at Kew Gardens as early as 1765, but they did not survive. Another early reference to vanilla species occurs in the second edition of Philip Miller’s Gardener’s Dictionary, which appeared in 1740. Miller describes the plant as having a “horned soft fleshy fruit filled with seeds … called by the Spaniards in America, Vanilla, or Vinello, and much used by them to scent their Chocolate.”
In 1819, Blandford moved to Blenheim Palace having inherited the Dukedom from his father. Although he continued gardening at his new home, it was without the enthusiasm and passion that had created the collection at White-Knights. A visitor to the estate in 1829 remarked that all of the greenhouses, hothouses and aquariums were by then standing empty. After a tour of White-Knights that same year, John Claudius Loudon writes in his influential Gardener’s Magazine “it must grieve a gardener to look at the ruins of so much splendour”.
To clear the Duke’s considerable personal debts much of WhiteKnights was sold up at auction, and in successive years the land was divided and the house itself was eventually demolished in 1840. The eventual fate of individual specimens of other rarities in Blandford’s plant collection remains unknown.
Some time between 1798 and 1800, Charles Greville obtained a cutting from the vanilla orchid in Blandford’s glasshouse. The importance of Greville’s orchid is that once in Paddington it thrived and blossomed, leading other collectors and horticulturists to want cuttings from such a healthy specimen. No reference to the plant ever bearing fruit while in Greville’s care exists. However, more than twenty years after Greville’s death, another illustration of his vanilla orchid appeared in John Lindley’s ‘Illustrations of Orchidaceous Plants’. Lindley’s artist, Franz Bauer, was the same man who had provided the artwork for Andrews’ Botanical Repository in 1807, and the painting in Lindley’s book was drawn from the same specimen. This time, not only was the orchid shown in bloom, but Bauer also drew a ripened seed pod which some botanists believe he must have seen growing on Greville’s vine.
Bauer’s paintings for Lindley are delicate representations of nature drawn with a meticulous eye, part of an enormous body of work carried out during a career at Kew Gardens which lasted more than fifty years. Employed directly by Joseph Banks the honorary director at Kew, Franz Bauer was paid £300 per year to paint examples of the plants in the botanical gardens. His time at Kew coincided with a massive growth of interest in orchids. When Bauer arrived in London from his native Austria in 1788 there were just thirty-six orchid species at Kew, and only three of them were from the tropics. Fifteen years later, the gardens had more than a hundred orchids, a quarter of them tropical species. In large part this was due to changes in the technology used in greenhouses. The original dry air-flue systems for heating the tropical houses were unsuited to orchids and had been replaced by hot water circulating through cast-iron pipes—a method which allowed finer control of humidity. Now that orchids could be kept alive more reliably, orchid collecting reached epic proportions. So great was market demand that one private collector had four thousand trees cut down in Colombia so that he could collect ten thousand epiphytic specimens of one picturesque variety to sell in Europe.
Bauer’s skill was not confined to merely depicting the plants as objects of beauty, and he developed a keen interest in botanical theory and in the use of the microscope to study them. He painted thousands of species, many of them orchids never before seen in Europe. Gold and yellow Foxtails speckled with black dots arrived from the Himalayas, and blue-green Creeping Lady’s Tresses from Japan. Czechoslovakian Lizard orchids with a perfume reminiscent of the scent of a male goat came to Bauer, as did rich purple Wax Lips from Australia. The bright delicate lines of his work are still vivid today.
Bauer’s depiction of Greville’s Vanilla planifolia is no less detailed than any of the more obviously decorative species he documented. He paints the elegant pod with its cargo of tiny black seeds, and then with the aid of his microscope reveals the seeds in various stages of ripeness. Alongside are the ovaries and transverse sections of the seed pod, their intimate structure exposed and immortalised in ink.
The dissection and analysis of rare, or newly arrived plants, was crucial to their proper identification and classification. Orchids were also sought after by private collectors, and it became something of a cult to own a species which no-one else possessed. Plant nurseries became big businesses, in part propelled by the success of the Horticultural Society’s annual ‘fête’ which began in 1827 and eventually became the Chelsea Flower Show. The gentry would flock to the shows, eager to add the latest and most unusual plants to their own gardens. In the scramble for ornamental plants the vanilla plant was not a star. Its small pale flowers did not have the allure of other richly coloured tropical orchids with their blatant ornamental charm. The orchid’s value lay in its fruit, the scented seed pods with their unique and seductive aroma.
When Charles Greville died in April 1809, he had not made a will. His impressive collection of almost twenty thousand minerals went largely to the British Museum, but his collection of plants was purchased by Thomas Jenkins of the Portman Nursery in London. Fortunately, cuttings from his flowering vanilla had already been taken, and sent to the botanical gardens at Liège in Belgium. Although he never knew it, Greville’s skill in keeping the tropical vine alive would spawn an industry.