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history: georgian On a cold January morning in 1734, cloth merchant Peter Collinson rushed from his office in the City of London to the Thames to pick up the most exciting piece of merchandise he had ever received: two wooden cases from Philadelphia, filled with hundreds of seeds neatly wrapped in paper. These seeds carried the beginning of what would become known as the ‘English Garden’. The man who had dispatched the two boxes was the American farmer John Bartram, a Pennsylvanian Quaker who was passionate about plants and botany. Over the next four decades, Bartram crisscrossed the North American colonies in search of new plants, sending hundreds of seed boxes to England, populating <strong>gardens</strong> and parks across the British Isles with American trees and shrubs. But the English couldn’t get enough. In 1761, Collinson wrote to Bartram that the gardeners wanted new and more species because ‘they say they are Tired of old ones’. ‘I have sent seeds of almost every tree and shrub from Nova Scotia to Carolina,’ Bartram replied, ‘do they think I can make new ones?’ But yes, he said, he would continue facing the dangers of the wilderness, risking his life, even ‘if I die A martar to Botany Gods’. Need for seed English gardeners were desperate for Bartram’s seeds, because never before had there been such a vast choice to bring beauty and variety to the garden in all seasons. With only four native British evergreens, gardeners couldn’t get enough of American conifers, but they also adored winter-flowering shrubs such as witch hazel. Even autumn, which until Bartram sent his boxes, had been a fairly muted affair, was now a show of spectacular colour as the red foliage of white ash competed with fiery maple leaves and 58 the english garden February 2013 CLOCKWISE FROM TOP The Crystal Grotto at Painshill in Surrey is one of many fancies built by owner Charles Hamilton to go with his exotic plants; the Chinese bridge; Hamilton’s plaque in front of the Gothic Temple. Find out more about the garden at www.painshill.co.uk the aubergine purple of sweet gum. The American towering trees, flowering shrubs and glossy evergreens gave English gardeners what they called ‘living pencils’, creating the irregular outlines and varied colours that made the first ‘natural’ landscapes in England. Instead of the straight lines and geometry that had underpinned the <strong>gardens</strong> of the late 17th and early 18th century, Bartram’s trees and shrubs provided shapes and patterns - columns, cones, pyramids and spheres - without the need for pruning shears. Red cedars and Eastern hemlock became vertical brushstrokes, while kalmias and rhododendrons spread in rounder shapes. Large fluttering leaves of Indian bean trees were set against the delicate lace-like foliage of false acacia, and the white bark of paper birch contrasted with the rustic look of shortleaf pine. It was America that freed England from the corset of patterns and topiary that gardeners had imposed on nature until then.
The view from inside the Gothic Temple at Painshill, looking down towards the amphitheatre. The garden, its features and its plants are a perfect surviving example of an 18th-century English landscape park.
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