Woodland Gardening by Kenneth Cox sample chapters pps 7-42

Woodland Gardening - prelims and chapters 1, 2 and 3 (290mm tall x 230mm wide).qxp 06/01/2018 08:39 Page 28
pART I: HISTORY
Glasnevin, Castlewellan and Ardnamona in Ireland. Seedlings were
also sent to the Arnold Arboretum in Boston, to Breslau, Berlin,
Dijon, Sydney and to three sites in New Zealand. Amongst Hooker’s
key 1850s woodland plant introductions were Magnolia campbellii,
Rhododendron niveum, R. lindleyi, R. campylocarpum, R. griffithianum,
R. thomsonii, R. setosum, R. dalhousiae, Meconopsis paniculata and
Primula sikkimensis. Hooker named many of his discoveries after the
government officials and friends who helped facilitate his trip including
Governor General Lord Dalhousie and his close friend and political
agent to Sikkim, Archibald Campbell.
Before we explore the next great era of plant-hunting at the beginning
of the twentieth century, another influential player needs to be
brought onto the stage.
William Robinson and the Victorian Gardener
The nineteenth century saw an explosion of horticulture in Victorian
England, which both the upper and lower classes embraced with
fervour. This was the age of formal/carpet bedding: shaped beds, cut
out of lawns, would be filled with geometrical patterns of colourful,
tender bedding plants and bulbs, replaced several times a year. The
expanding cities during the Industrial Revolution were beginning to
be dotted with parks, financed by leading industrialists, who engaged
designers such as Joseph Paxton to lay them out.
Another important Victorian obsession, and antecedent to the
woodland garden, was the shrubbery, using hardy evergreens such
Rhododendron falconeri, a Joseph Hooker herbarium specimen.
The Rhododendron Dell, Kew Gardens, London, designed by Sir Joseph Hooker, photographed in the late nineteenth century.
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