Eccentric Enthusiasts — Stories from the Far Side of the Garden
Plants & Gardens News Volume 17, Number 3 | Fall 2002
by Ilene Sternberg
2003 Garden Globe Award-Winning Article
Gardening has its share of wags, eccentrics, curmudgeons, and genuine oddballs (but then, you knew that, didn't you?). Take, for example, those famous Edwardians from over the water, Gertrude Jekyll, William Robinson, and their contemporaries.
Miss Jekyll, revered for her perfection of the herbaceous border, engaged in some unique gardening practices. A witness to her planting method for Lilium giganteum (now called Cardiocrinum giganteum) bulbs once deemed Jekyll a sorceress. On that day, having dug a sizable hole and added some leaf mold and sand, the famed gardener also tossed in a freshly killed rabbit. Then she counseled, "Now, always seat the bulbs clockwise," a task she accomplished with a firm rightward twist before filling in the hole with topsoil. Four months later, she apparently had lilies just a hare under five feet tall.
Once, ostensibly to entertain her niece, she organized an elaborate tea party for her six cats and kittens with written invitations, an elegantly set table, and a selection of kitty delicacies artistically arranged on saucers. Guests were seated on stools, paws resting on table, except for Miss Maggie, a cat who evidently felt it discourteous to put her feet on the tablecloth. The event was apparently well received, as, according to one biographer, "a grand purring and washing of faces" followed.
Of decidedly different temperament was William Robinson, popularizer of the trend of natural gardening. At age 21, while working in the greenhouse of a large Irish country estate, he was entrusted with the care of some tender plants that had been lovingly nurtured from seed. On a bitter cold night, after an equally bitter quarrel with his superior, Robinson allowed the greenhouse fires to die out and, after flinging the windows wide open, hotfooted it off to Dublin, never to return. Whether he was intentionally negligent was never quite determined, but after making his fortune, Robinson banned greenhouses from his own garden forever.
An equal opportunity provocateur, Robinson antagonized friend and foe alike, including neighbors, government agencies, other writers, renowned landscape theorists, and, naturally, his staff, who—whenever the boss was passing through the garden—never knew whether they were going to be fired on the spot or granted a raise. A heavy smoker and wine drinker, Robinson on one occasion abruptly burned his pipes and threw all his wine down a well. Then, perversely, he graciously offered houseguests wine and cigarettes. Those who accepted were served a note on their breakfast trays the following morning telling them the time of the next train to London.
Miss Ellen Willmott, a great plantswoman of the same era, dwindled away a fortune largely owing to her gardening obsession. When she outgrew her 50 acres in Essex, she bought a French château and an Italian villa to plant up, at one point employing more than 80 gardeners. Imperious and autocratic, she would blow her stack over the presence of a single weed in the garden or the discovery that the bloom time of one of her plants had been imprecisely documented. Her descent into bankruptcy never interfered with her purchase of any rare plant she coveted.
Once, detained for shoplifting, Willmott called upon her friend the Queen to intercede. The department store, after a yearlong hullabaloo, had to apologize for its "error." As her fortune faded, Willmott became increasingly paranoid, toting a revolver in her handbag, booby trapping her home against intruders, and having her daffodil display trip-wired so that air guns would blast anyone attempting to filch a few.
Miniature Matterhorn
Victorian England had its share of eccentrics, too. Lawyer and plant enthusiast Sir Frank Crisp tended 30 acres of gardens at his home, Friar Park. They were subsequently acquired by the former Beatle George Harrison, who dedicated "The Ballad of Sir Frankie Crisp" to him. Crisp had a taste for the bizarre and designed a garden few could overlook. (BBG's own Elizabethan Knot Garden in the Herb Garden was inspired by a design taken from a book on medieval gardens by Sir Frank.)
After Crisp's death in 1919, the garden fell to ruin. When Harrison bought the turreted, towered, and gargoyle-encrusted 120-room Gothic Revival house in 1971, he began restoring its labyrinth of subterranean passageways, caverns, lakes, and waterfalls, all linked by an underground river. One cave held skeletons and mirrors; another was an ice grotto; another featured vines and illuminated glass grapes; and one was a gnome home. Crisp owned the consummate garden-gnome collection, representatives of which surround Harrison on the cover of his classic solo album All Things Must Pass.
While entertaining guests by the upper shore of a lake built at three staggered levels, Sir Frank would sometimes have a gardener row leisurely nearby. He'd then furtively signal the oarsman to row into a lower section of the lake. By crouching in the boat, the gardener would appear to have vanished. What's more, just below the water's surface were stepping stones, so that when Crisp rang a bell his butler came marching across the lake with a tray of drinks, as if walking on water.
Crisp's most controversial oddity was his rock garden, composed of some 40,000 plants surrounding a 30-foot replica of the Matterhorn. The faux mountain was built from 7,000 tons of Yorkshire stone and topped with a piece of rock from the summit of the actual Matterhorn. A little tin chamois (a goatlike antelope found in the highlands of Europe) could be found cavorting on the slopes.
In 1914, Reginald Farrer, explorer, scholar, author, and as much a rabble-rouser as William Robinson, instigated an episode that came to be dubbed "the Crispian Row." In his introduction to E.A. Bowles's My Garden in Spring, Farrer launched into an attack on "some people's" tasteless rock-garden style, using unmistakable descriptions of Friar Park's Matterhorn marvel. Crisp and his defender, Miss Willmott, blamed the mild-mannered Bowles and excoriated him in pamphlets distributed at the Chelsea Flower Show that year. Robinson, never one to miss an opportunity to foment discord, reprinted their comments in his magazine, further embarrassing the unfortunate Mr. B.
More Unconventional Behavior
You just can't keep a good gardener down. When the author of the 1822 Encyclopedia of Gardening, John Claudius Loudon, was about to have his arm amputated (before the days of anesthesia) he coolly invited the surgeons to lunch beforehand. He continued conversing with them after the operation and was only with great difficulty on the part of others dissuaded from going downstairs to proceed with his daily business.
And then there's author Beverley Nichols, known in gardening circles for his mirthful stories, who details in his 1972 autobiography, Father Figure, his less than jovial childhood and his three unsuccessful attempts to murder his father.
Of course, we have our own "avant gardeners" on this side of the Atlantic, too, such as Jonathan Chapman, better known as Johnny Appleseed. In the books of my childhood, Chapman was depicted striding purposefully, casually flinging seeds, and wearing an inverted saucepan for a hat. Pothead or not, he did go barefoot and wear a coffee sack.
Son of a Revolutionary War hero and born during apple-harvest time in 1774, Johnny became a hero of another sort, dreaming of a world where no one ever went hungry and of an American frontier covered with apple trees. For almost 50 years he roamed over 100,000 square miles through five states, setting up a chain of apple nurseries one step ahead of the settlers, evangelizing as he went, often sleeping in hollow logs and tree stumps. Grafting might have guaranteed edible-quality apples, but Chapman thought cutting into trees was sinful and strictly planted his more portable seeds, producing mostly only cider-worthy fruits.
Of course, one needn't be legendary to be a bit strange. Some people who become fixated on one particular plant genus are often well on their way to being classified as, shall we say, a tad peculiar. Garden designer and galanthophile (snowdrop fancier) Hitch Lyman, for example, installs little mirrors around his bulbs at the Temple Nursery in Trumansburg, New York, so that he can view the faces of his nodding treasures. And noted horticulturalist Charles Cresson does deep knee bends before his Galanthus 'Ophelia' every February to help its reluctant petals unfold. (Ophelia's apparently shy about exposing herself.) Oh well, let's face it, all gardeners have their quirks. Except you and me, of course.
Ilene Sternberg is an award-winning garden columnist for the Wilmington News Journal in Wilmington, Delaware.
Illustration: Peggy Fussell