Growing pains

Toby Musgrave's The Head Gardeners depicts the hard life of the forgotten heroes of horticulture. By Andrea Wulf

The Head Gardeners: Forgotten Heroes of Horticulture

by Toby Musgrave
256pp, Aurum, £18.99

The creation of the English garden in the 18th and 19th centuries is often associated with the "great men" involved: garden designers such as William Kent, Lancelot "Capability" Brown and Humphry Repton. But Toby Musgrave has written a revisionist history of a forgotten profession: that of the head gardener. These were the people who actually laboured to grow thousands of annuals, who mixed secret recipes of manure to create verdant lawns, and who engineered fountains and lakes.

Life as a gardener started at about the age of 12, and apprenticeship usually lasted as many years. To learn their trade, boys washed flowerpots or stoked the boilers in the hothouses for more than 10 hours a day, six days a week, while studying the latest horticultural publications in the evenings. One Andrew Turnbull, for example, learned every night some 50 new plant names, in order to be allowed to work in the flower garden. Most of the apprentices and gardeners lived in abysmal conditions. Some of the so-called "bothies" were, as one horticultural writer complained, "very uncomfortable hovels" - cold, gloomy and unsuitable for human habitation. The wages were also low, even compared to other badly paid trades, and worst of all the boys had to bribe the head gardener with an annual "fee" to take them on at all.

Musgrave is particularly evocative when describing the education and daily work of the gardener in the 19th century - shovelling manure on frosty December days, with "sweat dripping off my nose like peas", as described by a David Thomson. At Bicton in Derbyshire, the gardeners were fined threepence if they arrived in a dirty shirt or if their shoes were not properly tied, and fourpence if they were "found gathering fruit with unwashed hands".

What is missing in The Head Gardeners, however, is an examination of what motivated these men to endure the hardship of the long apprenticeship, despite the prospect of lifelong penury and ever more demanding physical labour. There is little about the passion that drove them - that all-encompassing urge to grow, create, experiment and to improve (the soil, the technology, the plants, but also their station in life).

An example for this is Musgrave's case study of the greatest and most famous of all head gardeners, Joseph Paxton at Chatsworth, in the 19th century. His relationship with his employer, the Duke of Devonshire, was extraordinary, as it changed from servitude to deep mutual friendship. Paxton moved from mere employee to friend, companion and financial adviser. He travelled with the duke to France, Italy and Constantinople, seeing more art, architecture and cultural landmarks than many aristocrats. Back home, Paxton's sheer determination, combined with his horticultural and technological genius, made the duke "drunk with Chatsworth" - consequently spending more money on his garden than anybody else at the time. Paxton eventually used his knowledge and experience with the glasshouses at Chatsworth as inspiration for the Crystal Palace at the Great Exhibition in 1851, and thereby became both famous and rich.

However, despite this amazing story of friendship and obsession, Musgrave organises this section rigidly according to Chatsworth's garden features ("rockwork", "pinetum", "glasshouses" and so on). This destroys the narrative, which should surely have been driven by the irresistible relationship between Paxton and the duke and their ambitions.

Musgrave does succeed, however, in demonstrating how many of the gardeners became enormously accomplished, executing the grand ideas of famous landscape architects, which were often provided only as a sketch. They not only laid out these complex designs but also mass-produced tender exotics and pineapples in all seasons, built glass-houses, improved the soil, organised their staff and cajoled their employers. They were horticulturists, mathematicians, engineers, chemists, botanists and managers at the same time. Many also played a central role in disseminating the new horticultural knowledge. Philip Miller, as the head gardener at the Chelsea Physic Garden in the 18th century, was the first to publish a gardening encyclopedia which was based on observation and experiments instead of plant lore and myth - it was the mother of all plant dictionaries.

Others founded horticultural magazines or wrote books and articles, sharing their experience with professionals and amateurs. Some even ruled their employers: Thomas King, of Devizes Castle in Wiltshire, grew only flowers he liked, ignoring his employer's wishes. Samuel Barker, of Clumber Park in Nottinghamshire, went so far as to write threatening letters when the owner dared to pick and eat "his" prized grapes without asking for permission.

· Andrea Wulf is the co-author of This Other Eden. Seven Great Gardens and 300 Years of English History, published by Little, Brown.