Rediscovering a Victorian eccentric
Our guest speaker this month was author Sandra Lawrence. Sandra actually lives on my street and I got chatting to her at a street party last year. It turned out she knew Gustav Temple, editor of The Chap, so the NSC was easy enough to explain to her and, as you can probably tell by her look, she's into the 1940s/1950s rockerbilly/jive thing. When I discovered she had just written a book about an eccentric Victorian horticulturalist, Ellen Willmott, I naturally asked if she would be willing to come and speak to us on the subject.
Miss Willmott had gardens in three different estates and devoted her life to styling and populating them. She had the greenest of fingers and could make plants grow when no one else could; she is thought to have cultivated more than 100,000 species. Her archives (to which Sandra had unique access) show correspondence with all the major gardeners of her day, many plants were named after her and she won countless prizes and awards. She was a prominent member of the Royal Horticultural Society, one of only two women to receive their Victoria Medal of Honour, and the only woman to be elected a fellow of the Linnean Society.
Yet after her death she was quickly forgotten and her gardens mostly fell into ruin. The reasons are manifold, though she clearly could be awkward to deal with: she had a public spat with horticulturalist E.A Bowles over some comments on rock gardens in a book of his, and failed to turn up to be awarded her Victoria Medal of Honour. It was rumoured that she would scatter the seeds of a giant prickly thistle in other people's gardens, to the extent that the species became known as Miss Willmott's Ghost (also the title of Sandra’s book). There were many other negative rumours about her. Some, such as the claim that she once fired a gardener for allowing a single weed to be present, are untrue, though it is true that she booby-trapped her daffodils with trip-wires that triggered air guns. (Daff bulbs could sell for £50—in old money—and were targeted by thieves.) While the thistle story is a good metaphor for her undeniably prickly personality, it is also untrue.
One thing Ellen was never any good with was money. Her father didn't help, by shielding her from financial matters and presenting her with cheques for £1,000 (equivalent to £120,000 today) on each birthday from the age of seven. When she inherited she made no attempt to invest but simply burned through her capital, buying houses in France and Italy and sponsoring plant-hunting expeditions around the world. She died more or less bankrupt and the one house she had left by then was sold to pay her debts and later demolished.
Many thanks to Sandra for talking to us, and for working hard to rehabilitate the reputation of an important figure. You can see a few photos from the evening at www.flickr.com/photos/sheridanclub/albums/72177720306475642.
