presenting the inventive nursery gardeners of Brentford, Chiswick and nearby Middlesex Parishes, 1650-1850
For the historian, the practice of naming sons after fathers and/or grandfathers can cause no end of confusion. This has certainly been the case with a family of Scots gardeners called Kennedy.What follows is an attempt to clarify which gardeners called Lewis Kennedy had links with the Chiswick area. A Lewis Kennedy prepared Notitiae, elegant [...]
Stepping through the gate in the wall around Hogarth’s House in Chiswick, you leave behind six lanes of roaring traffic. It really does feel like stepping back into the past, even when planes are flying in every 90 seconds towards Heathrow on a warm summer’s day. The House has just re-opened after a major refurbishment which [...]
Two brothers, probably Scots and both pineapple specialists, were working in Chiswick from about 1740. James Scott ran a nursery at Turnham Green while Henry was Lord Burlington’s gardener at Chiswick House until he set himself up as a gardener in Weybridge in the 1750s.
Local brickearth and clay supported the manufacture of bricks, tiles and garden pottery in Brentford from the 17th to the 19th centuries. The Bull Lane Pottery is recorded in a naive painting of the 1840s, which shows its garden products.