Val will be presenting the history of the Greening family of Brentford End at a joint meeting of the Richmond Local History Society and the Kew Society. Two of the estates which today make up Kew Gardens were at one period managed by two brothers of the second generation of this family business, though they were locked in a legal battle over ownership of the family garden grounds around 1750! Another brother rose to run not only the two estates at Kew but also the gardens of Hampton Court and St James’ Park and Kensington Gardens. Val’s talk will reveal something of their expertise and creativity, discuss some of the aristocratic estates with which they were involved and consider the role of the ambitious Capability Brown in obliterating a good deal of their work.
8pm, at the Duke Street Church in Richmond, Surrey.
Admission is free to members of the two sponsoring societies. Non-members are welcome and will be invited to pay £4 on the door. There is no advance booking as the venue has plenty of seating.
A reputation for reliability and quality was the key to success in business for 17th and 18th century nursery gardeners. This could be influenced by many factors, from a gardener’s training, through early employment, to the respect of patrons and colleagues. Personal testimonials passed on by satisfied customers were invaluable, while the emerging genre of gardening books saw individual gardeners appearing in lists of subscribers and as beneficiaries of writers’ comments.
Gardening dynasties
Some nursery gardens were owned and managed very successfully over a long period by a single family. A number of those described on this website ran through several generations, some making the transition from 18th century nursery garden to 19th century market garden with great success.
The Greening, Kennedy, Masters, Ronalds and Woodman families sustained their good reputations through several generations. Those who prospered (or inherited well from their parents) became gentlemen and moved into another world, another class.
William Hugill’s indenture (Layton Collection)
Training and apprenticeships
While many nursery gardeners trained their own offspring to support the family business, local gardeners also took on apprentices. In August 1716 Powell Pearson, the son of the schoolmaster at Mortlake, Surrey, was apprenticed to Thomas Greening snr of Brentford, further upstream on the Middlesex bank (1). Hugh Ronalds took on William Hugill, a poor boy funded by a local parish charity, as apprentice in 1798. Some nursery businesses came to an end in the absence of a son or nephew to train up as heir, while other sons were prudently placed as apprentices in different trades and crafts.
Two parish officials in Kew had a difficult situation to deal with in 1749. Chapelwarden John Dillman, one of the royal gardeners, and nurseryman Richard Butt placed Cornelius, the son of gardener John Edwards, as apprentice to a glazier in St James’s. Cornelius’ behaviour was so bad that the glazier petitioned for him to be removed. Young Cornelius Edwards had destroyed his reputation at an early age and one wonders whether placing him at some distance from his family might have been “for his own good” (2).
Personal recommendations
In a world where communication was a much slower process than today’s, referrals from satisfied customers, previous employers and admiring colleagues were crucially important.
Rocque’s dedication to the Greenings
John Rocque acknowledged members of the Greening family by dedicating to them his plan of the gardens at Kew which they managed.
Thomas Knowlton frequently mentioned other gardeners in his correspondence. Aware of this, his proteges, the Scott brothers made sure he knew what they were doing. For example, in a letter of November 1754 to William Stonehouse, gardener to R Richardson, he described a print of Sarracenia Purpurea grown by James Scott in Turnham Green and the new trade card issued by Henry Scott, his brother, stating that the latter was “the neatest thing of the Kind I have seen, he sent me one down”(3).
But personal comment could also cause difficulties. Henry Woodman was from 1729 supplying plants and seeds to Henry Ellison for Gateshead Park. The contracts came to an end in 1733, because another gardener, Stephen Switzer, had convinced Ellison that Woodman was fixing his prices in league with Ellison’s agent, Woolley. Though Woodman’s prices were comparable to those of his contemporaries Woolley lost his post and, after receiving indignant letters from Woodman denying that he would ever do such a thing, Ellison placed the matter in the hands of a lawyer. No further letters survive to show how this was resolved. Switzer, however, succeeded in supplanting Woodman at Gateshead Park (4).
Fellow Gardeners
Though they were commercial competitors, most nursery gardeners were part of a community bound by friendship and marriage; they shared information, admired achievements and purchased from each other. The inventory prepared on the death of gardener John Asslett of Old Brentford in 1748 revealed a considerable list of creditors (5), amongst whom were numerous significant gardeners from the surrounding area. If they were purchasing from Asslett they must have trusted the quality of plants he supplied. As the preparation of a nursery inventory required horticultural expertise, Asslett’s widow brought in two respected gardeners to assist her, Thomas Ash of Twickenham and Richard Butt of Kew.
Auriculas
During the 18th century gardeners’ societies and clubs provided opportunities for presenting plants or fruits at meetings and for cementing friendships. A feast for about 130 florists, specialists in flower-cultivation, was reported in The Craftsman of 16 April 1729. It took place at The Dog on Richmond Hill. After the dinner several florists presented their flowers, mainly auriculas, for the judgement of “five ancient and judicious Gardiners”. Silver spoons and ladles were awarded as prizes; two spoons and one ladle going to a single Barnes gardener who excelled (6).
After the Horticultural Society of London (now the RHS) was established in 1804 high quality examples of fruit and flowers, some newly introduced, were regularly presented to members’ meetings and given awards. Displays and awards of this kind were of value to individual gardeners and were also a source of pride to the employers of estate gardeners. William Cock jnr of Chiswick won the Silver Knightian medal for his pelargoniums in 1839; he had won a Large Silver Medal for plants of the same variety in 1810 and continued to win awards each year. The family’s garden ground lay between Chiswick House and Hogarth’s House; William Cock jnr described himself as market gardener in his will (7) so pelargoniums must have been his hobby.
Patrons and supporters Nicholas Parker of Strand on the Green was a very successful Chiswick gardener. He supplied standard trees, yews and fruit trees for Lord Fauconberg’s new gardens at nearby Sutton Court in the 1680s and 1690. And Lord Ashburnham, who also owned an estate in Chiswick, contracted him to work on his Ampthill Park gardens in Bedfordshire between 1697 and 1707 (8). Though he married twice, Parker mentioned no surviving children in his will. Instead, he made thoughtful bequests of property to members of the Compton family, related to him by marriage, and to Henry Woodman, who was probably his foreman. This enabled Henry to marry one of the Compton heirs and establish his own nursery on part of Parker’s garden ground.
William Murfin was recommended for the post of head gardener at Chiswick House in 1789 by William Speechly, the Duke of Portland’s gardener at Welbeck. Murfin was trained at Castle Howard by Robert Teesdale who had recommended him 20 years earlier to Doncaster estate and now recommended him again (9). William Murfin’s nephew, Robert Clews, was trained by William’s brother, Robert Murfin; he succeeded William as head gardener at Chiswick and became a Fellow of the Horticultural Society. In 1823 he exhibited there varieties of grapes and in 1830 two varieties of apple named after him.
In the 17th and early 18th centuries, many Scots gardeners travelled south to find work on big estates. Some came to posts with aristocratic members of the Stuart court who had been awarded landed estates by the King. Others came for political reasons, or perhaps because there was more likelihood of prosperity in the gardens of the south of England. The Scotts were working in Chiswick in the late 1730s while the Ronalds’ nursery was established in New Brentford in the mid 1740s. Sir Joseph Banks, who had a house at Isleworth, knew and trusted Hugh Ronalds snr, whose nursery ground lay nearby in New Brentford. Banks placed substantial (and profitable) orders with Ronalds for plants to send to Australia.
Gardeners who worked as contractors, like Capability Brown, employed experienced and skillful managers to oversee their contracts. In 1765 Brown placed Michael Milliken, a Scot who had worked for him at Chatsworth for 10 years, to supervise work on the King’s Richmond Gardens at Kew. There Milliken stayed for 35 years – his touching letters to his wife and his will show that this was immensely profitable (10).
John Lawrence Clergyman’s Recreation 1714
Catalogues and handbooks
John Lawrence, in the preface to his book of 1714, The Clergyman’s Recreation, mentions the famous owners of the great nursery at Brompton, South Kensington, London and Wise, but also singles out Nicholas Parker of Strand on the Green for praise. He describes him as “that honest person I have so long dealt with and so often recommended” and comments on the reliability of more than 500 fruit trees supplied by him.
Despite the dispute mentioned above, the quality of the plants Henry Woodman supplied was endorsed by Thomas Hitt, another distinguished gardener, in his book A Treatise of Fruit-Trees (1755): “I must own I have received peach-trees and nectarines from Mr Henry Woodman of Strand on the Green in the county of Middlesex which I planted for the Reverend Mr Ewer of Bottisford near Belvoir Castle; all of them lived and some bore fruit the first year after planting, tho’ they were brought above a hundred miles, and only packed up with straw and matts; they have been planted nine years and are now strong healthy trees.”
Nathaniel Swinden included a catalogue of seeds in his book of 1778
Barnaby Millett, Lord Burlington’s head gardener at Chiswick, was described by Richard Bradley in various works between 1718 and 1724 as a “very ingenious gardener” skilled in the early ripening of strawberries and of cherries and apricots in frames (11). Nathaniel Swinden on the other hand, relied on a little elegant self-promotion. His book was not only full of useful advice on gardening but also acted as a catalogue of seeds which he could supply. And in a rather modern approach, Swinden offered boxes and baskets of selected seeds enabling purchasers to implement designs he had proposed in the book.
Obituaries
Unlike today’s published obituaries only occasionally did 18th and early 19th century death notices include more than a bare statement of a gardener’s death and the sadness of the surviving relatives. But by then it was too late to tell the deceased gardener of the esteem of the community of gardeners, which one hopes had been expressed in life!
References & Sources
(1) Apprenticeship Registers via ancestry.co.uk
(2) Westminster Session,Justices’ Working Documents April 1751 accessed through londonlives.org
(3) No Ordinary Gardener: Thomas Knowlton 1691-1781, Blanche Henrey, British Museum (Natural History) 1986 pp 230-1
(4) full transcripts of the correspondence in Early Nurserymen, John H Harvey, Phillimore, 1974
(5) TNA PROB 3/48/2
(6) quoted in English Florists’ Societies and Feasts in the 17th and First Half of the 18th Centuries, Ruth E Duthie, Garden History 10, No 1 (Spring, 1982), pp 17-35
(7) TNA PROB 11/2052
(8) Letter books of John 1st Baron Ashburnham Jan 1696 to Mar 1705, East Sussex Record Office ASH 840-845
(9) correspondence in Chatsworth Archives, quoted in Chiswick House Grounds Historical Survey, P6327, David Jacques (Travers Morgan for DoE), 1983
(10) Letters in private archive, quoted in Capability Brown, Dorothy Stroud, Country Life, 1950, and TNA PROB 11/1139
(11) from Garden History 11, No 1 p 33, quoted in Chiswick House Grounds Historical Survey, P6327, David Jacques (Travers Morgan for DoE), 1983
The Greenings were established in Brentford End by the early 1700s. Thomas Greening the elder was an innovative plantsman, and his sons followed him into the business. As well as producing plants, they obtained many aristocratic and royal contracts.
Thomas Greening (c1684-1757) and his three sons were all associated with gardens owned by the royal family. At the heart of their business was their nursery at Brentford End, whose management was a shared family undertaking. Thomas and his wife, Ann, were in Isleworth Parish by the early 1700s. There were four sons: John, Thomas, Robert and Richard, and Betsey, whose poor health is mentioned in family letters in the 1730s, was one of several daughters. Most members of the family are buried at Isleworth Parish Church.
John Rocque identified the Greenings’ house and garden on a small map of the Environs of Syon House which he used to decorate the 1743 prospectus for his ambitious map of London and Environs. Indeed, three Greenings were subscribers to this map. Their house and land were at Brentford End, west of the Brent and actually in Isleworth Parish; they lay on the north side of the road from Brentford to Hounslow, roughly opposite the old footpath from that road into Syon Park. The house was later to become a boys’ boarding school, known as Syon Park House, and survived until the early 1960s.
The Greenings house and garden is labelled near the top of the map
The Rev George Harbin visited Thomas Greening the elder’s garden on 20 August 1719. Harbin’s notes show that Greening was expert in growing dwarf apples and pears in tubs and pots, some of which he had kept this way for 14 years. He also grew peaches, nectarines and espalier apricots which he protected from frost by covering them with a “reed hedge”. Harbin also recorded a large grape vine growing against the house, called the Burlake or White Raisin grape. “The Bunches are extremely large & some of them have weighd above 7 pound”.
Greening and Harbin discussed hyacinths – large white ones with red eyes were 5s or 7s (25p or 35p) a root, the Province Rose, ranunculus (of which Greening grew a sweet-scented striped variety from Turkey), tulips, anemones (the finest included the Battersea Red), cherries, plums, almonds and sorbus. Richard Bradley reported seeing a passion flower in Greening’s garden in Brentford with more than 300 fruits.
Rocque dedicated his 1748 engraving to two Greening brothers.
Queen Caroline invested considerable sums in landscaping the gardens of Richmond Lodge, now part of Kew Gardens, during the 1920s, overseen by Charles Bridgeman and almost certainly largely implemented by Thomas Greening Snr. After Bridgeman died responsibility for their upkeep was given to Thomas Snr, assisted by his son, Robert, from 1738. Under their care, new features were created – the small wilderness and the sunken feature at the north of the garden, together with the Little Wilderness and the New Mount. During the 1730s the name Greening appears repeatedly in the records of Brentford Ferry, crossing the Thames with laden carts and returning with empty ones.
During the same period it is clear that the business combined the supply of plants and trees from the nursery with the undertaking of landscaping schemes; Thomas Snr worked at Shobdon, at Claremont, took on a commission to work on a major landscaping project at The Gnoll in Neath, Glamorgan and was supplying substantial quantities of fruit trees to Edward Gascoigne at Parlington in Yorkshire.
A set of letters from the two oldest Greening sons – Thomas jnr and Robert – to their father Thomas snr – survive in the National Archives. Robert was sent to manage his father’s farm in Aymstrey, Herefordshire, close to where they had been working on the Shobdon estate of Lord Bateman. The letters include commentary about the management of this farm, with details of the weather, the harvest and wheat prices. Plants and seeds were sent from Brentford to Aymstrey, including turnip seed, some bought in and some supplied from their own Brentford crop. They were also growing elm trees; Thomas Greening snr had been granted a royal patent in the 1720s for the grafting of English elm onto Dutch elm stock to encourage fast growth.
Richard, the youngest son, is mentioned in a letter from Robert to his father dated 26 July 1742: “it is a very great Concern to me that he has so Small a Share of Education . . . for had he been capable I could have recommended him to the Duke of Bolton for a Steward. . . . you may depend that neither my Br nor me will be wanting in our Brotherly help to him.” Robert’s letters show him caring for his sister Betsey in Herefordshire but yearning to be allowed to return to work in the Brentford End nursery.
The letters show the family were continually troubled by money problems. They coped to some extent by delaying payments themselves. The letters mention requests for payment: for example, in 1742 Mr Tunstall of Brentford ferry brought a bill which covered the Greenings’ river crossings from 1725 to 1737! At one stage their father has taken the “nurserybook” with him when he is away from home for some time. Thomas the younger writes of the embarrassment he suffers when he goes to seek payment of outstanding invoices only to be shown his father’s receipts for payments that he has failed to record, and the sums he is having to borrow in order to pay for supplies and services to keep the business going. For example, Thomas borrows from Mr Bever, probably Samuel Bever a “kinsman” of his father-in-law, Henry Marsh. The situation seems to have been made worse by the purchase of a farm in Herefordshire on which they appeared to be losing money.
Their major contracts with the royal family and with aristocratic clients were almost guaranteed to cause difficulty as such people rarely paid quickly, though being known to have a royal contract would have enabled them to obtain credit. Thomas Greening the younger wrote to his father on 9 February 1740 “The book debts are nothing at all except Ld Weymouth’s and the Duke of Marlborough which God knows when I shall receive”. He submitted a petition for payment of invoices for works at Kensington Gardens and St James’s Palace in 1752. A year passed before approval was given for payment of these though the sums involved on these contracts were substantial – £799.13s (£799.65) for Kensington and £354.5s (£354.25) for St James’s Palace.
By 1740 Thomas the elder was paying rates in Turnham Green for a house with a garden and field which he leased from Lord Burlington. This almost certainly lay near the junction of Sutton Lane South and today’s Wellesley Road and was later occupied by the Fromows. In 1746 he married again; his bride was Lucretia Abbott (c1711-1781) and he is described as “widower of Chiswick”. When he made his will two years later he was about to renew his lease and bequeathed the property, after his wife’s death, to his youngest son, Richard.
Thomas the younger (c1710-1757) married Sarah, daughter of Henry Marsh, a gentleman gardener of Hammersmith. Described in his father’s will as being “in a very thriving and prosperous way and stands in no want of anything I can give him”, he had one very large debt towards which his father left him £500. Either he or his father laid out gardens at Kirtlington in Oxfordshire, The Gnoll in Neath, Virginia Water near Windsor and Corsham Court, Wiltshire. In 1751 Thomas the Younger took on Kensington Gardens and St James’s Park, leaving Robert out of the contract and bringing his son into the business instead. He died in February 1757, only a few months before his father.
Thomas and Sarah’s son, Henry Thomas Greening (1730-1809) married Ann Hooper, the daughter of a prosperous Herefordshire lawyer. He appears to have been a gardener too until he inherited a substantial fortune on condition he changed his name to Gott, which he did in 1769. He purchased the Newlands estate in Buckinghamshire in 1770 and built himself a grand house there. Henry Thomas Gott was knighted in 1774.
John, the third son, became the Duke of Newcastle’s head gardener and steward at Claremont; he had worked there with his father as a boy on William Kent’s landscaping schemes. Later he oversaw a formal flower garden and 6 acres of walled garden and greenhouses for high quality fruits. Rocque’s 1738 plan of Claremont has small inset images of buildings on the estate including “Mr Greening’s House”, later known as White Cottage. (In 2012 this was in use as the sixth formers’ centre at the school at Claremont). Between 1758 and 1764 John was the King’s gardener at Hampton Court and was also paid for work at Windsor Great Park.
Robert not only assisted his father at Richmond Gardens but also worked with his brother Thomas there, and on some other contracts. After the brothers had fallen out and gone their separate ways, Robert became Princess Augusta’s head gardener for the pleasure grounds at Kew Gardens (and was also made responsible for her nine cows) from June 1753. He replaced John Dillman who nevertheless continued to be responsible for the 6a kitchen garden, melon ground and orangery there until 1755 when these too became Robert’s responsibility. For this contract Robert was to receive 300gns a year and have the use of 54 acres of farmland. In 1757 his contract was extended to include management of “a sufficient flock of sheep to feed the lawn” but he died in March 1758. His brother John then took on the royal contracts and spent several years sorting out Robert’s estate as executor; he did not receive payments until 1761/2 for some of Robert’s works executed in 1754 – gravelling the path to Goupy’s Chinese arch and overseeing the construction of two other Chinese garden buildings. Robert also produced designs for other estates. Those for the northern gardens at Wimpole Hall in Cambridgeshire survive, with elaborately irregular areas interspersed with formal and symmetrical avenues and vistas.
His wife Ann is described in his will as the daughter of Priscilla Price of Lucton, providing another family connection to Herefordshire. He drafted his will in 1750 when he had recently purchased a property in Isleworth and in Lucton; after Ann’s death these were to pass to his brothers John and Richard. In December 1757 his “dear, dear wife” was dying so he amended his bequests to provide an annuity for his stepmother, Lucretia Greening. He lived only a few months more and died in March 1758.
Richard, the youngest son, seems not to have held significant posts as a gardener. Family letters indicate that he may not have been well educated and refer to sending him money. Thomas the elder made Richard his executor so he must have trusted him. However, bequests from Thomas the elder and from Robert were clearly designed to support Richard, who lived only until 1760. Lucretia, Thomas’ second wife outlived them all, surviving until 1781 when she died aged 70.
References
Michael McGarvie and John H Harvey, Revd George Harbin and his Memoirs of Gardening 1716-1723
Richard Bradley, New Improvements of Planting & Gardening 1731
Ray Desmond, Kew: The History of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Harvill Press, London 1995
Ferry records, Layton Collection; sample pages at www.thamespilot.org.uk
Wills, National Archives: Thomas Greening snr PROB/11/837, Robert Greening PROB/11/837
Family letters, National Archives, C 108/353
Elm tree patent, British Library Eg Ch 8108
Payments for Kensington Gardens and St James’s Park, National Archives T1.352/2, 3a, 3b, and T1.353/115
