One of the great things about sharing my research on this website is the fact that it brings me interesting queries and contacts. I was recently approached by Ian Baggott of CFP consultancy who has been commissioned to work on a conservation management plan for Neath Port Talbot council which runs The Gnoll as a public park.
The listing description prepared by CADW is very useful and I have been transcribing some of the 1720s letters to which this refers. They show that Thomas Greening Snr was working there with Herbert Mackworth from at least 1724. By this date he was improving Sir James Bateman’s gardens at Shobdon in Herefordshire, where he also bought a farm of his own. Travelling from there into Wales was a much more realistic proposition than the journey from his nursery garden at Brentford!
One of the letters suggests that he supervised the work at The Gnoll through occasional visits – “Greening was here a few days since and protested to me that he never saw any thing in his life more properly layd out”. He would have needed an experienced foreman, upon whom he could rely, and a skilled team.
The landscaping at The Gnoll includes a very ambitious cascade, restored in 1995, which I visited in 2018. The 1740 map below shows the lake into which the cascade descends and the numerous other water courses on the estate, used for industrial purposes as well as ornament. The circular feature near the mansion (on the left) may have been the bowling green, referred to in a letter from September 1727 on which work was not expected to start until the next year. In my discussion with David Jacques about this garden he described the irregularly-laid out pleasure grounds behind the house as ‘quite a la moderne’ for the period. Today it is harder to interpret the landscape as much is overgrown and only footings and fragments of the house remain, but I look forward to a return visit in the future when the new CMP may have prompted regeneration of the estate.
The Gnoll with the straight line of the cascade bottom right, from a map of 1740.
I shall be giving a talk to the Brentford & Chiswick Local History Society on the evening of Monday, 19 September. This takes place at The Chiswick Memorial Club, Bourne Place, London W4, just off Dukes Avenue, at 7.30pm, and the Society welcome non-members at their talks, admission free.
The talk will tell the story of the Greening family, established in Brentford End by 1710 and, 4 generations on, still working in horticulture in the 1790s. Skillful nurserymen, they were also contractors, garden designers and agents, serving the aristocracy and especially the royal family.
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 notes and sketches, which survive in the archives at Chatsworth. These proposed improvements to the estate immediately to the east of the grounds of Chiswick House, which the 6th Duke of Devonshire purchased in 1812. This had been the property of Sir Stephen Fox, who invested in a magnificent house and grounds there in the early 1680s. It passed through successive owners after Fox’s death in 1716. From 1758 it was the home of the Earl and Countess of Morton and was later known as Moreton Hall. The Duke’s purpose was to enlarge his gardens and the Hall was soon demolished. His enhancements include the Italian garden and conservatory, the home of the Chiswick House Camellia Festival.
This Lewis Kennedy was born in 1789 and, despite his youth, had already worked for the Empress Josephine in France, obtaining permission to travel and export plants to France during the Napoleonic Wars. [This contract was almost certainly facilitated by a wealthy London merchant, George Hibbert (1757-1837), who was an impressive gardener, funding plant hunters and acting as a silent partner in the Vineyard Nursery. He was on intimate terms with Josephine and recommended that Kennedy be engaged to advise her.] The son of John Kennedy (1759-1842), Lewis’s expertise at such a young age must have come from working at the family’s Vineyard Nursery, the famous concern of Kennedy and Lee on the site where the Olympia exhibition halls were later built. John Kennedy was one of seven children, including three sets of twins. Two sons were both baptised Lewis but only the two other siblings – John and Amelia – survived to adulthood. Amelia Emily Kennedy married William Bridgewater Page; he trained at the Vineyard Nursery and in 1815 launched his own nursery in Southampton.
Kennedy’s scheme for Trebartha Castle that was never carried out
Lewis Kennedy (1789-1877) produced albums or “Notitiae” for other clients. In 2011 The Huntington Library in California acquired one of these, for Trebartha Hall in Cornwall. Kennedy’s proposals are set out in 12 manuscript pages, supplemented with 8 watercolor sketches and 5 pen-and-wash vignettes with verses, bound in olive green leather to seduce his client! Kennedy wrote “I have ventured to annex, a small slip of paper to shew the possibilities of Trebartha in the Castle style & at trifling more expence …” Seductive stuff but never implemented!
Another Lewis Kennedy (d 1782), born in Scotland, is said to have established this nursery in the first half of the 1740s with a fellow Scot, James Lee, from Selkirk (1715-1795). Lee had served his apprenticeship with Philip Miller, also a Scot, at the Chelsea Physic Garden and Loudon stated that he had then worked at Whitton Park and on the Syon Estate. John H Harvey suggested that this Lewis Kennedy was grandfather of the author of the Chiswick Notitiae. He identified him also as the Lewis Kennedy who was gardener to Lord Wilmington at Chiswick, when he subscribed to Philip Miller’s Dictionary in 1731, to Furber’s Short Introduction in 1733 and to Rocque’s map of London and Environs in 1741. Lord Wilmington showed his house and garden to Sir John Clerk of Penicuik in 1733; he wrote that he “shewed me all his gardens where there is a vast variety of Trees, Shrubs, plants & flowers…. One Kennedy a Scotsman is Gardiner & has been with him many years. I found the Ananis or pineapple very forward – he has a vast stock of Tulips Hyacinths Anemonies & Ranunculuses…. He has a neat Library for phylosophie & Botanie books of all kinds”.
Thomas Kirton, the local blacksmith, had a forge a short walk from Lord Wilmington’s house (now under the Hogarth Business Park). Kirton had worked for Lord Wilmington at Chiswick and was recommended by him to the Earl of Northampton. Kirton’s will included a bequest of a mourning ring to a Lewis Kennedy in 1755, and it makes sense that this refers to Lord Wilmington’s gardener. (Kirton’s mother, Mary, had kept up the family forge after her husband’s death and her name appears on invoices for smith’s work for Lord Burlington at Chiswick House and in the accounts in the 1720s, amongst the archives at Chatsworth).
The Gentleman’s Magazine, vol xiii, carried a report of the death of another Lewis Kennedy, gardener to the Duke of Bedford on the Woburn estate. Kennedy had cut his throat and died instantly; his suicide note, dated 6 October 1743, was printed in full. It referred to a long period of mental illness and instability, and asked for compassion rather than ridicule, but Kennedy was rational enough to have sorted out practical matters, leaving with his suicide note an IOU from Alexander Brown confirming that he owed Kennedy £10 and also a letter to Brown which asked him to ensure that Kennedy had a decent Christian burial and that his box of possessions should be sent to his nephew who was gardener to the Earl of Northampton.
The Lewis Kennedy who entered into a partnership with Lee soon after his uncle’s tragic death must have been this nephew. He was most likely the son of Thomas Kennedy (brother to the gardener at Woburn) who died in 1721 a few months after his son’s birth.
Sir Stephen Fox’s house was purchased by Lord Wilmington from Fox’s son and inherited by the Earl of Northampton – so the estate which today forms the eastern segment of the grounds of Chiswick House, comprising the Italian garden, the conservatory full of camellias and the series of walled gardens to the north, played a part in the horticultural lives of two of the Kennedys. One managed it for Lord Wilmington (and seems to have gone on to work for its next owner, the Earl of Northampton) and the other, his grandson, made ambitious and audacious proposals for its modification as a young man in 1812-14.
Sources of information:
John H Harvey, Early Nurserymen, Phillimore, 1974
E J Willson, James Lee and the Vineyard Nursery, Hammersmith, Hammersmith Local History Group, 1961 (Eleanor Willson obtained family information from descendants of both the Lee and Kennedy families)
Chatsworth Archives: purchase of Morton Hall, Kennedy’s Notitiae for this estate, and Chiswick House accounts used in R T Spence, Chiswick House and Its Gardens 1726-1732, Burlington Magazine, Vol. 135, No 1085, 1993
Gillian Clegg, Moreton Hall, Brentford & Chiswick Local History Journal no 9 (2000)
Sally Jeffrey, Fox’s “Extraordinarily Fine” Chiswick Garden, Brentford & Chiswick Local History Journal no 15, 2006
The Gentleman’s Magazine, xiii – note about suicide of Duke of Bedford’s gardener
Family history references traced and/or checked via www.ancestry.co.uk
Information from Richard Hewlings, English Heritage about recommendation to the Earl of Northampton.
www.georgehibbert.com– a website about the Hibbert family run by Nick Hibbert Steele
Note: This piece has prompted interest from several descendants of the gardening Kennedys – I am grateful for the information they have passed on and have been happy to share my research. Yesterday I took two of them for a walk around the Italian Garden and the Duke’s Avenue at Chiswick House to explore the design ideas Lewis Kennedy (1789-1877) had conceived in 1814. 2 July 2012
The Chiswick nursery where later Thornton Road was built, was established by James Scott in the 1740s and managed by, amongst others, Richard Williams (of Williams Pear fame) and Robert Glendinning.
The L-shaped 8-acre plot, shown shaded in peach on Milne’s Land Use Map of 1800, was cultivated by a series of important 18th and 19th century gardeners. Today the Victorian houses of Thornton and Mayfield Avenues run across the land.
The Chiswick Nursery was established in about 1740 by James Scott,and became famous for its pineapples, a great test of the nurseryman’s skill. Scott supplied the first pineapples to be fruited in Scotland from here. His ‘stoves’ or heated greenhouses for raising pineapples were highly recommended as were his cauliflower seeds.
Scott’s elegant trade card advertises his famous pineapples and also the stoves, fire walls and frames he could supply for forcing fruit. Scott died in 1770 and his nursery passed into other hands; after 1776 Roberson and Hodson (or Hudson) were running it, though no information has been traced about their garden work.
By 1784 Richard Williams was running it; he was to remain for over forty years. He specialised in heathers and introduced many new plants from the Cape of Good Hope, from Australia and America.
He propagated the Salopian Pippin, an apple which may have originated on his Shropshire estate at Hadnoll. This was commended by Hugh Ronalds, the Brentford nurseryman, in his book, Pyrus Malus Brentfordiensis, published in 1832.
Williams pear from a print which accompanied Hooker’s presentation of the fruit to the RHS, 1816
Williams is known today because he propagated the Williams Pear. He developed a sapling obtained from a Berkshire schoolmaster to a quality and reliability that saw William Hooker recommend it to a meeting of the Royal Horticultural Society in 1816. Hooker called it the Williams Bon Chretien. The quality and reliability of this variety saw it increasingly cultivated in England and across the world. It is still widely grown and is also known in America as the Bartlett Pear. The eau de vie, Poire William, produced mainly in Alsace, and the similar liqueur from the former Yugoslavia, viljamovka, still use Mr Williams’ name and are frequently produced with a pear grown inside the bottle.
The history of the nursery is obscure for a few years after Williams’ death in 1830. The detail in the newspaper advertisement shown here suggests that the nursery had become predominantly a fruit-growing ground.
The newscutting is preserved in a scrap book in Chiswick Local Studies collection and is annotated with the date of 1837. A little research by Simon Francis has pinned it down to the Morning Chronicle where it was also advertised on the day before the sale. A John Graham seems to have been at the nursery from 1836 until Robert Glendinning took it over in 1843, so it seems odd that the plants should have been sold off so soon after he took over when the nursery was to continue, unless, perhaps, the executors had debts to pay. It is possible, however, that having arranged to take over the land, he had to bid separately for the stock on the ground.
Glendinning was born in Lanark in 1805 and had been working on the estate at Bicton in the West Country in the 1830s. He was already an experienced gardener when he took on the Chiswick Nursery. He re-organised his Chiswick Nursery and installed new hothouses. He was sufficiently confident about its future to issue a long advertisement in The Gardeners’ Chronicle in December 1843 announcing the improvements and seeking business.
Glendinning’s horticultural interests were wide-ranging. He grew heathers and had a high reputation for conifers and fruit trees. He was an active member of the Horticultural Society of London whose gardens in Chiswick were about 10 minutes’ walk from his nursery. His Practical Hints on the Culture of Pineapples was published in 1839 and he donated a copy to the library at the Horticultural Society’s Chiswick gardens where he was commissioned to redesign the arboretum. Amongst many articles which he wrote for the Journalof the Horticultural Society was one on transplanting large trees in 1849, and he published The Pinetum, a list of conifers, 10 years later. Many other articles followed and he won numerous RHS awards. Robert Fortune’s third expedition to China supplied him with imported plants including rhododendrons.
By the time of his death in 1862 Glendinning had become so firmly established locally that he was one of the Chiswick Improvement Commissioners. His wife and sons continued the business for nine years after he died until it was taken over by Henry Ewen, Nurseryman and Florist. The 1881 Census lists The Ewen family, and describes Mr Ewen as employing 5 men and 34 boys. The 25″ OS map of about 1870 shows the extensive garden grounds but they were to become a building site as Chiswick was absorbed into London’s western suburbs.
