Category: Scottish gardeners

The Chiswick Nursery: Scott, Williams, Glendinning

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 Journal of 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.

updated 16 August 2023

The Middlemists

Who was John Middlemist, the gardener responsible for the camellia Middlemist’s Red? This bloomed in March 2010 in the newly-restored conservatory at Chiswick House and made the national press.

In March 2010  Middlemist’s Red camellia bloomed in the newly-restored conservatory at Chiswick House. Probably introduced in 1808, it is such a rarity 200 years later that the flowers appeared in the national press and on TV; only one other plant is believed to exist, in Waitangi, New Zealand.

Of all the names in my list of gardeners in Chiswick and nearby parishes, there was no mention of a Middlemist. Eleanor J Willson’s book, Nurserymen of Hammersmith & Fulham (1982), came to the rescue. She states that John Middlemist of Bryanston Street, Kensington, and Alexander Wood of Roehampton, created the Cape Nursery on 13 acres of arable land on the south side of Shepherds Bush Green.  They specialised in pelargoniums, camellias and dahlias and by 1802, had a good reputation for their flowering plants.

Middlemist had apparently spent time in South Africa – hence the name of the nursery – and at least some of his stock must have been raised from seed that he collected or which was supplied by contacts abroad.  Middlemist was running the nursery alone in 1822 but by 1834 part of it had been taken over by William Plimley, a nurseryman and another part was being let for building.

Children of John and Elizabeth Middlemist were baptised in Hammersmith in 1814/5 but I have not yet traced a will for John Middlemist. The National Archives holds wills for Walter Middlemist and William Middlemist, however, revealing that both of them were gardeners in Twickenham.  The relationship between these two is not yet clear – they may have been brothers – but they clearly come from a Scottish family. Walter’s will mentions his sister, Ann Scott, in Edinburgh; at her marriage in 1749 she is recorded as the daughter of Gilbert Middlemist, another gardener. William made a bequest to his brother’s children in Roxburghshire.

Many of those gardening in Middlesex during this period had come to London after the Act of Union of 1707 in search of work. Amongst them were Henry Scott, Lord Burlington’s gardener in the 1730s, his brother James, who ran a specialist nursery at Turnham Green and the Ronalds family who ran a substantial nursery business in Brentford from the 1740s.

Walter Middlemist was gardener to Mr Hindley, at Radnor House in Twickenham. When he died in 1780 Walter left his box of possessions, including books and a watch, to ‘William Middlemiss’, though he did not state his relationship to William in his will. Surprisingly since he had books, he made his mark, rather than signing his will – it is possible he was too ill to sign. Thoughtfully he left his clothes to his two staff at Radnor House, Sims Clarke and John Bridgewater.

William was gardener to John Briscoe, at Cross Deep House, a short distance upstream of Radnor House, close to Strawberry Hill; he nominated Briscoe as one of his executors. The other executor was John Middlemist, whom he described as his half-brother and to whom he left over £100 in 5% Bank of England stocks. As William was buried in Hammersmith Parish in 1804, where John’s children had been baptised and his family presumably lived and worked, this seems to confirm the connection between him and the Twickenham Middlemists.

References:  Walter Middlemist’s will PROB 11/1066; William Middlemist’s will PROB 11/ 1416 (both National Archives); burials, baptisms from parish registers indexed on ancestry.co.uk.