Chiswick – Nurserygardeners.com

A confusion of Lewis Kennedys

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.

Lewis Kennedy Trebartha lot1165-0 — 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)

Huntington Library, Trebartha Notitiae http://www.huntington.org/huntingtonlibrary

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

Further Reading:

Jan Woudstra,The Italian Garden at Chiswick House in English Heritage Historical Review 5, 2010

Clare Howard, The influence of the Kennedy family at Croxdale Hall, Historic England Research issue 5, 2017

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

William Hogarth’s garden

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.

T M Rooke Hogarth's House — T M Rooke's view of the House from the lane; John Allgrove's signboard is fixed to the wall (Hounslow Local Studies)

The House re-opened in November 2011 following a major refurbishment over the previous 4 years. Following a good deal of new research it has been possible to create a new presentation of the House. In the years before it closed for the refurbishment, trustees and volunteers asked visitors to the House what would make a visit more enjoyable. We were especially interested in the response of those who had come for the first time or returned after a long gap because of a special event. There were two strong messages from these discussions. First, they wanted to make sense of Hogarth’s House as a home and, secondly, they wanted to know who else had lived there before and after the Hogarths. Rather than continuing the past practice of using it as a gallery with serried ranks of Hogarth’s prints in black frames, the new presentation reveals the Hogarth household using the House as their second home, away from the noise of Leicester Fields, and tells the stories of their lives, provides information about their friends and neighbours and also reveals the fascinating residents who came before and after them.

It was not, however, part of the plan to refurbish the garden within this project. The double gates at the bottom of the garden have been restored and given back their spherical finials (found in the shrubbery!), and the path from there to the House now provides level access from the pavement outside. This follows the line of a path on the 1865 OS map. But replanting and dealing with the sycamore seedlings in neglected areas has to wait for the time being. My research into the garden in the past will help guide appropriate planting in the future. So what do we know?

The plot was an orchard, probably from the 1670s. It was enclosed from Chiswick’s Common Field by the Downes family who were millers and bakers; they appear int he parish accounts supplying communion bread to St Nicholas Church. Susannah Downes left the plot to one of her sons in 1713 and the new house was completed by 1717. In 1749 the Hogarths bought it from the son of the first occupant, Lutheran Pastor Georg Andreas Ruperti. His substantial library was sold over 8 evenings in 1732 and pleasingly included some gardening books.

The present garden is a distorted triangle and it was already that shape by the time of the first large scale Ordnance Survey in the 1860s. But on John Rocque’s 1745 Survey of London and Environs, there is clearly a rectangular plot. John Philips, a nephew of Mrs Hogarth and her cousin, Mary Lewis, kept a small collection of Hogarth mementoes and wrote notes to go with them. These items and the notes have found their way into Aberdeen City Art Gallery’s collection.

One note reads, ‘In 1759 Mr H increased the size of his garden by taking a lease for 21 years of 264 square foot from the Earl of Morton which made his garden square – The said pce forming two sides of a plain triangle.’ If this was a renewal of a previous lease it may explain the Rocque image for Morton House was next door to the west. [Built by Sir Stephen Fox in 1682-3 Morton House still stood when the property was acquired by the 6th Duke of Devonshire in 1812 in order to extend the grounds of Chiswick House. There he built the conservatory and employed Lewis Kennedy to lay out the Italian Garden; to the north of this three of Fox’s four walled gardens survive.]

It is not possible to recreate Hogarth’s rectangular garden as later developments – most of them aggressively inappropriate offices and industrial structures for the curtilage of a Grade 1 listed house – crowd up against the walls today. However, there is some evidence that the core of the garden’s structure remains.

ranbypicextract1 — Detail from Hogarth's view, his house shown in shade.

Hogarth’s own sketch of his House, seen from Chiswick Common Field to the north, was published as a print by his widow in 1782. Tall trees seem to follow the line of the far boundary and the western wall of the garden, with lower fruit trees in front of them. The long wall facing the lane with a gate near the House can be seen. At the bottom of the garden (on the right/west) is a double door giving access to Hogarth’s small carriage house and/or stable with a room above – one of John Phillips’ notes against the print in a scrap book confirms that this was the “paintin room”. The studio was pulled down in the 1870s but a double gate remains here.

HoHo1880s — Hogarth's House in the 1880s. The mulberry is the largest tree, with a fan trained fruit tree on the wall to the left and two plum trees which survived until the 1930s to the right (Hounslow Local Studies)

The Hogarths would have known the old mulberry tree in his garden, and there are stories that Mrs Hogarth made mulberry pies for foundling children who were visiting them. The tree may date from the original orchard; it has survived bomb damage and old age and gave a good crop of fruit this year, some of which was used in small pies at the re-opening of the House. Most houses of this size would have had a vegetable plot growing pot herbs for the kitchen and Hogarth also had a nut walk where he enjoyed playing ninepins with his friends.

We know nothing about a flower garden here in the Hogarth’s time. However, Mary Lewis’s brother John, a flautist who was related by marriage to the Clitherows of Boston Manor, lived in The Butts in Brentford. Amongst his neighbours was the Swinden family and it is interesting to imagine that Lewises and Swindens knew each other sufficiently well for Mary Lewis to have bought seeds for her garden at Chiswick from Swinden’s catalogue. We may be able to plant some of his flower garden schemes in the future.

When the long connection of Hogarth relatives and friends came to an end in 1813 the House was put up for sale. The newspaper advertisement describes the garden.

Exif_JPEG_PICTURE — Morning Chronicle 29 April 1814

From the mid 19th century the House was occupied by a variety of tenants. In about 1870 a nursery gardener called Coles was working the garden and his family shared the House with Alice Clack, who kept pigs. After Alfred Dawson restored the House in the early 1890s he let it to John Allgrove, described as a florist, who ran the Hogarth’s House Nursery there. Dawson also let to Allgrove part of the garden of his family’s home, The Cedars, which adjoined that of Hogarth’s House to the south.

EXGP3.5 — John Allgrove with his wife in the garden (Hounslow Local Studies)

The House was purchased in 1901 by Lieut Col Shipway, who made it his personal project. He took specialist advice from Frederick W Peel, architect, and Austin Dobson, then Hogarth’s most recent biographer. He restored the building, made a collection of Hogarth prints and commissioned chairs and tables based on pieces in Hogarth’s works from the Chiswick Art-Workers’ Guild. He even took the photographs for the 1904 guide book.

The influence of the arts and crafts movement is clear in the garden; having been a nursery garden until Shipway purchased it, some replanting must have taken place during the restoration. The long path from the House to the bottom of the garden was retained, and still survives, and the bed by the wall was planted with purple irises behind a low box hedge. Beneath the mulberry were daffodils – all of this was recorded in the spring of 1913 Jessie Macgregor for her book Gardens of Celebrities and Celebrated Gardens.

Chiswick gardens, 1746

John Rocque’s map of the Environs of London, surveyed 1741-5, provides remarkable detail about land use at that time. Pasture or meadow, arable land, woods, parkland and gardens are carefully identified.

Many garden plots lay in the triangle of rising ground between the riverside village of Strand on the Green on the west, the High Road to the north and Sutton Lane/Fauconberg Road and Grove Park Terrace to the south east (all now London w4). Garden grounds extended as far as Turnham Green and there were more in the area that is now the Hogarth Roundabout (A4/A316 junction today).

On his 1746 map of London & Environs John Rocque shows this very distinctive landscape, which differs from nearby farmland and the estates of Chiswick Grove (to the south), Sutton Court (to the east of the Strand) and Lord Burlington’s parkland (at the centre of the map).

The garden grounds have parallel rows of planting, sometimes in squares, and are often enclosed within walls or hedges to shelter them from the winds which still whip across the flat land beside the river. The area was well placed for road and river transport and near to the Brentford Ferry.

The Masters family

Several generations of the Masters family, including women gardeners, cultivated garden grounds in Strand on the Green and London Stile in Chiswick and Acton parishes in the 17th and 18th centuries.

George Masters of Strand on the Green died in March 1734 and in May a public notary assisted his widowed sister, Rebecca Clements, to prepare an inventory of his property. The document lists his furnishings and utensils, in seven rooms and a yard, followed by his nursery stock, tools and equipment. While the house was relatively sparsely furnished, his gardens were bursting with plants.

In the “seed rooms and other lofts” were old clothing, linen and lumber but no seeds, though bushells of peas and beans were listed elsewhere. The detail of the inventory is valuable in showing the range of plants Masters grew, mixing trees, shrubs and hedging plants with orchard trees and plants for the flower garden.

John Harvey found Masters’ name as one of the gardeners who prepared a similar inventory following the death of William Cox of Kew in 1722. Batty Langley, the son of a Twickenham gardener, wrote in New Principles of Gardening in 1728 that Cox was an improver of early peas, a variety “known by the name of Master’s Hots, first raised and improved by an ingenious Gardener and Nursery Man of that name now living in Strand on the Green near Old Brentford”.

Peas were popular in the early 18^th century and Masters’ inventory lists six bushells of Hotspur Peas and a further bushell of dwarf peas at 5 shillings a bushell, as well as 12 bushells of garden beans at 2 shillings a bushell, relatively modest quantities. The gardens were not planted with peas for seed when he died. In comparison, John Brooks, a neighbour, bequeathed to his son by his July 1723 will “seven cows & two heifers, seven hoggs, my seed peases worth forty pounds and his mothers books”. At 1734 prices this represents between 135 and 160 bushells of peas.

The inventory describes eleven plots, five on leases and one of these in Acton. More research is needed to confirm their locations but other evidence suggests that most were at London Stile, between today’s Kew Bridge and the High Road junction with Wellesley Road. These garden plots lay among many others in the triangle of rising ground between the riverside village of Strand on the Green on the west, the road to the west on north and Sutton Lane/Fauconberg Road and Grove Park Terrace to the south east (all London W4 today).

On his 1746 map of London & Environs Rocque shows the gardens with parallel rows of planting, sometimes in squares, and enclosed within walls or hedges to shelter them from the winds which whip across the flat land beside the river. The area was well placed for road and river transport and near to the Brentford & Kew Ferries.

In the “Garden next the Road Walled Round with Bricks” were flowers – six beds of anemones, 5,000 ranunculus, 44 cyclamen, 20 scarlet lichen, 24 double lady smocks, 12 peach-coloured hepaticas at a penny each and four blue at 6 pence each, along with 1,000 small yews and a few large hollies. In “the Great Garden Ground” were 200 striped lilies at three pence each, four thousand jonquils, 1500 Persian Iris at 2 shillings a hundred, 4 beds of double peonies and 600 fraxaneias.

The next three plots have trees, shrubs and hedging plants in large quantities. There were 10,000 quick (small cuttings of hawthorn or hazel) at 3 shillings a thousand, 600 “hedge yews at 3 foot high” at 10 shillings a hundred, 800 small seedling yews, standard elms, 24 roses at a penny each and 100 “lealocks” (lilacs) worth 15 shillings. In addition there were fruit trees: 200 plum stocks, 500 codling stocks and “pairs” (pears), 200 gooseberry plants, 100 redcurrants and 25 mulberry trees.

The “Upper Quarter next the Wall” housed some plants, the stock of seed peas and beans, and a great deal of equipment. Besides 600 horse chestnuts and 100 English chestnuts together worth £1 and 2,000 honeysuckles worth £5, there were plots of roses, standard elms, and “a parcel of small Orange Stocks in Potts and the Potts” worth 15 shillings.

The equipment included 11 lights for cucumber frames containing about 150 feet of glass at 3d a foot, 48 glasses for melons at 8d a glass, about a thousand paving bricks, 236 sieves and 22 half sieves (market baskets usually in bushell and half-bushell sizes), 16 maunds (baskets with handles), three barges (barrows without wheels), two hand-barrows, four garden ladders, a pair of steps, a harrow and a roller, a drill plough, a swing plough, 100 small garden pots, a water barrow and tub and four watering pots. All of the gardeners must have used large numbers of flower pots and these, together with other useful clay items like weights for fishermen’s nets, were probably made only yards upstream at Mr Trimmer’s brick tile works, or at the pottery in Brentford.

Survey of Ealing Parish 1777 — Detail from A Survey of Ealing Parish of 1777

The plot of land in Acton, leased from William Goodwin, held 800 elms at 10 shillings a hundred, 2,000 hornbeams at £5 a thousand and 500 beeches at 10 shillings a hundred. Though it lay in a neighbouring parish, Goodwin’s land was only a short distance eastwards near Turnham Green, on the opposite side of the road from the other plots held by Masters at London Stile, as the map shows.

On 2 acres at Strand on the Green, leased from John Pennar, were 100 pear trees, 25 double flowering whitethorn, 24 single flowering pomegranates, 150 Spanish chestnuts, 100 gooseberry plants, 1,700 small bays, four thousand yews 4 feet high worth £20, 200 grafted plum trees and plots of elm and yew trees. John Pennar or Pinner was a local carpenter who had been admitted to 3 acres of land and five cottages in 1707. In May 1734, after Masters’ death, Pennar surrendered them in the manor court to another gardener, William Compton, one of the heirs of Nicholas Parker.

As George Masters seems not to have left a will we have no details of family bequests or friends who were witnesses. He would certainly have needed labour in his gardens but we have no information about his workforce. However, the family can be reconstructed from other sources. The George who died in 1734 was the son and grandson of men of the same name. The burial of his mother Martha, in 1702, appears in the parish register with a note that she was the wife of George Masters, gardener, confirming that at least two generations were engaged in the gardening trade.

In 1685/6 a George Masters of Chiswick took an 8-year lease on the gardens of Holland House in Kensington, described as the Great Garden and the Kitchen Garden, from Viscount Dunkellin and the Countess of Warwick. He was to cultivate and maintain these gardens, and could house a “servant” in one of the lodges, but he must also allow the family of the aristocratic owners to continue to enjoy the gardens.

It is likely that this George Masters was “our” George’s father, who died in 1707. He was listed in the rate books at the fourth property from the south west end of Strand on the Green in the 1680s, with his father at London Stile from the 1670s. The parish rate books show “our” George signing his name as a vestry member in 1719. He took on his father’s property with the garden ground at Strand on the Green still valued at £24, while his brother Richard was listed 30th from the south west with a house worth £3. Their cousin, Thomas Masters, was at Little Sutton, with property worth £25, where another plot worth £30 was held by Masters and West. Given the huge difference in valuation, it is possible that Richard is rated only for a house and might have worked with George on the family gardens.

Rebecca Clements, born in 1681, married Richard Clements, from a large Isleworth gardening family, in 1708; she was widowed by March 1734 when she prepared her brother’s inventory. August 1734 saw two weddings – George’s daughter, Elizabeth, married Philip Clements while Rebecca married Rice Lewis, gardener to Lord Burlington at Chiswick House. (J H Harvey records that Lewis was one of the prominent gardeners who subscribed to Philip Miller’s Gardener’s Dictionary of 1731.) Rebecca made her will in 1735, describing herself as a gardener. In it she dealt with her own estate from the settlement made at her marriage to Lewis. Her sister Catherine’s husband, Thomas Couchman, a distiller with property in the City of London and on Strand on the Green, was a trustee of the settlement.

When Luke Wetten, the royal confectioner, acquired a house nearby with 6 acres of orchard and gardens in 1772, and a further 4.5 acres of adjoining land in 1774, both properties were said to have been “heretofore occupied” by George Masters. His relationship to “our” George is not yet clear. The court rolls record that the same property was let to Mr Zoffany, the artist, during 1764-1772. This was probably the adjoining Sydney House rather than London Stile House, but a Masters clearly worked most of the garden ground there.

MASTERS FAMILY TREE