There is another important anomaly in Paxton’s entry. The Handwriting Book says he was received into the garden on 13 November 1823, upon the recommendation of Joseph Sabine. Appointments were also recorded in the Garden Committee Minutes and when Paxton’s appointment appears a full five months later, the minutes record, ‘It is ordered upon the recommendation of the Secretary that Joseph Paxton, a person desirous of becoming a labourer upon the establishment be permitted to be so employed, his having previously been a Gardener notwithstanding.’² As we have seen, the scheme to admit young men to train and develop at the Garden was designed for those who had not yet progressed too far in their careers. Yet in his entry in the Handwriting Book, Paxton admits that he had been employed as a head gardener to Sir Gregory Osborne Page Turner since late 1821. Why did Paxton leave a position of responsibility and status as a gentleman’s gardener, to take up the lower-paid and lower-status position of ‘labourer under the Ornamental Gardener’ at Chiswick? And why did the Horticultural Society agree to this?

It appears to have been a mixture of push and pull factors. The push factor was that by early 1823 Paxton’s employer, Sir Gregory Osborne Page Turner, was showing signs of insanity. Eventually his condition worsened and by 1824 he was declared bankrupt with liabilities of more than £100,000. Paxton may well have seen the signs and decided in 1823 that it was time to move on. Moreover, he was nothing if not ambitious. He must have understood that the opportunity to develop new skills and shine was much greater at Chiswick, the epicentre of cutting-edge horticulture, than it would have been in a relatively modest garden in Bedfordshire, with a mentally and financially unstable employer. We have no way of knowing exactly which strings Paxton pulled to get the Horticultural Society to overlook its own rules and let him in. Perhaps William Griffin, head gardener at Woodhall Park in Hertfordshire where Paxton trained for three years before coming to Chiswick, put in a word on Paxton’s behalf. Griffin, an expert on cultivating pineapples, was one of a number of professional gardeners and nurserymen who, thanks to their knowledge and expertise, were admitted to the membership of the Horticultural Society.

Once in the Chiswick Garden, Paxton’s prior experience appears to have allowed him to progress rapidly up the ladder. In November 1824, just under a year after he entered Chiswick, the Garden Committee Minutes record his promotion to Under-Gardener in the Arboretum.

Paxton’s efforts to bend the rules to get into Chiswick paid off in a much bigger way than simply quick promotion. Everyone working in the Garden will have been aware of its landlord and next-door neighbour, the Duke of Devonshire. The Society’s Chiswick Garden lay next door to the duke’s impressive gardens of Chiswick Park. The story goes that in 1826 the thirty-six-year-old George Spencer Cavendish met Joseph Paxton (then aged twenty-three) as the duke let himself into the Society’s Garden through the private door that he had insisted was constructed in the wall separating it from the grounds of Chiswick House. The unmarried duke was partially deaf and, despite his enormous wealth and social standing, was a shy and rather nervous man. In the young Joseph Paxton he met someone with a confidence and self-possession that he himself lacked. It seems that Paxton had the same knack possessed by an earlier giant of British horticulture, Capability Brown, of being able to speak affably and confidently with people from all stations of life, from garden labourers to dukes. Specifically, in the case of the Duke of Devonshire, Paxton also had the sensitivity to speak slowly and clearly, so that the deaf duke could hear him.

Over the past two years Paxton had worked his way through the different departments and had now been promoted to oversee the Arboretum, one of the most prestigious parts of the Garden. An arboretum was a collection of rare and beautiful trees and by the 1820s owning a fine arboretum was, for the landed aristocracy, a highly desirable status symbol. The Horticultural Society invested a lot of time and effort in ensuring that its tree collection was one of the finest in the country. The trees were arranged in ‘clumps’ surrounded by turf and ornamental plants, with a long canal running up the centre. Loudon heavily criticized the layout; it was too flat to be picturesque or aesthetically pleasing, and too erratically laid out to be systematic or scientifically informative. Whatever the arboretum’s design faults, Paxton was nevertheless in charge of a collection of rare and valuable trees. He was able to answer the duke’s questions with authoritative confidence and, in all probability, an enthusiasm that matched the duke’s own growing fascination with the business of gardening on a grand scale. Since coming into his inheritance of estates in excess of 200,000 acres (81,000 hectares) in 1811, the duke had indulged in a spending spree on his collection of houses and gardens and now needed someone to take charge of the vast project to remodel Chats-worth in Derbyshire. The estate was already a building site, with the fashionable architect Jeffry Wyatt undertaking an ambitious remodelling of the house and pleasure grounds. The duke had already begun a massive tree-planting programme, covering an area of over 550 acres (223 hectares), more than sixty times the size of the Arboretum at Chiswick. Even if news of this redevelopment had not travelled, as it surely must have done in the horticultural world, Paxton needed only to poke his head into the duke’s garden next door at Chiswick to see the resources to be enjoyed by a gardener lucky enough to work for him. In 1813 the duke had commissioned a 300-foot (91-metre) long conservatory to house the newly fashionable camellias from China.

In March 1826 the Duke of Devonshire offered Paxton the position of Superintendent of the Gardens at Chatsworth. This made him head gardener at one of the grandest estates in England, and an employee of one of the richest and most indulgent employers in the land. Indeed, the duke was so wealthy that he complained of having too many houses; when he went to his Irish property in Lismore in 1844, it was only his second visit in twenty-two years. As well as Chatsworth and Chiswick, he owned Burlington House and Devonshire House (two enormous mansions in Mayfair). He also owned large sections of the West End of London, as well as coal mines in Derbyshire. With the backing of such a rich patron, Paxton knew he would be able to take the things he had seen and learnt at Chiswick and try them on a much bigger scale.

After leaving Chiswick, he transformed Chatsworth at an amazing rate – improving the glasshouses, designing new buildings and waterworks and creating an enormous arboretum. With high-profile coups such as the Great Stove (then the largest greenhouse in Europe) and the colossal Emperor Fountain, it was not long before Joseph Paxton was in demand to work for other clients by contract. In the 1840s he began to lay out cemeteries and municipal parks. He branched out into publishing, becoming editor of The Horticultural Register in 1831 and Paxton’s Magazine of Botany in 1834. He collaborated with John Lindley on the Pocket Botanical Dictionary (1840), Paxton’s Flower Garden (1850) and The Gardeners’ Chronicle, the weekly magazine that was to take on the mantle of the Gardener’s Magazine as the essential newspaper of the horticultural world. Paxton reached the peak of his celebrity with his design for the world-famous Crystal Palace, the home of the Great Exhibition of 1851, an achievement that resulted in a knighthood. As if all this were not enough, he oversaw the provision of accommodation for troops during the Crimean War, was elected to the House of Commons as a Liberal MP and was heavily involved in a number of railway schemes. By the time of his death in 1865, Sir Joseph Paxton had transcended the world of gardening and was a national figure.

The problem was that Joseph Paxton’s success was so extraordinary, so singular, it only served to overshadow all the other men who had also trained at Chiswick. However, he was far from the only success story to come out of this remarkable garden. During the 1820s the Horticultural Society’s aim to recommend men to major positions across the country was realized to a considerable extent. Of the 105 men in the book, thirty-nine are recorded in the Garden Committee Minutes as leaving after being ‘recommended to positions’. This is probably an underestimate of the number who went on to work in senior positions in significant gardens. The Garden Committee Minutes cease in late 1829, so men recommended after that point are not recorded; and there were also several men who asked for ‘permission to leave’ because they themselves had obtained employment without waiting for a recommendation. Today, with the exception of TV gardeners, horticultural careers do not have the status they deserve; whilst he was prime minister, David Cameron famously dismissed gardening as an occupation for those who did not excel academically. It is landscape architects and garden designers, rather than gardeners, who take the plaudits and rewards. However, things were very different in the nineteenth century. Our gardeners were lucky enough to emerge from their training at Chiswick into a world that was much richer in opportunity for skilled professionals.

The first reason for this was that there were plenty of wealthy employers looking for skilled head gardeners. Whilst times were hard for the working classes in the first half of the nineteenth century, for those at the top of the social tree there was more disposable income available to spend on large-scale gardens, and these gardens required sophisticated professionals to manage them. The agricultural revolution had massively increased farming yields and this resulted in higher rents and higher incomes for landowners. The preceding generation’s obsession with estate improvements à la Capability Brown, and others, had established that investing in the grounds of your country house was a socially acceptable way of flaunting your wealth and status.

Moreover, the style of gardening that developed in the first half of the nineteenth century was almost custom-made to both demand and showcase a new level of horticultural skill. Fashions in garden design had moved decisively away from the eighteenth-century landscaped park, which had aimed to turn the setting for country houses into an idealized image of nature. Humphry Repton and other designers and writers promoted the idea of returning the flower garden to the main view of the house, whilst Loudon and others emphasized the desirability of creating settings for ‘star’ specimen plants in island beds, designed to show off horticultural technique. The keenest garden owners would set aside areas to showcase specific types of plants – a rose garden, an American garden for acid-loving shrubs and trees, an alpine area, and so on. The net result was that during the career span of our gardeners there was more emphasis on the individual component parts of the garden, on artifice and temporary effect, meaning that the gardener could take centre-stage. If you were a rich landowner and you wanted a fashionable garden, you needed to employ a top-notch head gardener, backed by a large team of skilled under-gardeners, labourers and garden boys.

It was not just the traditional landed aristocracy who sought skilled gardeners. The Industrial Revolution was creating a new elite – industrialists and other entrepreneurs who became very rich, very rapidly. Many of the newly rich wanted to display their wealth in a way that would bring them an air of respectability and acceptance into the upper echelons of society. The purchase of a country house complete with a well-manicured pleasure garden was an essential part of the image of a gentleman. Moreover, an informed interest in plants and gardens marked a man or woman as being cultured and well educated, interested in both the arts and science. By employing a top-notch gardener, the nouveau riche could even hope to outstrip old money, by developing gardens in the latest fashion, crammed with the most contemporary, rarest and most expensive plants. The Horticultural Directory, published annually by the magazine the Cottage Gardener, provided a listing of head gardeners for the country’s largest and most horticulturally significant private gardens. Its 1867 issue listed more than a thousand head gardeners working at large establishments across the country. However, for a young gardener, tying your career to these moneyed families was not without its risks.