Introduction

The Derby Arboretum and Loudon's publications encouraged the planting of greater varieties of trees and shrubs and the provision of arboretums in public parks and gardens and the formation of public arboretums. Public arboretums were partly inspired by the discourse of rational recreation as expressed by the Select Committee on Public Walks of 1833 and partly intended to ameliorate the problems of urban industrial expansion and to provide a taste of rural pleasures in urban settings. Like Ruskin's intentions for architecture, arboretums were an attempt to restore the ‘loss of fellowship with nature’, to bring a piece of the countryside into towns and provide an opportunity to experience the foreign and exotic. As the Walsall Observer put it after the formation of a local arboretum, the ‘tendency of the age is towards the creation of an artificiality … incompatible with natural and real life’; the park would help ‘restore that balance’ which ‘busy commercial and industrial life has rendered artificial and unnatural’. Arboretums were places for urban refreshment where, as Charles Kinglsey observed of galleries, town dwellers could escape the grim smoky ‘city-world of stone and iron’ by taking country walks and wandering ‘beneath mountain peaks, blushing sunsets … broad woodlands … green meadows … overhanging rocks [and] rushing brooks’. Rational recreational objectives help to explain similarities between arboretums as ‘living museums’ and other nineteenth-century civic institutions such as galleries, museums, libraries and mechanics’ institutions.

Introduction

Late seventeenth-century Britain was one of the least wooded countries in Europe. In broad terms woodland had fallen to less than 5 per cent of the land area compared to the 10 per cent estimated to have existed at the time of Domesday. Moreover, compared to many European counties, the number of trees that could be classed as native to Britain was very low with less than thirty broadleaved species and as few as five evergreens. The geography of tree species resulted from a complicated mixture of environmental conditions and past human activities. Although of small acreage, the woods found in different parts of the country varied considerably: intensively managed oak coppice grown for tannin in Cornwall and Devon; strips of coppiced alder along brooks and rivers in the Midlands; pollarded oaks and ashes and stripped elms found in many hedgerows; while significant areas of native Scots pine were only to be found in Scotland. Partly as a consequence of the small area of woodland, Britain was largely dependent on imported rather than home-produced timber and wood products. In addition, there was very little publicly owned forest apart from some small remnants of Crown forests, such as parts of the Forest of Dean and the New Forest.

By the mid-twentieth century the term arboretum was relatively commonplace. It referred to a place where collections of trees were grown and displayed systematically, sometimes planted according to botanical taxonomies, labelled and catalogued. For some, such as Evelyn Waugh, arboretums had become hackneyed; the quotation above describes an arboretum in the garden of a ‘large, requisitioned villa in a still desolate area of Essex’, in 1943. Here the term is consciously pompous and affected, describing the remnant of a small tree collection in the garden of a modest house; but as we have seen, in the nineteenth century arboretums were perceived as innovative and exciting places.

This study has explored the development of arboretums in the period, arguing that there was a close relationship between botany and arboriculture and that the latter encouraged the adoption of the natural system in Britain. It has examined the emergence of tree collections intended to provide botanical education including botanical gardens, private estates and public sites where collections were displayed.

Introduction

Botany became one of the most fashionable and popular British Georgian pursuits, particularly after the translation and publication of the works of Carl Linnaeus. The Linnaean system helped to make botany accessible for men, women and children alike by providing a key through which plants in flower could be identified easily without requiring a profound knowledge of botanical characteristics. There were, however, other important aspects to British botany inspired by the economic, patriotic, cultural and fashionable emphasis upon horticultural and agricultural improvement. During the later Georgian period, and inspired by French botany and British arboriculture, increasing importance was attached to the interconnectedness of taxonomy, vegetable physiology and anatomy. The popularity of botany is exemplified by the number of natural historical works that were published and disseminated, the development of private gardens and commercial nurseries, creation of herbariums, practice of flower painting and formation of botanical societies. Introductions to the Linnaean system, intended for both sexes, sold widely and there were various attempts to translate key Linnaean works into English, whilst Erasmus Darwin's Loves of the Plants (1789), a poetical representation of the Linnaean world personified, proved especially popular during the 1790s. Although various botanical systems competed internationally in the period between 1760 and 1820, Linnaean taxonomy was dominant, particularly in Britain. The greatest challenge came from those who proffered what they claimed to be more ‘natural’ systems, especially French botanists such as Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu, although their work was partly inspired by suggestions offered by Linnaeus.

Loudon's Arboretum Britannicum has had a profound impact on the history of British arboriculture ever since its publication, unavoidably obscuring arboricultural works published prior to this and shaping subsequent interpretations of nineteenth-century tree collections. To fully contextualize Loudon's magnum opus and to appreciate its significance in the history of natural history we will examine some preceding arboretums and arboricultural works. This chapter argues that botanical society gardens were the first type of public and semi-public urban institutions with significant tree and shrub collections prior to the 1820s and that the challenges of applying Linnaean botany to arboriculture were first confronted leading to experiments with natural arrangements. Newly imported trees and shrubs were eagerly sought and presented but challenged taxonomic ideas and gardening practices, underscoring tensions between practical botany, education, popular natural history and publications. From the late eighteenth century, British botanical gardens began to present natural alongside Linnaean arrangements which impacted upon arboricultural publications such as Aylmer Bourke Lambert's Genus Pinus (1802–24) and Peter William Watson's Dendrologia Britannica (1825).

Older purposes of physic gardens were not entirely forgotten and, aided by active patronage from medical men, the potential to exploit plants for medicinal uses remained important, rhetorically if not often in practice. However, British botanical gardens and arboretums helped to develop and satisfy a new audience for botanical and arboricultural education. Private and semi-private institutions relied upon income from members, patrons and visitors whose expectations of the gardens had to be satisfied.

Loudon's Arboretum Britannicum is the most important systematic study of hardy British trees and shrubs to have been published in the past two centuries, and arguably ever. Its greatest significance lies in the fact that it combined a comprehensive study of trees and shrubs with geographically founded histories of arboriculture, analysis of the importance of trees and shrubs in landscape gardening and full-length portraits of trees at different growth stages. Loudon's ideas concerning arboretums developed in various ways during the 1820s and 1830s in response to his experience of trees in various contexts, including private gardens such as his Bayswater villa, botanical and horticultural society gardens, and country estate collections. The significance of the Arboretum Britannicum and arboretum concept, manifest in various changing forms, can only be fully appreciated if examined in the context of British scientific culture and particularly cultures of natural history. The book must also be judged in terms of Loudon's other efforts to promote botany within gardening and horticulture, encouraging new audiences and practitioners amongst all social classes in the British Isles and Ireland. Scientifically-informed arboriculture and landscape gardening should not be merely the preserve of aristocracy, gentry and their agents as in the days of Humphry Repton.

This book was motivated by recent work in the history of science and cultural and historical geography and a belief that arboretums have had a profound impact on British cultural and scientific history. We embark upon an exploration of the historical and cultural geographies of nineteenth-century arboretums in order to try to understand the various principles and practices underpinning their design and the management and consumption of tree collections, particularly tensions between naturalistic and geometric aesthetics and botanical taxonomies. This book traces interconnections between horticulture, botany and forestry, the role of institutions and the relationships between arboretums and their various social and cultural contexts including the horticultural trade, scientific development of forestry and importance of international networks, exploration, trade and imperialism in tree collecting. Although the principal focus is British arboretums (with some reference to the Republic of Ireland), just as John Claudius Loudon's Arboretum et Fruticetum Britannicum (1838, hereafter Arboretum Britannicum) was something of an international collaboration, and like nineteenth-century planted arboretums, any study of British arboretums is inherently both national and international.

This book is the result of a major project on the cultural and historical geographies of the arboretum begun at the School of Geography, Nottingham University and funded between 2004 and 2007.

Introduction

The most important scientific message of Loudon's Arboretum Britannicum was that botany was essential to all aspects of arboriculture from the economic and cultural uses of trees and tree products to effective artistic depictions of trees and landscape gardening. This paralleled Loudon's friend and collaborator John Lindley's attempt to place botany on a more rigorous, serious ‘masculinized’ and scientific institutional footing and raise its status in relation to physics and chemistry. With relatively few indigenous species and a flourishing commercial nursery sector, hardy and half hardy trees and shrubs provided a manageable subset of plants and demonstrated the efficacy of the Candollean natural system. The extensive scientific, economic, cultural and statistical information in the Arboretum Britannicum conveyed a sense of weighty learning, authority, professionalism and comprehensiveness whilst satisfying the Victorian desire for natural historical facts, objects and specimens. Loudon was criticized for a lack of moral and religious feeling and content in his applications of science to nature for instance, in relation to garden cemeteries. However, the unrivalled and daunting enumeration of facts that characterized all his works generated a secular form of wonder partially replacing the celebration of divine nature and natural theological assumptions underpinning most early and mid-Victorian natural historical works. The relentless accumulation of information added weight to the core scientific message that modern physical, anatomical and taxonomic botany was essential to modern arboriculture.