Strange Blooms: The Curious Lives and Adventures of the John Tradescants

By Jennifer Potter

Now in paperback, this beautifully written and gorgeously produced book describes the remarkable lives and times of the John Tradescants, father and son. In 17th-century Britain, a new breed of "curious" gardeners was pushing at the frontiers of knowledge and new plants were stealing into Europe from East and West. John Tradescant and his son were at the vanguard of this change—as gardeners, as collectors, and above all as exemplars of an age that began in wonder and ended with the dawning of science. Meticulously researched and vividly evoking the drama of their lives,this book takes readers to the edge of an expanding universe, andis a magnificent pleasure for gardeners and non-gardeners alike.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Release date: Jun 14, 2008
• ISBN: 9781782395461

Jennifer Potter

Jennifer Potter is the author of four novels and six works of non-fiction, most recently The Jamestown Brides, The Untold Story of England's 'maids for Virginia' (Atlantic, 2018). Other titles published by Atlantic include The Rose, A True History; Seven Flowers And How They Shaped Our World; and Strange Blooms, The Curious Lives and Adventures of the John Tradescants. A long-time reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement and an accredited Royal Literary Fund (RLF) Consultant Fellow, she currently runs writing workshops for students and staff at British universities and was recently appointed one of the first RLF Writing Fellows at the British Library.

Book preview

STRANGE

BLOOMS

Jennifer Potter is the author of three novels and two works of non-fiction: Secret Gardens, and Lost Gardens, written to accompany the television series. She reviews regularly for the Times Literary Supplement and writes on travel and gardens for a wide range of national newspapers and magazines.

‘Potter uses the Tradescants to tell the story of these extraordinary times, in an account that will appeal to history and garden enthusiasts, and garden historians in particular.’ Diane Summers, Financial Times

‘Potter’s book shows that the Tradescants’ collections were part of a grander story. The natural and ethnological discoveries of Renaissance adventurers were exchanged and discussed by a pan-European community for the curious, and from their acquisitive drive for not only theoretical, but also practical knowledge, recognisably modern natural sciences emerged . . . A great story.’ Edward Holberton, New Statesman

‘Impressive . . . the picture it paints of seventeenth-century horticulture is fascinating.’ Charles Elliott, Literary Review

‘Beautifully illustrated and well-written.’ Simon May, Saga

‘Wonderfully engrossing, a real voyage of discovery into the rich and strange. I learnt a huge amount about plants, and even more about the culture of the seventeenth century in which they grew. A remarkable book about two remarkable men.’ Deborah Moggach

‘I love this book! As a gardener, I love it for the broad canvas of flowers it unfurls. And as a social historian, I love the portrait of John Tradescant pottering round Europe in the train of his militant master, picking up likely-looking plants as he goes.’ Liza Picard

‘A triumph of good research, sympathetic understanding and stylish writing.’ Charles Quest-Ritson

First published in Great Britain in hardback in 2006 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.

This paperback edition published in 2007 by Atlantic Books.

Copyright © Jennifer Potter 2006

The moral right of Jennifer Potter to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders.

The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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eISBN 978 1 78239 546 1

Designed by Nicky Barneby @ Barneby Ltd

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For Chris, Lynn and Robert

‘We carry within us the wonders we seek without us.’

Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici (1643)

Contents

List of Illustrations

Integrated Illustrations

p. xxii. Tradescant’s dodo. H. E. Strickland and A. G. Melville, The Dodo and its Kindred (London, 1848).

p. 6. Spades. Walter Blith, The English Improver Improved or The Survey of Husbandry Surveyed (London, 1653).

pp. 16–17. The south prospect of Hatfield House. By Thomas Sadler.

p. 29. Dutch horticulture. Jacob Cats, Collected Works (Amsterdam, 1655).

p. 45. ‘Iris Susiana’. Pierre Vallet, Le Jardin du Roy Tres Chrestien Henry IV (Paris, 1608).

p. 55. Salomon de Caus’s plan for the water parterre at Hatfield House. Sketch in a letter from Thomas Wilson to Robert Cecil (1611).

p. 66. The frontispiece to William Lawson’s A New Orchard and Garden (London, 1638).

p. 73. The Scythian ‘lamb’. Claude Duret, Histoire Admirable des Plantes (1605).

pp. 76–7. Salisbury House and its Thames-side neighbours. Engraving by Wenceslaus Hollar (c. 1630). William Brenchley Rye, England as Seen By Foreigners in the Days of Elizabeth and James the First (author’s illustrated copy, 4 vols, London, 1865), vol. 3.

p. 89. A fenced melon ground. John Evelyn (trans.), The French Gardiner (London, 1672).

p. 106. Portrait of Pocahontas. Engraving by Simon van de Passe (1617).

p. 127. The briar rose. John Gerard, The Herball, enlarged and amended by Thomas Johnson (London, 1633).

p. 136. The prickly Indian fig tree. John Gerard, The Herball (London, 1633).

p. 150. George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. William Brenchley Rye, England as Seen By Foreigners (London, 1865), vol. 3.

p. 168. Strange fishes. Compiled by John Green, but known as the Astley Collection, A New General Collection of Voyages and Travels (4 vols, London, 1745-47), vol. 2.

pp. 182–3. La Rochelle (1628).

p. 186. Creeping sea wormwood. John Gerard, The Herball (London, 1633).

p. 198. Three tulips. John Gerard, The Herball (London, 1633).

p. 207. Oatlands Palace from the south. Sketch by Anthonis van den Wyngaerde (1559).

p. 228. Frontispiece to Ralph Austen’s A Treatise of Fruit-Trees (Oxford, 1653).

pp. 234–5. Inside the Museum Wormianum. Ole Worm, Museum Wormianum (1655).

p. 244. The schoolboy signature of John Tradescant the younger.

p. 250. Great dragons and small dragons. John Gerard, The Herball (London, 1633).

p. 268. The ‘hollow leafed strange plant’. John Parkinson, Paradisi in Sole, Paradisus Terrestris (London, 1629).

p. 272. ‘Powhatan’s mantle’.

pp. 292–3. The fort at Vauxhall (1643). Facsimiles of Capt Eyre’s Views and Plans of Fortifications of London (1853).

p. 309. Peas and beans. John Parkinson, Paradisi in Sole, Paradisus Terrestris (London, 1629).

p. 317. Elias Ashmole. Engraving by William Faithorne. William Brenchley Rye, England as Seen By Foreigners (London, 1865), vol. 1.

p. 339. Hester Tradescant.

p. 362. Map of the environs of London. Engraved by Remigius Parr from a drawing by John Rocque (1746).

p. 371 Tradescant’s Virginian spiderwort. John Gerard, The Herball (London, 1633).

First picture section

The author and publishers are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce illustrations: pages xxii, 6, 168, plates 21, 22, London Library; pages 16–17, the Marquess of Salisbury; pages 29, 76–7, 87, 150, 182–3, 292–3, 317, plates 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 19, British Library; pages 45, 228, Royal Horticultural Society, Lindley Library; page 55, plate 24, National Archives; pages 66, 73, 127, 136, 186, 198, 234–5, 250, 339, 371, plates 1, 13, 17, 25, Museum of Garden History; page 106, Virginia Historical Society; pages 207, 272, plates 10, 11, 12, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; page 244, plates 14, 20, Canterbury Cathedral Archives; page 362, plates 15, 18, Guildhall Library, City of London; plate 2, Leiden University Library; plates 16, 23, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

Acknowledgements

This book would not have happened without the help, advice and encouragement of many people. First, I would like to thank my editor, Angus Mackinnon, for suggesting the idea and for having confidence that I could do it. Any biographer owes a special debt to earlier authors and I am particularly grateful to Prudence Leith-Ross for her interest and help with my researches. I have drawn most heavily on her work with the late Dr John Harvey to identify plants grown and introduced by both Tradescants.

Scholars and specialists were extraordinarily generous in sharing their expertise, none more so than Dr Arthur MacGregor, Senior Assistant Keeper at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. I thank him for his encyclopaedic knowledge, exactitude and good humour. His colleagues Dr Jon Whiteley and Kate Heard were both extremely helpful on the portraits and drawings in the museum’s collection. I have also benefited enormously from the insights, expertise and enthusiasm of Malgosia Nowak-Kemp at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History; David Sturdy, historian of Lambeth, Oxford and the Tradescants generally; Anne Jennings of the Museum of Garden History; Dr Barrie Juniper, Reader Emeritus in Plant Sciences and Fellow Emeritus of St Catherine’s College, Oxford; and historian David Marsh, who shared with me his researches into the Worshipful Company of Gardeners.

For help in appreciating the elder Tradescant’s time at Hatfield House, I wish to thank the Dowager Marchioness of Salisbury. Robin Harcourt Williams, Librarian and Archivist to the Marquess of Salisbury, guided me into the archives with great skill and patience, while outdoors, David Beaumont walked me back in time through the Hatfield landscape. At New Hall in Essex, once gardened by Tradescant for the Duke of Buckingham, I am similarly indebted to Sister Mary Magdalene of the Priory of the Resurrection.

Libraries were my home for nearly two years. At the Bodleian Library, Oxford, I would like to thank in particular Dr Bruce Barker-Benfield, Senior Assistant Librarian, and Mike Webb, Head of Cataloguing, Western Manuscripts. Both were generous with their time and knowledge, and helped to turn my visits there into a joy. I pay tribute to the unfailing efficiency and courtesy of staff in the Rare Books, Manuscripts and Maps reading rooms at the British Library, as well as to the staffs of the London Library, the City of London’s Guildhall Library, the Huguenot Library at University College London, the Caird Library of the National Maritime Museum and the Lindley Library of the Royal Horticultural Society. My debt is equally great to the many archives and record offices who hold information relating to the Tradescants and their times, and in particular the National Archives at Kew; Magdalen College, Oxford; local record offices in Kent, Northampton and Suffolk; Canterbury Cathedral Archives; the Royal College of Physicians; the London Metropolitan Archives; and the Minet Library in Lambeth, where Jon Newman has accumulated a wealth of knowledge about the Tradescants, generously shared. My thanks go also to Paul Pollak, archivist of the King’s School, Canterbury, and to Jane Lingard, whose unpublished MA dissertation for the Courtauld Institute of Art on the houses of Robert Cecil helped to shape my own understanding. Lectures on the Stuart Age at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich and a study day on early planting by Mark Laird at the Architectural Association, London, gave me many new perspectives.

In planning this book, invaluable suggestions and contacts came from Jan Woudstra, Vanessa Bezemer Sellers, Mavis Batey, David Jacques, and Dr Brent Elliott, librarian of the Royal Horticultural Society in London, who remained a stalwart source of advice as the book progressed. For translations of Latin letters written during the time of the Civil War, I was lucky to have the help of J. B. Jonas, who took me beyond the letters to an appreciation of character.

My researches in Virginia were made possible by a generous grant from the Authors’ Foundation, administered by the Society of Authors. In Virginia itself, I have many contacts to thank, especially local historian Martha W. McCartney, who shared her incomparable knowledge of early settlers and eased my route into the collections of the Library of Virginia and the Rockefeller Library at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. Minor Weisiger at the former and Susan Shames at the latter turned my vague questions into concrete references. Martha also introduced me to ethnohistorian Helen C. Rowntree; together we tramped the boardwalks of the Great Dismal Swamp, looking for plants brought back to England by the younger Tradescant. I also enjoyed testing ideas with Dr Thomas E. Davidson of the Jamestown Settlement and with Beverly Straube, curator of the Jamestown Rediscovery Project for the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities, who gave me many more contacts. Among them was Ivor Noel Hume, who showed me his fine cypress trees by the James River.

Finally, I would like to thank my agent Pat Kavanagh, Clara Farmer and Sarah Norman at Atlantic Books, and all those who helped me to develop this book, especially Jack Klaff for his inspiration and advice at all stages, Robert Petit for his great company, Chris Potter and Lynn Ritchie for shelter and sustenance, and Ros Franey for her continued enthusiasm and support. All errors, gaps, inconsistencies and leaps of faith are, of course, my own.

Note on Sources, Transliteration and Dates

The notes to each chapter locate unpublished material held in archives and libraries, including Crown copyright material at the National Archives, Kew, and county record offices. I am especially grateful to the Marquess of Salisbury for allowing me to consult and quote from the archives at Hatfield House, and to the following bodies for permission to quote from their material: the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford; the British Library; Canterbury Cathedral Archives; the Diocese of London and the Guildhall Library, City of London; the President and Fellows of Magdalen College, Oxford; the Royal College of Physicians; the Worshipful Company of Coopers and the Worshipful Company of Gardeners.

For reasons of space, the chapter notes give abbreviated titles to published sources. Full titles to many of these appear in the ‘Selected Bibliography’.

The list of illustrations identifies the sources for the images in the text and in the plates. My thanks go to Alison Sproston of the London Library and Philip Norman of the Museum of Garden History for their generous help in sourcing many of the images, and to Cressida Annesley of Canterbury Cathedral Archives, Charlotte Brooks of the RHS Lindley Library and Jeremy Smith of the Guildhall Library, City of London.

In quotations, spelling follows the original apart from where I have standardized seventeenth-century usage of ‘u’ and ‘v’, and ‘j’ and ‘i’, to their modern-day equivalents.

England in the seventeenth century clung to the old Julian calendar, ten days behind the revised Gregorian calendar followed elsewhere in Western Europe. This rarely impinges on the narrative. More problematically, the new year began on 25 March, so 1 February 1616 becomes 1 February 1617 according to today’s usage. Wherever possible, I have given dates as if the new year began on 1 January.

Introduction

Of Marvels and Monsters

Cradled in tissue paper and shut away in a curator’s drawer lie the mortal remains of the Oxford dodo: one skeletal left foot and its dissected head. Neatly sliced along the mesial line, half the skull’s covering of dried skin was removed in mid-nineteenth century.¹ Now both parts lie side by side, together with some shavings of skin from the foot that have hardened to a turkey crisp. The dodo looks sad, an impression accentuated by the downward tilt to its jawline and the stubble on its otherwise bald head. No wonder Oxford mathematician Charles Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll) fell under its spell as he was writing Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.²

This same dodo may have been the ‘great fowle’ kept in a London chamber c.1638 and fed pebbles by its keeper to amuse curious visitors such as theologian Sir Hamon L’Estrange, tempted inside by a cloth banner hung in the street.³ It is certainly all that remains of the stuffed carcass displayed in the astonishing collection of rarities begun by John Tradescant the elder, royal gardener, passionate plant collector, ‘painfull [painstaking] industrious searcher, and lover of all natures varieties’.⁴ ‘Dodar, from the Island Mauritius,’ stated the collection’s first catalogue published by Tradescant’s only son John, ‘it is not able to flie being so big.’⁵

Such wonders fill this book, which tells the story of the John Tradescants (father and son), whose collection of plants and curiosities opened in London as Britain’s first public museum. It is a story of self-definition and cultural innovation, which took the scion of yeoman stock to the gardens of the rich and powerful, even to court. There is danger, too, in wars fought against the French and perilous journeys undertaken to Russia, to the pirate coasts of North Africa and westwards to Virginia. It is also crucially a story of succession between the generations: of a son trained as a gardener to fill his father’s shoes and of his determined attempts to match his father’s achievements. Had the younger Tradescant’s son survived into adulthood (another John, another gardener), he would have carried the struggle into the third generation and so avoided its tragic conclusion.

The dissected head of Tradescant’s dodo.

‘Tredeskins Ark’ was the name popularly given to the Tradescant collection of plants and rarities at their South Lambeth home on the outskirts of London. From the reign of King Charles I, through the years of civil war and civil government until well into the Restoration, the Ark remained one of the capital’s essential sights for any visitor of discernment, applauded by princes, county squires, plant fanatics, ornithologists, foreign dignitaries, fellow travellers and humble schoolteachers. By the 1680s, however, when the collection went on show in Oxford in a splendid new building that drained the university of funds, the name it celebrated was not the Tradescants’ but Elias Ashmole’s, the wily lawyer and assiduous courtier who had wheedled his way to legal title and successfully wrested control from the younger Tradescant’s widow. The metamorphosis of the Tradescant rarities into the founding collection of Oxford’s world-renowned Ashmolean Museum provides a bitter sting to the tale.

Yet, remarkably, the Tradescants survived in the popular imagination, celebrated in charming vignettes written by their friends and remembered in a handful of plant names among the many hundreds of plants they helped to introduce. As the centuries passed, they even attracted honours that strictly belonged to others, as if they were the only gardeners of their age, its only plant hunters and collectors. They were not; and their story becomes richer when credit is properly given. Their passionate curiosity took Britain to the frontiers of horticultural knowledge and it is through the example of men like these that Britain became – and remains – a nation of gardeners.

They were more than just gardeners, however, which helps to explain their enduring appeal. The Tradescant story celebrates the triumph of human ingenuity at a time of rapid and profound change when all the old certainties were breaking down – in politics, religion, art and culture, philosophy, even geography. The Tradescants were pioneers (the father, especially) but they were also quintessentially men of their time. How they responded to the risks and opportunities of their lives gives us a privileged glimpse into an extraordinary age, which began in superstition and wonder and ended with the dawning of science.

First and most obviously, the two men stood on the edge of an expanding universe. When the elder Tradescant was busy establishing a name for himself, the Americas were only just beginning to colonize the European imagination. The existence of a fourth continent – unknown before the voyages of Columbus and other late-fifteenth-century seafarers – had thrown Europe into turmoil, overturning accepted habits of thought and challenging the authority of the ancients. If they could get their world map so terribly wrong, what other flaws were waiting to be discovered?

Intellectually, too, thinkers such as Sir Francis Bacon were beginning to develop the ground rules of scientific enquiry. In a bold challenge to the Aristotelian notion that authoritative argument provides the path to truth, Bacon proposed instead a form of scientific testing through controlled experiment. Truth requires evidence from the real world, he believed, and specimens from the natural world – such as those collected by the Tradescants – could begin to play their proper part in the process of investigation.

The science of botany was still in its infancy, however. Not until much later in the century (when Nehemiah Grew published The Anatomy of Plants in 1682)⁶ would people begin to understand the sexuality of plants. So while a plantsman such as John Tradescant might cultivate new plants through the age-old techniques of selection and grafting, deliberate cross-breeding was out of the question. Even had he grasped the role of pollen in plant reproduction, he would still have faced a mighty psychological and spiritual hurdle. In Tradescant’s time, you did not meddle in God’s creation. God had made the world in six days and rested on the seventh. He had left no loose ends nor unmade plants for Man to fashion for him.

You do not have to be a gardener to enjoy this book, but it helps if you have a curious spirit. In the early seventeenth century, to be branded ‘curious’ was a mark of social and intellectual distinction. It meant that you were always pushing at the frontiers of knowledge, in arts and sciences. It also had a very particular use in relation to gardens. To be called a ‘curious gardener’ placed you in that elite band of men (and a very few women) who set out to collect and grow rare or unusual plants. You were almost certainly in contact with other curious spirits across Europe, such as the Robins in Paris (another father and son, gardeners to the French kings) or, a little later, French florist Pierre Morin, admired by John Evelyn for his rare collection of shells, flowers and insects.⁷ Your Dutch contacts might have included the scholarly Johannes de Laet in Leiden; and you would have known roving ambassadors and London-based merchants such as Nicholas Lete with a finger in every plant trade. Despite intermittent European wars, crossing boundaries was something you did all the time.

To be curious, then, was both a state of mind and an aspiration, and few deserved the compliment as much as the elder Tradescant. Born under Queen Elizabeth and in his early thirties when the bookish but bawdy Scottish King James ascended the English throne, Tradescant gardened for some of the most powerful men in the kingdom, among them Robert Cecil (chief minister to King James I); the hated Duke of Buckingham (favourite to two kings); and eventually for King Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria at one of their minor palaces (Oatlands Palace near Weybridge in Surrey). At the end of his life, his reputation as Britain’s premier horticulturalist was rewarded by his appointment as first keeper to the Oxford Physic Garden, England’s very first botanic garden.

Throughout his years of maturity, Tradescant was also building up his famous collection of rarities that allowed him to forge a new identity for himself, as self-made man and cultural pioneer. In spirit, his collection linked the Wunderkammer of Renaissance princes, which embodied their owners’ dominion over nature and culture,⁸ with the more rigorously ‘scientific’ collections of learned societies. Alongside the Tradescant medals, fossils, shells, insects, shoes, weapons, jewels, hats, toothbrushes and every other sort of natural or artificial wonder, even mid-century the collection still displayed objects that today would be dismissed as superstition: feathers from a phoenix, dragon’s eggs, a piece of the True Cross, and a coat lined with Agnus Scythicus, the famed vegetable lamb from the banks of the Volga that grew like a plant with a stalk attached to its belly and ‘died’ when it had exhausted the grass within its limited reach. Diversity was the Ark’s greatest strength and by opening his doors to the paying public the elder Tradescant shared his marvels with a much wider audience than had ever gained access to such treasures.

Tradescant the younger inherited his father’s collection of rarities as well as his job as keeper of the royal gardens, vines and silkworms at Oatlands Palace. What he made of this double legacy is one of the questions Strange Blooms sets out to resolve. Although he shared his father’s talent for making things grow, these were men of sharply different qualities who lived through very different times. Just four years after the son took on his royal post, King Charles I raised the standard at Nottingham, pitching the country into civil war. Unlike his father, who had sailed with the British fleet to quell the Barbary pirates of the North African coast, and fought alongside his employer, Buckingham, on the French Ile de Ré, Tradescant the younger kept his head down and stayed where he was. London had declared against the king, and for an ex-royal gardener life cannot have been easy. How he fared during the war years we can read in letters to a Dutch friend from the Master of the Watermills, John Morris, who had known the elder Tradescant and who now kept a watchful and at times reproving eye on the son.

Travel was one passion clearly enjoyed by both father and son. The expeditions that the elder Tradescant joined to Russia, North Africa and the Ile de Ré all ended in abject failure, either politically or militarily. But culturally the story was very different. As well as yielding plants and rarities for his collection, Tradescant’s sixteen-week Russian voyage through storms and fogs into perpetual day has given us an absolute joy: a manuscript diary, wildly spelt and written in a spidery, untutored hand.⁹ Yet for all its lack of polish, the diary brilliantly conveys how it feels to venture into the unknown when everything you encounter is wondrous strange: men who hid their heads under their clothes and birds to die for – or at least ones for which Tradescant would happily have paid 5s a skin. His diary shows us, too, a man struggling to find the words to define and communicate the unknown.

North America was another adventure that both Tradescants shared, although this time only the son actually made the crossing. Just ten years after the private Virginia Company had landed its first group of settlers on the riverine swamp that they would name Jamestown in honour of the British king, the elder Tradescant risked half his annual salary on a settlement scheme masterminded by Captain Sam Argall, then sailing back to Virginia to take charge as governor. His passengers should have included the returning Indian princess, Pocahontas (or Mrs John Rolfe, as she then was), but tragically her health failed and she got no further than Gravesend. Tradescant and the princess shared another friend in common: the energetic and flamboyant Captain John Smith, who had landed with that first group of settlers and later bequeathed to Tradescant one quarter of his books, stored in an iron trunk in Lambeth.

People were not Tradescant’s only links to the colony across the Atlantic that promised adventurers untold riches, especially those who believed it would lead them through the fabled North-West Passage to the Indies and Cathay. New plants came too, among them the three-petalled Virginian spiderwort eventually named in his honour by Carl Linnaeus as Tradescantia virginiana, and trunkfuls of rarities for his collection. Many more were discovered by Tradescant the younger, who visited the now royal colony in 1637 to collect rare flowers, plants and shells.¹⁰ Although its settlements were slowly spreading, much of the land remained unexplored and people still believed that the ocean lay to the west, just beyond the mountains.

No diary of the younger Tradescant’s American journeying has survived – perhaps he never kept one – but we can track his footsteps from the plants he brought back: two hundred or so in all,¹¹ a handful credited to him by name in the great herbal written by his father’s friend, John Parkinson.¹² Almost all were bog lovers, like the swamp cypress and the strange, insecteating pitcher plant (Sarracenia purpurea), suggesting that, like most of his compatriots, he did not stray very far from the settled but still swampy lands around the James River. By interrogating anew the documentary evidence, it has been possible to clear up the mystery surrounding the two later journeys that he is supposed to have made to Virginia.

Disentangling the Tradescants’ separate contributions to their collection of rarities is rather more difficult. Only one catalogue was ever compiled, by Tradescant the younger with opportunistic help from Elias Ashmole and his friend, Dr Thomas Wharton. (Ashmole astutely paid for its publication, placing Tradescant for ever in his debt.) The outdated titles given to some of the benefactors suggest a greater role for the father, and surviving letters soliciting rarities for both Buckingham and King Charles give us an idea of the wonders he sought. The son has no such supporting evidence, beyond his own claim to have augmented his father’s collection with ‘continued diligence’.¹³

On their plant skills and interests, we are fortunate in having plant lists from both father and son, and some fascinating differences emerge. Nongardeners may want to skip lightly over the plant names, but otherwise the gardening content of this book has been written in the firm belief that you can ‘read’ a whole society through its gardens – politically, socially, morally, even philosophically. Unfolding chapters take us from the embroidered conceits of the Elizabethan court; through the toys, water-jokes, flamboyance and Neoplatonic fantasies of the early Stuarts; to the emergence of plainer, more utilitarian themes during the Commonwealth, uplifted by a strong dose of spirituality; and on to the wildly extravagant French and Italianate flourishes of the Restoration. Dry plant lists confirm the changes taking place, and there are echoes in the gardening writers of the day: these include Sir Hugh Platt’s alchemico-horticultural wizardry; John Parkinson’s delightful ‘speaking garden’ written in the language of the King James Bible; Samuel Hartlib’s good plain Prussian works of profitable husbandry; Ralph Austen’s lyrical spirituality on the lessons to be learnt from orchard trees; and John Evelyn’s mannered attempts to produce an encyclopaedic Elysium in words (never finished, of course).

Here, too, you will find the earthiness put back into gardens after the polite attempts of garden historians to sweep the muck and toil out of sight. This is a book for people who like to get their hands dirty, in which dung is measured by the hatful, silkworms nestle between a woman’s breasts, only palm trees have sex in the vegetable kingdom and dead dogs are shredded for fertilizer. The Tradescants were gardeners and how they gardened forms a very rich subtext to their story. In the early chapters, we participate in the making of one of England’s great gardens – Robert Cecil’s Hatfield House, conceived on a dazzlingly ambitious scale. As with any great enterprise, the process is just as illuminating as the finished result and it is heartening to note that even the illustrious Cecil did not always get his plumbing right.

Finally, in tracking their footsteps through England, Europe and Virginia, it is impossible to ignore the companion genius of Shakespeare, who hinted at the fornication of gillyflowers long before the botanists understood how they did it, and who wrote of the same headless race recorded by the elder Tradescant on his way to Archangel. Shakespeare’s world was stalked by marvels and monsters, like Prospero’s misshapen slave Caliban in his late play, The Tempest, first performed at court in 1611 (the same year that Tradescant went to the Low Countries and France, plant-buying for Cecil). Shipwrecked jester Trinculo might well have been Tradescant’s scout when he wished he might transport the fishy monster back home. ‘A strange fish!’ he exclaimed. ‘Were I in England now (as once I was) and had but this fish painted, not a holiday fool there but would give a piece of silver. There would this monster make a man; any strange beast there makes a man. When they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian.’¹⁴

Tradescant liked monsters and he liked marvels too, as did his only son John who trailed after his father’s brighter star, like the tail of a comet. Their own garden and orchard at South Lambeth may long ago have disappeared under the concrete and brick of urban development, yet their memory lingers on, growing ever stronger as the strange blooms they loved so much set seed in the rich dark mulch of human desires.

Chapter One

Education of a Gardener

John Tradescant’s origins – as boy and gardener – remain tantalizingly obscure. The oldest surviving document from Tradescant himself is a letter he wrote in November 1609 to ‘Good Mr Trumbull’ complaining about the frustrations of travel.¹ Diplomat William Trumbull was just then taking over as English Agent at the Brussels court of the archdukes Albert and his wife, the Infanta Isabella, who ruled over the Catholic Spanish Netherlands through her father, King Philip II of Spain.

The letter does not tell us why Tradescant was travelling to the Low Countries, only that he had become entangled in red tape and that his attempts to buy his way out of trouble had failed. ‘I humbly thank your W[orship] for all your Cortisies,’ he wrote to the diligent Trumbull, ‘but your good Will and labours hath not efected what you desired to dooe for they have put me upon the Rack.’ The problem was one of mounting costs with more than a hint of palm-greasing. In total Tradescant’s outlay had amounted to 40s, ‘besids 24s the pasag to flusshing’² – and it seems he had nothing to show for it in return.

The letter is much more revealing about Tradescant the man than it is about his business. Among the neat, carefully phrased letters from other supplicants, it stands out for its blotched and awkward handwriting, haphazard spelling and complete absence of punctuation – even full stops are sorely absent. Its tone of mild pessimism also establishes Tradescant as a man for whom life did not always go as smoothly as his later career might suggest.

This first sighting of Tradescant on Dutch soil is interesting nonetheless because of enduring rumours that the Tradescants were either Dutch or Flemish by birth. It was the peevish antiquary Anthony Wood who first made this claim, in connection with the eventual inheritor of the Tradescant rarities, Elias Ashmole. As a close Oxford acquaintance of Elias Ashmole, Wood was widely believed when he said that Ashmole had acquired the rarities ‘of a famous Gardener called Joh. Tredescaut a Dutchman and his Wife’.³ Although Wood was here referring to the younger Tradescant – demonstrably English-born – the foreign label stuck, along with other invented honours that swelled their reputations (that the elder Tradescant had gardened for Queen Elizabeth, for instance, and that one or the other first brought the pineapple to Britain).⁴

The Dutch theory is attractive on a number of counts. Dutch parentage would help to explain how the elder Tradescant was able to travel freely and easily through the Low Countries unaided, stocking up his master’s garden with ‘strang and rare’ shrubs, roses and flowers.⁵ When shopping in the French capital, by contrast, he needed an intermediary to help him find his way about.⁶ Tradescant’s woeful spelling might provide further evidence of foreign blood, although it could equally point to a relatively humble education in England. There is no suggestion that he knew and used Latin for anything other than plant names, later in life.⁷

A Dutch connection (of blood or training) would also help to explain Tradescant’s extraordinary gardening talents and his fondness for the exotic and the strange. Until the sixteenth century at least, gardening in England was much more primitive than on the continent, where France and Italy led the way in matters of style while the Netherlands took the lead in horticultural practice. Dutch ports such as Antwerp provided the gateway through which many coveted rare plants and exotics slipped into Europe, among them the tulips from Turkey and elsewhere that set the Netherlands ablaze with tulip fever in the 1630s.

Against this, neither Tradescant nor any obvious member of his family appears among the lists of aliens applying for letters of denization or naturalization, nor among the lists of strangers with which a xenophobic England was periodically obsessed.⁸ Records are fallible, of course, but it is remarkable how many of his foreign-born contacts do appear in the lists.⁹ In all the bills and accounts so meticulously kept at Hatfield House, Tradescant’s nationality is never specified, unlike ‘Henrick Mansfeild a dutchman’¹⁰ who brought over cherry trees, medlars and walnut trees; or fountain-builder Salomon de Caus, often referred to simply as ‘the Frenchman’. For accounting purposes John Tradescant was as manifestly English as Mountain Jennings, Cecil’s other gardener and prime earth-mover of his grand new garden.

So any Dutch blood mentioned by Elias Ashmole to Anthony Wood must have come from earlier generations. Much more likely is the view put forward by previous biographers that the elder Tradescant was born into a largely yeoman family that had lived in Suffolk since at least the first quarter of the sixteenth century. Working on leads unearthed by Mea Allan,¹¹ Prudence Leith-Ross diligently tracked members of a family variously named as Treylnseant, Treyluscant, Tradeskante, Traluscant and Tradescant around a small area of north-east Suffolk, through wills and fading parish records of baptisms, marriages and burials.¹² From the mid-1520s, when a William Treylnseant was living at Wenhaston, some five miles inland from Walberswick, members of the family moved slowly northwards, settling for a time at the inland parish of Henstead where Tradescant was one of a handful of names that appear frequently in the early part of the parish register, according to a local historian compiling a parochial history of Suffolk.¹³ All the names in fact belong to John Tradescant’s immediate family, for here yeoman Thomas Tradescant fathered many children in the 1550s and 1560s, John’s siblings and half-siblings from his father’s two marriages.

Thomas’s first wife Elyner, whom he married in 1543, produced perhaps as many as ten children, although few survived into adulthood and several died soon after birth (the registers are damaged in places but family wills add missing names).¹⁴ Elyner herself died in 1564 and that same year Thomas Tradescant married John’s mother, Johane Settaway, who began immediately to procreate: a first-born John Tradescant, baptized in December 1565 but dead before the end of the month. The following year saw the birth of his brother Nicholas, then shortly afterwards the name ‘Tradescant’ abruptly vanishes from Henstead’s parish register when the family moved again to Corton, a small fishing village four miles beyond Lowestoft perched high on the cliffs above a fast-eroding coastline.

Here at Corton, it seems, the elder John Tradescant was born sometime around 1570 (his dead father would be described as ‘Thomas Tradescant of Corton’) but, maddeningly, the Corton parish register does not start until 1579 so the chain cannot be guaranteed.¹⁵ Although John Tradescant appears to have moved right away from his Suffolk family roots, his own son John would remember the connection in his will, leaving 5s apiece ‘to my two namesakes Robert Tredescant and Thomas Tredescant, of Walberswick in the Countie of Suffolk’, and 2s 6d to each of their surviving children. His widow Hester gave them all a further 2s 6d each, describing the two men as ‘my late husbands Kinsmen’.¹⁶

Whether these Suffolk Tradescants came originally from the Low Countries is not recorded. London’s Huguenot Library produced one solitary listing for Tradescant: a Catherine Tradescant from Woodbridge in Suffolk, a member of the Walloon congregation of Norwich whose will was listed among those of other ‘strangers’ proved in the mid-1700s.¹⁷ As the Walloons originated from the French-speaking part of what is now southern and eastern Belgium, this brings us no closer to detecting Dutch or Flemish blood.¹⁸

Perhaps, after all, the secret of Tradescant’s ‘Dutchness’ lies buried in the Suffolk countryside. Throughout much of the Middle Ages, Suffolk’s prosperity flowed from the export of wool to the continent where it was finished by skilled Flemish weavers in the great textile centres of Bruges, Arras and elsewhere.¹⁹ An influx of Flemish settlers to East Anglia – especially during the fourteenth century – brought these cloth-making skills to eastern England, as families were driven out by floods and later by Europe’s fomenting religious divisions that pitched Catholics against the growing Protestant tide. After the weavers came the horticulturalists and market gardeners, who settled around Colchester and Norwich in particular, their numbers swelling sharply from the 1570s when the Low Countries began to suffer the economic dislocation of political unrest that would eventually split them into the Protestant north and the Catholic south.²⁰

By the time of John Tradescant’s birth, the populations of eastern England and the Low Countries were thoroughly interlocked. In a study of English travellers abroad, John Stoye singled out the younger son of a Norfolk family, about 1550, who worked as a merchant’s factor in Bruges where he spent the greater part of each year, while his Dutch wife kept house for him in England. After her death he took a second wife with landed estates at Antwerp and with her capital built a large trade between England and the Low Countries. There he stayed until the wars finally brought him home. ‘This intimate connection between neighbouring peoples appeared part of the natural order,’ commented Stoye.²¹

The trade went the other way just as easily, as evidenced by the correspondence (in Latin) between two men who knew Tradescant well: John Morris, Master of the Watermills in London, writing to his friend Antwerpborn Johannes de Laet. Morris’s father was a Dutchman by birth but a free denizen by choice, who had worked for Queen Elizabeth’s handsome dancing Chancellor, Sir Christopher Hatton. De Laet, also a free denizen of England, chose instead to return to continental Europe, where he settled in Leiden, although his son Samuel married the daughter of a Dutch merchant who had settled in London.²² Perhaps the well-travelled John Tradescant would have shared Morris’s view that he was a citizen of the world rather than of England.²³ Foreign birth mattered, of course, to those forced by law to pay their taxes twice over, and those who suffered from English prejudice, incipient xenophobia or simply fear of competition. But in John Tradescant’s time, nationality was not the only – nor even the most important – way of defining yourself.

There remains the puzzle of where and how the young Tradescant learnt to garden, a journey that would take him from an undistinguished Suffolk coastal village where the rector stored manure in his chancel²⁴ to the Lord Treasurer’s grand new garden at Hatfield House. Sadly, Tradescant’s friend, the apothecary and incomparable garden writer John Parkinson, gives us no clues to Tradescant’s early career, merely noting that he was ‘sometimes belonging to the right Honourable Lord Robert Earle of Salisbury, Lord Treasurer of England in his time, and then unto the right Honourable the Lord Wotton at Canterbury in Kent, and lastly unto the late Duke of Buckingham’.²⁵ How Tradescant came to be Cecil’s gardener is passed over in silence.

Spades from a manual of husbandry by ‘lover of ingenuity’, Walter Blith.

Yet Robert Cecil employed only the very best artists and artisans to craft the properties that were the outward sign of his political power – men who came with a solid reputation, such as Salomon de Caus, engineer to the king’s eldest son, Prince Henry, or rising stars such as architect Inigo Jones. John Tradescant’s appointment as one of Cecil’s named gardeners at Hatfield suggests he was either known personally to Cecil or had been recommended by someone of standing.

There are places close to Tradescant’s birthplace and further afield in Suffolk where he might have learnt the gardening skills that would carry him to Hatfield and world renown. Less than five miles west of Corton lies Somerleyton Hall, owned by the Jernegan family for nearly three centuries until 1604 when it was bought by the energetic builder and farmer John Wentworth, who sparked local resentment (and a lawsuit) by his enclosure of common land. Wentworth adorned his house and park with fine gardens, woods, fishponds, water gardens, orchards, walks and a plantation of 256 fir trees, reputedly ‘the most incomparable piece in the Realm of England’ until it was flattened by a hurricane half a century later.²⁶

There were even family connections to the place. The Tradescant relatives included a Thomas Tradescant (probably John Tradescant’s older half-brother) who was first described as a ‘single man’ of Somerleyton and later of London. Tradescant’s widowed mother took as her second husband a William Stanton whose family held land in Somerleyton.²⁷ As Wentworth started on his new garden about the time Tradescant went to work for Cecil, this makes the connection unlikely.

An earlier Suffolk garden and therefore more promising as a possible link is Hengrave Hall to the north-west of Bury St Edmunds. The house was built between 1525 and 1538 for Sir Thomas Kytson, a fabulously wealthy wool merchant, merchant adventurer and former sheriff of London who kept a staff in Antwerp.²⁸ Kytson died in 1540, leaving a second wife, who gave birth to his posthumous son (another Sir Thomas) who embarked on a second round of garden improvements in the late 1570s and 1580s – just when the young Tradescant was setting out on his career as a gardener.

Originally moated (a large fishpond survives, and a formal garden now threatened with weeds), Hengrave Hall was approached by a long straight causeway raised above ditches on either side and lined with a triple avenue.²⁹ ‘It sounds Dutch,’ wrote Norman Scarfe in The Suffolk Landscape.

And when the builder’s son, in 1575, wanted to improve the setting of his house, he got a ‘Dutchman gardener’ over from Norwich to look at the orchards, gardens and walks, clip the knots, alter the alleys, and re-plant. Three years later, the Queen and Leicester and the entire court were here in late August, and treated to a spectacle ‘representing the fayries, as well as might be’.³⁰

Kytson’s gardens at Hengrave were of a magnificence that foreshadowed Cecil’s at Hatfield House. As well as a great and a little park, he had a vineyard or orchard, gardens, a hop ground, a hemp ground, a bowling alley and multiple fishponds. He kept seven boats for the moat and ponds, finishing his waterworks by 1583 when he paid a final bill to ‘Martin Plomer, at London, for bringing hoame of the water to all the offices at Hengrave house’.³¹ It is possible to imagine Tradescant as a boy-gardener coming to work for just such a Suffolk grandee, perhaps initially apprenticed to one of East Anglia’s Dutch gardeners who may conceivably have taken him travelling through the Low Countries and shown him the best places to buy plants.

The Kytsons and Robert Cecil had a friend in common who may have helped the talented young gardener’s progress from Suffolk to London and Hatfield: (Sir) Walter Cope, a political figure of some importance and one of Robert Cecil’s closest acolytes. Tradescant would later buy trees for Cope in the Low Countries, which could imply a favour returned. From a letter that Cope wrote to Lady Kytson warning her of the dangers of recusancy, Cope was clearly on intimate terms with the family.³² Before gaining employment with Cecil, Tradescant may even have gardened for Cope at the magnificent new mansion he was building in Kensington around 1605, known originally as Cope’s Castle.³³ When John Chamberlain, a chronicler of the times, visited in 1608 he was not allowed to touch a thing, ‘not so much as a cherry’, as the family was expecting a visit from Queen Anne.³⁴

Another possible route to Cecil was through Sir Noel Caron from Bruges, ‘Holland Ambassador’³⁵ at the courts