15-July London’s Garden Revolution

Summary

From Crusaders to Lily Mania: The Secret History of London’s Gardens

This month, London’s gardens explode with color—but behind every petal lies a wild story. Discover how Crusaders smuggled hollyhocks in their saddles, why a Sicilian monk sparked Britain’s sweet pea obsession, and how Victorian "lily hunters" braved avalanches to bring back towering regal lilies. Return on 15 July to uncover the rogue botanists, stolen seeds, and floral espionage that shaped the city’s gardens—including the phantom "Miss Wilmott’s Ghost" that still haunts Chelsea today.

Article

Garden Plants

There is an extremely long list of garden plants of every conceivable colour and from every part of the temperate world to be found in London’s gardens this month. The rarer species tend not to be seen in London’s streets but seem confined to plant collections or plantsmans’ gardens. London was not always this colourful. The Romans had no gardens to talk of but did grow medicinal herbs and are credited with the introduction of several species such as lavender, which they liked to put in their baths. The cottage garden favourites, such as hollyhocks, were brought back by the Crusaders. Wallflowers arrived in the eleventh century, marigolds in the twelfth and peonies in the thirteenth. In the fourteenth century almond trees came as well as cannabis and rose campion Lychnis coronaria. Lychnis comes from the Greek for ‘lamp’’, referring to the brightness of their flowers. Coronaria also refers back to the Greeks, who included the flowers in the head garlands for their heroes. Mediaeval gardens started to include snowdrops, lilies, passion flowers and pinks.

15-July London’s Garden Revolution Section Image

15-July London’s Garden Revolution Section Image

By the seventeenth century, Nicotiana, Agapanthus and morning glory were starting to appear and gardeners were beginning to compete as to how high they could grow a sunflower. The eighteenth century saw gardens starting to look a little more as we see them today with the arrival of brassy fuschias, pelagoniums, hostas, red hot pokers, weeping willows and sweet peas.

15-July London’s Garden Revolution Section Image

15-July London’s Garden Revolution Section Image

Sweet peas are greatly loved by Londoners. The original wild seeds were sent by a Sicilian monk to an Enfield schoolmaster who was said to prefer his plants to his pupils. A century later there was still only a small number of different colours available. However, after another century, around the beginning of the twentieth century, suddenly there were 115 types and 264 varieties. They reached their apogee in the Victorian and Edwardian period when the Daily Mail newspaper offered £1000 for the best bowl of them exhibited at the Crystal Palace. Princess Diana’s family garden at Althorp was responsible for introducing the waved and frilled varieties that we see so many of today. The twentieth century has produced a seemingly endless number of hybrids, cultivars and varieties. So we now enjoy a truly spectacular range of colour and diversity. This is a far cry from the green, dismal apothecary gardens of the past.

15-July London’s Garden Revolution Section Image

15-July London’s Garden Revolution Section Image

Other garden plants noticed a lot in July include day lilies, antirrhinums, geraniums, salvias, evening primroses, mallows, mulleins, hypericums, loosestrifes, Geums, Potentillas, nasturtiums and Campanulas. Commonly seen climbers would include clematis, jasmine, honeysuckle, Russian vine and, more recently, trumpet vines. On top of all this there are the roses, rock plants, hardy annuals and all the herbs to be seen in herb gardens.

Lilies, because of their size, beauty and heavy scent are thought to be among the first flowers to have been removed from the wild and put in gardens. Some believe the martagon lilies in Nower Wood, Surrey are a relic population left by the Romans who used to eat the bulbs and use their juice to treat their corns.

15-July London’s Garden Revolution Section Image

15-July London’s Garden Revolution Section Image

The first to be planted were wild European lilies, e.g. Lilium pyrenaicum and L. bulbiferum. Madonna lilies L. candidum were so often depicted in mediaeval paintings because they were probably the only ones around. The same may be true for L. monadelphum so evident in Persian art. By the seventeenth century Parkinson already mentions twelve different lilies in London. In the eighteenth century plant hunters started introducing them from a variety of places, finding new ones in Japan and America. They were even found growing as edible food crops in Korea and China. Significantly for breeding new varieties, in 1804 the tiger lily L. lancifolium arrived and then in 1862 the golden-rayed lily of Japan L. auratum.

15-July London’s Garden Revolution Section Image

15-July London’s Garden Revolution Section Image

These lilies ignited ‘lily mania’. In 1903 E H. Wilson, one of the more eccentric plant hunters, brought back the regal lily L. regale from a remote valley in Western China. He had discovered thousands of them stretching up a remote mountainside. Often travelling by sedan chair, he once broke his leg jumping out of it to avoid an avalanche. Later he always referred to his disability as his ‘lily limp’. Nowadays, it is largely a confusing set of hybrids that we see in our gardens, but it is well worth seeking out the old species lilies where you can. You could come across a regal lily a metre and a half high with as many as thirty flowers. Tiger lilies can even reach three metres in height before they give off their spicy, nutmeg scent. Places to look for lilies include the London Buddhist centre, Myddleton House and Wisley.

15-July London’s Garden Revolution Section Image

15-July London’s Garden Revolution Section Image

Parks have their own quite different collections of tough, reliable, vividly coloured bedding plants, including stalwarts such as Alyssum, Ageratum, Clarkia, Begonia, Godetia, Lobelia, Gazania and marigolds. Geometric beds usually include one or two ‘spot’ plants such as Abutilon, Ricinus or Cleome. London’s window boxes have a long and noble history of their own. Currently they are full of geraniums, petunias and verbenas.

15-July London’s Garden Revolution Section Image

15-July London’s Garden Revolution Section Image

Grand herbaceous borders are also required visiting this month as they are showing off their fine collections of herbaceous perennials from all over the world. Greenwich park, Hampton Court and Wisley all have interesting collections and may include Delphiniums, Phlox, Agapanthus, Penstemon, Crocismia, Cosmos, Acanthus, Achillea, Echinops, Kniphofia, Centaurea, Dicentra, Hosta, Astible, Coreopsis, Helenium, Ligularia, Galtonia, Lychnis as well as loosestrifes, lilies, bergamots, fuschias and scotch thistles. Towards the end of the month you may even see the first dahlias, sunflowers and hydrangeas.

15-July London’s Garden Revolution Section Image

15-July London’s Garden Revolution Section Image

For rarer garden plants it is again worth visiting the gardens at Wisley where representatives of the following can be found: Itea, Indigofera, Cuphea, Cerinthe, Romneya, Echinacea, Carpenteria, and Calibrachoa as well as rare species such as Typhonia rotundifolia, Baptisia australis, Solanum rantonnetii, and possibly Miss Wilmott’s ghost Eryngium gigantea. The redoubtable Miss Ellen Wilmott was one of London’s most famous as well as infamous gardeners. She employed over one hundred gardeners and is said to have insisted Queen Victoria kept to the path when she conducted her around her garden at Warley Place in Essex.

15-July London’s Garden Revolution Section Image

15-July London’s Garden Revolution Section Image

She also had an annoying habit of scattering seeds in other peoples’ gardens. Eryngium giganteum was her favourite as it germinates in dry, neglected situations and goes on to produce a startlingly blue, but ferociously spined plant. It is still found today in the most unlikely of places and always seems to keep reappearing in Chelsea Physic garden.

15-July London’s Garden Revolution Section Image

15-July London’s Garden Revolution Section Image