Two Gardening Giants- Joseph Chamberlain and Michael Heseltine

In the second of two blogs for National Gardening Week, here guest blogger Dr Jonathan Denby takes a closer look at two MPs with a passion for gardening, who served in the Cabinet one hundred years apart…

When Joseph Chamberlain sat down with his cabinet colleagues in 1880 every one of them had a country estate with a large ornamental garden and they all, not least Prime Minister Gladstone, shared his passion for gardening. In contrast, Michael Heseltine, in Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet one hundred years later, was the sole cabinet member to possess such a garden. Heseltine gardened in a markedly different way from Chamberlain, although their gardens were of a similar size, and the contrast between them illustrates how social attitudes to gardening changed over the century.

Joseph Chamberlain at Highbury

Birmingham MP Joseph Chamberlain was a businessman before entering Parliament in 1876 and he soon became a central figure in British politics, including serving as President of the Board of Trade in Gladstone’s government. Chamberlain marked his entry into national politics by buying a large plot of agricultural land outside Birmingham on which he built a mansion, which he called Highbury, in the ‘Venetian Gothic’ style, together with accompanying parkland and garden. His garden, initially designed by Edward Milner, is illustrated on the ordnance survey plan of 1916 (Figure 1).

This shows the various additions to the garden made over the years, namely the Dutch garden (1899), the Italian garden (1900), the Elizabethan garden (1901) the rockery (1902), a shrubbery (1902) and the tea garden (1904), all of which were designed by the Chamberlains themselves. The most striking feature of the plan is the range of glass houses which stretched for several hundred feet from the house to the kitchen garden. They numbered 25 in all, beginning at the mansion house with a 70ft Palm House from which a 240ft corridor led to 14 orchid houses and a fernery followed by houses for azaleas, primulas, carnations, begonias, rhododendrons, roses and cyclamens (Figure 2). There were additional houses in the kitchen garden, including four vineries and three peach houses, with forcing pits for melons and cucumbers.

The houses and pits were heated by 15,000 feet of pipes, fed by a Trentham boiler which consumed 8-10 tons of coke a week, more in the winter months. Chamberlain employed 20 gardeners, including three who worked exclusively in his orchid houses. The growing of showy orchids was Chamberlain’s hobby and an expensive one. In a letter to his daughter, Beatrice in 1879 he wrote: ‘[On] Friday I met a nursery man from York who tempted me into ‘some horrid extravagance’. I gave him an order for half a dozen extremely fine orchids, of which he brought me the flower, or description and which will be very beautiful though awfully dear’.

His local paper recorded in 1894 that he had placed an order with Messrs. Sanders and Co for £1,800 (an astonishing £789,200 at today’s values, using the earnings index). His total orchid collection was estimated to be worth up to £20,000 (£8.76m). Chamberlain was never seen in the House of Commons without a fresh orchid in his lapel. When he moved to Highbury, he took with him his head gardener, Edward Cooper, who had worked for him since 1875, and built a house for him in the slips of the kitchen garden, using the same architect as for the main house. Cooper was known affectionately by the family as ‘Coops’ and when he died suddenly in 1892 aged 52 of a brain haemorrhage, the regard in which the family held him can be seen from this passage from a letter from Chamberlain’s eldest daughter, Beatrice, to her brother Neville; 

[We] may easily get a gardener more equal to so large a place, but we shan’t easily get one more willing.  One hates to lose people who knew me so young, and therefore took an interest in me that new people can’t be expected to take. Cooper figures in so many memories of those two beloved gardens of Southbourne and Highbury. I can’t realise I shall see his familiar figure no more.

Chamberlain’s regard for his gardeners is evident from the fact that he established a benevolent fund for them, contributing himself an amount equal to that put in by the gardeners.

The gardeners at Highbury had three main functions, apart from looking after Joseph Chamberlain’s orchids. First, they had to supply the household of 6 adults and 14 servants with fruit, vegetables and flowers all year round, and when the family were in London send supplies to them there, by train. Secondly, they had to maintain the various pleasure gardens, which included three rose gardens with 400 varieties of roses (for which Mary Chamberlain had a passion approaching that of her husband for orchids). Thirdly they had to maintain the recreational aspects of the garden; the tennis courts, the croquet lawn, bowling green and walkways as well as the lake, which was used for boating and fishing.

Apart from the various recreational and sporting activities, the gardens at Highbury hosted numerous events. There were annual garden parties for Chamberlain’s constituents, meetings of Liberal Unionist activists, sometimes attended by crowds in their thousands, as well as house parties and balls attended by up to 500 guests. He also hosted his local horticultural society show in his garden every year. The guests would, invariably, be given a tour of the Palm House and orchid houses.

The gardens were thus an essential and integral part of the everyday life of the Chamberlain family. The gardeners in all departments showed great skill in looking after a valuable collection of orchids and an important garden and had the honour of being interviewed by the gardening press and having their portraits published. Joseph Chamberlain was not born to this kind of life, but he chose to adopt it as a natural adjunct to his political status, as did every other commoner who rose through the ranks in the two cabinets of 1880.

The Heseltines at Thenford

Much like Joseph Chamberlain, Michael Heseltine went into politics after making a fortune in business. In 1976 he and his wife Anne bought Thenford, a Palladian mansion in a parkland setting with several lakes and a two-acre walled kitchen garden. Considerations of cost, time and logistics would have made it unlikely for them to have considered building the house and estate from scratch as the Chamberlains had done. However, over a period of nearly 50 years the garden has been restored, developed and added to, making it one of the most important gardens of the modern age. Trees are to Michael Heseltine what orchids were to Joseph Chamberlain, his collection forming a fine arboretum of world renown. Their head gardener, Darren Webster, has the best modern qualifications, with a National Certificate in Horticulture and a Kew Diploma, which he obtained with honours, also winning the Matilda Smith Memorial prize for the best practical student. He oversees a staff of about a dozen. Like Edward Cooper at Highbury, he looks after 400 varieties of roses, but the scope of his gardening is on a much smaller scale. This is evident in the kitchen garden, which at Thenford has been turned into an ornamental garden, with only a minor part reserved for the growing of vegetables and fruit.

Formerly the kitchen garden produce was valued highly by the owner of Thenford. In 1818 the then owner, Mrs Ingram, offered a reward of 10 guineas following the theft of ‘a quantity of Cucumbers, about 2 bushells of Onions, about 5 dozen of Apricots, and other Fruit’, plus sundry items of equipment. (Figure 3) The quantities supplied to Mrs Ingram’s household have not been recorded, but an idea of the scale can be gleaned from Hatfield, the seat of Lord Salisbury, who was the Foreign Secretary in the Disraeli cabinet. Their head gardener, George Norman, was required to supply 50 pounds of forced strawberries, plus peaches and nectarines in proportion for dinner parties, for which he grew annually 7,000 strawberry plants and had the care of a Royal George peach tree which covered a roof space of 50ft x 10ft and produced 3-400 fruit annually. For the summer floral displays, he produced 30,000 bedding plants. The skills required to manage hothouses and to produce fruit and vegetables out of season are beyond the scope of nearly all modern gardeners. Indeed very few of the hothouses remain.

Thenford is very exceptional in that its owners can support a substantial gardening staff, whose cost is estimated to be about £250,000 a year. Very few private owners can afford running costs of this nature, out of taxed income, and Michael Heseltine concedes that Thenford is fortunate in being able to rely on financial support from his publishing company. In most cases, and as is the case with the 12 listed gardens which survive from the Gladstone/Disraeli cabinets, they are run with support from the paying public. Thenford is a reminder of how gardening was pursued by the whole of the political class a century earlier, albeit on a restricted scale and it remains the only modern example.

JD

Further reading:

Floud, R., An Economic History of the English Garden (London, Allen Lane, 2019),

Heseltine, M. & A., Thenford: The Creation of an English Garden (London, Head of Zeus, 2016)

Ballard, P., ”Rus in Urbe’: Joseph Chamberlain’s Gardens at Highbury, Moor Green Birmingham, 1879-1914,’ Garden History, v. 14 (1986)

Jonathan Denby holds a D.Phil in Economic and Social History from Oxford University and an MA in Garden History from Buckingham University. His research interests are gardens, gardening and economic and social conditions in the C19th. Find out about Jonathan’s own garden here.

Read Jonathan’s first blog, comparing parliamentary gardeners in the 19th and 20th centuries here.