T is for Tradescant
It is surprising how little we know about the gardens laid out by John Tradescant the elder at St Augustine’s Palace for Edward Wotton, First Baron of Marley. From humble origins Tradescant rose to become one of England’s most renowned gardeners. Tradescant came to Canterbury, most probably in 1615, after working for Sir Robert Cecil at Hatfield House. A phenomenal plantsman he regularly travelled into France and the Low Countries to purchase plants and also joined ambassadorial trips to more distant locations to hunt for specimens of exotic plants.
Suggestively rendered in a contemporary map of Canterbury, the gardens, which occupied the precincts of the former Abbey, were extensive. Jennifer Potter, in her study of the Tradescants Strange Blossoms (2006), highlights an account of the visit to the gardens by a Lieutenant Hammond in 1635. Hammond described an ‘orchard of delicate fruits…a garden of fragrant and delicious flowers…sweet walks, labyrinth-like wildernesses and groves, rare mounts and fountains.’ Teasing out more precise detail of this garden is difficult. Juanita Burnbury notes an earlier visit by John Parkinson the apothecary and plantsman. In his 1629 work A Garden of all Sorts of Pleasant Flowers, Parkinson recorded seeing two kinds of Mandrake and receiving a root of an ‘Indian Moly’ that had been grown at Canterbury. It is worth pausing over the appearance of these plants for the insight they might give into possible planting schemes. Although we do not know where these plants were situated they share some interesting features displaying a taste for striking foliage, long stemmed and unusual green flowers and green fruit. They are also European cultivars and their status as rare and unusual imports was part of their appeal.
The two different varieties of Mandrake appear to have been planted together for effect. Parkinson describes the leaves of the more unusual variety as a ‘greyish-green colour and somewhat folded together.’ This variety was contrasted with the ‘fair, large and green’ leaves (‘larger and longer than the greatest leaves of any lettuce’) of the standard variety ‘that grew hard by.’ Spring flowering, the flowers rose from the centre of these highly textured leaves singly ‘upon a long slender stalk’ very much like a Primrose only on a bigger scale. The flowers on Wotton’s Mandrakes were a ‘greenish white colour… standing in a whitish greene huske’. The fruit resembled ‘small round apples [that are] greene at the first and of a pale red colour when they are ripe’ in August.
The ‘Indian Moly’ appears to have been a form of allium; a genus still popular with gardeners today. Notable for their elegant purple or white pom-pom flower heads on long stalks, some varieties can resemble an exploding firework of ‘striking’ flowers in ‘star-fashion’ as Parkinson describes them. He praises the genus highly, describing their ‘beauty of stateliness’ that ‘delights’ the viewer. This particular cultivar is an unusual variety for the flowerhead appears to be made up of bulblets rather than flowers: ‘a head or cluster of greenish scaly bulbs’ appearing in June and July. Again the foliage is robust and Parkinson describes the leaves as ‘thick and large’.
Parkinson describes a notable addition to the garden: the wild Pomegranate tree with ‘its double flowers as large as a double Provence Rose’. The first known specimen in Britain was planted at Canterbury by Tradescant and it was an eye-catching ornamental tree with ‘purplish branches having thorns, shining, fair green leaves, [and flowers] of an excellent bright crimson colour like a silken carnation’. The beauty, novelty and rarity of this and the other plants recorded by Parkinson gives us a tantalising glimpse into the potential splendour of this garden and Tradescant’s genius.
Dr Claire Bartram, Is Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities, and a Member of the Canterbury Cathedral Archives and Library User Group.
The University will also be hosting a two-day conference on Canterbury and other UNESCO World Heritage Sites around the world on Friday 24 and Saturday 25 May at Old Sessions House, Longport.
