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The Garden
February 2004

In the beginning…

The birth of the organisation that was to become the RHS was on 7 March 1804. Brent Elliott profiles the seven men present at the inaugural meeting, including their sometimes colourful private lives and disagreements, and the plants that are part of their lasting legacies

The original suggestion for a British horticultural society came from John Wedgwood. In 1800 he canvassed his friends about the possibility of setting up a society that would fill the gap left by the existing agricultural societies, which gave awards for exercises in afforestation, cattle breeding and the like, but rarely ventured into gardens. Wedgwood’s idea was simple and small-scale: his society would meet regularly, allow members the chance to present papers on their activities and discoveries, encourage discussion, publish the best work, and award prizes for achievements in the garden.

It was four years before a meeting was arranged. Wedgwood began by writing to William Forsyth, but Forsyth was busy with a book on fruit trees, and getting involved in an acrimonious dispute over the merits of a ‘plaster’ for tree wounds, for which he had been awarded a sizeable Government grant. Thomas Andrew Knight, a close friend of Sir Joseph Banks who Wedgwood wanted to be involved in his society, virtually accused Forsyth of fraud over the plaster.

A meeting of seven men finally took place at James Hatchard’s bookshop on Piccadilly on 7 March 1804. It was a turbulent time: Britain was at war with France, indeed under threat of invasion until Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar in October 1805.

Wedgwood chaired the meeting: Banks and Forsyth were present, as were William Townsend Aiton, the Superintendent of Kew; James Dickson, a nurseryman; and two wealthy amateurs, Charles Francis Greville and Richard Anthony Salisbury. Wedgwood’s proposals were read out and all agreed to circulate copies to more people.

Thomas Knight was not present, but Banks immediately proposed him for membership, and soon put him to work writing the new Society’s objectives. As soon as Knight (who would shortly become President) spelled out his hopes for a research programme in fruit breeding, the Society’s remit began to expand beyond Wedgwood’s original ideas - a trend that has continued to this day.

The seal of the RHS replicates the Society’s first medal, struck in 1811, and features Flora and Pomona, Roman goddesses of flowers and fruit respectively

William Townsend Aiton (1766 - 1849)

Two Aitons were successively Superintendents of the Royal gardens at Kew: William Aiton (1731 - 93) was succeeded by his son William Townsend Aiton, who had worked as a garden designer in his 20s. Both produced versions of the Hortus Kewensis, a catalogue of the garden’s plants; William Townsend expanded the book into five volumes, with historical information on the plants’ introductions. He worked closely with Sir Joseph Banks and, after William Forsyth’s death, he was given control of the gardens at Kensington and St James’s Palaces as well. In the 1820s, after Banks’s death, his duties were further increased to include Windsor Great Park. All this expanded responsibility meant that the botanic garden at Kew suffered; in 1838, John Lindley led a working party into the management of Kew, and his report resulted in the botanic garden being removed from Aiton’s control. It became the Royal Botanic Gardens, under Government management. Aiton finally retired in 1845.

The younger Aiton did not have a plant named after him: his father had beaten him to it. Carl Peter Thunberg commemorated William Aiton in the South African shrub genus Aitonia, but this name is now obsolete; the plant is now known as Nymania.

Sir Joseph Banks (1743 - 1820)

At the time the Society was founded, Sir Joseph Banks was effectively the science ‘tsar’ of Britain. He was President of the Royal Society as well as the unofficial director of Kew, with a leading influence in enterprises ranging from the exploration of Africa to the settlement of Australia. He had achieved fame as an explorer, most importantly for his role in Captain Cook’s voyage round the world in the Endeavour (1768 - 71).

From some point in the 1770s he became increasingly involved in the administration of the Royal gardens at Kew until, by the end of the century, WT Aiton was working under his direction.

Banks’ library, a five-volume catalogue of which was published in his lifetime, later became the core of the Natural History Museum Library. Scholars were allowed to use it, and the young John Lindley was employed there, but when it came to sharing plants from the collections at Kew with other botanists, Banks was criticised for stinginess. At his house at Spring Grove, Isleworth, he experimented in growing American cranberries and had a pineapple house (which may have been the model for the one depicted on the reverse of the Horticultural Society’s first medal).

The younger Linnaeus named the Australian genus Banksia in his honour.

James Dickson (1738 - 1822)

Dickson was born in Traquhair, Scotland, but moved to London to work for Jeffery’s nursery in Kensington, establishing his own seed shop in Covent Garden in 1772. Here he came to know William Forsyth, whom he supplied with plants, and Joseph Banks, who arranged for Dickson to take over the care of the British Museum’s garden. In his later years he retired to Croydon.

Dickson collected plants throughout Scotland and the Hebrides, to which he made several expeditions. He was particularly interested in mosses and other non-flowering plants, so it is fitting that the botanist L’Héritier de Brutelle should name a genus of tree ferns Dicksonia in his honour in 1788.

In the same year, Dickson was a founder of the Linnean Society, and played a role in organising expeditions elsewhere. He introduced Mungo Park, his brother-in-law, to Banks, who organised Parks’ expedition to West Africa in the 1790s.

William Forsyth (1737 - 1804)

Forsyth was born in Aberdeen, but moved to London and became gardener at Syon Park. In 1771 he succeeded the famous Philip Miller as Superintendent of the Chelsea Physic Garden; during his time there he and Sir Joseph Banks created the rock garden using lava that Banks had brought back from Iceland. In 1784 Forsyth was appointed Superintendent of the gardens of St James’s and Kensington Palaces. Finding many of the trees suffering from fungal canker, he hacked away the diseased portions and experimented with different plasters to see which promoted the healing process best.

He originally kept the composition of ‘Forsyth’s Plaister’ secret, but published it on receipt of a Government grant after it had been used on trees in the Royal forests. The ingredients were cow dung, urine, wood ash, sand and powdered lime; Thomas Andrew Knight attacked Forsyth for fraud, and this controversy was raging at the time the Society was founded (and is probably why Knight did not attend the founding meeting). Forsyth died within a few months of the Society’s founding, leaving the way clear for Knight to play a greater role.

Martin Vahl named the genus Forsythia for him, but Forsyth never saw the plant: it did not reach Britain until Robert Fortune introduced it in the 1840s.

Charles Francis Greville (1749 - 1809)

Though the younger brother of the Earl of Warwick, Greville was not destined for the peerage. He rose through Parliament to become a Lord of the Admiralty, and developed the town of Milford Haven, Wales into an important port. But most of his interests lay in natural history, ranging from meteorites to the growing of exotic plants in his garden at Paddington Green, 14 of which were illustrated in Curtis’s Botanical Magazine. Robert Brown named the genus Grevillea in his honour.

Greville’s uncle, Sir William Hamilton, the Ambassador at the Court of Naples, advised him to marry a wealthy heiress. This meant discarding his existing mistress, Emma Hart. Greville sent her to Naples, where she expected him to follow her. He did not, and she eventually became Lady Hamilton, famous for her relationship with Lord Nelson.

Greville did not succeed in finding an heiress, and he has had a rough ride from posterity. From the high-mindedness of an older generation: ‘when she and Greville had their ménage à deux at Paddington Green, it was the man, and not the woman who lost his honour…’ (J T Herbert Baily, in Emma, Lady Hamilton, published in1905), to, more recently: ‘In all his portraits and extant utterances Greville seems a frigid prig…’ (David Constantine, in Fields of Fire: a life of Sir William Hamilton, published 2001). Greville’s only defender among Hamilton biographers was Hugh Tours, who continually refers to him as ‘kind-hearted’ in The Life and Letters of Emma Hamilton (1963).

Banks it seems was familiar with the business. Hamilton wrote to him in 1786: ‘A beautiful plant called Emma has been transplanted here from England and has not lost any of its beauty.’

Richard Anthony Salisbury (1761 - 1829)

Salisbury’s name was originally Markham; he took the name Salisbury as the condition of a legacy. His first garden was at Chapel Allerton, near Leeds, where he published a catalogue of his plant collection. His relations with women caused him even more problems than Greville: his wife left him, and it seems he pretended to be bankrupt in order to be let off maintenance payments.

He was certainly solvent by 1800, when he purchased Peter Collinson’s former garden at Mill Hill, where he lived until 1806. From 1805 to 1816 he was Secretary of the Horticultural Society; during these years he also published Paradisus Londinensis, with William Hooker as the artist. Hooker became the Society’s first artist, probably at the instigation of Salisbury. He later resigned as Secretary in apparent embarrassment over the parlous state of the Society’s accounts.

In his early years, Salisbury was a great friend of Sir James Edward Smith, the founder of the Linnean Society. Smith named the ginkgo tree Salisburia in his honour; but the name violated the rules of botanical nomenclature even then and was soon forgotten. It remains Ginkgo biloba. Salisbury eventually fell out with Smith, and the two blazed away at each other in print over nomenclature and taxonomy.

John Wedgwood (1766 - 1844)

Wedgwood was the son of Josiah Wedgwood, the founder of the pottery company. He worked for the family firm intermittently, but at the time of founding the Society he was a banker with the London and Middlesex Bank.

In 1816 Coutts Bank took over the London and Middlesex, and Wedgwood retired to travel and garden.

He resigned from the Society that was his idea in 1809, and unlike the other founders, did not have a plant named after him.

The Royal Horticultural Society: A History 1804 - 2004, by Brent Elliott (ISBN 1860772722) will be available from The Wisley Bookshop in March, price £50.
Tel: 01483 211113.
For RHS Mail Order enquiries, tel: 01483 211320; or mailto:mailorder@rhs.org.uk

Brent Elliott is RHS Librarian and Archivist

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