Publications

The Garden
June 2004

A Horticultural Place

Brent Elliott uncovers the history of the Society’s former garden at Chiswick in West London

Before Wisley there was Chiswick. In 1822 the Horticultural Society leased 33 acres of land from the Duke of Devonshire. This lay (in present-day London W4) between the northern boundary of Chiswick Park and Turnham Green, and between what are now Sutton Court Road and Duke’s Avenue.

The only sign on a London streetmap that there was once a garden on the site is a little street called Horticultural Place. But it was here that the Society held its first flower shows, set up its first school of horticulture, and established its world-famous fruit collections; even today there are still old pear trees in back gardens roughly where the pear collection was once grown. The colourful view of the rock garden shown here was published in Cassell’s Popular Gardening, 1884.

In the 1870s, at a time of financial difficulty, much of the site was sold for building, and the garden reduced to 10 acres. By that time the suburbs were beginning to encroach, beginning with Bedford Park (said to be the world’s first ‘garden suburb’), which was created between about 1875 and 1886 out of the garden of the Society’s former Secretary John Lindley. What had originally been a quasi-rural location was now part of the metropolis served by commuter trains. As a result, air pollution was taking its toll both on plants and glasshouses, and Chiswick became the site of a study of the effects of London smog, funded by the Royal Society, and published in the RHS Journal in 1891 and 1894. The Society spent the later 1890s looking for a new site for a garden, and in the event the answer was found at Wisley.

Brent Elliott is RHS Librarian and Archivist

The full story of the Chiswick garden is told in The Royal Horticultural Society: A History 1804–2004, by Brent Elliott, Phillimore & Co, March 2004, £50, ISBN 1860772722

Cassell’s Popular Gardening forms part of a collection in the RHS Lindley Library in London.

The RHS Lindley Library holds more than 50,000 books, 1,500 periodicals, 25,000 botanical drawings, and the UK's largest collection of horticultural trade catalogues. These are held in the RHS Lindley Library and may be consulted at the London branch at 80 Vincent Square, London, SW1, which is open to the public Monday - Friday, 9.30am - 5.30pm.
To visit the Libraries homepage, click here

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