“Gardens have provided solace, opportunity and inspiration for LGBTQ+ people”
To coincide with LGBTQ+ History Month, Dr Suzanne Moss looks at the lives of four pioneering queer gardeners whose inspiring work, revolutionary ideas and defiant attitudes are integral to the history of horticulture
The more we learn, the more we realise we don’t understand. For me, this statement is never more true than in garden history. If we study a little, we know the standard facts about famous faces. Capability Brown removed the plants, Humphry Repton put some back in, William Robinson made everything wild and David Douglas died in a bull pit searching for plants in Hawaii.
When I delved deeper I realised the limits of this view. Plants and gardens unite us. A passion for growing transcends class, colour, nationality, sex, wealth, sexuality and gender identity, and the true cast of historical horticulturists is fantastically diverse. Our challenge, as curious gardeners, is to interrogate the historical record to reveal the hidden histories that lie within. Here we’ll find that LGBTQ+ people are prominent in this story, where gardens have often provided solace, opportunity and inspiration.
The Duchess of Portland (1715–1785) and Mary Delany (1700–1788)
Mary Delany was one of the 18th century’s fiercest critics of marriage and a stalwart socialite, artist and woman of letters. Irish artist Letitia Bushe introduced her to Lady Anne Bligh as somebody who, “would not be shocked to be introduced to a woman whose relationship with another woman might be seen by some as contravening ‘decorums’”, which is about as overt as it gets in 18th-century correspondence.
When Patrick died in 1768, Mary moved in with her friend and fellow widow Margaret Cavendish Bentinck, Duchess of Portland. The Duchess was a polymath whose collection of natural history was out-classed only by the British Museum.
Her interest in science included her expansive garden, glasshouse and pressed plant collection at her house in Bullstrode, Buckinghamshire. For the next 20 years the two women collected, struck out on botanising and shell-collecting trips, and recorded new plant species.
Eminent botanical artist Georg Ehret spent two years painting plants at the Duchess’ house at Whitehall, Swedish naturalist Daniel Solander was a regular visitor and Joseph Banks, founder of the Horticultural Society of London (later, the RHS), was a personal friend.
As the Duchess grew plants, Mary recorded them. Never content to be conventional, she did so by creating around 1,000 papercut images that captured the intricacy and vibrancy of the flora of Bullstrode from 1771.
Mary also built a grotto of shells – the Duchess’ favourite item to collect – and wrote: “To her I owe the spirit of pursuing it [her art] with diligence and pleasure. To her I owe more than I dare express, but my heart will ever feel with the utmost gratitude, the tenderest affection, the honour and delight I have enjoy’d in her most generous, steady, and delicate friendship, for above forty years.”
These two women lived in the cosmopolitan world of the 18th-century upper class, where close female friendships existed, as historian Lisa Moore puts it, on a “continuum from sexual intimacy to chaste mutual devotion”.
We will never know quite where Mary and the Duchess sat within this continuum, but we do know that together they formed a formidable team, which changed not only how the scientific community regarded women, but also the botanical landscape of the future.
Ellen Willmott (1858–1934)
A fabulous archive of Miss Willmott’s life surfaced in the past decade, and has been documented by Sandra Lawrence in her 2022 book Miss Willmott’s Ghosts. Correspondence reveals a passionate affair between Ellen Willmott and Miss Georgiana ‘Gian’ Tufnell, lady-in-waiting to Princess Mary Adelaide.
Gian and Ellen met in 1894 and became very close, very quickly. “I love you so and you must know it in the same way that I know you love me. No time to tell you more, my dear heart, except that I want you very badly. I feel so lost without you,” Gian wrote on one of the occasions when they were parted. We have no idea what Ellen might have written back because Gian had all her letters burned.
When Princess Mary’s health deteriorated, the independently penniless Gian was in a tight spot and announced a surprise engagement to Lord George Mount Stephen. The wedding was arranged for 27 October 1897, the day after Miss Willmott was due to receive her medal of honour. Ellen fled to her property in France and missed both. Sandra Lawrence interprets this absence as her taking time to deal with her heartbreak, but because the relationship was secret, Ellen’s reputation for being rude and dismissive grew.
But that reputation wasn’t always misplaced. Ellen Willmott was a tricky character, but she lived at a time when women were alarming the patriarchy by doing unacceptable things such as having jobs and opinions. This sort of thing could be damaging to a lady’s reputation, but Ellen didn’t care. She picked herself up from heartbreak and set about making herself into one of the era’s most eminent horticulturists.