The Loddiges family (not uncommonly mis-spelt Loddige) managed one of the most notable of the eighteenth and nineteenth century plant nurseries that traded in and introduced exotic plants, trees, shrubs, ferns, palms and orchids into European gardens.
The founder of the nursery was Joachim Conrad Loddiges (1738–1826). He was born in Hildesheim, Lower Saxony; his father Casper Lochlies was a gardener to a nobleman in Wrisbergholzen, near Hannover. [1] Conrad trained in The Netherlands [2] and emigrated to Britain at the age of 19 during the Seven Years' War to take up employment as gardener for Dr J. B. Silvester [2] in the suburban village of Hackney, north of London. It was then that the family name was anglicised. When in his forties he married, he had not accumulated sufficient savings to expand a small seed business started by fellow German émigré John Busch, which he purchased, together with the good will of Busch's clientele in 1771 and had fully paid for by 1777, [2] by which time he began to write to people all over the world, urging them to send him packets of seeds collected from trips to native hills, valleys and plains. From these small beginnings, its initial catalogue appearing in 1777 [2] the nursery business gained a specialist market in Britain, and was increasingly able to attract clients from estates and botanical gardens throughout Europe.
The nursery rose to great prominence during the early nineteenth century under George Loddiges (1786–1846). From 1818 to 1833 Conrad and Sons published 20 issues of The Botanical Cabinet , a magazine consisting of over 1000 coloured plates of rare plants that were introduced from around the world into the nursery's gardens and hothouses. The largest hothouses in the world were built to display the best collection of palms and orchids in Europe. [3] George Loddiges also linked the nursery into the scientific circles of the day, becoming a Fellow of the Microscopical Society (FMS), Fellow of the Linnean Society (FLS), Fellow of the Horticultural Society (FHS), and Fellow of the Zoological Society (FZS) in London, for he had wide interests in scientific subjects beyond botany, becoming particularly knowledgeable about early microscopy and one aspect of ornithology (humming-birds). Abroad the nursery's influence spread to the imperial gardens of St Petersburg in Russia and the first Botanical Gardens at Adelaide in South Australia in 1839, by John Bailey who started with Conrad Loddiges in 1815. [4]
Although the business closed in the 1850s, it leaves an important legacy in many of our gardens and parks, since a number of the attractive plants we take for granted, were first introduced into cultivation by Loddiges Nursery.
On 2 January 1770, following his marriage, Joachim Conrad Loddiges wrote to his longstanding employer, Dr Silvester, asking for advice about his plan to move on from head gardener and grounds keeper, and set up a small seed and gardening business in the village of Hackney, north of London, with assistance from a fellow German emigree, Johann (syn. John) Busch. Busch was appointed as chief gardener to Catherine the Great and the two remained in contact - it is through this connection that the Loddiges had a role in importing and establishing rhubarb in Britain. Seed packets were received from all over the world, sometimes from well-known botanical explorers such as John Bartram and William Bartram in North America (who also favoured Quaker horticulturalists such as Peter Collinson with discoveries), and sometimes from ordinary travelers.
One of the first plant species to be introduced into cultivation in Britain by Conrad Loddiges was the Common Mauve Rhododendron, Rhododendron ponticum . He introduced this into England in the early 1760s while working as a gardener for Dr Silvester of Hackney, prior to setting up his own seed and nursery business. The young plants were supplied to the Marquis of Rockingham whose interest led to great enthusiasm for growing the species in British gardens.
Conrad's son George Loddiges is generally credited with raising the profile of the exotic Hackney nursery at least as greatly, if not more so, than his eminent horticulturalist father. In 1833 the Loddiges began using the newly developed Wardian Case to transport live plants from Australia, and also had a keen interest in microscopy and hummingbirds, one of which, the Marvelous Spatuletail, was named in his honour.
For example, the term 'arboretum' was first used in an English publication by J. C. Loudon in 1833 in The Gardener's Magazine when commenting on George Loddiges' famous Hackney Botanic Garden arboretum, begun in 1816, and open free to the public for educational benefit every Sunday. Loudon wrote: The arboretum looks better this season than it has ever done since it was planted... the more lofty trees suffered from the late high winds, but not materially. We walked round the two outer spirals of this coil of trees and shrubs; viz. from Acer to Quercus. There is no garden scene about London so interesting.
A plan of George Loddiges' arboretum was included in The Encyclopaedia of Gardening 1834 edition, and the interest this aroused helped inspire Loudon to write his encyclopaedic book Arboretum et Fruticetum Britannicum, first published in 1838. Although this incorporated drawings from several early botanic gardens and parklands throughout the UK, it relied greatly upon, and would not have been possible without, George Loddiges' well labeled arboretum. It was on the collection maintained by this firm more than any other that J.C.Loudon relied for living material in the preparation of his great work W.J.Bean notes in Trees and Shrubs Hardy in the British Isles, today's standard reference work.
Another notable visitor was Charles Darwin who in September 1838 wrote Saw in Loddiges garden 1279 varieties of roses!!! Proof of capability of variation [5]
Although George Loddiges' arboretum was widely praised, his better known horticultural endeavour was to establish the world's largest hothouse in his Hackney Botanic Nursery, and invent a system of warm mist-like rain to maintain beautiful tropical palms, epiphytic orchids, ferns and camellias in almost perfect environmental conditions akin to a 'tropical rainforest'.
George Loddiges' tropical hothouse range made use of recently invented curvilinear iron glazing bars and central heating systems, which together with his own inventions, enabled many new species of tropical plant to be introduced into cultivation, or flower for the first time in Europe. Visiting the hothouses on 30 March 1822, the Quaker pharmacist William Allen, his Cousin Emily Birkbeck and Anna Hanbury noted: We all went to Loddiges Nursery to see the camellias which are now in full bloom and very beautiful ! There is quite a forest of them: his hot-houses are, perhaps, the most capricious in the world: one off them is forty feet high: in this there is a banana tree which nearly reaches the top. A few years later, in 1829, Jacob Rinz (a visitor from a Frankfurt nursery) commented: never shall I forget the sensation produced by this establishment. I cannot describe the raptures I experienced on seeing that immense palm house. All that I had seen before of the kind appeared nothing to me compared with this. I fancied myself in the Brazils; and especially at that moment when Mr Loddiges had the kindness to produce, in my presence, a shower of artificial rain. Such conditions were ideal for tropical orchids, several of which were named in honour of George Loddiges, including Loddiges' dendrobium.
So infectious was the interest that George Loddiges and fellow nurserymen created during the early nineteenth century in the splendour of new ferns, trees, palms - indeed plants of all kinds - that he was prompted to begin marketing a series of volumes containing coloured engravings of the many new species and varieties. Entitled The Botanical Cabinet [6] it ran to twenty volumes and 2,000 plates. Facing each plant portrait, George Loddiges added a few lines of text outlining the source of the seeds and invariably adding a religious perspective. Many of the drawings for the publications were made by George himself, his daughter Jane and the young Edward Cooke who became a leading Victorian artist, and whose father, George Cooke, engraved a number of the plates.
The Horticultural Society awarded George Loddiges numerous medals throughout this period: Silver Medal, 1818, 1819; Silver Medal (Sir Joseph Banks Memorial Portrait Prize), 1823, 1826, 1832, 1835; President's Silver Medal, 1836; Silver Flora Medal, 1837.
In the late 1830s, George Loddiges became involved in the design and landscaping of one of the Magnificent Seven London garden cemeteries associated with burial reform: Abney Park Cemetery. Sensitively preserving the existing early eighteenth century parkland laid out by Lady Mary Abney and Isaac Watts, he introduced an educational landscape around the perimeter which was open to the public free of charge: a vast arboretum of 2,500 species and varieties, labelled alphabetically from A to Z rather than arranged in a more conventional way. Close to the Abney Park Chapel he also laid out a rosarium to complement the chapel's 'botanical rose windows' (described as 'botanical' owing to their unusual ten-part arrangement, as in the five sepals and five petals of the rose family, or petals of a simple rose including indentations as shown in the White Rose of York). George Loddiges also appears to have influenced the architect William Hosking and client George Collison II in their final choice of Egyptian Revival ornamentation for the main entrance, since the Egyptian-style entrance pylons incorporate the botanical imagery of the Egyptian White Lily or Lotus, a plant introduced into western cultivation by Loddiges Nursery in 1802.
In May 1838, John James Audubon published the fifth, and final, volume of his "Ornithological Biography", the textual supplement to his epic "Birds of America" series of 435 plates (1826-1838). Writing about the "Anna Humming Bird" in the Ornithological Biography, Audubon wrote, "...Those [figures/paintings] of the male I made from specimens, for the use of which I am indebted to Mr. Loddiges, of London, whose collection of Humming Birds is unrivaled." (In June 2018 an original, 4-volume edition of the Birds of America sold at a Christie's auction for $9.65 million).
On the death of George Loddiges in 1846, the nursery business passed to his son Conrad Loddiges II (1821–1865), who found it increasingly difficult to negotiate a new lease from the land-owner (St. Thomas' Hospital), given the much higher prices the land could now command for housing development, due to London's growth into the surrounding countryside. Similarly, the part of the nursery that was owned by the Loddiges family in freehold, was becoming more valuable as building land, whilst losing its attractive countryside village setting. Conrad was involved with the display of ferns and terrariums for the Great Exhibition. The nursery closed in stages between 1852 and 1854 due to expiry of the lease from St. Thomas' Hospital. Conrad Loddiges II offered the whole of the exotic plant stock to Kew Gardens for a sum of £9000 (20 years earlier the collection was valued at £200,000) but this was refused. Many rare plants were auctioned via Stevens auctioneers, including rare orchids sold to John Day who would later become famous as a botanical illustrator. Joseph Paxton purchased 300 palms and plants for the opening of the new Crystal Palace at Sydenham. The Illustrated London News of 5 August 1854 illustrated plumed horses pulling a giant palm tree through the City of London on its way to be prominently displayed by Paxton in time for the opening of the Crystal Palace by Queen Victoria.
Today, memorials to members of the Loddiges family can be seen in the gardens of the Church of St John-at-Hackney and Abney Park Cemetery.
An arboretum is a botanical collection composed exclusively of trees of a variety of species. Originally mostly created as a section in a larger garden or park for specimens of mostly non-local species, many modern arboreta are in botanical gardens as living collections of woody plants and is intended at least in part for scientific study.
The Birmingham Botanical Gardens are a 15-acre (6-hectare) botanical garden situated in Edgbaston, Birmingham, England. The gardens are located 1+1⁄2 miles (2.4 km) south-west of Birmingham city centre at grid reference SP049854. Designed in 1829, the gardens are Grade II* listed in Historic Englands's Register of Parks and Gardens, and retain many original features and layout, which was designed by the landscape gardener and horticulturalist John Claudius Loudon. The site is notable for its range of glasshouses and gardens, which display a wide variety of plants and birds. Birmingham Botanical Gardens is managed by Birmingham Botanical and Horticultural Society, a registered charity. The gardens are open daily to the public with paid admission.
John Claudius Loudon was a Scottish botanist, garden designer and author. He was the first to use the term arboretum in writing to refer to a garden of plants, especially trees, collected for the purpose of scientific study. He was married to Jane Webb, a fellow horticulturalist, and author of science-fiction, fantasy, horror, and gothic stories.
Abney Park cemetery is one of the "Magnificent Seven" cemeteries in London, England.
Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens is a botanical garden set in Schenley Park, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. It is a City of Pittsburgh historic landmark and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Ulmus × hollandica 'Vegeta', sometimes known as the Huntingdon Elm, is an old English hybrid cultivar raised at Brampton, near Huntingdon, by nurserymen Wood & Ingram in 1746, allegedly from seed collected at nearby Hinchingbrooke Park. In Augustine Henry's day, in the later 19th century, the elms in Hinchingbrooke Park were U. nitens. Richens, noting that wych elm is rare in Huntingdonshire, normally flowering four to six weeks later than field elm, pointed out that unusually favourable circumstances would have had to coincide to produce such seed: "It is possible that, some time in the eighteenth century, the threefold requirements of synchronous flowering of the two species, a south-west wind", "and a mild spring permitting the ripening of the samaras, were met."
Abney Park Chapel, is a Grade II Listed chapel, designed by William Hosking and built by John Jay that is situated in Europe's first wholly nondenominational cemetery, Abney Park Cemetery, London.
Karpatiosorbus latifolia is a species of whitebeam that is endemic to the area around Fontainebleau, south of Paris in France, where it has been known since the early eighteenth century.
The Wych Elm cultivar Ulmus glabra 'Horizontalis', commonly known as the Weeping Wych Elm or Horizontal Elm, was discovered in a Perth nursery circa 1816. The tree was originally identified as 'Pendula' by Loddiges (London), in his catalogue of 1836, a name adopted by Loudon two years later in Arboretum et Fruticetum Britannicum, 3: 1398, 1838, but later sunk as a synonym for 'Horizontalis'.
The St. George Village Botanical Garden is a botanical garden with arboretum located at 127 Estate St. George, Frederiksted, Saint Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands. It is open daily except Christmas; an admission fee is charged.
The Field Elm cultivar Ulmus minor 'Webbiana', or Webb's curly-leaf elm, distinguished by its unusual leaves that fold upwards longitudinally, was said to have been raised at Lee's Nursery, Hammersmith, London, circa 1868, and was first described in that year in The Gardener's Chronicle and The Florist and Pomologist. It was marketed by the Späth nursery of Berlin in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as U. campestris WebbianaHort., and by Louis van Houtte of Ghent as U. campestris crispa (Webbiana). Henry thought 'Webbiana' a form of Cornish Elm, adding that it "seems to be identical with the insufficiently described U. campestris var. concavaefoliaLoudon" – a view repeated by Krüssmann.
The dwarf wych elm cultivar Ulmus glabra 'Nana', a very slow growing shrub that with time forms a small tree, is of unknown origin. It was listed in the Simon-Louis 1869 catalogue as Ulmus montana nana. Henry (1913), referring his readers to an account of the Kew specimen in the journal Woods and Forests, 1884, suggested that it may have originated from a witch's broom. It is usually classified as a form of Ulmus glabra and is known widely as the 'Dwarf Wych Elm'. However, the ancestry of 'Nana' has been disputed in more recent years, Melville considering the specimen once grown at Kew to have been a cultivar of Ulmus × hollandica.
The Wych Elm cultivar Ulmus glabra 'Nigra', commonly known as the Black Irish Elm, was found in the Kilkenny area c.1770 by the father of nurseryman John Robertson of Kilkenny, who later cultivated it. Robertson stated that he had not seen the form outside Ireland. It was listed by Loddiges (1830) as Ulmus nigra, and described by Loudon in Arboretum et Fruticetum Britannicum (1838), as Ulmus montana nigra. 'Nigra' is not mentioned in either Elwes and Henry's or Bean's classic works on British trees.
The Field Elm cultivar Ulmus minor 'Cucullata', the Hooded elm, was listed by Loddiges of Hackney, London, in their catalogue of 1823 as Ulmus campestris cucullata, and later by Loudon in Arboretum et Fruticetum Britannicum (1838), as U. campestris var. cucullata.
The Field Elm cultivar Ulmus minor 'Argenteo-Variegata' or simply 'Variegata', known in Australasia and North America as Silver Elm or Tartan Elm, is said to have been cultivated in France from 1772. Green noted that variegated forms of Field Elm "arise frequently, and several clones may have been known under this name". Dumont de Courset (1802) listed an U. campestris var. glabra variegata, Loudon (1838) an U. nitens var. variegata, and Wesmael (1863) an U. campestris var. nuda microphylla variegata.
Lee and Kennedy were two families of prominent Scottish nurserymen in partnership for three generations at the Vineyard Nursery in Hammersmith, west of London. "For many years," wrote John Claudius Loudon in 1854, "this nursery was deservedly considered the first in the world."
The Field Elm cultivar Ulmus minor 'Viminalis Betulaefolia' (:'birch-leaved') is an elm tree of uncertain origin. An U. betulaefolia was listed by Loddiges of Hackney, London, in the catalogue of 1836, an U. campestris var. betulaefolia by Loudon in Arboretum et Fruticetum Britannicum (1838), and an U. betulifoliaBooth by the Lawson nursery of Edinburgh. Henry described an U. campestris var. betulaefolia at Kew in 1913, obtained from Fulham nurseryman Osborne in 1879, as "scarcely different from var. viminalis ". Melville considered the tree so named at Kew a form of his U. × viminalis, while Bean (1988), describing U. 'Betulaefolia', likewise placed it under U. 'Viminalis' as an apparently allied tree. Loudon and Browne had noted that some forms of 'Viminalis' can be mistaken for a variety of birch. An U. campestris betulaefolia was distributed by Hesse's Nurseries, Weener, Germany, in the 1930s.
The field elm cultivar Ulmus minor 'Viminalis' (:'willow-like'), occasionally referred to as the twiggy field elm, was raised by Masters in 1817, and listed in 1831 as U. campestris viminalis, without description. Loudon added a general description in 1838, and the Cambridge University Herbarium acquired a leaf specimen of the tree in 1866. Moss, writing in 1912, said that the Ulmus campestris viminalis from Cambridge University Herbarium was the only elm he thought agreed with the original Plot's elm as illustrated by Dr. Plot in 1677 from specimens growing in an avenue and coppice at Hanwell near Banbury. Elwes and Henry (1913) also considered Loudon's Ulmus campestris viminalis to be Dr Plot's elm. Its 19th-century name, U. campestris var. viminalis, led the cultivar to be classified for a time as a variety of English Elm. On the Continent, 'Viminalis' was the Ulmus antarcticaHort., 'zierliche Ulme' [:'dainty elm'] of Kirchner's Arboretum Muscaviense (1864).
The Wych Elm cultivar Ulmus glabra 'Concavaefolia', a form with up-curling leaves, was listed in Beissner's Handbuch der Laubholz-Benennung (1903) as Ulmus montana cucullataHort. [:'hooded', the leaf], a synonym of the Ulmus scabraMill. [:glabraHuds.] var. concavaefolia of herbarium specimens. An Ulmus campestris cucullata, of uncertain species, had appeared in Loddiges' 1823 list, but Loudon's brief description (1838) of concave- and hooded-leaved elms was insufficient for later botanists to distinguish them. The earliest unambiguous description appears to be that of Petzold and Kirchner in Arboretum Muscaviense (1864).
George Loddiges was a British gardener, artist, and naturalist. He worked in the nursery business established by his father and illustrated nearly 2000 plates of plants in the nursery's own periodical, the Botanical Cabinet, published between 1817 and 1833. He also planned a book on the hummingbirds but this was not published. The hummingbird genus Loddigesia is named after him.