Paxton Garden Reflected Victorian Garden Fashion

Head gardener Joseph Paxton (1803-1865) sought to provide his employer the Duke of Devonshire with the latest plants.

The Duke enjoyed such botanical treasures, sometimes including Paxton in his own travels to seek out new plants.

The plant everyone wanted and everyone coveted was the large water lily named Victoria amazonica or Victoria Regia. Paxton succeeded in bringing it into flower at Chatsworth where in 1849 in order to prove the strength of the leaves of the plant, Paxton’s daughter Annie stood on one of the leaves of the plant. [below]

At Chatsworth Paxton built a special lily house for the plant.

Years later at his own home outside of London called Rockhills, Paxton showed that he still pursued the latest garden fashion. There he lived in an elegant Victorian house on the corner of the Crystal Palace park. 

The landscape reflected the garden style of Victorian England of that period.

On the porch climbers like wisteria, passion flowers, and jasmine ran up the trellises. A gravel walk led a visitor to the house door.  On the lawn circular beds with flowering shrubs brought color while smaller beds were filled with the newest geraniums. Carpet beds and ribbon beds, the fashion of the day, also made up the garden.

His garden illustrated the latest Victorian fashion, all of it labour intensive.

In her extraordinary biography of Paxton, A Thing in Disguise: The Visionary Life of Joseph Paxton, Kate Colquhoun writes,”In this garden, as he had at Chatsworth, Paxton proved himself the greatest garden authority of his time.”

Thus, Paxton did not just garden, but gardened, as we all do, in the latest fashion and style for that time and place. In his case that happened to be Victorian England.

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