Miss Willmott’s Ghost

By Judith M. Taylor

“Miss Willmott’s Ghost” is the vernacular name of Eryngium giganteum, a large prickly ornamental thistle but by now I am afraid Miss Willmott herself has become something of a ghost too. Born the eldest of three sisters into a wealthy family she managed to spend her entire fortune on her gardens and ended up in grave financial difficulties. Not only did she inherit the family estate but her godmother left her a lot of money at her death.  Ellen Willmott, 1858- 1934, had no internal governor or compass, otherwise known as “common sense”, nor did she employ an external one such as a financial adviser. If she did she ignored whatever advice she received.

Portrait of Ellen Ann Willmott
(Rosina Mantovani)

Already the possessor of two estates with stellar gardens, one in England and one in France, in 1905 she insisted on buying a third in Italy, making the total number of gardeners she employed more than one hundred. Even Rockefeller might have thought twice about that. All her gardeners were men. She had nothing but contempt for women gardeners. The men were frightened of her as she was both autocratic and arbitrary. In old age this behavior hardened into eccentricity. For the last few years of her life she carried a revolver everywhere with her.

While still young she learned a great deal about plants and began to import new and exotic ones from all over the world. She herself never went on such expeditions but contributed to syndicates which did. Horticulture was her life and her world. This single-minded focus earned her a lot of respect in the garden community. She was the first woman to receive the Victoria Medal of Honour at the Royal Horticultural Society in the same year as Gertrude Jekyll, 1897. That was the first year the medal was awarded, an even greater honour. More than sixty plants are named for her personally or for Warley, her estate.

Warley Place

Ellen Willmott was particularly expert in roses, writing a well received monograph, “The Genus Rosa”, which is still useful today. The book was published in two volumes between 1910 and 1914 and dedicated to Queen Alexandra. Miss Willmott commissioned Alfred Parsons, a well known watercolorist, to illustrate her book and she later got him to paint many of her plants. The book came at a later phase of her life.

When she was younger narcissus fascinated her. Warley Place had thirty three acres, an expanse which allowed her to experiment with dozens of species of narcissus on a very grand scale. Ancient drifts of Narcissus pseudonarcissus had covered the hillsides. At first Miss Willmott added more and more species narcissus to the land offering varying hues of gold, yellow and white to occupy the eye at different times: N.incomparabilis, N. pallidoflorus and N. campernelii among many others. The gardeners loaded the bulbs on to wheel barrows and let their gleeful children toss handfuls of them all over the grounds. It was licensed pandemonium. The bulbs grew where they fell and then multiplied every year. She followed a similar course with crocus.

Ellen Willmott kept very careful notes, following each bed and site to see how the bulbs grew in different months. She crossed some species and once she found a hybrid she thought worthy she handed it off to commercial nurserymen to test further. Eventually they bulked it up and offered it for sale. This skill and expertise was the reason the royal Horticultural Society elected her a fellow in 1894. She served on their bulb committee for many years. Her complete mastery of the subject impressed the members of the society.

A Plan of Miss Willmott's House & Garden at Great Warley, 1904

In 1903 Miss Willmott played a big role in persuading Sir Thomas Hanbury to donate sixty acres of his property in Wisley, Surrey to the society to found an experimental site outside London.  The grounds at Chiswick had become too small. RHS Wisley now flourishes in its own right and recently built new science and visitors’ centres and other essential structures. All the trials of new flowers and vegetables are carried out in their grounds. Every year they make a very brave show.

Ellen’s father, Frederick Willmott, came from a very respectable family of pharmacists but he decided to become a solicitor. Although always very genteel in his behaviour he knew exactly where he was going and what he wanted. He married a woman slightly above him in the social scale, Ellen Fell. Both families were English Catholics. His three daughters were  brought up in the church, going to convent schools and spending much time in the company of religious women. The girls’ godmother Helen Tasker was very wealthy and each year presented the children with a thousand pounds each for their birthdays. At her death they inherited most of her money. The youngest daughter, Ada, died of diphtheria as a child leaving only Ellen and her younger sister Rose. It took the family a long time to recover from the shock of her death.

When Frederick began to make serious money he bought a fine estate in Essex, Warley Place. At the time it was quite far into the country side, though on the train line but now it is subsumed into Brentwood and the property is a public nature reserve. Mrs Willmott took the neglected garden in hand and made it handsome. She did not care for carpet bedding and used a more naturalistic style.

The family had a very active social life. Ellen played tennis very well and was also an accomplished violinist. Because she had complete access to her own money she began to buy expensive objects very early. She started by purchasing four very valuable string instruments, two violins, a viola and a violoncello, made by old Italian masters. She allowed an eleven year old prodigy, Lionel Tertis, to play the viola. Tertis was the first musician to be a virtuoso on the viola, an instrument so often neglected for the other strings.

Women were discouraged from playing the violin at that time because it brought the bosom into great prominence and was thus unladylike! It says a lot for the wisdom of her parents that they did not intervene but allowed her to study the instrument.

The Willmotts travelled together on the Continent every year and enjoyed all the delights that these journeys offered.  They had favourite haunts and particularly liked the countryside around Aix – en – Provence. Tresserve was a sleepy hamlet which had caught Queen Victoria’s eye. The monarch wanted to buy property there but the negotiations failed leaving Miss Willmott to snap it up in 1899.

Ellen Willmott was too intelligent and uncompromising to attract the sort of man likely to marry her and remained single all her life. Her sister married into the Berkeley family, also Catholic but actual gentry. There were some awkward moments due to snobbery. Rose Willmott Berkeley was also a good gardener and the grounds at Spetchley Park were made  to resemble those at Warley Place.

When Ellen was twenty-one she told her father she was going to build a rock garden in a corner of the Warley Place garden. He was very complacent and paid very little attention to what she was spending. All he asked her to do was to build it nowhere near his study so he was not bothered by the work.

The well known Yorkshire nursery of Backhouse laid down the rocks and planted the new grotto. The excavations led down to a small stream which supplied the necessary water. The plants have died and the stream now runs dry but the rocks remain showing how handsome the garden must have been. Ellen had learned how to do this by careful study in her growing library. She also sought advice from many known experts. It was the opening salvo in her future career. In view of Willmott’s interest in narcissus it is worth noting that Sarah Backhouse, sister in law of the owner, bred one of the signature new narcissi of the epoch, N. ‘Mrs R. O. Backhouse’ . It was an early pink type.

Many of the Warley hybrids were bred to championship levels. Ellen Willmott won a series of awards of merit and first class certificates at the Royal Horticultural Society shows for her narcissus. Perhaps her favourites were the ‘Triandus’ type, with three stamens. She named some of them for her sister and brother in law and one for her dead baby sister, Ada.

In 1923 her sister Rose died of cancer. Although the Willmotts were not demonstrative people Ellen and her sister were always close and it was assumed that she as the elder sister would die first. The loss was very grievous and may have contributed to her psychological unravelling as time went by. Poor management and profligate behaviour led to the dwindling and eventual loss of her fortune. Very reluctantly she was forced to sell first Tresserve and then Boccanegra.

Painting Ellen and Rose Willmott (Spetchley House)

Her almost encyclopaedic knowledge of horticulture won her many more awards even from the French and Italian organizations but her personality was to be her downfall. In spite of many individual acts of charity she was prickly, intolerant and always had to be right, no matter how misguided her point of view was. When she absent-mindedly left a shop in London without the receipt for her purchase the store detective called a policeman.

By then she was no longer smartly dressed and was assumed to be a poor thief. Within a very short time some of her highly placed friends rallied around and pointed out the mistake. The shop was ready to apologize and close the incident. Something in her nature made her reject that face saving measure. She insisted on going to jail for the night and being heard in court the next morning to be vindicated. This was to be a Pyrrhic victory. Foolish financial decisions had begun as early as 1907 when she bought more than even she could afford and began to borrow money.

By the mid 1920s she did not have enough money left with which to pay taxes and tried to sell some of her valuable things to scrape by. There was nowhere nearly enough of value for the sums involved. In spite of all her reverses Miss Willmott still attended meetings at the Royal Horticultural Society regularly though she no longer competed in the shows.

She died very abruptly in the night on September 26, 1934, at the age of seventy six. The loyal butler who had stuck with her throughout found her in the morning.

Eryngium giganteum 'Miss Willmott's Ghost'

Reference

Le Lievre, Audrey  1980      Miss Willmott of Warley Place
London and Boston         Faber and Faber

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Judith M. Taylor MD is a graduate of Somerville College and the Oxford University Medical School and is a board certified neurologist. She practiced neurology in New York and since retiring has written six books on horticultural history as well as numerous articles and book reviews on the same subject.

Dr Taylor’s books include The Olive in California: history of an immigrant tree (2000), Tangible Memories: Californians and their gardens 1800 – 1950 (2003), The Global Migrations of Ornamental Plants: how the world got into your garden (Missouri Botanical Garden Press 2009), Visions of Loveliness: the work of forgotten flower breeders (Ohio University Press 2014) and An Abundance of Flowers: more great flower breeders of the past (Ohio University Press  2018).  In 2019 she published A Five Year Plan for Geraniums: growing flowers commercially in East Germany 1946 – 1989.
Dr Taylor’s web site is: www.horthistoria.com

Sweet Peas in Worcestershire: Horticulturalist Hilda Hemus

By Judith Taylor

This is a story about a family. Their name was Hemus. The action took place near the River Severn and the time was the turn of the twentieth century. Upton was a quiet town, surrounded by farms and it followed the country rhythms of its forebears. Thomas and Harriette Hemus had six children, four girls and two boys but it is with the second eldest daughter, Hilda, we are concerned.

Hilda Hemus

Unlike so many fathers of the time Thomas decided his daughters should be properly educated, not just taught by a simpering governess. The end of the nineteenth century was punctuated by scientific advances which challenged and excited the imagination. Perhaps nothing caused as much interest as genetics and the tantalizing new view of heredity.

Thomas had bought a much larger farm to accommodate his growing family and every summer needed temporary help to bring in the harvest.  One summer in 1899 Rowland Biffen rode his bicycle from his home in Cheltenham to Upton. He was a student at Emanuel College, Cambridge but needed some extra money. His father, Rowland Biffen Sr, was a school master and very intellectual but not very well paid. It was up to young Rowland to seize every opportunity. Science was his passion and the idea of working on a farm with its crops was just the thing.

Thomas Hemus approved of the lad and allowed him to try a few experiments in the corner of a field. Rowland was able to see which type of wheat did best in the circumstances. Rowland also observed the charming young women about him. Hilda had a striking personality and was really handsome. Two summers later he asked her to marry him, based on his success at Cambridge and high probability of becoming a don. (The possibility of a prosperous father in law contributed mightily to his passions.)

Hilda did not feel like marrying anyone and turned him down. Rowland was unfazed. He turned round and proposed to her elder sister Mary who was delighted with the offer. Exit Rowland and Mary for now.

Hilda had bigger ideas. The most fashionable flower of that epoch was the sweet pea. Grown for its fragrance since it first arrived in 1699 from Sicily no one paid much attention to its appearance.  That changed in the last part of the 19th century. Slowly and painstakingly James Carter developed new forms and colours and in 1865 received a first class certificate for them at the Royal Horticultural Society’s Chelsea show. The world took notice.

She now knew what she wanted to do. She wanted to grow sweet peas as a crop and also try her hand at breeding new kinds. By this time her brother in law at Cambridge was a prominent agricultural geneticist. Both he and her sister used Mendelian methods to improve the sweet pea. Indeed Lady Mary Biffen won the Royal Horticultural Society’s medal for Mendelian studies, submitting a set of new and improved sweet peas.

Hilda’s father had bought a large fertile field, “Paradise,” adjacent to the farm and gave her free rein. The name “Miss Hemus of Upton, Worcs” started to appear in the records of the National Sweet Pea Society and she won prizes at many regional flower shows in the north of England during the first decade of the twentieth century. There was a very long list of new cultivars of sweet pea with the prefix ‘Paradise’, meaning they came from Miss Hemus.

Then she won a first class certificate at the Chelsea flower show. That was very special, an exceptional achievement and it is now we have to introduce her younger sister Evelyn.

The sisters worked together in the sweet pea fields and Evelyn held the fort when Hilda had to go Harrogate or London for a show. Neither of the other two sisters contributed very much to the enterprise because they now had their own families. Their brothers were also involved with other matters.

Evelyn Hemus

Evelyn lacked Hilda’s beauty and began to feel very resentful. On the one hand she was jealous of her sister Mary who now had a title and on the other had she believed her efforts were what kept the business going and that Hilda scooped up all the glittering baubles as if she had done everything herself. Things came to a head with this particular flower show.

By then Queen Victoria had died and Edward VII was king.  He awarded the prizes and shook Hilda’s hand, maybe holding it just a shade longer than was considered proper. Everyone knew that Edward VII had an eye for pretty women.

Sweet peas may be exquisitely pretty and fragrant but growing them on a large scale is every bit as hard labour as any other farm job. Soil had to be turned and fertilized, seeds planted, weeds pulled and then finally the crop harvested. The sisters needed men and horses for the heavy labour but the women were in charge. That in itself was hard on Hilda and Evelyn. Early twentieth century Englishmen were not happy to take orders from women.

Evelyn’s resentment boiled over. She stopped talking to Hilda and quit. They never spoke again. She wanted to be married and needed a larger pool of men than were available jn a small provincial town to overcome her lack of looks. India was the place, full of lonely civil servants and soldiers just dying to marry an English woman. Evelyn found her husband on the ship going to India. The price of the passage paid off. When she had children she never told them she had a sister Hilda. Exit Evelyn.

Hilda was a very good businesswoman. She had met Sir Samuel Ryder at the Harrogate flower show and signed a contract to supply his seed company with sweet pea seed. Every amateur gardener in the British Isles worth his or her wellies grew sweet peas. Sir Samuel was a farsighted man. He put a few seeds into a pretty envelope and sold them for tuppence at unexpected shops like Woolworths. The tuppences added up over the years and Sir Samuel was able to endow the famous Ryder Cup for golf with the proceeds.

When World War One started things changed radically in Upton as in all the other English towns. Growing food was a priority. No one was allowed to use men and horses for mere flowers and anyhow, the men were called up and horses requisitioned. Hilda showed her mettle in this situation as in every other. She put all her fields into wheat and when German prisoners were billeted nearby was one of the first farmers to use these gangs of prisoners. Raised eyebrows did not bother her.

She too married, a Major Ashworth, formerly of the quartermaster service and thus quite unscathed by the horrors of war. The conventions of time dictated that a married woman had no independent identity. Whatever she had built up or accomplished was now attributed to the major. Miss Hemus of Upton vanished.

The Ashworths had one daughter, Jean. The whole family emigrated to New Zealand to enjoy a warmer climate a few years after the end of the war and settled in Napier. Jean married a surgeon who died while still quite young. She survived into her nineties and kept all her mother’s records. She never heard from her Aunt Evelyn though her Aunt Mary sent her clothes and other gifts when she was still a little girl.

The Ashworths thus did not know that Aunt Evelyn, now Mrs Fyfe, had also emigrated to New Zealand but to Wellington on the west coast. Hilda’s daughter did not know she had cousins across the country. Evelyn’s children did not know of their relatives in the eastern part.

Things might have stayed that way were it not for a busybody (the author) trying to learn more about the sweet peas. Enough of the family remained in Upton and were dimly aware of this ancient history to be a starting point. With a great deal of help and assistance from the Upton historian Simon Wilkinson this busybody made the connection and the two wings of the divided family came together in the third generation.

All hail to busybodies.

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Judith M. Taylor MD is a graduate of Somerville College and the Oxford University Medical School and is a board certified neurologist. She practiced neurology in New York and since retiring has written six books on horticultural history as well as numerous articles and book reviews on the same subject. 

        Dr Taylor’s  books include The Olive in California: history of an immigrant tree (2000), Tangible Memories: Californians and their gardens 1800 – 1950 (2003), The Global Migrations of Ornamental Plants: how the world got into your garden (Missouri Botanical Garden Press 2009), Visions of Loveliness: the work of forgotten flower breeders (Ohio University Press 2014) and “An Abundance of Flowers: more great flower breeders of the past” (Ohio University Press  2018).
         In 2019 she published “A Five Year Plan for Geraniums: growing flowers commercially in East Germany 1946 – 1989”.
        Dr Taylor’s web site is: www.horthistoria.com