Sir Joseph Paxton (1803—1865) landscape gardener and architect

Paxton was the seventh son of a farmer being born at Milton Bryant, near Woburn in Bedfordshire.  His first job was as a gardener at Battlesden, the seat of Sir Gregory Page-Turner.  By the time he was nineteen he had already constructed a lake, his first great work.   

He moved in 1823 to the newly-opened gardens of the Horticultural Society, leased from the 6th Duke of Devonshire, adjoining Chiswick House in Middlesex.  There his inventiveness and industry attracted the attention the Duke and, within two years, he was offered the position of head gardener at the Duke’s seat at Chatsworth in Derbyshire. 

Paxton’s own description of taking over his new job is well worth retelling and indicates the calibre and character of the young man:

“I left London by the Comet Coach for Chesterfield and arrived at Chatsworth at half-past four o’clock in the morning of the ninth of May, 1826.  As no person was to be seen at that early hour, I got over the green-house gate by the old covered way, explored the pleasure grounds and looked round the outside of the house.  I then went down to the kitchen gardens, scaled the outside wall and saw the whole of the place, set the men to work at six o’clock; then returned to Chatsworth and got Thomas Weldon to play me the water works and afterwards went to breakfast with poor dear Mrs Gregory and her niece, the latter fell in love with me and I with her, and thus completed my first morning’s work, at Chatsworth, before nine o’clock”. 

Within a short time the Duke was relying more and more upon Paxton’s knowledge and authority.  Thanks also to his marriage in 1827 to the highly intelligent and resourceful Sarah Brown, a mill- owner’s daughter from Matlock in Derbyshire who took much of the more mundane detail work off his shoulders.  Paxton was able to extend his activities throughout the vast Chatsworth domain until finally he became the Duke’s agent.  

In the gardening sphere, between 1835 and 1844, Paxton laid out the Chatsworth arboretum, designed rock gardens on a grand scale, constructed the Emperor Fountain, with the then-highest jet in the world, plus the attendant lakes and conduits.  His ingenuity as a structural engineer was shown in a remarkable group of glazed and iron buildings erected in the Chatsworth kitchen gardens, and their success brought him a wide renown as propagator and botanist as well as designer of remarkably efficient structures.   

Between 1836 and 1840 he designed and supervised the building of the Great Stove which enclosed what was virtually a tropical landscape under glass.  

In designing a suitable conservatory for the propagation and flowering of the giant water lily Victoria amazonica in 1849, Paxton mastered the technical demands which were involved in the construction of an iron and glass building.  This expertise led him to his enormous success in designing the 1851 Great Exhibition building in London.

With his remarkable achievements in gardening and the design of garden structures, Paxton also had engaged in rebuilding three entire Chatsworth villages:  Edensor, Pilsley and Beeley. 

Paxton’s successes at Chatsworth brought him numerous commissions for the design of large-scale public gardens.  Amongst those for which he was responsible were

• PrincesPark,Liverpool (1842),
• BirkenheadPark (1843),
• CoventryCemetery (1843),
• The People’s Park, Halifax (1855)
• HeskethPark,Southport (1864)

and above all,

• the grounds of Crystal Palace on Sydenham Hill (1852—56)  to which the Great Exhibition buildings were removed with their Italian formal gardens and English informal gardens, lakes, terraces, statuary, temples and cascades. 

In 1854, Paxton was elected to Parliament and became deeply involved in parliamentary committees and controversies concerning various metropolitan improvements then under discussion.  He was also increasingly involved in the Sydenham project.   

Finally, overwork and ill-health caused his retirement from Parliament in 1865, also the year of his death.