Joseph Paxton
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Sir Joseph Paxton (1803–1865) was an English gardener and architect of The Crystal Palace.
He was born on 3 August 1803 at Milton Bryant, Bedfordshire. (Some references, incorrectly, list his birth date as 3 August 1801 This is as a result of misinformation he provided in his teens which he admitted in later life, which enabled him to enrol at Chiswick Gardens)
He became a garden boy, and in 1823 obtained a position at the Horticultural Society's Chiswick Gardens. These were close to the gardens of William Cavendish, 6th Duke of Devonshire at Chiswick House. After a chance meeting, and on impulse, the Duke offered the 23 year-old Joseph Paxton the position of Head Gardener at Chatsworth.
On his first morning at Chatsworth, Paxton met Sarah Bown, the housekeeper's niece. They later married. He also enjoyed a very friendly relationship with the "Bachelor Duke".
In 1837, Paxton started the Great Conservatory or Stove, a huge cast iron heated glasshouse. At the time, the Conservatory was the largest glass building in the world. However, it was prohibitively expensive to maintain, and it was destroyed in 1923. It took five attempts to blow it up.
The Great Conservatory was the test-bed for the prefabricated glass and iron structural techniques which Paxton pioneered and would employ for his masterpiece – The Crystal Palace of the Great Exhibition of 1851. These techniques were made physically possible by recent technological advances in the manufacture of of both glass and cast-iron, and financially possible by the dropping of a tax on glass.
In 1850 Paxton was commissioned by Baron Mayer de Rothschild to design Mentmore Towers in Buckinghamshire. This was to be one of the greatest country houses built during the Victorian Era. Following the completion of Mentmore, one of Baron de Rothschild's cousins commissioned Château de Ferrières at Ferrières-en-Brie near Paris to be 'Another Mentmore, but twice the size'. Both buildings still stand today.
Paxton also designed another country house, a smaller version of Mentmore at Battlesden near Woburn in Bedfordshire. This house was bought by the Duke of Bedford thirty years after its completion, and wantonly demolished, because the Duke wanted no other mansion close to Woburn Abbey.
He also worked on several other large projects at Chatsworth, such as the Arboretum, the Great Fountain, the Rock Garden and the Lily House.
Between 1835 and 1839, he organised plant-hunting expeditions, one of which ended in tragedy. Tragedy also struck at home when his eldest son died.
Paxton was honoured by being a member of the Kew Commission which was to suggest improvements for Royal Botanic Gardens, and by being considered for the post of Head Gardener at Windsor Castle.
He became affluent, not so much through his Chatsworth job, but by successful speculation in the railway industry.
In October 1845 he was invited to lay out one of the country's first municipal burial grounds in Coventry. This became the London Road Cemetery. He later became a Liberal Member of Parliament for Coventry from 1854 until his death in 1865.
In 1831, Paxton published a monthly magazine, The Horticultural Register. This was followed in 1834 by the Magazine of Botany. There followed in 1840 the Pocket Botanical Dictionary, The Flower Garden in 1850 and the Calendar of Gardening Operations. In addition to these titles he also, in 1841, co-founded perhaps the most famous horticultural periodical, The Gardeners' Chronicle along with John Lindley, Charles Wentworth Dilke and William Bradbury and later became it's editor.
References
External Links
- BBC Historic Figures (http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/paxton_joseph.shtml)
- The Joseph Paxton Society (http://csasip2.gold.ac.uk/paxton/index.html)
- Eddie Richardson's page (http://www.ge35.dial.pipex.com/sirjosephpaxton1.htm) on Sir Joseph Paxton - includes photgraphs and a family treefr:Joseph Paxton