At Home

by Bill Bryson

  Mrs. Loudon was even more successful than her husband thanks to a single work, Practical Instructions in Gardening for Ladies, published in 1841, which proved to be magnificently timely. It was the first book of any type ever to encourage women of elevated classes to get their hands dirty and even to take on a faint glow of perspiration. This was novel almost to the point of eroticism. Gardening for Ladies bravely insisted that women could manage gardening independent of male supervision if they simply observed a few sensible precautions—working steadily but not too vigorously, using only light tools, never standing on damp ground because of the unhealthful emanations that would rise up through their skirts. The book appeared to assume that the reader had scarcely ever been outdoors, much less laid hands on a gardening tool. Here, for instance, is Mrs. Loudon explaining what a spade does:

  The operation of digging, as performed by a gardener, consists of thrusting the iron part of the spade, which acts as a wedge, perpendicularly into the ground by the application of the foot, and then using the long handle as a lever, to raise up the loosened earth and turn it over.

  The whole book is like that, describing in almost painful detail the most mundane and obvious actions. It is practically unreadable now and it probably wasn’t greatly read then. The value of Gardening for Ladies wasn’t what it contained so much as what it represented: permission to go outside and do something. It came at exactly the right moment to catch the nation’s fancy. In 1841, middle-class women everywhere were bored out of their skulls by the rigidities of life and grateful for any suggestion of diversion. Gardening for Ladies remained lucratively in print for the rest of the century. And it really did encourage them to get their hands dirty. The whole of the second chapter was devoted to manure.

  Apart from its appeal as a recreation, there was a second, rather more unexpected impetus behind the rise of the garden movement in the nineteenth century, and one in which John Claudius Loudon also played a central role. The age was vividly marked by epidemics of cholera and other contagions, which killed vast numbers. This didn’t make people want to garden exactly, but it did lead to a general longing for fresh air and open spaces, particularly as it became inescapably evident that urban graveyards were on the whole squalid, overcrowded, and unhealthy.

  In the middle of the nineteenth century, London had just 218 acres of burial grounds. People were packed into them in densities almost beyond imagining. When the poet William Blake died in 1827, he was buried, at Bunhill Fields, on top of three others; later, four more were placed on top of him. By such means London’s burial places absorbed staggering heaps of dead flesh. St. Marylebone Parish Church packed an estimated one hundred thousand bodies into a burial ground of just over an acre. Where the National Gallery now stands on Trafalgar Square was the modest burial ground of St. Martin-in-the-Fields church. It held seventy thousand bodies in an area about the size of a modern bowling green, and uncounted thousands more were interred in the crypts inside.

  In 1859, when St. Martin’s announced its intention to clear out the crypts, the naturalist Frank Buckland decided to find the coffin of the great surgeon and anatomist John Hunter so that his remains could be reinterred at Westminster Abbey, and Buckland left a riveting account of what he found inside: “Mr Burstall having unlocked the ponderous oak door of the vault No. 3, we threw the light of our bull’s eye lantern into the vault, and then I beheld a sight I shall never forget.” In the shadowy gloom before him were thousands upon thousands of jumbled and broken coffins, crammed everywhere, as if deposited by a tsunami. It took Buckland sixteen days of dedicated searching to find his quarry.

  Unfortunately, no one took similar pains with any of the other coffins, which were roughly carted off to unmarked graves in other cemeteries. In consequence the whereabouts of the mortal remains of quite a number of worthies—the furniture maker Thomas Chippendale, the royal mistress Nell Gwyn, the scientist Robert Boyle, the miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard, the highwayman Jack Sheppard, and the original Winston Churchill, father of the first Duke of Marlborough, to name just some—are today quite unknown.

  Many churches made most of their money from burials, and were loath to give up such lucrative business. At the Enon Baptist Chapel on Clement’s Lane in Holborn (now the site of the campus of the London School of Economics), the church authorities managed to cram a colossal twelve thousand bodies in the cellar in just nineteen years. Not surprisingly, such a volume of rotting flesh created odors that could not well be contained. It was a rare service in which several worshippers didn’t faint. Eventually, most stopped coming altogether, but still the chapel kept accepting bodies for interment. The parson needed the income.

  Burial grounds grew so full that it was almost impossible to turn a spade of soil without bringing up some decaying limb or other organic relic. Bodies were buried in such shallow and cursory graves that often they were exposed by scavenging animals or rose spontaneously to the surface, the way rocks do in flowerbeds, and had to be redeposited. Mourners in cities almost never attended at graveside to witness a burial itself. The experience was simply too upsetting, and widely held to be dangerous in addition. Anecdotal reports abounded of graveyard visitors struck down by putrid emanations. A Dr. Walker testified to a parliamentary inquiry that graveyard workers, before disturbing a coffin, would drill a hole in the side, insert a tube, and burn off the escaping gases—a process that could take twenty minutes, he reported. He knew of one man who failed to observe the usual precautions and was felled instantly—“as if struck with a cannon-ball”—by the gases from a fresh grave. “To inhale this gas, undiluted with atmospheric air, is instant death,” confirmed the committee in its written report, “and even when much diluted it is productive of disease which commonly ends in death.” Till late in the century, the medical journal The Lancet ran occasional reports of people overcome by bad air while visiting graveyards.

  The sensible solution to all this horrid foulness, it seemed to many, was to move cemeteries out of the cities altogether and make them more like parks. Joseph Paxton was an enthusiast for the idea, but the person principally behind the movement was the tireless and ubiquitous John Claudius Loudon. In 1843, Loudon wrote and published On the Laying Out, Planting, and Managing of Cemeteries; and on the Improvement of Churchyards—an unexpectedly timely book, as it happened, since he would need a cemetery himself before the year was out. One of the problems with London cemeteries, Loudon pointed out, was that they were mostly built on heavy clay soils, which didn’t drain well and thus promoted festering and stagnation. Suburban cemeteries, he suggested, could be sited on sandy or gravel soils where the bodies planted within them would become, in effect, wholesome compost. Liberal plantings of trees and shrubs would not only create a bucolic air but also soak up any miasmas that leaked out of the graves and replace foul airs with fresh ones. Loudon designed three of these new model cemeteries and made them practically indistinguishable from parks. Unfortunately, he was not able to rest eternally in one of his own creations, as he died, worn out by overwork, before they could be built. However, he was buried at Kensal Green Cemetery, in West London, which was founded on similar principles.

  Cemeteries became, improbably, de facto parks. On Sunday afternoons, people went to them not just to pay their respects to the dear departed but also to stroll, take the air, and have picnics. Highgate Cemetery in North London, with its long views and imposing monuments, became a tourist attraction in its own right. People living nearby purchased gate keys so that they could let themselves in and out whenever it suited them. The largest of all was Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey, opened by the London Necropolis and National Mausoleum Company in 1854, which grew to hold almost a quarter of a million bodies on its two thousand bucolic acres. It became such a large operation that the company ran a private railway between London and Brookwood, twenty-three miles to the west, with three classes of service and two stations at Brookwood: one for Anglicans and one for nonconformists. Railway workers knew it affectionately as the “
Stiffs Express.” The service lasted until 1941, when it was dealt what proved to be a mortal blow by German bombers.

  • • •

  Gradually it dawned on the authorities that what was wanted really wasn’t cemeteries that were like parks, but parks that were like parks. In the year that Loudon died, an entirely new phenomenon—the municipal park—opened at Birkenhead, across the River Mersey from Liverpool. Built on 125 acres of wasteland, it was an instant success and a much-acclaimed marvel, and it almost goes without saying that it was designed by the ever industrious, ever inventive, ever reliable Joseph Paxton.

  Parks already existed at this time, but they were not like parks as we know them today. For one thing, they tended to be exclusive. Only people of fashion and rank (plus a smattering of impudently bold courtesans from time to time) were allowed into the big London parks until well into the nineteenth century. There was a “tacit understanding,” as it is always termed, that parks were not for people of the lower or even middle classes, however those rankings were defined. Some parks didn’t even bother to make it tacit. Regent’s Park charged an admission fee until 1835 expressly to discourage common people from cluttering the paths and lowering the tone. Many of the new industrial cities had almost no parks anyway, so large numbers of working people had nowhere to go for fresh air and recreation other than along the dusty roads that led out of town into the country, and anyone foolhardy enough to step off these rutted tracks and onto private land—to admire a view, empty a straining bladder, take a drink from a stream—could well find his foot painfully clamped in a steel trap. This was an age in which people were routinely transported to Australia for poaching, and any form of trespass, however innocent or slight, was bound to be regarded as nefarious.

  So the idea of a park built by a city for the free use of all its citizenry, whatever their station in life, was almost indescribably exciting. Paxton eschewed the formal avenues and ordered vistas that parks normally embraced and created instead something more natural and inviting. Birkenhead Park brought to mind the grounds of a private estate, but for the use of all people. The conception was widely celebrated, but its influence extended far beyond English shores. In the spring of 1851 (that year!), a young American journalist and author named Frederick Law Olmsted, while on a walking holiday in the north of England with two friends, stopped to buy provisions for lunch at a Birkenhead bakery and the baker spoke of the park with such enthusiasm and pride that they decided to go and have a look. Olmsted was enchanted. The quality of landscape design “had here reached a perfection that I had never before dreamed of,” he recalled in Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England, his popular account of the trip. At that time, many people in New York were actively pressing for a decent public park for the city, and this, thought Olmsted, was the very park they needed. He could have no idea that six years later he would design that park himself.

  Frederick Law Olmsted was born in 1822 in Hartford, Connecticut, the son of a prosperous dry goods merchant, and passed his early adulthood flitting from job to job. He worked for a textile firm, went to sea as a merchant seaman, ran a small farm, and finally turned to writing. After his return to America from England, he joined the fledgling New York Times, and went off to tour the southern states, producing a series of celebrated newspaper articles, which were later published as a successful book, The Cotton Kingdom. He became something of a gadfly, socializing with the likes of Washington Irving, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and William Makepeace Thackeray when they were in town, and joined the publishing firm of Dix & Edwards, where he became a partner. For a time everything seemed to be going his way, but then the firm suffered a series of financial setbacks, and in 1857—a year of economic depression and widespread bank failures—he found himself abruptly broke and unemployed.

  At just this moment, the city of New York was about to begin converting 840 acres of hayfields and scrubland into the long-awaited Central Park. It was an enormous site, stretching nearly 2.5 miles from top to bottom and half a mile across. Olmsted, in some desperation, applied for the job of superintendent of the workforce and got it. He was 35 years old, and this was not a step up for him. Becoming the superintendent of a municipal park was, for someone who had enjoyed as much success as he had, a humbling comedown, particularly as Central Park was a far from assured success. For one thing, in those days it wasn’t actually central at all. “Uptown” Manhattan was still nearly two miles to the south. The area of the proposed park was an uninhabited wasteland—a forlorn expanse of abandoned quarries and “pestiferous swamps,” in the words of one observer. The idea of it becoming a popular beauty spot seemed almost ludicrously ambitious.

  No design had been agreed for the park—which was, not incidentally, always called the Central Park, with a definite article, in its early days. A prize of $2,000 awaited the winning entry, and Olmsted needed the money. He teamed up with a young British architect, only recently arrived in America, named Calvert Vaux and submitted a plan. Vaux (pronounced “vawks”) was a slight figure, just four feet ten inches tall. He had grown up in London, the son of a doctor, but emigrated to America in 1850 soon after qualifying. Olmsted had passion and vision, but he lacked drafting skills, which Vaux could supply. It was the start of an immensely successful partnership. To satisfy the design brief, all the proposals were required to incorporate certain features—parade ground, playing fields, skating pond, at least one flower garden, and a lookout tower, among rather a lot else—and they also had to incorporate four crossing streets at intervals so that the park wouldn’t act as a barrier to east-west traffic along its entire length. What set Olmsted and Vaux’s design apart more than anything else was their decision to place the cross streets in trenches, below the line of sight, physically segregating them from park visitors, who passed safely above on bridges. “This also had the advantage of allowing the park to be closed at night without interrupting traffic,” writes Witold Rybczynski in his biography of Olmsted. Theirs was the only proposal with this feature.*

  It is easy to suppose that park making consists essentially of just planting trees, laying paths, setting out benches, and digging the odd pond. In fact, Central Park was an enormous engineering project. Over twenty thousand barrels of dynamite were needed to reconfigure the terrain to Olmsted and Vaux’s specifications, and over half a million cubic yards of fresh topsoil had to be brought in to make the earth rich enough for planting. At the peak of construction in 1859, Central Park had a workforce of thirty-six hundred men. The park opened bit by bit, so it never had a grand opening. Many people found it disordered and confusing. And it is true, Central Park has little in the way of dominant focal points. As Adam Gopnik has put it: “The Mall is oriented toward nothing much and goes nowhere in particular. The lakes and ponds are all nestled in their own places, and are not part of a continuous waterway. The main areas are not neatly marked off but dribble away into one another. There is a deliberate absence of orientation, of clear planning, of a familiar, reassuring lucidity. Central Park is without a central place.”

  But people grew to love it anyway, and soon Olmsted was receiving commissions from all over America. This is slightly surprising because Olmsted was not much good at building the kind of parks that people actually wanted—and the more parks he built, the more evident this became. Olmsted was convinced that all the ills of urban life were owing to bad air and a lack of exercise, producing “a premature failure of the vigor of the brain.” Quiet walks and tranquil reflection were what was needed to restore health, energy, and even moral tone to a jaded citizenry. So Olmsted was absolutely against anything that was noisy, vigorous, or fun. He especially didn’t want diversions like zoos and boating lakes—the very sorts of amusements park users craved. At Franklin Park in Boston he had baseball playing banned, along with all other “active recreations,” as he disdainfully called them, for anyone except children under sixteen. Fourth of July celebrations were flatly forbidden.

  People responded by ignoring the rules, and
park authorities obliged them by turning a blind eye, so that everywhere Olmsted’s parks ended up as much more pleasurable places than he wanted them to be, though still considerably more restrictive than the parks of Europe with their lively beer gardens and bright-lit rides.

  Although he didn’t start landscaping until he was well on the way to middle age, Olmsted’s career was breathtakingly productive. He built over a hundred municipal parks across North America—in Detroit, Albany, Buffalo, Chicago, Newark, Hartford, and Montreal. Though Central Park is his most famous creation, many think Prospect Park in Brooklyn his masterpiece. He also executed more than two hundred private commissions for estates and institutions of every kind, including some fifty university campuses. Biltmore was Olmsted’s last project—and in fact one of his last rational acts. Very soon afterward he slid into a helpless and progressive dementia. He spent the last five years of his life at the McLean Asylum in Belmont, Massachusetts, where, it almost goes without saying, he had designed the grounds.

  III

  Though there are obvious dangers in speculating too freely about the style of life adopted by the good Reverend Mr. Marsham in his rectory, something he will very probably have dreamed about, if not actually owned, was a greenhouse, for greenhouses were the great new toy of the age. Inspired by Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace in London, and neatly coinciding with the timely abolition of duties on glass, greenhouses soon were popping up all over and being filled with all the exciting new specimens of plant that were pouring into Britain from around the globe. This widespread transfer of living things between continents was not without consequences, however. In the summer of 1863, a keen gardener in Hammersmith, in West London, found a prize vine in his greenhouse sickening. He was unable to identify the malady, but he saw that the leaves were covered with galls from which sprang insects of a kind he had not seen before. He collected a few and sent them to John Obadiah Westwood, professor of zoology at Oxford and an international authority on insects.