If Ellen Willmott is remembered at all, it is as the eponymous Miss Willmott, the Edwardian lady gardener who scattered seeds of Eryngium giganteum, now popularly known as ‘Miss Willmott’s ghost’, among the herbaceous borders of unwitting friends and acquaintances. In her day she was described as “the greatest of living woman gardeners” by no less a personage than Gertrude Jekyll. She created three notable gardens — Warley Place in Essex, Tresserve in Menton and Boccanegra in Ventimiglia (both on the Riviera, one each side of the Franco-Italian border). She published an important, though deeply flawed, reference work on roses, was a Fellow of the Royal Horticultural Society, and was honoured with the Dean Hole Medal by the Royal National Rose Society.
But reading between the lines, I suspect Willmott was just as prickly as the spiky eryngium which bears her name. Take that little story about the eryngium. I investigated further, and found her described variously as egotistical, headstrong, charming, generous, arrogant, by turns wildly extravagant and eccentrically mean, and impossibly demanding of anyone unfortunate enough to be employed by her. What was never in doubt was her passion for plants.
She was born in 1858. From the age of 7, there was a cheque for £1,000 (the equivalent of about £25,000 in today’s money) on her breakfast plate every birthday. At the age of 24, she commissioned a stupendous rock garden for Warley from the leading firm of the day — a whole alpine gorge with a stream flowing through the bottom — where every type of alpine plant from every sort of habitat could be accommodated. At the age of 30 she inherited a further £140,000 (equivalent to about £3.5 million today), and bought the two villas on the Riviera to accommodate all the plants she couldn’t grow at home.
Nurserymen and plant hunters were anxious to flatter Willmott by naming their discoveries after her. All told, more than 50 plants were named in her honour, including the lovely late-blooming species rose R. willmottiae, discovered in Sichuan by E. H. Wilson in 1904. She collected hundreds of roses from around the world, seeking perhaps to emulate Empress Joséphine of France who made a famous collection of roses at her estate of Malmaison, near Paris. Like Jos éphine, Willmott decided to record her collection for posterity in a corpus of botanical paintings. But unlike the empress, who recognised her own limitations, Willmott’s Genus Rosa was to be annotated with her own text. Her Redouté was the eminent watercolourist Alfred Parsons. Poor Parsons — he produced 132 exquisite paintings and endured 14 years of recrimination and wrangling, only to see his work traduced by poor printing and compromised by Willmott ‘s text, which was late, and full of mistakes, inconsistencies and infelicities. When he died in 1920, 740 out of the original 1,000 copies were still unsold.
Like Willmott, Eryngium giganteum is a Jekyll-and-Hyde plant. For the first year or so of its life, it contents itself with producing a rosette of big, soft, dark green, arrow-shaped leaves. Then, one June, it sends up a mild-looking, soft-leaved, green thistle, as if butter wouldn’t melt in its mouth, which in July then turns an eye-catching silver and exceedingly prickly. It is about a metre tall (3ft 3in), sometimes a little more, with darker blue-grey cylindrical flowerheads up to 3in (8cm) long, studded with hundreds of tiny florets. The bees adore it, and I wouldn’t be without it at this time of year, relying on its vivid colouring to light up a rather dreary rose border after the roses have finished flowering. It is long-lasting in flower. Afterwards it dies, but sheds copious amounts of scratchy seeds, which start the whole sequence again. Which is where Miss Willmott comes in.
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She died, impoverished, in 1934. She had spent everything, all her vast fortune, on her gardens and her book. The house at Warley was demolished and the garden allowed to run wild. It is now maintained as a nature reserve by Essex Naturalists’ Trust (information: Abbotts Hall Farm, 01621 862960).
I am told you can still see the boulders of the alpine gorge among the wild flowers. But to get something of the flavour of Willmott’s style of gardening, you can still visit the garden she helped her sister Rose make at Spetchley Park, outside Worcester (open until Sept 30; ring 01453 810303; www.spetchleygardens.co.uk).
katherine.swift@thetimes.co.uk