The garden of the industrial age: new plants from every continent, glasshouses to grow them, bedding schemes of tender flowers renewed each summer, Italianate terraces revived round the house, and the public park for the people of the new towns, with Paxton’s Crystal Palace as its emblem.
Three things changed the garden after 1830: plants, glass and the town. Plant hunters sent back trees, shrubs and flowers in thousands: David Douglas from the American north-west in the 1820s, Joseph Hooker from the Himalaya in the 1840s, Robert Fortune from China, the collectors of the Veitch nurseries from Chile, Japan and California. The Wardian case, a sealed glass box described by Nathaniel Ward in 1842, let living plants survive long voyages. The repeal of the tax on glass in 1845 and the new sheet glass made glasshouses cheap.
J. C. Loudon gave the new garden a theory. In his gardenesque, each tree and shrub is planted apart so that it can grow to its full natural form and be admired as a specimen, and exotic plants are preferred because they show at once that the place is a garden (The gardenesque: every plant seen whole). Victorian gardens were often collections: the pinetum of conifers, the arboretum, the rockery and the fernery, the rose garden. The monkey puzzle, the Wellingtonia (introduced in 1853), the Douglas fir, rhododendrons, pampas grass and the copper beech became the signs of a modern garden.
Near the house the formal garden returned. Charles Barry gave Trentham, Harewood, Shrubland and Cliveden terraces with balustrades in the Italian manner, and W. A. Nesfield revived the parterre in coloured gravels and box. In the beds went bedding: half-hardy plants such as pelargoniums, calceolarias, lobelias and verbenas, raised by the thousand under glass and planted out in May in bright patterns, to be pulled up in autumn. From the late 1860s carpet bedding used low foliage plants, clipped to an even height, to make flat patterns, crests and lettering (Bedding out).
Joseph Paxton, gardener to the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth, joined the garden to engineering. His Great Conservatory (1836–41), 277 feet long, and his Lily House (1849–50), built for the giant water lily Victoria regia when it first flowered in England, worked out the system of ridge-and-furrow glazing on a light frame that he used for the Crystal Palace of 1851 (The ridge-and-furrow roof, The Crystal Palace grid of 24 feet). When the Palace was rebuilt at Sydenham in 1852–54, Paxton set it on Italianate terraces above a park of fountains, lakes and life-size models of dinosaurs.
The public park was the Victorian garden’s great civic work. Paxton’s Birkenhead Park (1843–47) was the first in Britain paid for out of public funds, its cost met by selling villa plots round its edge (A park paid for by the houses round it). Frederick Law Olmsted saw it in 1850, and with Calvert Vaux designed Central Park in New York (1858), where sunken roads carry the city’s traffic under the park and separate paths carry carriages, riders and walkers (Separate ways for carriages, riders and walkers). Every industrial city followed with its parks, their bandstands, lakes, glasshouses and bedding.