Exclusive interview with Vanessa Berridge and a review of her book on the history of London’s Kew Gardens
Rating: 3 Stars
Review by Gabrielle Pantera
“In the spring of 2004, I visited the Scottish island of Bute in the Firth of Clyde,” says The Princess’s Garden: The Untold Story of Kew and the Birth of British Gardening author Vanessa Berridge. “The head gardener pointed out a tall statue-topped column which had been erected by John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute….a botanist of distinction, who had worked closely with Augusta on the founding of Kew Gardens in 1759.” Augusta, the mother of George III, was the Dowager Princess of Wales, the widow of Frederick Prince of Wales.
If you’re a gardener you will definitely love this book. Berridge traces the history of the British royal family and horticulture. Family intrigue and discord are woven into the story of the creation of Kew gardens. The book reveals interesting facts about the royal family, their infighting, and the growth of parks and gardens in the UK. There is a family tree to help keep the family members straight.
In 1736 sixteen-year-old Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, who doesn’t speak a word of English, marries Prince Frederick, the eldest son of George II. Every king seems to hate his eldest son, but George II (1727-1760) took it a step further. He kidnapped his heir, Frederick, from Hanover, then cast him out of the family after a spectacular disagreement. Surprisingly, Augusta and Fredrick got on well, having nine children, the last born after Fredrick’s death. After Frederick’s death in 1751, Augusta became very close to Lord Bute, appointing him as tutor to her son, the future George III, and working with him at Kew. Many new plants were brought back to the UK and incorporated into the gardens of the aristocracy.
“Although always interested in history, I wasn’t a trained historian,” says Berridge. “So when I decided to write the book, I did an MA on the History of the British Isles at London University. It was eye-opening and stimulating. I discovered that history can be reinterpreted through the prism of race, gender, empire and class. All these approaches fed into my writing. When I began my researches into Augusta and Bute’s lives and work, I opened a Pandora’s box onto the dysfunctional Hanoverian royal family.”
For research, Berridge spent hours in the archives at Kew Gardens, the library at Stowe in Buckinghamshire, the Institute of Historical Research and at the British Library, which has a collection of Bute’s correspondence during his brief time as Prime Minister. “Many of his letters were copied out by his secretary, Charles Jenkinson, later Duke of Liverpool, in clear, scribe’s handwriting,” says Berridge. “But there were some letters in Bute’s own writing, a very scratchy, spidery affair. They reveal him to be a petulant, disappointed man who believed himself to be misunderstood by his contemporaries.”
Berridge read published diaries and memoirs of the period. “One difficulty was that Augusta burned all Frederick’s papers after his death because she feared reprisals from George II. The spiteful memoirs of Lord Hervey, a courtier of George II and his wife, Caroline of Ansbach, were a fruitful source of gossip about both Frederick and Augusta, while Horace Walpole’s memoirs and diaries took up the story decades later.”
Berridge has also written The Joy of Gardening (Summersdale 2014). She has contributed to several books on gardening, and ghost-written others. She was the launch editor of The English Garden magazine, published bi-monthly in the USA, and written about gardens, gardening and heritage for many years for newspapers and gardening magazines internationally. She was runner-up some for the Catherine Pakenham Award for Young Women Journalists. The Princess’s Garden has not been optioned for film or TV.
Berridge was born in Wimbledon, London, but in recent years has moved Winchcombe in the Cotswolds, a former 17th-century coaching town close to a Neolithic Anglo-Saxon settlement. She’s now writing a book about her move, the house, the town and the two walled gardens she owns. Part history, diary, and gardening book.
The Princess’s Garden: The Untold Story of Kew and the Birth of British Gardening by Vanessa Berridge. Hardcover: 272 pages, Publisher: Amberley (November 6, 2015), Language: English. ISBN: 9781445643205 $34.95
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