By Ella Finney, Assistant Curator
Ellen Willmott was one of the 19th century’s most important female horticulturists. Perhaps most famously, Willmott was one of only two women to receive the RHS Victoria Medal of Honour in its inaugural year in 1897, the other going to Gertrude Jekyll. A blue plaque at her family home, Warley Place in Essex, commemorates Willmott as an “Outstanding horticulturalist, photographer and musician, whose expertise and passion for plants inspired this and many other gardens“.
Throughout her life Willmott was described by her contemporaries as an extraordinarily determined and fastidious gardener. With a substantial income at her disposal thanks to family inheritance, she was able to comfortably dedicate her life to gardening, and threw herself into the pursuit of horticultural perfection. Her mentor and friend, the Swiss alpine specialist Henri Correvon, said that “the cause of gardening claims all her ability, erudition, fortune and talents”.
Willmott’s botanical pursuits extended to collecting and she employed horticulturists to send back plant species from across the world. She also presided over dozens of garden employees, at one time numbering 104 staff. Willmott was a celebrated hybridiser of various plant species, most notably narcissus; and would later become well regarded for her book on roses, The Genus Rosa (1910-1914).
Despite 200 plants carrying her name (usually as Willmottiae or Warleyensis), Willmott is now best remembered as the namesake of the Sea Holly Eryngium giganteum, or, Miss Willmott’s Ghost. Described by Beth Chatto, Miss Willmott’s Ghost has “Wickedly prickly, silvery-green collars [that] surround large, soft blue cones, while the whole plant fades to pale biscuit as it dries in a perfect shape.” Inextricably linked to a 1980s myth that Willmott would roam the countryside carrying seeds in her pockets to spitefully spread this thorny blight, her connection to this hostile plant has undeniably shaped retellings of Willmott’s life.
She inherited her family home Warley Place in 1892, and transformed the grounds into one of the most celebrated gardens in the country. Her home became a loadstone for horticultural royalty and noble visitors alike. And from the 1890s, Willmott became a prolific photographer of her garden. She used a large format camera, it’s said with a footman in tow to carry the heavy photographic plates, and set up her own dark room. Her photographs reveal that her gardening style epitomised the new, and increasingly popular, naturalist planting ideas encouraged by her contemporaries Gertrude Jekyll and William Robinson. Her beds were styled on loose, informal arrangements of herbaceous bulbs and vernacular planting schemes of pansies, wild roses, irises, foxgloves, cranesbills, clematis and honeysuckles. Willmott’s photographs were published regularly in magazine The Garden and they illustrated her own book, Warley Garden in Spring and Summer, published in 1909. A selection of photos can be seen in a blog post by Garden History Girl.
Until recently Willmott’s horticultural genius has been overshadowed by her Miss Havisham-esque death, at the age of 76, a spinster “alone and nearly bankrupt.” i Her garden at Warley Place is now a ruin (administered by Essex Wildlife Trust) and her ‘prickly’ reputation always precedes her. Veiled references to her ‘strong personality’, coupled with the fact that she never married and drove herself to financial ruin, easily stereotyped her as a ‘fallen woman.’ ii
After her death she became famed for a litany of eccentric and cantankerous acts; allegedly “being arrested for shop-lifting … carrying a revolver in her handbag and booby-[trapping] her daffodil fields to deter bulb thieves…[sacking] any gardener who allowed a single weed to compete with her pampered darlings.” iv
Less well known is that Willmott did not appear at the luncheon in 1897 to receive her RHS Victoria Medal of Honour. The award continues to be the highest honour bestowed by the RHS, and as was first intended, it has shaped the history of gardening for over 120 years. Thus, as Sandra Lawrence in her recent Willmott biography (Miss Willmott’s Ghosts) suggests, it is not unlikely that Willmott’s absence at the awards ceremony was taken as an institutional snub that was never forgiven, and by a woman no less.
But why did Willmott not attend? In 2019, Lawrence discovered new archival material containing a series of intense love letters spanning the course of three years, between Willmott and a close companion, Miss Georgiana ‘Gian’ Tufnell. Tufnell and Willmott’s relationship ended in terrible heartbreak – just before the prestigious RHS awards ceremony. Letters between the couple reveal that Tufnell had written to say that she was to marry Lord Mount Stephen the day after the ceremony. Willmott, heartbroken, fled to France, missing the presentation.
This tiled jardinière was used at Ellen Willmott’s home of Warley Place. The jardiniere is made in the Aesthetic style with ebonised wood and inlaid Minton tiles depicting figures in the garden in fairy-tale settings. Minton tiles could be purchased with the design in outline, and these have been expertly coloured by Willmott herself. Purchased by the Garden Museum in 2003 from the granddaughter of John Robinson, one of Willmott’s former gardeners, it is said to have been gifted to Robinson by Willmott “as one of the few staff loyal enough to stay.” The jardinière is on display in the Garden Museum’s permanent collection gallery.
