Marnock-Themed Plant Tour
Chris Beevers of the Yorkshire Gardens Trust reports on a guided tour of plants used by Marnock.
The month of June offered visitors to Sheffield Botanical Gardens a varied programme of events celebrating the life and work of their creator Robert Marnock (1800-1889).
The programme for Saturday June 17 provided a fully immersive ‘Marnock Experience’ starting with a guided tour of the gardens in the afternoon, followed by an evening lecture by Dr Jan Woudstra exploring in more detail the achievements of this highly regarded landscape designer, curator, nurseryman, writer and editor.
The Tour
A group of about 25 people assembled at the Dorothy Fox Education centre to meet Alison Hunter, Sheffield Botanical Gardens historian, the author and co-author of a two-volume history of the gardens.
Tour group in the Rose Garden, photo (c) Christine Rose.
Alison began with a brief history of the creation of the 19-acre site which opened in 1836 and an introduction to Robert Marnock’s arrival in Sheffield from his previous role as head gardener at Bretton Hall, after winning the design competition for the proposed Botanical Gardens.
A copy of a painting in the Sheffield Museums Collections “View of Sheffield from Sharrow Moor” clearly shows the newly completed Botanical Gardens with their impressive pavilions and glasshouses, as a significant feature in the Sheffield landscape.
The route of Alison’s guided tour was planned to highlight specimen trees and planting features which Robert Marnock would have known or used in Sheffield or in his long career elsewhere. Alison provided information and illustrations about aspects of the gardens development and evolution which really brought their history to life – with some memorable ‘did you know’ facts along the way.
Tour Highlights - Trees
The tour began with an exploration of the Conifer Collection. The group was invited to feel the soft spongy bark of the Sequoia sempervirens (the Coast Redwood) nature’s ingenious way of protecting the tree during the coastal fires of its native sites in California and Oregon. Taxodium distichum (below, the Bald Cypress) also has a fibrous bark. This tall deciduous tree has small cones and was recorded in Marnock’s catalogue as Cupressus distichia.
Taxodium distichum (c) Chris Beevers.
The Rose Garden
Diverting from the tree collection for a moment, the lovely rose garden was in full bloom, seen at its best in a year that has provided perfect growing conditions for roses. Robert Marnock designed rose gardens at Warwick Castle and Hagley Hall. His design for the Botanical Gardens rose garden was altered when it became an Italianate Garden in the period 1952-2009 but it is now restored to its original design principles.
The Rose Garden (c) Chris Beevers.
The Pavilions and Glass Houses
A competition was held in 1834, to design a glasshouse for the Sheffield Botanical Gardens. Sir Joseph Paxton (1803-1865) was one of the competition judges, but Alison corrected any suggestion linking Paxton to the final design. Robert Marnock won the first prize of £10 but his structurally complex design was discarded in favour of the glasshouse designed by Benjamin Broomhead Taylor a Sheffield architect, the winner of the £5 second prize. It was opened in 1836.
Alison pointed out the Musa cavendishii – the Cavendish Banana – which is recorded in Marnock’s catalogue of 1838. This plant descends from a plant that had been grown in a Chatsworth hothouse since the 1830s. The Cavendish banana fills today’s supermarket shelves and makes up almost the entire global export market.
Final Highlights of the Tree Collection
Leaving the glasshouse, the tour returned to a route which visited more trees of interest which included:
Ginkgo biloba: also known as the silver apricot from the Japanese words ‘gin’ meaning silver and ‘kyo’ meaning apricot. Only the female trees bear fruit. This disease-resistant tree is used in Sheffield’s urban setting to replace older trees recently removed.
Euonymous europeaus: the European spindle tree has very hard wood, which was used in the past for making wool-spinning spindles and butchers’ skewers. Charcoal produced from burning its wood generates superior quality artists’ charcoal.
Ostrya virginiana: the American hop hornbeam is an understory tree found across North America, famous for its hard wood, also known as ‘ironwood’. This wood played a key role in Sheffield’s famous tool-making industry where it was used for making tool handles. A more modern-day use is for patios and decking.
Our afternoon walk ended, and we thanked Alison for her fascinating tour of the gardens and for sharing her extensive knowledge of their history. Leaving by the Clarkehouse Road exit we had one final reminder of the period in which Robert Marnock lived, the traditional formal Victorian bedding with curving borders and numerous plants creating a riot of colour.
Victorian bedding (c) Chris Beevers.
Conclusion
“Celebrating Marnock” is an excellent initiative. It promotes the importance of Robert Marnock, locally, nationally and internationally with a superb collection of on-line material available.
More information about Dr Jan Woudstra’s talk on Robert Marnock will appear in the Autumn Yorkshire Gardens Trust Newsletter.
In the meantime, other Marnock sites to visit in Sheffield include:
Sheffield General Cemetery. The original landscape was designed by Robert Marnock, with work beginning in 1836, and further suggestions by him in the late 1840s. However, the late 19th century saw significant changes to Marnock’s original designs.
Weston Park, Sheffield’s first municipal public park. Robert Marnock modified the grounds of the earlier privately owned Weston Hall to transform the site into a public space c.1873.
A trail has been devised to take a journey through the three Marnock sites with an accompanying audio guide accessed via a QR code. An ideal follow up to the day.
Many thanks to Chris Beevers and the Yorkshire Gardens Trust for allowing us to republish this article from the YGT E-Bulletin of July 2023.