The Hackney Nursery

Horticulture

3 May

From around 1839 Marnock ran a nursery business in Hackney. Soon joined by Devon nurseryman James Manley, the business traded as Messrs Marnock and Manley.

Advert for Messrs Marnock and Manley, *Gardeners Chronicle*, 1842. Image from the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Contributed by Missouri Botanical Garden.

Adverts in the gardening press show that they offered ‘new and choice’ flower seeds, available in large quantities by post; bulbs of early single and double Dutch tulip varieties; unusual individual plants such as Passiflora fragrans, Martynia fragrans (a Mexican species Marnock introduced into the UK horticultural trade), Hardenbergia macrophylla and Fuchsia glabra multiflora; verbenas, petunia, salvias, alstroemerias etc for bedding out; climbing plants including Rhodochiton and Clematis sieboldii; trained fruit trees; flowering shrubs; vegetable seed, including the walcheren cauliflower, black carmelite melon and Victoria cabbage; and named plants such as Fuchsia ‘Marnock’s Princess Sophia’ and ‘Marnock’s Queen Victory’ cabbage.

Probably located somewhere on Dalston Lane, near the top of what was then Church Street, the nursery business was acquired in early 1846 as a going concern by James Brown, formerly gardener to the Duke of Buckingham at Stowe.

Hackney paxtonsmagazineo91843paxt_0106.jpg

Martynia fragrans (left) from Edward’s Botanical Register v.27 (1841). Image from the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Contributed by New York Botanical Garden. Passiflora fragrans (as P. middletoniana) from Paxton’s Magazine of Botany v.9 (1843). Image from the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Contributed by Smithsonian Libraries.

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