MISS WILLMOTT’S GHOST
Every gardener has an inner Ellen Willmott. An Englishwoman born into wealth in 1858, she was bitten early and hard by the gardening bug. In her prime she gardened, read, studied, patronized fabled plant hunters and employed hundreds of gardeners to tend her plants. She eventually lavished so much money on her gardens that when she died in 1934, her property had to be sold off to pay her debts. As the year’s first garden catalogs begin to arrive, it is easy to see how such a thing could have happened.
Ellen Ann Willmott’s gardening life began in 1875, when, as a seventeen year old, she moved with her parents to Warley Place, an estate in the southeastern English county of Essex. Sources suggest that her interest in gardening came from her mother, who encouraged a love of plants in Ellen and her aptly named sister, Rose. By the time she turned twenty-two, Ellen had persuaded her parents to let her build a ravine on the property that would provide suitable conditions for an alpine garden.
Rose eventually married, but Ellen remained single and stayed at Warley Place for the rest of her life. Like her contemporary, the great English garden designer and writer, Gertrude Jekyll, Ellen Willmott was self taught. Unlike Miss Jekyll, Miss Willmott did not design gardens for a living. Instead she focused on building the collections at Warley Place and developing gardens on properties she purchased in France and Italy. Though reputedly cantankerous, she maintained friendships with the garden luminaries of her day. In 1897, she and Miss Jekyll were the only women in the first group of sixty recipients to receive the Royal Horticultural Society’s Victoria Medal of Honor. This medal, which recognizes individuals who have achieved special distinction in horticulture, was created by the RHS to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. The VMH was only one of the many honors and accolades that Ellen Willmott received during her lifetime.
She had a special interest in roses, and between 1910 and 1914 she published The Genus Rosa, a comprehensive, two-volume book on roses, with watercolor illustrations by Alfred Parsons. The book is still regarded as a significant work on the subject.
One of the privileges of wealth is the ability to patronize artists, scientists, writers and other creative people. Ellen Willmott supported plant hunters, especially the celebrated Ernest Henry “Chinese” Wilson, who traveled to China repeatedly on behalf of institutions and individuals and brought back scores of new species. In return for her support, Wilson named plants after her, including a winter hazel, Corylopsis willmottiae, and a rose, Rosa willmottiae.
Though obviously an extremely intelligent woman, Ellen Willmott had her eccentricities and threw caution to the wind when it came to money. According to at least one biographer, in the years before World War I, she and her family were heavily invested in German railroad stock. Failing to notice the portents of war and sell off the stock, they lost their entire investment. Miss Willmott also did her best to fertilize her gardens with cash, at one time employing over a hundred gardeners to keep her prize plants in tip-top shape. Stories–which may or may not be apocryphal–abound about the booby traps she installed among her prized daffodils to deter thieves. In her later years she may also have carried a loaded revolver in her purse. The expenditures and eccentricities eventually caught up with her, however, and after her death, Warley Place narrowly escaped being sold to a real estate developer. Almost none of the Willmott garden survives now, but the estate lives on as a wildlife refuge.
The gardens may be gone, but Ellen Willmott’s legacy continues. Scores of plants, possibly over sixty, bear the names Willmott, Ellen Willmott or Warley in some form. Glancing through one of the spring catalogs I found a pink Ellen Willmott zinnia and a salmon-pink Ellen Willmott sweet pea, introduced in 1901. Vendors still sell the double white-flowered Ellen Willmott lilac. In addition to the species rose that E.H. Wilson named for her, there are at least three Ellen Willmott roses. Perhaps the most famous Willmott namesake is Eryngium giganteum or giant sea holly, a tall thistle-like plant that is commonly known as “Miss Willmott’s Ghost”. The name comes from the fact that Ellen Willmott used to carry eryngium seeds with her when she went to visit friends’ gardens, strewing the seeds surreptitiously as she walked among the beds and borders. Since the Willmott-sown plants were tall, with pale greenish gray leaves surrounding the flowerheads, they eventually acquired the “ghostly” nickname.
Someone could probably write a doctoral dissertation on gardeners like Thomas Jefferson and Ellen Willmott who died in debt due in part or in full to garden expenditures. Solvency is always more desirable, but now and then my inner Ellen Willmott whispers that there are worse ways to throw away money.