{"id":129,"date":"2008-12-29T04:59:40","date_gmt":"2008-12-29T12:59:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/garden\/?p=129"},"modified":"2015-11-24T07:33:00","modified_gmt":"2015-11-24T15:33:00","slug":"miss-willmotts-ghost","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/miss-willmotts-ghost\/","title":{"rendered":"Miss Willmott’s Ghost"},"content":{"rendered":"

MISS WILLMOTT’S GHOST<\/font><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Every gardener has an inner Ellen Willmott.\u00a0 An Englishwoman born into wealth in 1858, she was bitten early and hard by the gardening bug.\u00a0 In her prime she gardened, read, studied, patronized fabled plant hunters and employed hundreds of gardeners to tend her plants.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 As the year’s first garden catalogs begin to arrive, it is easy to see how such a thing could have happened. <\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 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. \u00a0Sources suggest that her interest in gardening came from her mother, who encouraged a love of plants in Ellen and her aptly named sister, Rose.\u00a0 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.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rose eventually married, but Ellen remained single and stayed at Warley Place for the rest of her life.\u00a0 Like her contemporary, the great English garden designer and writer, Gertrude Jekyll, Ellen Willmott was self taught.\u00a0 Unlike Miss Jekyll, Miss Willmott did not design gardens for a living.\u00a0 Instead she focused on building the collections at Warley Place and developing gardens on properties she purchased in France and Italy.\u00a0 Though reputedly cantankerous, she maintained friendships with the garden luminaries of her day.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 This medal, which recognizes individuals who have achieved special distinction in horticulture, was created by the RHS to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee.\u00a0 The VMH was only one of the many honors and accolades that Ellen Willmott received during her lifetime. <\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

She had a special interest in roses, and between 1910 and 1914 she published The Genus Rosa<\/em>, a comprehensive, two-volume book on roses, with watercolor illustrations by Alfred Parsons.\u00a0 The book is still regarded as a significant work on the subject.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

One of the privileges of wealth is the ability to patronize artists, scientists, writers and other creative people.\u00a0 Ellen Willmott supported plant hunters, especially the celebrated Ernest Henry “Chinese”\u009d Wilson, who traveled to China repeatedly on behalf of institutions and individuals and brought back scores of new species.\u00a0 In return for her support, Wilson named plants after her, including a winter hazel, Corylopsis willmottiae,<\/em> <\/em>and a rose, <\/em>Rosa<\/em> willmottiae<\/em>.
\n<\/em><\/font><\/font>Though obviously an extremely intelligent woman, Ellen Willmott had her eccentricities and threw caution to the wind when it came to money.\u00a0 According to at least one biographer, in the years before World War I, she and her family were heavily invested in German railroad stock.\u00a0 Failing to notice the portents of war and sell off the stock, they lost their entire investment.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Stories–which may or may not be apocryphal–abound about the booby traps she installed among her prized daffodils to deter thieves.\u00a0 In her later years she may also have carried a loaded revolver in her purse.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Almost none of the Willmott garden survives now, but the estate lives on as a wildlife refuge.<\/font><\/p>\n

The gardens may be gone, but Ellen Willmott’s legacy continues.\u00a0 Scores of plants, possibly over sixty, bear the names Willmott, Ellen Willmott or Warley in some form.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Vendors still sell the double white-flowered Ellen Willmott lilac.\u00a0 In addition to the species rose that E.H. Wilson named for her, there are at least three Ellen Willmott roses.\u00a0 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”\u009d.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Since the Willmott-sown plants were tall, with pale greenish gray leaves surrounding the flowerheads, they eventually acquired the “ghostly”\u009d nickname.<\/font><\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 Solvency is always more desirable, but now and then my inner Ellen Willmott whispers that there are worse ways to throw away money. <\/font><\/p>\n

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MISS WILLMOTT’S GHOST \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Every gardener has an inner Ellen Willmott.\u00a0 An Englishwoman born into wealth in 1858, she was bitten early and hard by the gardening bug.\u00a0 In her prime she gardened, read, studied, patronized fabled plant hunters and employed hundreds of gardeners to tend her plants.\u00a0 She eventually lavished so much money on … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-interest"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1655,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129\/revisions\/1655"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}