The Sweet Pea Man of Wem
Henry Eckford's gift to gardeners; the flowers next door to Forncet
around you the cane loggias, tent poles, trellises,
the flitter of sweet peas caught in their strings,
the scarlet runners, blossom that seems to burn
an incandescent aura towards evening.
Pisgah, Geoffrey Hill
i
Unlike my dad, who is a keen and experienced gardener, I never developed the so called green fingers. But I am quite fond of sweet peas. Wem, my home town, is known as the home of the sweet pea. Can a flower have a home? Where is home really? I'm writing this in Manchester, a place I regard as my home city because I have lived here for around 20 years. Wem is my home town through birth and via three generations of Bygott families living in the town. But then I dig down and discover several generations of Lincolnshire Bygotts, so Barton-on-Humber starts to become a pre-natal relative historical home of sorts. Links with Lincs. A thousand years ago the family name was Bigot or Bigod and the lineage roots us in Norfolk as Norman invaders acquiring the power and privilege of the first five Earls of Norfolk. When I visit Norfolk, I feel an affinity, reinforced by historical association and, no doubt, a touch of romantic fantasy. As mentioned in my previous post (see: The Bearded Man of Barton), my great grandfather named his Wem family home Forncet, after a village lorded over by Roger Bigod, father of Hugh Bigod, the 1st Earl of Norfolk. So, Norfolk becomes my deep historical ancestral home. Yet, Roger Bigod came from Normandy and of course, the Normans were the Northmen from Scandinavia. I have always felt that North is more my home direction than South. Home is a place as far back as you like.
All this leads me to start thinking of home, not as a specific place, but as a resonating line through time. Psycho-history offers us a vertical and meandering plunge, not down to one reassuring anchor point, but to a potentially bewildering set of meaningful reference points. I could call this the expanded home-line theory. Every person can trace places of home-significance, present and past, and plot a path. The shape of that path is the unique home-line constellation of each individual. It is never meant to be a sharp or over-literal map; linear possibilities are overlaid with non-linear nodes and narratives of imagination.
ii
We seem to have gone a long way from sweet peas. Let's assume sweet peas have homes too. Wem, home of the sweet pea. But the sweet pea family has its own multi-point home-line constellation.
In 1699 a Franciscan monk and horticultural researcher, called Francesco Cupani, was compiling an account of the flora of his Italian home island of Sicily. He had collected the seeds of Lathyrus odoratus, a wild purple coloured sweet pea, found in the region. Cupani sent some seeds to a man called Dr Robert Uvedale, an English cleric, teacher and horticulturalist living in Enfield, Middlesex. There was, at that time an extensive network of European horticulturalists, sharing seeds and pressed flowers in a cooperative venture to classify and understand botany. From Uvedale onwards the sweet pea was propagated and grown but with little variation in colour or shape, for over 180 years. There is a 1793 record of the Fleet Street seedsman John Mason listing only five varieties at that point: a black-flowered, a purple (likely the original Cupani wild type), a scarlet, a white and the pink 'Painted Lady'. It all changed with a 65 year old, white-bearded Scotsman, living in Shropshire, in the 1800s.
Henry Eckford was born in Stenhouse, near Edinburgh, in Scotland in 1823. Following his apprenticeship as a gardener at Beaufort Castle, on the estate of Lord Lovat, near Inverness, he worked at several Scottish castle gardens and estates. Moving to London in 1847, he married his first wife Charlotte with whom he had four sons and two daughters. By 1857 he had become head gardener at Coleshill, the gardens of the Earl of Radnor in Berkshire. At Coleshill, Charlotte died in November 1873, a week after giving birth to their ninth, yet still-born child. Charlotte had had two previous still-births, in 1862 and 1863. With Charlotte's father, Job Stanier, dying earlier in the year, it must have been a hard winter for Henry who was now fifty.
By 1878 Henry had married his second wife, Emily Gerring, and was in charge of Dr. William Henry Octavius Sankey's garden at Sandywell, a private psychiatric hospital (or 'mental asylum', as it would have been called in those days), in Gloucestershire. It was here he started to experiment with sweet peas, realising that he could, with careful observation, cross-fertilization and selection, develop many new varieties of sweet pea. When Sankey moved his asylum to Boreatton Park in Shropshire, Henry Eckford and his family moved with him. At this point he is only 10 miles from Wem. His sweet pea hybridisation experiments were starting to produce attractive results and varieties of plants not seen before. The plants were selling and he was getting recognition at horticultural shows around the country. At Boreatton, despite moving into his 60s, or perhaps because of this, he started to consider the possibility of setting up his own business. He had a unique product: sustainable, easily growable, attractive and marketable sweet pea plants. But how and where to do that?
One day at Boreatton, he was chatting to the postman and told him what he was thinking, I want a place quite out of the way, where I can grow my peas, he said. The postman, knowing the area well, replied - I think there's to be let some land at Wem, which would just suit you. In 1888 Henry Eckford leased nine acres of land on Soulton Road, immediately next door to Forncet, my great grandfather, Edward Bygott's house. As mentioned in my previous post, the medieval name for this local patch of open and common land was Cross Field. As land became enclosed for tighter farming tenancies, the fields took on individual names. According to an 1842 map of Shropshire field names, my great grandfather built his house on a field called Little Crosses and owned the field at the back of the property called Big Crosses. Henry Eckford leased his land on the adjacent three fields previously called Far, Near and Middle Crosses. The land was convenient: just outside the residential edge of town, on the Soulton Road and quite near the station - useful for business visitors. Frustratingly, I have yet to find out if Eckford leased the land off my great grandfather. Either way, by the time my great grandfather had married in 1891 and started a family, they would have been able to look out from the house and see the Eckford Nurseries with rows upon row of sweet peas beyond their own garden.
Henry and his family initially lodged with coal-merchant Issac Huxley at 31 Noble Street in Wem. It was a large, but with two families, crowded house. The Noble Street House was eventually purchased followed by three houses at 7, 9 and 10 Market Street next door to his home. The Market Street properties were for business, seed sorting, packing and distribution. Henry Eckford's breeding programme was highly successful and by 1901, he had introduced no less than 115 out of the 264 cultivars which were commercially available. By 1917, after his death in 1905, there were listed Eckford 153 cultivars, of which twenty-six remained in commerce. Eckford named sweet pea seeds are still available to purchase.
His reputation and his sweet peas were spread worldwide, particularly in North America, with seeds being commercially ‘bulked up’ in California and then marketed across the continent by the Burpee Seed Company of Philadelphia, run by the memorably named Washington Atlee Burpee. Burpee also started a breeding programme which led to a craze for sweet peas across America too. Burpee visited Eckford in Wem in 1905. Through eBay I sourced a postcard printed in America. On it is a photograph of Burpee and Eckford standing in amongst the sweet peas in the nursey next to Forncet. The date is July 13. Henry had recently received the Royal Horticultural Society's Victoria Medal of Honour. In the photograph Henry looks happy, long bearded, but youthful. Perhaps Wem took him back to his childhood - the town had a population of around four thousand, the same size as his hometown of Liberton in Scotland. Henry died only five months later in his home at 31 Noble Street, a few doors down from Trentham House, later to be my childhood home and a few more doors down from Hazlitt House earlier home of the famous essayist. (See Searching for the Six Mile Stone).
As well as having Henry as a working neighbour, my great grandfather, Edward Bygott would have known Henry Eckford from the Wem town council, of which they were both elected members. Clean drinking water was a widespread concern across the country. In 1901 public access to water was free, but unreliable and prone to serious health hazards such as dysentery. The only way to reduce the health risks would be to fund new sewage systems, which in turn meant water rates. In August of that year my great grandfather requested use of the town water supply for his field next to Forncet. The council agreed providing he paid an annual charge of ten shillings. Almost certainly Henry Eckford seconded the motion as by 'coincidence' the water pump was conveniently just next to his own nurseries.
After Henrys' death, his son John took over the Eckford business. The world was changing. John risked money on full page adverts in the Daily Mail and skirted on the edge of bankruptcy when the custom didn't come flowing in. The sweet pea craze was past its peak and then the First World War meant a reduction of leisure gardening for the practical needs of feeding the population. There was a ban on flower growing with an insistence on growing vegetables. I imagine John Eckford feeling the burden in the 1920s.
iii
John Eckford died in 1944. His daughters Agnes and Joan 'Queenie' carried on the sweet pea business from their house 'Ferndale' and nurseries on land at Tilley, the tiny village that merges with Wem. The Soulton Road land ceased to be Eckford Nurseries by the 1930s. It is currently one third residential housing and two thirds farm field. Agnes died in 1976 and Queenie, the last of John Eckford’s children, died in 1991 age 83.
In the late 1960s the fields (once Big Crosses Field and part of Little Crosses Field) around Forncet were developed into a housing estate. In the 1980s another plot of land on Mill Street became another new housing estate. Both new estates honoured previous residents of Wem: William Hazlitt and Henry Eckford. But by some odd local twist of reasoning the land nearest the Eckford Nurseries (and thus far away from Hazlitt House on Noble Street) was named Hazlitt Place and Eckford Park, on Mill Street, is far away from the Soulton Road nurseries. Though to be fair, Eckford Park is on the way to what was once John and Alice Eckford's family home and sweet pea fields at Tilley.
iv
In 1970 Ann and Ivan James bought Forncet from my Grandmother, Veronica Bygott, who had been living there, alone, since the death of her husband, my grandfather, in 1962. My Gran moved into a smaller, more manageable modern house not far from Forncet. She named her new house Crossfields, after the fields that Forncet had been built upon. The James' lived at Forncet with their daughters Rose and Claire and son Phil.
Having left my boarding school in 1979, I was growing my hair, playing electric guitar and living back with my parents in Wem. At the White Horse, my regular pub, I became friends with Phil James. It wasn't long before we figured out that he lived in what was previously my father's family house at Forncet. The last time I visited the house, before getting to know Phil, would have been for Christmas celebrations when I was eight or nine. This time, in my twenties, I was sitting in Phil's bedroom, all the walls painted black, and listening to AC/DC, Motorhead, The Ruts, Fisher-Z and Trust. We planned trips to gigs, trips of other sorts and a big trip to London to see The Stranglers with our mutual friend Mike Collinge (see: Climbing the Fountain of Eros Part 1). In the corner was a glass terrarium, home to Phil's red-knee tarantula. I think I held the large spider in my hands only once. Visually terrifying, yet in the palm, actually gentle and harmless. Tarantula hair is as soft as kitten's fur.
On different occasions in the 1980s Phil and Mike were tenants at 9a Market Street, one of the one-time Eckford business properties, next door to 31 Noble Street, the Eckford residence. The top floor and attic space of 9 Market Street was likely used for Henry Eckford's seed sorting and packing operations. In 1983 I was at one of Mike's parties, probably in the same space that Henry Eckford once directed his employees to packet up seeds to be sent across the world. I wouldn’t have known any of the Eckford history back them. Something I had in my 'baccy' tin at that party was certainly not sweet pea seeds. Sinsemilla is a cannabis plant which has not been fertilised and therefore has no seeds, rendering the cannabinol content more potent. Sinsemilla literally translates from the Spanish as without seeds. I put the lid back on the tin and wondered where Mike was. Across the hallway, a door was ajar. I peeped though into a low lit bedroom and caught a glimpse of a needle and an arm with a belt tightening around it. I suddenly didn't feel stoned. I knew I didn't want to step through that particular door. I felt less at home. I knew it was time to move on, to leave my home town, to find new homes, to smell new scents.
Years later, Mike contracted hepatitis C, developed cirrhosis of the liver and died in October 2007. The James family sold Forncet to the current owners in 2017, who contacted me a couple of years ago enquiring about the history of the house. They told me that the names of my great grandmother and her children were still visible, roughly hand-written on the wall of the coach house, with a record of their weights in 1920. I may yet get to visit the house again, in which case I will have seen it in the care of the only three families who have ever owned it, over the 140 years of its existence. I must remember to take them some sweet peas.