Commercial Arboretums
here were numerous commercial nursery gardens across Britain by the early nineteenth century, many, as Loudon noted, serving the demands of landowners and increasingly the middle classes for their parks and gardens.
Many were ‘originated by head gardeners, who have given up private servitude’ and ‘whose capital consist of the savings made during their servitude’ and what could be described as the practical and intellectual capital of the knowledge and skills that they had acquired in service. Arboretums formed by nurserymen were also instrumental in encouraging the importation of novel specimens and the creation of new hybrids through crossing.
Nurserymen, private landlords and botanical and scientific societies all encouraged expeditions in search of new specimens often taking advantage of the expanding empire such as David Douglas’s journeys in north America.
Utilitarian and commercial imperatives underlay the design of nursery gardens whilst seeds and plant sales were promoted in numerous printed catalogues and gardening publications such as Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, Loudon’s Gardener’s Magazine and Paxton’s Magazine of Botany.
George Loddiges and company of Hackney, for example, created one of the largest arboretums in Britain by the 1820s and provided valuable assistance to Loudon in the compilation of his Encyclopedia of Plants and Arboretum Fruticetum Britannicum as well as valuable specimens for a host of gardens and arboretums.
Their arboretum aimed to contain examples of all species that would grow in the British climate and specimens were arranged in alphabetical order for ease of access in a concentric layout of paths culminating in a spiral walk which terminated in an American ground at the centre
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