Laying Dynamite w/the 9th Duke of Devonshire

I grew up in a family greenhouse business in Strongsville, Ohio. As a fourth-generation member, I could trace my ancestry to an Austrian immigrant, my great-grandpa Sam Hirt, who started Hirt’s Greenhouse and Flowers in 1915. He built one greenhouse that year; his sons built four over the next sixty years; my father and uncle added at least three more glass houses and six hoop houses roofed in sheets of plastic - each addition angled on the same corner of land in northeast Ohio until the acreage gleamed with thousands of panes of glass. My brother worked there, mastering a greenhouse Sam Hirt could not have imagined because it was an online greenhouse, the new domain of www.hirts.com.

Those old greenhouses are gone now, torn down in the summer of 2005. They were wonderful, but aging. Glass breaking, frames warping, drains clogging, dinosaurs in an age of much more high-tech growing environs. My father and uncle sold the land to a developer, who built a CVS drugstore. I can’t say I’m settled about the whole thing, even though my dad and brother have since built new greenhouses on new land in a neighboring town. The business continues, but I wonder what’s been lost.

For so many years, as I lived out of state for graduate school, I could not visit Ohio without visiting the greenhouse; I could not walk under that glass roof without feeling my heritage the way a plant senses the sun. But if I could revisit the past, I would not linger on the 1940s photos of my grandparents in the greenhouse. Nor would I return to the greenhouse of my youth, or even the final days of the greenhouse in the summer of 2005.

Instead, I would request an invite to the Great Conservatory of Chatsworth, England, in December of 1843.

That winter, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert rode in a horse-drawn carriage down the center aisle of the largest greenhouse in the world. She was 24, already six years into her 63-year reign; Albert, her cousin, had been her husband for three years. They visited at night because they could - the incandescent lamp had been invented a few years earlier, and while Edison’s light bulb was still 36 years in the future, these short-lived lamps were a novelty fit for royalty. A stunning 12,000 lamps hung from the iron ribs of the greenhouse, courtesy of Joseph Paxton, gardener and builder of the Great Conservatory.

I know how worthwhile the visit must have been - to see such light twinkling off the glass and arches inspired by cathedrals. But Paxton had visions beyond the fancies of architecture, for he knew these incandescents were only meant to showcase the phenomenal collection of exotics he tended for the owner of Chatsworth, the 6^th Duke of Devonshire. The Duke so admired Paxton’s prowess that he said of the horticultural prodigy, I had rather all the plants were dead than have you ill. The Great Conservatory at Chatsworth, completed in 1841 after five years of construction, was renowned not only for its size and defiance of all known architectural guidelines, but also for the contents it housed.

I picture this - the Queen and Prince in a carriage drawn by a dappled pony, Paxton and the Duke stepping alongside, the excited tour guides in their jungle. Here was the Walton Date Palm, nearly full-grown with room to spare in the 67-foot high ceilings of the Great Conservatory. They hoped the tree would bear sweet dark dates, a hope not unfounded, since Paxton had coaxed fruit from a peculiar dwarf banana tree. Next were hibiscus flowers - such wide blossoms never before attained in captivity. Then the rare erythrina arborea, the short coral tree with red flowers, shadowed by cocos plumosa, an actual coconut tree thriving under glass in the center of gloomy England. Pink Bougainvillea cascaded on thorny vines. Bulbs bloomed under an orange tree. And from every angle, deep into the curved recesses grayed by the four miles worth of steam pipes used for heating, leaves and vines and stems of manners inconceivable and strange displayed themselves for the queen and the prince.

The Duke’s centerpiece in the greenhouse was dracaena draco, the dragon tree, a specimen doubled in worth because it was also a gift from one Lord Fitzwilliam. In the Victorian Era, a gift of an exotic plant rivaled jewels and fine wine. The story of the dragon tree is so rich that I’m sure Paxton, who was brilliant, halted the pony and spread his arms wide to introduce the woody, funnel-shaped tree with its dense branches uplifted at uniform angles. Leaves like sword blades crowned the top. The queen and the prince would have said they’d never seen anything like it, and Paxton, ever the showman, would have stepped under its shadow to swipe a pocket knife against a thin branch. He would have warned the young queen she was about to see something unsettling. She hardly flinched, I’m sure, but maybe the pony sidestepped in her harness and snorted. Paxton held the cut branch in his palm, and a crimson liquid pooled against his white skin. Dragon blood - legend spoke of the first dracaena draco, rooted from the corpse of Pau Tangula, the mythic sea dragon of the Solomon Islands. All descendants of that tree carried the blood of dragons.

Would Paxton have added that natives of the Canary Islands, where Europeans had first seen the dragon tree a century prior, believed that since the venerable trees bled, they also had souls? Or that unscrupulous gold-seekers cut countless dragon trees, letting their red sap harden into balls of “dragon fruit” sold in underground markets as aphrodisiacs? Maybe he dispensed with the witchcraft and myth-mongering for an ending that appealed to the refined artistic temperament of his guests. He would have explained how the red resin of dracaena draco was prized by Italian violinmakers intent on mixing varnishes for their instruments.

Had I sat in the carriage with the queen and the prince, listening to the dark-eyed Paxton, I would have wondered if the dragon tree harbored more than a soul - I would have wagered it knew the color of sound. Years later, Queen Victoria knighted Paxton for his achievements.

I think he’s an avatar. I could have fallen in love with him, but only for his greenhouse.

The Duke of Devonshire, with his wealth and connections, and Joseph Paxton, garden boy with an unflagging sense of vision and accomplishment, were a duo who refined the British horticultural world. Praise abounds. More than I wish to praise them, I wish to tell them I once had a plant they would have set on a pedestal in the Great Conservatory for Queen Victoria’s viewing.

When my boyfriend, Paul, and I lived in an apartment in Ames, Iowa, our neighbors fought like wildcats. Paul finally called 911 in response to their post-midnight go to hells and their penchant for whipping furniture against the walls, denting space with expletives. Even though their actions seemed to verge on murder, I can forgive them their domestic disputes. They were young and Midwestern, poor, unhappy, strung out. But I cannot forgive them for leaving an old philodendron houseplant on their front step on a February night, the watery cells of its elephantine leaves freezing to death. Forgiveness I deny them because I live by one maxim, inspired by my connection to my family’s greenhouse: take care of the plants. Neglect was not acceptable. Joseph Paxton knows what I mean.

I noticed the plant on the front steps as I headed to the store on an errand. This variety of philodendron I had not seen often - a spherical trunk tapered up into a prodigious spray of stems sleek and green as leeks.  From each stem’s end hung one tremendous leaf, a foot long and foot wide: a leaf spawned from a surrealist oak and a nuclear winter oak. Crusty aerial roots stretched from the stems and jutted from the trunk, thick and obscene in their quest for soil. It was the most magnificent philodendron I’d ever seen outside of a greenhouse.

I registered a newfound dislike of my short-tempered neighbors, now that they had kicked out a plant, the one living thing in their apartment unable to retaliate. I could only wonder at its trespass. It grew too big. It got in the way of the TV. It smelled funky. It didn’t have flowers. It was so-and-so’s plant and so-and-so was a goddamned slut. But I gave them the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they were cleaning. Maybe it had bugs. Maybe someone was moving. I made myself this promise - if the plant was still there when I returned home, I’d take it.

It was. I did.

In the twenty minutes I’d spent buying chips and beer, the philodendron had deflated into a limp bouquet on its way to freezing solid, like celery in an icebox. I hefted it down the stairs to my basement apartment; it easily weighed fifty pounds. I set it in the bathtub, turned on the hot water, closed the door, and created a steam room. Paul stood in the hallway and asked what I was doing, what this thing was I’d just hauled in. I said that if I could cease the freezing of the trunk, I could save the plant. He said what? and opened the door. I closed it and said don’t. He said you’re being creepy. I filled the tub halfway, so the scalding water lapped against the tall white pot. I examined the big old leaves and deemed them goners. With red scissors I cut all save one, leaving stubs of stem and a tiny leaf. From the soil surface, where a lattice of aerial roots had sunk their probing tips, I extracted cigarette butts and a handful of broken yellow pencils.

I respected this veteran philodendron. The mature trunk intrigued me - ringed like a coconut palm, but spotted with a pattern of almond circles that once were the base of stems. Someone had shaped it, coning the trunk and cutting stems until it was like a sculpture. I placed its age at twenty years, maybe thirty, based on the width of the trunk. An old houseplant is rare. And how had my undeserving neighbors come to own this specimen?  Certainly, they hadn’t owned it for its whole life.

I tended it for two hours, emptying the 54-gallon hot water tank as I tried to maintain the steam, irritating Paul who had to forgo his shower. I knew any respectable greenhouse worker would laugh at my desperate attempt at resuscitation. When tropical plants freeze, they die. Horticulture 101 would propose this solution: throw it away. I wasn’t willing. If I had nabbed the philodendron in time, I had done so with literally minutes to spare. Those minutes meant something, even though I knew I should have grabbed it the moment I saw it. I really did not know if the plant would survive, if mere humidity could halt the crystal of frost. Steam was my apology and my promise.

When the trunk felt warm and the top layer of soil evanesced that familiar peaty scent, I moved the plant to a crate by the window. Clear sap dripped from the amputated stems, a good sign, for at least then sap could flow. At least I don’t bring home stray animals, I told Paul when he pointed out that the trimmed plant took up a significant square of space, so it was sure to fill half of the living room when it rebounded, and wasn’t that problematic in our small apartment? Think of all the oxygen it will emit, I responded.

The plant basked in the morning and afternoon sun. I dosed it with fertilizer. I sat with it every night, just looking and thinking. The sitting felt good, lucid, relaxed. I sipped wine and knew the philodendron wasn’t dead because I could imagine how the new leaves would arch from the strange trunk, how tender aerial roots would straggle and harden before nudging soil. I also knew that when plants are injured, their response is to reproduce, to compensate wildly for a lost limb or a torn leaf or a sheared root. Certainly the continual injury of living with my neighbors had spurred the plant to its formidable size.

In two weeks it defied February and sprouted new stems whose tips unfurled like scrolls. At the library, I scanned horticulture books for its variety. It was a philodendron selloum, the tree philodendron. Within a month, massive leaves cast shadows across my bookshelves. I decided that while I had been sitting there looking at the philodendron, it had been considering my books.

If that philodendron could have read anything, it would have read about Yggdrasil, the “world tree” of Norse mythology. Yggdrasil makes the tree in the Garden of Eden look like a particle board stage prop.

Yggdrasil is the universe dressed up as a tree. Its roots grip soil in the underworld. A tree trunk rises from this pit, branching into a trinity. The south stem’s branches shelter the past, the present, and the future. The north stem’s branches are home to the frost giant Mimir and his fountain of wisdom. The center branch skewers the orb of earth- breaking through Asgard Mountain and leafing out into Valhalla, the heaven of the Norse gods. From below, the leaves are clouds and the fruits are stars. A zoo of animals live in Yggdrasil, and some are mischievous. The serpent, Nidhoggr, fangs the roots, for he dreams of the world ending in a hiss. Too far away to see the wrongdoings of Nidhoggr sits a nameless eagle, protector of the air. The squirrel, Batatosk, runs up and down the trunk all day, trying to pit the serpent and the eagle in a death match, but no one listens to him. Meanwhile, four stags live in the branches. Their names are noble - Dain, Dvalin, Duneyr, and Durathor. At dawn, dew gathers on their antlers. When they graze the leaves, dew drips to earth as rain.

My tree philodendron could have been Yggdrasil. Its roots sank deep into the core of a pot I could not twist free. The strange trunk was perfect for Batatosk’s fast feet, his worry-tail twirling. Mimir, the giant from the north stem, helped it survive the frost of February. And the plant sprouted leaves shaped like the racks of stags, leaves that dripped water like the staghorns dripped dew.

Amusingly, scholars have devoted significant research to making a case for what kind of tree Yggdrasil is. One popular opinion is that it is simply an evergreen - not necessarily a pine tree, but literally a forever-green tree, eternal and immune to seasons. The other notion, for the hardliners, is that Yggdrasil is an ash tree, obviously, since Norse legend holds that the first human sprang from an ash tree. To that I say, who cares what the hell kind of tree it is. Are you not concerned for Batatosk? The squirrel. All day, up and down that tree. I want to play with Batatosk because he is consumed with worry. I want to tell him the eagle will never listen and the serpent will never cease because I too have been tearing paths between demise and redemption, to no fruitful end. I want to show him the deer in the leaves because he cannot conceive of them, yet he must.

In the movie Harold and Maude, teenage introvert Harold falls in love with free-spirited Maude, a woman old enough to be his grandmother. A series of scenes juxtaposing their freakish pastimes (attending strangers’ funerals or demolitions) ends with Maude doting over tiny plants in a greenhouse. The place is expansive - bigger, I realize immediately, than my greenhouses. The tiny plants, nestled in terra cotta pots, stretch to the edge of the frame. Harold stands two rows over, so tense that his shoulders brush his earlobes.

“I like to watch things grow,” says Maude, each word a smile and a psalm.

Later, Maude steals a sickly city tree and speeds it to the forest, where she and Harold solemnly replant it in a forest of giants, where it will grow unhindered by concrete and smog. This scene, where Maude acts upon her ability to listen to plants, is one I have fantasized about far too often. Such delightful disobedience, such horticultural heroics. I too want to save the doomed.

Paxton, meanwhile, never dealt in half-dead trees - the Duke, in his zeal for collecting exotics, was often sending Paxton to procure plants that were absurdly vivacious. The Duke once bought a mature palm tree from Lady Tankerville, who was so rich she owned a private palm greenhouse. The palm weighed twelve tons, and the trunk was eight feet around. The Duke deemed it perfect for the Great Conservatory. He and Paxton hired workers to dismantle the palm house frame by frame, girder by girder, because there was no way to get the palm out. Then the workers (somehow) dug and transported the tree along the roads, probably with less turmoil than Maude’s tree-stealing caper. For the palm to pass, authorities dismantled the turnpikes between Surrey and Devonshire. Lucky for the Duke and Paxton, the Great Conservatory was not totally finished - the 500 workers they employed helped angle the palm inside and finished the greenhouse around it. Their desire for this palm makes me bet Maude would have turned down young Harold for a date with Paxton or the Duke. And I bet she’d perk at the chance to steal trees with my brother, Matt.

I once called Matt to ask him if he’d ever saved any plants. “I hear the plants talking to me,” he affirmed. “I can feel them. I can’t turn it off.”

Like Maude and me, Matt has stumbled upon plants in dire situations. Once, at the Dairymart where he gassed up his black Ford truck and bought Marlboros, he saw the thin leaves of a ponytail palm in the dumpster. Ponytail palms have bellbottom trunks and a fountain of blade-like leaves curling up and out and down. Matt hauled it out - it was a large palm, probably as tall as my philodendron - and drove it to the greenhouse.

“Everyone laughed at me,” he said, recollecting how he had to cut off all the foliage, which was infected with scale, a pervasive insect that lives under brown lumps on the fronds, sucking away nutrients. He replanted it into a larger pot, wrestling to wrench it from its old container. He watered it and sprayed it with insecticide. It rebounded and flourished, but then the scale returned so he threw it away.

He’s a cynic, but with clear cause. Paxton would take Matt’s side too. Paxton was so protective of the Great Conservatory that he refused to let most visitors inside. He made them peer through the glass. If Matt had known Paxton, he would have bought him a beer and said, Friend, I know where you’re coming from.

Paxton, however, had to relent when his Victoria regia water lily bloomed. Word spread when lily pads strong enough to hold little girls thrived so wildly that they blossomed white flowers fragrant as pineapple.

If any event set the stage for the Victorian Era’s reputation as the age of imitation, it was Paxton’s success with the humongous, finicky water lily native to the South American backwaters of the Amazon. When European explorers sighted the six-foot wide lily pads near Guiana and Bolivia, their first thought was to offer the fantastic plants as gifts to royalty, a trend all the rage back in the homeland. The edges of the lilies’ leaves bent up at uniform right angles like shallow bowls. The undersides were red. The white lotus-like flowers were extraordinary, the flowers of fairy tales. The problem, encountered by numerous botanists over the first half of the nineteenth century, was one of transport. Six-foot water lilies bearing fifteen-inch flowers presented logistical challenges unmet by the botanists and their little trowels and tidy pots of orchids and young ferns. Thaddeus Haenke tried in 1801, and botanical lore holds that he secured viable seeds, but he died mysteriously in 1817 and his entire collection was lost. Alcide d’Orbigny pickled the seeds before shipping them to Paris. He also sent a leaf. But by the time the ragged items arrived in Paris, the recipients weren’t even sure what these things were. The seeds molded. Someone folded the giant leaf to store it, an action so careless it later prompted British botanists to scoff at French botanists. Folding the giant water lily! Imagine the crime!

In 1831, Robert Schomburk was the first to actually take an intact water lily leaf across the Atlantic, arriving in London where the botanist John Lindley met him at the port and was able to examine the rotting remains, confidently naming it a new genus of plant. It was he who christened it Victoria regia, in honor of the queen.

Fourteen years later, Thomas Bridges, a tourist, succeeded where the botanists failed. While hunting in Bolivia, he found the lilies in a placid turn of the Amazon River. He sealed some flower buds in bottles of liquor to preserve them. He packed 22 seeds into cubes of clay. Twenty rotted by the time he docked in London. Two sprouted under the nervous hands of gardeners at the royal Kew Gardens. But success remained in the shadows of the Amazon. The Kew specimens grew, barely. No lily flowers graced the limp pads with their pale undersides.

In the summer of 1849, when Paxton viewed the lilies at Kew, he deduced the problem immediately. The lilies were set in stagnant pools of unmoving water. Their native Amazon was a river, not a lake. Back at the Great Conservatory, Paxton built a pool with a water wheel. The wheel circulated the water, making currents. Paxton was a true Victorian - his cleverness in imitation was unsurpassed. The gardeners at Kew sent him one languishing five-leaf lily, each lily pad all of six inches in width, on a special train that made no stops. By September, the lily pads were forty inches wide; by October, fifty inches. On November 2^nd, 1849, Paxton announced that he saw a flower bud that looked “like a large peach placed in a cup. No words can describe the grandeur.” Seven days later, at dusk, the Victoria regia bloomed. The flower remained open for 36 hours. The gardeners from Kew heeded Paxton’s urgent message to come immediately, to witness the sight “worth a journey of a thousand miles.” Queen Victoria visited too. Over the next year, the lily gave 112 blossoms. Paxton built a special greenhouse for the lily, with a larger pool and adequate aisles for viewing by the curious public.

When I moved to Idaho, I gave my philodendron to a friend who was staying in Iowa. With its long stems and wide leaves, it needed almost twelve cubic feet of space. I didn’t dare cram it into the dark moving truck for a four-day trip, its plant cells atrophying every minute past the usual dark of night, the furniture and boxes shifting to crinkle leaves and snap stems. I would have made a terrible botanical explorer. Yet when I arrived at my Idaho apartment after half a week on the road, the thin leaves of an unwanted houseplant poked from the dumpster. I lifted it out and smiled. I had no idea what it was, but it was mine. Days later I visited a florist’s shop in town and bought a new philodendron - not a tree species, but a split-leaf species. No staghorn leaves here. The foliage spread into shapes like breastplates and hearts and ribs and dragonheads.

Joseph Paxton died in 1865. A succession of dukes owned the Chatsworth estate at Devonshire, but it never again achieved the heights of the 1840s, with lilies and queens and incandescent lamps like soft stars. World War One drained the life from the Great Conservatory. Coal for heating was scarce - the tropical exotics died slowly. The ranks of gardeners who tended the structure turned plowshares to swords - by 1918 there was literally no one left to water the palms, replant the hibiscus, or bed the bulbs. Eight million soldiers, and every plant in the Great Conservatory at Chatsworth, died in the four years of the war.

One day in 1920, the 9^th Duke of Devonshire purchased dynamite. He was distressed by the run-down conservatory and haunted by all it no longer represented. He and Paxton’s grandson set bundles at the corroded bases of the arched girders. They lit fuses that twisted like serpents in the wildest Norse dreams of Nidhoggr. The great structure shuddered at the explosions - but it did not fall. The Duke and the grandson tried again. And again. After six tremendous explosions, the Great Conservatory reluctantly collapsed on itself.

It is easy to wish I had been at the Great Conservatory when the queen and the prince first visited, that spectacular night long before a world war, when lamps were strange new things, when the simple presence of exotic plants was a privilege. That is an easy wish indeed. It is the wish for timelessness and success, as if nothing else is worthy. But the wish is picture-book idealistic, as fanciful as Yggdrasil, the supposedly eternal tree, despite the serpent gnawing the roots.

How much more difficult to place myself in 1920, laying dynamite with the 9^th Duke and the grandson who would not inherit all his grandfather had built. I think I can place my brother there instead. I’ve never asked him, but I know he would understand why the Duke sought to bring down the ruin. When my dad sold the old family greenhouses, the demolition date set, he also set the foundations for new greenhouses, a new version of the business, with my brother taking over.

Loving this new precipice, this latest incarnation of tradition, my brother invited his friends for celebratory drinks at a bar and then called me in Idaho. “Like Cortez burning his ships,” he yelled, blitzed on the liquor of progress-of new beginnings, risk and chance.

I bet that if he could go back in time, he’d lay dynamite with the 9^th Duke of Devonshire. He’d invite the queen and the prince.  It’s really all anyone can do, here on the branch of Yggdrasil where the past, present, and future matter too much. He’d maybe even lend a cheer into the explosions, all six of them.

I’ve imagined it so intently that I can almost convince myself that that’s the way it happened, that this is the memory.

Endnotes

1. Colquhon, Kate. A Thing in Disguise: The Visionary Life of Joseph Paxton. London: Fourth Estate, 2003.
2. Elliot, Charles. “Water lily fit for a queen.” Horticulture. Jan. 1996, vol. 74.1. 20-24.
3. Emboden, William A. Bizarre Plants: Magical, Monstrous, Mythical. New York: Macmillan, 1974.
4. Harold and Maude. Dir. Hal Ashby. Perf. Ruth Gordon, Bud Cort. Paramount, 1971.
5. Hirt, Matt. Personal Interview. 5^th November 2003.
6. Hix, John. The Glass House. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1974.
7. Chapter 6, “The Private Conservatory,” provided factual details about Joseph
8. Lehner, Ernst and Johanna. Folklore and Symbolism of Flowers, Plants, and Trees. New York: Tudor Publishing, 1960.
9. “The Conservatory Garden and Maze.” Homepage. http://www.chatsworth-house.co.uk Accessed 5th November 2003.
10. Woods, May and Arete Swartz Warren. Glasshouses: A History of Greenhouses,
11. Orangeries, and Conservatories. New York: Rizzoli, 1988.