A prickly Catholic who had a genius for making enemies and for reckless overspending, she was also one of the great gardeners of her age
For the past five years I have been consumed with the life of a once famous but now largely forgotten plantswoman. Things became a lot more exciting when a huge cache of documents belonging to Ellen Ann Willmott – letters, diaries, receipts, notebooks, prayer cards and around 10,000 photographs – was discovered rotting in the basement of Spetchley Park, the Worcestershire home of her sister Rose Berkeley.
Willmott’s remarkable achievements as an innovative gardener, botanist, musician, antiquarian, raconteuse – and obsessive photographer – should have made her one of the most famous horticulturalists of her age. She was one of two women awarded the RHS Medal of Honour in Queen Victoria’s Jubilee Year, 1897. The other was Gertrude Jekyll, who described Willmott as “the greatest of all living woman gardeners”. But Willmott had a reputation of being “difficult”: eccentric, bitter, miserly and cantankerous; and seemingly every biographical reference to her is haunted by the apocryphal tale of her maliciously sprinkling seeds from a prickly sea holly in the borders of other people’s gardens.
To grasp Willmott’s life, work and wide range of achievements, it’s important to remember that everything she did was inspired by her Catholic faith. Being a Catholic in nineteenth-century Britain wasn’t as hazardous – or discriminatory – as it had been in the previous three centuries. The Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1829 was already 30 years old when Willmott was born in 1858, but Catholics still tended to stick together, socialise and marry within the faith. Many Catholic families had never quite rescinded their faith during – or after – the Reformation. The Berkeley family, with whom Willmott would later become so heavily involved, were not unusual in having taken a short foray into pragmatic Protestantism in the seventeenth century (the Robert Berkeley of the day declared his Catholic son “insane” to avoid the estate being confiscated) before discreetly returning to their Catholic roots two generations later.
