Jump to content

Edward Augustus Bowles

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by LymeRegis (talk | contribs) at 05:52, 18 August 2011 (→‎Death). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Crocus E A Bowles

Edward Augustus (Gussie) Bowles, VMH (14 May 1865 – 7 May 1954), known professionally as E.A. Bowles, was a British horticulturalist[1], plantsman and garden writer.[2] He developed an important garden at Myddelton House, his lifelong home near Enfield, Middlesex and has given his name to upwards of forty varieties of plant.[3]

Background and work

E. A. Bowles was born at his family's home, Myddelton House, near Enfield. He was of Huguenot descent and his father, Henry Carington Bowles, who died in 1918, was Chairman of the New River Company, which then controlled the artificial waterway that flowed past Myddelton, bringing water to London from the River Lea.[4]. Through an elder brother, Bowles was related to Andrew Parker Bowles (born 1939), whose first wife, Camilla Shand, became Duchess of Cornwall on her marriage to Charles, Prince of Wales in 2005.[5]

Bowles was educated at Jesus College, Cambridge.[6] He had wanted to enter the church, but family circumstances militated against this; so he remained at Myddelton and, in the words of one historian, "devoted himself to social work, painting, and natural history, particularly entomology".[7] Bowles transformed the garden at Myddelton and, as a keen traveller, especially to Europe and North Africa, brought home with him many specimens of plant. In 1908 he was elected to the Council of the Royal Horticultural Society,[8] whose grounds at Wisley, Surrey, now contain a memorial garden to him. Bowles received the society's highest award, the Victorian Medal of Honour, in 1916 and was a Vice-President from 1926 until his death almost thirty years later.[9] RHS colleagues knew him as "Bowley".[10]

Myddelton House

The garden at Myddelton House is open to the public and there is a museum there dedicated to Bowles' life and work. Many of the features that he created remain, including the rock garden (though this is now largely wild), the wisteria that he planted across a bridge that once crossed the New River, and his so-called "lunatic asylum" of horticultural oddities that he developed after abandoning plans to construct a Japanese garden. One of his imports was the highly invasive Japanese knot weed, whose architectural qualities Bowles admired. Two clumps of this are maintained at Myddelton to assist recognition of the plant. On one of the walls overlooking the kitchen garden Bowles' initials, that he carved in 1887, can still be seen.

Bowles received many distinguished visitors from the gardening world: for example, the great designer Gertrude Jekyll came to Myddelton twice in 1910, while Bowles was a guest at Jekyll's Munstead Wood.[11] An article in the Gardener's Magazine in 1910 observed "it would be difficult to imagine anything more delightful, floriculturally speaking, than to spend an hour or so with Mr. Bowles."[12] A so-called "tulip tea" was held annually at Myddelton to celebrate Bowles' birthday in early May. This usually coincided with the flowering of beds along his Tulip Terrace, which, given the tulip's decline in popularity since its mid-Victorian heyday, made him one of what he described in 1914 as the "noble little band who keep up its cultivation [and] are doing a great work for future gardeners".[13]

Publications

Bowles wrote a number of books about horticulture, notably My Garden in Spring, My Garden in Summer and My Garden in Autumn, all of which were published (1914-15) around the beginning of the First World War. The preface to the first of these by Bowles' friend Reginald Farrer, with whom he often travelled abroad,[14] contained some comments about showy rock gardens which Sir Frank Crisp, owner of Friar Park, Henley-on-Thames, and Ellen Willmott, who had known Gertrude Jekyll since 1873[15] and, like Bowles, was a leading figure in the RHS, took as personal criticism. This led Willmot to circulate a uncomplimentary pamphlet about Bowles and his garden at the second Chelsea Flower Show in 1914, thereby escalating a row which, however, was patched up the following year, when Bowles invited Willmot to Myddelton House.[16]

Bowles' more specialised works included his handbooks on crocuses (1924) and narcissi (1934).[17]

Death and legacy

Bowles continued to chair committees of the RHS until a few weeks before his death in 1954. His ashes were scattered on the rock garden at Myddelton House.[18] Bowles had no family of his own and Myddelton House and gardens passed to the University of London.[19] They are now owned and managed by the Lea Valley Regional Park Authority. The bulk of Bowles' correspondence is held by the RHS's Lindley Library. A charity, known as the E.A.Bowles of Myddelton House Society, seeks to maintain interest in both the man and his work and, since the fiftieth anniversary of his death in 2004, has sponsored a biennial studentship in his name in conjunction with the RHS.

Galanthus "E A Bowles"

In February 2011, a single bulb of Galanthus plicatus "E A Bowles" was sold on the internet auction site EBay for a record price of £350. Bowles bred the plant from one that he discovered in the gardens of Myddelton House.[20]

The standard author abbreviation Bowles is used to indicate this person as the author when citing a botanical name.[21]

References

  1. ^ E. A. Bowles of Myddelton House Society
  2. ^ Stearn, W. T., 'Edward Augustus Bowles (1865–1954)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (Oxford, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004) ISBN 0-19-861411-X
  3. ^ See list at [1]
  4. ^ Miles Hadfield (1960) A History of British Gardening
  5. ^ Genealogical display in Myddelton House museum, 2011
  6. ^ "Bowles, Edward Augustus (BWLS884EA)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of Cambridge.
  7. ^ Hadfield, op.cit.
  8. ^ Hadfield, op.cit.
  9. ^ [2]
  10. ^ Sally Festing (1991) Gertrude Jekyll
  11. ^ Festing, op.cit.
  12. ^ Quoted in Festing, op.cit.
  13. ^ Bowles (1914) My Garden in Spring
  14. ^ Hadfield, op.cit.. Farrer called Bowles "Uncle G": Festing, op.cit.
  15. ^ Festing, op.cit.
  16. ^ [3] Ellen Willmott and Gertrude Jekyll were the first female recipients of the RHS's Royal Victorian Medal, instituted in 1897 and, as noted, bestowed on Bowles in 1916. One of Jekyll's biographers wrote that Willmott "was in many ways as unusual as Gertrude" (Festing, op.cit.).
  17. ^ Handbook of Crocus and Colchicum (1924); Handbook of Narcissus (1934)
  18. ^ Hadfield, op.cit.
  19. ^ Hadfield, op.cit.
  20. ^ Daily Telegraph article Retrieved 6 February 2011
  21. ^ International Plant Names Index.  Bowles.

Template:Persondata


Stub icon

This article about a British botanist is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Edward_Augustus_Bowles&oldid=445457344"