IN 1976, Rosemary and John Nicholson visited the graveyard of the church of St Maryat-Lambeth to see the tomb of the John Tradescants, celebrated 17th-century gardeners, explorers and antiquaries. They found a sarcophagus carved with fantastic evocations of the distant lands where the father and son travelled in search of plants for our gardens and exhibits for their Ark in Lambeth: England’s first museum to be opened to the public.
Nearby stood the tomb of another collector of exotics, William Bligh, surmounted by a sculpture of breadfruit, saplings of which he was endeavouring to transport from Tahiti to the Caribbean on HMS Bounty when his crew decided otherwise.
Here were two profoundly significant relics of our horticultural past and yet they were overgrown, neglected. Still more dismaying, the church, whose roots in this Thames-side site antedated the Norman Conquest, had been decommissioned, allowed to fall derelict and doomed to demolition. The Nicholsons determined on a course of campaigning and funding appeals that succeeded in saving St Mary’s and enabling them to convert it into the world’s first museum of garden history.
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