Bird poo fuelled the First World War and also financed this manor house with a plant collection that rivals Kew
Melanie Bryan recounts the green-tinged history of Aldenham House.
The Gibbs family fortune was made in shipping and banking — and an exclusive concession on extremely profitable Peruvian guano. (Guano is the accumulated nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium-rich waste of seabirds. It is one of the most powerful organic fertilisers in the world and helped to fuel the First World War thanks to its use as an ingredient in gunpowder.)
When his father died, Henry 'Hucks' Gibbs joined the family business. In time, he would take complete control of it and work as the director and then governor of the Bank of England.
Among all of this work, Gibbs did find time to play and indulge his passion for gardening. He certainly had the fertiliser required to adequately feed one.
The Yew Garden was photographed for Country Life in 1900 and 1924.
In 1869, he acquired Aldenham House — an imposing Queen Anne-style, red brick manor house in the commutable district of Elstree, Hertfordshire. The land was flat. Unrelentingly flat. And the soil was heavy with clay. This, however, was no problem for a man with Gibbs’s vision.
He laid out impressive formal gardens and acquired neighbouring parcels of land. One of these included part of the town's High Street which he rerouted away from his home and sunk into a 10-foot cutting so as not to spoil the view from his pleasure grounds.
James Pulham and Sons — the brains behind a form of decorative concrete called Pulhamite — were called in to create a water garden. They used rubble as a base and fashioned small hills out of Pulhamite with waterfalls cascading down them, and Pulhamite old-world-style bridges.
A groundsman tending to one of the artificial ponds enhanced with Pulhamite rocks.
Pulham and Sons and Gibbs were assisted in their endeavours by the latter's son, Vicary, a confirmed bachelor, head gardener Edwin Beckett, a shrubs and trees expert called Arthur J. Sweet, and a team of 58 gardeners.
Together, Hucks, Vicary, Beckett and Sweet amassed a mind-boggling collection of plants that was so vast and so varied that Aldenham was said to rival Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
Vicary — a disqualified MP who would go on to be editor of the first two editions of The Complete Peerage — was an obsessive plant collector, collating rare specimens of trees, shrubs, and flowers from around the world for Beckett, Sweet and the team to tend.
Hucks died in 1907, but his horticultural legacy was secure and the team went on to win numerous awards including RHS Victoria Medal of Honours for Vicary and Sweet, and multiple RHS Chelsea Flower Show medals for Beckett (specifically for his work with vegetables). All three men wrote articles for Country Life and published books on their specialist subjects.
One of the numerous greenhouses at Aldenham, filled with rare rock plant specimens.
Upon his death in 1932, Vicary had collated more than 10,000 species of trees and shrubs at Aldenham, including more than 200 varieties of oak trees alone. It was truly unique.
In 1933, Vicary’s older brother, Lord Aldenham, rented out the house and it was converted into a club. Auctioneers were called in to dispose of the plants and, very sadly, 60 years of extraordinary horticultural history were brought to a close.
The house was requisitioned by the BBC for the duration of the Second World War. It went on to serve as picturesque backdrop for television shows such as The Saint and The Avengers and an MGM film called The Village of the Damned and was then turned into a school. It is still one today.
The playing fields are surrounded by some impressive specimens of trees, a small reminder of Hucks, Vicary, Beckett and Sweet.
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