Ask an artist to examine the history of any place, person or institution and the outcome is likely to be very different from anything that an art historian would produce. Jyll Bradley’s publication illustrates this magnificently.
Me Roscoe’s Garden was one of the key components of the Fragrant project, exploring the extraordinary story of one of Britain’s greatest plant collections, the Liverpool Botanical Collection. Significantly, Bradley is an artist based in London. Working as artist-in-residence in Liverpool she made a virtue of her lack of prior knowledge, for it has enabled her to share a journey of discovery with her readers. The images are an integral part of the project, and most of the book takes the form of a photographic essay examining the connections between plants and people, the images filling entire pages without any further interpretation. We must turn to the end of the book to see them again in miniature with their titles, dates and photographic credits. There are no page numbers, and the factual history of the Collection is revealed through a long essay composed of small discrete articles, rather than formal narrative. The writing is simple yet passionate, and the story told clearly and forcefully.
William Roscoe (1753–1831) was born in Liverpool, the son of a market gardener, and trained in law. He fell in love with Italy and its history, writing a life of Lorenzo de’ Medici in 1796 that made his reputation as an historian. He also pioneered the collecting of early Italian art in Britain, although he never visited Italy himself. When he went bankrupt in 1816 much of his large collection was sold; some of it was later acquired by the Walker Art Gallery.
Roscoe was elected Member of Parliament for Liverpool in 1806. Although he stood down the following year, in this short period he was able to cast his vote in favour of the abolition of the slave trade. Roscoe was a Unitarian, and his outspoken-ness against the slave trade – on which so much of Liverpool’s financial fortune was built – made both friends and enemies in his native city.
By 1803 Roscoe had founded Liverpool Botanical Collection. It developed into one of the finest of its day filled with the rare and newly discovered plants arriving through the city’s port from the growing British empire. In 1846 it moved to a larger site and it moved again in 1964. By the mid-twentieth century the Collection included the greatest collection of orchids ever amassed in municipal Britain. In the 1980’s it closed to the public in a bitter political storm that accompanied the other political upheavals in Liverpool at the time. Much was dispersed, a tragedy that contrasts all too sadly with a glorious past. Nonetheless, the orchids and many other plants still survive in glasshouses, some housed in Croxteth Country Park and some at Greenhill Nursery, where dedicated staff continue to nurture them. Dried plants are now in Liverpool Museum’s Herbarium and the books are in the City Library. Bradley draws together various themes: the plants and their collectors, the gardeners who have kept the homeless collection going, and the parks and buildings in which they have been located.
The wider Fragrant project included the re-emergence of the Roscoe Collection as an exhibit at the Chelsea Flower Show in 2008. it was the first Liverpool City contribution in several decades and one designed by Bradley with the gardeners to celebrate the city’s year as European Capital of Culture. Central to the exhibit was a small greenhouse, emulating the first botanic garden, and inside was a selection of Roscoea plants, the Himalayan genus named after Roscoe.
The Botanic Garden exhibition was held at the Walker Art Gallery (20 September – 1 March 2009) for which Bradley created an installation, a ‘virtual’ Liverpool botanic garden comprising an installation of light-boxes with panoramic images. In one light-box two botanists pressed an orchid in the herbarium; in another, two security guards settled in for a palm-house night-watch. This was a garden that did not exist, but which drew on the hopes of many Liverpudlians for the creation of a new garden. It was shown along with paintings from the permanent collection that once belonged to Roscoe.
Bradley’s Fragrant project was developed and produced in collaboration with London Artists Projects and curated by the Bluecoat in partnership with National Museums Liverpool, Liverpool City Council’s Library and Parks and Environment Service. Bradley has been quoted as saying that: ‘I hope we do Mr Roscoe proud.’ Indeed she has.
Patricia Andrew
Art Historian, Edinburgh