Miss Willmott's Ghosts: the extraordinary life and gardens of a forgotten genius

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One article in The Garden of November 1887 on " Sea Hollies " (along with an accompanying illustration as can be seen below), describes the " Giant Sea Holly (E. It was a time when collecting and status were strongly linked - William Burrell and Isabella Stewart Gardner whose collections are now the basis for museums - were contemporaries of Willmott. She tried to set up various businesses, a garden centre, a plant rental scheme, a seed catalogue - they were all loss making in the end, but they were pre-cursors of the types of businesses which would take off decades after her death. Miss Willmott and Gertrude Jekyll were the only two women amongst 58 men to be awarded the RHS Victoria Medal of Honour (VMH) in 1897, the year of its institution to mark Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee.

Pollination occurs when pollen is transferred from flower to flower by animals such as bird, bees, bats, butterflies, beetles and moths. Interesting biography of Ellen Willmott, one of only two original female VMH holders and superb Horticulturalist. Ellen Ann Willmott was a remarkable woman whose achievements in horticulture, botany, landscape architecture, photography and more, should have made her one of the most well-known trailblazers of her age.Miss Willmott was a plantswoman extraordinaire who at one time employed 104 gardeners at her own home.

This is a book with it all: gossip, sisters, rivalry, squandered inheritance, forbidden love, bad marriages and, at the heart of it all, trailblazing talent. The pollination seed collection brings together a range of plants and flowers that are not only beautiful, but will also help attract a wide variety of pollinators to your garden and help enhance the ecosystem. A wealthy heiress by the time she turned 30, Willmott devoted her life to learning about (and acquiring) plants, travel and creating gardens at properties she purchased in France and Italy, in addition to maintaining the grounds at Warley Place. When you hear the lists of her purchases read out - historic instruments, decorative silver, paintings, antique carpets, tapestries, sculpture - you can see the links to their collections. It’s quite a statuesque plant, forming an innocuous evergreen rosette of broad, heart-shaped plain green, lower leaves the first year, but then sending up in the second a stiff, thick, blue-green stalk of smaller sessile (without a petiole) stem leaves that are narrower, distinctly bluish with ivory veins and surrounded in nasty-looking prickles.Ellen was a very wealthy woman so that helped her on her plant journey but gave her a huge determination to be the best she could and to challenge attitudes around her. The plant has a commanding presence, and while it dies after flowering, a generous crop of seeds ensures subsequent generations. One of the first women to be awarded the RHS’s Victoria Medal of Honour in 1897; celebrated as a hybridizer of various plant species, most notably narcissus; and famous for her book on roses, The Genus Rosa .