Jyll Bradley with her book "Mr Roscoes Garden" in front of one of the photographs on display at the Walker Art Gallery.
Will a Capital of Culture project save Liverpool’s amazing Botanic Gardens collection and revive its lost worldwide reputation? Peter Elson reports.
WHEN the Militant regime destroyed the Botanic Greenhouses at Harthill, it was one of those calamities that defined the fall of old Liverpool.
But, in what is an archetypal story of the city, could this be the moment that sparks the phoenix- like rise of the fourth – yes, fourth – botanic gardens in 245 years?
William Roscoe, the great Liverpool polymath to whom we owe so much, created the town’s first Botanic Gardens, which opened in 1803 at Mount Pleasant.
Up until then, Liverpool’s astronomic commercial success was not accompanied by any cultural kudos. Roscoe changed all that.
“The Botanic Gardens put Liverpool on the cultural map,” says Jyll Bradley, author of an impressive new book, Mr Roscoe’s Garden.
“Until then, Liverpool was regarded by many as a brash place of outrageous fortune, not one of refinement.
“Suddenly, the Botanic Gardens meant that cultured people from all over the world wanted to visit Liverpool and see all these exotic specimens.”
This new book is part of a broader project undertaken by Jyll, commissioned by Liverpool Culture Company with National Museums Liverpool.
It includes an installation exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery and an award-winning display, Mr Roscoe’s Garden, seen at this year’s Chelsea Flower Show.
A parallel Walker exhibition, curated by Xanthe Brooke, shows 31 priceless paintings from Roscoe’s private collection (on which the gallery was founded). This appropriately includes The Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, c1515-50.
Roscoe, a lawyer and banker, with a strong artistic drive, cleverly built his first Botanic Gardens on Liverpool’s growing links across the world, by persuading merchants, ship- owners and captains to collect seeds and plants on his behalf.
So, the very thriving trade that made such a rough and tough seaport was turned to the higher level of cultural tourism. Any similarity of this project to current circumstances is not coincidental.
But where are the Botanic Gardens now? Jyll says: “They’re everywhere and nowhere.”
The Liverpool Botanical Collection rapidly outgrew Mount Pleasant and, with its original curator, John Shepherd, moved to Edge Lane, Wavertree, in 1836.
During the Second World War a stray bomb landed nearby in 1941, blowing the great glasshouses apart and the surviving plants were taken into safekeeping.
