MARS IS A GARDENER
As a feature in the latest issue of Rakesprogress reveals, Napoleon was a gardener. Tom Loxley talks to the author of the piece, historian Ruth Scurr, about the man who built gardens as well as empires…
Before he began making war and building empires, Napoleon Bonaparte was developing another obsession that stayed with him until the day he died: a love of nature. Gardens, in particular, punctuated his life. From the vegetable plot he tended at military school, to his family’s mulberry nursery on Corsica, to the botanical gardens of revolutionary Paris, to the walled garden of the Hougoumount farmhouse where he met his Waterloo, to his last garden, built in exile on the windswept rocky outcrop of St Helena, Napoleon was never more at home than when surrounded by plants. Historian Ruth Scurr’s new biography, Napoleon: a life in gardens and shadows – published earlier this summer to celebrate 200 years since Napoleon’s birth – tells his story afresh. Here, in conversation with rakesprogress, she reveals what inspired her to write about this hidden side of Napoleon Bonaparte, a man who built gardens as well as empires, who sowed seeds as well as war across Europe and beyond. And who once seemingly grafted an ash onto an elm – a tree that lives to this day…
I’m assuming the idea to tell Napoleon’s story through gardens came to you because you love gardening?
Yes, I absolutely do. I don’t know if this is a common story, but it suddenly entered my life when I was in my late 30s. I bought a little terraced house, and I knew it had a garden, and was pleased about that, but I was completely unconnected to the garden for the first 18 months I lived there. Then, suddenly, I started gardening, and learning. I made a lot of friends through that and now we exchange plants, and if we’re going to meet up, it’s, “Well, should we go to the garden centre or nursery?” Sorry, it makes me sound really old.
No, no, this is a common story. What’s interesting, I think, is once you start talking to people about gardens, you start to discover so much more – and not just about the plants…
Absolutely. Neither of my parents gardened at all when we were growing up, but both my grandmothers had been quite serious gardeners. They’d both grown fruit and veg, and known a lot about plants. But it seemed like that had skipped a generation. My grandmother was married to a farmer in Albrighton - they had the farm next to David Austin, the rose grower, and his farm was going to wrack and ruin because he was spending all his time with his roses. So they rented his land. When my grandmother died, we took her ashes back to Albrighton, and I bought my first two roses.
How many roses have you got now?
God, the last time I counted, it was getting on for 20. I’m really, really into them. I’ve got the Iceberg and The Generous Gardener, the climbers and things, but then I’m also into to the single flowering, the Gallica roses. Because even though they’re only once-flowering, they are just such a show when they’re doing it. I’ve got the Tuscany rose and the Officinalis, the very sort of bright pink one. They’re in bloom at the moment. And I also love Boule de Neige. I have, of course, the Albrighton Rambler. It’s a real love affair for me.
So, you’re a historian with a gardening habit. When you discovered that Napoleon had a garden at school, did you think, “Hang on a minute, there’s something here”?
I knew I wanted to write about Napoleon, and I wanted to write about him in a way that included a lot of the people around him who don’t normally make it into the story. I didn’t want to just be doing Napoleon and his generals, I wanted a way to situate his life in amongst the other lives that he touched in a much broader way than you tend to find in those more conventional biographies. “Why am I so drawn to writing about him?”, I thought. I realised it was this image of him at the end of his life, when he’d lost everything, having that garden on St Helena. That was what was really, really haunting and had stuck in my mind. So I went back to that image of him gardening, and I started to notice, “Hang on a minute, he had that garden at school, and the Botanical Garden in Paris was really important to him.” And then there was Malmaison, where his wife Josephine lived. I thought, “Well, this is all very well, but what is gonna happen about Waterloo?” I’ve got to include Waterloo. I can’t write a biography on Napoleon with no Waterloo! Then, miraculously, I found that the walled garden was at the centre of the battle.
We’re not history buffs, but we love nature, and like to read stories about people who have connected with the natural world, especially surprising stories. And I was really surprised to read that Napoleon had gardened all his life.
I’m so pleased to focus on the gardening side, because certainly I hoped that it wouldn’t just be the usual Napoleon history buffs that we’re going to be interested in this. Because I do think it’s a story about all the different things that gardens can mean across a particular lifetime.
You said that nature was a big deal in the late 18th century when Napoleon was starting out on his career and you write that at his French military school all the cadets were given a patch to garden. Was that unusual?
I think the connecting link between those things is science. All his life, he was very interested in scientific discovery, and that included the botanists and the biologists, the chemists, all the people who are trying to understand the natural world in a manner free from the old religious constraints on understanding. He, in that sense, is absolutely a man of his time. Right before he went into exile, he suddenly has this idea that, “Okay, well, that political career seems to be over, but I would have liked to have been a scientist, so perhaps now I can start making some discoveries.”
And this veneration of nature and science meant that after the revolution the French even went so far as to rip up the calendar and replace it with a revolutionary calendar and name the year again, after the seasons.
Absolutely. I love that calendar. You can follow it on Twitter … it’s like, “Today in the revolutionary calendar, we’re celebrating the pitchfork.” Or, “Today, in the revolutionary calendar, we’re celebrating irises.” All the imagery for that calendar was drawn from nature, and that was exactly what the revolution was trying to do, to say: “Listen, we used to have a calendar that had all these saints’ days, it was dominated by the church and by religion, but we’ve had the revolution. Let’s have a new calendar, let’s start again. And that’s going to be based on the natural world.”
So when Napoleon seizes power in the Coup of 18 Brumaire, that’s the 18th day in the month of the mists, isn’t it?
Absolutely. All the dates in his life, for that period of his rise to power, they are given in my book in both the revolutionary and the Gregorian calendar. Although Napoleon eventually went back to the old calendar because the new one was extremely complex. It was very difficult for people to adapt to, as beautiful and engaging as it is - practically, it was difficult.
When you think of Napoleon and his approach to gardens, and obviously you talk about specific gardens throughout his life, do you think his instincts were to conquer nature? That in reality he simply wanted to control it?
Yes, I do. I think he favoured, aesthetically, the traditional French topiary, straight lines, avenues, order imposed on nature. His first wife, Josephine, was a very keen plantswoman, and part of her identity in recovering from the trauma of the terror was to create this beautiful garden, but she wanted it in the English style; picturesque, with vistas and winding paths, so that you look at it like a landscape rather than this very orderly, rigid imposition of a pattern. They clashed in that regard.
Did she get her way in much else?
She had a very important and real relationship with him. And the respect in which she finally did not get her way was that she couldn’t have another child. She’d had two children with her previous husband, who had been executed during the revolution, but she couldn’t conceive a child with Napoleon. He started to believe that this was absolutely necessary to secure the future of France; he wanted to reintroduce a hereditary line to secure what would happen after his death. And so people were cruel and bitter about that, saying, “her garden is so fertile, but she herself is infertile.” She was distressed to be cast aside, but she and Napoleon remained friends.
But initially, theirs was a hot romance, wasn’t it? And flowers were the heart of it. Violets.
That’s right. Violets recur throughout the book. She had the violets on their wedding day, which was very quick, just before he was about to go off again with the army, then violets remain her favourite flower, and she asks that he always give her violets on their wedding anniversary. The violet becomes the symbol of the movement to bring him back from his first exile on Elba. Lots of the associated imagery and visual codes involve the violet, a perennial - it will come back in the spring.
People forget that Napoleon came from Corsica. Was he really a country boy?
Yes, I think so. He loved to walk or ride in the countryside. There are various stories of him galloping off on his own at certain points, when he wanted to think about something or just be immersed in the natural surroundings. In Corsica, as a young man he struggled to establish a mulberry nursery, which was associated with his family’s bankruptcy, the death of his father, and the injustice of the French old regime, with the monarchy and the government demanding their loan back. He starts off as a real Corsican nationalist, leading the resistance to France, but then decides he’s going to become part of the revolution, and goes back to France. But he misses Corsica terribly, he misses the scenery, the plants, and even the smell. When he was exiled to Elba, one of the first things he does is start saying, “Well, okay, there’s a bit of a downsize going on here… But never mind, we can still make a great garden.” He starts importing citrus trees, and he chooses to import mulberry trees, and that’s very interesting. Because the mulberry, of all trees, ought to have had bad associations for him.
Do you think someone of his standing – a general, even if he was a deposed emperor – would actually have got his hands dirty and worked the soil? Or would he have been standing there directing other people?
That’s true when it comes to the gardens constructed when was at the height of his power, at Malmaison, and Fontainebleau and elsewhere. Even on Elba, where he was first sent in exile, he would no doubt have been directing the gardeners. I imagine he’d pass through the garden and say: “This needs watering. Can somebody get on and do it?” But after his final defeat at Waterloo and his exile to St Helena, he does have the time to get involved with the physical contribution to making a garden, precisely because his doctor has recommended it. He had become very out of shape and his doctor saw gardening as a way he could get fit. Initially he refused to take exercise because he hated being followed around by the British guards, and he hated being “spied on”, as he saw it. But when his doctor has an inspired suggestion and says, “Well, okay, you can exercise in your own garden.” He says, “Yes, you’re right. That’s what we’re going to do.”
Do you think he would have known how to graft a mulberry tree?
I did look into this, and I do think he would have known. Whether he did it or not is another question. There’s this magical tree on Île d'Aix, which is the last place he was on French soil before he left for St Helena in 1815. After Waterloo, he fled to Rochefort, the port, and then he had a few days on Île d'Aix trying to work out what to do. And he was there when he surrendered to the British. And that was basically where he left French soil forever. But there’s a tree at the house that he stayed in, which is now a museum, with a notice by it saying that Napoleon was a competent enough gardener to make this complicated and unusual graft. He’s grafted, or allegedly has grafted, ash on to elm. You can see the graft; it’s very, very old.
We think of Napoleon as someone who killed a lot of people. You could call him a mass murderer. But here he is, nurturing nature – giving new life to a tree? That’s an odd disconnect isn’t it?
Yes, that’s right. Historians disagree about how many people died, whether or not all of the battles, or some of the battles, or most of the battles were his fault. Was he someone who inherited wars from the revolution? Other European powers certainly started wars with him, but there is no question that he was at the heart, at the very, very heart, of an astonishing amount of bloodshed. As you say, it’s the starkest of possible contrasts between that, and someone who would be interested in a grafting, and bringing life to, those sticks and nurturing them.
Is that tree all that remains of his gardening legacy?
All the gardens that he created have gone really. There have been heroic efforts on St Helena to restore his garden: it’s got the sunken paths, and a very elaborate bird cage that was built for him by the Chinese labourers who worked with him on his garden on St Helena. So there are little hints and remnants of that garden. But St Helena is a very hostile gardening environment; the altitude is very high, it is subject to heavy, dense mists coming across the south Atlantic. It would be very poignant if they managed to restore that garden. A museum holds the birdcage, which was given as a present to his family when they went to St Helena to bring Napoleon’s remains back to Paris, and they allowed me to include the photograph in my book. That’s the final sense of his actual, physical gardening.
But if we wanted to see a tree that Napoleon had very possibly grafted, we should head to the Ile de Aix?
Yes. My children and I often would go to La Rochelle for a holiday, and you can get a boat across to this island. When I realised that was the last place he’d been on French soil, I wanted to go, and then that’s when I discovered it. Whether or not he himself grafted it, I think it’s a wonderful thing to believe.
Ruth Scurr’s new biography, Napoleon: a life in gardens and shadows is published by Penguin and available from here
You can read Ruth Scurr’s feature in Rakesprogress Issue 13
