Loddiges family
From these small beginnings, its initial catalogue appearing in 1777[2] the nursery business gained a specialist market in Britain, and was increasingly able to attract clients from estates and botanical gardens throughout Europe.
From 1818 to 1833 Conrad and Sons published 20 issues of The Botanical Cabinet [es], a magazine consisting of over 1000 coloured plates of rare plants that were introduced from around the world into the nursery's gardens and hothouses.
[4] Although the business closed in the 1850s, it leaves an important legacy in many of our gardens and parks, since a number of the attractive plants we take for granted, were first introduced into cultivation by Loddiges Nursery.
Conrad's son George Loddiges is generally credited with raising the profile of the exotic Hackney nursery at least as greatly, if not more so, than his eminent horticulturalist father.
In 1833 the Loddiges began using the newly developed Wardian Case to transport live plants from Australia, and also had a keen interest in microscopy and hummingbirds, one of which, the Marvelous Spatuletail, was named in his honour.
Proof of capability of variation[5] Although George Loddiges' arboretum was widely praised, his better known horticultural endeavour was to establish the world's largest hothouse in his Hackney Botanic Nursery, and invent a system of warm mist-like rain to maintain beautiful tropical palms, epiphytic orchids, ferns and camellias in almost perfect environmental conditions akin to a 'tropical rainforest'.
Visiting the hothouses on 30 March 1822, the Quaker pharmacist William Allen, his Cousin Emily Birkbeck and Anna Hanbury noted: We all went to Loddiges Nursery to see the camellias which are now in full bloom and very beautiful !
So infectious was the interest that George Loddiges and fellow nurserymen created during the early nineteenth century in the splendour of new ferns, trees, palms - indeed plants of all kinds - that he was prompted to begin marketing a series of volumes containing coloured engravings of the many new species and varieties.
Sensitively preserving the existing early eighteenth century parkland laid out by Lady Mary Abney and Isaac Watts, he introduced an educational landscape around the perimeter which was open to the public free of charge: a vast arboretum of 2,500 species and varieties, labelled alphabetically from A to Z rather than arranged in a more conventional way.
In May 1838, John James Audubon published the fifth, and final, volume of his "Ornithological Biography", the textual supplement to his epic "Birds of America" series of 435 plates (1826-1838).
Similarly, the part of the nursery that was owned by the Loddiges family in freehold, was becoming more valuable as building land, whilst losing its attractive countryside village setting.
Conrad Loddiges II offered the whole of the exotic plant stock to Kew Gardens for a sum of £9000 (20 years earlier the collection was valued at £200,000) but this was refused.
