Thomas Blaikie Scottish Gardener to French Nobility

So many Scottish gardeners south to the Sassanach that the two are almost synonymous. Indeed James Boswell, himself a Scotsman, tells in his biography Life of Johnson, his subject once pungently pointed out, “The noblest prospect a Scotsman ever sees, is the high road that leads him to England.”

Many a Scottish plantsman made their mark there, so much so their names are commemorated botanically. William Forsythia (1737-1804), supervisor of Kensington Palace gardens is remembered in Forsythia. James Thomas Mackay (1775-1862) botanist and gardener lent his name to Mackaya. And of course, one can hardly turn in the garden without encountering a plant named after collector Robert Fortune.

Thomas Blaikie was not so blessed botanically. Obeying Samuel Johnson’s dictum, he rode the road to England, only to be dispatched to collect and record rare species in the Alps during 1775 and 1776, the year of the American Revolution. It was a long way from his birthplace of Corstophine Hill, then just outside Edinburgh.

Whilst hunting down plants at high elevations, he met the controversial French writer and philosopher Françoise-Marie Arouet, better known to us as Voltaire, who was to die just two years later. 

Whether this meeting turned him into a Francophile we will probably never know. However, after turning for a brief sojourn in Britain, 1777 found him supervising he Normandy gardens of Comte de Lauraguais. Unfortunately Blaikie, lacking the legendary financial acumen of his countrymen, failed to observe, as Ogden Nash elegantly put it years later: ‘No McTavish/Was ever lavish.’ The Comte failed to pay up, forcing Blaikie to mutter something about Auld Lang Syne.

A more reliable employer was in the offing. In 1777, Comte d’Artois, younger brother of Louis XVI and later to become Charles X, accepted a bet that he could not build an elegant chateau with landscaped grounds on some 60 acres in the Bois de Boulogne, Paris within three months. 

It took 800 workmen at a cost of three million livres, but in just 63 days from September the neoclassical Château de Bagatelle was completed. The immediate surroundings were landscaped in French landscape style by Françoise-Joseph Bélanger to suit French tastes with several formal gardens. The enclosing parkland was laid out the naturalistic English landscape style by Scottish garden-designer Thomas Blaikie. He added what were all the rage at the time back in Britain, an obelisk, a pagoda, hermits’ huts and grottoes – mostly now removed. 

The English landscape style at the Château de Bagatelle

The English landscape style at the Château de Bagatelle espoused by Blaikie was much admired by opera singer Sophie Arnould, mistress to Bélanger. So the gardener from Scotland rolled up another client, designing a garden for her in 1779. The following year, even as rumblings of what would become the French Revolution could have been heard by those with wit to hear, Duc de Chartres (later Duc d’Orleans finally Philippe Égalité) commissioned him to design some of his public gardens, including the Winter Garden at the Parc Monceau.

Following the failure of the Ancien Régime and the French Revolution in 1789, Blaikie was ruined as his clients were unable to pay. Rescue was just around the corner, however. Following her marriage to Napoléon Bonaparte and his departure to campaign in Egypt, in 1799 Josephine purchased the Chateau de Malmaison, then on the outskirts of Paris.

Admiring Blaikie’s landscaping at the Château de Bagatelle, she was determined that her new home would be surrounded gardens in the same style, planted with exotic species. Blaikie was only too happy to indulge in his new, imperial client. Not so pleased was her husband, demanding, “Why an English garden?” One could see his point. Britain ruled the waves, blockading overseas trade. Nelson had scuttled his Egyptian pretensions, blowing the French fleet out of the water at the Battle of Aboukir Bay along with the boy who waited too long on the burning deck of the French flaghip.

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Josephine, raised in the heady scents and lush landscapes of the French West Indies, was determined to have her way. Military and political genius Napoléon might be, when it came to gardens, he was simply out of date. Gone were the grand parterres of Le Notre at Versailles. If Comte d’Artois could have an English landscape at the Château de Bagatelle, then why could not Thomas Blaikie design her one at Malmaison?

So it was that while her husband was bringing death and disaster to hundreds of thousands, the gardens of the Chateau de Malmaison were to become a botanical mecca., rivalling those being developed across La Manche at Kew.  

Following Josephine’s death in 1811 and the end of the Napoleonic Wars four years later, prospects were bleak for the ex-pat gardener. Lacking contracts and enduring a robbery of a small fortune at his Paris house, Blaikie was forced to return to work as bailiff for Comte de Lauraguais with similar disputes following the restoration. 

Fortunately the new Duc d’Orleans who had become King Louis Philippe I, had a good memory. In 1826 he directed the award of a royal pension of 600 francs per annum to the hard-up garden designer. Thomas Blaikie died at his house on the rue de Vignes, Paris on 19 July 1838, age 88, proof, if any was needed, that gardening encourages a long life.

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