Fox Talbot's Botanic Garden: W.H. Fox Talbot's early experiments with photography at Lacock Abbey were in part prompted by his passion for botany, as Katie Fretwell explains

Apollo, April, 2004 by Katie Fretwell

Wlliam Henry Fox Talbot (1800-77), a brilliant man of many talents (Fig. 1), is best known as one of the pioneers of photography, and, above all, for his invention of the calotype--or negative-positive--process in 1840. (1) What is less well known is that it was his interest in plants, and the search for an improved method of recording them, that led to his ground-breaking discovery. At his home at Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire, he developed and stocked the Botanic Garden specifically in order to pursue his own studies. (2)

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Lacock Abbey, built as a nunnery in the thirteenth century, survives largely intact despite several campaigns of alterations and additions. After the Abbey was suppressed in 1539, it was bought by Sir William Sharington (1495?-1553), who created a formal garden of large courts around the south and east sides of the house which would have been best appreciated from the banqueting room at the top of his new octagonal tower. A descendant of Sharington, John Ivory Talbot (d. 1772), added a ha-ha, a formal canal and a terrace in the early eighteenth century. In 1753, the amateur architect Sanderson Miller (1716-80) rebuilt the Great Hall and designed a Gothic archway for the carriage drive. Around the same time, Lancelot 'Capability' Brown (1716-83) was paid two hundred and fifty pounds, perhaps for creating a new drive, moving the road further away, and laying out the paddock as a setting for the new hall. Later in the eighteenth century, the Reverend William Davenport continued the naturalisation of the landscape, removing the old formal garden to the north of the Abbey.

William Henry Fox Talbot, the grandson of the Reverend Davenport, was born at Lacock in 1800. His father died soon afterwards, and the family moved out and let the Abbey. It was not until 1827 that Fox Talbot returned to live at Lacock, with his mother, Lady Elisabeth, her second husband, Captain Feilding, and their two daughters.

From an early age Fox Talbot had been keenly interested in plants; he and a friend, C.W. Trevelyan, documented the local flora of their school, Harrow, precociously publishing The Flora and Fauna of Harrow in 1811. They continued to correspond on plant matters after going up to university--Fox Talbot to Cambridge and Trevelyan to Oxford. As a boy, Fox Talbot concentrated his studies on mosses, probably inspired by Sir William Jackson Hooker's (1785-1865) discovery of the rare Buxbaumia aphylla. He corresponded with the leading botanists of the day, and described plants in Glamorganshire to Lewis Weston Dillwyn at the age of fourteen. Other correspondents included William Hooker, who introduced him to the Reverend James Dalton of Croft in Yorkshire, an expert on mosses and sedges. Dalton encouraged Fox Talbot to extend his studies to other plant groups and he soon began gathering plant material on travels abroad. By the age of twenty-nine, Fox Talbot was a respected botanist and a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London. (3)

When the family moved back to the ancestral home at Lacock, Fox Talbot took charge of the garden. Almost immediately he began setting up his own Botanic Garden, taking over an old stone-walled enclosure, formerly the common or stable yard, next to the kitchen garden. Here John McPhail, the gardener, was at work trenching in 1828 to create beds for the already burgeoning plant collection. Later, greenhouses were added to widen the range of plants. Fox Talbot's careful and extensive notes show that he was recording plants, examining their structure, and applying taxonomic principles, as well as experimenting with horticultural and management techniques--for example, comparing methods of seed preparation, layering copsewood and soil-tilling. These activities took place side by side with his researches on chemicals and investigations into possible photographic techniques.

At first, Fox Talbot produced 'photogenic drawings'--made by exposing to the sun drawing paper coated in a solution of silver nitrate--as a means of recording flesh plant material (Fig. 2). These experiments led him to develop the calotype process, and the production, in 1835, of the first ever negative, a picture of the Oriel window at Lacock. He went on to make many further photographs of the garden, plants, local people and landscapes, developing a degree of attention to artistic detail akin to painting of the time. (4) Unfortunately, he does not seem to have purposely photographed his Botanic Garden, although it appears in the background of a picture of his children at play (Fig. 3).

[FIGURES 2-3 OMITTED]

Fox Talbot soon began acquiring plants from further afield. Throughout his life he travelled a great deal, mainly in Europe, visiting France, Germany, Italy and the Alps, everywhere listing and describing plants. In 1826, he had made a major botanical trip to the Ionian Islands off the west coast of Greece--to Corfu, Zante and Cefalonia--setting up a herbarium of Ionian plants, which are now held at Kew. Even his honeymoon to northern Italy in 1833, on his marriage to Constance Mundy of Markeaton, Derbyshire, turned into a botanising trip. Fox Talbot visited horticultural and botanic gardens abroad, such as the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, whilst maintaining an interest in native British flora, recording plants around Lacock.