The man who grew too much

Standing in his garden at Normanton Hall, in Nottinghamshire, retired County Court Judge John Vessey Machin looks on proudly at a bed of deep raspberry Hybrid Tea roses. This is the now-rare ‘H.V. Machin’, released in 1912 by Irish breeder Alex Dickson and named after John’s grandfather.

Henry Vessey Machin may go down in history as the world’s most prodigious amateur rose grower. He grew as many as 55,000 on his estate, purely for competing at exhibitions.

This is the story of an obsession – one that gripped many in Victorian Britain, spread across the world, and shaped our gardens for many decades. Its echoes linger today. The story starts about the time of Machin’s birth not far from where John and I are standing.

A vicar walked into a bar

On a cold April day in 1860, Samuel Reynolds Hole, a vicar from the Nottinghamshire village of Caunton, was invited to a Nottingham pub to judge roses. As he told it later in his immensely popular A Book about Roses, Hole did not grow any roses at the time, but what transpired that night was a road-to-Damascus experience that changed him forever.

“A prettier sight, a more complete surprise of beauty, could not have presented itself on that cold and cloudy morning,” he wrote. Afterwards, when judging was over and the men had rushed to see who had won, Hole was sent home clutching a bouquet. Within a week he had placed his first order of a dozen roses.

“Year by year my enthusiasm increased. … my Roses multiplied from a dozen to a score, from a score to a hundred, from a hundred to a thousand, from one to five thousand trees… They routed the rhubarb, they carried the asparagus with resistless force, they cut down the raspberries to a cane. They annexed that vegetable kingdom, and they retain it still.” – Samuel Reynolds Hole

Many years later he confessed to a more prosaic conversion story. One night after dinner, many years before 1860, while smoking in the garden, his eyes rested on a rose, ‘D’Aguesseau’. He was smitten and instantly became a votary of the Queen of Flowers. It is not as engaging a story (“one day he was having a fag in the garden”), but one suspects his obsession followed the same dramatic trajectory. It was to be repeated on an even grander scale with Machin.

Rose showing

In April 1857 Hole suggested in The Florist, Fruitist and Garden Miscellany magazine the idea of a GRAND NATIONAL ROSE SHOW. It took place in London the following July and was hugely successful. Thereafter it became an annual event. Smaller regional shows were added to the calendar as the hobby of growing and showing roses developed.

The National Rose Society, created in 1876, grew from this competitive culture. Hole was its inaugural President. At one point it had over 120,000 members – more than the RHS at the time. The Society existed to promote the rose, and it did so largely by organising exhibitions for breeders and growers. “They enable the general rose-loving public to see to what state of perfection the rose can be brought,” wrote Joseph Pemberton in 1908.

Into this world stepped Machin. A disciple of Hole, his story has similarities. In 1884, when he was just 25, he planted a dozen roses on his father’s thousand-acre estate at Gateford Hill, in Worksop. Two years later he exhibited at a local rose show, taking two seconds. And so the preoccupation took root.

He inherited the estate when his father died in 1889 and was soon filling fields with row upon row of roses. As his passion grew, so did his trophy cabinet.

And success

In 1895 Machin won 105 prizes – 55 firsts, 37 seconds and 13 thirds. That year, too, he secured for the second time the silver cup at the National Rose Society’s show at the Crystal Palace – for a display of 18 varieties of garden roses. In 1896-7 he won 88 firsts and 77 other prizes. He became Vice-President of the National Rose Society.

His small red, softback diary for 1894 records in scribbled pencil the cycle of work for the year – covering his roses with bracken in January; planting hundreds of seedling briars; removing suckers; piling leaf mould and 30 tons of cow manure on his dormant plants; liquid manuring and syringing them as they grew; applying soot to the leaves to prevent black spot. And so it went on. Of course, he did not do this all himself. Judging by how many days he records with the hunt, shooting pigeons or ferreting rabbits, he probably did very little manual work. But one assumes he supervised closely.

Moving into John’s office to forage through the family archives, we find a picture of his grandfather in flat cap and rolled-up sleeves, waistcoat adorned with a gold watch, and a small dicky bow tie at his collar. Alongside him are four smartly dressed gardeners. Machin poses mid-reach, carefully placing cut roses into a wooden exhibition case of 24 blooms. The box sits on a trolley ready to be carefully wheeled out of the fields and on to a train for competition.

Arise the Hybrid Tea

The great nurseries of the time were also competing – they had their own classification. Winning the top awards helped them sell their latest roses. As a result, one kind of rose came to dominate the production line – the Hybrid Tea. Its perfect form, upright shape and resilience when cut, made it ideal for the exhibition bench.

In 1909 the National Rose Society produced a catalogue of new roses introduced since 1906. Of the 456 listed, exactly half – 228 – were Hybrid Teas.

If they were dominating nursery catalogues, they were also shaping our gardens – and they did for decades. When I bought my Victorian house 30 years ago a rose bed arched across the lawn holding nothing but a line of colourful stand-to-attention Hybrid Teas. None had a scent.

It took till the 1950s for passionate growers like Graham Thomas, Vita Sackville-West and David Austin to spark a revival of interest in sweetly scented old shrub roses. They rescued them from obscurity and encouraged us to rethink how to use roses in our gardens in mixed beds.

It was now the turn of the Hybrid Teas to fall out of favour. And maybe this is why I am standing here with John, looking at the ‘H. V. Machin’ rose, feeling protective. This rose – beautiful, if not as healthy as more modern roses – has history.

‘H. V. Machin’ rose

Henry Machin bought many of his roses from the great Irish breeders, Dicksons. In 1912 they honoured his custom and friendship with the ‘H. V. Machin’ rose. It was exhibited for the first time at the National Show in Regents Park. Dicksons described it as a “dazzlingly, imperious, globular Rose of gigantic size. We consider it…one of the best exhibition Roses it has yet been our good fortune to produce… the embodiment of a perfect bloom, combining size, form and colour, the attributes demanded or required in a model exhibition flower.” It was awarded a gold medal by the National Rose Society.

Its release came just in time for an auspicious event. In 1913, bachelor Machin, then 54, decided at last to marry. The announcement of his engagement to 33-year-old Miss Evelyn Hawson appeared in the Tatler alongside that of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson.

They wed at St John’s Church in Worksop on October 2nd. In August Dicksons had written to apologise that they would not be able to supply any ‘H. V. Machin’ roses for the happy day as they had raided all their plants for bud wood for the following season. Yet newspaper reports suggest roses were a “conspicuous feature of the decorations” and chief among them this new rose.

The marriage was not to last long. On 29th August 1919 a maid entering the morning room at Gateford Hill found Machin dead in his armchair, with a pen in his hand and an unfinished letter in front of him.

Machin’s death

Machin was ruled to have had a heart attack. He may have aspired to a more fitting departure. When not showing roses he had given them away – often to local hospitals. A ward at one hospital was apparently christened the “Rose Ward” because of the number of roses he sent there. Machin once gave a matron a bunch of ‘Nephetos’ blooms. She spotted an old gardener casting such longing glances at the flowers from his bed that she gave him one. “He clutched it, pressed it to his nostrils in an ecstasy of admiration, and fell back dead with the flower still held tightly in his grasp.” Now that’s the way to go!

Within months of Machin’s death, Evelyn had his rose fields ploughed up. John says: “She quickly put the land to earning its keep again.”

The ‘H. V. Machin’ rose thrived for a few more years, performing well on the exhibition circuit, but as new roses emerged it fell out of favour. The blooms we are looking at today in John’s garden were secured from Germany’s famous Sangerhausen rosarium 50 years ago.

Sangerhausen is a home for roses on the brink of extinction – a fate that befell nearly every one of the 456 roses listed in that 1909 catalogue.

Modern breeders argue, as did those before them, that this is progress. And it is – we need the disease-resistant new varieties. But it is also sad. I may have to take a cutting from John and squeeze some space for it in my garden. Who needs a lawn anyway?

Banner image: Gentleman farmer Henry Vessey Machin admires some of the 55,000 roses he grew for competition. Image: John Vessey Machin collection