Joseph Paxton

In 1827, Paxton married Sarah Bown, the Chatsworth housekeeper's niece, whom he met on his first day of work at Chatsworth.

Joseph Paxton died on June 8, 1865, at his home at Rockhills, Sydenham. His wife remained at their house on the Chatsworth Estate until her death in 1871.

Joseph Paxton was born on August 3, 1803, in Milton Bryan, Bedfordshire, in a farming family. He was the seventh son of a yeoman farmer.

At the age of 15, he became a garden boy for Sir Gregory Osborne Page-Turner at Battlesden Park, near Woburn. After changing several garden jobs, he obtained a position at the Horticultural Society's Chiswick Gardens, in 1823.

As the Horticultural Society's gardens were close to the gardens of William Cavendish, 6th Duke of Devonshire, Paxton met Duke and the Duke was impressed with Paxton’s work. He offered Paxton the position of Head Gardener at Chatsworth, which Paxton gleefully accepted.

In 1831, along with working as the head gardener, Paxton also started designing conservatories at Chatsworth using the ridge-and-furrow system of glazed roofs, a system invented by Loudon in 1817.

He distinguished himself with the ‘Great Stove’ conservatory at Chatsworth, built between 1836 and 1840, which was the largest glass building in the world at that time.

Subsequently, he designed the biggest glass-house in Europe, made up entirely using sheet-glass. The curved ridge-and-furrow glazed timber roof was carried on arched laminated-timber frames supported on cast-iron columns and buttressed by the side arches over the flanking aisles.

During 1838-48, he created the village of Edensor, near Chatsworth, drawing on a range of styles and also worked on public parks in Liverpool, Glasgow, Halifax, and Birkenhead Park, the last one of the first English public parks. He successfully constructed the 'emperor fountain', at 280 feet, the tallest in Europe.

During the 1840s, he continued to work on landscape gardening and lay out of public parks. He also designed various country houses and other domestic buildings.

Paxton’s most elegant masterpiece was ‘The Crystal Palace’ for the ‘Great Exhibition’ of 1851. The building was erected in just six months, with 293,655 panes of glass, 330 huge iron columns and 24 miles of gutters.

He also built the Great Conservatory or Stove, a huge glasshouse, and a lily house specially constructed for a giant lily with a design based on the leaves of the plant.