From: Cknowlton1@aol.com
Date: Mon, 8 Apr 1996 22:33:40 -0400
Subject: change of email address
Hi,
I haven't seen any Knowlton mailing lists come since I changed my email address. Did you get the change?? I miss seeing these mailing lists! By the way, the web page looks great!
Cathy Knowlton
Date: 19 Apr 96 14:53:52 EDT
From: "Elizabeth W. Knowlton" <75013.1446@compuserve.com>
Subject: Botanical Matters
April 11-19 Several of you (well, two) have asked after me. One reason I haven't sent messages recently is that it is finally spring in the South, 70+ degrees, after weeks of capricious weather and low temperatures. The dogwoods are turning slowly from cream to white, and epimedium 'niveum' is casting its tiny bells across the shade of my holly tree. I am overwhelmed as usual with the planting and weeding and transplanting and mulching. But the reason I am at home with all this gorgeousness is because I am sick (again) with one of those colds that linger in the chest, making me inappropriate company for my office. They don't like to think of galloping consumption all day long.
So I putter in and out, separating seedlings in the mudroom, making up trays of plants for the neighbors outside, peering at the tomatoes in their Walls of Water, and thinking of Knowlton gardeners. I would like to make a real connection between our ancestor William (1) who left England for the "New World" and the Knowltons who continued to live in England for several more centuries because the latter include several eminent horticulturists: John Knowlton (1688-1781), his brother Thomas Knowlton (1690-1781), and Thomas's grandson Thomas (1758-1836). How John and his brother first became interested in landscape gardening is not known, but John's work for the Earl Fitzwilliam of Northumberland in the most northern part of England must have been the move that took the English Knowltons out of the southeastern English counties.
His brother Thomas was chosen to work for Dr. William Sherard--a fellow of Oxford, a botanist, a traveler while tutor to the future Earl of Bedford, and a British consul to Smyrna--as a landscape gardener on the estate at Eltham, then a suburb of London. Thomas came to the notice of the Earl of Burlington, who offered in 1728 to put Knowlton in charge of his own country seat at Londesboro, Yorkshire, also in the north of England. In addition to fulfilling his landscaping duties, Knowlton discovered an ancient Roman camp, Delgovicia, in the area. He did so well for himself that he was able to send his son John to Cambridge. It is the following letter from Thomas to one of the Cambridge professors that makes me so sure he is our genetic relative:
"I was at Cambridge but was greatly disappointed in the design of the Physic Garden, which is laid out so preposterously that instead of pleasing gives a disgust designed to please the ignorant rather than the curious. " [Stocking, p. 9] I could not have done better myself in my Spring newsletter, "Knowlton's Nasty Nursery Notes."
Thomas left instructions to be buried in his garden (rather than the churchyard) but parish wardens later had the cemetery enlarged to take in Thomas's grave.
Thomas's grandson, also Thomas, entered the service of the Earl of Burlington and his heir, the Duke of Devonshire, not only as his landscape gardener but also as his agent. Neither he nor his sister Sarah ever married but managed Burlington House at Londesboro(ugh) and the Duke of Devonshire's estate, Chatsworth. The latter is open to the public, and I urge any of you who travel to England to make a special visit to see the wonderful park with its orangery, conservatories, arboretum, kitchen gardens, etc., regardless of your interest in Knowltons. Because Thomas's era here was followed by the more famous Joseph Paxton's, the Knowlton name does not appear in any readily-available publicity about Chatsworth. In preparation for the building of a special model village for the use of Chatsworth employees, Thomas and his sister moved south to that estate and oversaw the work at Edensor.
The Duke of Devonshire also owned the Irish estate of Lismore on the banks of the Blackmore River (seized of course by Queen Elizabeth I from the Irish). Thomas Knowlton traveled to Lismore "frequently" and had an office in the quadrangle of the old castle; he declined a permanent position there, however, although he assisted Sir William, ninth Duke, in the making of another model village in Lismore. Eventually he retired to Darley Dale in Derbyshire with his sister, where he continued working in the fields and gardens. Of Sarah we know nothing except that she was beautiful, lost her fiance to early death, declined to chose another, and turned all her attentions to cats, "of which she had numerous and remarkable specimens." [Stocking, p. 17]
In 1884 a woman named Eleanor Vere Boyle (1825-1916) published a book called Days and Hours in a Garden--hers was in Buckinghamshire--in which she talked about the gardens at Hampton Court, once filled, deliberately, with goldenrod. In a footnote she says, "In the royal Private Gardens, however, at Hampton Court, rare plants were cultivated so far back as 1691; such as the Green-flowered Knowltonia Vesicatoria, etc." (p. 196) Surely this plant, which I have never heard of elsewhere, must have been named for one of our Knowltons.
We Americans have had our botanists also. Going to a field guide, Trees of North America, one day to find the name of a small tree that is covered with pods like tiny bladders every June, I discovered it was the Eastern Hophornbeam or ironwood tree, found throughout most of the Eastern U.S. It must be distinguished from the Knowlton Hophornbeam, found only in the moist canyons of two Western locations. I picture the explorer, perhaps on a packhorse with collecting baskets, picking her way along the moist canyons, "Ah ha, a sort of hophornbeam!" But was she the Knowlton, or was the tree named for a friend or colleague?
Most recently I opened my Park's Advance Bulb Sale catalog to find a photograph of the new Iris Batik on p. 2--"A triple award winner for American Iris Society: Honorable Mention 1988, Award of Merit 1990, and the Knowlton Medal of 1992." Who ARE all these Knowltons?
What I notice most about gardeners, Knowlton or otherwise, is how long they lived in eras when the average lifespan was only half of ours. Whether Eleanor Boyle, Gertrude Jekyll, Maria Theresa Villiers (Mrs.) Earle, William Robinson, Elizabeth Lawrence, or John and Thomas Knowlton, these gardeners all lived for 80-90 years. I picture them puttering about their properties, large or small, an earth-caked trowel in one hand, knees getting a little stiff now, eyes squinting into a vision of how the garden will be next season.
Elizabeth W. Knowlton 75013.1446@compuserve.com
From: Cknowlton1@aol.com
Date: Fri, 19 Apr 1996 20:02:41 -0400
Subject: Our Knowlton Gardeners
It's funny Elizabeth should bring up the subject of Knowlton gardeners as I too am an avid one. While reading her piece on this subject I was reminded of an article I had seen in my files regarding Knowlton cactus. After digging through many files and papers I happened across it. The following is the article in its entirety. Unfortunately I do not have the year it appeared in Time Magazine, just that if appeared in the first part of November.
"The Living Library of Plants". A new center seeks to preserve 3,000 endangered species.
The California condor, the Maryland darter, the Florida panther and other animals struggling to survive are not the only endangered species. Largely because of man's encroachment, many, perhaps dozens of American plant species are disappearing each year. Indeed, botanists estimate that some 3,000 of the 22,000 species of higher plants native to the US may be facing extinction. Around the world, as many as 40,000 plant species are in trouble.
Now help is on the way, at least for America's vegetation, in the form of the Center for Plant Conservation, which has its headquarters at Harvard University's Arnold Arboretum. With seed money of $500,000, the center has begun an unprecedented program, by far the most comprehensive to date, that aims to preserve every kind of threatened plant in the U.S.
Through a network of 18 affiliated botanical gardens and horticultural research facilities in 14 states, the center this summer coordinated the collection of 92 threatened species, including such exotic plants as the pygmy fringe tree and Gray's lily. It plans to at least double that number next year and hopes to have specimens of most of the nation's endangered plants secured in greenhouses and other protected environments within ten years.
As added insurance, the center will stockpile seeds of some of the species at the Department of Agriculture's Ford Collins, CO, seed-storage facility. That way, says Frank Thibodeau, the center's scientific director, "despite power losses, hurricanes, fires or any other natural disaster that could befall a greenhouse or garden, we will always have the seeds available for study and propagation."
By growing these rare plants, the center expects eventually to reintroduce some into their natural habitats and to satisfy the needs of both researchers and collectors. The collectors, oddly enough, have contributed to the near extinction of several species. One victim is the Knowlton cactus, the first endangered species cataloged by the center. Says Donald Falk, the center's administrative director: "Collectors will go out and decimate populations, uprooting the cactus to send it back to live on windowsills."
Why spend money and energy to save, say, the frostweed or the small whorled pogonia? Medical benefits alone, says Thibodeau, could justify the center's efforts: "Well over a quarter of all prescription medicines in the US are based on plant products." He points, for example, to antitumor alkaloids found in the Madagascar periwinkle that are now used in the treatment of childhood leukemia and Hodgkin's disease. "The question," says Thibodeau, "is whether you're willing to bet that there isn't another important drug out there among those 3,000 plants or whether you're willing to hold the plants long enough to study them."
Then, too, some of the plants may have as yet undiscovered characteristics important to agriculture: for example, resistance to disease or drought. Using new recombinant DNA techniques, scientists look forward to identifying the genes that confer these traits and transferring them from wild plants to crop plants. By preserving the endangered species, says Falk, "we're building a genetic library." Thibodeau considers the library essential "even if it turned out that these plants have no other identifiable value. They would still be worth saving, just as it is worth preserving old manuscripts."
To ensure the preservation of most or all of the 3,000 threatened species, the center hopes eventually to create a $15 million endowment. "That works out to about $5,000 per species," says Thibodeau. "In fact, for $5,000 we will be delighted to save an endangered plant in your name." -By Jamie Murphy. Reported by David Bjerklie/New York.
From: Cknowlton1@aol.com
Date: Fri, 19 Apr 1996 20:02:50 -0400
Subject: Newspaper Article
"The Times Record", Troy, NY, Friday Evening, July 21, 1972.
To Appear At Park - Nathan Hale Ancient Fife and Drums and Knowlton's Rangers of Connecticut will appear Sunday at the visitor center at Saratoga National Historical Park, near Schuylerville, at 1 pm and present a three-act show, "A Day in the Life of a Continental Soldier." The group from Coventry, Conn., was organized on Nathan Hale Day, Sept. 23, 1965, to commemorate the patriot martyr-spy who was born in Coventry. The music played by the corps is from the 1776 period or earlier in history. The corps is accompanied by a color guard of Knowlton's Rangers, named for the American Revolutionary War hero, Thomas Knowlton. They have appeared in many historical enactments and pageants.
From: Cknowlton1@aol.com
Date: Fri, 19 Apr 1996 20:02:46 -0400
Subject: Knowlton Reunion booklet
As I was rummaging through my files looking for the Knowlton cactus article I found a few other things that might be of interest to everyone (I should go through these files more often!).
One is a pamphlet titled "Knowlton Reunion", Ipswich, MA, June 28, 1899. Printed by the Ipswich Independent Press. Inside reads:
Places of Interest Within a Short Distance of the Depot:
The Memorial Tablets of the Historical Society near the South Green.
The Steamer Carlotta makes two trips daily to Little Neck, Plum Island and Newbury.
Electric Cars for Essex, Gloucester and Cape Ann, Beverly and Salem leave the Square every half hour.
Date: 22 Apr 96 21:46:04 EDT
From: David Milliken <71672.2263@compuserve.com>
Subject: Lydia A. Knowlton, b. Oct. 17, 1786
I am interested in obtaining any information on the parents of Lydia A. Knowlton, b Oct. 17, 1786, Farmington, ME. Here's what I have found so far; any information you can provide will be appreciated.
Descendants of Jonathan Knowlton
1 Jonathan Knowlton +Mary Blunt ( Oakes)
2 Lydia A. Knowlton [b: Oct 17, 1786 in Farmington, MA,
d: Dec 22, 1824 in Farmington, MA] +Thomas Wellman
[b: Feb 4, 1777 in Lyndeborough, NH, d: Jun 7, 1844
in Farmington, MA]
3 Susan B. Wellman [b: Nov 10, 1812 in Hampden, MA,
d: Jul 29, 1870 in Farmington, MA] +Jonathan Sewell
Milliken [b: Mar 21, 1811 d: Oct 16, 1890]
2 Jonathan Knowlton b: Dec 4, 1780 + Deborah Tufts
David Milliken
Date: Fri, 26 Apr 1996 12:56:50 -0400
From: Herb Arkin - Arkin@sundial.net
Subject: Minerva Knowlton
Searching: Arkin, Batterson, Cooney, Hibbs, Losch, Mendat, Wright
Does anyone have the dates on Minerva Knowlton married Samuel Wright (1815-1846) in 1841, probably Vermont.
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