Best remembered today for his technically innovative design for the Crystal Palace of 1851, Joseph Paxton (1803 65) was head gardener to the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth by the age of twenty-three, and remained involved in gardening throughout his life. Tapping in to the burgeoning interest in gardening amongst the Victorians, in 1841 he founded the periodical The Gardener's Chronicle with the botanist John Lindley (1799 1865), with whom he had worked on a Government report on Kew Gardens. Paxton's Flower Garden appeared between 1850 and 1853, following a series of plant-collecting...