Louisa Lawrence

Louisa Lawrence (née Senior; 1803 – 14 August 1855) was an English horticulturist in the second quarter of the 19th century.

Louisa Senior was born at Broughton House, on the outskirts of Aylesbury, to James Senior and Elizabeth Ann Trevor. Her father had made his money as a haberdasher in Bruton Street, Berkeley Square, London.

Like her father, Louisa had social ambitions. After she married the surgeon William Lawrence in 1828 when she was 25 and he was 45, her social ambitions were gratified by horticulture, first in a villa with less than two acres at Drayton Green. In her comparatively small garden she cultivated over 200 orchids and over 500 varieties of roses, long before hybrid tea roses and perpetuals were fashionable. There were Italian pollarded walks, rock work including a rustic arch (with Cupid), a French parterre, a span-roofed greenhouse, a stove and an orchid house. By 1838 a detailed account of this model of what a suburban garden could be made into was published in The Gardener’s Magazine.

In June 1838, her husband purchased the Ealing Park mansion along with the surrounding 100 acres known as "Little Ealing" (then in Middlesex) at a purchase price of £9,000 (equivalent to £731,000 in 2015). Ealing Park is described by Pevsner as "Low and long; nine bays with pediment over the centre and an Ionic one-storeyed colonnade all along." The property was grandly furnished, as may be seen from the catalogue of the sale of the contents after her death. The estate boasted livestock, including poultry of all sorts, cows, sheep and pigs. There were thousands of bedding plants, “stove plants”, more than 600 plants in early forcing houses, nearly a hundred camellias, and more.

An indication of Lawrence's celebrity is that two influential gardening books were dedicated to her in the early 1840s. In 1841 Mrs Loudon, wife of the editor of The Gardener's Magazine, wrote The Ladies' Companion to the Flower Garden, being an Alphabetical Arrangement of all the ornamental plants usually grown in gardens and shrubberies, with full directions for their culture. She dedicated it to Mrs Lawrence of Ealing Park, Middlesex, “as a zealous patron of floriculture, an excellent botanist, and, above all, as one of the first lady-gardeners of the present day”. Vol. LXVIII of Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, the work of Sir William Jackson Hooker, the director of the Royal Botanic Garden was dedicated "with sentiments of great regard and esteem" to Mrs Lawrence, “the beauty of whose gardens and pleasure grounds and whose most successfully cultivated vegetable treasures are only equalled by the liberality with which they are shown to all who are in botany and horticulture.

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