Maria Theresa Earle

Artist Info

Maria Theresa EarleLondon, 1836 - 1925, Cobham, Kent

http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/nb2006019753

Earle [née Villiers], (Maria) Theresa [known as Mrs C. W. Earle] (1836–1925), horticulturist, was born at 45 Cambridge Terrace, London, on 8 June 1836, the eldest daughter of Edward Ernest Villiers (1806–1843), younger brother of the fourth earl of Clarendon, and his wife, Elizabeth Charlotte (1807–1890), née Liddell, fifth daughter of the first Baron Ravensworth (second creation). She was educated by governesses, while the family divided its time between London and Grove Mill House, Hertfordshire, and, in the 1850s, wintered in France or Italy. She was presented at court in 1854, and in 1856 declined an invitation to serve as maid of honour to Queen Victoria, thus earning the family epithet Radical Theresa.

The Villiers family moved in literary and artistic circles, with Henry Taylor and George Frederick Watts notable acquaintances. Theresa aspired to become an artist, won the encouragement of Ruskin, and received an award from the South Kensington School in 1856. In 1857, while in Florence, she met Captain Charles William Earle (c.1828–1897), son of William Earle of Liverpool; they became engaged in 1863, after his return from military service in India, and were married in St Paul's, Knightsbridge, on 14 April 1864. The following year Earle was appointed a director of the Belgrave Mansions Company; in 1869 he was elected managing director of the Australasian Telegraph Company, and followed this with a series of other telegraphic directorships. The Earles had three children: Sydney (1865), Lionel (1866), and Maxwell (1871).

In 1878–9 Earle inherited the estates of his brothers, depriving Mrs Earle of what she had considered her two vocations in life: to nurse her husband and to be what she called a good ‘poor man's’ wife. (Her younger sisters became countess of Lytton and Baroness Loch by their marriages.) The Earles continued their artistic connections, becoming friends of Burne-Jones, Oscar Wilde, George Eliot, and the Rossettis.

In 1879 the Earles took a new house at 5 Bryanston Square, and soon after a small country house, Woodlands, in Cobham, Surrey, a house with a 2 acre garden which Mrs Earle described as ‘a small piece of flat ground surrounding an ordinary suburban house’. Here she developed a garden which was much admired by her social circle, comprising a terrace with tubbed plants, beds and borders of hardy plants, and a kitchen garden in which culinary herbs were given prominence. In the 1890s she advised a German friend, Mme De Grunelius, about furnishing a country house near Frankfurt, and was urged by her to write her advice down. With encouragement and contributions from her niece Constance Lytton she compiled a book, arranged according to the months of the year, of reflective essays on gardening and household matters. It was published by Smith Elder in 1897 under the title Pot-Pourri from a Surrey Garden. Shortly after its publication, on 8 June 1897, her husband was killed in a road accident.

The book became an instant success; it was favourably reviewed in the gardening press, bought by fashionable society because of her social connections, and recommended by Dean Samuel Reynolds Hole in the Nineteenth Century with the words ‘Buy it’. Within two years the book had been through ten editions, mostly simple reprints, although an appendix on Japanese flower arranging by Constance Lytton was added in the eighth edition. While not the first book of its genre—contemporary reviewers singled out Henry Arthur Bright's A Year in a Lancashire Garden (1879) as its predecessor—it was by far the most successful, and formed the model for the first books of Gertrude Jekyll a few years later. Mrs Earle modified the formula only slightly for two subsequent works, which, together with her first, form a trilogy: More Pot-Pourri from a Surrey Garden (1899) and A Third Pot-Pourri (1903).

In the years after her husband's death, Mrs Earle travelled in Germany and Italy, developed friendships with Gertrude Jekyll and younger gardeners such as Ethel Case, and collaborated with the latter on two gardening books: Gardening for the Ignorant (1912) and Pot-Pourri Mixed by Two (1914). She also wrote two books of autobiography and family history: Letters to Young and Old (1906) and Memoirs and Memories (1911). In 1905 she wrote the chapter on spring in the anthology Garden Colour, illustrated by Margaret Waterfield.

Mrs Earle died at Woodlands on 27 February 1925. Her son, Sir Lionel Earle (1866–1948), as permanent secretary of the office of works (1912–33), followed his mother's example by his promotion of horticulture in the royal parks.

Brent Elliott

Sources

Mrs C. W. Earle, Memoirs and memories (1911) · Mrs Earle's pot-pourri, ed. A. Jones (1982) · D. MacLeod, Down-to-earth women (1982) · T. Clark, ‘Mrs C. W. Earle (1836–1925), a reappraisal of her work’, Garden History, 8/2 (1980), 75–83 · Gardeners' Chronicle, 3rd ser., 77 (1925), 174 · Botanical Exchange Club Report (1925), 846–7 · S. Festing, ‘A patient gleaner’, The Garden, 103 (1978), 412–14 · B. Massingham, A century of gardeners (1982) · B. Massingham, ‘Some nineteenth-century English gardens’, Huntia, 84/2 (1982), 93–102 · d. cert.

Likenesses

H. West, photograph, 1908, repro. in Earle, Memoirs and memories · photograph, NPG [see illus.]

Wealth at death

£3028 10s. 6d.: probate, 16 April 1925, CGPLA Eng. & Wales

Brent Elliott, ‘Earle , (Maria) Theresa (1836–1925)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/48832, accessed 17 Oct 2017]

(Maria) Theresa Earle (1836–1925): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/48832

Maria Teresa Earle née Villiers (1836-1925)

Mrs C W Earle, as she was better known to her readers, lived at “Woodlands” in Cobham. She was a horticultralist and writer on garden subjects, her books influenced many subsequent writers on gardening subjects including Gertrude Jekyll. Mrs Earle’s social circle very much admired the way in which she developed the two acre garden at “Woodlands”. The garden was originally quite flat and featureless when the Earles moved in. Mrs Earle developed her garden to include a terrace with containers of plants, beds and borders of hardy plants and a kitchen garden planted with a wide range of culinary herbs. With some encouragement from her niece Constance Lytton, Mrs Earle compiled a book of reflective essays on gardening and household matters arranged by month of the year. http://www.exploringsurreyspast.org.uk/themes/people/gardeners/villiers/ accessed 10/17/2017