The inconstant gardener

In the autumn of 1826, Prince Hermann Ludwig Heinrich von Pückler-Muskau came ashore in London after a long and gruelling voyage from Rotterdam.

In the autumn of 1826, Prince Hermann Ludwig Heinrich von Pückler-Muskau came ashore in London after a long and gruelling voyage from Rotterdam. A whiskery Prussian princeling with a heavily indebted estate and a passion for landscape gardening, Pückler had come to England determined to find a wife.

This was not a romantic project, however. English women were celebrated on the continent not only for their beauty — the perpetual damp was said to do wonders for their skin — but for their prosperity. Every year the arrival of the Season brought with it, like a plague of flying ants, a host of obscurely gazetted European noblemen in search of fat dowries.

Pückler was one of them. He came into his inheritance after a somewhat rackety youth — a bundle survives among his personal papers marked ‘Drafts of old love letters to be re-used as appropriate’ — and he married Lucie Countess Pappenheim, a stout widow nine years his senior.