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THE ESSEX NATURALIST
the gardening world. Petre used his services frequently and it
was in Miller's company that as a young virtuoso of eighteen
years of age he burst upon the Yorkshire scene in October 1731.5
In 1736 Miller drew up for him a complete catalogue of all the
plants at Thorndon which has now so unfortunately disappeared6
At times relations between the two seem to have become
strained, for Miller was no easy man7, and indeed Thomas
Knowlton, Lord Burlington's gardener at Londesborough in
Yorkshire, went so far as to call him a coxcomb who was only
happy in the company of Dukes and Lords and had no time for
poor men.8 Nevertheless Petre remained in close contact with
Miller to the end of his life, ordering plants through him and
asking him not to forget "the Catalogue at Leisure times."9
In fact the eighth Lord Petre engaged his first gardener when
he was still a boy. His passion for botany and gardening started
when he was very young. In 1727, when he was fourteen, one of
the admirers of his very young mother, Ralph Standish Howard,
came to spend Christmas at Ingatestone and as a Christmas pre-
sent gave the son and heir a pruning knife and a saw which he had
had specially made. The gift was obviously calculated and not
unconnected with Howard's (ultimately unsuccessful) suit, but he
had the satisfaction of reporting that it had been "well taken".10
Peter Collinson in a note at the end of his copy of John Evelyn's
Sylva now in the library of the Royal Forestry Society at Tring,
states that among the trees planted out at Thorndon in April and
May 1740 were some raised from seed sown by Lord Petre when
he was a boy. Though Lord Petre spent his boyhood at Ingate-
stone with his mother and grandmother, he probably did much
of his gardening at Thorndon where he would have had a clear
run of the place. At any rate, in 1729 when he was abroad with
his mother completing his education11, there was a robbery at
Thorndon and Thomas Walton, the steward at Ingatestone,
writing to John Caryll, one of the young Lord's guardians, about
the affair, says that the self-confessed culprit was "a suspicious
young fellow" who lived in the garden-house at Thorndon and
whom "my Lord keeps there as Gardiner". His name is not
divulged and the last that is heard of him is with a warrant out
for his arrest, for besides being a thief he was also discovered to
be a poacher of the Thorndon deer.12
The employment of this gardener was, of course, a bit of private
enterprise on the part of a boy, for the control and management
of both Ingatestone and Thorndon were still in the hands of the
mother. Thomas Walton's letter mentions the name of the
"official" gardener, James Huntback. Huntback, like the gar-
deners of many other noblemen, was a subscriber to the 1731
edition of Miller's Gardener's Dictionary where he is described as
"Gardiner to the Right Honourable Lord Petre". He followed
his master to Thorndon in 1732, and Petre's appreciation of him
as a gardener may be judged by his remark to Collinson that he