Of pepper and pigsties

"He was able to identify plants by the smell of their leaves'

- Isabel Bannerman

IT being the season for the painted purple perennial wallflower Erysimum ‘Bowles’s Mauve’ and irises, I have been looking into the world of E. A. Bowles. Imagine, if you will, a horticultural Howards End set in Enfield, north London, famous for rifles and motorbikes. This secure, golden place was hearth and home of the Bowles family at Myddelton House, EN2: settled successfully there, in business, for some 250 years before the birth of Edward Augustus in 1865. A benign oligarchy, five children, mother cheerfully rotund, describing herself as ‘bouncing’ round the house and, unconventionally, cooking in the morning room as a pastime. Well-equipped nurseries inside and out catered for children and plants and a pavilion in the garden served as a billiards and smoking room that young Augustus turned into his museum of natural history.

Educated at home with his younger sister Medora, Bowles lost the sight of one eye aged eight, spending a year in a darkened room learning to play the piano by ear. He lost the other eye in his dotage. He was always able, nevertheless, to identify plants by the smell of their leaves, trained since the invention with his sister of ‘The Smelling Game’, in which each tested the other's ability to recognise, without looking, anything, gooseberry skins or worse.