Departures of note

In the summer of 1716, Thomas Fairchild, a London nurseryman, took pollen from a Sweet William with a feather and brushed it onto the stigma of a Carnation pink. The following spring, the resulting plant appeared—a new hybrid later known as 'Fairchild's Mule.' It was the first scientifically produced artificial hybrid, and it unsettled Fairchild. Like many of his contemporaries, he believed all plant species were fixed creations of God, and he feared the consequences of disturbing that order. When asked to show his dried specimen to the Royal Society in 1720, he claimed the cross had been an accident.

Fairchild had established himself as a nurseryman and florist at Hoxton, Shoreditch, around 1690, working on a nursery of only half an acre but close to the City of London. He became 'the leading nurseryman of his day,' corresponding with Carl Linnaeus and conducting experiments that helped establish the existence of sex in plants, a notion still denied by most botanists. He introduced plants such as the red buckeye and the American flowering dogwood, and was an early participant in the wave of introductions from the eastern seaboard of British America. His garden was so well stocked that he could boast that more than twenty species blossomed each December, then regarded as remarkable for England.

Fairchild was also a writer and a member of the scientifically minded gardening community forming in London. In 1722 he published 'The City Gardener,' a guide to trees and plants that would thrive in London, noting that pear trees bore excellent fruit about Barbican and that figs and mulberries thrived in the city. In 1724 he read a paper to the Royal Society on the motion of sap in plants. He contributed to 'A Catalogue of Trees and Shrubs both Exotic and Domestic which are propagated for Sale in the Gardens near London,' and may have written an anonymous treatise on fallowing ground and raising grass seeds. Around 1725 he joined the Society of Gardeners, which met monthly at Newhall's coffee-house in Chelsea.

Fairchild died on 10 October 1729 and was buried in the churchyard of St. Leonard, Shoreditch, as he had directed. In his will, he left the bulk of his property to his nephew, John Bacon, and bequeathed £25 for an annual sermon on 'the wonderful works of God in the Creation.' That sermon is still delivered today, now at St Giles, Cripplegate, attended by the Worshipful Company of Gardeners. His legacy also includes Fairchild's Garden, a public park near Columbia Road Market in Hoxton, and the Thomas Fairchild Community School in Shoreditch. In 2003, a David Austin rose was named 'The Ingenious Mr. Fairchild' in his honour.