A Great Agricultural Estate, being the Story of the Origin and Administration of Woburn and Thorney First Report on the Working and Results of the Woburn Experimental Fruit Farm

Abstract

ONE is tempted to believe that agriculture has been in the blood of the Russell family not only by inheritance, but by heredity. It has been to the Earls and Dukes of Bedford what politics has been to some families and drink to others—a deadly recurrent outbreak. It apparently began with a lady, the wife of the third Earl, who, according to Sir William Temple, contrived ‘the perfectest figure of a garden” at Moor Park. Her offspring in successive generations have been famous improvers of estates, plantations, fields and gardens. It was John, the fourth Duke, who in defiance of the remonstrance of the celebrated Philip Miller, his gardener, thinned his famous plantation of pines and firs, and so that there might result no injury to Miller's reputation as a planter, caused a board to be fixed in the plantation, facing the road, on which was inscribed, “This plantation has been thinned by John, Duke of Bedford, contrary to the advice and opinion of his gardener.”

A Great Agricultural Estate, being the Story of the Origin and Administration of Woburn and Thorney.

By the Duke of Bedford. Pp. 254. (London: John Murray, 1897.)

First Report on the Working and Results of the Woburn Experimental Fruit Farm.

By the Duke of Bedford and Spencer Pickering, F.R.S. Pp. iv + 194. (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1897.)