The Tradescants and Grape Cultivation in Stuart England

In the early seventeenth century, two men — a father and son who shared the same name, John Tradescant — scoured the known world for plants, built what became Britain’s first great museum, and, along the way, tried to coax the vine to flourish in cold, grey England¹. Their story sits at the crossroads of gardening, science and the long, stubborn English dream of making wine.

Gardeners to the King

John Tradescant the Elder (c.1577–1638) began as head gardener to Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, at Hatfield House, and rose to become gardener to King Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria¹. When he died, his son John Tradescant the Younger (1608–1662) inherited both the royal post and the family’s consuming passion for plants⁴.

Plant hunters to the ends of the earth

The Tradescants were among the first Englishmen to hunt plants across the globe. The Elder sailed to the Low Countries for fruit trees, ventured to Arctic Russia in 1618, and even joined an expedition against the Barbary corsairs in the Mediterranean — collecting specimens everywhere he went⁶. He is credited with introducing many plants to English gardens, and the spiderwort genus Tradescantia is named in the family’s honour². The Younger travelled further still, crossing the Atlantic to Virginia three times and bringing home American species that transformed English horticulture — the magnolia, the tulip tree and the bald cypress among them².

Vines in a cold country

Grapes fascinated them. The Tradescants grew a remarkable range of vines and other fruit in their Lambeth garden, and their published catalogue lists many grape varieties³. But Stuart England had the deck stacked against it: the seventeenth century fell within the “Little Ice Age,” a stretch of unusually cold summers in which wine grapes could rarely ripen reliably⁴. For the Tradescants and their contemporaries, the vine remained a botanical treasure and a gentleman’s experiment rather than the basis of an industry — an English wine culture that would only truly arrive centuries later, with modern cool-climate sparkling wine.

The Ark and the first museum

Everywhere they travelled, the Tradescants also gathered curiosities — shells, coins, weapons, stuffed creatures and exotic artefacts — which they displayed at their Lambeth home in a collection nicknamed “The Ark.” It is generally regarded as the first museum in Britain open to the paying public¹. In 1656 the Younger published its catalogue as Musaeum Tradescantianum, the first such catalogue printed in England³.

The collection’s fate was less happy. The antiquary Elias Ashmole acquired it — by a disputed deed of gift — and it became the founding collection of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, which opened in 1683 as the world’s first university museum⁵⁷.

A lasting legacy

England did not become a wine power in the Tradescants’ lifetimes; the climate saw to that⁸. But their relentless curiosity reshaped English gardens and helped lay the foundations of botany and public museums in Britain. They embodied their age’s hunger to collect, cultivate and understand the whole world — grapevines included — and the vindication of that long English faith in the vine would have to wait for a warmer, more modern age.

Frequently asked questions

Read more

• Wine in Victorian Britain
• Sack: the wine of Tudor England
• The origins of wine and viticulture

References

1. Guildhall Library — John Tradescant the Elder and the Younger: Gardeners to Charles I. guildhalllibrarynewsletter.wordpress.com ↩
2. Linda Hall Library — John Tradescant the Younger (Scientist of the Day). www.lindahall.org ↩
3. Garden Museum / Google Arts & Culture — The Tradescants. artsandculture.google.com ↩
4. Encyclopædia Britannica — John Tradescant, the Elder. www.britannica.com ↩
5. Encyclopædia Britannica — Ashmolean Museum. www.britannica.com ↩
6. The Elmbridge Hundred — John Tradescant (the Elder & the son). people.elmbridgehundred.org.uk ↩
7. Encyclopædia Britannica — Elias Ashmole. www.britannica.com ↩
8. Agecroft Hall & Gardens — Who are the John Tradescants? www.agecrofthall.org ↩

Recommended reading

Vintage: The Story of Wine
Hugh Johnson
A masterly history of wine that traces England’s long, halting effort to grow the vine in a cold climate.

A Short History of Wine
Rod Phillips
A crisp global history of wine, useful for setting England’s early experiments in worldwide context.

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