Ellen Ann Willmott was born on 19 August 1858 in Heston, Middlesex, the eldest of three daughters of Frederick Willmott, a successful solicitor, and Ellen Fell. The family belonged to the rising Victorian middle class, comfortably off and socially ambitious. In 1875 they moved to Warley Place, a Queen Anne house with extensive grounds near Great Warley in Essex. That estate became the centre of Ellen’s life and the stage on which she built one of the most remarkable horticultural careers of her generation.
From childhood she showed an intense interest in plants. Her mother was a keen gardener, and Ellen and her sister Rose taught themselves Latin so they could read plant catalogues. A wealthy godmother, Countess Helen Tasker, sent Ellen a cheque for one thousand pounds on her birthday year after year and later left her a large inheritance. Combined with money from her parents, this fortune allowed her to spend without ordinary restraint. On her twenty-first birthday her father permitted her to create an alpine garden. She commissioned a professional firm to construct a ravine, waterfall, fern grotto and rockery on a scale far beyond the usual suburban rockery of the period. The result announced both her ambition and her willingness to treat gardening as a serious, expensive art.
After her father’s death in 1892 and her mother’s in 1898, Warley Place belonged entirely to Ellen. She enlarged the gardens, employed at one time more than a hundred gardeners, and assembled a collection said to number more than one hundred thousand species and cultivars. She specialised in narcissus, roses, alpines and many other groups, hybridising and exhibiting with conspicuous success. She sat on Royal Horticultural Society committees for narcissus, tulips, lilies and floral groups. In 1897, when the Society created the Victoria Medal of Honour, she was one of only two women among the first recipients; the other was Gertrude Jekyll. She later became one of the first women elected a Fellow of the Linnean Society.
Willmott used her wealth to finance plant-hunting expeditions, notably those of Ernest Henry Wilson in China. Plants that reached Europe through her support include Ceratostigma willmottianum, Rosa willmottiae and Corylopsis willmottiae. Dozens of other plants carry her name or that of Warley Place: Veronica prostrata ‘Warley Blue’, Potentilla nepalensis ‘Miss Willmott’, Aethionema ‘Warley Rose’ and many more. The sea holly Eryngium giganteum became popularly known as Miss Willmott’s Ghost, a nickname that attached itself to stories that she scattered its seeds in other people’s gardens. Whether the stories are true or later embroidery, they illustrate the sharp, independent reputation she acquired.
She bought two further properties: Tresserve near Aix-les-Bains in France and Boccanegra on the Italian Riviera near Ventimiglia. Both received ambitious gardens. At Boccanegra she employed dozens of men to terrace a steep coastal site. She also advised on planting at Anne Hathaway’s Cottage for the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, choosing plants mentioned in the plays. She photographed her gardens extensively and published Warley Garden in Spring and Summer in 1909. Between 1910 and 1914 she issued The Genus Rosa, two large volumes illustrated by Alfred Parsons, a work that remains a landmark in rose literature even though it was not a commercial success.
Willmott never married. She dressed for practical work rather than drawing-room convention and ran her estates with exacting standards; gardeners were said to be dismissed for allowing a single weed. She collected musical instruments, manuscripts and antiquities as well as plants. Visitors of rank, including members of the royal family, came to Warley Place when the gardens were at their height.
The same lavishness that built her collections eventually destroyed her finances. By the early twentieth century she was borrowing heavily. The French and Italian properties were sold, along with pictures, furniture and instruments. In 1928 she was arrested on a shoplifting charge that was later dropped. She continued to live at Warley Place in increasing isolation and relative poverty. She died there on 27 September 1934 of heart disease, aged seventy-six. The house was sold to pay debts and demolished in 1939. The grounds, stripped of many of their rarities, became a nature reserve managed by Essex Wildlife Trust. In spring the daffodils she planted still appear in great numbers, one of the most visible remnants of her work.
Willmott’s reputation after death was mixed. She was remembered as a plantswoman of exceptional skill and as a difficult, sometimes malicious figure. Recent biographies have tried to recover a more complete person: musician, photographer, writer, sister and friend as well as gardener. What remains unambiguous is the scale of her achievement. In an age when serious horticulture was still largely a male profession, she created gardens of international standing, supported exploration that brought new plants into cultivation, published a major botanical work, and earned the highest honours her profession could give. More than sixty plants still carry her name. Warley Place itself is a ruin, yet the bulbs and the stories persist. Ellen Willmott spent a fortune and a lifetime on plants; the plants, at least, have outlasted the fortune.