Henry Baines (1793-1878)

Botanist and creator of the Museum Gardens

Plaque on Manor Cottage, Museum Gardens

EXIT, pursued by a bear is one of the great stage directions. It's to be found in Shakespeare's 'Winter's Tale'. But if ever a play were to be written about the history of York's Museum Gardens, it might need to be included there, too. Because some time in 1831, the Gardens' resident bear (yes, really: it was part of the menagerie) seems to have got loose and chased two distinguished gentlemen (Professor John Phillips, Keeper of the Yorkshire Museum, and the Rev. Vernon Harcourt) into an outhouse.

The play would need to include another stage direction, too: 'Bear exits, accompanied by a curator'. That's because the Yorkshire Philosophical Society which ran the Gardens, clearly realising it wasn't equipped to manage fierce animals, despatched the unruly bear to London Zoo. It was sent by stagecoach (travelling 'outside'), and was chaperoned by non other than Henry Baines, the 'gardener and sub-curator' who effectively created the Museum Gardens.

We don't, sadly, know how Mr Baines and his travelling companion got on during their journey down to London: but it is clear his employers took some care, at least, for his safety. According to Peter Hogarth in 'The Most Fortunate Situation', a history of the Museum Gardens, the Yorkshire Philosophical Society's accounts included £4 to a Mr Cludery for a bear cage. "This probably refers to a secure travelling cage," Peter writes. We hope so, for Mr Baines' sake.

Whatever Mr Baines' skills as a bear-tamer, he was most certainly a very fine botanist and gardener.

Born in 1793 in a small cottage over the cloisters of St Leonard's Hospital (the lower part of the building was apparently in use by a wine merchant) the 12-year-old Henry first put a 'spade in the ground' in the wine merchant's garden, just outside the Multangular Tower.

As a young man, he moved to Halifax, married Rebecca Bartle, and got a job as a gardener. In about 1825, he returned to York, where he worked for the Backhouse nursery, quickly rising to become foreman in 1829.

Thomas Backhouse was a member of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society, which had been founded in 1822 to 'gain and spread knowledge related to science and history'. In 1829 the YPS was laying the foundations for the Yorkshire Museum. Henry was appointed 'gardener and sub-curator', working with John Phillips.

The Yorkshire Museum opened in 1830, and an initial three acres of Museum Gardens (including the ruins of St Mary's Abbey) were landscaped and planted by Henry Baines. He was to remain in post for more than 40 years, eventually retiring in 1870.

At first, he and his family were given three rooms to live in in the basement of the Yorkshire Museum. As his family grew (he and his wife were to have five daughters, and also kept a servant), a house was built especially for him between the museum and the city wall. Now known as Manor Cottage, he was to live there for the rest of his life.

In 1840, Baines published - at his own expense - the Flora of Yorkshire. In 1853, meanwhile, he came up with an entirely new initiative: a 'Grand Exhibition' at the museum and Museum Gardens billed as a display 'of an entirely novel kind'. This was to be an exhibition of 'Plants, remarkable for variety and beauty... curious in structure... (and) most instructive in physiology, or most valuable in food, medicine and the Arts'. The exhibition was to include more than 100 plant species from around the world. The museum's lecture hall was fitted up to house some of the plants, whose 'stems and foliage reached in many instances the roof'.

Henry Baines retired in 1870, but continued to live in Manor Cottage until he died in 1878. His daughter Fanny and wife Rebecca then moved to the Lodge, where Fanny became gatekeeper - retiring in 1914 but continuing to live at the Lodge until she herself died in 1916.

For the stories behind more York Civic Trust plaques, visit yorkcivictrust.co.uk/