The grave of Thomas Fairchild, with Fairmule House in the background.

Hackney Road must surely rank among the limpest, tat-laden and unpleasant roads in London, with its run-down shops and warehouses, lurching fences and random pockets of grim. Towards the western end, however, lay the remains of a gentleman who sought to beautify the city, and whose playful experiments with plants led to many horticultural advances.

Thomas Fairchild (1667-1729) is largely forgotten today. Indeed, he doesn’t even warrant a Wikipedia entry (except, for some reason, in German). However, this is the chap who created the first deliberately hybridized plant, when he placed the pollen of a Sweet William ( Dianthus barbatus ) on the style of a carnation ( Dianthus caryophyllus ) to produce a cross he called the ‘Fairchild Mule’.

Plants of different species commonly hybridize naturally (take, for example, the familiar and hardy London plane tree, which is a hybrid of the Oriental and American species), but until Fairchild, nobody had purposely set out to merge two species. In a (slightly hyperbolic) way, he could be described as the first person to experiment with genetic modification. Since then, hybridization has become a common technique for improving the qualities of crops and garden plants.

Back on Hackney Road, a rare patch of green marks Fairchild’s final resting place. It’s a scrappy park; the master of horticulture would be dismayed. Fairchild’s weathered tombstone is the only survivor from a former burial ground (an extension of nearby St Leonard’s) now home to an ill-maintained tennis court and a handful of those London plane trees I mentioned earlier. It’s easy to find the grave – a prominent sign for a strip joint illuminates the wall behind

As a postscript to this story, Fairchild’s name was recently revived as part of a new eco-development at the southern end of the park. The UK’s largest all-wooden (apart from the bits that clearly aren’t wooden) building carries the name Fairmule house, to commemorate Fairchild and his first plant ‘mule’. The architects have incorporated floral elements into the window panes as a further reference to the site’s history.



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