Syon Garden and a Co-Galileo

As Britain easing out of lockdown – slightly – the “stately homes” are allowed to resume opening their gardens to the public.

We had wondered when we would ever see the beautiful conservatory of our stately neighbor, Syon House.  We learned that it would on June 17 let visitors in limited numbers book for time slots, 10:30, 11:30, 12:30, and 1:30.  Because Tilly is smart, we became the first to present ourselves with our printed-out tickets.  On the way in, a plaque about “A True Renaissance Scientist” told me more than I had known about Thomas Harriot.

In normal summers the place would swarm with visitors, at £8 a head; coaches bring tourists, and people stay at the hotel within the park so as to visit the house and gardens.  We had the stately spaces almost to ourselves.

The conservatory.

Inside it.

Colors.

The largest flowering spike I had ever seen, I think.

Magpie in the outer part of the garden, which is more relaxed than a botanical garden; mixed with wild spaces.

A Mexican bean tree, fallen, but still putting out shoots.

Swan parents and cygnets.

A leaf large enough for a baby to lie in, though rather prickly.

Flora’s column.

Syon Park was a main venue for the International Year of Astronomy, held in 2009 because telescopic astronomy began in 1609 with Galileo – and with Thomas Harriot.  An actor named Alan Cheeseman wandered the grounds, portraying Harriot; and there was a display of Harriot’s drawings, brought from another stately home (Petworth).

My cover picture and story for Astronomical Calendar 2009 were mainly about Galileo, but I mentioned Harriot.  He was the first to observe sunspots telescopically, in December 1610, before Galileo did.  Blemishes in the Sun, and its rotation as shown by their movement, were another blow to the established conception of the universe, and it was when Galileo published his Letters on the Sunspots in 1613 that he began to get in deeper trouble with the church.  I included a box about Harriot:

As early as Galileo?

Thomas Harriot of Oxford was scientist for the expedition Sir Walter Raleigh sent in 1585 to the coast he had named Virginia.  Harriot learned the natives’ language, and brought to Britain the potato.  The 1607 apparition of Halley’s Comet turned his interest to astronomy.  He made telescopes about the same time as Galileo, and was probably the first – on 1609 July 6 – to make telescopic observations and drawings of the Moon.  His telescope magnified six times, rather weaker than the one Galileo showed at Venice in August, and the detail seen through it was not much better than with naked eye.  He made telescopic observations of comets and, in December 1610, sunspot observations that were probably the first and were quite detailed.  He was a mathematician and all-round scientist: we owe to him the greater-than and less-than signs, > and <, and a formulation of the law of refraction, later called Snell’s.  He has had little credit because he published little.  But as part of International Year of Astronomy he will be celebrated in a public “Telescope400” day, 2009 July 26, Sunday, at Syon Park beside the Thames in western London.

What I didn’t then know, or didn’t mention, was that Harriot did all of his astronomical observing from Syon.  He became the guest there of its owner, Henry Percy, ninth Earl of Northumberland, called the Wizard Earl because of his interest in science.

The earl, and Harriot, were suspected of involvement in Guy Fawkes’s gunpowder plot of 1605, and both spent time imprisoned in the Tower of London.  When Harriot died in 1621, the earl commissioned an epitaph for him – a rather dry one, in Latin, about his learnedness.