Early Life
Paxton was born in 1803, the seventh son of a farming family, at Milton Bryan, Bedfordshire. Some references, incorrectly, list his birth year as 1801. This is, as he admitted in later life, a result of misinformation he provided in his teens, which enabled him to enrol at Chiswick Gardens. He became a garden boy at the age of fifteen for Sir Gregory Osborne Page-Turner at Battlesden Park, near Woburn. After several moves, he obtained a position in 1823 at the Horticultural Society's Chiswick Gardens.
Read more about this topic: Joseph Paxton
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“For with this desire of physical beauty mingled itself early the fear of death—the fear of death intensified by the desire of beauty.”
—Walter Pater 1839–1894, British writer, educator. originally published in Macmillan’s Magazine (Aug. 1878)
“On the grey rock of Cashel I suddenly saw
A Sphinx with woman breast and lion paw,
A Buddha, hand at rest,
Hand lifted up that blest;
And right between these two a girl at play
That, it may be, had danced her life away....”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)