William Bradbery
British horticulturist (1776-1860)
William Bradbery (11 July 1776 – 11 August 1860), an entrepreneur, was the first person in England to cultivate and sell watercress on a commercial basis.
Early life
William was born in Didcot in Berkshire (now Oxfordshire), he was one of seven children to Thomas and Catherine Bradbery. In 1796 he married Phoebe Whiting in Marcham, Berkshire. Until around 1805 he stayed in the Marcham area, then they moved to Springhead, Northfleet in Kent, where he first started to cultivate watercress.
Watercress cultivation
In an article by Henry Bellenden Ker, FRS in 1822, to the London Horticultural Society. He states, "I lately found that watercress is grown in this neighbourhood, by Mr. William Bradbery, for the purpose of supplying the London markets. Mr. Bradbery first began to cultivate the watercress in February 1808, at Northfleet Spring Head, near Gravesend. For this purpose, he procured young plants, and placed them, with a small proportion of the wet earth in which they grew, in shallow running water; the plants soon formed large tufts, and rapidly spread over the water; and he then gathered the cress regularly for the London markets".
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This entry incorporates text from “William Bradbery” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.