Charles Isham

Charles Isham

Sir Charles Edmund Isham, 10th Baronet (16 December 1819 - 7 April 1903) was a landowner and gardener based at Lamport Hall, Northampton. He is credited with beginning the tradition of garden gnomes in the United Kingdom when he introduced a number of terracotta figures from Germany in the 1840s.

Isham was educated at Rugby School and Brasenose College, Oxford. In 1846, on the death of his elder brother, he succeeded to the baronetcy.

In 1847, inspired by the writings of John Claudius Loudon, landscape gardener and horticulturalist, he commenced construction of a large rockery alongside his house. It was in this rockery that he first placed gnomes from Nuremberg as ornamentation. He is recorded as being the High Sheriff of Northamptonshire in 1851.

Isham died at The Bungalow, Horsham, Sussex at the age of 83.

Isham married Emily Vaughan, daughter of Sir John Vaughan and his wife Louisa Boughton on 26 October 1847. She died on 6 September 1898 aged 74. His first child, Vere Isham (later Sir Vere Isham 11th Bt. who married Millicent Vaughan in 1895) was born in 1862.