the cemetery company and was appointed to lead its landscape design, planting and educational labelling, to complement William Hosking's layout and building and engineering (drainage) scheme. The pair worked closely as a design team under the guiding influence of the third designer George Collison, who represented the client company both as its solicitor and principal learned visionary. Loddiges' earlier experience in designing an A to Z arboretum at his Mare Street nursery, and possession of one of the largest ranges of trees and shrubs then grown for sale in Britain, ensured success. The overall effect was to establish Abney Park as the most impressively landscaped garden cemetery of its period. However regrettably, Loddiges Nursery closed in the early 1850s and thereafter maintenance of the trees and shrubs and of their botanical labels, was impaired. Today Loddiges' work is of unparalleled significance to landscape design, being recognised as of European importance. Abney Park was the first London cemetery to be invited to join the Association of Significant Cemeteries in Europe (ASCE) and it is the only surviving example of an English landscape designed by Loddiges. The Campo Santo of the Dissenters Such an elaborate planting scheme for a park cemetery may also be a reflection of the symbolic importance the founding directors attached to the land that formed Abney Park Cemetery. As nonconformists, who treasured the independence of their religious beliefs—and therefore practised Christianity outside of the established Church of England—they held the land itself to be of immense significance, for it had previously been two neighbouring and inter-related 18th-century parkland estates, the grounds of Abney House and Fleetwood House, where the non-conformist Doctor of Divinity, educationalist and poet Dr. Isaac Watts lived and taught, and indeed wrote several of his popular books and hymns. Due to these religious associations, Abney Park Cemetery rapidly became the most attractive Victorian resting place for nonconformist or dissenting ministers and educationalists, principally those from a Protestant dissenting tradition. Indeed, it stands today as the most important burial place in the UK of 19th-century Congregational, Baptist, Methodist and Salvation Army ministers and educationalists, including Christopher Newman Hall and many others, some of whom are mentioned below. Whereas Bunhill Fields was described by the poet Robert Southey as "the Campo Santo of the Dissenters" (a reference to the monumental cemetery of that name in Pisa, Italy – campo santo translates as "sacred field" or "saints' abode"