I
N 1760 Haidar Ali, soldier of fortune and de facto ruler of Mysore, ordered the creation of a botanical garden in Bangalore, the first in India. He gave it the common name of Lal Bagh, or “red garden,” for its abundance of roses and other red flowers. Inspired by the French gardens in Pondicherry and even more by the Mughal garden in newly conquered Sira, he wanted a similar retreat of his own. Like its Mughal models, it consisted of a series of square parterres intersected by paths lined with fruit trees. Cypresses framed rose bushes and flowerbeds. A small tank at the south end provided water. Haidar augmented the local flora with exotic plants from other regions of India. Flowers were one of his few indulgences in a Spartan life of almost constant warfare. A Portuguese soldier serving in one of his regiments recounted how Haidar would walk in his garden of an evening with his concubines, each holding a nosegay of flowers. Those from whom he plucked a bouquet would be his companions for the night.1
Haidar’s son Tipu Sultan extended the gardens. “They please me very much,” commented James Achilles Fitzpatrick, British Resident at the court of Hyderabad, “and are laid out with taste and design, [and] the numerous cypress trees that form the principal avenues are the tallest and most beautiful I ever saw.”2 Tipu shared his father’s love of flowers and was in the habit of presenting a garland of jasmine to guests as a mark of particular favor. Frescoes of the battle of Polilur, his greatest triumph against the British, painted for the summer palace, depict him on horseback, incongruously smelling a bouquet of flowers amid the carnage all about him.3 But Tipu was far more educated and cosmopolitan than his father, possessing a “large and curious library.”4 Like his Enlightenment contemporaries in Europe, he was an “improver,” eager to embrace the latest technology and to experiment with new varieties of crops and plants, some from as far away as Afghanistan, Persia, and Turkey. He promoted agriculture in his dominions, introducing higher-yielding strains of rice. More significantly, he set up twenty-one stations for silkworm cultivation, with adjoining mulberry plantations, laying the foundations for the later preeminence of Mysore’s silk industry.
In the summer of 1788 Tipu sent a stunningly ill-timed embassy to the French king, Louis XVI, in hopes of creating a grand alliance against the East India Company, with which Mysore (and France) had been sporadically at war for several decades. The ambassadors had a thoroughly good time and caused an Orientalist furor in the French capital. “They were,” writes Joseph Michaud, “the subject of all conversations, on them all eyes were fixed, and the name of Tippoo Saheb became, for a moment, famous among the lighthearted people who were more struck by the originality of Asiatic costumes than by the importance of their possessions in India.”5 Having soon run through their funds, the envoys reluctantly returned, deeply in debt, bringing with them seeds and bulbs from the Jardin du Roi, along with gardeners, engineers, a clockmaker, and a disappointingly small military contingent. A decade later Tipu, ever hopeful of raising armies against the British, sent another embassy to the French colony of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. This, too, was more successful botanically than militarily: the envoys brought back twenty chests of plants and seeds, along with clove and nutmeg trees that required eighty men to carry them over the Western Ghats from the port of Mangalore.6
After Tipu’s death in 1799 at the battle of Srirangapatnam (where he also had an exquisite garden that reminded Lady Clive of Chantilly), the Lal Bagh passed into the possession of the victorious British army, presided over by a British officer who amused himself stocking it with European and Chinese plants until he was transferred elsewhere and handed the garden over to the Madras Presidency. After several decades of intermittent neglect, William New, a Kew-trained gardener, was put in charge. New energetically resuscitated the garden and made it a botanical showplace, adding plantings from China, South Africa, the Indian Ocean, and Kew, as well as walks and avenues of fast-growing Grevillea robusta. Under New and his successors, it became a center of scientific research and oversaw the development of plants of ornamental and economic value.
As Ray Desmond would later write of Kew itself, Haidar’s Lal Bagh is a palimpsest of garden styles and functions.7 Like Kew, it evolved from a royal pleasure garden into a botanical garden; like Kew, it endured periods of neglect, shifting administrations, and debates about its very nature. What was it to be—the handmaiden of commerce and agriculture or a beacon of science? Or should it be above all a “green place,” with, in Edward Lear’s words, “something very rural quiet” where ordinary people could escape the hurlyburly of urban life?8
“Imperial Kew”
The botanic garden had its roots in the royal garden on the one hand and the physic garden on the other. Private gardens with their follies and temples, knots and pagodas had long been the preserve of princes and nobles, vying with each other for the elegance of their estates and the services of the most noted garden designers, who often crossed national borders, spreading styles and creating vogues. Italian craftsmen were especially in demand, for example, at Hampton Court during the sixteenth century. The first physic garden, too, was Italian. Established in Padua in 1545, it was attached to the medical school. Other physic gardens followed across Europe: Oxford in 1621, Chelsea in 1673. Practical rather than ornamental, these gardens served apothecaries with an array of medicinal plants whose history stretched back to antiquity.9
The influx of plants in the wake of the period of European exploration known as the Discoveries and consequent imperial expansion enriched both types of gardens. In the medieval period, the Arabs had been the principle agents of diffusion from east to west, bringing rice, citrus fruits, melons, mulberry trees, cotton, and sugar. At the same time they expanded the spice trade from Southeast Asia and India, whetting insatiable appetites for pepper, nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, and more. The opening up of sea routes to Africa, Asia, and the Americas not only took Europeans to the sources of these spices, cutting out Arab and other intermediaries, it also unleashed on the continent a flood of new and exotic plants. For a moment, eager collectors fantasized that it might at last be possible to reconstruct the Garden of Eden with an ingathering of every known species, a sort of floral Noah’s Ark. Soon, however, they were overwhelmed by a tsunami of new plants.
The problem was how to order them. Up until now botanists had relied on systems of classification dating from classical times, but these proved hopelessly inadequate to the task. Gradually the idea caught on of classifying plants according to family relationships, using binomial nomenclature to indicate genera and species. In a pioneering work of twelve volumes (1623), Gaspard Bauhin managed to describe some six thousand species accordingly before this system, too, succumbed to the flood of new plants, especially those supplied by Dutch enterprise in the East and West Indies. It was left to the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus to bring order out of rising chaos, declaring, it was said, “Deus creavit: Linnaeus posuit.” In other words, God had preordained him to reveal the order that lay behind the original creation of nature. Linnaeus proposed an entirely new basis for classifying plants, one that he readily acknowledged to be “artificial” (the natural relationships of the divine plan not yet having been revealed to mankind). Since plants reproduced sexually, they should be classified by a single feature, namely the numbers and arrangements of male stamens and female pistils each possessed. He came up with twenty-four classes, subdivided into orders, families, and finally into Bauhin’s genera and species. Almost from the start, however, Linnaeus, too, found himself under attack from fellow botanists who considered his system an arbitrary one and, more to the point, incapable of absorbing many plants from distant corners of the globe, since counting stamens and pistils alone meant that many unrelated plants ended up quite literally as bedfellows—Linnaeus’s terminology was heavy on marital metaphors.10
Initially botanists were most interested in pursuing the medicinal promise of new exotics. In time, however, large European trading companies such as the British East India Company and its Dutch and French counterparts realized the huge commercial potential of a wider range of plants and avidly sponsored the search for new species, less out of scientific curiosity than in hopes of enriching themselves and their nations. The Dutch had taken the lead in experimenting with potentially lucrative exotics with their gardens in Cape Town (1694), followed by the French, who established Pamplemousses on Mauritius (1735), both of which eventually ended up in British hands. The British also laid out a pioneering botanical garden on the island of St. Vincent in the West Indies in 1764. When Queen Victoria ascended the throne in 1837, there were about ten active British botanical gardens; at her death in 1901, the empire boasted 126.11
At the nerve center of this network was the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, the British counterpart of the French Jardin du Roi. The guiding forces behind the ascendancy of Kew were two remarkable amateur botanists, Lord Bute and Sir Joseph Banks. Bute joined with the Dowager Princess Augusta and George III to create one of the finest Georgian gardens in the land. He secured government funding of hitherto unimagined munificence, brought in a number of gifted architects and landscape designers, and augmented its stock of rare plants. By 1767 he boasted that “the Exotick Garden at Kew is by far the richest in Europe[,] . . . getting plants and seeds from every Corner of the Habitable world.”12
When Bute fell from favor and Princess Augusta died, the vacuum at Kew was filled by Banks. The son of a wealthy Lincolnshire landowner, he had been captivated by natural history as a schoolboy. Still in his twenties, he circumnavigated the globe with Captain Cook, having paid his own way and that of a small entourage of transnational scientists and illustrators. The Endeavour returned to port in 1771 with a collection of some 3,600 dried plant species, of which more than a third were new to science, along with a wealth of seed and pickled specimens of animal and marine life, a portfolio of drawings, and assorted oddities from the Antipodes. Although the voyage had taken the lives of thirty-eight of the ship’s crew and five of his scientist companions, Banks was immediately lionized by society and received by King George III at St James Palace.13
Banks went on to an illustrious career as president of the Royal Society for over thirty years (1788–1820) and the dominant power at Kew for even longer. He seemed to know and correspond with everyone, from the king on down. His interests spanned the globe. As overseer of the Gardens he excelled less as a scientist in his own right than as botanical entrepreneur and facilitator. He encouraged collecting by diplomats, merchants, military officers, and missionaries—in short anyone who might be traveling to distant shores. Just as importantly, Kew-trained gardeners now fanned out all over the world to collect and to supervise local establishments. The result was a steady influx of plants and seeds to Kew as well as a reciprocal outflow to the West Indies, India, and Australia.14
If Erasmus Darwin could sing of “Imperial Kew by Thames’s glittering side,”15 this was largely due to Banks. He had determined to make the garden “a great botanical exchange house for the empire.” In an age that stressed not only the exotic and the beautiful but above all the useful—Louis XVI wore a boutonnière of potato flowers offered by Parmentier—Banks detailed the potential agricultural benefits of botanic exploration, for both the motherland and her colonies. Botany became the symbol, as Richard Drayton has written, of an “improving plantocracy.”16 Kew itself reflected this perspective: while botanical activities garnered much of the public attention, they occupied only a small corner of the garden; the bulk of its acreage was devoted to providing fruit and vegetables for the palace tables, raising cattle and pheasants, and growing grain. And flowers: during the reign of George III, there were also hothouses and flowerbeds reserved solely for the sovereign’s nosegays and floral arrangements.17
Banks died in 1820, the same year as his supportive but long-incapacitated sovereign. His death coincided with a declining interest in botany after the glory years of the eighteenth century, when it could well claim to be the queen of the sciences. With a severe cut in official support as part of the retrenchment that followed the Napoleonic Wars, the Botanic Gardens entered a period of neglect and uncertainty. Already during Banks’s tenure, private gardeners and nurserymen had been clamoring for a share of Kew’s exotics. Rare plants were much in demand and commanded lucrative prices. Smuggling was an ongoing problem, no doubt abetted by some of the garden staff. The royal household was less and less inclined to fund the gardens with their earlier lavishness, so that overstuffed hothouses fell into disrepair, the lake silted up into a muddy pond, and buildings grew shabbier and shabbier. The Gardener’s Gazette declared in 1837, “The state of the place is slovenly and discreditable, and that of the plants disgracefully dirty.”18
As Kew’s fortunes declined, other institutions rose to challenge it. Under attack from all sides, Kew faced an identity crisis. Should it be useful or ornamental, royal or public? What was to be the role of science? Above all, where would the funding come from? It had become a battleground, fought over with a surprising—or perhaps not so surprising—degree of vitriol and old-style politicking.19 It was pulled back from the precipice by the skillful intervention of several champions, and just in time. In 1840 the Royal Botanic Gardens was transferred from the monarch to Her Majesty’s Government and Sir William Hooker, professor of botany at the University of Glasgow, put in charge. His appointment represented a victory for the partisans of botany over horticultural entrepreneurs who favored subordinating science to ornamental gardening. The price exacted was the opening up of the garden for public recreational use. Nevertheless, Sir William and the dynastic succession of son Sir Joseph Hooker and son-in-law Sir William Thiselton-Dyer cemented their control over Kew until the early years of the twentieth century. By the late 1870s they had achieved their goal of making it the world’s foremost center of botany and botanical research, with ties to gardens, planters, and administrators on every continent.
Kew’s directors became adept at the art of tying botany to the imperial enterprise. Not only would it be the repository of the world’s flora—“a garden in which a vast assemblage of plants from every accessible part of the earth’s surface is systematically cultivated”—it would increasingly assert its right as final arbiter in naming new plants, superseding Linnaeus as imperial Adam. At the same time, it actively promoted the economic exploitation of major agricultural commodities such as cinchona and rubber from South America, tea from China, indigo, sisal, and spices. The Colonial Office itself, with mushrooming African dependencies under its wing, depended on Kew’s expertise in its endeavors to make colonies profitable, or, if not profitable, at least self-supporting.20
“The Most Perfect Thing of Its Kind”:
Calcutta’s Botanic Garden
John Lindley’s report to the Royal Gardens Committee in 1838 amounted to a “mission statement” for Kew as a “National Botanic Garden,” the nexus of a global network.21 It would be the sun around which the satellite imperial gardens revolved, bestowing their beneficial rays on British commerce, agriculture, medicine, horticulture, and manufactures. And so it came to pass, thanks in large measure to the skillful leadership of the Hookers. At the head of Lindley’s list of botanic gardens were those of India: Calcutta, Bombay, Saharanpur. To these he might also have added Madras, whose founder discovered that a type of prickly pear was effective against scurvy, the bane of sailors.22 With the exception of Saharanpur, a former Mughal garden, these were colonial creations in the capitals of the three presidencies. In time more would be added, from the Himalayas in the north to the Nilgiris in the south, but Calcutta remained to Indian gardens what Kew was to the empire as a whole.
In 1786 Colonel Robert Kyd proposed to the Court of Directors of the East India Company the creation of a “Botanical Garden” in Calcutta. A military man who was also an amateur botanist, Kyd argued that such a garden should be founded “not for the purpose of collecting rare plants as things of curiosity or furnishing articles for the gratification of luxury, but for establishing a stock for disseminating such articles as may prove beneficial to the inhabitants as well as the natives of Great Britain, and which ultimately may tend to the extension of the national commerce and riches.” In official correspondence, he of course had to emphasize the commercial benefits to be expected from the garden, while privately he was just as concerned with importing drought-resistant crops, such as sago palms from the Malay Peninsula and date palms from Persia, that could be distributed to peasants in drought-prone areas of India. Britain, he believed, had a responsibility for protecting the citizens of newly acquired Bengal from the devastation of recurrent famine.23
The Company, on the other hand, was far more interested in Kyd’s suggestion that Dacca cotton could be widely cultivated in India. In the 1780s India was draining precious bullion from British coffers and Indian cottons were competing with those of the nascent British textile industry. If India could be turned into a supplier of raw materials—not only cotton, but also spices, indigo, tea, coffee, tobacco, sandalwood, teak, hemp—and a market for British manufactures, the balance of trade might be reversed.24 The idea of “economic botany” was very much in the air. The Company had already been encouraging the search for useful plants and the introduction of exotic crops into India on a modest scale, and was therefore in a receptive mood for Kyd’s proposals.
The Calcutta Botanic Garden opened in 1787 on a site next to Kyd’s own garden at Shalimar, on the west bank of the Hughli at Sibpor. As its first superintendent, he launched an ambitious but ultimately unsuccessful program of introducing spice-yielding trees and vines: nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon, pepper. He was more successful in other areas, establishing some three hundred species in the garden and participating in an active exchange of plants and seeds with both other Company gardens and Kew. Kyd died in 1793. He had hoped to be buried in his beloved Shalimar, but his wishes were disregarded on the grounds that so distinguished a servant of the Company should not be buried in unhallowed ground but rather in the South Park Street cemetery.25
Kyd’s work was carried on for the next half century by two remarkably able botanists, both of whom shared his eagerness to develop plants that would benefit the native population as well as the Company’s balance sheet. A surgeon in the East India Company’s navy, later a botanist stationed in Madras, William Roxburgh became known as “the Indian Linnaeus,” “the father of Indian botany.” Over the twenty years of his stewardship, he transformed the Calcutta garden into the largest and most scientifically organized in Asia, adding some 22,000 species of plants and more than 800 trees. His successor, Nathaniel Wallich, had originally come to India as surgeon at the Danish settlement of Serampore, upriver from Calcutta. When Serampore was captured by the British in 1813, he was taken prisoner, but once his botanical abilities were recognized, they were quickly exploited. It was Wallich’s infinite knowledge of plants that had so delighted Lady Amherst. Indeed, if less scientifically gifted than his predecessor, he was the consummate field botanist, collecting specimens in Nepal, Singapore, Penang, and Burma, as well as much of India. Together, Roxburgh and Wallich made Calcutta a center of experimentation with living plants from all over the subcontinent and the world as well as with dried specimens stored in the herbarium for study, classification, and illustration. Ships outward bound from Calcutta were prevailed upon, however reluctantly, to stow plants and seeds from the Botanic Garden (which took up space and were often a nuisance to keep alive on long voyages); in return came treasures from the Indies and the Cape of Good Hope.26
Lord Valentia visited Roxburgh’s garden in 1803. “It affords,” he wrote, “a wonderful display of the vegetable world, infinitely surpassing any thing I have ever before beheld. It is laid out in a very good style, and its vast extent renders the confinement of beds totally unnecessary.” Nevertheless, he regretted that so little space was allotted to “a scientific arrangement.” It was, to be sure, hardly surprising that “utility seems to have been more attended to than science.” Still, he noted that Calcutta was the center “where productions of every climate are assembled, to be distributed to every spot where they have a chance of being beneficial.” Already the garden had disseminated thousands of teaks, loquots, grafted mangoes, and other trees valuable for fruit and timber throughout Britain’s “Oriental territories.” Lovely nymphaeas bloomed in the pond, but the prize specimen was a “noble” Ficus bengalensis, swathed in epidendrons—the great banyan tree that is still the garden’s main attraction, covering an area nearly 1,300 feet in circumference in spite of having its central trunk eviscerated in 1925 because of fungus damage (see Pl. 12).27 It was, incidentally, under the spreading arms of a Ficus that Adam and Eve took refuge after the Fall:
. . . Not that tree for fruit renown’d,
But such, and at this day to Indians known
In Malabar or Deccan spreads her arms,
Branching so broad and long, that in the ground
The bended twigs take root, and daughters grow
About the mother tree. . . .
And with its leaves they gird their waists “to hide thir gilt and dreaded shame.”28
Bishop Heber had happier thoughts. Touring the garden with Lady Amherst, he was minded less of the expulsion from Eden than of Paradise. The scene, he wrote, “more perfectly answers Milton’s idea of Paradise, except that it is on a dead flat instead of a hill, than any thing I ever saw.” Lady Amherst herself characterized the garden as “this superb establishment,” declaring that it “is the most perfect thing of its kind existing certainly in the East—the vast collection of plants from all parts of the world in the finest state of luxuriant growth.” Her only lament: trees imported from England failed to thrive. A giant baobab from Senegambia, however, was doing splendidly. Heber found that this “elephant of the vegetable creation,” about which he had heard so much, bore more resemblance to “that disease of the leg which bears the elephant’s name, than tallies with his majestic and well-proportioned, though somewhat unwieldy stature”—part of a long-winded explanation of why he did not find the tree particularly attractive. Heber also noted with satisfaction that public establishments such as the Botanic Garden were no longer cultivated by “convicts in chains” but by peasants hired by the day or week, a change that was cheap “as well as otherwise advantageous and agreeable.” The only problem was summoning them to work on time, a problem solved by the installation of a very large brass bell, specially cast in Canton.29
Wallich subsequently immortalized Lady Amherst with Amherstia nobilis, otherwise known as the Pride of Burma or Orchid Tree because of its spectacular hanging flowers with their crimson tips. Legend had it that the tree was so beautiful it was offered as a sacrifice to Buddha (Wallich found it in a ruined monastery). Gardeners all over the world vied in their attempts to acclimate it; it defeated them all until Louisa Lawrence brought it to bloom in her villa garden at Ealing Park. By the end of the century Calcutta could boast a magnificent Amherstia forty feet tall, its pendulous boughs resplendent with blossoms of scarlet and gold.30 Naming rights were, incidentally, one of the few favors botanists dispensed, and some used them as judiciously as any politician.
A few plants were too delicate even for Bengal’s mild winter. Still, the nutmeg, “a pretty tree, something like a myrtle, with a beautiful peach-like blossom,” was finally coaxed to grow by matting it carefully and putting it in the most sheltered spot.31 Eventually, like Kew, the Botanic Garden added conservatories for plants not indigenous to India of the plains, especially for orchids. Like Kew, too, Calcutta had its Palm House, “an enormous octagonal structure, with a central dome” and framed in iron; unlike Kew, however, the sides and roof were covered with wire netting, on top of which there was a thin thatch of grass. Inside, the palms were planted in the ground rather than in pots, conveying a more natural effect. But nothing could protect the garden from the periodic cyclones that devastated Bengal.32
There were, alas, serpents in Calcutta’s Eden. Some were mundane, like the perennial tussle with the Company and later the Government of India over funds. Others were ideological differences about the true calling of a botanical garden, echoes of those waged in Great Britain itself. At its inception, Banks had not been happy with Kyd’s suggestion that the Calcutta garden be open to the public as “a not inelegant retreat for such of the members of administrations whose indisposition may preclude [them] from the duties of their station”—in other words, a refuge from the city’s insalubrious climate. More generally, Calcutta, like botanic gardens the world over, could not resist pressures to take on more and more of the attributes of a public park.33
Lord Valentia had also called attention to the conflict between utility and science, a conflict not easily resolved. If the pendulum seemed at first to swing in the direction of utility, this was not always the case. During one of Wallich’s extended sick leaves, William Griffith was put in charge of the garden. A brilliant and courageous collector who amassed some nine thousand specimens of natural history from Afghanistan to Malacca, he was a disaster as curator. In a few short years he managed to wreak greater havoc than the cyclone of 1842, all in the name of science. Considering the existing plan something of a hodgepodge, he reordered it into a circular garden intended to reflect Jussieu’s and de Candolle’s classification of plants; complementing this was a separate display of medicinal and useful plants native to lower Bengal. When Joseph Hooker first visited the garden in 1848, “nothing was to be seen of its former beauty and grandeur, but a few noble trees or graceful palms rearing their heads over a low ragged jungle, or spreading their broad leaves or naked limbs over the forlorn hope of a botanical garden, that consisted of open clay beds, disposed in concentric circles, and baking into brick under the fervid heat of a Bengal sun.” An “unsparing hand” had swept away the avenue of Cycas palms “unmatched in any tropical garden” and destroyed the groves of “teak, mahogany, clove, nutmeg, and cinnamon.” The great Amherstia had nearly succumbed to injudicious treatment and the baking of the soil over its roots, and even the celebrated banyan tree almost ceased sending out descending limbs thanks to neglect in providing the wet clay and moss it required. In Ray Desmond’s words, Griffith was “completely insensitive to any aesthetic considerations”; for him the garden was “no more than an open-air laboratory.” With phenomenal but misguided energy and vision, he pursued his blinkered agenda. “Where is the stately, matchless garden that I left in 1842?” wrote Wallich in despair to William Hooker at Kew on his return two years later. “Day is not more different from night than the state of the garden as it was from its present utterly ruined condition.”34
Fortunately by the time Joseph Hooker returned to Calcutta early in 1850, he found recovery well underway, thanks to the efforts of Wallich, once more in command, and his successor, John Falconer. The tropical climate helped: “The rapidity of growth is so great in this climate,” Hooker noted, “that within eight months from the commencement of the improvements, a great change had already taken place. The grounds bore a park-like appearance; broad shady walks had replaced the narrow winding paths that ran in distorted lines over the ground, and a large Palmetum, or collection of tall and graceful palms of various kinds, occupied several acres at one side of the garden.” There were new plantings of bamboos, evergreens of every sort, plantains, and screwpines. The banyan was now sending out hundreds of props and the Amherstia thriving, thanks to a watering system making use of bamboo pipes sunk deep into the ground. Nevertheless, the expense of restoration had been enormous and “now cripples the resources of the garden library and other valuable adjuncts.”35
Flowers were another potential problem. What role should pure aesthetics play in a botanical garden? Griffith did grudgingly allow for a flower garden during his stewardship, although he didn’t care for floral borders along the paths. Kew itself faced the same pushes and pulls. An MP voiced his certainty “that where one person was interested in the botanical specimens, 100 were attracted by the flowers.” In 1856 one of the Kew commissioners made known his displeasure with the “bad state of the flower-beds and the untidy appearance of the grass and the extremely bad condition of the walks in the Gardens,” declaring, “I cannot suffer such things in the future.” Thus reprimanded, Hooker dutifully planted flowerbed after flowerbed until three years later Kew counted some four hundred. Nevertheless, for years he subdivided his annual report into separate headings for “a place of beautiful recreation” and for educational, instructive, and scientific pursuits.36
Even flowers themselves were not neutral. Horticultural partisans battled over the role of bedding-out plants, massing by color, paths, and lawns, their dictates changing over time. Plantings at Kew were reviewed like the latest in music or fashion, with praise and rebuke meted accordingly. Where William Hooker was forced to accept the annual ritual of bedding-out flowers, his son and successor Joseph Hooker had to give in to the “passion for a blaze of gaudy colours,” which William Morris labeled “an aberration of the human mind.”37 Farther from the horticultural epicenter, the Calcutta Botanic Garden nevertheless reflected changing tastes and changing demands. After the 1864 cyclone wiped out most of its trees and turned large areas into marsh, the director seized the occasion to redesign the whole, creating pools in which to show off the great South American waterlily, Victoria amazonica (also a star at Kew), and clusters of trees and shrubs owing more to aesthetics than taxonomic relationships.38
Botanical gardens, whether at home or abroad, were also expected to supply plants to nurseries and to the public, the more spectacular the better. So serious a problem had this become that when Lord Canning arrived in Calcutta as governor-general in 1856 he resolved to improve the garden, which although a “fine establishment . . . has been quite spoiled by the practices of giving plants to whoever wished for them.” In the preceding ten months alone, some fifty thousand plants had been given away. If Canning did not quite end the practice—his own wife was writing home a few months later that the director was “most amiable in getting plants for me”—he sharply curtailed it.39 On the other hand, a longtime superintendent of the garden at Saharanpur, in the foothills northwest of Calcutta, was quite happy to ignore the demands of science in favor of raising flowers and agricultural plants to stock the private gardens and parks from Lahore to Lucknow and Delhi. At the same time, he responded to the insatiable appetite for deodars (Himalayan cedars) in Britain with large shipments of seeds.40
Gardens in more temperate climes, such as Saharanpur and the higher elevations of the hill stations, offered opportunities that Calcutta could not match. Wandering through the serpentine walks bordered with English flowers and shrubs, Captain Mundy almost forgot he was in India, “an illusion, however, which was speedily dispelled by the apparition of my faithful elephant waiting for me at the gate.”41 Here European fruits and vegetables could thrive—an enterprising botanist even suggested growing hops in the neighborhood of Kabul to produce beer for the troops now penetrating into Afghanistan—and European flowers gladden the heart of expatriates. But these gardens also served the aims of economic botany. Initially a major focus had been on medicinal plants, a matter of growing importance with more and more troops stationed overseas. Drugs from Europe were not only expensive but tended to lose their potency on the long voyage east. They were also often of little help in treating tropical diseases. This led to a keen interest in “bazaar medicines,” a term first used by John Forbes Royle. Royle, like many European botanists before the “rampant racism” of the later nineteenth century took hold, had a great respect for local knowledge, particularly local knowledge of materia medica. He considered that Indian works on the subject “were far advanced and embraced an extensive range of subjects before any progress had been made in Europe,” and laid out a garden for medicinal plants at Mussoorie in the foothills of the Himalayas that included species commonly used by indigenous doctors.42 A garden for medicinal plants is still a feature of the Darjeeling Botanical Garden (Fig. 27).
Fig. 27. Medical Garden, Darjeeling Botanical Garden
[Photograph by author]
Quinine, Opium, and Tea
The most critical plant for survival in the tropics, however, was the cinchona tree, whose bark yielded quinine, the only known treatment for malaria. It was native to the Andes, and the more jealously the Spanish crown guarded its monopoly, the more other colonial powers tried vainly to smuggle out seeds and plants and grow them in their own dependencies, initially with little success. By the 1850s the British were spending more than £40,000 per year to supply the Bengal Presidency alone with quinine. Kew and the India Office combined forces to obtain seeds, germinating some of them in the United Kingdom but sending most on to the botanic garden at Ootacamund, where a Kew-trained gardener at last succeeded in getting large plantations to grow. The species established at Ooty as well as in Ceylon and Darjeeling proved nevertheless to have a much weaker concentration of quinine than that later found in Bolivia, but when seeds of this species were offered to Kew, Sir Joseph Hooker, distracted by the death of his father and his own illness, turned them down. They were snapped up by the Dutch consul-general in London, shipped off to Java, grafted onto older stock, and thrived so spectacularly that the Dutch henceforth dominated the world market. Whatever its source, by the end of the nineteenth century, one could buy a dose of quinine at any Indian post office for half a farthing; mixed with gin, it became the colonial “tipple” par excellence.43
Cinchona was only one of a host of “useful plants” the British tried to exploit commercially in India. Spices, indigo, cochineal, cotton, hemp, flax, teak, mahogany, rubber—the emphasis changed over time, mirroring changing markets in the outside world. Many were blind alleys. With a whole empire to choose from, the British found, for example, that sisal did better in East Africa, cloves in Zanzibar, and rubber in Malaya. Two plants, however, were to prove bonanzas—tea and opium—and their histories were curiously intertwined.
Marlene Dietrich once observed that the British “have an umbilical cord that has never been cut and through which tea flows constantly.”44 This recourse to tea in moments of both stress and ease is relatively recent. The beverage began its rise to preeminence as the national drink of England only in the early decades of the eighteenth century after beating out its rival, coffee. Like coffee, it was touted at first mainly as an exotic medicinal. Not only did it “delight the Palate,” noted John Ovington, an early advocate, it also prevented gout, stone, and other complaints, especially those brought on by “a pernicious Excess of inflaming Liquors.” Indeed a Poem to Tea contrasted its balm with the “turbulent Effects” of alcoholic drinks; tea, declared the poet, “does not run our Senses all aground.” He concluded with a clarion call to the “sickly Souls, that languish on your Beds”:
Call for the Kettle, and raise up your heads:
Sip but a little of this Nectar rare,
Expect it will your Health, and Wit repair.
Nonetheless doubters not only challenged its therapeutic value but found it downright unpatriotic. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, blamed his disorder of the nerves on twenty-six years of tea-drinking at breakfast and advised his fellow countrymen to leave off the alien beverage and content themselves with “English Herbs instead.” Others denounced it as a destroyer of female beauty and a drain on the national economy.45
Opponents were fighting a losing battle. Before long, as its price dropped steadily, tea was “cheering the whole land from the palace to the cottage,” a welcome picker-upper in the “foggy Air or fenny watery Places” of the British Isles.46 At the same time, tea-drinking moved from coffee houses and taverns into the newly created pleasure gardens of Vauxhall and Ranelagh, gardens that brought the “elegant aristocratic parks of the countryside into the town,” offering Londoners “a scintillating carnival of delight . . . ranging from the cultural to the carnal, seductively twinkling across the river” like the moonlight gardens of some Indian prince.47 Here the middle classes came to see and be seen; here they promenaded, viewing the latest objects of curiosity, artistic or mechanical, and drinking tea. And, unlike coffee houses and taverns, the gardens were very much open to women and children. By midcentury tea had become a staple of working-class diets as well, affordable to the lowest farmhand and, with the advent of the industrial revolution, the lowest millhand. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that tea changed both eating and social habits, accommodating to and even reinforcing the class structure of the nation.
Camellia sinensis originated in the remote hills of Yunnan in southwestern China, the cradle of so many plants. The tiny new leaves were plucked from wild trees by small peasant farmers. After being processed laboriously by hand in time-honored fashion, the tea made the long and tortuous journey to the port of Canton on the backs of human porters. Until 1833 the East India Company maintained a monopoly of tea imports into Britain. The figures are staggering: consumption climbed from 20,000 pounds in 1700 to more than 20 million pounds by the end of the century, or some two cups a day for every man, woman, and child—and these figures did not take into account the perhaps equal amounts of tea smuggled into the country.48 The dizzying increase in consumption meant equally dizzying profits both for the Company and for the British Government, which taxed imports. Initially Bengal cotton was traded to the Chinese for tea, but when the Chinese improved their own cotton industry, tea merchants insisted on payment in silver. By the late eighteenth century, when tea had become the single most valuable item in the Company portfolio, supplies of silver were drying up, and the Company was desperate for another commodity acceptable to the Chinese. Opium provided the answer. If the demand was not insatiable at the start, it soon became so.
Opium had been grown in several parts of India long before the British arrived.49 From the time of Babur, Mughal rulers and their courts indulged freely, often drinking the drug mixed with wine. The lion’s share of Indian opium was produced in the Ganges plain between Patna and Benares. When the East India Company wrested control of the region from the Mughals in the second half of the eighteenth century, they also took over their predecessors’ monopoly of the trade. As demand skyrocketed, huge areas of land were diverted from other crops to poppies, especially in Bengal. Hundred of workers were employed, many of whom became addicts themselves, either by choice or simply by exposure to the drug.
Kipling gives a vivid account of the factory at Ghazipur, some forty miles below Benares, “an opium mint” that so handsomely filled the coffers of the Indian government. Ironically, the city had been known earlier as the “Gulistan, the rose-bed, of Bengal” for its plain of roses “as far as the eye can see.” They were made into the finest rosewater in the world.50 Opium was a different matter. The entire process was tightly controlled from the moment regiments of a hundred jars, each holding one maund (about eighty pounds), began arriving in April. At every stage forms had to be filled out—“never was such a place for forms as the Ghazipur Factory”—certifying the quality and weight of each pot; woe betide anyone involved if a pot arrived tampered with or broken. Random samples were checked for adulteration, resulting in still more forms and registers. Once approved, the jars were emptied into huge vats, and then smashed and tossed into the Ganges. The contents of the vats were assayed yet again before the blend was transferred into smaller vats and worked by the feet of coolies, dangling from ropes and dragging their legs painfully through the slurry: “Try to wade in mud of 70° consistency, and see what it is like.” Next, the opium was made into cakes, finally packed into chests, and dispatched to Calcutta. Kipling reckons the value of Ghazipur’s huge godowns of opium at the beginning of the cold season at three and a half millions in sterling.51
Some of Ghazipur’s opium was refined into morphia and other medicinal compounds, but the “real opium” was destined for the China trade, carefully tailored to meet the exacting requirements of the Chinese smoker. China itself had long produced opium, but it was uneven in quality, while that imported from Smyrna had characteristics that made it less desirable—hence the preference for Indian opium: “The Chinaman likes every inch of the stuff we send him,” even boiling the shell in which it was packed.52 Needless to say, the Chinese government watched with horror as more and more of its citizens became addicted: “For a pot of tea,” Henry Hobhouse has written, “one could say, Chinese culture was nearly destroyed.” This is a slight exaggeration, to be sure, since China continued to produce opium itself, and an unholy alliance of Chinese smugglers and corrupt officials made sure that the Celestial Empire’s attempts to interdict the trade would be unavailing. In the face of growing protest in both China and Great Britain, the East India Company could plead innocence since it was not itself directly involved but sold the opium to private traders, including many Americans, who operated under Company license.53
The Opium War of 1838–42 had devastating and long-lasting effects on China while at the same time underscoring the vulnerability of British reliance on China for its national drink and the need to find other sources. The obvious place to look was India. Both Warren Hastings and Joseph Banks had had the foresight in the latter decades of the eighteenth century to propose acclimatizing the tea plant to the subcontinent, but the Company was too distracted by its wars of expansion—and in fact it was only these that brought under its dominions the mountainous areas that would prove suitable for tea cultivation. By the 1820s, however, interest was rekindled, stimulated by reports of wild tea growing in newly acquired, if remote, areas of Assam. The first seeds and plants sent to Calcutta were met with considerable skepticism—were they really tea or simply a flowering form of camellia? Given the uncertainty it seemed wiser to some to try to smuggle tea plants out of China, in spite of official Chinese embargoes and even death penalties. One misguided report argued that even inferior Chinese plants would be more likely to produce a marketable crop than would the “jungly stock” of Assam. In the mid-1830s the Assam plant was positively identified as true tea, inspiring the Tea Committee in Calcutta to pronounce the discovery “by far the most important and valuable that has ever been made in matters connected with the agricultural and communal resources of this empire.” Nevertheless, it would be decades before less hardy Chinese hybrids, the “pests of Assam,” were finally eradicated.54
Given the remoteness of Assam, the Company hoped to be able to stimulate local chiefs to grow tea, but this plan was quickly abandoned in favor of European “tea gardens.” The problems were manifold. Europeans knew nothing about cultivating or processing tea, the elaborate sequence of drying, withering, rolling, and cutting to break down the leaf—the so-called CTC (cut, tear, curl) method.55 They even labored under the mistaken assumption that black and green tea came from different plants. An early planter did learn serendipitously that tea trees grow faster when pruned—and a bush is much easier to pick than a ten-foot tree. Since the local populations were sparse and uninterested in plantation labor, planters turned to the Chinese for both labor and know-how. Naively assuming that “every Chinaman must be an expert in tea cultivation and manufacture,” they shanghaied stray Chinese in the bazaars of Calcutta. Many had come from the sea ports of China and had never seen a tea plant in their lives. “Stuck in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by jungles full of herds of wild elephants, tigers so plentiful they were referred to as pests like the leeches and rats, far from their families, without women or recreation,” the Chinese suffered heavy mortality and absconded whenever they could. Nevertheless, they provided much of the labor force into the 1860s, along with Indians rounded up by unscrupulous recruiters among the poor of Calcutta.56
Once the real Chinese experts were found, a veritable tea mania ensued, thanks to the promise of free land and dreams of unlimited wealth. European planters descended on Assam and later on other areas found suitable, such as Darjeeling, the Nilgiri Hills, the Western Ghats, and Ceylon. Inevitably this led to overexpansion and poor quality, with periodic crises throughout the century. The crash of 1867 was so severe that it prompted a rethinking of the industry and its methods from start to finish. Even with miserably paid “coolie” labor, Indian tea was more expensive than Chinese and Japanese tea produced by peasants earning even less. To compete successfully, science and capitalism would have to be applied to every stage of production. Although there was no way to mechanize planting, growing, and picking, they could be made more scientific, along the lines of British agriculture at home. Science could prescribe the best plants and the best soils, the optimum spacing between plants and rows, the best trees for shading and how they should be located, the appropriate seeds, fertilizer, and pesticides. The hand labor, still indispensable to pick the new leaves as they appeared, could be subjected to the same sort of time discipline and supervision that nurtured the industrial revolution. “The green world” became, in Alan Macfarlane’s words, “an extended factory, roofed only by the shade trees” (Fig. 28).57 Gradually, machines were adapted to the processing of tea leaves, driven first by steam, later by electricity.
Fig. 28. Tea plantation, Western Ghats
[Photograph by author]
The end result was that Indian tea was a standardized product, consistent in quality—and cheaper than even the very cheap China tea that could claim to be neither. It helped as well that there was no export duty on Indian tea (in contrast to a 35 percent duty on Chinese tea), that there were few middlemen, and that Indian tea could now be shipped out by steamship or rail, rather than on the backs of humans. In 1884 imports of Indian tea into Great Britain exceeded those from China for the first time, and by the early decades of the twentieth century Chinese tea exports were negligible, leaving a millennia-old industry in tatters.58
A curious coda to this story is the creation virtually ex nihilo of a tea-drinking public in India itself. Although surrounded by tea-drinking peoples, Indians had never taken to it except for small fractions of the population influenced by close contact with British culture. Coffee, in contrast, had been introduced into southern India much earlier by Arab Ocean traders and acquired many devotees. Nevertheless, a few champions of Indian tea foresaw a time when the huge Indian market would become avid consumers, with, of course, benefits for all concerned: for surplus agricultural labor, for mountain wastes that could now be brought under cultivation, for the government through increased revenue. The great plant explorer Robert Fortune declared already in the 1840s that tea would make the Indian and his family “more comfortable and more happy.”59 In fact, tea did not colonize India until the twentieth century—the familiar cry of the chai-wallah passing through the railway corridors, “Chai! Gurram, gurram chai!” is thus nowhere near as old as the railroads themselves—and then only as a consequence of a massive, well-financed advertising campaign carried out by the Indian Tea Association. The ITA literally canvassed the entire subcontinent, often sending tea-preparers door-to-door, as well as providing canteens for factory workers and soldiers. Their efforts were finally rewarded, as tea drinking filtered down even to the homeless on the streets of Calcutta and now seems as Indian as lassis. To be sure, along the way it has become indigenized by the addition of spices such as cardamom and ginger.60 And like the invasion of Great Britain by curry, chai is now a staple in western coffee shops.
Botanizing in India
“A new frontier . . . seems an irresistible lure to a collector,” observes Alice Coats in her lively book The Quest for Plants. “No sooner is a mud fort built, with a handful of native soldiers and two or three British officers in residence, than the botanist is there.”61 In India during the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the botanist was, more often than not, a Scottish surgeon in the employ of the East India Company. Scottish universities such as Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen offered the best in medical education, and botanical instruction was an integral part of the training of every aspiring doctor, since plants were the primary source of medicinals. In India as elsewhere, the quest for plants focused initially on those that could profitably be added to the pharmacopoeia, drawing on the ancient and rich corpus of Ayurvedic medicine. Conveniently, Scotland had more than its share of sons on offer for empire-building: nine superintendents of the Calcutta Botanical Garden were born and educated in Scotland, along with myriad professional and amateur plant collectors, to say nothing of soldiers, administrators, and other personnel.62
Imperial plant-collecting in India has a long history, going back to Alexander the Great’s Asian campaigns of 331–323 B.C.E. He took along a special corps to collect plants, animals, fish, and other specimens for the benefit of his tutor, Aristotle, who was writing a book on natural history. The book was never finished, but on his death in 322 his papers were passed on to Theophrastus, who did record the botanical finds of the expedition in his Enquiry into Plants. This remained the only source on Indian flora for the next two millennia. His first modern successor was the Danish surgeon Johann Gerhard Koenig. A Moravian missionary and botanist trained by Linnaeus himself, Koenig was stationed in Tranquebar, south of Madras, from 1768 to 1785. For a time he was naturalist to the nawab of Arcot before passing into the employ of the East India Company which also sent him botanizing in Siam and the Straits.63 On his death, Koenig was followed in the field by a number of pioneering collectors.
Indeed, whatever their other failings, both Warren Hastings and, after him, Lord Wellesley were keen naturalists and sponsors of naturalist exploration; so were governors of Madras such as Lord Clive and Sir Thomas Munro.64 Francis Buchanan, dispatched by Wellesley to carry out the exhaustive survey of the territories in southern India acquired with the defeat of Tipu Sultan, was, like so many other botanists, a Scottish surgeon. Earlier, he had roamed about Burma, Nepal, and Bihar and published a scholarly work on the fish of the Ganges and Bengal. He was an ideal field collector, but the mandate of this mission was even more ambitious than plant- or fish-collecting, as its title makes abundantly clear: A Journey from Madras Through the Countries of Mysore, Canara, and Malabar: for the express purpose of investigating the State of Agriculture, Arts and Commerce; the Religion, Manners, and Customs; the History Natural and Civil and Antiquities. His instructions, inter alia, were to send on to the botanical garden in Calcutta “whatever useful, or rare, or curious plants and seeds you may be enabled to acquire,” with directions for their cultivation. Buchanan seconded earlier proposals to grow grapes and other fruits from the Cape of Good Hope in the higher elevations of Mysore.65 After his successful return, Wellesley installed him as the first superintendent of his menagerie at Barrackpore, a scaled-down version of the governor-general’s original intent to create an “Institution for Promoting the Natural History of India.” The menagerie limped along for just a few years after Buchanan went on leave and Wellesley was recalled for extravagance. Nevertheless, between them they left a legacy of some three thousand drawings of plants, birds, and animals from India and neighboring countries, now contained in the India Office Library.66
Other naturalists, including the superintendents of Indian botanical gardens, crisscrossed the length and breadth of the subcontinent as more and more territories came under British control. Some even trained elephants to pluck flowers from high branches and geological specimens from roadbeds.67 Surgeons of the Company were soon joined by botanists sent out by Kew, by the Royal Horticultural Society, even by private nurseries, such as veitch, and aristocratic estate owners, such as the Duke of Devonshire. But “Flora could be a melancholy muse”—plant collecting was dangerous work.68 Banks personally selected many of the collectors dispatched across the world, preferring bachelors—who would, he argued, be less distracted from their tasks, but he might also have been hoping to avoid the bothersome problem of widows, for most of the men were of modest backgrounds and were woefully paid. Banks himself had lost several of his team in the South Seas with Captain Cook. Victor Jacquemont, bon vivant and inspired amateur collector, died in Bombay at the age of thirty-two; William Griffith died on the eve of his thirty-fifth birthday. Contemplating possible expeditions of his own, the young Joseph Hooker remarked to the taxonomist George Bentham, “Have not you Botanists killed collectors a-plenty in the Tropics?”69 Isaac D’Israeli, father of the future prime minister, declared the plant hunters more worthy of remembrance than many a better-known hero: “Monuments are reared, and medals struck to commemorate events and names which are less deserving of our regard than those who have transported into the cold regions of the North, the rich fruits, the beautiful flowers, and the succulent pulse and roots of more favoured spots.”70 Reading accounts of their adventures one marvels that any survived. Whether in the arid Deccan or the malarial swamps of Assam and Burma or the bitter cold of the Himalayas, their devotion to the search for plants is humbling to the stay-at-home-in-comfort reader.71
The Himalayas were the last frontier of Indian botanical exploration. Extending some seventeen hundred miles from Afghanistan to Assam and China, from the arid Hindu Kush to the subtropical valleys of Kashmir, Nepal, Sikkim, and Bhutan, they offered a rich diversity of soils and microclimates and a treasure trove of plants: dense forests of many-hued rhododendrons and white magnolias, carpets of daphnes and poppies, primulas and potentillas, dazzling assortments of orchids, and clusters of Alpine flora clinging to the rugged outcrops. On their northern and western reaches, the mountains formed a botanical continuum with western Asia and Europe, while to the south and east the affinities were with India and China, a fact first noted by the seventeenth-century traveler François Bernier. The mountain kingdom of Nepal, some 500 miles long and 150 miles at its widest, formed the heart of the transitional zone between east and west. But if the Himalayas were a botanist’s paradise, collecting was complicated not only by their ruggedness but also by the politics of the region, much of which remained beyond British control during the first half of the nineteenth century. Buchanan was forced to cut short his mission to Khatmandu in 1803 because of the hostility of its recently installed Ghorka rulers. To the west, Ranjit Singh determined who could and could not come exploring in the Punjab and Kashmir; to the east, the dewan of Sikkim frustrated Joseph Hooker’s original plans to botanize in that kingdom, even going so far as to have his companion, Archibald Campbell, superintendent of Darjeeling, imprisoned and beaten. Hooker was of no political interest but loyally remained with his friend.72
Hooker was far from the first to be attracted to the Himalayas. Three quarters of a century before he set out, Warren Hastings had sent George Bogle on an embassy to the Panchen Lama in Tibet with instructions to learn all he could about the natural history of the mountains of Bhutan through which he passed. Even more appealing than any botanical finds was the shawl goat Bogle brought back to Calcutta, the animal Hastings tried unsuccessfully to acclimate to his English estate.73 Thomas Hardwicke seems to have been the first to identify Rhododendron arboreum while botanizing in the Siwalik Hills on a military tour in 1796. He sent home seeds, little imagining the floodgates about to open. Indeed, few of the leading names in Indian botany could resist the lure of the Himalayas, but inevitably Hooker’s name takes precedence over all the others.
Hooker’s Himalayan Journals, chronicling his travels from 1848 to 1850, make exciting and beguiling reading (Fig. 29). They were an immediate popular success, as were the botanical works that followed in quick succession: Illustrations of Himalayan Plants (1855), the first volume of Flora Indica (1855), and, most eagerly devoured of all, Rhododendrons of Sikkim-Himalaya (1849–51). Ten lithographed plates from this last had appeared to whet the public appetite while Hooker was still in the mountains. Kew’s official botanical artist, Walter Hood Fitch, translated Hooker’s sketches and dried specimens into lithographed plates. Ironically, some of the plates showed the rhododendrons in their natural habitats, a practice Hooker generally disparaged as unscientific (!). Amazed that such magnificent illustration could be produced in so short a time, a reviewer in the Athenaeum pronounced them “one of the marvels of our time.” By the time the twenty-ninth and last appeared, both botanist and gardener had been captivated by the new species of rhododendron Hooker introduced.74 Before long many of them had taken their place in English gardens, flourishing wherever acid soils prevailed—Hooker was surprised to find that the plants he collected grew even better on the Cornish Riviera than in their native Sikkim.75 At Cragside in Northumberland his Himalayan Journals inspired Lord Armstrong to plant several hundred thousand, “forming impenetrable thickets, and blooming so profusely as to light up the whole hillside.” At Kew itself they are displayed in all their May glory in Rhododendron Dell, a corner of the gardens landscaped originally by Capability Brown (who would probably not have approved).76 Rhododendrons had more than their beauty to recommend them to British estate owners: layered in stands of trees, they provided an ideal cover for pheasants at just the time these were replacing partridges as the game bird of choice.77
Finding plants was only the beginning. Tons of living materials were gathered in the field, loaded onto the backs of human porters and humped back to base, often over the most difficult terrain. The problem was to get these cargoes to their final destinations alive. Originally plant boxes were simply flour barrels with holes cut in their sides for ventilation, with lath and tarpaulin covers. Ship captains begrudged the space, care during long voyages was often hit or miss, and plants had to be kept out of nibbling range of the livestock with whom they shared their quarters. Furthermore, no one was quite sure how exotics should be tended once they had been removed from their habitats. Seeds were less bulky and were even entrusted to the mails by midcentury, but they didn’t always germinate on arrival. Wallich experimented with improved plant boxes. The real breakthrough came with the adoption of the Wardian case: a wooden box topped with glass, in fact a mini-greenhouse which insured a steady recycling of water vapor, sufficient light for photosynthesis, and relatively constant temperature. The Duke of Devonshire’s plant collector, John Gibson, was the first to take the cases to India, and most botanists soon adopted them. So much did they reduce plant mortality that in 1851 Sir William Hooker was able to declare with satisfaction that “they have been the means, in the last fifteen years, of introducing more new and valuable plants to our gardens than were imported during the preceding century.”78
Fig. 29. Sir Joseph Hooker in the Himalaya. Engraved by W. Walter after Frank Stone
[The British Library Board, P576]
Plants then had to be identified and preserved in some form. Botanists developed the technique of preserving them in herbaria by first drying and then pressing them between sheets of paper which were mounted on stiff paper or cardboard. As collecting gained momentum early in the nineteenth century, herbaria piled up at such a rate that it required whole teams to sort through them. Wallich alone arrived back in England on leave in 1828 with his entire herbarium packed up in thirty crates, together with chests of living plants and troves of seeds—more than eight thousand species assembled by not only his own efforts but those of an army of official and unofficial collectors in the field. He was generous in sharing his materials with other British and continental botanists—he distributed some 250,000 specimens to 66 individuals and institutions. While some British botanists attacked him for his “exotic liberalities,” other colleagues reciprocated by collaborating on the Herculean task of sorting and labeling specimens, with the result that he was able to begin publishing installments of his monumental Plantae Asiaticae Rariores the very next year. Lest any doubts remained about the splendors of Asian flora, the first plate, Amherstia nobilis, supplied a brilliant “curtainraiser” on the beauties to come.79
But important as herbaria were and still are to the taxonomist, much was lost when plants were dried—one critic even dismissed them quite unfairly as “dried foreign weeds” to which “barbarous binomials” were attached.80 What was needed was a means to illustrate live plants and then to duplicate the illustrations. Woodcuts were the earliest form of illustration, used especially in herbals, but they were too clumsy to convey fine details, a matter of little importance until botany became a more exact science in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and had to face the huge influx of exotics. If botanists were going to classify plants and create a permanent record of an ephemeral object, they needed to be able to produce precise images showing the exact structure of the flower in bloom along with its seed. In time a standardized system evolved, showing the idealized form of the plant in isolation and emphasizing taxonomic details rather than context. Artists even found ways to resuscitate dried herbarium specimens sent back by the distant collectors, but the specimen was then useless, so that there had to be duplicates.81
Trained European illustrators were few in India, but there were indigenous artists aplenty. They had long demonstrated their aesthetic versatility in the employ of the Mughal court. Under the patronage of Akbar and his successors, painters, both Hindu and Muslim, synthesized the styles of Iranian masters of the miniature with a growing interest in European illustration. Akbar showed great curiosity for European printed books, first introduced by Jesuit missionaries in 1580, and commissioned paintings to accompany the Baburnama, his grandfather’s classic memoir. What especially intrigued him was the European art of portraiture. He had likenesses painted of himself and of many of his grandees. His son, Jahangir, however, was more interested in the natural world. He and his wife, the formidable Nur Jahan, were passionate lovers of nature and great admirers of European botanical etchings and engravings. In his own memoirs, he describes instructing his foremost court painter, Mansur, to paint more than a hundred flowers blooming in the summer meadows of Kashmir.82 Known as the “Wonder of the Age,” Mansur produced exquisite studies of tulips, narcissi, and other blossoms, recording each with almost scientific exactitude but also capturing the “essence of the plant.” Jahangir’s son and successor, Shah Jahan, shared his father’s love of flowers. During his reign they become the decorative motifs of choice in miniatures, textiles, and architecture. Best known are the studies contained in the Dara Shikoh Album, named for Shah Jahan’s favorite son (see Pl. 13). True to the more flamboyant “floral imperialism” of Shah Jahan, these studies tend to be gaudier and more stylized than those of Jahangir’s artists.83
Europeans for their part had been turning to Indian artists to paint scenes from Indian life virtually from the moment they arrived on the subcontinent in the sixteenth century. So great was the demand that by the eighteenth century families of artists came to specialize in subjects of interest to the British concentrated in areas such as Tanjur, Trichinopoly, Delhi, Murshibad, Patna, Calcutta, Benares, and Lucknow. They learned to adapt both style and technique to suit their new patrons, and began to work in watercolor rather than gouache. They also toned down the brilliant colors favored in Indian miniatures to suit British preferences for more muted hues. Some even experimented with one-point perspective and shading as well, without, however, entirely abandoning their own pictorial conventions. The best achieved a “hybrid vigour,” rather like their counterparts in the garden world.84
All the major botanists working in India drew on this pool of skilled artists, initiating them with differing degrees of success into the conventions that had come to dominate the medium, especially the decontextualization of plants, their isolation from surrounding habitats. Roxburgh kept an Indian artist “constantly employed” while still in Madras, for not only could he describe plants accurately, he could also add information on their uses gleaned from his own experience or from local testimony. Roxburgh continued the practice when he became director of the Calcutta Botanical Garden. Touring the garden in 1810, Maria Graham was delighted not only with the “great collection of plants from every quarter of the globe,” including of course the fabled banyan tree, but also with the native artists she saw at work, drawing some of the rarest botanical treasures: “They are the most beautiful and correct delineations I ever saw,” she declared, commenting that Hindus excel in miniature work. Eventually roxburgh was able to forward almost seven hundred paintings to the Company for publication in his Plants of the Coromandel Coast, considered by Banks to be one of the finest Indian floras yet to appear. Lord Valentia was equally impressed with drawings by a native artist at the Bangalore gardens then tended by Benjamin Heyne, another surgeon-botanist. A few observers were more critical. When he selected the illustrations for his Rhododendrons of Sikkim-Himalaya, Joseph Hooker instructed the Kew artist to redraw them to correct “the stiffness and want of botanical knowledge displayed by the native artists who executed most of the originals.”85
Perhaps Hooker’s dissatisfaction stemmed from his relatively brief time in India. Others, such as Robert Wight, were able to form close and extended collaborations with Indian artists and plant collectors. Another of the East India Company’s stable of Scottish surgeons, Wight made extensive collecting trips around South India, the Palni Hills, and Western Ghats in addition to official duties such as experimenting with the introduction of American long-staple cotton in the region of Coimbatore. To speed up the publication of his finds, he bought a press and taught himself lithography. Normally a relatively simple technique, environmental extremes in Madras made the process unpredictable, resulting in “innumerable failures, from the damp and heat of the climate, clumsiness and prejudice of the natives, warpings of presses, breaking of stones, moulding of paper, drying of printing ink, and cracking of rollers.” Most important of all, the ink had to be of a consistent thickness if fine lines were to make an impression, and this was a constant struggle. Nevertheless, by the time he left India in 1853, Wight had published no fewer than 2,464 plates of Indian plants, claiming with justifiable pride that “the Indian Flora can now . . . boast of being more thoroughly illustrated than any other country under British [rule], Great Britain alone excepted.”86
Unusually, the names of Wight’s two principal illustrators are known. Rungiah worked with him for some twenty years, from about 1825 to 1845, and may have trained his successor, Govindoo. Even more remarkably, 711 of their original, labeled drawings have survived in the library of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, with a further store of works never published by Wight in the Natural History Museum in London. As they were Teleguspeaking artists in South India, their art probably owes little to the Mughal traditions of the north; they are much closer in style to the textiles of the Coromandel Coast, with their sinuously ebullient hand-painted floral motifs. If Hooker complained of stiffness in his artists, Rungiah is their polar opposite. His drawing of a climbing cucurbit (see Pl. 14), for example, fills the entire page with its exuberant flowering—as Henry Noltie comments, Rungiah has taken its stem not so much for a walk, as for a dance! On the other hand, his careful training in dissection and microscopic examination shows in the fine details of another work. An extraordinary Nilgiri orchid drawn by Govindoo is close to Rungiah’s style, although the plant itself looks like something out of Edward Lear’s Flora Nonsensica. In time Govindoo appears to have developed a style that was both bolder and cruder, perhaps recognizing that subtle effects would be lost in the lithographic process.87
Amateurs
The East India Company supported botanical researches, if sometimes grudgingly, in the hopes they might yield unexpected treasures that would gladden the hearts of stockholders. The Company’s Scottish surgeons-cumbotanists, for their part, often found themselves playing a “double game”: mindful of their contractual duties but also devoted to the disinterested pursuit of knowledge and the larger benefits it might bestow.88 The same was true of other officials—and their wives. In the post-Company period, the naturalist and botanical artist Marianne North was often pleasantly surprised by the botanical knowledge and enthusiasm she encountered in her travels in India and Ceylon.89
William Jones has been pronounced “perhaps the most interesting person in the history of eighteenth-century British policy in India”; he is surely one of the most appealing of its amateur botanists. Nicknamed “Persian Jones” for his facility in Persian while still a young man, he was a brilliant linguist, a master not only of Greek and Latin but also of Arabic and eventually of Sanskrit and a host of other languages. As an Orientalist, he is best known for his pioneering studies of the genetic relationship between Sanskrit and the classical European languages, and for his compilations of Indian law. But his great delight was botany, “the loveliest and most copious division in the science of nature.”90
Almost as soon as Jones arrived in Calcutta in 1784 to take up his duties as a judge on the Supreme Court, he and his wife, Anna Maria, fell in love with Bengal, “this wonderful kingdom, which Fortune threw into her [Britain’s] lap while she was asleep.” He soon decided to devote his vacations “to a vast and interesting study, a complete knowledge of India, which I can only attain in the country itself.”91 His goal was, in fact, to know India better than any other European had ever known it. As a first step he founded the Asiatick Society of Bengal to encourage the exchange of knowledge among like-minded expatriates and publication of researches in an annual journal. The Asiatick Society was to have “but one rule, namely, to have no rules at all,” its aim to benefit both Asia and Europe through an interdisciplinary approach to the study of “Man and Nature.”92
Jones immediately sought out pundits to teach him Sanskrit, to assist him not only in his official work of codifying Hindu law but also in translating classic works such as Kalidasa’s Sakuntala. “Every day supplies me with something new in Oriental learning, and if I were to stay here half a century, I should be continually amused,” he wrote to the botanist Patrick Russell a few months after his arrival.93 He was fascinated by the natural world around him, although the actual practice of zoology repelled him. “I never could understand,” he commented, “by what right, nor conceive with what feeling, a naturalist can occasion the misery of an innocent bird, and leave its young to perish in a cold nest, because it has gay plumage, and has never been delineated, or deprive even a butterfly of its nocturnal enjoyment, because it has the misfortune to be rare or beautiful.”94 Indeed, Jones and his wife shared a love of animals that went far beyond not wanting to stuff birds or pin butterfly wings to boards. On the voyage out, they had rescued several sheep intended for the pot, which subsequently formed the nucleus of herds kept at their house in Garden Reach, downriver from Calcutta. Here Anna Maria had “an excellent dairy which produces the best butter in India.”95
Their retreat at Krishnagar was even more idyllic. As he described their “Indian Arcadia” to his patroness, Lady Spencer, “it would bring to your mind what the poets tell us of the golden age; for, not to mention our flocks and herds that eat bread out of our hands, you might see a kid and a tiger playing together at Anna’s feet. The tiger is not so large as a full-grown cat [it was about a month old at the time], though he will be (as he is of the royal breed) as large as an ox; he is suckled by a she-goat, and has all the gentleness (except when he is hungry) of his foster-mother.” The tiger he named Jupiter; alas, one looks in vain for references to Jupiter’s later life.96 In Calcutta a friend reported that while dining with the Joneses, William at one point called for “Othello.” Expecting a servant to materialize, the guest was startled to see instead a large turtle waddling over to his master’s chair to be fed. Jones apologized that he would prefer to set it free but knew it wouldn’t last long in the river.97
Unlike zoology, botany did not offend his almost Buddhist reverence for life; it soon became the great delight of his leisure hours, a delight shared by Anna Maria, who illustrated the specimens he found or had brought to him. He was soon exchanging letters and seeds with his fellow Harrovian Sir Joseph Banks, with Sir George Yonge, superintendent of the botanical garden on St. Vincent, and, closer to home, the pioneering botanist Johann Koenig, whose death in 1785 he much lamented. Like Banks and others, Jones hoped to identify plants with medicinal qualities as well as those that might go some way to remedying the awful famines that regularly ravaged India.
Jones preferred to study fresh plants. Rather than collecting specimens, he initially limited himself to describing them and trying to fit them into the Linnaean system. Sometimes this was successful, sometimes not. One morning Anna Maria brought home “the most lovely epidendrum that ever was seen,” which “grew on a lofty amra, but it is an air plant, and puts forth its fragrant enameled blossoms in a pot without earth or water.”98 Nothing in Linnaeus corresponded to it. He asked Banks’s help, too, in trying to find a Linnaean category for cusha, a plant celebrated in the Vedas. Another plant that he identified was atimucta, the favorite plant of Sakuntala, the heroine of Kalidasa’s play. Sakuntala, he noted, calls it justly the “Delight of the Woods” for its fragrant and beautiful flowers.99 There are also references in Sakuntala to the madhavi, about which Jones enthused, “If ever flower was worthy or paradise, it is our charming Ipomea.”100
As Jones was able to identify more and more plants by their Sanskrit names, he proposed that the Linnaean system be altered to catalog Indian plants with their “Indian appellations,” an innovation he maintained Linnaeus himself would have approved. His own practice was to provide names in both Roman and Sanskrit orthography, along with their Linnaean genera where ascertainable; this presentation he thought would be most serviceable to posterity. Within a few years of his arrival, he had collected the Sanskrit names for a thousand plants, including some three hundred to which medicinal properties—“virtues”—were ascribed.101 Thanks to his linguistic facility, he was able to supplement field study with literary sources and vernacular identifications, often annotating Anna Maria’s sketches with Hindi and Bengali vernacular names, descriptions, and indications of their use. One drawing, for example, represents a seven-leafed plant medicinal plant mentioned in Sakuntala with its Bengali and Sanskrit names in their respective scripts (Fig. 30).102 For publication, Jones turned to professional Indian illustrators such as Zayn al-Din, whose drawings were then engraved by John Alefounder.
William Jones found in India happiness beyond any he had known in England: “I never was unhappy in England,” he wrote a friend, “it was not in my nature to be so; but I never was happy till I was settled in India.” His religion became a kind of floral pantheism: “We find a more exquisite lecture, on the being and attributes of God, in every flower, every leaf, and every berry, than can be produced by the mere wisdom or eloquence of man.” He might well have been tempted to settle for good in India had it not been for the “incessant ill health” of his wife. Once he had put away enough money, he fantasized that they might retire to a country house in England, far from the intrigues of the capital, with pasture for horses and “garden ground enough for our botanical amusements, with which we are both in love.”103
Lady Jones sailed for home in 1793, with the expectation that Sir William would follow within the next two years. In a supremely ironical twist of fate, he died suddenly in April 1794 at the age of forty-seven, while she lived on for another thirty-five years. Like his Digest of Indian law, his Treatise on the Plants of India was left unfinished at his death. Generations of botanists with better training and greater opportunities for travel completed the work he and Koenig and Russell had begun, but few could match Jones for the sheer breadth of his learning and eagerness to benefit both Europe and Asia with the fruits of his researches. His botanical memorial, as lasting as the obelisk in South Park Street cemetery, is Jonesia asoca, the “Sorrowless” tree under which tradition says Buddha was born.104
Fig. 30. Lady Anna Maria Jones, Botanical drawing
[Courtesy of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, Jones Collection, 025.054.]
Anna Maria Jones was far from unusual in her devotion to botany and her application to botanical illustration. From the middle of the eighteenth century botany had become an increasingly fashionable pursuit in England, even a kind of “occupational therapy” for well-born ladies with little to do. Troubled not at all about the indelicacy of Linnaean metaphors, one writer declared that the study of nature “prevents the tumult of passions and provides the mind with a nourishment which is salutary by filling it with an object most worthy of contemplation.”105 In India Sir Elijah Impey, Chief Justice of Bengal, and his wife had anticipated the Joneses in their excitement with the flora and fauna of India. They maintained an assemblage of birds and animals in their Calcutta menagerie. While she does not seem to have done any illustrating herself, Lady Impey took the lead in commissioning more than three hundred paintings of their collection between 1777 and 1782. Three Indian artists were employed, both Hindu and Muslim, but all came from Patna where they had been trained in the Mughal tradition.106 One of them was the Zayn al-Din, who, as we have seen, subsequently made botanical illustrations for Jones.
Early in the following century, Lady Amherst pioneered the study of Himalayan botany. During their ten-week stay in Simla in 1827, she and her daughter Sarah happily roamed the hills in search of new plants. Clematis montana and Anemone vitifola were among the flowers raised from seeds she sent home, and she also brought from her travels a trove of flowers to Wallich and the Calcutta Botanical Garden, where we have already encountered her in the beautiful Amherstia nobilis, one of the few good things to come out of Lord Amherst’s Burma campaigns. Also a keen ornithologist, she returned home with large botanical and zoological collections, including two living Lady Amherst pheasants, also known as golden pheasants, beautiful creatures whose descendants can still be found strolling along the walkways of Kew.107
Wives of other officials also tried their hand at botanical exploration and illustration in India as elsewhere in the empire. Marianne Cookson, wife of a military officer, completed thirty folio-sized paintings of indigenous plants during her posting in 1834, and they were published the following year. They depicted a water lily, lotus, banyan tree, and cashew, some sufficiently detailed to show flower or fruit at different stages of development. Lady Emily Bourne collaborated with her administrator husband in collecting and cataloguing plants from southern India in the early twentieth century. She mobilized a posse of European amateur naturalists summering at the hill stations of Kodaikanal and Ootacamund to collect and illustrate the local flora. The results of their work can be found in an unpublished bound volume of some 225 illustrations in the Ooty Botanical Garden. Similarly, Diana Fyson illustrated her husband’s Flora of the South Indian Hill Stations, published in 1932.108
The most memorable and the most accomplished of the women botanical illustrators in India, however, was Lady Charlotte Canning. Nineteen great leatherbound volumes containing her mounted watercolors reside in the Library of Harewood House, Yorkshire. One feels that an experience, most especially an experience of novelty, was not quite real for Charlotte Canning until she had drawn or painted it. When she first landed in Alexandria on her way to India in 1855, she was dazzled by the exoticism of the scenes around her, for which her earlier travels had done nothing to prepare her. “I long to draw and so regret being unable to sketch figures when everyone is so picturesque,” she wrote Queen Victoria, “the land is like the richest gardens, and the view ranges over crops of rice, wheat, cotton and sugar cane, and wretched mud villages with their palm trees raised on mounds just high enough to escape the inundation.” Far more isolated from both Indian and even English society than the Joneses had been (“isolated to a degree I never could have imagined”) thanks to her high station as wife of the governor-general, to the increasing distance of ruler and ruled during the nineteenth century, and to the outbreak of rebellion in 1857, she found solace not only in her garden at Barrackpore but also in collecting and illustrating Indian flora.109
Lady Canning found something of a botanical heir in Lady Beatrix Stanley, whose husband was governor of Madras from 1929 to 1934 and briefly acting viceroy. As we have seen, Lady Beatrix was particularly knowledgeable about what plants were best suited to southern India, but she painted large numbers of watercolors of flowers from all over the subcontinent—a family photograph shows her sitting at her easel in Srinagar during a trip to Kashmir. She has been immortalized in both a lovely blue iris and a snowdrop.110 Of a generation sandwiched between Canning and Stanley, Marianne North cut quite a different figure. She had no official position but very good connections. Altogether lacking in Canning’s vulnerability, North was an intrepid, even imperious, artist with the means and independence to travel wherever she listed and to devote herself wholeheartedly to the depiction of the world’s tropical flora, albeit more as a landscape painter since she did not stick to the rigid conventions of botanical illustration (Canning did both). Unlike Canning she not only survived but also insured her own immortality by endowing a gallery for her art in the bosom of Kew.111
The World as a Garden
In 1889 a glasshouse, modeled after London’s Crystal Palace, was built in the Bangalore Lal Bagh to commemorate the visit of the Prince of Wales and to serve as the venue for flower shows (see Pl. 15).112 By this time the Lal Bagh was a “purely European pleasure-Ground,” a public park in the heart of the growing city with bandstand, menagerie, aquarium, gravel paths, and a topiary garden along with the glasshouse. To be sure, there were “the gorgeous creepers, the wide-spreading mangos, and the graceful betel-nut trees,” lest one forget that it was, after all, the East. Edward Lear delightedly labeled it the “Kew of India,” and declared that he had never seen “a more beautiful place, terraces, trellises, etc., not to speak of some wild beasts. Flowers exquisite.” The natives, wrote the wife of a British official, “seem fully to appreciate the gardens, and every evening numbers are there sitting under the trees, or looking at the flowers and animals.”113
The Lal Bagh was part of a botanical network that spanned the globe, completing the process of plant transfers that had begun in antiquity, accelerated with the discoveries of the sixteenth century, and spiraled in the nineteenth.114 J. C. Loudon, a leading garden writer in the first half of the century, estimated that 89 species of trees and shrubs were introduced into England in the sixteenth century, about 130 in the next, more than 490 by the eighteenth century, “whereas in the first thirty years alone of the nineteenth around 700 species were brought to England.” When plants of all kinds were factored in, this meant about two hundred actively cultivated in England in 1500 compared with more than eighteen thousand by 1839. By this date imported evergreens had already transformed a landscape that had hitherto been dominated by deciduous native trees.115 Well might the Reverend Henry Hill speak of England in 1838 as “a vase emerging from the ocean, in which the Sylvans of every region have set their favourite plants, and the Flora of every climate poured her choicest gifts, for the embellishment of the spot round which Neptune throws his fostering arms.”116 Still more revolutionary changes were to come: Himalayan rhododendrons, Chinese primulas, American redwoods, Australian eucalyptus, begonias from Assam.
Loudon’s and Hill’s perspectives were unduly insular, for the phenomenon of plant transfer was worldwide. Dapuri was a backwater, a minor Indian botanical garden near Poona in existence for less than thirty years (1837–1865), and yet an inventory of the plants illustrated by an unidentified native artist in the late 1840s includes species from Central and South America, from North America (including some collected by David Douglas in California and Thomas Drummond in Texas), from Africa, China, and western and southeastern Asia, as well as from other parts of India (Fig. 31). In its small way, too, Dapuri reflected the tug of war between science and government. Attached as many botanical gardens were to the governor’s residence, its priorities were often trumped by the demands of the official household: for vegetables and flowers for the governor’s table, for grass for the governor’s horses.117 Shades of royal Kew!
In the larger picture, botanical gardens were under pressure to justify their existence by seeking out and adapting “useful plants,” plants with commercial potential, from all corners of the globe. If botanists were the foot soldiers of imperialism, Sir Joseph Banks was their captain (the “staunchest imperialist of the day,” one admiring official called him)118 and Kew their command center (H-Kew, we might say). Already in 1737 the frontispiece of Linnaeus’s Hortus Cliffortianus (1737) showed Europe seated in the center with the key of knowledge in her right hand, while Asia (bearing coffee), Africa, and America wait to deliver their own gifts.119 Botanists were even expected to engage in espionage and smuggling to serve national interests, for example, to thwart the Spanish monopoly on quinine or the Chinese on tea. There was an imperial dimension as well to the prerogative, increasingly insisted upon by botanists at home, that they, not those in the field, had the right to name a new species—even if they had never seen it growing wild—and in a tongue understood by few Europeans and almost no one anywhere else; metropolitan science trumped vernacular knowledge. Then the apotheosis: botanical illustration, “the final act in possessing a plant and the first act in civilizing it, whence multiplied by engraving it could pass into the worlds of learning and commerce.” But it was Flora standing all alone, isolated from her natural habitat, her physiology stripped bare, rendered as a Platonic ideal form that might never have actually existed and that froze the species for all time. Europe dictated most emphatically how nature would be represented.120
Fig. 31. Plan of the garden at Dapuri
[Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh]
Furthermore, while the exchange of plants and of botanical knowledge might ultimately benefit the rest of the world, European interests always took precedence. After ruining the indigenous cotton industry with cheap Manchester imports, for example, England was eager to expand the production of Dacca and later American cotton in India to feed its ravenous mills. At the same time, the world’s botanical riches became status symbols for the high and mighty, who vied to be the first to coax blossoms from their Amherstia nobilis or Victoria amazonica in their chilly climes. It would be an oversimplification nonetheless to see botany as nothing more than the handmaiden of imperial commerce and power. Aside from those who devoted their lives to the acquisition of knowledge as an end in itself, the expanding repertoire of flowers and shrubs and trees brought disinterested delight to countless ordinary mortals. And thanks to nineteenth-century advances in glass and iron manufacture, one did not have to be the Duke of Devonshire to benefit from the bounty of exotics; even the middle-class homeowner in Surrey could aspire to a greenhouse to bring on bedding plants or nurture tender tropicals.
Another aspect of plant collecting that was little noted at the time, however—one that now resonates all too conspicuously—was the ecological impact. When Robert Wight went on leave in England in 1831, he took with him a hundred thousand specimens, weighing two tons, and his was a relatively modest collection. Hooker shipped out even more tons of living plants from the Himalayas, including seven head-loads of a single species of orchid, the spectacular blue-flowered Vanda caerulea. Much of the material died even before reaching England, but simply by calling attention to the great value of these flowers—to orchids in particular—Hooker stimulated a rush into the field by other orchid hunters. He estimated that a collector might clear £2,000–3,000 in a single season from the sale of Khasia Orchids.121 orchids were not the only casualty: whole districts were denuded of trees as well. In the search for one species alone, ten thousand plants were collected—but four thousand trees were cut down to obtain them. Then the camp of floral treasure-seekers moved on to start all over again.122
India’s forests were indeed under threat from all sides. At the same time that collectors were stripping the subcontinent of its flora, planters were clearing forests for tea gardens and cinchona plantations: in Sikkim alone great swaths were lost to such plantations within thirty years of Hooker’s explorations.123 Earlier, naval demands for teak and the Company’s interest in expanding land under cultivation to increase its revenues led to serious deforestation in both mountain and plain. When Lord Dalhousie arrived as governor-general in 1847, surgeon-botanists had been warning for half a century that the loss of India’s forests was not only causing local shortages of wood for cooking fires and for house building but also might have far-reaching ecological and climatic effects such as lower rainfall, soil erosion, and silting up of rivers and streams. Dalhousie has not fared well at the hands of later historians, who have tended to overlook his precocious environmentalism in spotlighting his disastrous policies in other areas. Dalhousie, however, had a strong utilitarian bent and chanced to sail out to India with Joseph Hooker, not yet the despoiler of the orchids. After a visit to St. Helena and Ascension Islands, which thanks to Sir Joseph Banks had kept careful meteorological records, Hooker had become convinced of the relationship between forest cover and rainfall, subsequently promoting a program of tree planting on Ascension, an important British naval base in the south Atlantic.
Influenced by Hooker as well as by a host of reports by Company officials and by some modest projects already underway, Dalhousie established the first all-India Forest Department. He took as his model the precolonial policies of the recently conquered Punjab and Sind. Here forest reserves had long been administered by the central government, stressing conservation rather than reforestation. This was not ideal, to sure, in that authorities could decide just how lenient to be in granting access to timber, but it did focus attention on the problem. Later, there would be renewed pressure on India’s forests with the huge appetite for wood for building telegraph poles and railway carriages.124 In some areas the government also encouraged tree planting, although attempts at reforestation were not always well advised, as we have seen with the wholesale introduction of Australian blue gums in Ootacamund. “Improvement” could be a double-edged sword.
Finally, the human cost of plant collecting was often lost in what one might call the furor florae. Hooker’s rich harvest of “2000 flowering plants . . . 150 ferns, and a profusion of mosses, lichens, and fungi,” all within a ten-mile radius, was obtained at the cost of the lives of many local Khasias who had been driven over a precipice in their skirmish with the British, a “sanguinary conflict” that seemed to trouble the botanist very little.125