White Beech: The Rainforest Years

by Greer, Germaine

  The most important figure in Australian botany is another highly endowed amateur, Joseph Banks. Banks became interested in botany when he was a small boy. As a student in 1764, when he found that there was no teaching of botany at Oxford, he paid for a series of lectures to be delivered by Cambridge botanist Israel Lyons. He then continued his studies in botany at the Chelsea Physic Garden and the British Museum, where he met Daniel Solander who put him in touch with his own teacher, Linnaeus. In 1766 Banks travelled to Newfoundland and Labrador, and published an account of the plants and animals he found there. When he heard of the planning of an expedition to the South Seas to observe the transit of Venus, desperate to be appointed naturalist on the voyage, he stepped in with a donation of £10,000 towards the cost of the expedition. When the Endeavour set out from England in 1768 Banks was aboard, along with a retinue of illustrators and scientists, including Solander. Banks’s purpose was to collect specimens of the flora of the remotest parts of the earth, for his own collection and for the royal collection at Kew. He succeeded admirably, bringing back specimens of about 110 new genera and 1,300 new species.

  Some of the Cave Creek flora were first collected by Banks’s cohort in 1770, some at Botany Bay and some on the Endeavour River, but the specimens were not studied in time to provide the types. The Black Bean, for example, was originally collected on the Endeavour River in 1770, but not identified until 1830, when Hooker described the specimens collected later by Cunningham and Frazer, by which time the name had already been used by Robert Mudie in two books, The Picture of Australia and Vegetable Substances, both of 1828 (Mabberley, 1992).

  Every naturalist botanising in the New World had to send all his specimens back to the big European collections for identification; of these by far the most important was, and is, Kew. The introduction to the ‘Australian Virtual Herbarium’ on the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew website gives a pretty fair assessment:

  Australia has a vascular flora of about 20,000 species. Of these, 8,125 had been described by the completion of Bentham’s Flora Australiensis (1863–1878), written at Kew, and of this group, comprising more than a third of the current total taxa, most have Type material of some kind at Kew. These include collections by R. Brown, J. Banks & D. Solander, J. D. Hooker, A. & R. Cunningham, R. C. Gunn, J. Milligan, C. Stuart, G. Caley, F. Mueller, J. Drummond, J. McGillivray, T. Mitchell, A. F. Oldfield, G. Maxwell, L. Leichhardt, B. Bynoe, C. Fraser, H. Beckler, H. H. Behr, W. Baxter, J. Dallachy and many more. Taxa described later are also represented to a lesser extent in Kew. For many taxa there are multiple Type specimens in Kew (holotypes, isotypes, syntypes and lectotypes), and many associated historical collections (e.g. non-type specimens cited by Bentham, 1863–1878), vital for interpretation of early botanical works.

  Thus the old world, in the name of scientific method, extended and intensified its control over the new. After his first foray Banks concentrated on building up a network of scientific contacts all over Europe, and employed troops of botanists whom he sent hither and yon to every part of the known world, to continue amassing specimens for his own herbarium and the royal collections at Kew, and any other establishments that might have materials to offer in exchange. In 1778 he was elected President of the Royal Society, a position he would hold till his death; he would eventually take over the botanic garden at Kew, set up the herbarium there, and organise, finance and direct the scientific exploration of Australia from the other side of the world. Banks is commemorated at Cave Creek by the specific name of our violet, Viola banksii, and Solander by our crowsfoot, Geranium solanderi. In 1782 in the Supplementum Plantarum (15:26) the younger Linnaeus named an important genus (seventy-seven species at the present count) Banksia for Banks, who had been created baronet in 1781. Australia was by then so much Banks’s domain that when a name for the continent was being sought Linnaeus suggested ‘Banksia’ for that too. Happily the suggestion was not heeded.

  After the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788 the amateurs John White, surgeon-general (ADB), and Richard Johnson, colonial chaplain (ADB), took up the work of sending Australian plant material to Banks. In 1791 Banks arranged to pay the Superintendent of Convicts David Burton an annual stipend for collecting seeds and plant material. Unfortunately Burton accidentally shot himself the next year (ADB). In 1798 Banks sent out George Caley (ADB). As Caley had no formal qualifications Banks himself paid his salary of fifteen shillings a week; Caley collected for both Banks and Kew, and was allowed to sell extra specimens to nurserymen.

  Banks was also responsible for the presence in Australia of one of my heroes, Robert Brown (ADB). Brown had come to botany through the school of medicine at Edinburgh University where he enrolled in 1791 only to drop out in 1793, possibly for lack of money, and maybe for lack of attention to his studies as well. He had perhaps spent too much time botanising in the Highlands, sometimes with the nurseryman George Don. In 1794 he joined the army, serving in Ireland as a surgeon’s mate, which took up so little time that he was able to concentrate on his botanical researches. At this stage he was fascinated by cryptogams and pioneered the use of the microscope in examining minute plant parts. The genera of many of our rainforest mosses and ferns were first identified by Brown, who contributed (unacknowledged) to James Dickson’s Fasciculi plantarum cryptogamicarum britanniae in 1796. In 1800 Banks offered to appoint the twenty-seven-year-old Brown naturalist to Matthew Flinders’s circumnavigation of Australia, and provided him with the services of the botanical artist Ferdinand Bauer. Brown prepared for the trip by studying the collections already made by Banks and Solander. HMS Investigator sailed in July 1801; when it called at Port Jackson for the second time in June 1803, signalling the completion of the circumnavigation of the continent, Brown and Bauer decided to stay and continue collecting in New South Wales. In three and a half years in Australia Brown collected 3,400 species, more than half of them previously unknown. Though many of his specimens were lost aboard a ship that was wrecked on the return journey, he was able in 1810 to publish a preparatory Australian flora, Prodromus Florae Novae Hollandiae et Insulae Van Diemen. When Leichhardt set off on his first botanising rambles he carried a copy in his saddlebag. Allan Cunningham too carried a copy.

  Brown’s was not the first attempt at a provisional Australian flora. The naturalist on the expedition of d’Entrecastaux to Oceania (1791–3), Jacques de Labillardière, who collected specimens in south-west Australia and Tasmania, had brought out his Novae Hollandiae Plantarum Specimen in instalments between 1804 and 1807. Sir Joseph Banks, whom he had met on a visit to England in 1783, intervened when the British confiscated Labillardière’s scientific collections as spoils of war and arranged for their restitution, unmindful that the royal collection would be poorer for lack of them. Labillardière got his reward in 1793 when Sir James Edward Smith named a genus of Australian plants Billardiera (Smith, 1:1).

  Labillardière has been criticised for making unacknowledged use of specimens from the collection of the amateur naturalist Charles Louis l’Héritier de Brutelle, who is principally famous, at least among Australians, for naming the genus Eucalyptus. L’Héritier published the name in his Sertum Anglicum, an account of his botanising among the British collections in the 1780s. The species on which he founded the genus Eucalyptus was Eucalyptus obliqua, originally collected by William Anderson, physician on board HMS Resolution, on Cook’s second expedition when it visited Tasmania in 1774. Anderson had called his sample ‘Aromadendron’, the smelly tree. L’Héritier renamed it after the pretty (eu) cap (calyptera) made of fused petals that encloses the anthers of the gum-blossom in bud. Anderson was assisted by David Nelson, a gardener from Kew, who was employed, paid, equipped and trained by Banks. Other species of eucalypt had been collected earlier by Banks and Solander, but when L’Héritier was working at the British Museum in 1786–7 they had not yet been named. And so it was that a man who never glimpsed the great south land, never saw a eucalypt in the wild, succeeded in naming the genus of the ‘most important
and dominant trees of the Australian flora’. He also named the Kangaroo Paw Anigozanthos and a species of tree fern Dicksonia after James Dickson.

  Though he was not the first botanist to describe Australian flora, Brown has a pretty good claim to being the best. His grasp of plant anatomy was unparalleled, partly because of his innovative use of microscopic examination. He was also unusually self-effacing. When a rival botanist supplied a good name for a new genus Brown made no bones about accepting it. To study the whole list of plant names authorised by Brown is to realise that for the most part he bucked the trend of using plant names to oblige his colleagues and superiors. He preferred to name his plants for themselves; he gave the Bolwarra the scientific name Eupomatia, ‘eu’ meaning ‘pleasing’ and ‘pomatia’ referring to the pixie cap of the flowerbud. The type he called E. laurina, meaning like a laurel, referring to its leaves. Forty years later, when Victorian government botanist Ferdinand Mueller was sent the Small Bolwarra collected by Charles Moore, he typically named it for George Bennett, E. bennettii. Bennett, an Englishman who travelled extensively before settling in Australia in 1836, when he went into medical practice in Sydney, was a founding member of the Australian Museum, the Acclimatisation Society and the Zoological Society (ADB).

  Brown was obliged to name another large proteaceous genus Grevillea in memory of the algologist Charles Francis Greville, one of the founders of the Royal Horticultural Society, because the name had already been published by Joseph Knight. How this came about is a tale of the kind of skulduggery that is not expected of scholars and gentlemen. Knight worked as head gardener for a gentleman botanist called George Hibberd, who had fallen for the new fad of growing proteaceous plants. In 1809 Knight published On the Cultivation of the Plants belonging to the natural order of Protëeae which, as well as providing ten pages or so of instructions for the successful growing of Proteaceae, included a revised taxonomy for the group. This taxonomy had been copied down by Robert Salisbury from a lecture given by Robert Brown to the Linnaean Society, and published by Knight before the text of Brown’s lecture could be published in the Transactions of the Linnaean Society. For this piece of piracy Salisbury was ostracised by the botanical fraternity, but nothing could alter the fact that Knight had published before Brown, and so we read that the genus Grevillea is ‘R. Br. ex Knight’, even though Knight had been unable to name or describe the type specimen which was in fact Brown’s Grevillea gibbosa, the Bushman’s Clothes-peg (Brown, 1810b, 375). Within the genus Grevillea Brown remembered Banks, Bauer, Baxter, Caley, Cunningham and Dryander. He also named a monotypic genus Bellendena after Sir John Bellenden Ker.

  As a man without liberal education who had no Latin, Brown’s colleague George Caley, who was otherwise an expert botanist, was never permitted to publish under his own name. Though he was a rather morose individual who often made life difficult for Brown, Brown made sure he was not forgotten by naming a small genus of flying duck orchids after him, Caleana. Brown named four more species for Caley as well, a Grevillea, a Banksia, a Persoonia and an Anadenia. To another Grevillea and another Banksia Brown gave the specific epithet goodii, in honour of the gardener on the Investigator, Peter Good, whose job it was to tend any live plants being taken back to England, and make sure that the collected seed remained viable. Good had died of dysentery shortly after the Investigator docked in Port Jackson in 1803; the plants to which Brown gave his name are his only memorial (Brown, 1810b, 1:174)

  Brown collected the plant we now call Brunonia, but he did not name it after himself. Sir James Edward Smith, lecturer in botany at Guy’s Hospital, who had acquired all Linnaeus’s collections after his death in 1778, chose the name but, because Brown published it in his Prodromus in 1810, before Smith’s paper was published in the Transactions of the Linnaean Society, he is credited as the author (Smith, 1811, 366). The name Brownia has never been used so there was no need to latinise it as Brunonia. In 1863 Ferdinand Mueller attempted to confer Brown’s name on the Australian Flintwood, which Brown had originally collected on the Hunter River (Fragmenta, 3:17, 11). Mueller had originally identified his specimen as a Phoberos as described by Loureiro, and named it Phoberos brownii; by 1863 he reclassified it as a Scolopia, but he was not able to retain his original species name brownii because of an odd circumstance. In June 1854 German botanist Johann Friedrich Klotzsch had come upon a specimen of the same species in the herbarium of the Berlin Botanical Garden marked ‘patria ignota’. Klotzsch described it, named it Adenogyrus braunii for his friend and colleague Alexander Carl Friedrich Braun, and the name was published the same year (Fischer and Meyer). The genus name was not good but there was no way of removing the specific epithet, so Scolopia braunii it is and ever will be. Botanists who treat braunii as if it were a variant spelling of brownii (and they include the great Floyd) are simply wrong. Scolopia braunii is a wonderful slow-growing tree with glossy lozenge-shaped leaves and scented flowers; it is a real shame that it was not named for the best botanist of them all. At one stage the Queensland Kauri was being referred to as ‘Agathis brownii’, but that name too was without authority (Mabberley, 2002). That still leaves more than 150 plant species with the specific name brownii, nearly all of them named by younger generations of botanists who are all aware of how much we owe to Robert Brown. One of the earliest plants named for Brown is Banksia brownii, which was collected by William Baxter at King George’s Sound in 1829; it is now facing imminent extinction in its native habitat in south-west Western Australia.

  Brown is the original collector of many Cave Creek natives. Some he was able to name with purely descriptive names in the peculiar mixture of Latin and Greek that is called botanical Latin: the genera Asplenium and Cryptocarya, Aneilema biflorum, A. acuminatum, Adiantum formosum, Alpinia caerulea, Alyxia ruscifolia, Gymnostachys anceps. There was nothing Brown could do to stop the Cave Creek Commelina commemorating Jan and Caspar Commelijn, because Linnaeus had already named the genus in 1753, but typically he chose a descriptive epithet, cyanea – blue. Our Koda belongs to a genus named in 1756 Ehretia for the great botanical artist Georg Dionysius Ehret, and again Brown applied a descriptive epithet, acuminata. Brown listed Olea paniculata, an important member of our plant community, which had been tentatively named ‘Ligustrum arboreum’ by the botanists on the Endeavour. He also named Clerodendrum floribundum and Callicarpa pedunculata. Brown also identified Pseuderanthemum variabile, tentatively labelled ‘Iusticia umbratilis’. And so on, to the end of the alphabet.

  Though Alan Cunningham and Charles Frazer accomplished much less than Brown, at Cave Creek their names crop up every day, Frazer’s being usually and apparently incorrectly spelt as ‘Fraser’ (ADB). Cunningham was a gardener’s son, who found work in 1810 as a cataloguer of Banks’s collections at Kew. When the post of travelling plant collector was advertised in 1814, Banks encouraged Cunningham to apply and he was duly appointed. After travelling in South America, he arrived in Port Jackson in 1816, the same year that Frazer arrived in New South Wales as a soldier. Within a year Frazer had been appointed Superintendent of the Botanic Gardens and first Colonial Botanist. Both men joined John Oxley’s expeditions to north-eastern New South Wales in 1818, and in 1828 they accompanied Captain Patrick Logan’s expedition from Brisbane south to Mount Barney in the McPherson Range, which was named by Cunningham after Major Duncan McPherson, an officer in the 39th regiment. Bentham credits Frazer as the original collector of more than 230 New South Wales species. Our most spectacular rosewood is Dysoxylum fraserianum and the sandpaper fig, Ficus fraseri, is one of the most important trees for our fruit-eating birds.

  Cunningham’s memory haunts the treescape; the Hoop Pine, Araucaria cunninghamii, the Bangalow Palm, Archontophoenix cunninghamiana, the local Casuarina, Allocasuarina cunninghamiana, the Native Tamarind, Diploglottis cunninghamii, the Brown Beech, Pennantia cunninghamii, are all named for him. Lately Cunningham has been losing some of his titles; Diploglottis cunninghamii is now to be called D. australis, Clerodendron cun
ninghamii C. longiflorum var. glabrum, Cryptocarya cunninghamii C. macdonaldii, but then Kreysigia multiflora was renamed Tripladenia cunninghamii, so what Cunningham lost on the roundabouts he made up on a swing. In 1831 Cunningham went back to England, to join the other botanists working on the 200 boxes of Australian specimens he had sent to the Kew herbarium. He published little, and it would probably be unfair to suggest that it was he who called some of the most frequently encountered species in the McPherson Range after himself. One thing he did do was to ensure that a ‘majestic bluff’ encountered on Oxley’s earlier expedition was named after George Caley.

  Even more important than Robert Brown in arriving at an authoritative account of the Australian flora is another gentleman amateur, George Bentham (DNB). Bentham was virtually self-educated; he became interested in botany when his father moved his household to France in 1816, eventually settling near Montpellier. He diverted himself by applying the logical principles developed by his uncle Jeremy Bentham to anything that interested him. He was impressed by the analytical tables for plant identification that he found in Augustin Pyramus de Candolle’s Flore française and began to apply them to his own botanising. On a visit to London in 1823 he made his first contact with British botanists. In 1831 his father died, and in 1832 his uncle; Bentham inherited from both. As a gentleman of independent means he could now spend all his time botanising. In 1836 he published his first work of systematic botany, Labiatarum genera et species, for which he had visited every European herbarium at least once. He then travelled to Vienna to study legumes, and produced De leguminosarum generibus commentationes, which was published in the annals of the Vienna Museum. He went on to collaborate with De Candolle on the Prodromus systematis naturalis regni vegetabilis, producing descriptions of 4,730 species.