by Ed Douglas
The following year, seedlings of the blue poppy went on sale at Chelsea for a guinea each: three days’ wages for a labourer. Thomas Hay, superintendent of the Royal Parks in London bedded out massed displays of the new flower in Hyde Park, delighting the public and inspiring amateur gardeners to try for themselves. Alas, blue poppies proved fiendishly difficult to grow: Perenyi dubbed them her ‘abominable snowman’ so conspicuous were they by their absence, despite repeated attempts.
I have never seen it – not the tiniest shoot having come up from repeated sowings. . . . I would give anything for a glimpse of it even in somebody else’s garden.
In his memoirs, Russell Page, the impossibly tall designer of gardens for everyone from the Duchess of Windsor to Oscar de la Renta, judged the blue poppy ‘as difficult to succeed with as the philosopher’s stone’. (Always tuned to the infinite, Page married as his first wife Lida, niece of the mystic George Gurdjieff; his second was the widow of poet René Daumal, author of Mount Analogue.)
Such judgments, not quite deserved, were a disappointment for the slight, taciturn man who more than anyone was responsible for the sensation the blue poppy made in 1926. Frank Kingdon-Ward was not the first European to discover or even collect the blue poppy; that distinction went to a French missionary forty years earlier. Kingdon-Ward wasn’t even the first Briton: that was the enigmatic explorer, spy and diplomat Eric Bailey, recorded in the Latin name for one of the handful of species of blue poppy, Meconopsis baileyi. Bailey had discovered the flower before the Great War in south-east Tibet while exploring the secrets of the Tsangpo gorges. Yet it was Kingdon-Ward, a gifted plant collector, who was able to collect viable seed and bring the plant to market, a landmark in his long career.
The son of Harry Marshall Ward, professor of botany at Cambridge University, Frank had once heard a friend of his father say: ‘There are places up the Brahmaputra where no white man has ever been.’ As a boy, the notion of discovery thrilled him. In 1924 he was ‘up the Brahmaputra’ himself, three hundred kilometres east of Lhasa and following in the footsteps of his hero Eric Bailey, gazing at the flower that would make him famous. ‘Never,’ he wrote in The Riddle of the Tsangpo Gorges,
have I seen a blue poppy which held out such high hopes of being hardy, and of easy cultivation in Britain. Being a woodland plant it will suffer less from the tricks of our uncertain climate; coming from a moderate elevation, it is accustomed to that featureless average of weather which we know so well how to provide it with; and being perennial, it will not exasperate gardeners.
It did exasperate gardeners, but Kingdon-Ward’s description reveals his genius as a plant hunter, perhaps the last of the great collectors who with immense courage and expertise travelled the Himalaya. In relocating the valuable species they found there around the world, they enriched the gardens of Europe and North America and transformed economies. Just as the growing awareness of Buddhism, from the patient scholarship of Eugène Burnouf and Sylvain Lévi to the wild imaginings of Helena Blavatsky, changed the philosophical and spiritual landscape of Europe, botany’s exploration of the intensely biodiverse eastern Himalaya would alter its physical landscape too. But gardeners at horticultural shows on both side of the Atlantic were not the only beneficiaries of this exchange: plants travelled in the opposite direction too, into the Himalaya, in some cases a catalyst for social, economic and demographic upheaval with long-term political consequences that still ripple outwards today.
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There was nothing new about plant hunting. Our species has been relocating other species for pleasure and profit since we began. Ancient Egyptians sent out expeditions to find the trees that produced the resin they burned in their temples. What changed in the eighteenth century was epistemological: Sweden’s Carl Linnaeus, the ‘prince of botanists’, founder of modern ecology, created a workable system of binomial classification for every species on earth. With a reliable intellectual structure in place to study the earth’s plants and creatures, exploration had a powerful new tool with which to approach the undiscovered. In 1768 Linnaeus’ pupil and fellow Swede Daniel Solander took leave from his job cataloguing the collection at the British Museum to join the wealthy naturalist Joseph Banks on board James Cook’s Endeavour for its famous three-year voyage, first to Tahiti to witness the transit of Venus, then in search of Antarctica. When Endeavour reached home in July 1771, it was Banks, not Cook, whom London applauded loudest. George III gave him great influence at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew and the energetic Banks used the opportunity to encourage more botanists to go exploring. He had brought home an extensive plant collection – or herbarium – from his voyage round the world but little that would grow. What he wanted were living specimens, bulbs, roots and seeds, shipped home as quickly as possible.
The first professional collector he sent into the field was Francis Masson in 1772 and to the place that had most inspired Banks on his travels: South Africa. Much later in life and confined to a wheelchair by gout, Banks suggested to a young Norfolk-born botanist called William Jackson Hooker that he go to Iceland. It was the first collecting trip of what would turn out to be a remarkable career. Although a second expedition to Ceylon had to be shelved, at great personal expense, Hooker made further collecting trips in Europe and built a reputation as a botanic writer and collector, partly to pay his debts. In 1820, he was appointed professor of botany at Glasgow University, where he helped establish the Royal Botanic Institution of Glasgow to supply the university with medicinal plants; later he persuaded the British government to include scientists on official expeditions. In 1841, by then in his mid fifties, he took over as director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. It was an auspicious moment. Botany was playing an increasingly important role in the economic development of the British Empire and Kew, along with the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh, was central to that, breeding viable commercial species for the various colonies’ particular climates and locations. The abolition of tax on glass, ‘that absurd impost on light’ as The Lancet described it, also allowed a rapid expansion of commercial greenhouses. Technology was catching up with aspiration and Kew and Edinburgh became the engines of what was known as ‘economic botany’.
All plant hunters faced challenges, but the deep gorges and steep slopes of the Himalaya were remote and their geography poorly known. And while an experienced collector could scan a mountainside for the unfamiliar, they still faced the challenge of reaching their target and assessing its potential, be it aesthetic or commercial, or both. They also had to do this twice, first when the plant was flowering and then again when it produced seed, meaning the collector would have to know its precise location often in areas that hadn’t yet been mapped. And of course there was always the risk that by the time they returned the plant might have been eaten or crushed. If it was intact, then the collector faced hours of painstaking work each evening, preparing herbarium specimens, writing up detailed notes, drying and cleaning seeds and packing everything so that the seeds remained viable.
One great advantage that Edwardian collectors like Kingdon-Ward enjoyed was access to a terrarium, a sealable glass container. The terrarium, known at first as a Wardian case after its inventor Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward, is one of those inventions that most people have never heard of even though it radically changed the world. Before Ward, specimens collected by plant hunters had only a narrow chance of making it home in a viable state. Many plants travelled badly, especially at sea, exposed to salt spray on deck or else hidden in the dark below, and sailors were disinclined to share valuable drinking water with a plant if it began to run low. The problem was recognised as a major hurdle preventing the spread of valuable crops around the world. Ward’s invention would overcome this problem, another chain in the link of our hyperconnected world.
Born in 1791 and raised in the Essex town of Plaistow, Nathaniel Ward was the son of a doctor who followed his father’s example, plying his trade from ‘dingy dwellings’ in Wellclose Square in London’s docklands, very
much a Dickensian scene, wreathed in smog that poisoned Ward’s garden and his collection of ferns. (Joseph Conrad lived there too, as a young sailor a few years after Ward’s death.) As a boy he would get up at three in the morning to go botanising in the Essex countryside and his deep knowledge and medical background put him at the heart of London’s scientific society. Most early botanists were medical men, since the remedies, syrups, powders and ointments they gave their patients grew in gardens or wild in the countryside: materia medica, as it was known. Most of the botanic gardens founded in the era were linked to hospitals.
Ward was an entomologist as well as a gardener, and in the late 1820s, looking into a sealed glass bottle that contained the pupa of a moth and some leaf mould, he noticed that seeds trapped in the bottle were germinating. He put the jar on a window ledge and over the next few months watched them grow into common species of grass and fern. It was only when the bottle top failed – four years later – that the plants died. Through the 1830s Ward experimented with sealed glass containers, proving beyond doubt that plants could thrive in a well-lit closed environment without the need for watering. Moisture could be recycled almost indefinitely, condensing out of the air at night to soak the soil once more. Two prototypes were sent to Australia with British plants that happily survived the journey. Then the boxes were cleaned out and returned to Ward with the Australian fern Gleichenia microphylla growing inside. Despite a trip around Cape Horn, the fern was alive and well when it reached London.
Among the first people Ward told about his long and patient research was William Hooker, whose son Joseph Dalton Hooker became one of the first plant collectors to use the invention in the field. Joseph, William’s second son, is most widely known now as the friend and correspondent of Charles Darwin but his career as a botanist was even more glittering than his father’s. Towards the end of his life, during a speech to the Royal Society, he described himself as a ‘puppet of natural selection’, growing up in a household steeped in botany and exploration. He was identifying mosses as a small boy and sitting on his grandfather’s knee reading Cook’s Voyages. Although in his youth he suffered from croup – his mother dubbed him ‘croaky Joe’ – any infirmity disappeared as he grew. He worked hard and became physically strong. His father recalled how Joseph once walked the forty kilometres home from Helensburgh rather than wait for the steamer back to Glasgow. In a firmament of heroes peopled by James Cook and Joseph Banks, the idea of exploration was always in his mind. In 1837, he enrolled in an astronomy class to get the practical and theoretical knowledge he needed to survey. It was time well spent. Sixty-six years later, when Hooker was eighty-six, he received a telegram from British officers of the Sikkim-Tibet Boundary Commission, including Francis Younghusband and David Prain, who would succeed him at Kew, congratulating Hooker on his surveying efforts there.
William was always on the lookout for his son’s interests, so when at a friend’s house he met Captain James Clark Ross, commander of a proposed Antarctic voyage, he suggested Joseph be included in the party as a naturalist. Ross agreed, but only if the young man had completed his medical training and served in the Royal Navy. The expedition left Chatham Dockyard in September 1839 and would last almost exactly four years. It remains among the most significant voyages in the history of British exploration. It also made Joseph Hooker’s reputation, not just as a capable and thoughtful botanist, especially on plant distribution, but also as a hugely entertaining correspondent; his letters are among the best of any explorer, shining with energy and interest.
Much had changed by the time the expedition’s two boats Erebus and Terror finally returned, dropping anchor at Folkestone in September 1843. Hooker’s father had achieved a long-held ambition to become director of Kew and was transforming an institution only recently threatened with closure. Joseph, who learned of his father’s promotion while in Australia, had sent home a stream of exciting new discoveries. In the Antarctic, Hooker learned his older brother Willy had died in Jamaica of yellow fever and his sister Mary Harriette of consumption.
In the aftermath of Hooker’s epic adventure, he developed a friendship with Darwin that provided one of the most significant correspondences in the history of science. He had met Darwin for the first time in 1839, shortly before he left for Antarctica, walking through Charing Cross with Robert McCormick, who had served on the Beagle and was surgeon on Ross’s ship Erebus. Hooker was now returned from Antarctica ‘well salted’, having shed a little of the Puritan strictness that had characterised his upbringing. Darwin felt increasingly confident in testing his ideas of natural selection on the young botanist. Both had travelled to remote places, like Tierra del Fuego, and Darwin was supportive of Hooker’s Flora Antarctica, his classic work on the expedition’s botanical discoveries.
Despite recently getting engaged and starting a new job, Hooker was restless. He wanted to travel again and botanise somewhere new and exciting, perhaps in the tropics but certainly in India. He had good contacts there: Hugh Falconer, superintendent of the Botanic Garden at Saharanpur in northern India, was one; Falconer suggested the kingdom of Sikkim as somewhere new to investigate. Another was a botanist friend from student days in Glasgow. Thomas Thomson had served as a doctor during the Anglo-Sikh wars of the 1840s and then been appointed to the commission aimed at settling the border between Ladakh and Tibet. The commission was largely thwarted in its aims, so Thomson had spent much of his time botanising in Ladakh and Zanskar. With the quickening march of economic botany, the transforming technology of Wardian cases and his father’s new position at Kew it seemed the perfect moment for Hooker to explore new frontiers in the world’s highest mountains.
Europeans had been plant collecting in the Himalaya for more than half a century before Hooker arrived. Collection had been part of George Bogle’s mission to Tibet of 1774, and in 1796 the naturalist Thomas Hardwicke had been part of a collecting mission to Garhwal. Ten years earlier, the Calcutta Botanical Garden had been founded, initially to identify and develop plants of commercial value. By the 1830s the garden had developed a strong scientific foundation, first through William Roxburgh, who introduced mahogany to India, and then the Danish-born surgeon Nathaniel Wallich, whose catalogue of Indian plants exceeded eight thousand. Few went plant hunting in India without consulting Wallich and sending him new species. The Himalaya was now part of this expanding body of botanical knowledge: Edward Gardner sent him plants from the garden of the Kathmandu residency and William Moorcroft from the western Himalaya. Wallich himself had spent the whole of 1821 in Nepal collecting plants and published a short monograph on Nepali botany, Tentamen Florae Napalensis Illustratae. John Forbes Royle, another medical man, was in 1823 made director of the botanic garden at Saharanpur, founded in an old Pashtun palace at the foot of the Himalaya. He worked on the medicinal value of Himalayan plants, publishing Illustrations of the botany and other branches of natural history of the Himalayan mountains and of the flora of Cashmere in 1839. Royle was among the first botanists to suggest that the cinchona tree, the source of the anti-malarial quinine, might be grown in India.
One of the earliest British interventions in Himalayan horticulture was the humble potato. Warren Hastings had encouraged his Tibet envoy George Bogle to conduct an experiment on his journey through Bhutan, planting potatoes on each stage of his route to see if they would flourish. ‘Don’t return without something to shew where you have been,’ Hastings told him,
though it be but a contraband Walnutt, a pilfered Slip of Sweet Briar, or the Seeds of a Bootea Turnip taken in Payment for the Potatoes you have given them gratis.
Samuel Turner, following in Bogle’s footsteps nine years later, judged the experiment a failure having been shown ‘a small specimen of potatoes’ that had been grown in Bhutan, ‘not bigger than boys’ marbles’. Turner concluded that ‘either from ignorance or idleness’, the people of Bhutan had ‘failed in the cultivation of this valuable root’.
A decade after Samuel Turner’s journey to Tibe
t, William Kirkpatrick arrived in Kathmandu on his stillborn mission to mediate between the Gorkhalis and the Qing.
I had heard, before my visit . . . that our most esteemed kitchen vegetables did not only grow there in much higher perfection than in Bengal, but that the propagation of them was annually continued from their own seed . . . My disappointment, therefore, was very great on finding the fact otherwise, and on being assured that they could not raise even potatoes, without procuring every year from Patna fresh roots for sowing; I think it extremely probable, however, that their failure in this respect has been occasioned solely by want of attention or skill, having no doubt . . . that with proper management, there are few of our hortulan productions, whether fruit, flower, or herb, which might not be successfully reared, and abundantly multiplied . . . in the valley of Nepaul.
Potatoes had been in India for over a century by that point, introduced by the Portuguese not long after arriving in Europe. They now spread through the Himalaya along with seasonal labourers returning home from British hill stations. Frederick Young, the Irish officer who had commanded the Sirmur batallion in the war with Gorkha, planted potatoes at Mussoorie, the hill station he founded. Kathmandu’s potatoes almost certainly came from Patna. Those in western Nepal arrived from Simla or Naini Tal and in the east from Darjeeling. Francis Buchanan-Hamilton, later briefly the superintendent at the Calcutta Botanic Garden, visited Nepal a decade after Kirkpatrick and in one brief comment managed to report that the people of the Himalaya were getting to grips with the potato while at the same time maintaining a prejudice against them: