Nature Displaced, Nature Displayed: Order and Beauty in Botanical Gardens 9780755622856, 9781848857124

Citation preview

In memory of Ann Johnson

Figures

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Plan of the Old Botanic Garden, Cambridge, from Martyn, T., Mantissa Plantarum Horti Botanici Cantabrigiensis, Cambridge, 1771 (by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library) 22 View of the Old Botanic Garden, Cambridge, from Ackermann, R., A History of the University of Cambridge, London, 1815 (by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library) 23 A Survey of the Botanic Garden at Glasnevin in the County of Dublin (1800), by Sherrard, Thomas, from Transactions of the Dublin Society, 1801 (by permission of the National Library of Ireland) 44 Mutlow’s Plan of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Glasnevin, from Warburton, J., Whitelaw, J. and Walsh, R., History of the City of Dublin, London, 1818 (by permission of the National Library of Ireland) 45 Serpentine Lake at Glasnevin Botanic Gardens 49 Visitors’ Map of Glasnevin Botanic Gardens, from Niven, N., The Visitors Companion to the Botanic Garden, Dublin, 1838 (by permission of the National Library of Ireland) 55 Carl Linnaeus’ System of Classification, from Niven, N., The Visitors Companion to the Botanic Garden, Dublin, 1838 (by permission of the National Library of Ireland) 56–57 Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu’s System of Classification, from Niven, N., The Visitors Companion to the Botanic Garden, Dublin, 1838 (by permission of the National Library of Ireland) 58

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9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

Edward Lapidge’s Plan for the New Botanic Garden, Cambridge, from Smith, J.J., The Cambridge Portfolio, London, 1840 (by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library) 66 Andrew Murray’s Plan for the New Botanic Garden, Cambridge, 1846 (reproduced by kind permission of Cambridge University Botanic Garden) 70 The First Tree Planted in the New Botanic Garden, Cambridge, in 1846 72 Plan of the Belfast Botanic Gardens, from Ferguson, D., A Popular Guide to the Royal Botanic Gardens of Belfast, Belfast, 1851 79 The Central Dome of the Palm House, Belfast 94 Charles Lanyon’s Original Plan for the Palm House, Belfast, from Hall, Mr and Mrs, Ireland, 1843 96 The Palm House, Belfast 98 Ground Plan of the Hothouses, Glasnevin, from Transactions of the Dublin Society, 1801 (by permission of the National Library of Ireland) 102 Elevations of the Hothouses, Glasnevin, from Transactions of the Dublin Society, 1801 (by permission of the National Library of Ireland) 102 Frontispiece showing the Octagon House, Glasnevin, from Niven, N., The Visitors Companion to the Botanic Garden, Dublin, 1838 (by permission of the National Library of Ireland) 107 View from Front of Hothouses, Glasnevin, from Niven, N., The Visitors Companion to the Botanic Garden, Dublin, 1838 (by permission of the National Library of Ireland) 108 The Range of Glasshouses, Glasnevin, Eason Collection (by permission of the National Library of Ireland) 110 Central House of the Curvilinear Range, Glasnevin 112 The Palm House, Glasnevin, from The Gardeners’ Chronicle, 1884 115 The New Palm House, Glasnevin, Eason Collection (by permission of the National Library of Ireland) 116 Interior of the New Palm House, Glasnevin, Valentine Collection (by permission of the National Library of Ireland) 117

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Ground Plan of the Old Botanical Garden, 1838, Cambridge, from Smith, J.J., The Cambridge Portfolio, London, 1840 (by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library) Proposed Conservatory by E. Lapidge, 1830, Cambridge, University Archives, Cambridge, p. xxxviii.i (by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library) The Glasshouse Range in Cambridge Botanic Garden Front Page of the Plant Book, Glasnevin, 1834 (courtesy of the National Botanic Gardens, Glasnevin) Sample Page from the Plant Book, Glasnevin, 1834 (courtesy of the National Botanic Gardens, Glasnevin) Plan of Cambridge Botanic Garden, from Gilbert-Carter, H., A Guide to the University Botanic Garden, Cambridge, 1922 (by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library) Tabular Representation of Arrangements at the Botanic Garden, Glasnevin, from Niven, N., The Visitors Companion to the Botanic Garden, Dublin, 1838 (by permission of the National Library of Ireland) Plan of the Botanic Garden, Glasnevin, from Moore, D., Hand-Book for the Botanic Gardens of the Royal Dublin Society, Dublin, 1850 (by permission of the National Library of Ireland) The Plantain Tree, from Moore, D., Handbook for the Botanic Gardens of the Royal Dublin Society, Dublin, 1859 (by permission of the National Library of Ireland) Rosemary Street Presbyterian Church, Belfast, c. 1831, from Kernohan, J.W., Rosemary Street Presbyterian Church: A Record of the Past 200 Years, Belfast Interior of Rosemary Street Presbyterian Church, Belfast, c. 1923, from Kernohan, J.W., Rosemary Street Presbyterian Church: A Record of the Past 200 years, Belfast Curvilinear Range, Glasnevin, from London Illustrated News, August 1849 (by permission of the National Library of Ireland)

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Acknowledgements

This book is the product of numerous discussions and conversations with many academic colleagues and friends. My interest in plants, however, has deeper roots and stems from childhood memories of my parents growing vegetables and flowers in the garden of our house in suburban Dublin. Neither were botanists nor professional horticulturalists; rather, their knowledge came directly from experience in farming. Their expertise in the practice of cultivation was matched by their desire to create a pleasing space around our home. Thus my fascination with gardens has a long genealogy that is as much personal as professional. The direct impetus for engaging in a study of botanical gardens in particular stemmed from debates with colleagues at Queen’s University Belfast about the relationships between science and beauty. Buoyed up by these stimulating discussions, the botanical gardens at Cambridge, Belfast and Dublin became the focus of my project. I am especially indebted to David Livingstone who acted as a generous critic of drafts of this book and a supportive friend throughout the process. My thinking on the subject was hugely enhanced by the lively discussions at our research cluster’s reading group and I extend my thanks to participants: Keith Bennett, Diarmid Finnegan, Satish Kumar, Niall Majury, Linda Price, Barbara Renzi and Steve Royle. Moreover the informal debates held with this group during – often extended – coffee breaks helped me clarify my ideas, and remain motivated and tolerably good-humoured during the writing phase. The institutional support provided by the School of Geography, Archaeology and Palaeoecology through the provision of sabbatical leave and support for conferences is also much appreciated.

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Beyond the boundaries of Queen’s University Belfast I also owe a debt of gratitude to the many colleagues and friends with whom I discussed parts of or all of the substance of this book. These include John Agnew, Julia Cream, Paul Elliott, Judith Kenny, Stephen Legg, Gerald Mills, Sue Roberts, James Ryan, Rich Schein and Liz Young. I particularly appreciated the kind hospitality extended by Jim Duncan and Nancy Ginnel Duncan during the many trips I made to Cambridge in the course of this research. Good cooking was matched by equally tasty conversations about matters geographical and horticultural. Parts of the argument of this book were presented at various conferences over the years and in seminars at: University College London; Trinity College Dublin; University of Kentucky; Nordic Research Course, Trondheim; Arboretum Symposium, Linnaean Society London; Queen’s University Belfast; University of Hull; and the University of Nottingham. I benefitted enormously from the feedback received and thank all those who participated in these events. I made numerous demands on a wide variety of libraries and I would like to acknowledge the staffs at: the Departments of Rare Books, and Manuscripts and University Archives, Cambridge University Library; Cory Library, Cambridge Botanical Garden; National Library of Ireland; Special Collections, McClay Library, Queen’s University Belfast; Library, National Botanic Gardens, Glasnevin; Linen Hall Library, Belfast; the National Archives, Kew; Public Record Office of Northern Ireland; Belfast Central Library. I wish to extend thanks to David Stonestreet, Senior Geography Editor at I.B.Tauris, to the production staff at the press and especially to my copy-editor, Ronnie Hanna, for the patient assistance and the sound advice he offered during the final stages of the book’s production. Special acknowledgement is also due to Maura Pringle, of Queen’s University Belfast, in working tirelessly preparing the illustrations. It is my family, however, who provided the greatest and most invaluable support for this project. Their interest, help, good humour and tolerance were always appreciated. Thanks to my sister, Máirín Nic Eoin, for the many excursions we paid to the gardens in Glasnevin accompanied by her children; to my late father Thomas Johnson for his quiet and unwavering confidence in me; and finally to the xiv

Acknowledgements

gardener par excellence of my family, my late mother Ann Johnson, whose infectious joy for life and knowledge of all things horticultural helped make the research and writing of this book a wholly gratifying exercise. And it is to her that I dedicate this work. Nuala C. Johnson Belfast

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1 Nature, Botanical Gardens and the Circulation of Science ‘What did Thought do?’ ‘Stuck a feather in the ground and thought it would grow a hen.’ Rod by rod we pegged the drill for sweetpea with light brittle sticks, twiggy and unlikely in fresh mould, and stalk by stalk we snipped the coming blooms1

Seamus Heaney, ‘Sweetpea’

In the opening stanza of this arresting poem, Seamus Heaney conveys the subtle relationship we have with nature as we engage with it through abstract reason and embodied practice. Juxtaposing thought with action, Heaney foregrounds the disparity between literally training sweetpeas along ordered drills and reflecting about hens being a product of the cultivation of their feathers. Growing plants and creating a garden is not just, or perhaps even primarily, an intellectual activity. It is more often a set of procedures and practices – learned over generations of experience and accumulated knowledge – about how nature can be reworked, controlled and designed to produce spaces where plants will thrive, thrill and tutor. This knowledge takes many

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forms, from texts and treatises on gardening, to demonstrations and trials of planting techniques and environments. Moreover, styles of gardening vary enormously across the globe from the Zen gardens of Kyoto to the cottage gardens of the Cotswolds. This book, however, is concerned with botanical gardens as one venue where the complex relationships between the pursuit of science and the aesthetic display of nature get played out. Adopting a comparative approach that focuses on the emergence of botanical gardens in Belfast, Cambridge and Dublin, this study seeks to unravel the issues at stake in the pursuit of the overall design, mosaics of display and consumption regimens found in these three particular gardens.

From Physic to Botanic Gardens Cultivating nature through gardening has a long genealogy in the history of humanity and the search for an original, Edenic garden has exerted a powerful magnetic attraction in Christian theology, while gardens more generally have exercised an intense spiritual hold in many religious traditions from Islam to Buddhism.2 As Cunningham notes, the word paradise means an enclosed park or garden and consequently a ‘garden is a place of peace and harmony, a place to promote and reflect spiritual well-being, a place where there is refreshment for the soul’.3 Botanical gardening directed towards medicinal and scientific ends, however, is of more recent vintage, dating approximately from the late Middle Ages and evolving into a specific form with its own set of aesthetic, taxonomic and design principles.4 It developed in tandem with the Renaissance garden which stimulated a return, at least in part, to some of the practices of garden design popular among the ancient Greeks and Romans. Of particular note was the inclination to imitate the idea of laying out gardens in geometric shapes – perfect circles, perfect squares – where proportion ruled and a sense of harmony prevailed. Classical statuary, buildings and fountains were added to these spaces to enhance the appearance of order. It was known that trees planted in rows and topiary were popular in the gardens of classical antiquity and these were adopted in the design of the Renaissance garden. These princely gardens, generally attached to the villas or palaces of their 2

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owners, were not just expressions of style; they were testaments to the power and prestige of their creators and owners, and as such they played important social and political roles.5 The shape, architecture and masonry of these early Renaissance gardens often took precedence over the plants themselves and it has been observed that it is only in the seventeenth century that ‘the gardener came into his own as master of the garden, diminishing the role of the fontaniere’.6 It was through the development of botanical gardens that plants moved centre stage in the design of Renaissance gardens. Early ones were first established as ‘physic’ gardens attached to the medical faculties of universities. Their aim was to enhance the knowledge of and education in plants for training doctors so that they could prescribe and prepare drugs for patients more readily. The first of these new physic gardens was founded in Padua in 1545 and reflected the interest that the university city of Venice had in materia medica and in geographical exploration. Padua adopted a circular design, which was thought to represent the most perfect of shapes, but it also curtailed any future expansion and thus was not adopted much elsewhere. As physic gardens developed in Italy (for instance in Rome in 1566 and Bologna in 1567) they also began to be established in other places such as Zurich in 1561, Lyons in 1564, Montpellier in 1598, Paris in 1640, the University of Oxford in 1621 and the Chelsea Physic Garden to train apothecaries’ apprentices in 1673.7 Rocks and animals were sometimes also displayed in these spaces, although later separate zoological institutions would emerge across Europe and beyond.8 These early botanical gardens shared many of the same characteristics of their princely Renaissance counterparts. They deployed geometric shapes with squares enclosing circular beds or squares enclosing square beds being the most popular forms. They were also, like their princely cousins, inspired by the works of the ancient philosophers and the latter’s insights into the relationships between plants and medicine. Gathering plants from all over the globe into a single place was matched by textual efforts to devise compilations of world flora in plant-books. Otto Brunfels’ Herbarum Vivae Eicones (1530), Leonhard Fuchs’ De Historia Stirpium (1542) and the apothecary and botanist John Parkinson’s herbal Theatrum Botanicum, published in 1640, for instance, were all popular treatises and reflected the increased accumulation of plant specimens and knowledge about them. Lavishly illustrated floral 3

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books were important texts accompanying the making of botanical gardens as sites of medicinal knowledge and spaces of learning. But gardens also attempted to gather as many plants from around the world as possible in the belief that ‘the value of a Botanic Garden was that it conveyed a direct knowledge of God. Since each plant was a created thing, and God had revealed a part of himself in each thing that he created, a complete collection of all the things created by God must reveal God completely.’9 These early physic institutions formed a precursor to the botanical gardens that were to develop in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although only one of the case studies began life as a physic garden (University of Cambridge), understanding how these early gardens emerged is important. It demonstrates how the pursuit of scientific botany in Cambridge, Dublin and Belfast shifted the form, scale, philosophy and content from the physic garden ideal of strict spatial geometry to an archetype of taxonomic regulation. Botanical knowledge would trump medicinal concerns and the design of the space would radically depart from the principles of composition that underpinned the Renaissance garden scheme. To gain some insight into the development of the physic garden I will pause briefly to consider the early origination of the one at Leiden. While a number of new gardens materialized in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the University of Leiden example proved to be one of the most important. When the university was instituted in 1575, medicine as well as law and theology were its foundation disciplines. It was believed that physicians would acquire the requisite knowledge for their profession through ‘examining, dissecting, dissolving and transmuting the bodies of animals, vegetables and minerals’.10 To this end the university needed a physic garden and from the outset tried to establish one. Many of the founding curators of the new university were well-to-do, keen gardeners, sharing an interest in the natural world that was typical of their social class. Leiden University was one of the centres of Calvinist education in the Netherlands yet it had a complicated relationship with other faiths, especially Catholicism. It initially appointed as professor Rembert Dodoens, a famous Catholic botanist and physician, in 1582, but he died prematurely in 1585. A plot of land to establish a garden was obtained by the university in 1587 and Pieter Pauw joined the faculty as botanical professor. A noted anatomist with experience of studying 4

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in Padua and the Baltic, he advanced medical knowledge but did little to develop the garden. The university curators continued to search for a professor for their collection and after much negotiation eventually attracted the well-known botanist and lawyer Carolus Clusius to Leiden. With experience of establishing a botanical garden for the Emperor of Austria in Vienna, as well as amassing a good plant collection that included tulips, his knowledge was considered invaluable. He arrived in the autumn of 1593 and began preliminary work, but due to ill health and a complex contract with the university, Clusius did not physically work in the garden, and consequently the apothecary Cluyt did much of the labour and planning. The latter was appointed professor with responsibilities for teaching the students about plants in the garden in summer, and about minerals and other natural phenomena in winter. By the end of 1594 the garden was complete. Like other physic gardens of this early period it was divided into four quarters and in this respect it resembled many Renaissance establishments that were geometrical in form. Three of the quarters contained 16 beds and the final quarter contained 12.11 The idea of dividing a square enclosure by paths into four quarters, often with a fountain at the centre, was a style of design popular in western European physic gardens, and ‘gardeners were perhaps particularly receptive to the idea that these might correspond to the four continents’.12 In Leiden the four sections contained around 1,400 plants, and only about one third of these were of materia medica. The remainder were ornamentals or exotics which were of interest to Clusius and Cluyt. In 1599 a glass gallery was added at the southern end and in it delicate plants were over-wintered while the professor could give instruction on other naturalia contained there including mineral and animal specimens.13 Like many early physic gardens the area covered by the original space was small. In the early decades plants were obtained through the Dutch East India Company from its trading posts and possessions in south Asia and thus many plants of exotic provenance as well as of medicinal value were in the collection. The guide to this and other early gardens indicates a desire to expand the reservoir of plants from around the world, and, in some instances, to have the four quarters represent the four continents of the earth, illustrating their diverse bounty. But to collect the world’s plant variety in a single location also harkened back to earlier Edenic images of gardens as living catalogues of Creation. As 5

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these botanical spaces were developing in Europe, colonial equivalents were concomitantly beginning to be established in Europe’s overseas possessions. Imperial gardens, which could meet medicinal needs, would also importantly nurture economic botany and a move towards the development of a complex network of plant exchange between the colonies and home.14 Leiden was one of the most significant early physic gardens; many medical students and botanists were trained there and its gradual expansion from a small physic garden to a larger botanical arena reflected its continued significance in the expansion of European botany. By the eighteenth century the intellectual underpinnings of botanical gardens more generally had begun to shift as the older physic spaces attached to universities expanded and a host of new gardens were established, some of which were subsidized by the state. In a British context the gardens at Edinburgh (1670), Kew (1759) and Dublin (1795) were the most important publicly-funded gardens and gradually Kew came to be regarded as the nucleus of Britain’s plant exchange network and the central node in the practice of economic botany.15 It became the lynchpin in a discourse about agricultural improvement and the introduction of new commercial crops. The transformative effect of an intensified plant exchange system had repercussions throughout the botanical network. Gardens now began to serve the interests of an expanding science of botany, and using these spaces to order ‘nature’ in some scientifically meaningful way became increasingly significant. As the historian of science Emma Spary has claimed, ‘For eighteenth century naturalists … plants were moving, changing, politically and chemically potent beings.’16 And some of them were moving into botanic gardens as these places competed for scientific and social prestige within a widening network of sites of horticultural and botanical expertise.

In search of order Despite an expanding literature on the history of botanic gardens in general and a number of book-length studies of individual gardens, much work has still to be done.17 McCracken’s overview of botanical 6

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institutions in Britain’s Victorian empire offers a useful summary of the scale and spread of botanic gardens across the globe,18 while Ray Desmond’s investigation of the history of Kew focuses on the transformation of the space from the Queen’s private demesne to a wider botanical establishment serving the scientific public and the country’s overseas empire.19 Lucille Brockway’s study of Kew places it firmly within the context of a colonizing discourse where she focuses on its role as a centre for the generation and dissemination of knowledge about economic botany that would serve a growing empire through the exploitation of useful plants such as cinchona.20 Richard Drayton’s inquiries place the emergence of Kew more squarely within an Enlightenment framework where a chronicle of improvement – economic, political, social, intellectual – prevailed, with botanical science at its epicentre.21 Emma Spary’s examination of the royal Parisian botanical garden paves the way for thinking about the development of Enlightenment natural history in France in tandem with an emerging political discourse of republicanism.22 Drawing on post-colonial perspectives, scholars have treated botanic gardens as ‘contact zones’ or hybrid spaces where links between European science and its empire have been arbitrated and where the conventional leitmotif of centre–periphery relationships challenged.23 Indeed the role of space has increasingly anchored discussions of natural history more generally and botanical and zoological knowledge more specifically.24 From discussions of laboratories and field sites to menageries and science museums the spatial theories and applications underpinning the exhibiting and disseminating of scientific information is increasingly seen to revolve around questions of power both between humans and between nature and humans. Harriet Ritvo has observed of zoos that ‘Scientific classification was hailed as both symbol and agent of a larger intellectual triumph, one that would ultimately reverse the traditional relationship between humans and the natural world.’25 This mastery over the intellectual domain of natural history was matched by a European hegemony over the geographical terrain of the globe through the acquisition (formally and informally) of overseas territories. Disputes over nomenclature and the identification of species were a regular feature of nineteenthcentury naming practices and, Ritvo concludes, were as much about the assertion of personal and institutional power as scientific 7

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knowledge.26 The authority to name was in large part an expression of the geopolitical positioning of particular national cultures. American naturalists, for instance, resisted outsiders’ efforts to denominate and describe, and so lay academic claim to species indigenous to North America. John Berger notes that the zoos of Paris, Berlin and London ‘brought considerable prestige to the national capitals … The capturing of animals was a symbolic representation of the conquest of all distant and exotic lands.’27 Moreover, Thomas Veltre sees the development of the nineteenth-century zoological garden as an expression of ‘the symbolic role of animals within a culture’.28 Questions of power, however, were not confined to the geopolitics of inter-state rivalries; regional competition was also significant in the development of scientific institutions as I will demonstrate in my analysis of the three gardens under consideration here. The internal ordering of space within botanical and zoological gardens is also crucial to understanding the spatialities of display. Richard Burkhardt’s investigation of the zoological section of the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris of the 1800s has revealed how zoologists and others debated and struggled over the control of specimens and their exhibition within the garden.29 The internal design of zoological space is likewise central to Ritvo’s analysis of Regent’s Park zoo in London. The Zoological Society of London, founded by Sir Stamford Raffles in 1824, was moved by a desire to establish an animal collection in London that matched Britain’s pre-eminence as a geopolitical and imperial power. The choice of animals to populate the zoo was influenced by two different, and sometimes, opposing visions. The first, mainly articulated by landowners, was driven by the desire to introduce exotic animals that might be acclimatized and bred, and ultimately introduced to the parks and tables of the British aristocracy. The second constituency, comprised primarily of naturalists, wanted a collection of exotic animals that would be of scientific interest especially in relation to animal taxonomy. Overall they did share a common underlying purpose: ‘to acquire, maintain, and display representatives of the animal kingdom in a way that echoed and emphasized British pre-eminence’.30 Moreover, the design of the collection was to represent the triumph of reason over the chaos and disorder of nature. Naturalists at the zoo sought to spatially represent this by arranging animals along strict taxonomic principles that would illustrate the broader order of 8

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the animal kingdom. Large carnivores – like big cats housed in cages – were the ultimate expression of human domination and were central to any important zoo. Regent’s Park housed many large cats in the mid-nineteenth century and their average life expectancy, under such conditions, was two years. Zoos were laid out in ‘artificial settings, using a variety of plants that also mirrored the nation’s global reach. Ordering collections became the dominant motif and zoo guidebooks were inveterately linear. No matter what the shape of a zoo, its official guidebook would prescribe a single route through the exhibits.’31 In the case of Adelaide zoo in Australia, Kay Anderson claims that ‘the zoo is a cultural institution which reflects not nature itself – as if such an unmediated thing exists – but a human adaptation of the ensemble of life forms that bears the name “nature”’.32 Taking the zoo as a quintessential expression of the human desire to offer an iconic expression of control, Anderson claims that zoos represent boundary-making exercises, in a double sense, where humans and animals are separated from each other and also where intra-animal boundaries are erected between, for instance, reptiles and birds. In Australia, as in other ‘new world’ societies, there was a desire to establish institutions that would engender civic and national pride. In the case of Adelaide, the zoo emerged from the formation in 1878 of the Acclimatisation Society of South Australia (later renamed the Royal Zoological Society of South Australia), itself a colonial offshoot of its English parent. It was located on a tract of land adjacent to the botanic garden, indicating the often close partnership between the zoological and botanical sciences. For many white Australians, acclimatizing animals, insects and birds from England to the Australian environment would transform the indigenous landscape into one made in the image of the English countryside. By the end of the nineteenth century the zoo was thus ‘incorporated into a well-coordinated imperial network of animal trading, itself the arm of the regime of extractive capitalism’,33 but the animals continued to be arranged taxonomically, rather than in terms of their social patterns, cultural life or habitat. Adelaide, in this respect, followed a familiar pattern in the development of zoo displays. Zoological gardens often developed in consort with botanical institutions and shared many of the same political, economic and scientific objectives. Although controlling ‘wild’ animals presented considerable organizational and preservational challenges to curators, 9

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plants too proved difficult to govern. Like zoos, botanical gardens were informed by the disciplining practice of taxonomic regulation but as this book seeks to demonstrate, questions of aesthetic appeal, the fragility of maintaining scientific order and the desire to entertain as well as educate all affected their internal composition and their public consumption.

In search of beauty As well as being spaces in which to illustrate scientific classification and carry out experiments, botanical gardens were also part of a broader narrative of gardening history. As such, they formed part of that wider concern with creating a landscape – nurturing a ‘way of seeing’ that was shot through with symbolic meaning.34 There is an extensive literature on the political, social and ideological meanings underlying particular forms of landscape and garden taste especially with respect to representing national identities.35 There are also notable studies that investigate the approach of significant landscape architects such as Humphry Repton, Uvedale Price and John Ruskin,36 in fashioning materially and philosophically a garden aesthetic particularly as it cohered with an idea of the picturesque. Moreover there are numerous studies of the ‘art’ of scientific illustration. Earlier accounts adopted broadly an art history perspective separating the visual image from the scientific text it sought to represent and thus maintaining a division between art and science.37 More recently, however, science studies historians have begun to take the visual dimension of scientific knowledge more seriously as intrinsic to the cognitive claims, with Martin Rudwick arguing that geology developed a ‘visual language’ which was often deployed in the settling of disputes among geologists.38 Scientific illustrations also form a central part of Bruno Latour’s thesis on how science inscribes ‘nature’ through immutable mobiles, such as maps, charts, graphs, that can be transported, managed, manipulated and made measurable.39 The cultural work that scientific images do has also informed projects that have concentrated on how they enter into wider discourses about the body and sexuality or race and gender for instance,40 while the 10

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materiality of communication technologies informs the thinking behind Timothy Lenoir’s analysis of science texts and the approach of Caroline Jones and Peter Galison in their collection of essays on science’s pictures.41 These studies, however, overwhelmingly focus on various types of illustration or image that are reproduced and circulated through texts, lectures or demonstrations and become part and parcel of the scientist’s repertoire of evidence. In botanic gardens, the design of the space itself is the lens through which the science of botany is projected. But these places did not develop within an aesthetic vacuum, just as botanical illustration did not develop outside of a tradition of painting. On the question of beauty, Jonathan Smith illustrates how divergent aesthetic sensibilities and practices were mobilized by Darwin and Darwinians that radically diverged from the attitudes and actions of anti-evolutionists such as John Ruskin. Smith charts how a ‘physiological aesthetics’ was developed to support Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection and was underpinned by a utilitarian view of beauty. In contradistinction, Ruskin’s botanical aesthetics distanced itself from any gesture towards scientific naturalism and rejected any notion of beauty which reduced it to a trait generated for evolutionary survival.42 While Smith’s study has aesthetics at its heart it too focuses on written texts and illustrations used by both sides in this debate rather than on the arrangement of living ‘nature’ in gardens. In this investigation I wish to attend to how issues of appearance and beauty were intermingled with debates about taxonomic order in the design of botanical gardens. Unlike Smith’s study, however, these gardens developed before the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and an evolutionary aesthetics had not yet taken hold to act as a counterpoint to more traditional views of the role of elegance in the social and moral dimensions of humans. In the discussions surrounding the initial planting of Cambridge, Dublin and Belfast I seek to document the role of aesthetic considerations in the overall execution of their plans. Did the gardens zealously adhere to representing nature through plant classification systems or did other considerations influence the spatial layout? In particular, how ideas of the picturesque infiltrated the internal organization of the gardens will be considered within the seemingly dominant thrust of producing systematic order based on plant species. 11

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The three gardens that are the subject of this inquiry were chosen firstly because each emerged within different institutional frameworks. Cambridge was founded as a physic garden supported and funded by the university and serving primarily the professors and the students. The gardens at Glasnevin in Dublin were instituted by the Royal Dublin Society to advance agriculture for commercial purposes and to deepen botanical knowledge. Although run by a learned society, the gardens were primarily funded by the state and thus were more akin to the organizational arrangements found at Kew. In Belfast the idea of establishing gardens originated with the Belfast Natural History Society but they were founded and funded by a private, limited company under the auspices of the Belfast Botanical and Horticultural Society. While Cambridge’s and Dublin’s gardens were established in the eighteenth century, most of the substantive work on all three gardens was carried out in the nineteenth and thus the primary empirical focus will be in that period up to around 1870. This book will elucidate the effect that the differing institutional arrangements had on the ways in which the gardens developed. Secondly, these three gardens represent contrasting locational and cultural contexts that domesticated the universalizing vocabulary of scientific order in particular ways. Cambridge’s proximity to a Londonbased scientific elite, as well as its status as an English university town, provides the context for discussing the type of botany and garden that would emerge. Across the Irish Sea the political and ideological context was radically different. Located in Ireland’s capital, Glasnevin originated from a largely Protestant learned society but served a predominantly Catholic city and island, and this would shape the founding objectives and some of the work carried out in the garden. The impact of the potato blight on Irish agriculture in the 1840s for instance would affect the research agenda of this garden and its relationship with the wider society of which it was a part. Developing a garden in Belfast – a Presbyterian, industrial and unionist city – was stimulated by the desire to provide a public amenity and was orchestrated within a narrative of civic enhancement. Together these gardens were founded amidst a suite of debates centred on issues of improvement and enlightened science; urban embellishment for an industrializing public; and the triumphing of botany over medicine in the intellectual approach to the plant world. While these themes 12

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animated discussions as foundational principles, the actual practice of designing, building, digging, irrigating, planting, transplanting, cultivating and opening up these spaces to the public presented different and sometimes contradictory responses from each of the gardens. The purpose of Nature Displaced, Nature Displayed: Order and Beauty in Botanical Gardens is to unravel some of these through an exploration of four principal themes. The relationships between ordering and beautifying imperatives will be the focus of analysis in chapters 2 and 3. In looking in some detail at the debates leading up to their establishment and the initial planting of the three gardens, the links between creating a scientific venue and a visually appealing space will be investigated. How issues of attractiveness as expressed through the language of formality, the picturesque and the sublime were interwoven with the language of plant classification in the outdoor collections will be the focus. Chapter 4 will consider the relative role of glasshouses in the botanical arrangement of the three gardens. From the technological expertise required to build these structures to the plants placed inside them, this chapter will address how the tropical world in particular was translated within these spaces. Moreover this discussion will also highlight the significance of visual pleasure as much as the functionality of the hothouses by those commissioning and experiencing them. Thus although the ‘nature’ represented in these areas differed radically from the flora of the outdoor collections and brought with them a host of images about the non-European world, their aesthetic staging as much as their survival was important to the garden curators, designers and consumers. The network of connections between the three gardens and others around the United Kingdom and the colonies is the focus of Chapter 5. Sourcing plants was a constant preoccupation of botanical institutions and thus developing a healthy network of contacts was important both for adding prestige and exchanging knowledge. The style and intensity of networking varied between Cambridge, Dublin and Belfast, and reflected their status within the intellectual, gardening and national context. Of course botanical gardens also satisfied a public appetite for education and entertainment and to varying degrees the three gardens under consideration here were open to the public and this issue will be discussed in Chapter 6. Although public access was hotly debated in all three cases, once the gardens opened to the public 13

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the consuming eye was pointed in particular directions and to some degree offered interpretive narratives to understand the arrangements. I will explore these through an analysis of the guidebooks associated with the gardens. They also operated as forums for academic debate and entertainment – from fêtes to public lectures – and their personnel occasionally travelled outside the gardens to deliver popular talks; the contours of these activities will be investigated as a mechanism for understanding their role within the broader society. Collectively this chapter will evaluate how the viewing public were to receive these gardens and the conditions under which their access and behaviour would be regulated, as well as how their inquisitive senses were being trained to appreciate, behold and understand the natural world and its scientific staging in these arenas of display.

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Foundations The Botanic Gardens, which are the most perfect examples of the attempt to collect the whole world in a chamber, may be said to have lain at the academic end of the gardening spectrum.1 J. Prest, The Garden of Eden

While botanical gardens had been developing in Europe since the Renaissance and some significant ones had already been established in Britain by the beginning of the eighteenth century, it was in the latter part of that century and into the early decades of the nineteenth that there was notable expansion. By 1900 there were over 20 gardens in Britain and Ireland, many emerging in newly enlarging industrial cities such as Liverpool, Hull and Glasgow. Similarly, botanic gardens and stations mushroomed in Britain’s overseas colonies from St Vincent in the Caribbean to Christchurch in New Zealand, reaching a total of 130 establishments at the height of Britain’s empire.2 This flourishing of botanical sites and agricultural stations reflected a demand for empirical and theoretical knowledge about the earth’s flora and in particular the development of economic botany in the service of widening imperial interests.3 They were also a response, however, to a burgeoning Enlightenment ideology of ‘improvement’ which as Richard Drayton has observed was ‘a concern shaping activity at the empire’s periphery as well as at its centre’.4 The early development of the gardens in Cambridge, Glasnevin and Belfast highlights the motivational comparisons as well as the marked contrasts underpinning the desire to establish ones in these particular spaces. Promoting the academic study of plants, representing the diversity of the earth’s flora, advancing economic botany, educating popular audiences, enhancing

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the status of particular institutions and stimulating the prestige of specific cities all, to varying degrees, informed debates surrounding the establishment of the gardens in Cambridge, Dublin and Belfast. As Steven Shapin has remarked, the intellectual and cultural uses of science ‘must be sought in local conditions and examined in local terms’.5 While there are overlaps in the kinds of advocacy put forward in support of each garden there are also important local contextual effects which inform the discussions held in each place. Thus while operating within a wider discourse about the practical and intellectual value of botanical knowledge, championing the development of a garden in a specific town or city also had important refracting consequences. This chapter will chart some of the key issues that anchored the foundations of these gardens and will spotlight the early form these institutions embraced.

From Physic to Botanical Garden: the University of Cambridge The earliest serious interest in botany developed in Cambridge with the admission of John Ray to the university in 1644. He was elected a Fellow of Trinity College in 1649 and held a variety of teaching and administrative posts until 1662 when he was forced to resign from the college on religious grounds.6 Aware of the medicinal origins of botanical writing, Ray published in 1660 Catalogus Plantarum circa Cantabrigiam Nascentium, his ‘Cambridgeshire Flora’, in which he noted that ‘among so many masters of learning and luminaries of letters I found not a single person who was deeply versed in Botany, and only one or two who had even a slight acquaintance with the subject’.7 As a result he developed his own botanical research somewhat in isolation, and relied substantially on the existing published herbals and materia medica written by other English savants of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.8 Unlike the University of Oxford which had set up a garden in 1621 and established a Chair of Botany in 1669, Ray’s tenure in Cambridge was spent without either.9 There is evidence, however, that he established a small botanic plot beside his rooms in Trinity College and that he cultivated species there 16

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that are mentioned in his later work Historia Plantarum (1688–1704).10 It is estimated that he made reference to about 40 plants he developed while in Cambridge and produced a manuscript copy of a catalogue of the plants that he cultivated in his garden.11 His forced departure from Cambridge in 1662 deprived it of an important scientific mind. He was to subsequently publish a range of notable botanical works, including his Methodus Plantarum (1682) where he developed a plant classification system.12 The role of botanical gardens as ‘laboratories’ for the study of botany was well understood by Ray. In the absence of a formal infrastructure he noted in the Methodus volume: ‘I live in the country far from London and Oxford and have no Botanic Gardens near enough to visit. I have neither time nor means for discovering, procuring and cultivating plants.’13 John Ray proved to be a prominent early figure in the development of English botany but much of this work was carried out after his departure from Cambridge, with his most famous book published in 1691, The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation. This treatise became the foundation stone for much subsequent thinking on natural theology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.14 It was not until 1724 that the first professorship of Botany was established at Cambridge and held by Richard Bradley. Conventional wisdom had it that Bradley was a disreputable character who obtained his position in the university by deception and who made little contribution to its academic life. Recent scholarship has challenged this characterization and offered a more balanced analysis of his contribution to botanical research.15 During his tenure there had been some talk of his establishing a garden. However, Hamshaw Thomas suggests that Bradley was ‘but little interested in the names of plants, and it is highly probable that the botanic garden which he promised to provide was not a botanic garden in the post-Linnaean sense, but a place where experiments on growing plants could be made and demonstrated’.16 His understanding of the role of gardens was influenced by his trip to the Amsterdam one and his broader conception of botany as an area of study.17 As well as viewing a botanical garden as a space in which medicinal plants would be grown he claimed that ‘as soon as a Physic Garden is completed at Cambridge, where besides collecting such plants as are used in physic, and choice vegetables from foreign countries, a little room may be spared for experiments tending to the improvement 17

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of land, which may be the means of increasing the estate of every man in England’.18 Drawing from a Georgian notion of improvement where practical science could be nurtured to advance farming in Britain, he also argued that in such a space economic and exotic plants could be collected, studied and cultivated so that new types of agriculture could be promoted in different parts of the colonies. With respect to coffee, for instance, Bradley claimed: which at first they cultivated at Batavia … and brought trees of it to Amsterdam; where, after a little time they raised several hundreds and send them to Surinam and Curasau, in the West Indies, from whence, I am told, they receive a good freight of coffee every year … When I … reflect upon the state of our American plantations, and our extensive trade, I can see no reason but that we may render them more advantageous than they are at present, by sending to them many plants of use, which will grow freely there, and may be collected and prepared for them, in such a Garden as I speak of.19

Although nothing came of Bradley’s plans for a botanic garden in Cambridge the value of studying economic plants in the service of an expanding empire is clear from his remarks.20 Applied science could play an important role in the accumulation and circulation of scientific expertise, which would ultimately promote the agricultural riches of an overseas empire. He was a well-travelled man, having visited the botanic gardens in Paris and the Low Countries as well as nurseries and private estates around London. He conducted a correspondence with many leading botanists and gardeners as is evident in the many references made to individuals in his A General Treatise of Husbandry and Gardening, a periodical he published between April 1721 and 1722.21 Bradley had been one of the first botanists to describe the relationship between plants and their environment.22 In 1721 he claimed that ‘every plant [has] an exposure, a temper of air, and soil, proper to nourish and maintain it in a right state of health’.23 Although to his immediate successors Bradley may have appeared to be more of a gardener than a botanist, Thomas notes that he ‘has a permanent place in the history of botanical discovery owing to his work on the experimental production of plant hybrids’.24 He also developed an early design for a greenhouse that would combine a decorative function with the capacity to sustain plants well.25 Thus although Richard Bradley did not actually establish 18

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a botanical garden, at the very least he delineated its potential value to the university and some of his thinking reads like a precursor to the philosophy that would later emerge through the work of Joseph Banks and his activities in making Kew Gardens a centre of accumulation and calculation in Britain’s expanding geographical and botanical empire.26 With Bradley’s death in 1732 John Martyn filled the Chair of Botany. He was the son of a prosperous London merchant and the first secretary of the Botanical Society which he helped establish in 1721.27 He had developed a deep curiosity in plants from friends and from excursions to the Chelsea Physic Garden. In 1730 he was admitted to Emmanuel College but did not complete his intended degree in medicine although he did practise in London for some years. Martyn’s interest in botany centred on understanding plant morphology and instruction in field botany. Unlike Bradley he had limited curiosity in experimentation.28 Despite his interest in the development of a botanical garden at Cambridge, John Martyn made only limited efforts to establish one. Indeed after 1735 he delivered no lectures at the university and was largely an absentee professor. He did, however, donate his herbarium and botanical library to the university. John Martyn’s son, Thomas, succeeded his father in 1762 and held the professorship for 60 years. Like his father he went to Emmanuel College and completed a BA in 1756 and was elected a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College in 1758. Ordained an Anglican priest in 1759, Martyn’s botanical training ‘had been acquired in a gentlemanly manner as a hobby of his father’s’,29 rather than through more formal academic channels. He was particularly attracted to the writings of Linnaeus and one of his major contributions to the development of botany at the university was the introduction and adoption of the Linnaean system of plant classification in his book Plantae Cantabrigienses published in 1763.30 Through this work he began to teach about the local flora of Cambridgeshire using the binomial system. One of the standardized methods of plant classification was thus introduced to Cambridge in textual form, providing a basis for a communal knowledge of plant species. The relative simplicity of the sexual system of Linnaeus made it a pleasurable system to teach and to enable students and amateur botanists to identify and name plants. Thomas Martyn’s support of the Linnaean system found repeated and popular expression in his contributions to the Gentleman’s Magazine where he regularly published 19

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between 1783 and 1800.31 The adoption and development of a standard taxonomy was being established and this would eventually move from paper to the soil once a botanic garden was established. A garden finally came into being with the purchase of a plot of land for £1,600 in central Cambridge by the Vice-Master of Trinity College, Richard Walker, in July 1760.32 He donated it to the university in 1762 to establish a botanic garden and in a pamphlet published in 1765 Walker outlined his reasons for wanting it. First he professed ‘The knowledge of Plants is also of the greatest Utility to Mankind, as the practice of Physic is principally founded thereon.’33 Second, Walker sought to revivify the study of botany within the university as it had been during the tenure of Ray. He was aware that his colleague the physician Dr Heberden, 15 years earlier, had lamented the absence of a public garden in which to demonstrate the usefulness of botanical knowledge for medicine.34 For Walker, therefore, the primary purpose was to advance the medical uses of botany, indeed he contended ‘in comparison whereof [to medicinal plants], Flowers and Fruits must be looked upon as amusements only; though as these do not want their Excellencies and Uses, they need not be totally neglected’.35 He recommended that trials of new medicinal plants be carried out and that ‘the result of these trials should constantly be sent up to the Royal Society and College of Physicians’.36 Walker also made provision for two posts to accompany the garden, a Reader on Plants and a Curator or Superintendent to look after the everyday administration of the space. Although there is little evidence of Thomas Martyn having any direct influence on the proposal, Walker appointed him the first Reader and he chose Charles Miller, son of Philip Miller from the Chelsea Physic Garden, as the first Curator. He identified the functions of each: in the Mansion House’s long room on the ground floor the space should be used for the delivery of the Reader’s lectures and for carrying out experiments. The room above should be used as a library for botanical books and related sciences and a Hortus Siccus [dried specimens] should be also established there. The Reader should be proficient in botany and be capable of delivering his lectures in English or Latin. The Curator should also be well skilled in Botany and be capable of situating plants according to their proper order.37 A division of labour was thus established between the academic botanist educating the students and the practical botanist arranging 20

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the garden. Unfortunately Richard Walker died in 1764 and Charles Miller retired from his post after seven years in 1770 to go to the West Indies. The plot of land purchased by Walker was the site of the Mansion House on Free School Lane in what was then close to the outskirts of Cambridge. It comprised five acres which had originally been the site of a monastery of the Austin Friars. It was comparable in size to the gardens at Oxford and Chelsea at that time.38 Although Walker had donated the garden to the university there was a constant need for subscriptions and funding to develop and maintain it.39 The trustees of the garden quickly agreed that the accounts of the garden be printed and distributed around the university.40 They were aware of the significance of their enterprise declaring that: ‘Botany (or knowledge of plants) has always been esteemed a necessary Part of Learning, for all those who are designed for the practice of Physic, or the compounding of medicines, especially if they are desirous to distinguish medicine from a poison … there is scarce a University in other parts of Europe (however small) where physic is taught, which has not a botanic garden.’41 By contrast, Thomas Martyn’s outline of lectures in botany of 1764 stressed the value of studying the botany of exotics and contributing to the ‘great spirit of planting which has lately arisen in Britain’, and this underwrote his belief that the science of botany should be taken more seriously at the university to reflect this trend.42 He made no specific mention of teaching about the uses of medicinal plants and even though medical botany continued to be important it ran in tandem with a burgeoning public interest in garden aesthetics and an intellectual impetus to develop more deeply the academic study of botany. As early as 1768 it was agreed that ‘the plants there [in the botanic garden] be ranged and marked according to the system of Linnaeus, and that a catalogue of them should be printed’.43 A system for organizing the display was immediately adopted. This early garden in Cambridge, ‘largely modeled on the Chelsea Physic Garden with its formal design and rectangular beds’, adopted a geometric design of the plot to facilitate medicine.44 An aesthetic of formality, which inspired older Renaissance physic gardens, was the dominant motif. This reflected an attitude which regarded rectilinear planting regimes as the best means to disclose the harmony of nature. Moreover regular beds, designed along cardinal 21

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axes, also mirrored a style popular in seventeenth-century baroque pleasure gardens where beauty was found in regularity of shape and repetition of design.45

1 Plan of the Old Botanic Garden, Cambridge (1771)

The garden was arranged with a broad walk running around the edge of the space, which contained shrubs generally organized according to their genera (figure 1). At the southern end and in the middle of the plot herbaceous perennials were laid out systematically according to the Linnaean taxonomy. To the north of these there was a pond for aquatics and then additional herbaceous beds containing less hardy perennials. There was also a vacant space sheltered with hedges where 22

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greenhouse plants were set in summer together with a small peat plot for ericaceous plants. A range of glasshouses was positioned against the north wall.46 The main gravel walk ran north–south, crossing an east–west pond – perfect geometry – and the plant catalogue suggested that it was largely composed of a teaching collection, put together by Miller to facilitate Martyn’s lectures.47 The shape of the garden strongly resembled the earlier physic gardens already in existence in Europe. Given the size of the plot, there were few trees, and although Ackermann’s drawing gives a flavour of its layout, the presence of many exotic looking trees suggests that there was some artistic licence used in the execution of the drawing (figure 2). The Mansion House, in which the lecture room and library were located, was sold in 1784 and the university erected a new lecture room and additional buildings to the garden in 1787. The foundations of Cambridge’s Botanic Garden were thereby laid although many changes would take place over the next century, the most significant being the movement of the garden to another site in 1846.

2 View of the Old Botanic Garden, Cambridge

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Bringing Prestige to Ireland’s Capital: The Royal Dublin Society and Glasnevin Botanic Gardens By the beginning of the eighteenth century there had not yet been published a complete list of Irish flora. Although Ray had included some Irish plants in his Synopsis it was not until the arrival in Ireland of the Englishman Caleb Threlkeld, in 1713, that we have the first effort to compile one. He was a trained physician but also had broader interests in botany and published in 1726 his Synopsis Stirpium Hibernicarium, which included a list of over 500 native species; their medicinal uses were sometimes mentioned. He also incorporated the vernacular names of plants in English and Irish, since native Irish speakers had plenty of local knowledge and nomenclature for Ireland’s flora.48 Three important people were associated with the small physic garden established in Trinity College Dublin from about 1687: Dr Thomas Molyneaux, physician and Professor of Physic (FRS, who had been a medical student at the University of Leiden where he would have seen their botanical garden), William Maple, who took charge in 1722, and William Stephens, who assumed the professorship and the running of the garden in 1773. The latter had trained with the Dutch Professor of Physic and Botany at the University of Leiden, Herman Boerhaave. In June 1731 these three men and eleven others met in the rooms of the Philosophical Society, Trinity College, to ‘form a Society by the name of the Dublin Society [later called the Royal Dublin Society] for improving Husbandry, Manufactures, and other useful arts’.49 In a later meeting the same year it was decided that the sciences should also be added to the list. The foundation of the Dublin Society mirrored the development of similar institutions such as the Royal Society in London, established in 1660, and the Edinburgh Philosophical Society, founded in 1738 and which transformed itself into the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1783. In the early years following its establishment, the Dublin Society focused on practical agricultural experiments, the distribution of incentive premiums to improve farming (these were privately funded), and the setting up of training schools for architects, surveyors, artisans and artists. By the 1760s the Irish Parliament used the Dublin Society to disburse its development grants to industry and agriculture, a move that marked the beginning of state influence on the Society. The 24

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increased role of government subsidy is evidenced by the fact that the last grant provided by the independent Irish Parliament to the RDS amounted to £15,000. The Act of Union (1801) also stipulated that the London-based government would continue to provide premiums to Irish agriculture and manufactures for a further 20 years. Besides, the Parliament helped to set up the Farming Society of Ireland in 1800 to take over much of the Dublin Society’s role in the development of the Irish agricultural industry. The eighteenth-century legacy of the Dublin Society included the development of its drawing schools (1750), its Museum of Natural History and Geology (1792) and its Botanical Gardens (1795). Between 1795 and 1800, professors of Botany, Mineralogy, Chemistry and Veterinary Science had been established to conduct experiments in their respective fields and to deliver public lectures and demonstrations.50 The Dublin Society (hereafter Royal Dublin Society, RDS) was also key to establishing in the nineteenth century the Veterinary College, the National Museum and National Art Gallery, and the National Library of Ireland. The RDS was an expression of the improving and experimental strand of thinking largely among the Anglo-Irish population of the eighteenth century.51 It has also been regarded as an agent of economic development supported by the Dublin Parliament and representing the ‘Enlightenment’ values that were taking hold in Ireland and beyond through the course of that century and into the next.52 Its promotion of agriculture and industry, its dissemination of practical knowledge and its support of innovation all mark it out as an important institution in the advancement of Irish science particularly in the eighteenth century. The role of the RDS in the nineteenth century, however, was narrowed as the government increasingly reigned control over the Society’s educational institutions by curtailing its subsidies and grants, and its non-sectarian credentials were seriously queried in the controversy over its refusal to admit membership to the Catholic Archbishop, Murray, in 1835.53 So how did the RDS come to establish a botanical garden in the city of Dublin in the latter part of the eighteenth century? As early as 1732 a committee was instituted by the RDS to find a piece of suitable ground to conduct agricultural experiments. A small plot of land in north Dublin was obtained in 1733 and this was known as the RDS’s Summer Hill garden. Three years later another site was found, a four-acre plot of land at Martin’s Lane off O’Connell Street 25

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in the city centre, but the soil proved unsuitable and the plan was abandoned in 1740. Through the century the old physic garden at Trinity College became defunct and the then Professor of Botany at the university (appointed in 1773), Edward Hill, began lobbying the university to provide a proper botanical space. Frustrated in his efforts he moved to become President of the College of Physicians in 1783 and continued in his quest to see a botanical garden established.54 In a parallel movement, from the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the RDS had been lobbying the Irish Parliament to institute a botanic garden in the city. With gardens already established in London, Edinburgh, Oxford and Cambridge, as well as in some of the overseas colonies, the RDS membership was anxious for its capital city to have one of its own. National rivalries were beginning to be expressed through the status of learned societies. Botany was only beginning to stimulate attention in Ireland when the RDS was established in 1731, but the presence of physicians such as Sir Thomas Molyneaux among its founding members nurtured that interest. Dr Walter Wade, a Dublin-based surgeon and licentiate of the College of Physicians, who became an honorary member of the RDS in 1792, petitioned the Irish Parliament to establish a ‘Publick Botanical Garden’ in February 1790.55 This petition was strongly supported by the Right Honourable John Foster, Speaker of the Irish House of Commons, and consequently the Dublin Society Act 1790 included a clause which awarded £300 to the RDS to establish a botanical garden. Edward Hill was approached to set it up, but he refused to relinquish his professorship of Physic and of Botany at Trinity College and preferred to continue in his quest to have a garden established for Trinity and the College of Physicians. He proposed to the university that £100 from the legacy of Sir Patrick Dun be used on condition that it be matched by the college. The Trinity Provost, John Hely-Hutchinson, together with fellows of the university, approached the government once again in 1793 claiming that the university had insufficient resources to support a garden and that the University Board suggested that a botanical garden would be best instituted by co-operation between the RDS, the College of Physicians and Trinity College. This strategy, they claimed, would satisfy the needs of medical students, other scholars and the public. A bill was drafted and went into parliamentary committee stage in June 1793. Hely-Hutchinson, who was Secretary of State as well as Provost 26

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of Trinity College, supported the bill while Speaker John Foster, Samuel Hayes MP, Thomas Burgh MP and John Toler MP totally opposed it. The reasons given illustrate the strongly disputed visions of the role that any such institution should play in Dublin. The Parliamentary Register recorded that ‘the Royal Dublin Society should not be compelled … to give up 300£, to 112£ of the University and 100£ of the College of Physicians, for a botanical garden for the more particular purpose of only medical and scientific knowledge, when agriculture and arts were the peculiar purposes of the grant of Parliament to the Dublin Society’.56 The bill was defeated in Parliament and the university had to take alternative steps to establish its own garden while the way was at last clear for the RDS to establish theirs. While the RDS’s initial focus in the eighteenth century was on economic improvement and applied botany, British and European developments in scientific botany did not go unnoticed. It was in the context of wanting to marry agricultural husbandry with advances in science, as well as to stimulate education in pure botanical science, that the garden idea was promoted. Since the 1730s the RDS, through its premium system, had been stimulating the expansion of forestry in Ireland. The Society had encouraged the planting of non-native species such as Norway spruce, beech, chestnut, larch, walnut and sycamore and many landowners had also begun to plant ornamental exotics on their estates and gardens.57 Demesnes at the great houses in Breckdenston, Castletown and Carton, for instance, had all developed significant tree collections importing many species from London.58 The Irish Parliament’s annual grant of £5,000 to the RDS, of which £300 was to be allocated for the development and maintenance of a garden, was to finally take shape on the ground.59 This early history indicates the battles that were fought over the merits of pursuing academic knowledge as an end in itself and the view that fostering this type of know-how to support commercial and practical improvements in the Irish economy was the primary purpose of such establishments. While both could be advanced in a single knowledge space, the relative emphasis placed on each would affect the ultimate planting of the plot. The Committee of Botany, which was set up by the Society with the task of overseeing the running of the garden, included the Hon. John Foster (Lord Oriel), who had proved so influential in shepherding the 27

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original bill through the Irish Parliament.60 Foster came from Collon, County Louth, and formed part of that Irish Protestant landed class who sought to maintain their economic and political status as a sister kingdom within the United Kingdom but with their own Parliament in Dublin. His father, Anthony Foster (1705–1779), who entered the Irish House of Commons in 1737, was a barrister by profession and was regarded as an ‘improving landlord’ who nurtured his estate and tenants.61 Arthur Young confirmed this reputation in his published tour of Ireland where he claimed that Foster had ‘made a barren wilderness smile with cultivation, planted it with people and made those people happy’.62 His son John entered Parliament in 1764, and as well as being a keen politician, Foster had an immense interest in agricultural improvement in Ireland and in botany more generally. The family estate in County Louth was testament to these passions. Anthony Foster had built glasshouses in 1763 for the cultivation of exotic fruits and the family were friends with John Ellis, one of the foremost amateur naturalists of the time, who procured many exotic plants for the estate. As the London agent to the Linen Board, he had access to the capital’s varied nurseries and gardens. In particular, he supplied Foster with copper beech, and Collon developed into one of the foremost arboreta of the time in the country. In addition he established a botanical library at the estate where he gathered the works of the leading naturalists of the day. Agricultural improvement was also high on John Foster’s agenda and from 1775 he assumed the role of Vice-President of the RDS and served in this post for 30 years. Although a member of the gentry, Foster’s family genealogy reveals a more middle-class ancestry and this ‘is extremely important to an understanding of his successful paternalism in local politics; it was because it was not lofty, and it was not lofty because the Fosters were not themselves so far removed from the soil’.63 Foster deeply opposed the Act of Union as it would remove Ireland’s direct control over its own affairs; he also opposed Catholic Emancipation and the admission of Catholics into Parliament as this might diminish the political influence of Ireland’s Protestant elite in College Green and dilute Ireland’s autonomy as a co-sister within the British empire.64 His support of a botanical garden was thus stimulated by a variety of political and personal forces. His interest in plants was, no doubt, one leading consideration, but his view of Ireland as an equal 28

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partner within the United Kingdom persuaded him of the need for Dublin to have a garden equal in status to that of His Majesty’s garden at Kew and the Edinburgh garden, as well as his interest in Ireland’s agricultural development matching that of its neighbour.65 He was aided on the committee by another devotee of flora, Samuel Hayes MP. Hayes was an enthusiastic forester and author of the well-known book Planting and the Management of Woods and Coppices, published in 1794. This committee would steer the overall management of the gardens and report regularly to the RDS. As soon as the Dublin Society Bill was passed, the RDS was faced with the task of setting up a garden. By July 1790 it held an initial meeting to discuss a scheme and it was decided that by November 1790 a distinct plan should be drawn up.66 Walter Wade headed this task force and eventually submitted a plan to Parliament in 1793. It proposed that a garden of eight to ten acres be established in the Harold’s Cross area of south-west Dublin. The main part would be devoted to agricultural experiments and would include poisonous plants, native Irish flora and grasses, native and exotic mushrooms, Irish and non-Irish leguminous plants, foreign and native ferns and mosses as well as medicinal plants. Clearly the needs of agriculture primarily anchored this proposal but there would be glasshouses for exotic and non-hardy plants, ponds and an artificial lake for aquatics. Plants would be arranged outdoors systematically and would be appropriately labelled: ‘It is to be understood that trees, shrubs and under-shrubs are to be disposed of in the best manner through the garden … All the different plants should have the Linnaean names in Latin, and the most common English names affixed to them. Where genuine Irish names are obtainable they should be added to the indigenous plants of this kingdom.’67 A lecturer in Botany would be appointed and there would also be a lecturer in Agriculture who would be responsible for disseminating both theoretical and practical knowledge of farming practices. The appointees would have to speak English fluently and on the grounds there would be a building in which lecture rooms would be available and a library where agricultural and botanical books would be housed.68 The emphasis in this proposal was heavily weighted towards the advancement of agriculture in Ireland and reflected the biases of many leading members of the RDS. The fact that it was developed outside 29

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the jurisdiction of a higher education institution was significant. Wade stressed the fact that botanic gardens were not just the preserve of universities and medical faculties but that they played a ‘national’ function as well. He claimed that ‘every wise political and polished government has seen the absolute necessity of such establishments … What a pre-eminent instance is the Royal Garden at Kew … whose exemplary partiality for Botany is such as to make it respected as a science and as an amusement fashionable and agreeable to persons of all ranks and situations.’69 For members of the Irish House of Commons such appeals to a patriotic and national identity within the United Kingdom were welcome and endorsed, particularly as Ireland’s political autonomy was beginning to be challenged. While a plan had thus been devised, locating a suitable site was to prove more difficult. The annual grant from Parliament was beginning to accumulate and with the failure of Trinity College’s three-party proposal, the RDS was under pressure to deliver a garden. Attempts were made to secure a plot; Wade suggested somewhere in the Phoenix Park but this seems to have been ignored. One committee member, Andrew Caldwell, suggested a site belonging to Dr Delany, a Fellow of Trinity College, a friend of Jonathan Swift and later a Dean of Downpatrick, located in the village of Glasnevin. It had been noted though that the situation was ‘too much covered with trees’ and that some removal would be necessary.70 The land was never acquired, however, as the lease stipulated that the ground could not be broken up nor trees or shrubs removed. Eventually in 1795, 16 Irish acres (27 statute acres) were acquired at a site near to Dr Delany’s land on a demesne in Glasnevin (three miles from Dublin’s city centre), along the west bank of the River Tolka. Various people had held it under lease from the Dean and Chapter of Christ Church and finally it was purchased outright from a certain John Kiernan.71 The property’s most distinguished occupant was the minor poet Thomas Tickell who, with the influence of his patron Joseph Addison – secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in 1714 – was appointed secretary to the Lord Justices in Ireland in 1724. Addison was a writer and poet as well as a statesman.72 When the site was acquired by the RDS there already existed a large house (now the Director’s house) and some trees. These included elms, willows, cedars of Lebanon and a double row of yews flanking what was described as Addison’s walk. It is not known when precisely these trees were planted 30

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although some suggest that Tickell planted them during Addison’s life and that they walked along the avenue; others regard them as Tickell’s memorial to Addison.73 One way or the other these yews are the earliest surviving trees on the site and are estimated to date from the 1740s. The original property contained a dwelling house, gate lodge, outhouses as well as some trees. By the spring of 1796 the land was leased, the ground was ready for planting and the RDS had appointed Dr Walter Wade as Professor and Lecturer in Botany. Walter Wade MD, FRS, MRIA was already an established medical practitioner and botanist, having published a Catalogus Systematicus Plantarum Indigenarum in Comitatu Dublinensi Inventarum (‘A Flora of Dublin’) in 1794.74 In addition a large poster of the proposed garden was produced in 1796 which outlined for the public the purpose and overall layout of the garden. The original design and how it subsequently developed will be dealt with in the following chapter. Suffice to note that after 70 years since its foundation and a decade of serious government lobbying the Royal Dublin Society succeeded in acquiring the coveted prize of a botanic garden that would add prestige to the Society and the city of Dublin, as well as foster agricultural development, horticulture and botanical expertise on the island.

Industrial City: Natural History and the Founding of the Belfast Botanic Gardens While Dublin in the late eighteenth century was the second largest city of the United Kingdom, Belfast was just beginning to become a burgeoning industrial town. Built on the manufacturing industries of textiles, shipbuilding, rope-making, engineering and tobacco, the town’s industrial base began to grow.75 By 1830 Belfast’s status as a port heightened as its value in trade surpassed that of Dublin.76 Its population was also expanding, from 19,000 people in 1801 to over 174,000 residents in 1871, although it would not exceed Dublin’s size until the end of the century.77 The religious composition of the town was originally mainly English and Protestant settlers (members of the Established Church) who had migrated to Ireland during the seventeenth-century plantation of Ulster.78 But by the eighteenth 31

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century large numbers of Scottish Presbyterians had also settled here and many of them formed the backbone of the industrial expansion that had begun to take place. Wealthy Presbyterians, however, had no university provision in Ireland and thus travelled to Glasgow and Edinburgh for higher learning. This prompted the establishment of the Belfast Academy in 1785 to train Presbyterians in medicine and for the ministry. Moreover learned societies would fill the vacuum where no university existed. It was within this context that in 1821 the Belfast Natural History Society (BNHS) was founded. Although there were earlier societies fulfilling similar functions (for instance the Cork Scientific Society founded in 1809) this was the first named natural history society in Ireland. It was primarily established by wellto-do, Presbyterian families employed in commerce, education and the ministry. In this respect the BNHS was marking that more general movement away from learned societies which were comprised mainly of a ‘gentlemanly’ elite to ones that incorporated a more diverse social base.79 The Belfast Natural History Society (renamed the Belfast Natural History and Philosophical Society in 1842) formed part of a wider trend of provincial learned societies being spawned all around nineteenthcentury Britain.80 Natural history proved popular particularly in industrial cities and in Belfast’s case it marks the different origins that underlay the idea of developing a botanic garden compared to Cambridge and Dublin. The BNHS’s official objectives were set out as follows: the establishment of a Society in this town, for the cultivation of Natural History, in its several branches of Zoology, Botany and Mineralogy, and more particularly for the investigation of the Natural History of Ireland would be highly gratifying to ourselves and conducive to the promotion of science in this part of the kingdom.81

Some of the earliest members of the BNHS were already involved in other societies concerned with scientific investigation at the Belfast Academy, and those at this institution eventually moved to the new Queen’s College when it opened in 1849. All of the original eight founding members were Presbyterians and the first President, James

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Lawson Drummond, was Professor of Anatomy and Physiology at the Belfast Academical Institution. The religious composition of the founding members exerted a profound impact on the overall tenor of the Society. In his Presidential Address of 1824, the Reverend Thomas Dix Hincks urged members ‘to go on in their innocent and delightful pursuits … that one exalted feeling would reward their exertions – that of looking from Nature to Nature’s God’.82 Hincks was Professor of Oriental Languages at the Academical Institution and a member of the First Presbyterian Church. One of the early initiatives of the Society was to establish a museum and some of the funds for this purpose were raised by offering shares in the assets of the BNHS,83 a revenue-raising system that would be subsequently employed when a garden was established. Drummond’s vision for the role of the Society and particularly its aim in founding a museum was to ‘give a new and powerful impulse to the study of nature and physical science, that it will create and foster a taste for knowledge among all the classes in our community’.84 The omnipotent religious background of the early membership of the Society contributed to a natural theology that exerted a strong influence and guiding framework from which the scientific study of nature should take place. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, science and religion existed in harmony, and when this accord was challenged from the 1850s onwards,85 Belfast Presbyterians’ faith in godly design continued to provide an overarching explanatory framework for understanding change in nature.86 When the museum was opened in 1831, President Drummond’s speech at the ceremony was replete with the vocabulary of natural theology. He included phrases such as the ‘works of the Creator’ and the ‘designs of the Deity’.87 Such sentiments would continue into the latter decades of the nineteenth century when the British Association for the Advancement of Science held their controversial meetings in the city in 1874 (see Chapter 6). The first meetings of the BNHS were held in the home of Professor Drummond but subsequently moved to suitable premises at the Commercial Building in the town centre. Membership of the Society comprised four categories: Honorary, Corresponding, Visiting and Ordinary members – the latter were the scientific backbone of the organization. They paid an annual fee of 20 shillings in 1824.88 Additional income was generated from shareholders and subscribers 33

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who were charged to attend lecture courses and to visit the museum. John Templeton, one of the first honorary members of the BNHS, had established an arboretum and collection of exotic plant species on his property in the Malone area, just outside Belfast, and it had been described as ‘one of the most curious Botanical collections in this Kingdom’.89 Templeton was regarded as an accomplished botanist and as early as 1809 he had hoped that the Belfast Academical Institution would include a botanical garden. Financial constraints, however, meant that none was incorporated in the plan for the school which was completed in 1814. Templeton announced ‘Without this [garden], one prominent part of our plan must fail.’90 However, the desire for such an institution was again mooted when the BNHS was set up and in 1827 the foundation of the Belfast Botanical and Horticultural Society in one of the meeting rooms of the BNHS (comprised largely of BNHS members)91 marked a renewed effort to create a garden. The Marquis of Donegall was appointed President and its offices were initially on Arthur Street in the city centre before moving later to Waring Street. A small plot of land of about one acre was leased at Bradbury Place near the Malone Road turnpike on the outskirts of the town with the aim of making ‘such a collection as might aid the student of this department [botany] of natural science’.92 The small size of the plot and the poor quality of the soil, however, proved that ‘a much more extended plan would find favour in the eyes of the inhabitants – such a plan as would combine science and recreation’.93 From the very outset, enthusiasm for a garden was not solely founded on scientific priorities. In 1827 subscription lists were opened to raise funds for the project and the purpose of a botanic garden was set out in the Gardeners’ Magazine: A desirable place for public recreation … taking occasional air and exercise … for enjoying an agreeable walk and the pleasures of summer … for the introduction and dispersion over the anatomy of the many fruits, scrubs, trees, useful esculent vegetables not hitherto known here … for the introduction of a superior style of gardening and to train apprentices.94

While exotic plants could be seen on the private estates of wealthy families, the tone of this advertisement suggests that the Belfast gardens would provide the ordinary people of the city with access to unusual

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and appealing plants. They would also serve as a training ground for apprentice gardeners who were in demand on estates and gardens across the island. The contacts between the two societies would be mutually beneficial as ‘The connections already formed by the Natural History Society will empower them occasionally to procure seeds and plants from various quarters; and the garden of the Botanical Society will enable the Natural History Society to cultivate, to greater advantage, the study of one of the most attractive branches of natural history.’95 The working of the BNHS was supplemented by the establishment of a Juvenile Natural History Society of Belfast to provide training for young people interested in natural history. It was formed by pupils of the Belfast Academy, aged 12–18, who hoped to set up their own small museum at the school.96 A suitable site of 14 acres a mile south of the city centre was purchased to establish a garden and in 1829 the Society became a private, limited, company that was able to issue and sell shares and subscriptions. The need to capitalize the project meant attracting shareholders and the company issued 500 at seven guineas apiece. Eventually 413 were sold and the number of shareholders fluctuated as they changed hands over the years. As well as the money generated from this sale the project also found investment through a loan of £3,000 borrowed from the Presbyterian Widows’ Fund and this was repaid in 1868. Supplementary funds were generated through the entrance fees into the garden. A committee of 22 shareholders ran the company and a smaller committee of eight was appointed to oversee the garden. In 1840 the garden received the title ‘Royal’ and was initially open only to subscribers and the Society was renamed officially the Royal Belfast Botanical and Horticultural Company. The garden was seen as ‘partly a material expression of the order eighteenth century naturalists found in nature, and partly a showpiece for the plants brought home by the explorers who were pushing farther and farther outwards from the Old World’.97 It covered 14½ acres (about a third of the size of Kew at that time), and by the end of the 1880s had extended to incorporate 17 acres. Annual visitor records reveal that 30,000 people visited the gardens in 1839 and this leaped to 72,000 by 1862, making it a popular attraction in the city. The role of the garden in the life of Belfast was clearly identified in 1864: ‘The establishment and successful management of the Botanic Gardens in large manufacturing towns is 35

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of utmost importance to the inhabitants and the public generally.’98 The confluence of location in an industrial, Presbyterian, city in the northern part of Ireland shaped the way the garden developed in comparison to its neighbour in Dublin, and the university garden in Cambridge.

Conclusion The inauguration of three new botanical gardens illustrates a communality of vision that transcends the provincial on the one hand, while also demonstrating the localizing effect of the cultural and intellectual milieux on the other. All three gardens sought to enhance their status as cities within an expanding British empire. For Cambridge and Dublin, raising the profile vis-à-vis other comparable cities was an important motive for establishing gardens. Cambridge engaged in competition with Oxford so as not to appear an intellectual backwater beside the capital London. Dublin was determined to retain its self-perception as the second city of the United Kingdom and the capital of Ireland and thus thought it needed gardens equivalent to Kew or Edinburgh. Belfast’s motivation was more analogous to other industrializing cities of northern England and Scotland where civic pride was an important motivating force to have a showpiece garden. Second, an improving and educating rhetoric was employed by the advocates in all three cases to justify their desires to develop botanical spaces within their cities. While academic botany and medicine may have been the chief stimuli of the garden’s supporters in Cambridge, in Dublin the improving impulse of the state and the RDS to ameliorate agricultural backwardness on the island was a powerful motive. Educating and entertaining the public was an influential rationale in Belfast where popular botanical/gardening knowledge could be nurtured. Third, the intellectual location as well as the space in which these gardens emerged moulded the shape and direction of the debates surrounding their foundation. The politics of promoting botanical study and science more generally in a university, which valorized the humanities, theology and medicine, is intrinsic to the story in Cambridge. By contrast the politics of maintaining a separate Irish 36

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legislature and cultivating a cultural distinctiveness of Irishness within a broader United Kingdom polity in part provoked the urge to develop a prestige garden in Dublin. While in Belfast the marriage of a dissenting religion, mercantile success and civic pride all governed the narrative of this city’s hunger to develop a garden. Thus although the knowledge accumulated in such spaces was chiefly global in scope and universal in its claims, the local actors and contexts significantly structured how that information was processed, packaged and practised. Each garden sprang from different local contours that refracted on the arguments surrounding their foundations. Inevitably, therefore, the gardens participated in what is often now called the glocal. In the following chapter we explore the precise design of these gardens in some detail to highlight the extent which globalizing botanical knowledge finds expression in the soil of particular places.

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3

Displaying and Displacing Nature: Order, Classification and Pleasure Since the sixteenth century, the images of botanical floras have been concerted attempts to represent a universal, not a particular. Linnaean Latin descriptions and illustrations are deliberately laconic, even schematic, because they must capture the essence of a species or an entire genus … 1 L. Daston, ‘On scientific observation’

Making sense of the observable world and condensing the myriad of minute variations between plants and animals into an organized schema was a vital preoccupation of naturalists. Pictorial and textual descriptions were key techniques to placing order on the raw world of floral diversity. They can also be seen as endeavours in the standardization of meaning across different spaces – of universalizing stratagems in a desire to make knowledge transferable, or in the phraseology of Bruno Latour, to create ‘immutable mobiles’,2 whose meaning would travel well over space and across time. While books represented some of these efforts,3 botanical gardens also effectively attempted to create order in the display of the earth’s plant life. Unlike a text that often created an ideal type of a particular species, the garden deployed actual plants and these were representative specimens rather than the idealized exemplars found in botanical

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pictures. Living nature could be put on show to exemplify order but creating that ordered space was often an onerous and challenging task, not least because the botanical arrangements could be easily disturbed and confused. Moreover discussions surrounding the design of the gardens in Dublin, Cambridge and Belfast were frequently animated by aesthetic considerations particularly over the role of the picturesque in determining layout and structure. Creating spaces that would educate the mind as well as titillate the senses, that would represent taxonomic regularity as well as landscape beauty to differing degrees affected the debates surrounding and the eventual layout of these three gardens.

Order in Dublin With Walter Wade appointed as Professor of Botany, initial plans were made to develop the site at Glasnevin. In May 1797 the RDS awarded him £100 to make excursions to other gardens and to employ people to procure plants for Dublin.4 In 1798 John Underwood, on the recommendation of Thomas Curtis, editor of the Gardeners’ Magazine, was appointed Head Gardener. He came from London but was thought to be originally Scottish. He assisted Wade in designing the garden and, by 1802, it was agreed that Underwood would be entirely responsible for superintending the garden, thus freeing Wade from the day-to-day supervision and enabling him to devote his time to lecturing on botany and conducting experiments. In return Underwood was paid an annual salary of £100 with his two assistants in turn receiving £50 each.5 In its inaugural poster, the garden was advertised as ‘promoting scientific knowledge in the various branches of agriculture’,6 and as David Moore later claimed ‘to increase and foster a taste for practical and scientific botany’.7 It would act both as a space for the development of the academic knowledge of plants as well as a site for testing and enhancing farming practices and expertise. Given the significance of agriculture to Ireland’s domestic economy, and the presence of a large landowning class among the members of the Royal Dublin Society, it is not surprising the status accorded to the agricultural dimension of the garden.8 Owing to this emphasis on agriculture the RDS did not initially intend to create an arboretum. Instead the garden was 40

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to be laid out to best assist farmers, labourers and herdsmen in their agricultural occupations. However, it was eventually decided to include a tree section, perhaps due to the influence of key personnel like Foster and Hayes who had arboreta on their own private estates and who were promoting reforestation on their lands.9 Furthermore the RDS had encouraged tree planting more generally in the mid-eighteenth century as part of a broader desire to reforest Ireland, with the result that about 25 million trees had been planted between 1766 and 1806.10 In the original plan developed in 1796, the garden was divided into a number of different utilitarian categories, including a cattle garden, a hay garden, an esculent garden as well as a Hortus Linnaeus. The latter was divided into three parts – Herbarium (herbaceous), Fruticetum (shrub) and Arboretum (tree). Each plant was ‘to be arranged according to its Class, Order, Genus and Species, beginning with the first class and proceeding regularly to the last class of Cryptogamia, for which a separate Division of ground is to be allotted’.11 Specific instructions also applied to the marking of individual plants: ‘every plant is to have a painted mark affixed to it, which is to show – the number in the Glasnevin catalogue – the class and order – the generic and specific name, all in black on a white ground, and the English name in red’.12 The original plan also specified where the arboretum should be located, namely on the west and south sides of the ground. It was: to form a screen of about five or six perches wide, with a broad gravel way through the centre, and the grass kept as fine as a bowling-green; the trees are to be planted from twenty to thirty feet apart, and where there is a very delicate or choice species, two may be planted, lest one should fail; the intermediate spaces are to be filled with Fir, Larch, Laurel, Elm etc. for shelter, which are to be cut away when they come to interfere with the Linnaean plants, or are useless as nurses, always taking care that the nurses be as distinct in appearance as possible from the species they are planted to protect, as Deciduous for Evergreens, and vice versa.13

The garden encompassed both the scientific and agricultural uses of botany and the professor was charged with the responsibility of delivering lectures to educate young men in the art and craft of agriculture. To that end, certain parts of the garden were laid out in the service of farming. In the cattle garden there were five divisions, 41

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for sheep, cattle, horses, goats and swine. Each was arranged in regular beds, with alleys three feet wide between each, and a gravel walkway nearly in the centre. On one side of the walk, plants were to be placed in the Linnaean Order according to the requirements of the animal diet. On the other side of the walk were located plants which the animal would eat but were injurious to it and plants that the animal would not eat. Each plant was to be marked in the same manner as in the Hortus Linnaeus and if it was a native species, ‘N’ was added to the back of the marker. The next garden, the hay garden, contained plants that produced hay and were arranged according to the time when they were fit for cutting on one side of the walk, and the least useful hay plants on the other. These two gardens were designed for instruction in practical husbandry so that the farmer would get to recognize every plant, shrub and weed that grew in Ireland. In addition to the formal beds there was to be a large meadow planted on a separate part of ground to demonstrate the qualities of different hay grasses. In the esculent garden were displayed all plants that humans could eat, and in the dyers’ garden plants suitable for the dying industry were sown. The final six gardens were more botanical and horticultural in emphasis, and included a rock garden, creepers and climbers, bog and water plants, marine plants, variegated plants and a nursery section for propagation.14 Wade was to provide ‘Lectures on Botany at large, to be given during the season when the generality of plants are in flower, for the better demonstration of the sexual system. And the professor [is] to be allowed to use the house and gardens for delivering them.’15 But he was not just charged with the teaching of scientific botany; he was also to provide separate classes on the cattle and hay gardens ‘for the instruction of common Farmers, their Servants, or Labouring Men’.16 These were the terms laid out by the Society’s Committee of Agriculture and interestingly the plan did not include a medicinal garden although it had been contemplated.17 The Royal Dublin Society requested in 1800 that separate catalogues of each part of the garden be made and printed.18 John Underwood had set about creating some interim lists19 and, finally, in 1804 a complete catalogue was published, the only full one of the garden ever produced. It was arranged by listing all plants according to their Linnaean name, English name, native country, time of flowering and whether a plant was annual, biennial or perennial, shrub or tree. It comprised 117 42

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pages recording plants from Class 1 to Class 24 and it amounted to over 6,000 different species and variety of plant.20 Although displaying labelled plants was central to the garden’s function, keeping an account – a written text of each plant – was also crucial. Living plants could be easily destroyed or disappear while printed reference guides might have greater longevity and would aid identification if confusion arose. They would be part of what Spary has referred to as ‘the labor involved in fashioning the recognizable object of scientific study from the raw stuff of everyday life’.21 Also included was Thomas Sherrard’s colour plan of the gardens, dated 1800, which provided the first visual representation of the arrangement of the different sections of the garden, details on the planting regimes and a record of the early structure of the space (figure 3). The arboretum was formed mainly on the high ground along the western periphery and along a strip of land running westwards from the entrance gate (figure 4). This served to screen a section of the garden which was not developed until later. According to the catalogue the planting comprised over 200 species of deciduous trees and around 33 species of conifers. By Loudon’s reckoning the pinetum at Glasnevin was the third oldest in Europe, being pre-dated only by Kew (1760) and Dropmore (1796),22 and although there were far fewer conifers than deciduous specimens, this reflects the fact that the great import of coniferous trees took place later in the nineteenth century.23 In this initial planting of the garden the principal structure of the arrangement was laid out and on the eastern side of the garden a considerable amount of land was given over to meadow, hay and pasture lands. The interior of the space was reserved for beds suitable for agriculture as well as the outdoor herbaceous systematic arrangements. The first vestiges of order were being literally dug into the space as it began to take initial shape but fairly large areas of the plot were devoted to more informal planting such as the areas given over to the display of agricultural crops. These sections simulated the type of regime found on a farm rather than a space governed strictly by taxonomy. At this early stage too there was but a limited number of glasshouses, near the entrance, which contained the tender exotic collections of the garden. However, as the place developed over the next decade the thirst to create a highly ordered planting scheme would intensify and the space would be increasingly regulated. 43

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3 A Survey of the Botanic Garden at Glasnevin in the County of Dublin (1800)

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4 Mutlow’s Plan of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Glasnevin (1818)

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Creating order: classifying, naming and labelling Labelling plants was central to Glanevin’s botanical organization. The sheer number of new specimens entering Britain and, in particular, botanical gardens required systematic arrangement. It has been estimated that there were 10,000 plant species known during Linnaeus’ life and that this number had expanded to about 60,000 by circa 1845.24 Having species easily identified and catalogued, and a garden arranged so as to be ‘read’, paralleled the idea of organizing museums as libraries. In her analysis of Victorian science museums, Sophie Forgan has highlighted the significance of literary analogies in the structuring of museum space. She has argued that museums, it was thought, could be consulted like an encyclopaedia. Mobile glazed cases, for instance, were likened to the ‘leaves of a book’.25 In such arrangements space was anything but a mere container housing objects; it was an active force in the production of meaning, intrinsic, so to speak, to the grammar of knowledge communication. Michel Foucault, in his discussion of the development of natural history, has also seen naming practices and classification as central to the regulation of Enlightenment science. He claims that ‘The documents of this new history are not other words, texts or records; but unencumbered spaces in which things are juxtaposed: herbariums, collections, gardens … grouped according to their common features, and thus already virtually analysed, and bearers of nothing but their own individual names.’26 Zoological gardens similarly deployed textual motifs where ‘print cultures viewed animals as books, turning menageries into living libraries of nature’.27 While attempting to contain one example of each species, menageries confronted the twin roles of being centres for scientific classification and sites of national showmanship and national pride.28 The passion to create a scientific garden at Glasnevin, as well as one beneficial to agriculture, is evident from the efforts made to clearly identify and label plants according to one of the dominant classificatory systems. The initial preference was for the Linnaean sexual system, but natural systems were finding increased favour as the nineteenth century wore on. Although Dorinda Outram has pointed out that Irish natural history was concerned with issues other than taxonomy in the Enlightenment period (for example, county and regional natural histories),29 it is clear at Glasnevin, if not 46

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among the wider community of Irish naturalists, that plant classification was a driving imperative in the design of the garden in its early years. Within a decade of planting the space, the issue of labels arose and continued to be a cause for concern over the coming decades. In 1810 the Royal Dublin Society instructed the Committee of Botany to immediately ‘inquire into and report the state of the labels of the Botanic Gardens, and the cheapest and best mode of repairing the same’.30 They met at the garden and promptly reported back that the labels were in ‘a very ruinous state, and [we] are of the opinion that new metal labels, bearing figures, having reference to printed catalogues of the plants, would be the cheapest and most durable’.31 By 1812 the Committee of Botany was reporting that ‘metal labels, with numbers referring to a printed catalogue of the plants, would be more satisfactory, permanent, and cheaper than wooden labels; the price of the former being about 6d and of the latter 1s.6d each’32 and that ‘the labels in the garden are in a very ruinous and imperfect state’.33 The fragility of wooden labels to the elements as well as their loss by being removed by birds during nest-making, a feature noted in the old botanical garden in central Cambridge, made it necessary for botanical establishments to procure and install the most robust types of markers.34 As Bruno Latour has observed with respect to the circulation of scientific references, ‘remove … maps, confuse cartographic conventions, erase the tens of thousands of hours invested in Radambrasil’s atlas … and our four scientists would be lost in the landscape and obliged once more to begin all the work of exploration, reference marking, triangulation, and squaring performed by their hundreds of predecessors’.35 For curators of plant collections, too, losing labels, wrongly naming plants, or misplacing them within the taxonomy could quickly destroy all sense of order and disrupt the the preservation of coherent floral knowledge. By early May 1813 the Committee of Botany had been instructed to assess the state of labels in the hothouses and to order as many castiron labels as it deemed necessary for the garden.36 Of the glasshouse labels, the committee was of the opinion ‘that wooden labels, painted of a white colour, with the names of plants legibly pencilled on them, are best calculated for that purpose’ and reported that 6,000 metal labels had been ordered for the outdoor collections.37 Cast-iron labels would help cast knowledge in steel and offer it permanence. The cost of labels in 1815 totalled £42 12s 13½d and was paid to the suppliers, 47

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Messrs Clarke. A sum of £12 10s 0d was paid the under-gardener John White, for painting and lettering 1,000 labels. Over the years 1814–15, £417 was spent in total for labels and stages.38 This represented an expenditure of 13 per cent of the total budget for the garden. While labels only needed periodic replacing, it is clear that unlabelled plants were considered unsatisfactory both as an educational tool for training apprentices and for the public. The arrangements themselves were also considered less meaningful if not clearly identified and named. Systems of classification could be relatively easily unhinged, and it has been claimed in the context of museums that one ‘without labels is like an index torn out of a book; it may be amusing, but it teaches very little’.39 Similarly, tree collections without labels might begin to resemble a woodland garden, a decorative plantation, or even a forest, but lacking scientific merit in the taxonomic sense of the term. In January 1820 more labels were required and it was recommended that they be painted white on a black background; they would cost 1 penny per label.40 John White, the under-gardener, was subsequently paid £62 14s 6d for painting, lettering, numbering and varnishing 7,257 labels at 2d per label.41

Nature redesigned In the first two decades of the nineteenth century the shape of the garden altered considerably. While in the early years large parts of the plot were unplanted, the arboretum and fruticetum were making good headway. This arboretum was developing in advance of Loudon’s famous treatise on the design and composition of arboreta.42 The limey soil, however, limited the scope for planting ericas and rhododendrons and these were situated in special peat beds. The first major modification to the original garden was the excavation of a pond in what was meadow (figure 5). Located in the north-western part of the garden and running roughly parallel with the River Tolka, the pond was carved in a serpentine shape and ran about 200 feet in length. It served to display both aquatic plants and marsh-loving species and was considered a valuable addition to the garden’s arrangement. The other major change was the removal of the hay, vegetable and cattle gardens to 48

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the vacant south-western corner of the plot, as well as the elimination of grasses, medicinal plants and plants used for dyeing. These plants were rearranged in rectangular, orderly beds with neat, straight paths separating them and this design resembled the Renaissance physic gardens laid out in formal quadrangles.43

5 Serpentine Lake at Glasnevin Botanic Gardens

In the plots rendered vacant, the tree, shrub and herbaceous sections at Glasnevin were further extended. According to Walter Wade’s 1818 prospectus of the garden, they continued to be arranged according to the system of Linnaeus, with metal markers affixed to each plant and these two divisions (arboretum/fruticetum and herbaceous divisions) ‘are to be considered as the leading figures of the whole Botanical establishment – the scientific systematic arrangements, according to true Linnaean principles’.44 In addition, however, on the ground immediately opposite the front of the lecture room and library ‘a very epitomised sketch of the celebrated Jussieu’s Natural Families, or Natural System of Plants, is to be seen’.45 While the Linnaean system 49

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of classification was popular, natural systems were also fashionable, particularly de Jussieu’s taxonomy, where order was seen to emerge from nature itself rather than being imposed by human agency. Nature was being redesigned as one mechanism for scientifically ordering plant material was replaced by another. Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu began developing a méthode naturelle in Paris from the 1770s onwards. He claimed to be advancing a classification practice that was based on the observation of natural rapports and these affinities could be more readily detected in botanical gardens where plants from diverse places were collected together.46 The spectrum of characteristics which overlapped between plants that were related were combined by nature itself, therefore, and not manufactured by botanists who artificially pressed plants into categories based on a few key characteristics, such as the sex organs used by Linnaeus.47 The sexual system could serve as a good introduction to natural history and had been the dominant one from the mid-eighteenth century, but the natural system was considered more advanced and superseded the sexual one in the nineteenth century. De Jussieu was just one among a group of botanists who developed natural systems. Yet, as Emma Spary has claimed, this emphasis on the ‘naturalness’ of the system depended on ‘The characters used for generating the classes … [being] drawn from parts judged a priori to be essential to the preservation of the species within the economy of nature – the seed, flower and fruit.’48 And, ultimately, these decisions about natural plant relationships, being observable by the trained eye of the botanist, relied on a system of trust between plant classifiers like de Jussieu and his scientific peers and followers. In Dublin we have the beginnings of the introduction of a second classification system into the garden during the first two decades of the nineteenth century. An aesthetic of natural combinations began to supersede one based on artificial assemblages within the scientific community. During Underwood and Wade’s first decades of tending the garden, the general principles of a botanical display were established. Nonetheless, by the 1820s both men were elderly and the condition of the garden had declined. Walter Wade died in 1825 and Dr Samuel Litton replaced him. Litton was originally from London, but had completed a Bachelor’s degree at Trinity College Dublin (1800), followed by a medical doctorate at the University of Edinburgh (1806). 50

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In 1815 he was appointed librarian to the Royal Dublin Society before acquiring the professorship of Botany in 1826. This corresponded with the ending of John Foster’s influence in the RDS and over the botanic garden and John Underwood’s declining health. In his proposed initial set of lectures, Litton was to teach about plants suitable for agriculture, ‘a natural history of trees, either actually reared or capable of being reared with advantage in Ireland’,49 and to give instruction on botany. In contrast to Wade, Litton focused on the science of plant structure and physiology and he left plant classification systems to the end of his lecture course. In 1828 the Committee of Botany, in consultation with the professor, was asked to report on the expediency and cost of transplanting some adult trees according to the Allantonian system with a view to making it the first example in Ireland, but nothing ever came of this proposal.50 Through its 1830 annual report, the Committee of Botany sought further support from the RDS arguing that ‘it [the garden] is already, perhaps, the most beautiful in Europe, with the rare advantage of a fine collection of forest trees’.51 In the same year the RDS requested Litton to produce a report on the state of garden, especially with respect to the original objectives laid out when it was established ‘together with his opinion of the means best calculated to render the same [garden] practically useful to the public’.52 In the following spring, Litton presented his findings to the Society. In a confident voice Litton opened his overview by declaring that the garden ‘is much improved since I have had the honour of being appointed Professor of Botany’53 and that visitors ‘must have been gratified with the neatness and good order of the greatest part of it’.54 The original divisions of the gardens, he pointed out, had been preserved with the addition of a Hortus Hibernicus and a section representing the de Jussieu arrangement. He was particularly complimentary about the Linnaean arrangement of the arboretum, claiming that Glasnevin ‘is particularly rich in trees and shrubs, many of them extremely rare, and generally in good condition’.55 He did, however, concur with an earlier recommendation by the Committee of Botany to extend the tree collection. He claimed: A great proportion of the trees in the systematic division are pressing upon each other, so that their natural form and habits are very

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imperfectly exhibited, and as they are disposed according to their botanical affinities, they are not always placed in the most favourable soil; it would add therefore much to the value of the arboretum, if duplicates of the most important of such trees were planted in suitable situations, as well as others which have become known to us since the formation of the garden.56

Of other regions of the garden, however, Litton was more critical. He questioned the value of the cattle garden, insisting that ‘this division appears to me scarcely deserving of the time and labour required to keep it in order. Experiments … have been hitherto very imperfectly conducted, except on a few, the properties of which are too generally known to require being pointed out by a public establishment.’57 He complained about the condition of the hay garden and ‘questioned whether this [exhibition of grasses] can be well done in one division of the garden, which must consist of nearly similar soil, and of patches too small for instituting useful practical experiments’.58 The rocky mount designed for the rock garden was useless for the purpose and ‘no longer ornamental’; and the hothouses needed repair. He proposed an extension of plants that would be useful to the florist and commented that a medicinal garden had been formed that was part of the original 1800 plan. He also recommended that ‘many of the compartments of the systematic division should be enclosed with privet hedges, which, besides increasing the cheerfulness and variety of the scenery, would answer the more important ends of seclusion and shelter’.59 This plan would improve the garden both practically and aesthetically. The role of nature in affecting the design of the space was well understood by Litton and was highlighted in his criticisms and recommendations for it. Completing these, he commented, would render the garden ‘as it is one of the most extensive in Europe, not inferior to any as the means of national improvement’.60 Reviewing both the original prospectus of the garden in 1800 and Litton’s report, the Select Committee and the Committee of Botany would have to decide how to render the ‘Department of Botany more efficient in promoting agriculture, and the several other purposes of practical instruction and improvement, for which it was originally designed and instituted’.61 The RDS quickly acted on some of Litton’s recommendations and provided additional money for the repair of the glasshouses.

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Nonetheless, there was a general perception that the garden was in decline. Perhaps it was on account of his ill-health that Underwood ‘allowed the apprentices to run wild, was rude to visiting members, let the water drain away from the lake in the arboretum and the aquatics perish, lopped branches from trees indiscriminately and in general stonewalled the efforts of the Committee of Botany’.62 Eventually, the RDS took action: they pensioned him off and appointed Ninian Niven as Head Gardener in 1834. Like many gardeners in Ireland, Niven was also a native of Scotland. He had an impressive record of working as head gardener on many Scottish estates, of being a reasonably talented botanical painter,63 of receiving instruction from William Hooker and Stewart Murray and, finally, of becoming Head Gardener at the Chief Secretary’s Lodge in the Phoenix Park, Dublin, before taking up his post at Glasnevin.64 Despite Niven’s worthy credentials, however, his relationship with Professor Litton proved difficult. In early 1835, in a letter to the RDS outlining his progress and his plans for improving the garden, Niven raised the issue of labels and labelling. The herbaceous section had been completely rearranged, he noted, but complained that ‘there are over 1100 labels without plants, those, with the openings left for the lately introduced plants, will require around 1500 specimens and varieties to [be added to the] collection’.65 In the arboretum, he advised that he was undertaking a careful examination of the trees and shrubs for pruning or removal. A number of contentious issues arose between Litton and Niven, but the primary one centred on plant classification. Niven wanted to replace the Linnaean arrangement of plants in the garden with de Jussieu’s arrangement and told Hooker that Glasnevin ‘was destitute of any Natural Arrangement’, and that he would like ‘to exhibit a lineal arrangement of plants according to their natural orders’.66 In the 1835 meeting of the British Association in Dublin, Niven outlined his proposal and in November of that year he reported that ‘I am most anxious to proceed to the formation of a natural arrangement of plants, on the portion of ground partly prepared for that purpose; without which the garden remains comparatively vacant and incomplete.’67 In this respect, Niven was following the pattern of other gardens where natural systems were beginning to replace the sexual system. Litton opposed such a proposition tooth and nail, declaring that the natural system might find itself replaced by yet another system 53

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in ten years time and that the garden would again need its plants rearranged. He pointed out that the gardens were there to promote the study of scientific botany and ‘not a promenade for the mere refined amateur such as the garden of the Chief Secretary in the decoration of which Mr Niven has acquired deserved celebrity’.68 Litton also objected to some of the ornamental beds that Niven had introduced into the garden, despite earlier recommending the expansion of some of the more decorative sections of the garden. While the garden during these first three decades underwent considerable redesign it is clear that no perfect organizational structure of plants or personnel could be completely produced. In spite of the conflict between the two men, Ninian Niven achieved much in the four years he held the curatorship at Glasnevin. He succeeded in restocking depleted collections and adding new plants to some areas of the garden. As the map of 1838 illustrates (figure 6), the overall layout of the gardens did not radically alter from 1818 but there were some notable developments. The grass garden was converted into an experimental garden where economic crops, like potatoes, useful to farmers were tested. The cattle garden and Irish garden were removed and some of the trees in the arboretum were felled where overcrowding had occurred. He also made two important additions to the garden’s tree collection. He introduced a fruit garden in the south field with the aim of showing the varieties which were most suitable for commercial growth in Ireland and to demonstrate to apprentices the process of developing an orchard – training, grafting and experimenting with fruit trees. The botanic garden already had some fruit trees in the arboretum but Niven’s development of a new fruit section served to illustrate his horticultural skills and reflected his interest in this area. When Niven resigned, his fruit garden contained 103 varieties of apples, 63 of pears, 39 of plums and 19 of cherries.69 Niven also initiated the planting of a willow garden, located in the Mill field site adjacent to the river. The willows were cultivated to supply sets for those customers who wanted them. (The cultivation of willow for cane more generally was extensive along the banks of Irish rivers at this time.) In addition to his work in renovating and restoring the garden, Niven also produced in 1838 a visitor’s guide with a plan of the garden70 which was greatly appreciated by the members of the RDS and the public. It included, for instance, a graphic 54

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6 Visitors’ Map of Glasnevin Botanic Gardens (1838)

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representation of the two systems of classification, Linnaeus’ (figure 7) and de Jussieu’s (figure 8), and thus offered the reader a visual tool for understanding botanical arrangements, educating the senses, and disciplining observation. These illustrations provided visitors with a generic appreciation of the principles of classification while also enabling them to apply these to the specificities of Glasnevin’s planting scheme. As Latour acknowledges with respect to the Munsell code’s role in soil type identification, ‘Though seemingly always out of reach, the threshold between local and global can now be crossed

7 (above and opposite): Carl Linnaeus’ System of Classification (1838)

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instantaneously.’71 So too Niven’s guide created an immutable link between the abstraction of a universalized systematic botany and the localized space of plants growing in the soils of Dublin. Niven tendered his resignation in August 1838, primarily due to the poor relations between himself and the Professor of Botany, but he continued his career as a nurseryman elsewhere in the city and as a respected landscape gardener. Another Scotsman, David Moore, replaced Niven in November 1838. Moore had a vast array of experience before taking up the position in Glasnevin, including the post of foreman at the Trinity College Botanic Garden, and botanist at the Irish Ordnance Survey in Belfast,72 as well as an impressive list of referees, including William Hooker

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8 Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu’s System of Classification (1838) 58

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(Glasgow University) and Robert Graham (Edinburgh University). His first major task was to ensure that the garden survived the harsh winter of 1839. Many Glasnevin trees fell victim to the January gale that wreaked havoc across Ireland that winter. Moore, however, thought that some of the damage actually improved the appearance of the garden, providing a more picturesque vista on the north side. Many of the trees in this section, he suggested, were of little scientific value and could be replaced by rarer species. By contrast, the exposure of Glasnevin village through the toppling of trees was regretted, as it revealed an unattractive view and laid the garden open to cold north-easterly winds.73 As a consequence of the storm, Moore raised many trees of significance, mainly poplars, oaks and pines, and they survived the experience. The development of the arboretum was one of the driving ambitions underpinning Moore’s curatorship. Litton had written to the Council of the RDS in 1839 claiming that whilst the ‘original beauty … neatness, order and tasteful decoration … [is not] surpassed by similar establishments’ there were defects in the garden chiefly found in the systematic arrangements where plants were missing.74 In 1842, Moore sought to revitalize the arboretum and he focused much of his attention on the western end. He suggested that it be extended by reducing the space occupied by the hardy herbaceous plants. He also suggested the removal of duplicates and unsightly or diseased specimens to make more room for rarer species. By 1843 he could report that new hardy pines from North America, Mexico and the Himalayas had been introduced to the garden, for instance, the Cedrus deodara. This had been achieved, he claimed, as ‘New species have been added to most of the other genera through the arboretum, in places which were occupied by duplicates of the old species.’75 Although he continued Niven’s work in rearranging plants to their natural order, it was impractical, he pointed out, to move fully established trees. Thus the planting scheme was also regulated by issues of practicality, soil type and aspect, and not just scientific classification. The calpy limestone of the garden was unapt for many coniferous American species and thus pits had to be dug and soil placed in them to successfully grow certain species. In his annual report of 1844, Moore could happily record that ‘In the Arboretum, many of the trees which have been recently added, native of the 59

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Mexican and Himalayan mountains, as well as other parts of the world, are now beginning to establish themselves, and prove their suitableness for the climate of Ireland.’76 He felt confident that the Pinus montezumae would turn out to be hardy enough. Not all plants were successful, however, and Moore reported that a small species of bamboo from Nepal struggled in the Irish weather and the canes were too small to be commercially viable.77 Although there was also some tension between Moore and Professor Litton, they did manage to work together until Litton’s death in 1847 and the garden’s layout gradually matured and developed. The professor was replaced by Dr William Harvey, a Limerick man of Quaker stock who had a keen interest in botany, who had served as Colonial Treasurer at the Cape of Good Hope and had received impressive recommendations from some of Europe’s leading botanists (such as de Jussieu). In his first report to the RDS in 1848, Harvey made the following observations: The extent of the collection … is not great, but it is respectable … and I am sure that Mr Moore does all in his power to increase the scientific value of the Garden, by adding to it such new plants as he has the opportunity of procuring … It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, without ample expenditure, to keep such extensive grounds in that nice order which a visitor, fresh from an English Garden, looks for; and your Curator is not to be blamed if his garden cannot compete in neatness with kindred establishments which have larger funds.78

While comparing Glasnevin to the standards of English landscape taste, Harvey was establishing a template of beauty to which the garden should aspire. And that aspiration did not lie in the cultivation of an indigenous, Irish aesthetic, but in imitating English fashions in garden design.79 Harvey went on in this report to comment on the garden’s status as a botanical establishment, and provided a lengthy justification for altering the hardy collection from a Linnaean to a natural order classification system. He claimed ‘the student learns to embody a group that has a real existence in Nature, and to fix its image in his mind as a definite idea’.80 This contrasted, he posited, with the sexual system which offered no insight into the real physiology of plants or their economic significance. This recommendation was accepted by the RDS and Moore set about transforming the hardy herbaceous collection. 60

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It also mirrored the increasingly widespread preference for natural systems as representing a more scientific approach to botany. In the following year’s report, Harvey recorded that the refashioned structure was keeping ‘pace with the advanced state of modern Botany’ and that the design had been executed ‘with much taste and judgement’.81 Moore, he observed, had ‘availed himself of the shape of the ground to convert what was formerly an unsightly, and comparatively useless part of the Garden, into an ornamental [section]; whilst the scientific value of this part of the garden has been greatly increased’.82 Clearly, the aesthetic and scientific were interwoven in this analysis of the garden’s layout. Indeed in Moore’s own report he also praised the transformation from the sexual system to Dr Lindley’s vegetable kingdom and he emphasized its beautifying effect. He commented that the natural system had been implemented through a series of: tastefully formed beds, on grass, where spaces have been reserved at suitable intervals for planting evergreen and other shrubs, to correspond, as nearly as possible, with the family of herbaceous plants … This, it is hoped, will obviate much of that bare appearance, so generally characteristic of Botanic Gardens during the winter months, and, with the other alterations, give this department more the look of a well laid-out flower-garden, than the stiff, straight lines of plants, with their corresponding lines of tallies, so repulsive to good taste.83

The new style clearly reflected his and Harvey’s twin desires to create a visually pleasing garden in line with contemporary tastes as well as creating an exemplar of the insights of botanical science. Moore further contributed to these aims by seeking to popularize the names of orders for visitors by including their common names. He argued, for instance, that the Order Solanaceae would make much more sense to the public if accompanied by the common name Potato Family. The fundamental layout of the garden had been established, with the major future reforms occurring in the indoor collections and the glasshouses built to display them (Chapter 4). Three key considerations animated debates about the design of Glasnevin over the first half-century of its existence. It needed to satisfy the RDS’s desire to provide a space in which Irish agriculture would be advanced 61

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through experiment and demonstration. Concomitantly it was to be an institution which fostered knowledge of nature through the representation of floral taxonomy. There was periodic argument over which systems of classification best captured the most sophisticated thinking in botanical science and there were stylistic repercussions in changing from the sexual to the natural system. Interwoven with these twin concerns was an underlying desire to create an aesthetically pleasing space which appealed to the eye as much as the intellect, and discussions over the structure and content of the arboretum and other elements in the garden reflected this preoccupation.

Re-forming Nature: the University of Cambridge’s New Botanic Garden 1831–1856 While the foundations of the gardens at Cambridge have been outlined (Chapter 2) and the layout of the original old botanical garden in central Cambridge highlighted, the appointment of John Stevens Henslow as Professor of Botany at the university would alter the locale, design and purpose of the gardens in this town. Moving the garden to a different location meant re-forming nature from its original purpose and spatial patterning as a physic garden in the city’s heart, to a much larger space on its outskirts which broadened numerically the collection of plants but also refashioned the scientific basis upon which they would be planted, viewed and understood. Thomas Martyn had overseen the creation of the old garden and had published in 1771 a Catalogue of plants in cultivation in the garden at that time.84 It did not contain all plants readily available in Britain but appears to have included a teaching collection for Martyn’s lectures. During the 1770s the trustees agreed that the ‘Greenhouse should be completed, the walks gravelled, new earth brought in, the fences secured, and the room fitted up for a Museum’.85 In 1778 £10 was awarded for the purchase of new plants,86 and John Salton, the gardener, was awarded £8 to ‘provide foreign trees that are wanting’.87 By 1786 a hothouse had been erected and ten years later the trustees agreed to print a catalogue and to allow the gardener to retain the profits from the sale as an inducement towards diligence.88 By now James Donn had been appointed gardener. He had 62

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trained at Kew under Aiton and was a competent botanist who served at Cambridge until his death in 1813. He published seven editions of his catalogue between 1796 and 181289 although it has been suggested that the text included plants not actually growing in the botanical garden but more broadly found in Britain.90 By the early nineteenth century Martyn was an absentee professor and hence the teaching of botany had lapsed at the university. The garden continued under the curatorship of Donn but it too experienced some decline with his death. By 1819 the trustees were receiving proposals from the Fitzwilliam Syndicate to exchange the garden for another suitable plot as they wanted the site to build the Fitzwilliam museum.91 John Stevens Henslow was appointed Professor of Botany in 1825. He already held the Chair of Mineralogy and although his initial formal training focused on geology and chemistry, when the opportunity for the professorship emerged, the Anglican clergyman successfully applied for the post. Ordained in 1824, Henslow had to maintain a balance between his duties as a Christian minister and as Chair of Botany. He was born in Rochester in Kent in 1796 and showed an early curiosity for natural objects before he entered Cambridge in 1814, graduating with a BA degree after three years. Although not part of the tripos, Henslow’s interest in the natural world prompted him to take lectures in chemistry and mineralogy and to play a significant role in the establishment of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, founded in 1819. He became its joint Secretary in 1821 and thereafter Secretary until 1839. As Professor of Mineralogy, Henslow sought to stimulate an interest in science around the university by hosting Friday evening soirées dedicated to science in general and more particularly natural history.92 His most famous student, Charles Darwin, who entered the university in 1828, attended Henslow’s lectures and excursions on natural history. They were to become close friends and Henslow was instrumental in recommending Darwin as naturalist in the voyage of the Beagle.93 He made representations to the governors of the Botanic Garden for a new garden that would meet the needs of ‘modern’ science. The Improvement Syndicate of the university had already asked the trustees if they would be willing to part with their interest in the garden if the university could procure a more suitable site provided that the Trust would share the benefit of the full value of the property.94 The 63

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size and location of the garden was proving unsuitable for the pursuit of scientific order. To that end the trustees acquired a site, adjoining the Pemberton land at the entrance into Cambridge from the London Road, which they purchased from Trinity Hall in 1831 and which comprised 38 acres, 23 roods and 32 perches at a cost of £2,210 8s.95 In the nineteenth century this required a special Private Act of Parliament in which the reasons for relocating the garden included the point that due to ‘the great increase and extension of the same town the said Botanic Garden is now clearly surrounded by buildings, whereby the free circulation of air is impeded and restricted’.96 This was not the only physical or environmental factor that was at play. Apart from the small size of the original botanic garden, one of the problems that dogged it in the city centre was the presence of jackdaws that avariciously flew away with the timber laths used for labelling plants.97 This caused immense problems of identification as it was noted ‘Those who are aware how closely some species of the grasses, garlic … resemble each other and also how needful it is to prefix labels to them.’98 The presence of large numbers of these birds around Cambridge’s colleges provides an amusing parable of the fragile basis of the instruments of representation of botanical materials. Systems of classification could be relatively easily unhinged. Moving the gardens to the outskirts of the city might allow human agents more control over nature. A larger site, a more open aspect and a tabula rasa from which to impose order on the space would all impact on its final appearance. Henslow was aware of the significance of observation in scientific inquiry as he made clear in the preface to his 1851 Questions on the Subject Matter of Sixteen Lectures in Botany: ‘“How to observe” is an art to be acquired by “observing” and not by listening, or even by reading alone. The Student will find himself confused rather than enlightened if he will not take the trouble to examine plants, and to compare what he sees in them with the descriptions and definitions by which they are to be recognized.’99 Moreover Henslow suggested that these visual skills could be honed by ‘occasional visits to the Botanic Garden, [and] during walks in the country’.100 For Henslow the garden could provide tuition in the development of the natural philosopher’s expertise. It served as a training ground for sharpening the senses, focusing on what was significant, and engaging in the critical task of comparison. 64

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In the context of late eighteenth-century Paris, Spary has observed that at the Jardin des Plantes the practice of natural history was viewed ‘in terms of a particular sensory epistemology which privileged the visual powers’.101 Learning to see nature properly itself became a scientific practice, known and exercised by experts. The visual continued to be of immense significance for training in natural history in the nineteenth century but this emphasis on sight would also serve as training in an aesthetic appreciation of the plant world.102 Daston has noted that, at its height in the eighteenth century, observation had ‘become an essential and ubiquitous scientific practice, an art in the service of science’ and even when experiment trumped observation in the mid-nineteenth century ‘it continued to be a fundamental scientific practice – and arguably the one most likely to generate novelties, including new ontologies’.103 The role and structure of botanic gardens were thus profoundly implicated in the twin concerns of developing scientific competence and refined sensibility – impulses that were anything but mutually exclusive. While the idea of distanced observation was gaining currency among naturalists, the aesthetics of landscape design, which used perspective to create a sense of distance, was also gaining popularity.104 Both science and beauty may have been seeking to order nature but while one made cognitive claims, the other sought to offer pleasure to the owner, designer and viewer. In the spaces of scientific plant arrangement, ornamental values and questions of taste were interspersed with the scientific preoccupations of the naturalist. How this gets worked out in practice in the redesign of Cambridge’s botanical institution will now be the focus of attention as the garden moves physically, but also intellectually, to another part of the city.

Redesigning nature Although the land was purchased in 1831, for legal reasons, the first tree-planting in the new botanic garden did not take place until 1846.105 In the interim Edward Lapidge was employed to produce a blueprint for the garden. He was the son of Samuel Lapidge who had worked for Lancelot Brown and Humphrey Repton at the height of 65

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the popularity of the picturesque. The site of 38 acres was completely mapped out by Lapidge, although in the end only half the garden (the western half of about 20 acres) was used. Lapidge visited Cambridge in July 1830 to inspect the site, take measurements and meet with Henslow and the university Vice-Chancellor. He returned in October with his scheme to present to the Botanic Garden Syndicate. This included an elaborate glasshouse, systematic beds, an arboretum and other specialist collections. A formal design in the centre of the garden and an artificial lake with an island would be complimented by a more naturalistic periphery of trees and large shrubs (figure 9). He commented that ‘In forming the plan for the Garden, I would propose, there being sufficient space in the low part of the ground which has been excavated for gravel, to form a piece of water with an island in it, in order to combine a variation of landscape gardening, with a scientific arrangement of plants.’106

9 Edward Lapidge’s Plan for the New Botanic Garden

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The following is the list that Lapidge proposed to plant: Four acres in the main area of the Garden for a Hortus Linnaeaus and a Hortus Jussieucensus. Four Paved areas adjoining for the reception of the Greenhouse plants in summer. A quarter for native English, Irish and Scotch plants – Twining, creeping and climbing plants Shrubby and herbaceous Florists flowers, pinks, carnations etc. Annual border flowers Biennials Bulbs Roses of species and varieties House flowering plants Variegated plants Shrubs – hardy foreign Plants used in medicine Hardy poisonous plants Culinary vegetables Different sorts of fruit trees and vines which grow in the open air in England Specimens for grafting Agricultural plants, including the different kinds of hedges A quarter for grasses and clovers The island to contain all sorts of – American plants and trees Bog earth plants Ferns Marsh trees and shrubs A rockwork for rock plants Vaults underneath for fungi and mosses An aquarium around the island On the exterior of the wall a general arboretum of Deciduous forest trees Evergreen trees 67

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Firs and pines Willows Duplicate flowering shrubs and flowers in the borders of the plantations, which screen the garden from the wind.107

As an architect and gardener Lapidge was conscious of creating a design that would serve both science and beauty. It has been suggested though that the plan he developed was created in consultation with Henslow and thus would indicate the type of botany that the professor wished to teach using live specimens.108 Classification continued to be vital, with four acres devoted to a Hortus Linnaeus and a Hortus Jussieucensus, while an island – to include American plants and trees – reflected the broadening interest and knowledge that was emerging about plants of transatlantic origins that were increasingly arriving in Britain in the 1840s. In addition to the general arboretum, Lapidge proposed ‘Duplicate flowering shrubs and flowers in the borders of the plantations, which screen the garden from the wind.’109 As it turned out, due to financial and other pressures, Lapidge’s scheme was never carried out in full and there were constant delays to developing the new site.110 The hold-ups were principally caused by the lack of agreement between a tenant and the university and Lapidge had to write to the Vice-Chancellor stating that: ‘You will doubtless recollect my drawings for the proposed Botanic Garden in Cambridge, which have lain dormant these ten years … That I should feel very great interest in the work you will rapidly suppose, my plan having been approved by the Syndicate on the 5th October 1830, and my bill of £131.5.0 having remained in abeyance ever since that period.’111 The bill was paid in February 1841. Henslow remained the chief architect of the idea of a modern botanic garden. In an address to the members of the university he claimed that ‘the larger the number of living species that are cultivated in a Botanic Garden, the greater will be the facilities afforded to us all; not merely for systematic improvement, but for anatomical and other experimental researches essential to the progress of general physiology’.112 Henslow hoped to expand the scientific basis of botany from merely a ‘science of categorization’ and he also valorized the merits of a bigger and more diverse plant collection. He claimed a larger garden was required to

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establish an arboretum and this highlights his increased interest in a specialist tree garden: … chiefly owing to the vastly increased number of trees and shrubs that have been introduced within the last half century. The demands of modern science require as much attention to be paid to these, as to those herbaceous species which alone can form the staple of collections in small establishments … an Arboretum would add very greatly to the ornamental as well as to the efficient character of the Garden.113

The presence of increased woody plants imported from temperate Asia and North America emphasized the greater reach of a network of botanical hunting, but Henslow was keen to underline the aesthetic as well as the scientific dimensions of an arboretum. Trees would add a vertical dimension to the garden and soften the formal beds at the garden’s centre. It was also hoped that they would offer ‘considerable protection’114 to the interior of the space. The style of the Renaissance physic garden would be transformed into the style of the modern botanic garden. In Paris, in the latter decades of the eighteenth century, issues of taste and beauty informed debates about the Jardins des Plantes, and the botanist Louis-Jean-Marie Daubenton ‘laid the foundations for discriminating between the tasteful observer, who could not look beyond the surface order of the collection and actively sought out beautiful arrangements, and the truly scientific observer for whom human arrangements were epiphenomenal to the study of nature’.115 While enlightened science governed Henlow’s views, the beauty of nature was not too distant from his mind. Henslow’s visits to Kew and his meetings with William Hooker provided him with a vision broader than that embraced by the old botanic garden. He became part of a wider network of scientists, collectors and planners of natural history display and investigation.116 His recognition of the development of a web of botanical expertise is reflected in his ambition to ‘put our own garden upon at least an equal footing with those of Edinburgh, Glasgow or Dublin’.117 He wrote to Hooker on numerous occasions seeking advice about the garden design, and modifying Lapidge’s plan to suit the smaller site that was to be developed. This modification process was carried out by Andrew Murray who was appointed Curator in 1845. He was chosen from a 69

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field of four candidates based on an examination set by Henslow which included a design for the garden. Later Murray developed a blueprint that was used in the eventual planting scheme of the garden and it may have incorporated some of the features in his original application but was more likely to have been developed in consultation with Henslow (figure 10).

10 Andrew Murray’s Plan for the New Botanic Garden, Cambridge (1846) 70

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The early years in the development of the garden were spent laying out the foundations of the western half of the plot as the planting scheme was reduced to about 20 acres. Henslow’s colleague, the Cambridge botanist Charles Babington, expressed his pleasure with Murray’s appointment.118 Murray had come from Liverpool botanical garden where he had been involved in the moving of plants from the old botanic garden there to its new site on Edge Lane. Thus he had the experience of transplanting and developing a new garden in Liverpool before arriving in Cambridge. The old garden in Liverpool was designed following the principles of the physic gardens of Pisa and Padua whereas in the new garden a ‘genre of naturalism … reached a crescendo’.119 Thus Murray had the experience of transferring a botanical collection from one site to another and would be ideally suited to performing this task in his new job. After the initial formal tree-planting ceremony by the Vice-Chancellor and Professor of Botany in 1846 to mark the official foundation of the new garden (figure 11), 20 men were actively engaged in digging seven acres which were intended for planting larger trees before winter.120 Murray had already planted the outline of the arboretum with some tree saplings.121 By November 1846 the Syndicate was reporting that seven acres should be trenched ‘as a preparation for planting trees to form the belt which is necessary for the shelter of the garden: – such trees being so grouped as to constitute an Arboretum’ and that £70 be awarded to buy the trees for planting in this belt since some of the rarer ones would be supplied by other botanical gardens.122 Soil was also prepared and £200 requested for removal of plants from the old botanic garden and relocation in the new.123 A new Botanic Garden Syndicate was appointed in 1848 consisting of the Vice-Chancellor and other trustees of the Botanic Garden, the Master of Jesus College, the Master of Sydney Sussex College, Professor Henslow, Mr Stokes of Caius College and Mr Charles Babington of St John’s College.124 These early commitments by the university indicate its desire to transform the structure and complexion of botany and to have the garden play a central role in that development. This new space would be radically different in its spatial organization, contents and role to the old physic plot in the city centre. By 1848 the Syndicate was reporting that the exterior area had been planted and that ‘The trees in this belt consist of those Natural Families which contain the specimens of largest growth and which are arranged 71

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11 The First Tree Planted in the New Botanic Garden, Cambridge, in 1846

in the order shown in a sketch … They are growing well and should be a good shelter for the interior of the garden.’125 Murray produced a catalogue of the hardy perennials moved from the old garden to the new with a view to ‘inviting attention to the imperfect state of this portion of the collection’;126 there were about 2,000 plants listed and he hoped that omissions would be obtained through donations. By 1849 the hardy plants from the old garden were transported to the new (over 1,776 species). An additional 890 species were donated from other gardens including Oxford, Kew, Glasnevin (Dublin), Trinity College (Dublin), Copenhagen, Glasgow and Edinburgh. Of the 1,589 species and varieties of shrubs and trees in the arboretum, 688 were bought and 123 gifted and this volume of donations was believed to show the ‘high relative position with regard to that department amongst the Botanic Gardens of this country’.127 In a revised catalogue of 1850, Murray listed nearly 5,500 species in the garden and stated that ‘the names generally adopted are those employed in de Candolle’s Prodromus and Loudon’s Arboretum Britannicum [sic]’.128 The trees were arranged according to natural families in a belt surrounding the whole ground of the garden and these included varieties of beech and oak, 72

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as well as a pinetum including many important species of Pinus.129 While Murray was making good headway in developing the garden according to his plan, he died prematurely in 1850 from pneumonia contracted from falling into Hobson’s Conduit, which flowed along the western boundary of the garden. Babington wrote the obituary in which he stated that Murray was ‘Thoroughly understanding his business, both in its scientific and practical departments, he was respectful but firm in his well formed opinion towards his superiors, and a good master to those under him.’130 James Stratton replaced Murray and the task of removing the remaining plants from the old botanical garden fell to him. The plan as it was developing under Murray was a radical departure in terms of design compared to the old garden. The range of plants was much extended and the arboretum was cast in a lead role in the spatial organization of the plot, framing the interior as well as being of great scientific importance. By the time of Murray’s death, however, Henslow’s presence at the university became increasingly remote as he spent more time at his parish in Hitcham and Charles Babington oversaw much of the work of botany at the university. While taxonomy was important in the planting scheme, establishing a space of beauty was also significant. By 1856 it was claimed ‘Amongst them will be found nearly all the trees that will stand our climate, and it is believed that, when grown up, they will form one of the most perfect Arboreta in the kingdom.’131 Perfection in this context incorporated the overall visual effect as well as the comprehensiveness of the collection. The hardy shrubs were arranged scientifically according to their natural affinities in beds crossing the upper end of the central walk. Yet nature’s agency proved recalcitrant: ‘… it is now found that some of them will not succeed in that part of the ground, and therefore, the plan must be partially disarranged by their removal to a portion of the unoccupied land near the proposed pond’.132 Soil type intervened to interrupt the scientific plan and again the contingent agency of nature is evident in disrupting the scientific pattern.133 While botanists and horticulturalists could develop ideal arrangements of plants which would demonstrate their interrelatedness in nature, frequently nature itself revoked on such schemes by plants failing to thrive or even survive in their allotted position. Under such circumstances taxonomic accuracy had to be compromised. 73

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It was also noted that some trees might be added to the shrub area as they ‘would add considerably to the beauty of the grounds … and would not interfere with the convenience of the scientific arrangement of the plants’.134 Softening the beds and making concessions to an aesthetic of the picturesque illustrates that although the scientific basis of botanical gardening was constantly emphasized, the decorative effect continued to animate discussions. As the First Annual Report of the Botanic Garden Syndicate of 1856 noted, ‘[I]n the formation of the new Garden, it was intended to make Science the first consideration; but, in order to encourage a general taste for botanical studies, and to render the Garden an agreeable acquisition to the University, the designers consulted ornamental appearance, whenever it did not interfere with the main object.’135 The cultivation of an interest in the study of nature seemed to rely on simultaneously cultivating a garden that exposed the elegance of nature. Similarly in Henslow’s lectures on botany a hint of natural theology was evident when he claimed that ‘However the wit or the wisdom of man may delight us, the excellency of God’s work leaves them far behind.’136 The garden was to put science on display but the pleasing stamp of the Creator’s hand might also be revealed. Climate again, however, interfered and in 1861 the Syndicate was reporting that the very severe frost of that winter injured many of the evergreen trees and shrubs and that ‘it is quite useless to attempt the cultivation of many species, especially of the Coniferae, which are able to endure the milder climate of the south and west of England’.137 As in Dublin, questions of labelling intermittently arose. In 1872 it was noted that the Curator was ‘rearranging the herbaceous plants which by lapse of time had become much confused. This is a laborious work which requires to be done at intervals of a very few years: for the utmost attention will not prevent labels from being displaced and the names of the species, from that and other causes, being rendered erroneous.’138 Keeping a watchful eye on labels was thus important as nature and people regularly displaced them. Indeed the Curator noted that ‘it is only by the most unremitting and careful attention that the names of plants can be kept even approximately correct. This is the chief difficulty experienced by all botanical gardens.’139 The role of labels in creating a sense of order was paramount especially in the outdoor arrangements where discipline was harder to maintain, but it also was relevant to the indoor collections. A sub-syndicate could report in 1875 74

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that the progress made with the relabelling of plants was satisfactory, with 2,000 new labels written for the outdoor collection and 1,000 for the indoor ones.140 By 1878 a further 5,000 labels had been installed over the winter141 and the report of 1880 noted that 1,200 plants had been carefully relabelled.142 The maintenance of taxonomic order was a delicate process that required constant supervision and updating of the naming practices. This was not easily achieved; it was a battle; a project to prevent chaos recolonizing cultivated nature and reverting back to the ‘wild’. Despite the lack of resources for an extensive collection of tropical plants (see Chapter 4), Cambridge was desperately keen to preserve a representative collection of exotics maintained in stove houses. Indeed in a pamphlet for a walking tour of Cambridge, Henslow included illustrations of the tropical economic plants found in the garden and encouraged the visitors to examine the space where the greenhouses for tropical specimens were being built.143 By the middle of the nineteenth century, botany at the university had been established as a distinct scholarly discipline and the botanical garden established to support it. Understanding plant life and being able to recognize, classify and experiment with species became the principal focus of the subject. While the early garden met the needs of medicine with its small formal design, and reflected seventeenth-century physic gardens with their geometric layout, the new garden expanded the focus to the study of plant physiology and taxonomy. Although ordering nature on scientific principles and relocating plants according to species identification seemed central to botanical arrangement, it is clear, too, that ordering nature along lines of cultivated taste was also significant. The arboretum formed the centrepiece of the new garden. The height, colour and shape of trees and shrubs, their locational configurations and their aesthetic staging, influenced the arrangement because such characteristics ultimately influenced the visual effect. Arboreta had been developing since the late eighteenth century and found textual as well as material expression though John Claudius Loudon’s famous book, Arboretum et Fruticetum Britannicum, published in 1838. As well as offering guidance on how to design theoretically, Loudon actually planned the Derby arboretum where ‘he raised small hills to overcome the flatness [of the site] and constructed winding walks among the existing straight ones’.144 Even before Loudon’s 75

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display in Derby other landscape gardeners were including arboreta in their commissions. Humphry Repton created one of exotic trees as Ashridge Park, Hertfordshire, between 1813 and 1815.145 Similarly the landscape architect Uvedale Price recommended the use of trees in garden design as they ‘not only far excel everything of inanimate nature [in beauty]’ but they offered infinite possibilities for heightening a sense of picturesque naturalism due to their intricacy of leaf and bark and the variety of their ‘forms, tints … light and shade’.146 For landscape gardeners, systematic, taxonomic collections alone would not entice the eye; they would have to be located in situations where other features could attract the sight line, for instance streams or distant views. Thus on large private estates tree collections formed part of a larger exercise in the projection of beauty. But even in botanical gardens such questions arose not only because attracting funding and visitors was important but also because the seeming dichotomy between scientific and beautifying principles in garden design was often blurred, with the romantic informing the scientific. Tree gardens formed part of a larger discourse which scholars have suggested ‘represent a powerful arboricultural version of the Edenic myth, the life-affirming narrative of rekindling Platonic order and perfection in an imperfect world, or a precious botanical ark preserving the essence of nature through the stormy vicissitudes of time’.147 While landscape taste was changing in mid-nineteenth-century Britain, remnants of the painterly tradition were still evident and botanists, curators and gardeners together sought to present nature along the principles of science while at the same time allowing the picturesque features of the plants or formalized planting regimes to act on the arrangement. In that sense, plants both fashioned and were fashioned by scientific botanical gardens and Cambridge exemplifies this process.

Planting Pleasures: Royal Botanical Gardens in Belfast If the Dublin garden was developed to promote agricultural improvement and botanical knowledge, and Cambridge’s origins lay in the advancement of medical science and academic botany, in Belfast 76

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the garden’s role as a site of social and scientific progress as well as entertainment for an expanding industrial city informed the display of nature, and, with the support of the Belfast Botanical and Horticultural Company, Thomas Drummond was appointed Head Gardener. He was the son of Thomas Drummond Senior, who was a gardener at the Fotheringham estate near Forfar in Scotland. Both of Thomas Senior’s sons were gardeners (his son James took up the curatorship of the Royal Cork Institution’s botanical garden) and this was emblematic of the critical role of Scottish horticultural expertise moving about Britain and Ireland in the nineteenth century. The well-advanced apprenticeship system of training gardeners in Scotland provided a wealth of horticultural and botanical knowledge that was used on the estates and botanic institutions across the islands.148 Moreover this genealogy of expertise would have a direct impact on the design. As Spary noted of natural history more generally, the ‘collection was the site at which disciplining people and disciplining nature became similar problems’149 as the ordering of specimens was predicated on an ordering of society which bestowed trust in certain individuals’ and groups’ knowledge. Before coming to Belfast, Drummond had amassed a range of scientific experience. He had been a manager of George Don’s nursery in Forfar before joining John Franklin’s second expedition to the Arctic in 1825.150 During these travels he collected a wide range of plants, particularly mosses, and returned with the other Scottish plant collector, David Douglas, on board the Prince of Wales, arriving in London in the autumn of 1827.151 The Belfast Botanical and Horticultural Society was keen to appoint a good name as it was aware of its inferior status as far as gardening was concerned compared to the mainland. As Dr James Lawson Drummond (one of the founding members) put it: ‘It will be a matter of primary import to have a man of undoubted qualifications, both as a practical and scientific gardener, appointed as chief curator; a man acquainted with modern gardening in all its most improved forms. The apprentices, then, who will be taught their profession under his care and direction, will come out formed in a very superior mould. They will be employed as gardeners by the gentlemen throughout the country.’152 Thomas Drummond arrived to take up his post in Belfast in the summer of 1828 and in a series of correspondence with William 77

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Hooker in Glasgow Drummond quickly began to complain of his new post: ‘We only employ labourers,’ he lamented. ‘I must constantly be with them. Our new planted shrubbery has suffered severely from the cold dry weather.’153 The absence of a qualified assistant continued to bother Drummond especially in relation to the amount of free time he had to spend on his treasured American collection and he complained: ‘I am very much confined having none but labourers at work and it requires my almost constant attendance to direct them.’154 The absence of resources to provide adequate assistance to Drummond led him to seek alternative employment, and he lamented to Hooker about the lack of funds to establish a proper garden and to build a glasshouse. In fact he hoped Hooker could find him a position on another plant-hunting expedition. Similarly the BNHS was unhappy with Drummond’s overall performance and his noted intemperance meant that he was given notice to vacate his position in early 1831.155 He had departed for the United States on another expedition by April 1831 and died in mysterious circumstances in Cuba in 1835, aged 42 years. His short tenure in Belfast is notable, not for what he achieved in laying out the space, but that he was immediately faced with the problems of limited resources to develop a pleasurable and botanical collection. Without the state subsidy or university funds that Dublin and Cambridge enjoyed, the scope for quickly amassing a wide variety of plants or employing qualified staff to plant the plot was limited. David Bishop replaced Drummond briefly but very little evidence remains about his tenure at Belfast. John Campbell took up the position of Curator for two years and was followed by Daniel Ferguson who had worked at the Glasgow Botanic Garden. Ferguson was 34 years old when he took up the post and he remained in it until his death in 1864. Thus although the beginnings of the layout were instituted by Drummond the final design of the place was executed by Ferguson.

Rooting pleasure at the gardens in Belfast The garden was structured along a Main Walk leading from the entrance gate on the Stranmillis Road and traversing the space around 78

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a circular circuit. While the roots of the plants were sown, the routes through which the visitor should experience the garden were also being developed at an early stage in the planning process. The garden initially covered 14 acres 1 rood and 28 perches (English acres) and a further two acres were added in 1865, and by 1890 the area covered was over 17 acres. It was organized into a series of distinct sections with the experience of the guest kept in mind (figure 12) and this layout has remained relatively unchanged since its initial planting. The garden employed a team of gatekeepers, foremen, gardeners and apprentices to prepare the space for public consumption. On entering the garden past the gate lodge, a narrow path was built to straddle the wall where a number of climbers were trained to provide a pleasing effect; these included Wisteria sinensis. The lawn in front of this wall and the whole southern section of the Main Walk were planted as a pinetum including junipers and cypresses. At the north end lay a narrow path bordered by shrubs and leading into the entrance lawns of the Palm House. Although the glasshouse and its contents formed a focal point of the whole arrangement a discussion of it is reserved to Chapter 4.

12 Plan of the Belfast Botanic Gardens (1851)

Without any substantial monetary endowment, Belfast relied heavily on the generous gifts from individual plant hunters with Irish connections and from larger institutional collectors. In the lawns in front of the Palm House several species of Rhododendron were planted. 79

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They were raised from seed supplied by Major Edward Madden from Kilkenny, who served with the Royal Bengal Artillery in India. Madden proved a good source of plants, and a healthy and lengthy link between this plant-hunting gentleman and Irish botanical gardens developed. Commenting on European newcomers to India, Arnold claims that the landscape acted as a kind of biblical exegesis where botany provided first-hand observation of plants previously only read about in the Bible. For Madden this impulse manifested itself in his compilation of a list of ‘biblical plants’ he had come across in India with supporting biblical references.156 Sir W.J. Hooker supplied other rhododendrons from Kew botanical gardens. Plant exchanges were very important in Belfast as there was a constant shortage of financial resources to buy new species but this paradoxically curtailed Belfast’s ability to participate fully in the emerging plant exchange network. Occasionally the garden sent plants to other institutions. Drummond, for instance, sent 40 plants to Glasnevin in 1829 from seed he had collected on his trip to North America.157 Some good specimens were procured from around the botanical network but the garden did not have the close and prestigious links that Cambridge and Glasnevin enjoyed. In front of the glasshouse the following plants were laid: Garrya elliptica, a native species from California and the Chilean highland plant, Araucaria imbricata, a Camellia japonica and a Phormium tenax or New Zealand flax. Magnolias were planted along the walls near the glasshouse and most of them were North American in origin. Beyond the Palm House the Main Walk curved to the right and formed the East Walk, around which another section of the garden was planted and a pleasurable route formed. This portion of the garden was mainly structured around clusters of deciduous trees. On the lefthand side of the pathway (see figure 12) species of Eucalyptus were sown while on the opposite side was a collection of about 12 species of horse-chestnut (Mark B) and about 20 different species of Acer (maple, Mark C). These plants were noted for their ornamental value, and were complimented by a collection of Rhododendron ponticum. While this space formed a small arboretum the term was not used explicitly to describe the planting. Adjacent to the maples (Mark D) was a general collection of hardy Rhododendron, accompanied by species of Arbutus and Azalea. Together this grouping lay among ‘many highly ornamental plants remarkable for the exquisite beauty of their flowers, which are 80

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of various colours and copiously produced’.158 On the opposite side of the walk Ericas and Cistus as well as hawthorns were planted; further along this portion of the plot and in the section marked E on the plan was a bed including Vaccinium, and beside them were species from the rose family including fruiting trees such as apple and plum. The next section of the garden (at the spot marked E) became the South Walk, with two narrow paths radiating from it. One led off towards the River Lagan and this part of the scheme was developed to provide a vista of scenic landscape outside of the gardens. The Castlereagh Hills to the east framed the view from this vantage point and the middistance supplied a view of the river weaving its way towards Belfast Lough. In keeping with the principles of the picturesque, the inside and outside of the garden were merged.159 The other path led to an aquatic area where ponds were nestled in a sunken valley, with a rock garden and a grotto. This provided an interior embodiment of the picturesque with the elevation purposely lowered to give the illusion of entering an enchanted, secluded and private space. As Hunt has claimed ‘Ruins were a prime ingredient of any picturesque view. They satisfied … a love for broken and rough surfaces’, and the building of a grotto served this purpose.160 This part of the garden therefore encapsulated many of the key instruments in the promotion of picturesque beauty. Unlike the other two gardens comparatively little space in Belfast was planted explicitly to represent the taxonomic systems of the day. However, an area of native plants arranged according to the system of Linnaeus did surface and there was a series of beds also planted using the natural system. According to the 1851 Guide ‘they are in long beds cut out of the grass lawn, a plan, the advantages of which will be better seen in the collection classified according to the natural arrangement’.161 The formal layout of this section of the garden was interrupted by the introduction of beds containing florists’ flowers that softened the appearance of the display and offered a less rigid overall impression. Compared with Cambridge or Dublin this teaching section was limited and arranging plants strictly along botanical precepts was compromised in an effort to create a visually alluring space. In the 1851 Guide visitors ‘who are beginning the study of systematic biology, will find it advantageous to examine Linnaeus’ artificial system before proceeding to others more natural’.162 As we have seen, the merits of the Linnaean system were being challenged by this time and readers 81

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were warned that the system ‘is not so much followed now as in former days … [and] it must ultimately give place to one of a more scientific character’.163 At the west end of the Linnaean section a crossroads of four walks met and the pathway leading south to the Curator’s house was straddled by currant and gooseberry bushes. North of these were the beds arranged according to the natural system: ‘the long beds are cut out of the lawn, and each is curved like an italic S, which has a less formal and more pleasing appearance than if they had been in straight lines’.164 The urge to move away from the geometric patterns so popular in the Palladian landscape aesthetic is clear while still maintaining an educational function. While this section of the garden was the one most devoted to botanical arrangements and education in botany, by 1860 the entire British herbaceous collection was altered from the Linnaean to the natural system.165 Initially Queen’s University paid an annual subscription of £50 for the use of the garden by the Professor of Botany and for instruction to his students. Labelling plants, however, always presented a challenge and by 1889 all the outdoor labels in the garden had disappeared. The university’s government grant too was reduced in 1862 prompting Queen’s to withdraw its subscription, but a new one of £20 was reinstituted in 1873.166 By the 1880s even the university’s small financial support to the garden was withdrawn as the college asserted, ‘that the collection of plants in the Garden was so poor as to be scientifically useless’.167 At the west end of the natural collection and behind the glasshouses was planted a small section of medicinal species, sown in long parallel beds and running at right angles to the natural collection. The grass in front of the Curator’s house formed the epicentre of the tree collection in the garden. The most easterly part of this area was planted with deciduous trees, mainly willows and oaks, and ‘many are highly ornamental, and some of them valuable timber trees’.168 The western portion was planted with a precious collection of fir trees which formed the pinetum. It contained at least 170 species and varieties, some of which were very rare. Among the most significant trees planted were the Pinus insignis, a Californian native, the Pinus coulteri, ‘a noble pine, of very remarkable appearance, from the western parts of North America; the plant in this collection is 14 feet in height, and one of the finest in the country’.169 Several Mexican pines were also planted 82

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including Pinus montezumae. The collection also contained Abies douglasii, Douglas’s Spruce Fir, and the Cedrus lebani, Cedar of Lebanon, as well as many less usual cypresses and junipers on the north side of the Main Walk. The pinetum was considered by the Curator to be one of the most important features of the entire garden and governed much of the overall design by giving a strong visual impression on entering the garden from the Stranmillis Road. Although the garden altered over the first 50 years – for instance, the upper pond had its small island removed in 1866 and was itself drained in 1869 in preparation for the visit by Prince Arthur Patrick – the main foundations had been laid. Its role as a training ground for apprentice gardeners and a space of pleasure for Belfast’s middle classes underpinned much of its layout. Botanical education and nomenclature seemed to play a less prominent role in the design of this garden and consequently the amount of land devoted to displaying the classification systems was relatively small. Providing a luxuriant setting for the exhibition of colourful and alluring rhododendrons as well as the provision of clusters of deciduous trees and a pinetum provided an interesting set of walks for visitors and this was complimented hugely by the ornate and seductive Palm House and other hothouses eventually built on the site. In keeping with its original remit of providing a space of desire and relaxation for Belfast’s busy citizens, visual pleasure often took precedence over the promotion of the scientific investigation of plants and the ultimate style of the garden was emblematic of this trend.

Conclusion While all three botanical gardens contained scientific and ornamental plant displays, the particular relative emphasis placed on each was partly a reflection of the site, origins, context and resources upon which each garden could draw. The import of producing accurate and solid illustrations of the taxonomic systems of the day varied from garden to garden. In Cambridge the move to a site on the outskirts of the city underscored the desire to create a truly modern, scientific space suitable for the increasingly important discipline of botany. 83

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Well-organized and labelled herbaceous beds as well as a well-stocked arboretum formed the backbone of the design. Labelling species with care and representing a good sample of the earth’s trees that would survive temperate climates permeated the outdoor collection. Creating a visually gratifying aspect, however, was also of some importance and plants were sometimes placed in particular locations to achieve this objective. Beauty was not antithetical to botanical arrangement but occasionally these patterns were reordered to create a visually more pleasing affect. Dublin’s historic desire for a prestige scientific space which would enhance the knowledge of botany and improve Irish agriculture lay at the heart of the garden’s design. The initial promotion of farming knowledge and experiment found expression in the large tracts of the garden given over to plants useful to agriculture. The development of a large and impressive arboretum was also of great significance, particularly under Moore’s curatorship. Questions of accurately naming and labelling plants usurped much of the time of garden staff and, like Cambridge, creating a picturesque space was also an important motivational impulse. Trees could play a helpful role in achieving this by adding height, texture, variation in verdant hues and they also helped to create vistas within the garden as well as opening up or closing off views of lands outside the garden. They were therefore important scoping devices in achieving romantic vistas as well as being scientifically interesting. Finally in Belfast, creating a garden that would appeal to the city’s working population as well as training young men in horticulture were central to the garden’s development. Although trees formed the centrepiece of the outdoor collections, taxonomy seemed to be of far less import than at the university’s or the RDS’s gardens. The planting scheme and layout was stimulated by the eagerness to showcase the exotic outdoor varieties, particularly rhododendrons and azaleas with their vibrant and rich colours. The pinetum added height and winter colour to the tree collections and the uneven aspect of the plot enabled the designers to take advantage of vistas to the hills outside the gardens as well as produce more private, almost secret, niches within. While botanical spaces derived from the impulse to create globalizing narratives about the nature and physiology of the earth’s flora, and to represent through living specimens these universal knowledge 84

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claims, they also grew within very local and particular circumstances. Consequently the meaning, as well as the spatial ordering and prioritizing of sections, within these gardens was multifarious. While each of the three institutions considered here shared many of the same species within their collections, giving weight to particular classes of plants and locating them within particular parts of their plots had important intellectual and aesthetic consequences for the representational practices and design of the gardens. Achieving order and pleasure would be conjugated differently in each place and thus the science represented in these arenas would also be (g)localized. As well as the outdoor flora the indoor collections were also an important part of the botanical projects in Belfast, Cambridge and Dublin and it is to these spaces that the next chapter will turn.

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4

Glass, Iron and Steam: Botanical Buildings and Cultivating the Exotic The large and beautiful leaves of some of these plants [banana] are turned to various useful purposes: as a parasol, to protect from the scorching rays of the tropical sun – as a substitute for pottery or pewter, when cooking meat on heated stones in a pit – instead of tablecloth and plates – as a material for basket making.1 D. Ferguson, A Popular Guide to the Botanic Garden of Belfast

This was the description offered to people viewing the banana trees inside the Palm House of Belfast Botanic Gardens in 1851. The utility as well as the aesthetic appeal of these exotic plants foregrounded the manner in which this specimen of nature was to be observed and experienced. The description was part of a suite of practices that named, delineated and constructed an idea of what David Arnold has referred to as ‘tropicality’.2 There is now an extensive academic literature on the genealogy of the idea of the tropical world as a space apart from the temperate climes of Europe in particular and as a categorization which had purchase as much at a conceptual as at a physical geographical level.3

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From the eighteenth century onward an imaginative geography of the tropics was mobilized by Europeans where all manner of scientific, artistic, moral and cultural baggage could be deposited; it became much more than a cartographically defined territory that was environmentally different from the temperate zones, and the history of its evolution is complex. The opening up of the tropical world to exploration in the ‘voyages of discovery’ of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries provided some of the earliest records of the tropics as lands of botanical and faunal fecundity, enchanted territories of exotic beasts, plants and ‘strange’ peoples.4 The intensification of travel into the tropical zones stimulated further commentary on their alluring richness, but also the seeming concomitant excesses of heat, humidity, predatory animals, disease and ‘savagery’ of the native peoples began to trouble European eyes.5 The move towards a more scientific analysis of the tropics Arnold dates from the 1750s to the 1820s where casual observations were replaced by more systematic study and measurement carried out by itinerant naturalists and medical practitioners, mainly along the coastal regions of tropical lands.6 But these investigations did not subvert literary accounts of these spaces; they were interspersed with them and deepened by them. Arnold identifies as a second phase, in the charting of an idea of the tropics, the period from 1815 onward when extended travel into the interior of these lands became more commonplace and the empirical information more rich and at times more contradictory. This was particularly true of the South American travels of Alexander von Humboldt which Arnold claims paved the way for the view that ‘the dazzling tropics’ required sentiment as well as science if their intrinsic vibrancy and visual impact were to be properly understood and their dreamlike quality captured and communicated’.7 In his examination of a ‘travelling gaze’ in India he charts how zealous botanizing was regularly accompanied by an aesthetic enjoyment of the scenery and a romantic vision of the picturesque, as well as the disappointment and despondency of scientific travellers when the landscape did not live up to the expectations embedded in the paradigmatic vision of the tropics as Eden. Nancy Stepan, in her phrase ‘picturing the tropics’, unravels how iconic images of the Latin American tropics were envisioned and circulated through popular travel texts and visual media to audiences inhabiting the temperate latitudes.8 Similarly Luciana Martins and Felix Driver have noted the prioritization of the visual in scientific 88

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and aesthetic renditions of the tropics.9 Moreover, David Livingstone has extended this analysis to European cartographic, medical and climatic discourses of tropicality which brought with them, he claims, ‘the vocabulary of moral evaluation’10 and which were mobilized through a tropical hermeneutics that regularly rendered the space ‘as excessive, extravagant, immoderate’.11 Thus the tropics became a zone for multiple representations and diverse interpretations of its potential as a site of redemptive promise or degenerate promiscuity.12 These were the tropics translated – richly, regularly, robustly – through lecture and lantern, through travelogue and treatise, through painting and print, through medical and missionary missive. My tropics, however, were transplanted through the movement of plants, seeds and sowing guidelines across a range of people, and private and public institutions from the outer reaches of the Himalayas to the inner hothouses of Dublin, Belfast and Cambridge’s botanical gardens. They were biogeographical spaces, metaphorical maps of plant diversity, where efforts to reproduce tropical environments had to engage literally with the production of structures to simulate a tropical habitat. As such they were ultimate efforts in the creation of artifice – nature was to be brought indoors and in so doing glasshouses were as much expressions of feats of structural engineering and heating technology as they were locations where the workings of tropical nature could be revealed, understood and appreciated. In some respects this type of tropical imaginary was more limited than other depictions because it focused exclusively on plant life. The idea of tropicality translated in my botanical gardens did not include exotic animals or peoples. As such the visual impact was particularly significant for the general visitor and garden designer and their intellectual role revolved around the survivability of exotic species in temperate lands rather than medical or cultural discourses centred on climate.

Internalizing Nature Designing spaces of display for hothouse or exotic species had been developing in Britain since the seventeenth century. The history of glasshouses, however, can be traced back to ancient Roman times when citrus fruits were introduced to Europe. Initially the desire to 89

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over-winter orange and lemon trees stimulated the development of early orangeries and gradually a greater architectural interest which broadened their functions beyond the cultivation of citrus.13 But it was in the nineteenth century that glasshouse design reached its apogee and it was ‘the technical daring as much as the aesthetic genius of the schemes … that earned the glasshouse a place among the greatest architectural achievements’.14 The circulation of building expertise and the advance of technoscience in glasshouse construction were important in the development of spaces of botanical display. Not only did knowledge about plant identification, labelling and classification travel through networks of botanists, nurserymen and plant collectors, but the technical knowledge required to stage nature also flowed through parallel and overlapping networks of engineering, architectural and construction specialists.15 Eighteenth-century orangeries were designed largely to keep in tune with the ornamentation of the building and the living quarters to which they were attached and they were primarily constructed of brick or stone with large dividing windows facing south and covered with a solid roof. By the nineteenth century this form of glasshouse was to gradually change as much of the new specialized knowledge emanated from Britain.16 A general interest in gardening, an expanding industrial base, particularly in iron and steel engineering, coupled with an extending overseas empire, all provided the preconditions for innovation in glasshouse construction. In particular in Britain ‘the cultivation of exotic species became an important part of the popular culture of gardening’.17 Glass began to replace masonry as this would extend the availability of light. Wood and later iron also were substituted for stone in constructing the frame of the building, and with the introduction of iron in particular great spans of area could be bridged, maximizing the height and light available in the space. New changes in the heating techniques, where hot water and steam eliminated the need for a stone wall to insulate the glasshouse, made it possible to glaze a building all the way around. By the early nineteenth century a transition from orangery-style structures to buildings of iron and glass was well underway. These changes also reflected a wider scientific concern with the physiology of plant life. William Taylor has maintained that as forcing houses these buildings functioned in research terms as laboratories to assess the role of light in the structural 90

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composition of plants. He claims that ‘these various structures [greenhouses, orangeries and conservatories] provided a literal space of representation in which classical optics was a medium for representing natural causes and constituted a technique for inducing corresponding effects’.18 Some of the first experiments in this direction can be seen in the 20-metre dome of the great conservatory at Syon House in London, built between 1820 and 1827 by Charles Fowler.19 John Claudius Loudon proved to be one of the most important theoretical and practical popularizers of glasshouse design. Through his numerous books and articles on the subject, Loudon exerted considerable influence in the erection of glasshouse buildings.20 He provided a step-by-step guide to principles of construction which would maximize light and permit exotics to thrive. Loudon’s principles were based on the findings of George MacKenzie which he reported in a lecture to the Horticultural Society in 1815.21 In the lecture, MacKenzie argued that the most suitable shape of a glass roof was a hemispherical figure. This would allow the roof to run parallel with the course of the sun so that most rays would hit the roof vertically both in summer and during the winter’s low sun. If the building’s ground-plan was semicircular a quarter of the sphere would face south and receive morning, afternoon and evening sun.22 MacKenzie’s research provided the scientific justification for adopting spherical shapes in glasshouse design and prompted Loudon to promote the virtues of curvilinearity and semi-eliptical ground-plans and sections. In addition, both Mackenzie and Loudon were aware of the huge cost of earlier glasshouses and thought that curvilinear shapes would minimize wasted heat (fuel) and maximize the space available to cultivate plants – hence they would be more efficient and affordable. Loudon also suggested the use of a ridge-and-furrow roof design, which he personally never used, but which was deployed by Joseph Paxton in his design of the Great Conservatory at Chatsworth House (1836).23 Loudon submitted two plans for glasshouses in the new Birmingham botanical garden using these new principles of glasshouse manufacture, but neither design was built. However, Loudon’s and Paxton’s early glasshouses on private estates provided something of a template for hothouse design in nineteenth-century British and European botanical gardens. Key figures in the development of these large buildings were the architect Decimus Burton (1800–1881) and 91

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the engineer Richard Turner (1798–1881). While Burton would excel in the decorative and ornamental dimensions of design, Turner would shine on the functional and structural elements of which he would become a specialist. Two further technical developments in the 1830s were critical in advancing glasshouse composition. Firstly, a new method of glass manufacture enabled sheets of glass to be made up to six feet long thus allowing bigger windows to be inserted. Secondly, cast-iron frames came into use replacing the brick, stone and wood used in eighteenth-century orangeries and stoves. These two transformations in engineering had significant implications for exotic collections as they gave the height and the light necessary for the cultivation of tropical and subtropical trees and palms. They also created ‘an unusual relationship between the architect and engineer in the nineteenth century, for the architect was inordinately dependent on the engineer’s design and fabricating skills’.24 While experiments were taking place elsewhere to test the hardiness of tropical species in temperate lands, well-heated and welllighted glasshouses enabled the more tender varieties of tropical plants to be represented in these cooler locations. The high central space and wings of many of these glasshouses allowed them to be partitioned into different climatic zones – tropical, subtropical and temperate – different natures could be housed under one glass roof creating a kind of hyperspace, and exemplars of nature’s map could be put on display and experienced. But artifice was needed to reveal nature and glasshouses were central to this creation.25 While glasshouse design was significant in the advancement of botanical experiment and display, the conservatory also played a notable social role in Victorian Britain. Nineteenth-century fiction regularly highlighted the extra-botanical function of this space. While people such as Loudon regarded the glasshouse as transporting the picturesque indoors, fiction writers were more conscious of its role in regulating social affairs. In literary texts the conservatory often staged the performance of more intimate social relations than were permitted in other parts of the Victorian middle- and upper-class dwelling. The exotic plants, the birds and statuary ferried the characters and their readers away from the humdrum norms of the everyday. Michael Waters observes that the ‘the conservatory is the affluent Victorians’ image of Utopia, it is the Utopia of those with a propensity to 92

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substitute dreaming for doing, and distraction from the harsh realities and inequalities of Victorian society for direct confrontation with the determining conditions over which they prevail’.26 While the literary role of the conservatory is significant, particularly in the private residence, in the glasshouses of (semi) public botanical gardens a more complex range of scientific, social and cultural norms were theorized and practised. But first the structures had to be built and I now wish to turn to that process in Belfast.

Belfast’s Innovations While the gardens at Belfast were founded later than Dublin and Cambridge, one of the most striking features of this entire garden is its Palm House, with its two wings flanking an elliptical dome (figure 13). It formed the cynosure of the garden’s exotic collection and it was the first curvilinear greenhouse fashioned of iron and glass in British botanical gardens – it pre-dated those built at Kew (1843–48) and Dublin (1843–69). By 1834 the committee responsible for Belfast’s gardens were making plans for raising funds to build a glasshouse. Annual subscriptions and entrance fees for visitors were not proving to generate enough income to support the gardens. In 1838 therefore a fête was held in early June which included a balloon ascent, a flower show and dancing. It made a profit of £74 and prompted the committee to hold another one in late June which produced a £147 surplus. This pattern of fund-raising would continue for many decades,27 and ten years after the establishment of the gardens the foundation stone for the Palm House was laid on 22 June 1839 by the Marquis of Donegall.28 The glasshouse was designed by the architect Charles Lanyon. Born in England in 1813, he later moved to Dublin to take up the post of apprentice engineer in the Irish Board of Works. He obtained second place in the Irish county surveyorships in 1835 and was appointed county surveyor for Kildare and later for County Antrim. During his time as Antrim surveyor he was responsible for many important engineering projects, including the great Antrim coast road from Larne to Portrush, bridges such as the viaduct bridge at Glendun (1837), the Ormeau bridge in Belfast across the River Lagan (1860–63), and the 93

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13 The Central Dome of the Palm House, Belfast

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Belfast, Holywood and Bangor railway line.29 He also had an important impact on the fashioning of many of Belfast’s most impressive buildings. He was responsible for designing the Queen’s College (Queen’s University) in 1846–49, the city’s court house (1848–50), the county gaol (1843–45) and the custom house (1848–50).30 As well as the architectural and engineering importance of Charles Lanyon he also had an interest in botany and initiated the planting of Frosses trees in 1839, a plantation of around 1,500 Scots pine grown on a stretch of land just north of Ballymena. Much of Lanyon’s architectural work was carried out through his private practice and in 1860 he resigned his county surveyor post and devoted himself to service in public life. He became Mayor of Belfast in 1862 and he successfully ran for office as a Conservative Member of Parliament in 1866 before losing his seat in 1868.31 He served in the 1870s as High Sheriff of County Antrim and was one of Belfast’s harbour commissioners. Professionally he was elected President of the Royal Institute of Architects, was Fellow of the Institute of British Architects and was knighted in 1868. Lanyon became director of the Royal Belfast Botanical and Horticultural Company in 1861. The Botanic Garden Palm House was built in two phases between 1840 and 1852. The original plan was for a low central square structure rising a short distance above the two flanking wings. At the end of each wing would be located terminal domes (figure 14). Lanyon’s final design, however, varied considerably from the original. The central square house was substituted by a 46-foot-high elliptical dome with a 45-foot axis spanning the space between the two wings and a 66foot axis from front to back. This central house at the front elevation extended well beyond the wings which were 65 feet long, 20 feet high and 20 feet wide.32 The two wings were completed first in 1840 at a cost of £1,400. In 1878 the width of the platforms in the east and west wings were reduced to provide greater space for visitors to walk, and gas lighting was introduced in 1881. The cast-iron frames for the structure in Belfast were designed by the Dublin iron-master Richard Turner. The line of the vertical windows on the front of the wings was extended into the central house and the curvilinear upper part of the dome was supported by a row of vertical windows that began halfway up the wing roofs. This was completed in the early 1850s not by Turner but by the Edinburgh firm of Young and Co. It cost £1,000 to complete. 95

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While Turner executed the Belfast glasshouse wings, it is evident that Lanyon’s final design may have been influenced by Turner’s other commissions where curvilinearity was emerging. The organic shape as well as the access to light made these designs appealing to gardeners and to the broader public.

14 Charles Lanyon’s Original Plan for the Palm House (1843)

The Turner ironworks in Dublin originated in the 1810s and it was described as ‘Ironmonger to the Bank of Ireland’ in 1818. The family moved their workshop from the city centre to the Hammersmith Works on the Shelbourne Road, Dublin, in 1836. The firm undertook a variety of work including railway and roof construction (for example, Lime Street Station in Liverpool) but it is for their conservatories that the family’s name is renowned. As well as the Kew and Dublin houses, Turner designed a glasshouse at Killakee, County Dublin, a vinery at the Vice-Regal Lodge in Dublin, and a winter garden at Regent’s Park Botanic Garden. He and his brother Thomas also submitted a design for the Crystal Palace which was rejected as too expensive.33 The status of the firm is borne out by the fact that Charles MacIntosh’s work, The Book of the Garden (1853), contains illustrations of three curvilinear glasshouses constructed or designed by Richard Turner.34 The influence of this iron-master is evident in some of the most prominent nineteenthcentury glasshouses erected in Britain and Ireland. As one commentator 96

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has put it, ‘He offered to an expanding market private conservatories, designed by himself, of a type which showed characteristics of the buildings at Kew and Regent’s Park.’35 The west wing of the Belfast Palm House, the greenhouse, was used to house New Holland and South African plants in winter, pelargoniums and fuchsias in summer, as well as heaths from Ireland and species of Epacris from the East Indies. The latter were noted for being ‘more remarkable for beauty than on account of any economical or medicinal properties’.36 Of the Yew family, Phyllocladus rhomboidalis, it was observed that it had proved hardy and one was planted outside in the pinetum. The west wing also contained a Norfolk Island pine as well as a number of climbers, many of which were noted for their exotic beauty, such as the passion flower. The east wing – a hothouse with higher temperatures than the west wing – was divided into two compartments. The first contained species of aloes, gasterias, haworthias, and the cactus family. The second section housed, for instance, species of bananas, sugar cane, date palm, coffee and bamboo. The central dome contained the larger shrubs and trees requiring heat. These included cycads, a 20-foot-high wax palm, bougainvillea, a cocoa tree and other exotic species (figure 15). The sheer size and ornamental value of these plants was not underestimated and their representation of the wealth of tropical nature formed a critical part of the garden and revealed what Nash has referred to as the import and export of nature.37 David Arnold has commented on how certain tropical species acquired iconic status where following Humboldt ‘palm trees were particularly noble and emblematic representatives of tropical flora, just as bananas (or plantains) epitomized the fruitful, life-sustaining abundance of the “torrid zone” … The form as well as the function of such emblematic plants helped define the tropics.’38 Tropical plants made visible in the glasshouses of botanical gardens appealed both to the practical and aesthetic sensibilities of the viewers. Unlike private conservatories, botanical gardens were generally more open to the public and thus ‘Palm houses now began to have a dual purpose, for as well as their scientific (and educational) objective, they now became public wintergardens.’39 Thus while the tropical lands of the earth were not seen first hand by many Europeans they were experienced in the hothouses of European gardens and were made all the more visible and comprehensible by being clearly labelled, 97

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geographically classified mappaemundi of plants. They enabled visitors to experience virtual travel as they were temporarily transported to the tropics.

15 The Palm House, Belfast

In addition to the Palm House the early garden at Belfast also had a small Orchid House erected near to the natural collection of outdoor plants in 1842. It was 50 feet long and 15 feet wide, and had a propagating house added to the west end. While orchids grew all over the world, apart from very arid regions, it was the tropical varieties that were most coveted. It has been claimed that ‘In addition to the beauty of their flowers, many of them diffuse a delicious perfume; they are in general more ornamental than useful, very few affording anything valuable in medicine, economy or the arts.’40 As well as housing orchids, this building also contained species of fern as well as pitcher plants and Dionaea muscipula or Fly Trap. It was demolished in the 1880s to make room for the tropical Ravine House which was erected in 1886 by the then Curator Charles McKimm. Another important event in relation to Belfast’s indoor collections was its success at bringing to flowering stage the giant water lily, Victoria 98

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amazonica. Daniel Ferguson, Curator, obtained seeds of the plant in London when he visted Syon House and Regent’s Park botanical garden in 1851. He had a special glasshouse built in Belfast to house the seeds and although he funded the building himself at a cost of £75, he was subsequently reimbursed by the company. As an annual plant it did not produce flowers in the first trial of 1852; however, in 1853 he obtained another seed and succeeded in bringing the plant into bloom, thus beating David Moore’s efforts in Dublin to have a flowering giant water lily in the gardens there.41 The tropical Ravine House, erected in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, represented an altogether different approach to exhibiting the exotic, and one which found favour across botanical gardens at this time. It was designed as a rectangular building – the form of the structure was arranged so that the visitor walked along a balcony-like edifice that skirted a sunken ravine, and this ushered the viewers along a path which enabled them to experience the scene from the canopy rather than from the floor of the space. In this way nature was being surveyed from a height or bird’s-eye position and had the effect of both placing the human in a controlling and distancing perspective from the tropics beneath. As Koppelkaam notes, ‘While the plants in the early glasshouses were arranged according to a botanical principle, a desire to create an illusion of scenery later took its place [in the nineteenth century].’42 The ravine encompassed a moist valley containing a variety of tropical plants, a small stream and shallow pools. Limetsone, quartz and basalt were enrolled to produce an authenticating effect to the setting. The ravine was divided into two sections – a temperate section and a smaller stove area – which contained ferns, mosses, bamboos, climbing and trailing plants, cycads, palms, tree-ferns and pitcher plants. Burbridge, the Curator of Trinity College Dublin Botanic Garden, described the house as ‘one of the finest houses of the kind in the kingdom’.43 Visitors were charged a small fee to enter the house and in 1890 5,000 people visited it. It very much followed the principles proposed by Neumann, the Director of the Parisian botanical gardens, in 1852 when he suggested that the role of glasshouses was ‘to imitate the rich disorder of a virgin forest by artistically concealing all obvious traces of artifice, and if possible hiding all material evidence that one is walking under a glass roof’.44 In 1900 when Belfast Corporation took over the Belfast Botanic Gardens 99

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they renovated and reconstructed part of the Ravine House, but kept to the original design, at a cost of £1,000. In 1902 they extended the building to include a heated lily pond (located above the boiler house) thus making it 185 feet long and 45 feet wide in total. They spent a further £340 to complete this task and the new pond contained the giant water lily. While having less resources than Glasnevin and Cambridge, the gardens in Belfast succeeded in creating pleasing and technically innovative spaces for the display of tropical and subtropical plants. Moreover, as noted in the previous chapter, although scientific botany may have exerted less influence on the overall design of these gardens, the glasshouses proved to be a priority. Creating enchanting structures which would appeal to shareholders and a fee-paying public alike underscored the thinking behind the erection of the glasshouses. While a curvilinearity of shape would be favoured across a range of botanical institutions in the nineteenth century the fact that Belfast inaugurated one of the first marks it out as an innovator in this respect. Meanwhile 100 miles south in Dublin, creating tropical habitats also occupied the minds and energies of the governing authorities.

Dublin’s Early Travels to the Tropics From the outset there was a desire to install glasshouses in the new Dublin gardens. In his 1793 pamphlet, Walter Wade included greenhouses and hothouses ‘Of such length, breadth and height as will admit different exotic trees, shrubs, under-shrubs and lower plants which may require such a situation.’45 After the appointment of Wade and Underwood the task of laying out the gardens began and glasshouses formed an integral part of the design. The site along the River Tolka already contained a house, which was in some disrepair, but had a conservatory attached to it, and the architect Edward Parke was appointed to oversee its restoration and to provide a set of plans for glasshouses. By 1799 work had begun on a range of glasshouses based on his plans. They were located north-east of the main house and were connected to it by a glazed corridor which allowed direct access from the lecture room located in the house to the glasshouses (figure 16). They comprised one large hothouse at the centre of the 100

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range, measuring 60 feet by 25 feet wide, bounded on either side by a set of two smaller houses. The dimensions of these houses were 60 feet by 16 feet wide, with a 10-foot-wide space between each building. At the back of the range were a series of interconnected sheds. The houses themselves were to take an angular form and had pitched roofs (figure 17). Although in total these structures exceeded the area of the Palm House in Belfast, these early houses did not have the height or elliptical shape found in Ulster. As early as 1800 it was reported that ‘To add to the beauty and dignity of the whole, a Green-house has been erected, at present furnished with a very curious and valuable collection of plants, particularly the Ericeae, or beautiful Heaths of the Cape, amounting to above 150 species.’46 By 1801 the Committee of Botany had inspected the progress being made on the range and could report that ‘Two Hot Houses are finished … The foundations of the other three houses are laid; – The breast summers and uprights of the Green House erected; the principal rafters ready to be fixed … the breast summers and uprights of the other two Hot Houses, ready, and now putting up.’47 They also noted that the upright sashes were ready and glazed, the cut stone for the flagging complete and on site, the ironwork made and all the glass cut and ready for work. They reported that they were pleased with the progress of Parke’s design,48 and were hopeful that the range would be quickly completed. By 1802 it was proposed and accepted by the RDS that duplicates of greenhouse plants be sold by Underwood to raise additional funds for the gardens.49 When the glasshouses were finished they each contained a different variety of plants. One stovehouse contained species from the wet tropics, another housed succulents from dry, desert climates, a third contained larger plants and a fourth mainly included species of Erica from the Cape regions. The large central conservatory housed tender trees.50 Wade noted that ‘The collection of rare, beautiful, and curious exotics in the Green houses, Hot houses, and Conservatories … give an embellishment and finish to the whole Botanical establishment [emphasis in original].’51 Exotics were invariably regarded as aesthetically pleasing – rarity or unusualness of plants conferred these spaces with an exceptionally alluring appeal. In common though with the rest of the garden, labelling plants was always a preoccupation and of the indoor collections the Committee of Botany recommended that 101

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16 Ground Plan of the Hothouses, Glasnevin (1801)

17 Elevations of the Hothouses, Glasnevin (1801)

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‘wooden labels, painted of a white colour, with the names of the plants legibly pencilled on them, are best calculated for that purpose’.52 Metal labels were reserved for the outdoor collections. Despite erecting a string of glasshouses at a very early stage in Glasnevin’s development they were subject to practical and aesthetic criticism. As they were mainly constructed of wood and glass they were exposed to fairly rapid decay from rain and wind. They were also a challenge to heat and the stoves expended vast quantities of coal each year to keep the temperatures at an acceptable level for the survival of the tender species.53 But perhaps the most important overall failing was their poor orientation – their narrow side was facing south while their long sides were aligned east–west. Because of their close proximity they cast shadows onto their neighbours and obstructed the light source in each house. Within a decade of their construction they were generating criticism from a variety of quarters and there was even a suggestion in 1806 that the range be removed and relocated to a more favourable site. John Foster resisted this proposal and was inclined to blame the Head Gardener for the difficulties. The Committee of Botany, however, defended Underwood and emphatically claimed that ‘the situation of the glasshouses not his [Underwood’s] ignorance is the cause of all our failure’.54 Instead of moving the range, however, Foster approved the building of a new Epiphyte House. It was an 82 feet long and 12 feet wide structure divided into three compartments for growing orchids, cacti and other tropical plants and it was located between the house and the gates to the garden and this time was oriented along a proper east–west axis. The early glasshouse collections did not attract universal praise. Anne Plumptre, in her visit to the gardens in 1814, was generally admiring of the garden but noted that ‘The conservatories … and the collection of exotic plants, are not so good as in the King’s garden at Kew.’55 The Reverend Robert Walsh, vicar of the close-by parish of Finglas, was highly critical and, as co-author of a History of Dublin, described the conservatories as being ‘built without any attention to architectural ornament. They are obtruded into the most conspicuous parts of the garden, where they are coarse and formal objects destroying the picturesque effect which was so particularly attended to in every other arrangement.’56 Drawing on a theological aesthetic which saw in botanical arrangements elements of the original Garden of Eden, Walsh 103

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considered the Dublin garden to be overly formal and regularized, and lacking the ‘naturalistic’ effect embodied in the picturesque. The impulse to create order at the same time as advancing beauty often produced contrasting impressions of the results. The next stage in the development of indoor collections in the garden concerned the fate of the tree Araucaria excesia (Norfolk Island pine) which had come to the garden in 1798 and had been placed in the conservatory attached to the house. By the mid-1810s the tree had outgrown the house and it was recommended that new accommodation be built and although plans for a new house were submitted to the RDS, the project was deemed too expensive and was not pursued.57 As the glasshouses attached to the house were close to complete collapse by 1817 a new range was built. They were designed by Robert Doyle, and this Long Range was located in the middle of the garden near the rock mound (near the present site of the Palm House). Constructed of wooden frames, this range was 153 feet in length and 9 feet in height. It was divided into five sections: on the east side were housed Camellia and Rhododrendron; this was followed by Erica from the Cape; the central section, which protruded slightly forward from the two wings, was also bigger in area and housed plants from warm, temperate climates (for example, Banksia) and the west side contained a small section of Australian Epacridaceae and a dry stove for cacti.58 Unfortunately the pitch of the roof was too low and allowed rain to penetrate between the panes of glass. It was also insufficiently high to accommodate the Norfolk Island pine. In a visit to the garden the Committee of Botany reported to the RDS in June 1819 that the pine, which they described as ‘this beautiful and rare botanical specimen’, was not properly sheltered from the weather and they were recommending that immediate action to protect it be taken.59 Accommodating attractive plants regularly required artifice, staging and management to achieve the required effect. By July 1819, tenders had been sought for another glasshouse and the estimate of James Carpenter of Dublin was accepted. The work was to be supervised by Underwood and Robert Doyle and it was proposed that the house be completed within two months as the tree was now growing outdoors. However, the building took more time to finish than estimated and on 24 November 1819 the temperature dropped overnight to -7° Celsius, but initially the pine seemed to survive the low temperatures. By 104

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December the glasshouse was ready and the pine was covered from the elements but by early spring the tree was showing signs of distress and began to go into terminal decline. The Committee of Botany reported and discussed the reasons why the pine was not properly protected from the winter frosts and Underwood in particular was blamed.60 His fondness for alcohol was well known, although he did defend himself against accusations of neglect. The whole episode marked the beginning of a period of decline of the gardens in general as the hostility between Underwood and the Committee of Botany continued and Walter Wade was reaching the end of his career. Samuel Litton was appointed professor in 1826 and oversaw the next phase in glasshouse construction. Underwood continued as Head Gardener and there was general agreement that the wooden framed glasshouses should be replaced with metal glazing bars.61 The Committee of Botany examined the glasshouses in 1830 and recommended that they be replaced completely with iron houses with the exception of the Acacia and the Pelargonium (conservatory attached to the professor’s residence) houses.62 In a follow-up report they advocated the acceptance of a plan and estimate provided by Messrs Mallett of Ryders Row in Dublin for the new conservatories. The committee had sought expert advice on the matter from Mr MacKay, Curator of Trinity College Botanic Garden.63 The RDS, however, could not supply the money to support this proposal. Professor Litton was requested to produce a report on the state of the overall garden and in 1831 he presented it to the RDS. With respect to the hothouses and conservatories he observed that they ‘are very imperfect, and exhibit in their structure none of the recent improvements which have been made in this department, so instead of taking the lead, as becomes a great national institution, we are far behind in the progress of improvement. It is unnecessary to point out to an intelligent Society, the importance of this branch of horticulture, whether for scientific instruction, or the great national object of naturalising valuable exotics.’64 Litton’s criticism of this section of the garden prompted the RDS to provide £100 for repairing the glasshouses. In 1834 both Underwood and his under-gardener White retired from service in the garden and this marked the ending of the opening phase in the evolution of Dublin’s garden. Underwood’s successor, Ninian Niven, set about improving the overall condition of the garden after some years of neglect in the latter days of 105

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Underwood’s tenure. Niven accomplished a significant amount during his four years as Head Gardener including completing a guidebook to the gardens which contained two views of the glasshouses.65 Figure 18 depicts the Octagon House (named on the plate as the Banana House) and figure 19 is an illustration of the Long Range in the centre of the garden and is an interpretation rather than an accurate representation of the glasshouses and surrounding garden. The plan (see figure 6, page 55), however, provides a more accurate map of the layout of the site in 1838. Although Niven was not responsible for the replacement of any of the glasshouses, he did record the size of the indoor collections. He noted that there were 2,549 plants in the Long Range, 1,593 in the Lower Range, 605 in the Pelargonium House and 253 in the Acacia House. Together these total almost 5,000 potted plants in the indoor collections.66 The relationship between Niven and Litton was a tense one throughout his appointment and he resigned his position in 1838 but had made a very good start on restocking the garden with plants, including almost doubling the number of plants in the glasshouses, as well as altering the layout of the garden in places.67 Like many of his contemporaries, Niven was a deeply religious man and his view of the garden was regularly portrayed through a theological lens but he was never satisfied that his garden adequately captured the spirit of an Edenic paradise. For Litton the luxuriance of a heavenly space, displaying the beauty of God’s diverse creation, was not seen to be realized in Glasnevin. The exotics formed part of this design and with the shortage of funds to renew or restore the glasshouses they represented a poor imitation of tropical bounty. Scientific botanical ordering in outdoor beds alone would not reproduce the desired effect of transforming wild nature into a mirror of the generosity of a transcendental Creator and thus the indoor collections were crucial to creating such an impression. The appointment of David Moore as Curator in 1838 marked the beginning of the development of a completely new range of iron glasshouses that formed the curvilinear range, as well as the development of new palm houses and conservatories. Moore’s initial years at the gardens between 1838 and 1842, however, were marked with uncertainty. As relations became strained between the RDS and the government and with the Lord Lieutenant refusing in 1841 to recommend to Parliament the payment of the annual grant to the 106

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18 Frontispiece showing the Octagon House, Glasnevin

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society, the future of the gardens was temporarily put in jeopardy. After protracted negotiation and some concession on the part of the RDS, the grant was restored and the crisis abated.68 In the early years instead of replacing the glasshouses Moore rearranged the plants grown in existing houses, had them repainted and in the case of the Octagon House had a new heating system installed which ‘we shall be able to raise … to a sufficiently high temperature for any tropical plants, which will enable us to devote this fine house, almost exclusively, to the growth of Palms and the Banana tribe’.69

19 View from Front of Hothouses, Glasnevin

In his annual report of 1841, Moore commented that ‘The stoves and green-houses have suffered more from the deranged state of the Society than any other department … I fear the collection will be liable to be injured during the ensuing winter.’70 In 1842 David Moore visited England for the purpose of procuring plants and to gather suitable plans for new glasshouses. Moore visited a wide variety of botanical gardens, nurseries and private estates. At Chatsworth House he noted the ridgeand-furrow roof construction of some of the houses and observed that ‘The large stove Conservatory which covers nearly half an acre 108

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is, perhaps, the noblest structure of its kind in Europe.’71 In Exeter he examined a new heating system and he recommended to the RDS a plan for an Epiphyte House and a new method of heating which would be less expensive to run.72 The Committee of Botany instructed Moore to consult with Mr Duncan Ferguson, the RDS’s master of architectural drawing, to devise more detailed plans and estimates of the work. Over the second half of 1842 Moore and Ferguson worked up the plans while the existing houses were temporarily propped up. In December Ferguson was told to prepare a final blueprint for the Epiphyte House and a general range comprising a conservatory and stove houses, which was to be constructed partly of wood and iron with glazed sheet glass.73 These plans were exhibited in the RDS’s conversation room, but by March 1843 Ferguson was asked to revise them as the cost was considered too high. He did so and the RDS advertised for tenders for the work in Saunders’ Newsletter. They received 16 tender applications as well as a new drawing for the glasshouses from the Dublin iron-master Richard Turner. His design was for an Epiphyte House (east wing of the curvilinear range) constructed completely of iron which was accepted at a meeting of the RDS. Ferguson was once again instructed to revise in accordance with Turner’s proposals and he prepared a new proposal for a conservatory fashioned solely of wrought iron, extending 100 feet long, 18 feet high and 18 feet wide, glazed with patent glass and heated by hypocaust.74 This was accepted and new tenders were advertised in Saunders’ Newsletter. There were four applicants, one of which was Turner’s estimate of £890. But the cheaper tender of £810 submitted by William Clancy won the day and he was given the contract.75 Work began in July 1843 but there were many delays. The house was completed late and over-budget, the final cost being £924 12s 0d. It was named the Kemmis House after the Vice-President of the RDS who had made huge efforts to raise money for this scheme. The final design consisted of a lean-to structure with a curvilinear roof and bow ends backed with a brick wall on the north side and heated through the hypocaust system (figure 20).76 By 1844 Moore could report to the RDS that ‘The incongruity which has so long existed between the Plant Houses and the Garden generally, is now happily being done away with … one wing of the new range of Conservatories has been erected … being commodious, handsome and in keeping 109

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with the exterior of the Garden.’77 In the meantime the old, original Epiphyte House was demolished after 30 years of service and ‘The opening up of a grand Central Walk, leading from the Octagon House along the front of the new range … will alter the present features of the Garden very materially – I trust for the better.’78

20 The Range of Glasshouses, Glasnevin

Tropical nature and its consumption pattern was being radically altered as the interior spaces of the glasshouses were integrated with the outdoor collections arranged in their botanical orders. This reflected the broader stimulus to treat the globe’s flora as a single system of creation where tropical and temperate, sun-loving and shade-loving, utilitarian and aesthetic could be brought together in a single place that would best exhibit the underlying nobility of their fabricator. Humans could expedite this task with skill and scientific knowledge while yet retaining a sense of the wonderment of a transcendental hand shaping this beauty. The first stage in the building of what would be known as 110

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the curvilinear range had taken place and in the same year the RDS requested from the Treasury additional funding to complete a whole range of glasshouses. The architect Frederick Darley was asked to submit plans for the next phase in the scheme. He had already designed the Library of King’s Inns, and had plenty of experience. In August 1844 the government approved a grant of £2,000 to carry out the work and Darley amended his proposals to comply with the amount of available money. It was put out to tender and Turner won the contract to complete the west wing (which would be identical to the one already constructed on the east side) and create two corridors that would link the wings to a central conservatory.79 Turner was already engaged in the construction of the Great Palm House at Kew when he tendered for the second stage of the Dublin range.80 He sought advice from William Hooker about heating the wing and was recommended a hot water system which he adopted. The west wing was completed in the spring of 1846 but there now needed to be supplementary funding raised to design and erect the central conservatory. In consultation with Turner, Darley planned the central house as a rectangular building 40 feet in height and Turner’s tender of £1,900 to complete the project was accepted by the RDS.81 It was built by early 1848 except that there was not enough money available to heat the house and the heating system was not installed until 1850. Dr William Harvey had been appointed professor in January 1848 (see Chapter 3) and in his first annual report on the garden commended the efforts of Moore but also lamented the lack of funds that meant the garden could not compete in ‘neatness’ with similar establishments. Although he lamented the fact that the new palm stove was not completed, he did compliment the wings of the new curvilinear range, stating that the plants ‘are generally healthy, well-furnished specimens, with wellformed shoots and leaves; and there is perhaps [a] greater tendency to produce flowers than in wooden houses of the old construction … In the wing used as a stove, climbing plants have been, in several places, trained to the rafters with good effect, their leaves serving to break the direct force of the sun and to give the shade of natural foliage to the plants below. This is often useful to many tropical plants, natives of dense forest jungles; and under proper regulation, these leafy screens appear to act better than the uniform shade of a curtain, while their appearance is highly ornamental and pleasing.’82 When 111

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completed, the entire curvilinear range – 350 feet long – provided a series of separate spaces representing different environments and enabling plants from several distinct ecologies to be suitably housed (figure 21). Acknowledging nature’s diversity, this range of glasshouses attempted to represent the earth’s tropical biogeography in miniature and to do so in ways that seemed to ‘imitate’ or replicate nature. The first east wing housed the epiphytes; the west wing was used for cacti, succulents, Cape heaths and a general collection of subtropical plants. Palms, bananas and other tropical trees occupied the central pavilion. The gardens in mid-century, and the hothouse collection in particular, were used to steer the gazing eye of the visitor on tropical nature.

21 Central House of the Curvilinear Range, Glasnevin

Before moving on to discuss other glasshouses erected in Glasnevin, I wish to elaborate on some alterations made to this range later in the century to accommodate the expanding level of consumption as these spaces’ popularity intensified. As visitor numbers increased in the gardens this glasshouse suffered from congestion as people tried to navigate their way through the two fairly narrow wings of the range. Consequently in 1861 Moore requested that the Committee of Botany 112

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examine the wings and with the help of the Board of Works architect, Frederick Villiers Clarendon, make an assessment of what might be done to expand them. Clarendon suggested that the wings be extended by adding a corresponding side to the north of that which was currently facing south. By 1868 William Turner, the son of Richard, submitted plans on how to increase the width. These were accepted by the RDS and work began on extending the wings to the north side of the leanto wall. They were exact replicas of the existing design of the wings and once completed the lean-to walls were removed and the roof span was supported by butterfly trusses, doubling the overall width. The east and west ends of the range were given new doors and two new turrets were installed joining the wings and corridors. The construction was considered innovative and successful and was completed in 1869; it won the approval of Moore and provided additional space for plants and for visitors to move within the curvilinear range.83 Under Harvey’s professorship additional changes were made to the indoor collections to mark the expanding range of tropical bounty being brought back from the empire and to match the heightened level of demand as the garden became progressively more accessible to the public. The old Octagon House, for instance, was finally demolished in 1886 and a new purpose-built fern house was erected. Efforts to bring the Victoria regia water lily to flower occupied the time of many curators and private gardeners in the mid-nineteenth century and Glasnevin was no different. In 1849 a seedling was received but it died over the winter for lack of suitable accommodation. This prompted Moore to lobby the Committee of Botany to support the building of an Aquarium House for tropical aquatics, and this was supported by Harvey, and fund-raising activities in the gardens were held in 1853. Duncan Ferguson was again employed to design this glasshouse and it was finished by mid-1854. It ran 44 feet long by 40 feet wide with a circular pool for the water lily and in 1855 Glasnevin succeeded in producing a flowering plant. Maintaining and repairing glasshouses was a constant preoccupation for the garden curator and his staff. In the spring of 1849, for instance, a hailstorm wreaked havoc on the houses which warranted extensive restoration and hard work to save plants from perishing.84 In his report for 1850 Moore requested that the establishment of ‘an Economical Museum of Vegetable Productions’85 be undertaken to put Dublin on 113

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a similar footing to the gardens at Kew and Paris. By 1852 the RDS donated a prefabricated iron house which had been erected on Leinster Lawn in 1850 for the Exhibition of Manufactures but which needed to be removed to open space for the Great Exhibition of 1853. It was moved to Glasnevin and £250 was spent installing display cases and heating stoves. It contained a wide variety of plant material including barks, oils, fibres for the making of fabrics, woods and fruits. In 1852 the Royal Dublin Society decided to build a Palm House or secondary set of conservatories to compliment the curvilinear range. This new complex was to replace the old Long Range which was now over 30 years in service and in a bad state of repair, prompting Moore to comment that ‘the collection of orchidaceous plants and ferns … could no longer be cultivated in them’.86 The new Palm House was designed by the architect Jacob Owen who was originally from Montgomeryshire but moved to Dublin in 1832 as engineer and architect of the new Board of Works. His commissions included the wing addition to the Vice-Regal Lodge (1842–54), extending the record buildings of the King’s Inns (1848–49) and overseeing the building of the three Queen’s Colleges. Charles Lanyon was one of his pupils and married Owen’s daughter in 1837; this intensified the ties between Dublin and Belfast.87 The central house of the new structure was 20 foot higher than the central pavilion of the curvilinear range. It was flanked by two lower lying wings which were to be used to house orchids and camellias. The structure was angular in shape with a steep pitched roof on the central conservatory. It was 60 feet long by 80 feet wide and rose to a height of 60 feet (figure 22). The design was quite dissimilar to the curvilinear range, creating another experience of tropicality which focused primarily on the tree species and creating a sense of the extreme tallness they could reach. The high ceiling enabled the palms from the curvilinear range to be successfully transplanted to the new glasshouse, and cycads, agaves, mango and cocoa trees were soon added. The house was fully completed by 1860 at a cost of £4,000; however, it aroused considerable criticism. William Robinson, after visiting the gardens in 1864, described it in the Gardeners’ Chronicle as ‘the astonishingly ugly new Palm House’ which was ‘externally a hundred degrees too ugly’.88 Comparing it to Turner’s range he claimed it was ‘as a Dove to a Dodo, as white-winged Yankee clipper to a swinish Monitor’. In the same article he declared, ‘There is 114

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an intensity of ugliness about this building, seen from the north side, which quite appals one. It is as if the demon of bad taste had been let loose, fully accredited, to attack the enemy in his strongest camp, and accordingly set to work and built this temple in the central scene of a beautiful garden, in the midst of the elegant leaf-builders, and over a host of graceful Palms.’89 Tropical nature had to be represented in a manner as pleasing to the eye in its exterior façade as much as in its interior staging of exotic flora. The modernist design of the structure, resembling a very high gabled barn, was not only plagued by aesthetic criticism but also suffered from structural problems – it swayed heavily in high winds and the wood was subject to rot.

22 The Palm House, Glasnevin 115

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After considerable wind damage in the winter of 1883 it was decided to demolish the building and James Boyd of Scotland redesigned a new central section based on specifications provided by Frederick Moore, Curator since his father’s death in 1879. The new house was 65 feet high, 80 feet wide and 100 feet from front to rear. The sides were constructed of teak bound with wrought iron. The curved roof had iron-glazing bars and inside a walkway encircled the dome 25 feet above the ground. A spiral staircase led to the gallery to provide a good viewing position for the visitor, accompanied by an exterior gallery which provided a vista of the gardens in general (figure 23). The total cost was £800 and the house was completed in less than a year. The tall palms and other tropical trees occupied the new house while the original wings continued to contain orchids and camellias (figure 24). As in Belfast, creating a vista from which to view tropical nature was important in the latter decades of the century and it provided, as Humboldt had done of the American tropics, an image that ‘was sublime because it could evoke in the alert viewer a sense of awe in the presence of the vast and mysterious’.90

23 The New Palm House, Glasnevin 116

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24 Interior of the New Palm House, Glasnevin

From the 1870s onwards Glasnevin added to its indoor spaces by erecting a number of smaller glasshouses. Together these houses formed an interconnected complex for the display of indoor plants, many of exotic species from desert and tropical climates, as well as some temperate species of ferns. Since its foundation, Glasnevin strove

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to create a series of visually pleasing and diverse indoor collections that would woo the visitor into their interiors, educate them about exotic flora and provide spaces for the scientific observation and study of tropical species. Of all three gardens Dublin provided the most diverse range of indoor spaces, reflecting the status of the city within Britain’s nineteenth-century empire and the priorities of the curators and the Royal Dublin Society.

Schooling Tropical Botany: Cambridge’s Indoor Collection Like the other two botanical gardens, Cambridge’s old botanical garden did develop a glasshouse range. As the garden was designed according to the principles of a physic garden, once the plot of ground was acquired in 1760 plans were made for the building of glasshouses. These were to include greenhouses and a hothouse. By 1761 Thomas Martyn could report that ‘a stove is building; and Stone is preparing to raise the superstructure of a greenhouse on the foundation which was laid last year’.91 Issues of cost in developing and maintaining the garden, however, were a constant preoccupation. Martyn reported in 1766 that ‘our income is still very scanty, so that we cannot finish our greenhouse, much less build stoves’.92 The Botanic Garden trustees were requesting about £70 to complete the greenhouse in 1767,93 and by 1772 it was agreed ‘by the Trustees that the Greenhouse should be completed, the walks gravelled, new earth brought in’.94 By 1786 grace was offered to the senate for granting £100 for building the hothouse and 10 guineas were awarded to the gardener, John Salton, ‘in consideration of the extraordinary trouble he has had during the building of the hothouse’.95 A view of the glasshouses is discernible from Ackermann’s 1815 print of the gardens (see figure2, page 23). They appear to be leanto structures with solid roofs and constructed of wood, glass and stone. They are comparable to the hothouses of other physic gardens where they were often designed to fit in with the architectural integrity of existing buildings, to which they were often attached, and used the classical forms of regularity and geometry in relation to the rest of the space that was so popular in Renaissance gardens. 118

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As Martyn’s role in the garden and the teaching of botany declined, the condition of the garden similarly deteriorated. In 1824 the Austrian botanist Schultes recorded in a letter his trip to Cambridge botanical garden and a translation of it was subsequently published by Hooker. In it Schultes commented, ‘The stoves are well-built, and they may have been hitherto large enough; but the progress of the Science will soon cause their size to be insufficient, as they extend only to 216 feet.’96 Henslow, taking up of the professorship of Botany two years later, held many of the same reservations about the suitability of the physic garden for the pursuit of modern science. Like the outdoor collections the indoor plants were acquired and displayed to advance floral knowledge and not for their aesthetic effect per se. The 1838 plan (figure 25) reveals that the garden altered very little from its original layout and it continued to maintain a spatial arrangement quite reminiscent of early physic gardens. At the north end of the neatly arranged systematic beds of herbaceous plants lay the three glasshouses. These comprised a stove house measuring 58 feet in length, and two greenhouses measuring 50 feet 4 inches and 104 feet respectively (labelled d, f, e in the plan). It was claimed that ‘If the open border is now quite insufficient to meet the demands of Botany in its present state, the Stove and Green-houses are still more defective. They are constructed with brick flues, and the arrangements of the stove are so incomplete that it is impossible to maintain a temperature in it much above 60°, and consequently no very rare plant requiring a high temperature can exist here for any length of time. The larger Green-house is much superior to the stove, though not well lighted or sufficiently lofty. A few plants of some interest from their size and age exist in it.’97 A modern science required a modern infrastructure to support it and the buildings of the old physic garden were considered inadequate for schooling Cambridge staff and students in tropical botany. In his report and plan for a new botanic garden of 1830, Edward Lapidge included a range of glasshouses: ‘It being desirable for effect to approach the larger of the conservatories in front, I have made the entrance lodge of the garden in Plan no.2, opposite the centre of the houses, with a broad terrace walk ahead of them, a plot at the end of the main gravelled walk.’ 98 Lapidge researched his design for the glasshouses by visiting other gardens: ‘I have considered the extent 119

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25 Ground Plan of the Old Botanical Garden (1838) 120

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of glasshouses in the botanic gardens of Glasgow and of Edinburgh, the former is 319 feet in length and another stove of 66 feet could be employed, making a total of 385 feet – in the latter Garden the length of houses is 350 feet, and a material defect is said to exist in the want of two lofty houses, one for greenhouse plants, the other for stove plants. The new botanic garden in Brussels boasts a handsome extended range of building for the plants and committee rooms, from an architectural design.’ 99 As well as the report Lapidge submitted a drawing of his proposed glasshouses (figure 26).

26 Proposed Conservatory by E. Lapidge (1830)

The design was elaborate with a central domed conservatory accompanied by two flanking wings, all fashioned of glass and what appears to be decorative supporting columns fashioned in stone. This form was reminiscent of the structure of Edinburgh’s Palm House where architectural features were prominent, particularly the sandstone columns constructed in a classical style.100 The popularity of buildings made completely of iron and glass had not yet fully developed, hence 121

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Lapidge’s plan differs from those of Belfast’s and Glasnevin’s curvilinear houses. The ground plan, however, was of an interconnected house, with the central dome conservatory, a stove house in the left wing and a greenhouse in the right. Attached to the back of the range were seed rooms and the living quarters for the Curator. Lapidge regarded the scheme as both functional and pleasing and noted that ‘The accompanying design 240 feet in length can be carried into execution at two separate times, and it is capable of being extended to any length, without destroying its architectural appearance.’101 Lapidge was keen to retain the integrity of the proposal while at the same time allowing for expansion if necessary and as a trained architect rather than an engineer the style of the building may have had more import than the function. Although the university accepted Lapidge’s plans, delays in acquiring the site were matched by delays in paying his professional fee. Eventually in 1841 the sum of £131 19s 5d was agreed to be paid to the architect.102 When the new botanic garden was finally beginning to be laid out and established, Lapidge’s plans were radically altered. Firstly, the size of the site designed was reduced by almost 50 per cent to the western half of the plot. Murray began laying out the arboretum and the systematic beds. Secondly, the glasshouse range that Lapidge proposed was never built according to his design. It was much plainer in appearance without the same level of ornamentation. Utilitarian considerations eclipsed any impulse to create a building based primarily on aesthetic principles. The syndicate could not recommend ‘the erection of any edifice sufficiently large and ornamental to occupy the central position opposite to the great gravel walk’.103 Under Stratton, who worked in conjunction with the Cambridge architect John Smith, the glasshouses began to take shape using materials from the old botanic gardens and built to a far less elaborate design in the spot where the current rock garden exists. The syndicate advised ‘that for houses of the size of those which are needed for the present purposes of the Garden, wooden frames are preferable to iron’.104 According to the rules of the garden the hothouses could be visited by persons accompanied by the Curator from 1 to 4 pm.105 Progress was slow in the building of the glasshouses and the 1856 Annual Report suggested that hardy plants were preferred over tender due to the cost of glasshouse construction and maintenance. It was claimed that ‘no attempt is made to keep 122

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an extensive collection of tender plants, for that would require very much larger Plant-houses than the university can afford to erect or maintain … [The new houses] are capable of containing a sufficiently numerous collection to be tolerably illustrative of the chief groups of the plants that inhabit the warmer regions of the earth.’106 These houses recycled the building materials of the glasshouses in the old botanic garden, and when William Mudd took up the post as Curator in 1864 he immediately set about ‘examining the contents of the Plant-houses to test the accuracy of the names given to the plants and is otherwise endeavouring to increase the usefulness and beauty of the collection’.107 By 1869 the limited space available in the glasshouses was noted, especially for the cultivation of tree-ferns, and thus the Botanic Garden Syndicate recommended that an addition be built to one of the houses so that tree-ferns and other large plants could be added at a cost of £200. This was approved and the renovations were completed the following year at a total cost of £215 15s.108 But the crisis about space continued and in 1874 the syndicate reported that donations of seeds and plants from warmer climates were being discouraged because ‘The houses are over-crowded but the Professor and the Curator are unable to see in what manner the number of plants kept in them can be materially reduced without injuring the efficiency of the garden. Several of the finest and most valuable specimen-plants now threaten to grow through the roof.’109 By 1878 two new propagating houses were added and repairs were carried out on the Palm House.110 Cambridge wanted to have a good representation of the main tropical species but because the garden was principally for training students in botanical knowledge the indoor collections were not being developed for their display as exemplars of exotic beauty. Mudd died in 1879 and Irwin Lynch was appointed to the post of Curator. Many new valuable additions were made to the indoor collections including ferns and orchids and the syndicate noted that ‘The constant employment of a woman in the garden has already been very beneficial, especially by promoting the cleanliness of the plants in the houses.’111 In a tour of botanical gardens in 1882 Lynch visited a number of different botanical establishments and paid particular attention to their glasshouses. From Chatsworth’s conservatory he learned that many plants could be grown in soil rather than pots; in Dublin he examined the heating systems and the fact that the houses 123

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were built of iron; while he also expressed a great interest in Glasgow’s teak houses.112 By the mid-1880s Lynch was lobbying hard for the glasshouse range to be replaced as it was in a terrible state of repair. He obtained advice from Thiselton-Dyer at Kew who sent his clerk of works, Mr Judd, to examine Cambridge’s range. Judd was of the opinion that the woodwork was beyond restoration and that they ought to be rebuilt on a new site opposite the Great Gravel Walk. They would consist of seven houses at intervals of 25 feet and the likely cost would be around £6,000.113 At a special meeting to discuss the recommendations, Professor Foster proposed that some of the houses be mended, for instance the Stove House and Palm House, for a cost of less than £3,000.114 This report was amended later in the year with £2,750 provided to build new Stove, Warm Fern and Orchid houses.115 Mr James Boyd of Paisley, a firm of horticultural builders, was approached for an estimate. The plan consisted of a Palm House, Orchid House, Stove, Fern House, Stove Pit and Tropical Aquarium to be located east of the Curator’s house and north of the present range at the end of the Broad Walk. They would form a corridor running east–west and the houses themselves oriented north–south with 10 feet between them. On the north side there would also be potting sheds, store rooms and boiler houses. The houses were to be of the same size except for the Palm House which would be 42 feet by 38 feet. The total combined area of the complex would amount to 2,660 sq ft (the existing range was 2,290 sq ft).116 Between 1881 and 1892 this plan was implemented and the range of houses was gradually constructed of wood on the new site, including a Temperate House and Filmy Fern House. Additional funds of £2,500 were provided for this purpose.117 This range was rebuilt of Burma teak on the same site in the 1930s (figure 27). The completed range included a Temperate House including plants from the Mediterranean, California, South Africa and the Atlantic Ocean islands of St Helena and the Canaries. This was followed by the Cool Fern House with temperate ferns and a Conservatory with plants used in teaching for all year round interest and for their decorative effect. The Stove House comprised a teaching collection, systematically arranged and labelled and indicative of the conditions of a tropical rainforest. This contrasted with the Temperate House where plants were arranged geographically.118 The Palm House, the largest in the 124

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range, contained tropical trees but was constrained by the fact that many of these species grow extremely high and could not therefore be contained in a glasshouse. The Tropical Fern House was also central for teaching. The final two houses were the Orchid House and Succulent House.119 Together this range formed the focal point of the teaching collection about tender plants. Unlike Dublin, or indeed Belfast, the glasshouses of the new garden were not of any particular architectural merit; their building design was more functional than elegant. Financial constraints were always affecting discussion about Cambridge’s indoor plant collection. Moving from the old to the new garden did alter the emphasis in the articulation and representation of Cambridge botany. Moving towards a more modern botanical garden rather than an older physic garden altered the shape of the garden itself. While the indoor collections were deemed important for botanical training they did not form the iconic climax that they did in Belfast or indeed Dublin. The arboretum and outdoor systematic beds seemed of much greater import in this educational institution than alluring structures of glass and iron.

27 The Glasshouse Range in Cambridge Botanic Garden

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Conclusion The creation of glasshouse collections in Belfast, Dublin and Cambridge botanical gardens formed part of a wider set of practices and discourses centred on developing an idea of the tropical world. Glasshouses involved the mobilization of a set of interconnected knowledges about creating spaces in which tropical plants would survive. Engineers, architects, garden designers/curators and botanists were all involved in this process, and flows of information travelled through networks of specialists across Britain and Ireland in particular. Although glasshouses were ostensibly to function as spaces where tropical and semi-hardy species could be represented and housed, the structures themselves often became the focus of debate. The aesthetic composition of the buildings was informed by their functionality but just as importantly by the beauty of their architecture in the context of a garden. They had to work well within the overall design of a botanical establishment; their exterior appearance as much as their interior composition was important. As sites in which rarities and exotics were housed, there was a strong desire in all these examples to create an atmosphere of floral tropicality that would fit in with an aesthetic of the romantic picturesque. The choice of majestic species, seen to represent the tropics, were found in all hothouses; palms, cycads and banana trees were particularly fashionable. The interior spaces were often partitioned into tropical, subtropical, desert and temperate rooms, where a miniaturized version of the biogeography of the earth’s warmer zones could be readily viewed. As very expensive parts of botanical gardens, glasshouses were a prized part of the whole enterprise, and although they acted as scientific spaces for testing the growth patterns, physiology and structure of tropical plants, they were also important cultural spaces. They regularly formed the centrepiece of the botanical garden experience for the visitor who would never see the tropics first-hand and whose knowledge of them was mediated through the texts and drawings of travellers and colonialists. Glasshouses became one space where the heat, humidity, floral bounty and luxuriance of the tropics could be conveyed and experienced and the broader world of tropical nature imagined. From early pitch-roof and lean-to structures to curvilinear shapes popular in the mid-nineteenth century, and later to the elevated walkways 126

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within glasshouses, these spaces were the quintessential arenas for representing exotic nature. The beauty of the structures was always interspersed with discussions about their functionality. The ‘nature’ which these buildings housed was valued for its scale, its verdant hue, its rich variety of floral colours, its humid atmosphere and its visually pleasing effect. This nature created a blind spot for the more negative images of tropicality found in other venues and appealed to the more romantic, subliminal imagination that Europeans held of the earth’s hotter climates. In Belfast, Dublin and Cambridge the emphasis given to the role of the glasshouse was variable. In line with Glasnevin’s ambition to be one of the most prestigious gardens in these islands, the glasshouses were both important in adding cultural status to the institution as well as furthering its scientific aspirations as a hive of botanical expertise. Thus the hothouse range played an important part in the garden’s structure and their prominence as paradigms of architectural and engineering sophistication was just as important as their place as sites of tropical knowledge. The Palm House in Belfast in particular was also a triumph in design beauty and was cherished as such. Creating an ambiance of tropical bounty and fashioning buildings of quality and appeal trumped any need to advance science. These were primarily spaces of display in an industrial city where transporting people to warmer, humid climes was an attractive and popular proposition. By contrast in Cambridge the indoor collections and the buildings which housed them were selected on functional grounds. Assembling an array of plants which would adequately represent the earth’s biogeography and aid in the botanical education of student and scholar was the main priority. Consequently the glasshouses did not share the same architectural interest of the other two gardens nor were they awarded as prominent a position within the space. They did work well to offer a representative sample of plant biodiversity and they were enticing spaces but perhaps not quite as enchanting as their counterparts in Ireland.

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Networks and Exchanges: Knowledge Transfer and Peopling Botanical Institutions The gathering of facts not only created great excitement but depended on enormous investments of time, energy, expertise, experience and money. It also required collaborative work. Even what seem like minor bits of information came into being through the labors of large networks.1 H.J. Cook, Matters of Exchange

While botanical gardens played a significant role in the cities and towns in which they were located – as sites of civic as well as educational pride – they were also notable nodes in networks of natural history exchange and experimentation. The role of Kew gardens as one epicentre of British botanical expertise is well acknowledged and Miller has highlighted the position of Joseph Banks in Hanoverian London in developing Kew’s status.2 Using Bruno Latour’s thesis that ‘centres of calculation’ and ‘cycles of accumulation’3 developed from European eighteenth-century exploration and brought together at specific locations natural historical, anthropological, geographical and cultural information, Miller traces Banks’s contribution to this process particularly as he nurtured the royal gardens at Kew. His ability to mobilize and discipline a variety of political, economic and scientific resources to further the emergence

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of Kew as the centre of a network of expertise is well documented. Lucille Brockway has identified the critical role of Kew in the exchange of botanical knowledge and experimentation, particularly in relation to the regulation of colonial gardens developing in Britain’s expanding global empire. Taking cinchona, rubber and sisal as three exemplars of the transfer of economic plants from their original indigenous places of cultivation to new parts of Britain’s colonies, Brockway highlights the technical, political, labour and commercial imperatives underpinning these large-scale transfers of important cash crops. The key part played by Kew in appointing plant hunters and curators of colonial gardens as well as regulating the transfer of plants across vast spaces, often directly via Kew, indicates the deepening and widening scope of the network that Kew was establishing in the nineteenth century. As Brockway notes, ‘Kew’s role was much more than smuggling seeds. Through its scientific development of the plants transferred, Kew converted knowledge to profit and power, for the Empire and for the industrial world system of which Britain was then the leader.’4 Well-organized botanical gardens were seen also as proof of a benevolent administration, intent on improving the lives of those at home and in the colonies. Drayton has identified the expansion of Kew’s influence as part of a culture of improvement being cultivated in Britain as geopolitical and strategic competition between European nations deepened.5 As well as gardens, botanical and natural history societies, such as the one founded in Edinburgh in 1836, fostered what Allen refers to as ‘network research’, the origins of which he attributes to H.C. Watson, the prominent field botanist of the nineteenth century, and which stimulated systematic specimen exchange at a national scale.6 Relationships between metropole and province, centre and periphery, however, were never straightforward. In his study of Sydney botanical gardens Endersby has highlighted how networks of exchange and botanical barter were crucial to the institution’s development as a site of prestige and cultural power as well a centre for scientific knowledge and collecting. Endersby queries claims that all power emanated from the pre-eminence of Kew and by contrast he foregrounds the complexity of centre–periphery relationships. He questions the assumption that the traffic of power and influence in these relationships is in any sense one-way, noting that ‘the reciprocal nature of these exchanges [between Kew and Sydney] makes them more equal than they might first appear; 130

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no debt was accumulated by those on the periphery as long as they were able to send back plants that their correspondents needed’.7 To some degree, therefore, colonial and metropolitan gardens were both centres of accumulation and at times calculative sites in their own right. Indeed Endersby concludes that ‘colonial actors with exclusive access to hard-to-obtain specimens could have considerable bargaining power in their relationships with metropolitan experts’.8 While all regional botanical gardens were in contact with Kew they also had many relationships with other gardens at home and abroad as well as being important sites of exchange within their local communities. Alberti has highlighted the significance of gift exchange for museums where ‘donation constituted a reciprocal relationship between benefactor and recipient. An isolated practitioner, collector or manufacturer sent a specimen to a metropolitan museum with the hope of securing potentially useful patronage, or, even better, the minor fame of a label or catalogue mention.’9 While botanical gardens were not the same as museums, they did share some of this type of exchange culture, especially where individual donors were concerned. This chapter will highlight some of the ways in which the transfer of expertise was exercised in practice. These mechanisms include analyses of the material exchanges involving the transfer of plant specimens; educational dialogue as expressed through lectures, demonstrations and course syllabuses; and the conduct of significant scientific experiments that were relayed through learned journals of the day. The power of each of the gardens to become centres of accumulation and exchange was highly differentiated, as they co-operated and competed for status within their local social and intellectual communities, as well as within the larger national canvas and the wider web of gardens developing across Europe and in the colonies. Overall, Belfast seems to have had the least dense network of contacts and had the smallest amount of extant information upon which to draw. There is little available source material about the networks that Belfast may have had with other individuals and institutions, and the educational role of the garden seems much weaker. In the absence of detailed empirical data to consult, one can speculate that Belfast did not have the resources to catalogue and maintain a bank of reports and correspondence that might throw light on the density of the exchange networks. By contrast Glasnevin and Cambridge both harnessed healthy and influential contacts and 131

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provided important spaces for botanical education in their local and extra-local intellectual and social communities.

Educating and Disseminating: Cambridge Professors, Curators and Gardeners Many persons, both within and without the Universities, suppose its [botany] objects limited to fixing names to the vast number of plants, and to describing and classing them under this or that particular ‘system’. They are not aware that Systematic Botany is now considered to be no more than a stepping stone for more important departments of this Science.10

This was part of the statement made by John Stevens Henslow in his address to the University of Cambridge in 1846 to promote the development of a new botanical garden that would meet the needs of modern natural history. As the original garden was chiefly founded to enhance medical knowledge, it was considered insufficient by the mid-nineteenth century as a site to advance modern botanical science. Its size precluded it from containing the large number of new trees and shrubs being increasingly introduced to Europe from the colonies. The physic garden, with the Martyns (John and Thomas) as the readers and professors, marked the emergence of a small network of interconnected expertise across a range of learned institutions. The appointment of Charles Miller as the first Curator in Cambridge indicates the role of acquaintances and friendship networks in the early years of the garden. The Miller and Martyn families had been friends in London when Philip Miller was Curator of the Chelsea Physic Garden founded by the Society of Apothecaries. Nonetheless, for the Martyns botany remained more of a pastime than a serious academic pursuit. Indeed by the early nineteenth century Thomas Martyn had handed over his lecture room and botanical collection to the Professor of Mineralogy, Dr E.D. Clarke,11 and there is little evidence that the garden was used as a site of education in botanical studies. Consequently although the original garden was adequately stocked, it did not receive any great scholarly support from Cambridge personnel and thus strong linkages

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with other gardens would have to await a more energetic academic leadership.12 The tradition of exchanging and transferring curatorial staff from one garden to another, however, did occur at the university. The Curator, James Donn, for instance, had been trained at Kew Gardens under the direction of William Aiton (first Curator of the new botanical garden set up in Kew in 1759). Moreover, Aiton himself had been trained by Philip Miller at the Chelsea Physic Garden, and this shows how the links between London’s botanical elite and Cambridge’s emerging range of experts was growing. When Henslow was addressing the university to procure additional funds for developing the new garden in 1846, he highlighted the work he had undertaken to appoint a new Curator, Murray, and the travels he had undertaken to obtain advice from those he thought more expert than himself in designing gardens. He twice visited Kew and obtained counsel from his friend the superintendent Sir William Hooker, and from Dr John Lindley (of University College London) about how to develop a prestige space that would serve science well and would be a centre of power among Britain’s regional gardens.13 The Kew connection flourished with a circle of patronage and familial ties that emerged into one of the three interconnected family groups that David Allen sees as forming the ‘intellectual aristocracy’ of nineteenth-century English science.14 William Hooker, originally appointed Professor of Botany at Glasgow University, and a protégé of Joseph Banks, returned to Kew in 1841 as Director. Joseph Hooker, his son, was educated with a degree in medicine at Glasgow University and would follow his father’s footsteps at Kew Gardens. Henslow’s connections with William Hooker were solidified when their relationship became both personal as well as professional. William’s son, Joseph Hooker, married Henslow’s daughter Frances and marked the second generation of Hookers whose wives were the daughters of eminent botanists. Questions of academic merit and issues of prestige and dominance intertwined in the pursuit of a new garden for Cambridge. Henslow pointed out that £10,000 more than could be accumulated through the sale of the old site would be required for the development of the 20–30 acres of new garden, otherwise there was a danger that Cambridge would become like some provincial gardens which were a novelty initially but rapidly fell into neglect and disrepair.15 Murray was appointed after Henslow had contacted 133

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other botanical institutions for suggestions of suitable candidates. Testimonials were received which ‘must relate to the Candidate’s capacity for arranging a new garden, according to a given plan, and to his practical and scientific qualifications [emphasis in the original]’.16 A shortlist was drawn up and each candidate was set an examination which Henslow and Charles Babington marked; eventually Murray from Liverpool botanical gardens was appointed.17

Spreading the word: teaching botany at Cambridge As botany was not yet part of the official university tripos, Henslow was aware of the limitations of asking the university for additional funding and instead proposed that some form of subscription might provide extra monies for developing the new garden. Although botany was not an intrinsic part of the university’s curriculum, the professor was obliged to deliver 20 lectures on the subject each year, and medical students (of which there were about half a dozen annually) were required to attend them.18 One of Henslow’s students, of course, was Charles Darwin and Henslow was instrumental in obtaining Darwin a position on the Beagle expedition. This was acknowledged in the Preface to Darwin’s journal The Voyage of the Beagle (1845), where he stated that: I must be allowed to return my most sincere thanks to the Reverent Professor Henslow who, when I was an under-graduate at Cambridge, was one chief means of giving me a taste for Natural History, – who, during my absence, took charge of the collections I sent home, and by his correspondence directed my endeavors, – and who, since my return home, has constantly rendered me every assistance which the kindest friend could offer.19

Henslow would remain a close ally of Darwin for the remainder of his life, including chairing the famous meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Oxford in 1860 where heated exchanges between Thomas Henry Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce occurred on the merits of evolution by natural selection.20 He also developed a friendship with another student, Leonard Jenyns, through 134

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whom he met his wife Harriet, Jenyns’ sister. Leonard Jenyns would later write a memoir of his teacher.21 Henslow’s clear connections with the metropolitan academic elite of the day aided his aim to advance natural history at Cambridge and in developing clear connections between the new garden in the city and ones elsewhere, particularly at Kew. Indeed in 1848 William Hooker and Henslow set up a Museum of Economic Botany at Kew, where plants deemed commercially useful were available for study and reference. Brockway has noted that ‘Those plants with economic possibilities were propagated in the Kew greenhouses, studied and sometimes improved by hybridization, and then sent out to the colonial gardens and botanical stations for trial and distribution to planters. In this way Kew became a depot for the interchange of plants throughout the empire.’22 The desire to develop a museum was predicated on Hooker’s desire ‘to give Kew a use beyond beauty’,23 but he recognized that highlighting the economic value of scientific research at the gardens would be more likely to receive financial support than just pursuing science as an end in itself. Moreover the international status of the institution would be enhanced if its role was perceived to be more than a hedonistic passion for the pursuit of elegance and instead was seen to serve higher, enlightened purposes that might result in such elegance but were not motivated solely by it. Henslow’s wide-ranging connections with some of the most powerful naturalists of the time ensured that he obtained guidance and expertise about the development of the new garden at Cambridge. By 1839, however, he no longer resided in the city but had moved to his parish of Hitcham in Suffolk, yet he did continue to promote the cause of botany at the university and the development of the garden. His role as an educator in natural history is evidenced by the fact that he continually delivered a course of lectures in botany in the Easter term from 1825 to 1850 although his lack of residence in the city resulted in low attendance in the latter years of his teaching. Henslow’s interest in the agricultural and applied uses of botanical knowledge would also find their way into his teaching curriculum at Cambridge. The broad outline of the content of his lectures are available from the published syllabuses of his curriculum. In 1828 they included a discussion of the physiology of plants, for instance their chemical constituents, followed by an examination of both artificial and natural 135

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systems of plant classification. He claimed that ‘The several parts of a flower, and the method of technical description, will be explained here, to enable us to commence our ‘demonstrations’ from living specimens.’24 The significance of the practical demonstration class is clear from the outset in Henslow’s educational method. The books used in the course included J.E. Smith’s Introduction to Physiological and Systematical Botany and De Candolle’s Thèorie Élémentaire de la Botanique.25 In his 1833 syllabus, demonstrations took place on Tuesdays and Thursdays and ‘As the first few minutes of every Lecture will be occupied with the demonstration of some British plant, the various forms of the complex organs will be explained at these times.’26 This was followed by classification where ‘After the demonstration of each specimen, its Genus and Species will be ascertained, by referring it to its Class and Order in the Artificial System of Linneaus.’27 Once the name of the plant had been discovered, its place within the natural system was to be specified. As Anne Secord has reminded us ‘encouraging reliable habits of observation’28 was crucial to the diffusion of scientific knowledge both to elites and popular consumers, and the pleasure of looking was one way through which botany was promoted in the nineteenth century. In this lecture course Henslow also included a section entitled ‘Botanical Geography’ where the geographical distribution of plant species was to be outlined. The range of textbooks was also enlarged and included, amongst others, Lindley’s Introduction to Botany and Hooker’s British Flora.29 The latter was published in 1830 to aid students on field excursions, as was Charles Babington’s Manual of British Botany (1843) which ran into numerous editions.30 In this outline Henslow also included a list of the apparatus necessary for the study of botany, including a vasculum, large and small; chalk paper; old book covers; a press and digging knife as well as forceps, lens and penknife and microscope for the lecture room. The practicality of botanical study is evident from the tools and texts necessary, but these instruments and their mastery would also foreground the importance of the visual in scientific training and the pleasure that could accompany it, while keeping in mind the need for the scientist to do more than create a spectacle for its own sake.31 From the 1820s, vascula appeared as essential tools for Cambridge and Edinburgh students undertaking fieldwork.32 A further edition of Henlow’s course of lectures appeared in 1848 but it was prepared 136

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hurriedly as an outline of ‘what I consider might be reasonably expected of men whose time has been preoccupied in mastering the subjects already required for an ordinary degree’.33 In his 1851 syllabus Henslow underscored the significance of fieldwork and observation to the practice of botany; he claimed ‘“How to observe” is an art to be acquired by “observing”, and not by listening, or even by reading alone.’34 He went on to highlight the importance of visits to the botanical garden and the countryside for acquiring the art of observation. Ultimately he maintained that ‘By mastering, whilst at College, the little difficulties which stand in the way of all who wish to learn “how to observe” the works of nature, they will have obtained a sufficient grasp of such subjects to make them afterwards agreeable as well as instructive occupations.’35 This bears out Secord’s claim that ‘Far from a rejection of entertainment … the efforts of promoters of science are better seen as attempts to relocate the sites of pleasure.’36 In his 1853 syllabus Henslow continued to teach structural botany, systematic botany and physiological botany, the latter including a section on ‘botanical geography’. In this section much attention was devoted to the role of climate, altitude, exposure and soils ‘in determining “stations” for Endemic species’.37 This connects with a wider imperial interest in the acclimatization of plants across the globe. While Henslow delivered his lectures to students and members of the university, he also periodically ran courses for the younger members of the Royal Family, for instance in 1860 organizing a course of four lectures including economic botany and classification.38 William Hooker’s book Botanical Illustrations: Being a Series of Figures Designed to Illustrate the Terms Employed in a Course of Lectures on Botany with Descriptions was published in 1822. It contained 21 colour plates with up to 18 figures per plate,39 and on Hooker’s advice Henslow used this book in his academic and popular lectures on botany and he noted the pleasure it stimulated with his audiences. He also prepared some of his own drawings to accompany his lecture courses. Moreover, as well as educating Cambridge students in botany, Henslow provided instruction for plant collectors and those who might provide specimens for him and the botanical gardens, and therefore was widening the network. Professional scientists continued to rely heavily on amateurs to gather plant specimens for them. In his observations Henslow emphasized the significance of particular plants 137

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to botanical research and drew a distinction between ‘expert’ collectors and those who merely searched for rarities. He claimed: that persons who are not naturalists are no judges of what objects are most likely to be of interest in a strictly scientific point of view. Botanists would rather receive one of our most common weeds from a newly-discovered or newly-explored country than a new species of an already known genus … To ascertain the geographical distribution of a well-known species is a point of vastly superior interest to the mere acquisition of a rare specimen.40

He went on to point out that Darwin had sent him two blighted ears of wheat from his travels in South America and that these were of much more consequence for his study of the cause of blight in this plant.41 Thus while amateurs were important for accumulating specimens it was also imperative to discipline the eye sufficiently to render observations reliable and useful. And this would serve the dual role of educating the public in natural history while also employing their services in providing knowledge to professional botanists and garden curators. Henlsow was conscious of the need to develop a co-ordinated scientific method of experiment that would embrace a population larger than that of trained, academic botanists. He noted the difficulty with identifying plants and the likelihood that some plants which may be varieties were being identified as distinct species. He concluded that direct experiment – laboratory space rather than fieldwork – would be the only way to minimize these errors and a plan of co-operation between botanists had been proposed when the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) met in Cambridge in 1834 ‘by which botanists from different parts of the kingdom might be enabled to compare their observations, and obtain more satisfactory conclusions’.42 Henslow was worried that there were some genera whose species had multiplied fourfold beyond the number they should really contain and consequently British flora appeared to have a much higher ranking than the floras of other countries ‘and this must lead to very erroneous conclusions respecting the laws which regulate the numerical distribution of species in different latitudes’.43 Developing a metrology which would facilitate comparison and accuracy was becoming increasingly urgent. 138

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While Henslow continued his botanical research, but not as a resident in Cambridge, the task of overseeing the botanic garden rested with Charles Babington. Like Henslow, Babington came from a solid, professional background and attended St John’s College, Cambridge. He had developed an early interest in botany and had been influential in establishing the Entomological Society, later to become the Cambridge Natural History Society. With Henslow occupying the only Chair of Botany at the university, Babington would have to be content as a bachelor don at St John’s College for many years. During this time he did publish a Manual of British Botany,44 followed by a Flora of Cambridgeshire in 1860.45 Because Henslow was absent he oversaw the general running of the gardens and he also began to nurture important contacts. In 1835 Babington attended the BAAS meeting in Dublin as it became part of what has been regarded as ‘the circuit of academic and metropolitan centres’.46 He stayed at rooms in Trinity College and met with Mr Mackay at the college botanical gardens. Like other delegates at this meeting, Babington had breakfast at Glasnevin and after the meeting he made a tour of Ireland, particularly to Joyce’s country, a region of Connemara. He was accompanied by two other Cambridge friends, R.M. Longwood, a botanist, and J. Ball, a geologist, both of Christ’s College. Babington noted the botanical bounty yet to be explored in Ireland on account of ‘the false notion, so generally current in England, that it is difficult, nay almost impossible, to travel in the wilder and more distant parts of Ireland, without personal danger, or, at least, very great inconvenience, from the religious and political feelings of the people’.47 He described his journey through Galway, particularly noting the flora but also the geological and social composition of the areas he travelled through. The following year Babington made another botanizing trip to Ireland, where he was admitted to an MA degree at Trinity College. Again he met Mackay, visited Powerscourt House and its gardens, and his excursion this time brought him to Westport, Connemara and Cong. He spent over a month travelling, making note of the plants he found and describing the landscape. He left Ireland, sailing for Liverpool on 17 August and then travelled on to the BAAS meeting in Bristol before returning to Cambridge.48 Babington continued to be in regular attendance at the annual BAAS meetings and he also made 139

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several more botanizing excursions to Ireland, Scotland and Wales. With the untimely death of Andrew Murray in 1850 it was necessary to find a replacement but it was noted that ‘We [do not] anticipate many English competitors, for it must be owned that English gardeners are upon the whole not more conspicuous for their skill in cultivation than for their acquaintance with Botany.’49 It was stipulated that the new curator ought to have a general knowledge of plant classification and should be able to discern the genus and order to which a plant belonged.50 Thus while Cambridge was competing well with other prestige botanical institutions, the absence of local experts who could act as curators for such gardens was well recognized. Charles Babington did not assume the Chair of Botany until Henslow’s death in 1861, where he would remain until 1895, but his role as understudy to the professor during the many years of Henslow’s absence from the city ensured that he played an important role in stimulating and maintaining the garden’s network of contacts.

Plant-hunting and exchange networks at Cambridge As well as being a centre for educational exchange between student and professor, the material transfer of plants and seeds was also developing. While botanical gardens purchased many of their plants from the leading nurseries, they also developed a potent system of plant interchange between gardens, as well as being recipients of donations from private collectors. Although Kew may have been the entrepôt for many exotics introduced into Britain, many bilateral trades developed between regional gardens within the UK and those in continental Europe. Moreover, as Britain’s empire expanded, regional gardens developed reciprocal links with the colonies. Plant-hunting expeditions overseas as well as written correspondence fostered these connections.51 This traffic in plants would prove to be both useful and economical in nurturing links between gardens and in keeping them well stocked with both rarities and more common species. Furthermore they deepened the movement of knowledge between institutions and encouraged the transfer of personnel, particularly curators and undergardeners, across a range of botanical establishments. Gardens became 140

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important sites of accumulation of knowledge and although many contained similar collections, they were never entirely the same from one institution to another. Degrees of specialization would emerge partly reflecting the types of networks that a garden enjoyed, its institutional and funding basis, and its location within a hierarchy of social relationships as well as its geographical positioning with respect to soil, climate and relief. In the old garden in Cambridge there is little extant evidence of where the plants were sourced but when the new garden was being developed it was reported that 1,776 herbaceous plants had been moved from the old garden, and a total of 2,258 new plants had been donated of which 123 were species of trees and shrubs for the arboretum. The syndicate acknowledged that some very large donations had been received and this illustrated the ‘high relative position with regard to that department amongst the botanical gardens of this country’.52 It also listed donors who contributed large quantities of seeds and plants. These included some private individuals such as Mr J. Atkin of Northampton, who may have had some connections with the university. In 1849 the gardens acknowledged were: Oxford, Kew, Copenhagen, Trinity College Dublin, Glasnevin, Liverpool and Edinburgh.53 The annual reports, produced from 1856 onwards, regularly noted the plant donations but did not do so each year. Presumably great quantities of plants were not received every year and thus only when significant donations were received was it deemed necessary to acknowledge them formally in the reports. Unlike Glasnevin, Cambridge’s annual reports did not record the plants they donated to other gardens. The importance attached to an exchange network was noted in the first report: ‘The Botanic Garden is now in correspondence with most of the Botanic Gardens in this country, and with some on the Continent, to their mutual benefit. By this means many highly interesting additions have been made to the collection.’54 In the same year it was registered that plants had been received from the botanic gardens at Kew, Edinburgh, Glasnevin and Belfast. It is clear that by middle of the nineteenth century the gardens in Dublin, and perhaps to a lesser extent Belfast, were an important part of the transfer network. Kew, as the perceived epicentre of botanical collecting, proved important to all other British and overseas gardens, while Edinburgh, a very significant garden in its own right, was also central to the network.55 141

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The necessity for restocking the gardens sometimes arose from adverse weather conditions. It was noted in two consecutive reports that plants had been damaged and in 1860, for instance, it was feared ‘that the severity of the winter may have occasioned considerable injury to the less hardy plants … [and] the beauty of many will be much impaired’.56 The injury caused by severe frosts was recorded in the following year’s report also: ‘… there is reason to fear that many trees are killed, and that a considerable number of others will have to be cut down nearly or even quite to the ground. It is now ascertained that it is quite useless to attempt the cultivation of many species, especially of the Coniferae which are able to endure the milder climate of the south and west of England.’57 No mention was made of any donations during these years. In the report of 1862, however, a number of donors were acknowledged and some gifts received were a result of a tour of botanical gardens and nurseries undertaken by the Curator, Mr Stratton, the previous summer. These included 108 hothouse plants from Liverpool, 278 hothouse and hardy plants from Glasnevin, ‘very valuable plants’ of Ouvirandra fenestralis from Mr Bain at Trinity College Garden in Dublin, 40 plants from Edinburgh botanical gardens, 114 plants from a Mr George Stirling of Edinburgh and 40 plants from the nursery Messrs Hugh Low and Co. of Clapton.58 Cambridge’s network of contacts was now established and the volume of plants arriving at the garden was comparable to that of Dublin. Clearly visits to gardens around the country could have a significant effect in generating donations and it was a common practice for curators of all gardens to periodically make tours of the country and occasionally the continent. In 1863 there was acknowledgement of 74 plants received from Regent’s Park Botanical Garden which were chiefly valuable from a medical point of view and note was made that ‘The Syndicate had previously presented duplicate plants to this and other Botanical Gardens, and have pleasure of observing the advantages derived from such a system of interchange.’59 The strengthening of these relationships continued; the following year it was recorded that 30 palms and conifers, all new to the collection at Cambridge, were received from Edinburgh, while 80 valuable kinds of hardy and greenhouse plants came from Liverpool and some rose seeds from Glasnevin.60 From the consistent reference to particular institutions, key players in the web of plant interchange were Edinburgh, Glasnevin, Liverpool and Kew. 142

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Mr Stratton died in 1864 and was replaced by Mr William Mudd of Great Ayton, Yorkshire, and he set about ‘carefully examining the contents of the Plant-Houses to test the accuracy of the names given to the plants and is otherwise endeavouring to increase the usefulness and beauty of the collection’.61 To this end the gardens received a large quantity of bulbs from the Cape of Good Hope, donated by Mr J.T. Dickson of Downing College.62 Members of the university could be an important source for new plants, sometimes gathered during their travels abroad or received from friends. Almost every year from 1865 onwards donations were acknowledged in the annual reports. Glasnevin gardens continued to prove to be a very significant source of gifts particularly in the provision of ferns and orchidaceous plants.63 The reach of Cambridge’s plant exchange network had expanded by the late 1860s. Donations began to accrue from European gardens such as the Imperial Garden in St Petersburg and the university garden in Pesth, Hungary.64 Moreover, plants and seeds arrived from overseas gardens particularly within the empire but occasionally also from outside it, as well as from individuals travelling in the non-European world. For instance, it was acknowledged in 1870 that donations had been received from individuals, often connected to the university, from Australia, India and the Cape of Good Hope.65 Again in 1874 two bags of seeds were obtained from the Indian Plant Department, two bags of seeds from Baron von Mueller of Melbourne botanical gardens and seeds and plants from Professor Wright in Nepal.66 The list was shorter because although an expanding network was welcomed it also caused difficulties ‘owing to the necessity of not encouraging gifts of seeds of plants belonging to warmer regions, because there is not room for the proper cultivation of such plants when raised. The houses are overcrowded but the Professor and the Curator are unable to see in what manner the number of plants kept in them can be materially reduced without injuring the efficiency of the garden. Some of the finest and most valuable specimen-plants now threaten to grow through the roof of the house.’67 Thus even though a sound plant exchange network was fostered, tropical and desert plants could present challenges to the curators of gardens. Cambridge had a limited array of glasshouses and hothouses and thus saw the need to curb the receipt of plants requiring these conditions, even as the empire expanded deeper into the tropical world. 143

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Nonetheless the trades continued and by 1878 it could be reported that 150 members of the university had used the garden for the study of botany and many thousands of specimens had been furnished to teachers of botany.68 The garden’s role in university education continued to carry significance particularly in the provision of specimens for students to examine. With the death of Mudd in 1879, Irwin Lynch was appointed Curator. He reported being in correspondence with the following gardens: Kew, Edinburgh, Glasnevin, Trinity Dublin, Chelsea, Oxford, Saharunpore, Jardins des Plantes, St Petersburg and the Department of Agriculture, Washington DC,69 indicating the fundamental importance of good connections for any curator of a prominent garden. Donations continued apace in the 1880s, with Lynch reporting receiving 2,600 plants and 1,285 packets of seeds in 1881 including many useful stove and greenhouse plants.70 Not only was knowledge of plants exchanged through donations but Lynch could report exhibiting ‘many interesting specimens from this garden at the meetings of the Scientific Committee of the Royal Horticultural Society in London: and several plants from this collection have been figured in the Botanical Magazine and other well known Scientific Journals’.71 Plainly the prestige of the University of Cambridge gardens was displayed through such publications and knowledge about the collection was brought to a broader audience. In 1882 Lynch also noted that a special collection of medical plants had been formed to aid that branch of education at the university. The syndicate acknowledged its special debt to Kew for the provision of medicinal species as well as rubber-producing plants and other economic species including cycads.72 In the same year Lynch made a tour of gardens to gather information about glasshouses, boilers and planting techniques as well as enriching the exchange network. He visited Glasnevin and Trinity College Dublin, as well as Manchester and Liverpool botanic gardens and the Duke of Devonshire’s gardens at Chatsworth. Lynch hoped that the excursion would yield about 312 plants by exchange, particularly rare species not in the gardens in Cambridge. Maintaining the profile of the garden, consolidating the collection and obtaining information on the latest technological and cultivation techniques was enhanced through such visits. In Dublin, Lynch noted the effect of the moist and mild climate on plant success. He commented, for instance, that the Killarney fern ‘is cultivated about Dublin with a success quite 144

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rare in England, and as soon as I can obtain a stock I hope to be, by the help of my observations, quite as successful’.73 At Trinity College gardens Lynch observed that the ‘wild-garden’ design was extremely efficacious and that the common opium poppy grew well under trees even though it was not supposed to. The whole expedition was a worthy exercise by Lynch; he received plants and much information on horticultural techniques as well as valued guidance on glasshouse construction and maintenance. He requested the syndicate to consider providing him with funding to attend as a juror (for which he received an invitation) at the International Exhibition of Horticulture at St Petersburg in 1884, where he could also visit its botanical garden.74 The value of such excursions resided in the trading of knowledge as well as in the accumulation of specimens. For wealthier gardens such opportunities could be seized although for smaller and more poorly resourced institutions such tours were a rarity. By the latter decades of the nineteenth century the new garden at Cambridge was exceedingly well networked and an acknowledged site for botanical education, research and display. For the university the movement to a new site on the outskirts of the city not only enhanced the internal ordering of the collection but also invigorated Cambridge’s standing as a centre of accumulation and calculation. The greater size of the space enabled a larger assemblage of species to be planted and it provided a rationale for developing more intense reciprocal links with other important institutions. Both the professional teaching and curatorial staff deepened these linkages through correspondence, excursions to other gardens, species trading and the education of potential amateur and trained plant hunters and in so doing made Cambridge an important repository of botanical knowledge.

Glasnevin: A Centre for Accumulation and Exchange The gardens at Glasnevin were no less well-placed than Cambridge to develop a network of contacts that would enhance the status of the garden and provide impetus for its development. The role of the professor in advancing agricultural as well as botanical knowledge was 145

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established early. In 1796 the RDS pronounced that the garden would have a professor who would deliver lectures in botany in general as well as separate lectures on the cattle and hay gardens ‘for the instruction of common farmers, their servants, or labouring men, all of whom are to be admitted to the lectures gratis … That like lectures be given on the garden for dyers’ use, and that for the purpose of extending practical knowledge, particularly in husbandry, samples and seeds be allowed to be given, and even plants, where they can be spared, to all persons who may wish for them.’75 The general lectures on botany would require a subscription by the students and the professor would be allowed use the garden and glasshouses to deliver them. As early as 1797 £100 was paid to Dr Wade to enable him to make excursions and to employ plant hunters to procure or purchase plants for the new garden.76 The Head Gardener, Mr Underwood, was also instructed in 1800 to be sent to England to acquire stock for the garden. In that same year £50 4s 4d was paid to Mr James Lynch, optician, for instruments he provided for the garden’s laboratory. By 1801, experiments were being carried out in the garden and the results were published in the Proceedings of the RDS. Dr Wade was instructed to carry out trials on the culture of potatoes in various types of soils and to test the planting of shoots, cuttings and scoopings from the seed of apples. Such work would be helpful to agriculture and expand academic knowledge on botany.77 Moreover, the public was also being encouraged to send along plants that might be useful either directly to Dr Wade’s residence in Capel Street or to the garden itself. The garden would also sell some of its plants where duplicates existed or where testing was completed. In 1802, for instance, Mr Underwood disposed of potatoes which had been used in experiments the previous year for the sum of £15 5s 4½d.78 Gradually the garden began to devise an apprenticeship system to train gardeners and to provide the labour necessary to run the whole operation. In 1812 it was recommended that six young lads aged 17 be admitted to work as apprentices and be paid 9 shillings per week where they would be trained over the course of a year and offered a certificate by the head gardener on completion of their apprenticeship.79 The space was to increasingly become a centre for horticultural education and training as well as a site for the accumulation of plants. In the hay and grass gardens experiments were 146

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carried out to ascertain by chemical means the quantity of saccharine matter of each species of mown grass. John White, the undergardener, was paid a sum of £10 in 1813 for collecting native plants, while the donations of the Reverend Robert Walshe of Glasnevin, for seeds from Ternate and other equinoctial islands in the East Indies, were acknowledged.80 The volume of donations began to expand as the garden developed and by the 1810s there were regular (although not systematic) acknowledgements made of donors in the annual reports. In 1816 the Countess of Loudon and Moira on her return from India donated a variety of seeds from Hindostan,81 and two years later acknowledgement was made of exotic seeds received from Lord O’Neal and for 30 species of seeds sent by Mr Corbet from the ship the Conqueror, located off the coast of St Helena.82 Furthermore, in the same year the Committee of Botany requested that £20 be paid to the under-gardener, Mr Mackie, for over 100 plants that he had procured for the garden. The Committee of Botany made the following observations: That with respect to the growth of plants and seeds sent to the Botanical Garden, particularly those brought from foreign parts within the last two years, your committee having examined the plants and interrogated the gardener, report, that very few failures have taken place in the growth of perennial seeds and plants, and none attributable to neglect or inattention; but that many seeds transmitted were annuals and biennials, which have failed at the end of the first or second year, this climate not permitting the seeds to come to sufficient maturity for reproduction: that in general one half of the seeds transmitted have been sown in the same year, and that a number of those remaining have been sown this season, which they hope and expect will be ready for inspection of the members of the Society this summer … many perennial plants, the seeds of which were transmitted, are in a flourishing and healthy state in the several houses at the Botanic Garden.83

Exotic plants were expanding in number but many were not capable of acclimatizing to the local temperate climate. The committee also recognized the intensification of the plant procurement network and they recommended that the Head Gardener maintain a ledger of all plants received.84 By 1834 this ledger had been established and recorded 147

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all plants received and donated by Glasnevin. It is an invaluable source of information about the diversity of plants and donors in contact with the gardens over the remainder of the nineteenth century (figure 28).

28 Front Page of the Plant Book, 1834

Many of the donors in the early years were people travelling around or working in some part of the empire and conveying plants or seeds back to Ireland themselves or through intermediaries. Those with family connections to Ireland or to the Royal Dublin Society 148

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were some of the first to provide seeds and specimens to the garden and these donations heightened the reputation of the garden as an important institution. Many donations bypassed Kew and came straight to Dublin. For instance, the Reverend Mr Goff presented a parcel of seeds from India which were the donation of a Colonel Carpenter,85 while 27 seeds from Calcutta botanical garden were sent by Mr Sweetman, and Sir Harding Gifford, the Irish-born Chief Justice of Ceylon, donated 40 species of Ceylon seeds and 25 species of Cape seeds.86 The government botanist of New South Wales, Stewart King, had his son from the 48th Regiment bring home seeds from that territory.87 Members of the RDS or their families also donated seeds from their travels and there is the gradual emergence of inter-garden exchange networks. Of the overseas gardens the most significant was Calcutta botanical gardens, one of the earliest to be developed in colonial territories.88 Captain Anderson of the brig Mary sent four cocoa nut trees from the Indies, while Joseph Farran sent a fine Malabar nut tree to Glasnevin.89 Established European gardens also began to make contact with Dublin. Monsieur Thouin of the Paris Jardins de Plantes sent through Joseph Sabine (FRS), Secretary to the Horticultural Society of London, 190 species of rare and valuable seeds, and he also delivered a desiderata for Paris, hoping to receive some seeds or plants from Glasnevin and developing a system of reciprocation.90 There were many repeat donors like Sir Harding Gifford who continued to send seeds from Ceylon, and donations from Australia became more regular. Nonetheless although the plant exchange system was commendable, the limitations of such a system were also being voiced. Sir William Bentham, in his report to the RDS in 1824, commented: Your committee anxious that your Botanic Garden should attain the highest degree of perfection to which their exertions are capable of advancing it, and convinced that the promotion of Botanical Science in this country will much depend on the good order, cultivation, and extent of the specimens of vegetable nature with which it is furnished, cannot but regret that the means which they possess are altogether inadequate to the satisfactory discharge of the trust reposed in them … [due to] the want of a disposable fund for the purchase of plants … [thus] the impossibility of completing your 149

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collection of Botanical species by the present mode of obtaining them.91

He recommended the allocation of an annual sum for plant purchase. Clearly the exchange network served an important purpose in the circulation of plant material and knowledge, but it was also viewed as necessary to obtain plants through commercial channels. Overseas donors often sent plants of interest to them but not necessarily the most significant for a botanical garden. The demands on garden funds for glasshouses, labelling, salaries, heating systems and buildings, however, meant there was little left for buying plants. Thus donations continued to be an important source with, for instance, the Right Honourable Lord Oriel donating 160 species of trees and shrubs.92 Dublin was early to establish a system of exchange and when Walter Wade died in 1825 the foundations of the Dublin garden had been put on a secure footing. Wade had established the educational function of the garden through his lecture series, an apprenticeship scheme had been set up, experiments in economic botany had begun and a plant exchange system was being nurtured. The garden had been placed on the botanical map of Europe and solid contacts had been established with gardens at home and overseas.

Promoting agriculture: experiments in economic botany With the appointment of Professor Litton, the agricultural function of the garden was reinvigorated and this made it different to both Cambridge and Belfast. Bearing in mind that one of the original purposes of the gardens was to promote farming development, Litton incorporated elements of agriculture and the principles of planting into his lectures. For instance, in his syllabus of lectures for 1826, Litton extolled ‘the properties of the different varieties of soils and manures, with the method of adapting them to the plants usually employed in agriculture [and] … the natural history of trees, either actually reared or capable of being reared with advantage in Ireland, and the uses to which they are applied in the arts and manufactures’.93 The RDS approved the spending of £92 9s 5d for rebuilding the bow of the lecture room and 150

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making the professor’s house more habitable.94 The RDS also resolved that the Committee of Botany look into the idea of establishing a professorship of Practical Agriculture and the means of rendering the garden subservient to this purpose.95 No separate professorship responsible for agricultural advancement did get established but some major experiments in economic botany did take place. This desire to nurture commercial botany was experienced more intensely in Dublin than the other two gardens. One area of experimentation that the garden undertook was in the production of silk. The Committee of Botany in 1827 suggested that ‘the growth of silk in Ireland is practicable and would be of great benefit to the country’.96 They recommended that ‘the most advisable step to forward this branch of business in Ireland would be the propagation of the different species of mulberry tree at the Botanic Gardens, on an extensive scale, and the laying in such supply as would enable the Society to grant young trees to those who may be willing to engage in this branch of industry’.97 It was recommended that the plants be procured from a nursery plantation in Mitchelstown, County Tipperary, where some tests with white mulberry trees had already been carried out and it was stipulated that the professor would ‘lay before the public such information on the culture of these plants, on the habits of the silk-worm, and the best means of procuring the valuable produce’.98 Researching crops of potential commercial value to Ireland was hugely stressed by the Society. In 1828 Sir Isaac Weld (member of the RDS and Vice-President from 1849) submitted a letter to the Assistant Secretary of the RDS offering his experience with the cultivation of mulberry trees. Weld was a descendant of a learned and pious clergyman, and in 1795 found himself distressed by conditions in Ireland and in Europe generally, and set out on a voyage to North America. He reached Philadelphia in November  1795 and over the next 15 months travelled through Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, and Lower and Upper Canada, returning to Ireland via New York City. In January 1799 he published an account of his voyage, Travels Through the States of North America, and the Provinces of Upper and Lower Canada, During the Years 1795, 1796, and 1797, which was an immediate success. It went through several editions and was translated into French, German, Dutch, and Italian.99 151

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He undertook a variety of other excursions around Europe and Ireland and after an extended trip to Italy, where silk was being produced, Weld brought back to Ireland seeds of the white mulberry tree. He presented some to Glasnevin and raised the remainder on his estate in south Dublin. He reported that he succeeded in raising a considerable quantity of plants. He also visited the plantation in Mitchelstown which contained more than one variety of white mulberry. Weld observed that these were not the first occasions that experiments with silk worms had been carried out in Ireland and that the ‘silk-worm will spin in this climate, and also will increase and multiply, in its usual prolific ratio, is a fact’.100 However, Weld was to report that in his experimental plantation there was little prospect of success. The problem, he identified, was in the lateness in the development of the leaves, probably arising from the imperfect ripening of the preceding summer’s wood. The experiment in Mitchelstown had yet to yield conclusive results as the trees had been so short a time planted. Weld observed in Italy that the expansion of the leaves corresponded with the opening of the silk-worm eggs and ‘a certain temperature appears to influence both equally’.101 Artificial means of retarding the opening of the eggs until the leaves were sufficiently developed was possible (for example, in Italy the eggs were stored in glass bottles with the lees of wine in cold, dark cellars), but might not be necessarily a commercial option. Weld was of the opinion that silk might only be raised in Ireland by associated companies or wealthy individuals who could afford the expense of feeding, maintaining and cultivating silk worms and mulberry trees. Even in Italy he conjectured that the raising of silk was an expensive and precarious business. Nonetheless the botanical garden did acquire, in the spring of 1828, 1,000 white mulberry bushes and six grafted ones from Mitchelstown nursery and they were planted. An additional 200 white mulberry trees were donated by a Miss Colville of Clontarf, Dublin. Although the trees grew in Glasnevin, the difficulty of producing silk made their commercial value to farmers limited and this trial did not precipitate a silk industry developing in Ireland. Notwithstanding the failure of the experiment to produce a viable plant, the RDS remained conscious of the need for the gardens to have an applied role and by 1830 they were worried ‘that the Botanical Garden is of an extent unnecessarily great for botanical purposes purely scientific, and that it would be highly 152

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desirable to devote a given portion thereof to the establishment of an Horticultural department, provided the Society can afford the expense of the outlay’.102 In his report on the state of the garden, Professor Litton made the following recommendations to make the garden more ‘practically useful’: he wanted in particular use to be made of the cattle garden and the hay garden for experimenting on plants useful to agriculture; he also wanted the esculent garden to be promoted so that fruit and vegetables could be provided to the professor for his lectures and for exhibiting to the general public the ‘improvements in this part of practical science’.103 He also recommended the setting up of a botanical museum and a small library to further enhance the practical utility of the garden. Dublin therefore carved a niche of distinctiveness – more utilitarian than Cambridge, where science was valorized over agriculture, or Belfast, where pleasure surmounted both botany and farming. Having the garden serve national, commercial interests as well as represent taxonomic order carried a lot of weight. Although the superintendent Ninian Niven’s tenure was short – he resigned his post in 1838 – he did strengthen the plant exchange network and began to pay particular attention to saving seed from potatoes with a view to propagating new varieties in the future. Indeed, in 1835 Niven was awarded a silver medal by the RDS for his essay on the potato and the cause of the recent partial failures.104 The essay was published in the Irish Farmer’s and Gardener’s Magazine in 1835 and in it he was concerned with the ‘dry rot’. He considered atmospheric conditions to be the cause of the disease and a fungus the consequence of it. He thought that the atmospheric influence attacked bruised or cut potato seed and thus he recommended that hill farmers be encouraged to save their own seed to avoid the damage sustained by seed potatoes that were imported.105 In a later essay during the height of the Famine, Niven observed the presence of blight on the potato but he attributed this disease also to atmospheric effects.106 Niven continued with the garden’s plant exchange network and the first entries to the plant donation book were made in 1834 (figure 29). In the autumn of the same year Niven made a short visit to gardens in Scotland and England including the botanic gardens at Edinburgh, Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham and Kew. He also visited the Duke of Northumberland’s estate and Lady Stanley of Hooton. He received upwards of 1,000 donations and bought an additional 261 species from 153

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specialist nurseries.107 The following spring, Niven went on a 15-day, plant-hunting excursion to England. In a letter to the RDS he reported that he had visited the great houses of Wentworth and Chatsworth as well as the botanical gardens in Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool and the newly established garden in Sheffield. He noted that 600 species of plants had been donated to him by Mountnorris and that they included many hardy, exotic and expensive rarities. He also expected to receive upwards of 500 species from the other gardens he visited and he viewed the trip as important for establishing channels of ‘reciprocal exchange’.108 Acknowledgements began to be more readily made to donations received from North America also. In 1836 Niven secured £68 from the RDS to purchase some rare orchidaceous plants on offer from a Cork nursery and he also noted some of the rarer plants he received since his excursions to England and Scotland and implored the RDS to provide sufficient money to maintain the ‘reciprocal principle’.109 He went to considerable lengths to pursue his vision for the gardens and to deepen its range of species. In the late summer of 1836 Niven made a short excursion to Connemara where he collected plants and made new contacts.110 In a report to the RDS in 1837 he outlined the progress made in the garden and in the acquisition of new plants. He particularly noted the contribution of rare seeds sent from Mr John Tweedie of Buenos Ayres whom he described as ‘one of the most persevering and indefatigable of botanical collectors’.111 Most notable was the flowering of a plant from seed sent by Tweedie and named ‘Verbena tweedieana’. The Committee of Botany recommended to the RDS that foreign collectors be encouraged ‘by some moderate pecuniary contribution to the expense of their missions (as is the practice in all the principal botanical establishments in the empire)’.112 They noted that the Tweedie seeds had served the gardens well as they procured in exchange for the Verbena £50 worth of plants from a Liverpool nurseryman. The value of developing networks with gardens and plant-hunters was increasingly being recognized by the RDS and the status that this practice imbued upon an institution and its curator was acknowledged. Niven had done much to enhance this network and he could report to the Committee on Botany in 1837 that he had made a trip to Edinburgh and Glasgow botanical gardens and to the West Highlands where he acquired species for the British arrangement of 154

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plants. In addition he obtained two species of plantain from MacNab of Edinburgh and he believed this to be the first time for this species to be introduced in Ireland. He also noted though that Glasnevin did not have a glasshouse range comparable to Edinburgh’s and thus did not have the temperature or space to cultivate these giants of the vegetable kingdom as they had been in Scottish hothouses.113

29 Sample Page from the Plant Book

In his 1837 annual report, Niven again highlighted the role of the Verbena tweedieana in helping him to cultivate important networks across Britain and in establishing substantial amounts of credit with 155

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nurserymen who wished to stock this new plant. Niven recognized the commercial value of distributing rare and unusual plants but he also noted the need to establish what he referred to as ‘friendly correspondence’ with the plant trade in general for both the benefit of the gardens in Dublin and for its reputation on a national and wider scale. Building a reliable and steadfast name in the botanical circuit was important in the development of successful networks of exchange and commerce. In this report Niven summarized the exchange ledger since he established it in 1834. It recorded the following balance sheet of traffic: 1834 1835 1836 1837

Given 76 284 350 1200

Total

1810

Received 1411 472 406 1336 3625114

Source: Plant Donation Book, Glasnevin 1834– Clearly Glasnevin was receiving more than it was donating, but a healthy number of plants were travelling both ways. Niven also noted in this report some significant overseas donors. Seeds and plants came from New Holland, the East Indies, Greece, the West Indies, India, South America and Van Deimen’s Land. Niven did not confine himself to the curatorial work alone; he also presented papers at the meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (for instance he presented a paper at the Liverpool meeting in 1837), some of which were published and thus he was nurturing the academic and experimental science of botany as well as the practical dimensions of curating a large and developing garden, and forging links with other thinkers in the field.115 Nonetheless, despite the inroads made by Niven in deepening the professional networks through which the garden obtained plants and expertise, and despite his efforts to make the garden known to the wider national and international audience, his tenure was brief. His relationship with Professor Litton was strained and thus he resigned his post in 1838, leaving it to David 156

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Moore to further the progress of the garden as an important centre in a burgeoning network of botanical establishments.

Networking, experimenting and placing Glasnevin on the map: David Moore From a shortlist of three candidates which included Andrew Murray (who would become the Curator at Cambridge), David Moore was appointed and immediately set about improving the garden. In his first report he noted the deficiency of American trees and shrubs and hoped that this could be remedied.116 In a letter to the botanical committee he also noted that plant donations had been growing apace with Glasnevin donating 879 species to public gardens and other establishments, of which 400 were sent to Belfast gardens.117 In his annual report for 1839 Moore reported that he had made a brief excursion to Antrim and Derry to collect plants listed as missing from Glasnevin’s British collection as well as supplying some to the garden’s correspondents. On this trip Moore found two species of grass which were not known to grow in any other place in Britain and Ireland and he was sending some samples to the major establishments in England and Scotland as well as dried specimens to the continent. Moore was immediately boosting Dublin’s scientific calibre by supplying rarities to other institutions. He reported that he had also made a tour through England and Scotland, funded by the RDS, and had acquired over 1,800 new species of plant. He presented an inventory of the places that either donated or sold plants to him. They included Edinburgh, Chelsea, Liverpool, Birmingham, and Glasgow botanical gardens, as well as private nurseries and private estate gardens.118 David Moore was immediately nurturing the plant network established in the garden and making trips to gather plants and make face-to-face contact with other curators and horticulturalists at home and abroad. The following year Moore would report that he made a one-month excursion to counties Clare, Cork and Kerry to collect unusual Irish plants which Professor Litton had found wanting in the arrangement of indigenous plants. As a national institution Glasnevin was at 157

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the forefront of the promotion of native flora. Moore also began experiments in the agricultural department, including a species of vetch and a new variety of Swedish turnip being sown to test their suitability to Irish agriculture.119 Moore consistently made tours through Ireland and Britain to obtain plants and strengthen links. In 1842 he reported on his excursion to England with the twofold purpose of ‘making additions to the Society’s collections of plants, and obtaining such information as I could procure by personal inspection of the most approved structures in the way of plant stoves and conservatories’.120 He began by visiting nurseries, private collections and the botanical gardens in Liverpool. He then proceeded to Manchester, Chatsworth, Sheffield, Derby arboretum, Birmingham botanical garden and then onto London. In London he visited Kew, Chelsea and the new Regent’s Park garden as well as a variety of important nurseries and private gardens and he finished his excursion at Exeter and Plymouth.121 Moore’s connections with the plantsmen of Britain and Ireland were being regularly deepened. Major donors were recorded in his annual reports and all plants received and donated continued to be recorded in the plant book established by Niven. By the mid-1840s Moore could note the impact of the new glasshouse developments and other improvements to the garden: ‘… the increasing interest taken by the Public to this Establishment, shows that they duly appreciate the improvements going forward, which is manifest from the greater number of donations of seeds from friends, both at home and abroad, and also by the prevailing classes who visit the garden’.122 Clearly, under Moore’s tenure, the garden was expanding its collections, its network of contacts and its prestige among the gardens of Britain and Ireland. However, while the stock of representative plants was being nurtured, the arboretum replenished and expanded, and the glasshouse collection enhanced, the agricultural role of the garden did not go unheeded and it is in experiments with potatoes that Moore would make some substantial advances. Through this he furthered scientific contacts as well as providing knowledge for the farmers of Ireland.

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Finding a solution to potato blight: David Moore’s efforts The appearance of potato blight in 1845 marked the beginning of a devastating cycle of crop failure across parts of western Europe, particularly the Low Countries, France, Britain and Ireland. In the latter case the effects of the disease coupled with the local landholding conditions and political relationship between Britain and Ireland resulted in catastrophic human and environmental devastation. Widespread death and mass emigration were two of the most immediate social consequences of the Famine and there is now considerable scholarship on the demographic and economic consequences of the disease in Ireland.123 Moreover, literary scholars have chartered the cultural response to the food shortages through analyses of songs, prayers and fictional works documenting the crisis. While the potato disease is thought to have spread from Belgium into Ireland in the summer of 1845, destroying a substantial amount of this staple food crop, by the following summer the blight had reappeared and virtually wiped out the harvest. While the Famine prompted political and social responses, it also generated a scientific investigation of the disease especially at Glasnevin where David Moore played a particularly significant role in analysing the cause and possible solutions to the blight. Scholars have paid attention to the general scientific characteristics of the Irish potato blight124 but Charles Nelson’s work, which focuses on the role of Moore and the gardens, is the only significant research detailing his contribution to the local and international debate about the causes of the disease.125 This episode highlights the role of this botanic garden within a wider network of scientific research in three important ways. First, it underpins Glasnevin’s place as a centre for experiment that moved beyond the investigation of the successful cultivation of plants, shrubs and trees. While research had been carried out on the propagation of new species and some inquiry into the economic botany of new crops that might be of commercial value to Ireland, the potato experiments represented a sustained effort to comprehend and treat a poorly understood disease within Europe. Second, the experiments carried out by Moore and his reporting of them deepened the circuit of scientific networks of which the garden was a part. In particular, Moore’s correspondence with the Reverend Miles J. Berkeley was significant. 159

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Berkeley, the clergyman and amateur naturalist, was a graduate of Cambridge University, where a close acquaintance with Henslow was fostered. This stimulated his interest in botany and particularly cryptogamy.126 His links to Ireland extended further than his work on the Irish potato disease as he was encouraged to pursue his interest in cryptogams by Professor William Henry Harvey of Trinity College Dublin. His contribution to cryptogamic botany was not ‘confined to the taxonomy of fungi. Indeed, he can with some justification be regarded as the founder of plant pathology, for he was the first to appreciate the economic importance of the incidence of plant disease caused by fungi.’127 The government commission established to determine the cause of the blight consulted extensively with Berkeley. The connection between Moore and Berkeley served to widen the garden’s status as a centre for scientific exchange and expertise and both men were members of the Dublin Natural History Society. Third, this episode underscores the importance of the agricultural dimension of the gardens as first laid out in the initial ‘charter’. In this sense the local was important in shaping botanical knowledge with Glasnevin playing a significant role in understanding a plant disease devastating the economy of the island. While the arboretum, systematic beds and glasshouse collections seemed to represent the core function of the gardens and whose aesthetic appearance attracted popular and scientific attention, the study of potato blight focused attention on the practical over the ornamental, the mundane over the glamorous, the microscopic over the macro-scale. The effect of innovation in microscope technology in the 1830s enabled botanists to increase their knowledge of the lower organisms including mosses, fungi and lichens128 and this would impact on the understanding of the disease affecting potatoes in Ireland. In 1845 David Moore studied potato blight using the microscopes of the Dublin Microscopical Club which provided him with a detailed picture of the fungus attacking potatoes.129 In mid-nineteenth century Europe the cause of the late summer blight of potatoes perplexed the scientists of the day. In keeping with the dominant theories of disease transmission, many investigators thought that the malady was produced by the weather conditions of the summer of 1845 and that it might have been exacerbated by a degeneration of the seed potato from years of propagation within Europe. Such a 160

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view found favour with important scientists such as UCL’s Professor of Botany and editor of the Gardeners’ Chronicle John Lindley who claimed ‘that the cause of the calamity is … clearly traceable to the season … It is true that a minute fungus has made matters infinitely worse; but that is, we quite believe, a secondary source.’130 Lindley was a member of the government commission established by the Lord Lieutenant to investigate the crisis in 1845 with Dr John Playfair and Professor Robert Kane. All three shared the view that the disease was a result of climatic conditions. David Moore reported first noticing the disease in Glasnevin in August 1845 and others also noted the presence of the disease in different parts of the island. Treating the gardens as a quasilaboratory, in an article to the Irish Farmers’ Journal in September 1845, Moore reported fungal attacks on the tubers of decaying potatoes at the site but he concurred with Lindley that the disease’s cause was atmospheric conditions.131 He proceeded with experiments in 1845 on the preservation of potatoes, reporting to the RDS that dryness retarded the disease and recommending the digging of uninfected potatoes and storing them in dry conditions. The Dublin Natural History Society was also conducting investigations and members such as William Andrews concurred with the dominant theory that the disease was carried in the conditions of the atmosphere.132 Alternative explanations of the potato blight began to emerge in the early 1840s. In North America the potato disease noticed in 1843 was attributed to a fungal infection. Similarly in Belgium, Abbé Edouard van den Hecke and Professor Charles Morren both supported a fungal explanation for the murrain. Charles Montagne, a French army doctor, described the fungus and named it Botrytis infestans at a meeting of the Société Philomatique in Paris in August 1845.133 Montagne sent specimens of infected potato leaves to Berkeley in Northamptonshire where the disease had not yet struck. Berkeley compared the leaves sent by Montagne with those of English diseased plants and noted that the same fungus appeared in both. He concluded that the fungus was the primary cause of the disease and not a secondary effect. In fact Berkeley believed that the fungus developed in conditions of excessive wet and he accurately described the course of the disease and championed the fungal theory in Britain.134 David Moore continued with his experiments in Glasnevin through 1845 and early 1846. He read Berkeley’s paper (1846 a) and wrote to him with examples of fungi 161

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he had observed on the diseased potatoes at Glasnevin. Moore reported in the spring of 1846 that keeping diseased potatoes in dry storage over winter did not prevent the disease recurring as was previously thought, nor did steeping them in lime and water before planting affect shoot production. He also realized that diseased potatoes did not contaminate sound tubers. While acknowledging the presence of the fungus on potatoes, Moore did not yet conclude that the fungus was the cause rather than an accompaniment to blight.135 Several experiments were taking place on finding a solution to the potato blight but as 1846 progressed it was clear that the disease was again going to decimate the Irish crop. It was known that the application of copper sulphate or bluestone on wheat seed prevented fungal infection and it was suggested that this remedy should be applied to potato tubers.136 Experiments took place in Glasnevin and elsewhere but proved unsuccessful as copper sulphate had to be sprayed on the foliage of the plant rather than on the tubers to be successful. Keeping in correspondence with Berkeley in the spring of 1846 it dawned on Moore that he had observed blight on potatoes raised from diseased tubers that had been stored during winter in one of the garden’s glasshouses. This led him to alter his view and concur with Berkeley that the disease must be caused by the fungus and not by climatic conditions per se. He thought that the fungal spores overwintered inside the tubers and developed again when the climate became more favourable for spore development. He reported this view in the Irish Farmers’ Journal137 and in a letter to Berkeley where he claimed ‘I cannot longer deny myself the pleasure of congratulating you on the justness of your views relative to the Botrytis infestans being the cause of the potato disease and not the effect as I had supposed [emphasis in the original].’138 The endorsement of the fungal theory by Moore was reported by Lindley in the Gardeners’ Chronicle as follows: ‘Mr Moore’s name cannot fail to give new weight to the high authorities with whom the [fungal theory] commenced,’139 and although the fungal theory was still not widely believed, interest in it increased. Moore continued his observations at the botanic garden and noticed in 1846 that Phytophthora infestans was attacking other species of the Solanaceae family found in his glasshouses (Anthocercis ilicifolia). He also observed the presence of the fungus in tomato plants. Berkeley 162

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confirmed Moore’s claim that potato blight was present in other species including eggplants (Solanum melongera) and this he also reported in the Gardeners’ Chronicle. During 1846, Moore continued experimenting, with the application of copper sulphate and other compounds on the tubers as well as conducting experiments on the effect of ‘electro-culture’ on inducing the disease. Neither experiment produced positive results. Outside the botanic gardens the potato crop of 1846 had been totally destroyed, exacerbating the already critical situation for the population in general. He continued to report his findings to the RDS, accurately predicting the recurrence of the blight in 1847 but ‘like Berkeley, was hampered because he was opposed by a large number of people in influential positions, who did not accept that the epidemic was caused by a fungus’.140 Moore did not observe the transmission of the blight through airborne spores, as Nelson opines that it was unlikely he had any uninfected seed potatoes. Nonetheless, Moore made a notable contribution to the understanding of potato blight, its source and the progress of the disease. This chapter in the botanic garden’s history marks the significance of Glasnevin as a site of experimentation. Not only was Moore tending the systematic collections, extending the arboretum and imploring the RDS to support his programme for glasshouse development, but he was also concerned with research into agricultural plants. The Famine provides us with an unfortunate but relevant insight into the extent to which Moore engaged with close observation, trial and experiment in advancing knowledge about the blight devastating the potato crop across Ireland between 1845 and 1847. It also indicates Moore’s contacts with scientists and naturalists working around the UK in this period. Although not directly part of the metropolitan, scientific nucleus of London, his stature was nonetheless acknowledged through his contacts with Berkeley and Lindley during the debate about the causes of potato blight and in advancing the thesis that a parasitical fungus was the source of the disease rather than conditions in the atmosphere. Using comparative experiments with fungal diseases in grain crops, as well as microscopic observation of the progress of the disease in potatoes, Moore was deploying the theories and methods of scientific practice of the day and in so doing was connecting with a more widespread network of investigation and extending Glasnevin’s reputation as a site of serious scientific endeavour. 163

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In the case of Dublin, its status as a national institution helped it to carve out a distinct and influential network of contacts throughout Britain and beyond. The national context helped to further the garden’s role in the advancement of agricultural economics particularly with respect to the trialling of particular crops for commercial cultivation. Its status as Ireland’s premier botanic garden also helped it attract a large series of plant donations from individual plant hunters and collectors from other privately owned and publicly funded gardens. The professors of Botany as well as the curators nurtured important links with leading botanists in other institutions through correspondence, travel, plant exchange and published work and in so doing fostered Glasnevin as an significant centre of accumulation and calculation.

Belfast’s Network of Contacts Compared to the other two sites there is little extant material which would indicate the pattern and strength of Belfast’s plant networks and consequently the analysis of this case is brief. Without the strong support of a university institution or funding through the public purse, Belfast’s resources were limited. Although Queen’s University paid a small subsidy to the garden and used it for teaching purposes, the wider role of the garden within the scientific community was more limited than at Cambridge or Dublin. The Belfast Natural History Society was the chief learned society whose membership mainly made up the Belfast Botanical and Horticultural Society which founded the botanical gardens. The BNHS was a lively forum for debate, with papers in natural science delivered regularly, including botany, medicine, zoology and chemistry, at the Museum Building in Belfast. Members also presented papers at the meetings of the BAAS especially when hosted in Belfast as in 1852. The membership of the BNHS was drawn from professional, scientific and commercial circles. They included doctors, teachers at the Belfast Academy and later at the newly founded Queen’s College Belfast, clergymen and business people.141 It was these people who were the central players in the botanic garden and they sought to establish links with other institutions. 164

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Belfast gradually became part of the plant exchange network developing across Britain. In particular Glasnevin supplied plants to the gardens and occasionally received plants from Belfast. The Curator Daniel Ferguson (1836 to 1864) had been an employee at Glasgow botanical gardens since 1820 and thus had connections with that institution. Men of Irish stock in the colonial administration overseas also donated plants to the garden, in particular Edward Madden, but the records are weak on the precise numbers of plants coming into and being delivered out of the garden. Joseph Forsyth Johnson (Curator during the latter part of the nineteenth century) did produce a book, The Natural Principles of Landscape Gardening or the Adornment of Land for Perpetual Beauty (1874). In it he provided a detailed instructional guide to gardeners on how to create beauty by ‘show[ing] how arrangements can be made in accordance with natural beauty – how to enhance without impairing the amenity of nature’.142 Through a discussion of colour; the ‘line of beauty’, be it along straight lines or following the picturesque advocacy of curved lines and rounded trees; the use of shrubs, trees and grass; and the general architecture of a garden, Johnson provided a template for achieving an aesthetically pleasing space. In the book he does not mention at all botanical gardening or his experience in the Belfast one and this perhaps reflects the decreasing importance of taxonomic order in these gardens. Unlike Cambridge and Dublin, in Belfast the network of professional connections seems weaker and less developed, and the documentary evidence to exemplify any relationships far more scanty.

Conclusion While botanic gardens served the local institutional setting in which they emerged, they also formed part of a wider circuit of connections. Forming, maintaining and deepening networks of plant transfer and knowledge exchange were crucial for the development and status of a garden within the international, national and regional setting. The exchange of plant material lay at the heart of the accumulation processes and in Cambridge and Dublin strong bilateral links were established between these institutions and other gardens around the country and 165

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beyond. These links enabled them to keep their gardens well stocked and to add new or rare species to their existing collections. It also helped to minimize the demands on the budget to buy new plants. While plants moved between places, people also moved in parallel and sometimes intertwined networks. Curators regularly travelled to other gardens (privately owned and public) to gain knowledge, for instance about glasshouse construction or the acclimatization of particular species, as well as to acquire new specimens. These expeditions regularly yielded new stock but also created intellectual links where botanical information could be traded. Botanizing trips by Cambridge’s professors and expeditions by Dublin’s curators around the country widened and deepened those links which ultimately would enhance the visibility and status of a particular garden. They reinforced the role of these sites as nodes of accumulation. However, these gardens also formed the nucleus of educational exchange and centres of calculation. In Cambridge, students were trained to recalibrate the natural world through a scientific lens which would enable them to discipline their observations of plant life and attach meaning to this world beyond surface admiration. Learning how to conduct work in the field was part of this process. In Belfast and Dublin the educational exchanges were more horticultural in emphasis, where apprentices learned the art and craft of gardening. But in the field of agricultural experiment Glasnevin also became a centre of calculation, running trials on the feasibility of developing a silk industry and in the 1840s investigating the causes and possible cures of the potato blight. While these spaces therefore worked within the wider social networks of nineteenthcentury natural history, they were also important sites for popular instruction and entertainment and it is towards these issues that I wish to turn in the forthcoming chapter.

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Popular Science, Public Pleasure and the Botanical Garden as a Site of Education and Entertainment … the botanic garden, from the sixteenth century, had always had a political meaning as spectacle. As it summoned the variety of nature to one climax, and ordered and named the pleasures of colour, form, and smell, the garden served to make power appear beautiful and perhaps natural.1 R. Drayton, Nature’s Government

As well as being sites for the advancement of scientific botany, gardens were also important centres for the popular consumption of horticultural and botanical knowledge. They formed part of a widening network of spaces in which public audiences could be educated in the workings of nature. They would become important venues and vehicles through which science would be popularized. Historians of science have begun to take seriously the role of a visual imaginary in the popularization of science in ways which challenge earlier assumptions that visual techniques were simplifications of much more complex scientific processes and only suited to the dissemination of science to an uneducated public. Indeed scholars have increasingly stressed the

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key role of images in the armoury of professional scientists as they sought to persuade their academic peers of their theories. Moreover, on occasion, the visual image could form a central part of the argument being presented.2 The dichotomy between professional and amateur scientist has also been questioned as historians investigate how these two spheres have been mutually constituted, affecting each other in complex and profound ways.3 From printed books4 to the staging of popular spectacles and panoramas,5 visual culture was beginning to infiltrate the whole arena of scientific investigation and display. Parallel with these trends were changes in how vision was conceived and disciplined as Victorian science went popular. With the introduction of new devices of visualization (for example, the kaleidescope and zoetrope) the ease with which the eye could be deceived was illustrated.6 Furthermore, for those wedded to a natural theology perspective new forms and practices of visualization were manoeuvred into place to maintain a religious standpoint in the face of the increasing secularization of science. Bernard Lightman has demonstrated how Victorian popularizers constructed a ‘reverent eye’ through which God’s design could be demonstrated by embracing ever more sophisticated optical instruments. In his discussion of the Reverend John George Wood’s popular treatises on science, for instance, Lightman points out that ‘While T.H. Huxley’s future science teachers were trained to see a fully secularized material world at his lab at South Kensington, Wood’s reading audience was expected to see divine beauty through the lens of the microscope.’7 Appreciating beauty was the lynchpin of Wood’s discussion of butterflies and moths. Other popularizers similarly refashioned the visual medium to retain a natural theology stance and ‘Their use of images was designed to open up hidden worlds of wonder for their audiences.’8 It was not just in books and lecture tours that scientific worlds were opening up to wider audiences but museums, exhibition halls, botanical and zoological gardens also all became significant sites for the popular consumption of science. Morus has claimed that the importance of particular sites in the performance of scientific theories requires further investigation, as does the role of the audience in the mediation of this knowledge. As he puts it, ‘To understand science’s visual culture … we need to know more about the expectations and composition of those audiences.’9 One area in which some work 168

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has been done in this field is with respect to the role of women in producing and consuming Victorian science. For example, recent studies have highlighted women’s role in producing botanical illustrations, attending lecture tours and conversaziones as well as being active in field collecting and display.10 Moreover in the area of museum studies Forgan has investigated the relationship between the materiality of museum architecture and the layout of scientific objects.11 The building of museums regularly foregrounded disputes about the types of knowledge claims and practices that the site was supposed to incorporate.12 Similarly she has highlighted the significance of the locational setting of museums in the transmission of information and theories to a wider audience.13 Metropolitan museums, for instance, often functioned differently to regional and provincial museums both in their representational practices and reception. Contradictory responses, from wonder and reverence to repulsion and irreverence, have been documented depending on where an exhibit is located.14 According to Forgan, ‘“Looking” in the museum requires standing in space, movement through space, and mobilizing the senses to create attention, before any response or understanding of what is exhibited can be achieved.’15 At a more micro-level, museum culture has been explored through the detailed examination of the biography of its represented objects. Drawing from an anthropological tradition which charts the biography of things,16 museum historians have adopted this approach to understanding museum display objects by excavating their career from origins to staging.17 This enables the relationships between people and objects, between objects and other objects, and between objects and their material setting to be simultaneously explored. At botanical gardens, collecting, displaying and juxtaposing plant specimens involved a whole series of interrelated biographies from the people curating a garden, the natural history discourse they drew upon, the objects they had at their disposal to display, the networks through which these objects were acquired and the infrastructural setting in which they were being placed – the latter would include local material conditions like climate, relief and temperature, as well as buildings and equipment. Some objects might achieve iconic status within that space, for instance, an elephant occupying a central position in a provincial zoo. But as Alberti notes, ‘this emblematic status was only 169

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one of their meanings; they also had their place in the classification of the collection. Elephants were (ostensibly) no more privileged than the humble snails and wild grasses. Taxonomically dissimilar objects that might have shared an acquisition route were catagorized, isolated from each other, and reordered.’18 And it is this reordering from outside to inside the display space that can have a profound effect on how an exhibit might be viewed. The reception of objects by different viewing publics is only beginning to be understood.19 Not only is the meaning of objects polysemic, but the audiences who gazed, touched, smelt and talked about objects were also heterogeneous in their social, gender, political, religious and moral compositions. In botanical gardens as sites of pleasure and scientific experiment all these elements came into play in debates surrounding the public’s access to these spaces and their response to the plants and buildings put on show. Audiences were often tutored in the art and science of observation, and they could learn about cultivation and planting techniques and in winter gardens they could witness nature from climates and lands distant from their everyday lives and experiences. Not only was the public educated in botany and horticulture at botanical establishments, they were also entertained and the gardens could act as a showcase for the prestige of a city, national culture or empire. Royal visits, large public fêtes, concerts and conversaziones, fund-raising events, unveiling ceremonies and public lectures were regular features of botanical garden life, particularly in cities where they were publicly funded and had a civic role in bolstering the education of the citizenry and cultivating a taste in gardening techniques. University gardens had a somewhat different role in that their immediate function was to serve in the education of medical practitioners, botany students and other scientists and they often restricted their public access function. The differing institutional make-up of the gardens under consideration had a direct impact on the scale and type of popular science represented in them and public consumption of them. In this chapter I will examine the varying attitudes towards public access at the three sites, debates surrounding Sunday opening and regulations regarding public behaviour in the gardens. Second, guides to the gardens will be analysed as a mechanism for understanding how the public was supposed to view and experience these spaces during visits and how they disciplined the observer. Third, the place of these gardens 170

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as sites of entertainment will be analysed (where relevant) and finally the role of public education through lectures and demonstrations will be overviewed, paying particular attention to a case study of David Moore’s intervention in the debate on evolution in the latter decades of nineteenth-century Ireland.

Regulating Bodies and Opening to the Public Respectable tradesmen, with their wives and families, should be admitted into the garden, on one evening in the week, for two or three months in the summer, on the recommendation of a subscriber, and on the payment of such a trifling sum for admission as should be within their means.20

This was the observation of Robert Patterson, Vice-President of the Belfast Natural History Society, at its annual general meeting of 1840. Botanical gardens were not public parks and thus access was invariably restricted. To finance the garden in Belfast shares had been issued in 1827 at 7 guineas per share and this brought with it a reduced entrance fee, voting rights and extended family access. These benefits were graduated depending on the number of shares held by an individual. Holders of four or more shares paid no entrance fee, had four votes and all family members were permitted to visit the garden. Those with three shares paid a 2 shilling annual entrance fee, had three votes and all family members could visit. Holders of two shares paid a 5 shilling annual entrance fee, had two votes and all family members had visiting rights and finally those with one share in the company paid 10 shillings and 6 pence in annual admission fees, had one vote and two family members were allowed visit the garden.21 Thus there was a graduated right of entry by shareholders. There were also alternative forms of gaining access to the garden. Annual subscriptions could be paid at 1 guinea for a family ticket and 10 shillings and 6 pence for a single ticket. Annual subscribers had no voting rights until they had maintained ten years’ continual subscription when they received one share in the company. In 1888 this was revised to a tariff of 10 shillings and 6 pence for subscribers

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living greater than one mile from the garden.22 The number of annual subscribers varied from 300 to 600 people and both shareholders and subscribers with family tickets included the admission of their children and their nursemaid. Casual visitors could obtain entry at the gate on payment of 1 shilling for adults and 6 pence for children and these charges were halved if the person had travelled more than six miles to the garden. Although a private institution from its foundation, this garden was trying to extend access. The tariffs, however, broadly excluded the labouring classes of Belfast who could not afford the fee and thus it was largely the city’s middle class who would benefit from the gardens. The suggestion by Patterson to admit working-class people at a peppercorn rate was rejected by the BNHS. However, later in 1840 there was an experiment conducted to test the suitability of the labouring classes for ‘rational enjoyment’ as a 1 pence entry fee was introduced. The Garden Committee considered it a failure and ‘could not recommend the indiscriminate admission of all persons’ and would only sanction the admittance of employees of members at certain times of the year, paid for by members, who would be held accountable ‘for the good conduct of the visitors’.23 Regulating the consumption of the scientific space was really controlling the social space that the garden would service. Thus in the early years visitors were mainly drawn from the middle classes and the wealthy. The 1851 Guide to the garden said that the space ‘would also afford, by its extensive walks, a means of relaxation and rational enjoyment to the respectable townspeople and their families’.24 Gradually, however, attitudes towards widening access to different social groups began to be seriously discussed once again. James Thomson, a member of the BNHS, delivered a paper to the Belfast Social Enquiry Society querying the public health of the population in industrial towns and complaining at ‘the general want of any public walks, which might enable the middle and poorer classes to have the advantage of fresh air and exercise in their occasional hours of leisure’.25 He went on to recommend the formation of a public park arguing that ‘when manufactures have done so very much to increase riches, why should the possessors object to spend some small part of those riches in obviating the concomitant evils of the manufacturing system’.26 In light of this emerging thinking among Belfast’s social improvers, attitudes towards access to the Botanic Gardens changed in the 1860s as pressure to extend popular admission deepened. It 172

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was acknowledged by 1864 that ‘The establishment and successful management of Botanic Gardens in large manufacturing towns is of the utmost importance to the inhabitants and public more generally.’27 This mirrored a widening recognition that entry to the garden would be a ‘means of recreation for the working people … [and would] improve moral status, whereby public peace, loyalty and government are generally promoted’.28 In manufacturing cities and towns across Britain emerged a Victorian reformist movement which wished to tackle the absence of publicly accessible green areas especially for the labouring classes. Belfast acknowledged that the high entrance fees were excluding working people yet at the same time this funding was needed for the garden’s upkeep so the Garden Committee resolved to apply for government finance ‘for the Botanic Garden to be placed on the same footing and supervision as those now endowed’,29 that is Dublin, Edinburgh and Kew. However, as a provincial rather than national garden no subsidy was awarded and so the garden proprietors initiated their own scheme of democratizing entry. At a special meeting of the Garden Committee in 1865 they agreed to admit the general public for free on Saturdays from 1 May to 31 October from 2 pm until sundown. They stipulated that ‘no baskets, parcels or refreshments were to be brought into the garden’.30 The scheme, known as the Free Admission Fund, was to be covered by the subscribers and supported by the ‘leading mercantile families’ of the city who would also fund the cost of a band and other attractions ‘for those whom they employ’.31 Attitudes towards the working classes were beginning to change as expressed by the company: We are not those who fear to trust working people: on the contrary we believe that the working men and their families generally conduct themselves better and have greater respect of property under circumstances than many who occupy a higher social position.32

The new scheme did initially attract large numbers of visitors on Saturdays. Attendance rose initially to 10,000 on Saturdays but levelled off later to about 7,000 visitors. The overall increase necessitated the appointment of a new gatekeeper and the installation of a drinking fountain donated by the local Drinking Fountain Association.33 By

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1869 the scheme proved too cumbersome to administer and it was substituted by a scheme where employers of large numbers of people were invited to buy books of 100 tickets for £1 which were to be distributed to workers and their families. This system worked for a few years with the company selling about £100 worth of tickets per year.34 By the 1870s, however, employers were no longer prepared to buy these tickets and with the opening of the Ormeau Park in 1871 and the Falls Road Park in 1872, both public parks, the demand for access to the Botanical Gardens as a recreational space for the working classes was reduced. When the gardens were taken over by Belfast Corporation in 1895 they were opened free to the public. By contrast the gardens in Glasnevin, although administered by the RDS, were always in receipt of state monies. As early as 1800 they were open to the public but there were immediate worries as complaints were made that ‘many plants have been injured, and some entirely taken away and pulled out of the ground’.35 Managing the public’s performance in the garden became an immediate priority. The committee agreed ‘That no person whatsoever be admitted to walk in the said garden without being attended by Mr. Underwood … or some person appointed by him’36 and that they should make a voluntary contribution to the garden. In 1801 the RDS reported that it wished to place an advertisement in the public papers for one week outlining their admission policy to the gardens. The preamble explained why the action was necessary: It having been represented to the Dublin Society, that great numbers of idle people, and particularly Children, have obtained admittance into the Botanic Garden … [and] have done considerable mischief to many curious and valuable plants, and given great disturbance to those persons who have visited the gardens for useful enquiries.37

The Society resolved that tickets of admission would have to be obtained from Professor Wade and that no one would be admitted without a ticket except members of the Dublin Society; children would have to be accompanied by their parents. In 1802 the head gardener’s duties included supervising admission and apart from the houses and walled garden, all areas would be open to the public at

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all times that did not interfere with the duties of the head gardener and his staff. The head gardener provided information to visitors who required or asked for it and he was given the assistance of his men to supervise visitors until sunset in summer. No dogs or pets were to be allowed entry into the gardens. With respect to the hothouses, the head gardener exercised his own discretion but the doors of the houses were not to be opened too frequently lest the plants be damaged from temperature changes and no visitors were to be permitted in the houses unaccompanied by the Curator or an under-gardener. As the prized exhibits of the garden, the indoor collections had be to well protected from possible damage. On weekdays no admission tickets would be necessary but anyone entering the garden must have their name written in an entrance book. This record keeping would help to control behaviour within the space. On Sundays there would be no public admission except with special permission from the professor or certain members of the Dublin Society.38 The Society stipulated that ‘These regulations are to be fairly copied and suspended in the hall of the great house, in the hot-house, the head gardener’s house, and the porter’s lodge’.39 The Committee of Botany considered making public the policies of the garden an important matter and thus posted the regulations in very visible locations. They agreed in 1803 that the hothouses would open to the public on Tuesdays and Fridays from 12 to 4 pm,40 and the following year resolved that members of the Dublin Society be granted admittance into the garden every day until 6 pm and into the hothouses from 12 to 4 pm each day.41 Despite the regulatory regime the behaviour of the public did not always conform to the expectations of the RDS. In June 1834 vandals wreaked havoc upon the garden and the Committee of Botany recommended that the foreman and gatekeeper reside on the premises.42 By and large, though, the opening of the garden to the general public resulted in a steady increase of visitors and peaceable enjoyment. In 1834, for instance, 7,110 people visited while 19,141 visited in 1837 as the garden’s popularity expanded.43 The issue of public access to the garden did not arise again for a couple of decades when James Haughton, Quaker, member of the RDS, and descended from a Dublin corn merchant family as well as an antislavery advocate, proposed in 1851 that the gardens should be opened to the public on Sundays. He believed that such a move would provide 175

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a space for working class men to spend time with their families rather than in public houses. The motion was defeated at a general meeting in December 1854.44 In 1840 Haughton had persuaded the Royal Zoological Society to open on Sundays and he claimed that: I attach no particular holiness to the Sabbath day, as Sunday is erroneously called, for our lives should be devoted to God and man, every day, but I do value the Sunday as a season to be particularly devoted, in the first place to religious duties, and in the next place to rational and innocent enjoyment.45

Haughton revived the issue again in 1859,46 and this led to the foundation of a public committee that published a pamphlet supporting Sunday opening hours. The pamphleteers pointed out that the gardens at Kew were open on Sunday and that the current state of affairs at Glasnevin was ‘well contrived for the convenience of fashionable and other loungers, and for the exclusion of the workers, both the manual and the mental’ and not ‘to admit an unwashed mob, who would break the Sabbath, be drunk and disorderly if admitted on Sunday’.47 Furthermore, the pamphlet pointed out that outside of Scotland and New England botanical gardens opened on Sundays throughout the world and that in Dublin Catholics did not attach the same meaning to Sunday that might prevent them from making a visit to the gardens.48 The Royal Dublin Society continued to resist attempts for Sunday opening, letters were published in the popular press and a 6,000-name petition opposing Sunday access surfaced.49 Sir William Gregory, MP for Galway, however, produced a counter-petition of 16,000 names which supported Sunday opening.50 In an exchange of letters between the RDS and the government’s Science and Art Department in 1861, the latter insisted that the gardens should open like those at Kew and Hampton Court which were also publicly funded. The RDS countered that these were Crown properties, whereas Glasnevin’s legal position was different – it was neither Crown property nor solely funded by the taxpayer. They also noted that the British Museum did not open on Sundays and its position was more akin to that of Dublin’s botanical gardens.51 The Science and Art Department reminded the RDS that it provided an annual grant of £6,000 whereas individual subscriptions

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amounted to approximately £1,336 annually. It also noted that the government had awarded additional funding for the building of new glasshouses (the Curvilinear Range and Palm House) and that the cost to the Exchequer of opening Kew and Hampton Court was £20 and £156 respectively per annum. In a broader vein the government proclaimed its public duty towards ‘the improvement of the habits and tastes of the people, and to affording them the means of healthful recreation, [hence] my Lords are strongly of the opinion that the Royal Dublin Society should deal with this subject not from the view of a private Society, but as a public institution; and they trust that the Society will afford to the working classes of Dublin all the facilities for visiting the Glasnevin Gardens they can’.52 The impasse continued as the RDS defended its case, arguing that the British Museum received far more state subsidy and did not open on Sundays; that the RDS was independent of direct government intervention;53 and that ‘The arrangement of the grounds is made solely with a view to purposes of education in scientific and economic botany, due regard being, of course, had to picturesque effect.’54 They also claimed that the gardens would not be able to accommodate large numbers of people especially given its proximity to Glasnevin cemetery where many funerals were held on Sundays and thus where even larger numbers of visitors might be attracted to the venue and do ‘irreparable damage to the Garden, and [be] a subversion of its arrangements as a place of scientific reference and research’.55 The issue was debated in Parliament, with the House of Commons recommending that the state grant be withdrawn if the gardens remained closed on Sundays.56 Finally, at a Special General Meeting of the RDS on 25 July 1861 a vote was taken with 125 out of the 236 members present agreeing to open on Sundays.57 The dispute over access was finally over and on 18 August 1861 the gardens at Glasnevin opened to the public on Sunday from 2:30 pm until 7 pm in summer and from 2.30 pm until sunset in winter. The government prevailed in this instance, valorizing its civic responsibilities over objections made on scientific grounds. It marked a tension between the perceived needs of the garden as a space of scientific research and as a space where popular audiences might learn about botany and horticulture. The final decision did prompt the bishop of Meath, Joseph Henderson Singer, to resign his life membership of the RDS as a matter of protest. 177

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The gardens attracted large numbers of Sunday visitors and David Moore could report that for 1861 80,655 people visited on Sundays, while 53,125 visited on weekdays.58 He could also happily report that he was ‘not aware of a single flower having being plucked by them [Sunday visitors], nor any plant taken; neither have the police been obliged to expel any person for bad conduct’.59 The government provided, free of charge, one police sergeant and six constables to supervise Sunday visitors. For staff to carry out their duties efficiently the gardens were closed to the public on Mondays and it wasn’t until 1869 that they opened permanently seven days a week. The issue of Sunday opening at Glasnevin exposed a few key issues about the power to regulate public access. First, the role of the RDS as an independent institution was challenged and its decision-making processes reviewed and revised. This led to a transfer of control from the general membership through its general meetings to the executive council in 1866. Second, the government took a dim view of the RDS’s apparent reluctance to change, and expressed a more widespread scepticism about its reasons for constraining access. The religious sensibilities of many of the members seemed to be the motivation underpinning resistance despite the fact that most of the new visitors who would avail of Sunday opening would be Catholic. Underpinning the question of access was a tacit religious dispute about the sacredness of the Sabbath. Finally, the claim that popular audience participation in the gardens would undermine its scientific purity smelt of a classbased snobbery among the members of the RDS and an exclusionary rhetoric about the restrictive social bases of scientific knowledge. If public access was the subject of some debate in Dublin it also aroused some discussion at the university’s garden in Cambridge. Our garden begins to flourish, shrubs and trees are already planted; plenty of seeds, both tender and hardy, are sown; a stove is building; and stone is preparing to raise the superstructure of a greenhouse on the foundation which was laid last year. All this, I hope, will increase the number of botanists among us. Indeed, we already begin to grow considerable, for I never had more than one companion before this spring, but now I have three; and expect soon to have two or three more converts.60

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This was the observation of Thomas Martyn in April 1761 about the progress of the original botanical garden in Cambridge. Clearly the promotion of botany lay at the heart of the project and the educational and research function of the gardens was paramount, particularly in the early years of the old garden. As a university garden funded by the private bequest of Dr Walker and bequeathed to the university, the governance of the garden rested with the Botanic Garden trustees. The garden had a number of functions: the teaching of botany and provision of specimens for use in botany demonstrations and classes; scientific experimentation and research by the university’s academic staff; the training of gardeners; and lastly, a park for the public to enjoy. Unlike Belfast or Dublin, the role of the garden as a site for public consumption was not one of its foremost priorities. From its earliest days, the lecture room (built in 1787) in the old botanic garden was used by the Professor of Botany (and the Professor of Natural Experimental Philosophy) to deliver his lectures, although, as noted earlier, these were intermittent in the early decades of botany in Cambridge. Thomas Martyn’s 1771 Catalogus Horti Botanici Cantabrigiensis, for instance, included the heads of his course of lectures as well as a list of the plants in the garden, and a plan of the garden.61 The garden during this period was primarily used by the professor and a few other scholars around the university interested in botanical studies. The wives of university fellows also had access as evidenced in Fig. 2.2 (see page 23). Bateson also speculates that in the first decades of the nineteenth century the garden was probably chiefly used by Dr E.D. Clarke, the Professor of Mineralogy, as Martyn had made over his botanical collection and lecture room to Clarke.62 The significance of the garden to university education, however, was rejuvenated with the appointment of Henslow, and this is clear from the outline of his course of lectures in botany for 1833. The programme was divided into two parts with items under the heading ‘Demonstrative’ carried out on Tuesdays and Thursdays (these included morphology, anatomy and systematic botany), while Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays were devoted to the analysis of plant physiology.63 The demonstration classes included the use of live species obtained from the garden. Henslow claimed that ‘After the demonstration of each specimen, it Genus and Species will be ascertained, by referring it to its Class and Order in the Artificial System of Linnaeus. When the name 179

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of the plant is discovered, its right position must be sought for in the Natural System.’64 One of his pupils, Jenyns, described his approach: He used to have ‘demonstrations’, as he called them, from living specimens. For this purpose he would provide the day before a large number of specimens of some of the more common plants, such as primrose … which the pupils, following their teacher during his explanation of their several parts, pulled to pieces for themselves … In addition to these were rows of small stone bottles containing specimens of all the British plants that could be procured in flower, the whole representing, as far as practicable, the different natural families properly named and arranged.65

The garden provided the specimens for teaching, but Henslow also encouraged students to visit it and the surrounding environs of Cambridge to learn the skill of plant recognition, dissection and classification. It also provided the professor with plant samples with which to experiment and the results of these were regularly reported in the popular and scientific journals. In 1833, for instance, he reported findings made with respect to the propagation mechanisms of the mistletoe, based on a specimen cut from a crab tree in the botanic garden.66 Public access was very limited in the old physic garden. The old garden, however, scarcely met the needs of modern botanical studies and the move to the outskirts of Cambridge stimulated greater interest in and use of the garden by students, university fellows and the public alike. In 1854 the rules of admission were spelt out. It was open to all graduates of the university; all undergraduates, giving their name and college if required, and ‘all respectably dressed strangers, on condition of giving their name and address if required’.67 Servants with children or children alone were prohibited from entering the garden, as were any parties with dogs. The hothouses could be visited between 1 and 4 pm by persons accompanied by the Curator.68 This set of rules was printed as posters and circulated by the Vice-Chancellor but as they did not have the sanction of the garden’s governors they were recalled.69 The rules were later confirmed and the opening hours slightly amended.70 Widening access did lead to the occasional instance of damage such as the removal and destruction of plant labels in 1851. Between 400 and 500 labels were plucked up and some 180

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of them thrown into the conduit stream. They came from recently planted beds of foreign plants and thus it was reported that ‘months and months of work will be entailed upon the gentlemen having the care of these species, which have as yet never flowered or seeded, and will thus require the most acute microscopical observations before the labels can be rearranged, and the classes of each identified’.71 As a consequence, regulating access was paramount to the trustees and the gardeners alike. In an 1880 meeting of the Botanic Garden Syndicate, Mr Clark complained about the ban on smoking in the space as it was so large. He also expressed dismay that it was not open on Sunday afternoons for the members of the Senate and their friends. Mr Clark claimed that ‘[on Sundays] … the Trumpington Road is so full and busy that it was impossible for members of the university and their wives to walk there’.72 The Vice-Chancellor informed the syndicate that the ban on Sunday opening could be amended if it was the wish of the university. Professor Babington objected to Sunday opening as it would necessitate more labour for the gardeners and there was no guarantee that admitting only members of the Senate would prevent vandalism. He also thought that Sunday opening for pleasure would contravene the original purpose of the garden. He asserted that ‘the garden was given and endowed by Dr Walker for scientific purposes alone: for the growing of plants to be used in the study of their “properties and uses for the benefit of mankind” and not at all for the recreation of the members of the University’.73 Clark did not think that opening on Sunday would increase the workload of the gardeners and he pointed out that London zoo did not employ more keepers because they opened on Sunday.74 The Master of Pembroke College strongly objected, claiming ‘to uphold the character of the English Sunday’75 while Mr Van Sittart approved of the proposal as ‘To him it was part of a movement, the movement which began in the Garden of Eden … to admire the works of the vegetable creation.’76 The Vice-Chancellor reported that the majority of the gardeners were opposed to the proposal. In the end, those who formally objected to the idea of Sunday opening were 13 clergymen and one layperson.77 The rules of admission were amended in 1880 to include formally the smoking ban and instructions that ‘Visitors must not gather or handle the plants. University teachers and students must apply to the Curator for permission to use the plants.’78 181

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The gardens opened for the first time on Sundays in 1881 from 29 May to 25 September to members of the Senate and their friends. Over those 18 Sundays, 114 visits were made to it by 53 members of the Senate, while 28 entered only once.79 The primary scientific role of the garden was never trumped by a popularizing rhetoric in the nineteenth century. In 1878, for example, 150 members of the university had used the facility for botanical study and many thousands of specimens had been furnished to the teachers of botany for illustration as well as for private examination by students.80 The role of the gardeners in caring for the space was regularly noted and it was particularly observed that the ‘constant employment of a woman in the garden has already been very beneficial, especially by promoting the cleanliness of the plants in the houses’.81 As the nineteenth century progressed, the stature of Cambridge gardens increased, with Joseph Hooker commenting in 1884 that it was ‘rapidly rising to eminence, as one of the very best in Europe’.82 Public access was a less significant issue at Cambridge than in Belfast or Dublin, partly due to the town’s size and the institutional context of the garden; nonetheless the issue of Sunday opening aroused opposition as it did in other places. Overall, where popularizing the scientific display of plants was concerned, each garden gradually widened access.

Guiding the Public through the Gardens All these botanical institutions provided, at some point, printed guides to be used by visitors. Although catalogues of plants in the gardens were published early and were of great use to the professional and scientific botanists, long lists of plants would not prove to be very informative to the general public and without a map of the planting scheme would not be particularly useful in plant identification.83 Thus while the catalogues served an educated elite, the public benefited from more generalized guides. Glasnevin produced the largest number of guides, beginning with Ninian Niven’s in 1838, whereas Belfast produced just one guide, in the middle of the nineteenth century (1851). Cambridge gardens did not publish a guide until the early twentieth century (1922) although some detailed information on the garden did appear 182

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in a wider guidebook to Cambridge town and university, published in 1898. This confirms its limited role as a popularizing venue in its early decades. Guidebooks served a number of important functions. First, they often suggested the route that a visitor should use to view a garden. The sequence of experiences of different plant arrangements was laid out in guidebooks, prioritizing certain features and displays; guiding and disciplining the public’s eye through the route. They served as spatial summaries of the globe’s floral complexity. In the context of zoological gardens, Ritvo has noted that ‘Ordering collections became the dominant motif and zoo guidebooks were inveterately linear. No matter what the shape of a zoo, its official guidebook would prescribe a single route through exhibits.’84 Second, a guidebook educated a visitor on the broad categories of plants. Although not catalogues of the entire content of a botanic garden, guides did identify genera and sometimes specific species were highlighted for their aesthetic or taxonomic significance. In some books different classification systems were explained and how the garden represented these systems was featured. As Richard Burkhardt observes of the zoo section in the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris in the 1800s, ‘the power of place was integrally related to the power to place’.85 Third, guidebooks offered detailed descriptions and names of plants among the indoor collections. Often these glasshouse flora took pride of place within the guidebook and were sometimes accompanied by drawings of species or the glasshouses themselves. Finally, to varying degrees guides provided an interpretive framework in which to ‘read’ and understand a garden, from geographical regions and taxonomic plans to evidence of benevolent design. As exercises in spatial hermeneutics these texts transported the visitor from the confines of the local to a much more far-reaching global understanding of plant science and its geography. The earliest guide to Cambridge formed part of a larger guide to the city. It was written by John Willis Clark, Fellow of Trinity College and Superintendent of the Museum of Zoology, went into at least 12 editions, and was published up until the mid-1940s. In the introduction the size of the garden was specified and the fact that the outdoor plants in general were arranged according to De Candolle’s classification system was noted.86 The guide suggested that visitors enter from the Bateman Street entrance and that they immediately 183

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move towards the ten interconnected glasshouses, each of which was described in some detail. For instance, the Temperate House, the reader is told, contains ‘plants of Australia, the Cape, and countries of similar climate’,87 including New Zealand flax, various species of Eucalypti, bluegum tree and the camphor tree. The Tropical Fern House contained a representative collection of ferns. In the Stove House, readers were informed that the cycads, ‘handsome as they are in foliage, represent the lowest type of flowering plants. They flourished about the end of the Triassic and beginning of the Jurassic period.’88 The palaeoecological record was being highlighted and their place in the evolutionary ladder underlined. Individual species were drawn to the attention of the readers, and their eye was being trained to identify and observe the detail of specific plants. At the Succulent House and Cactus House the public was informed ‘[the houses] are always highly instructive on the effect of environment on evolution, and the collections are very efficient from this point of view’.89 Training the audience to detect evidence of evolutionary change was significant and this was being spatialized by focusing on the plants from specific climatic regions. Upon leaving the glasshouse collections, the visitor was directed to attend to the rockery and then on to a series of beds ‘arranged from the point of view of physiology’.90 For instance in this section there was a bed containing halophytes, that is plants which grow more or less exclusively in the presence of salt. Passing the front of the plant houses the visitor was routed towards the bog and water gardens and was implored to note the good collection of willows. The guest was also to take note of the Californian redwood, Sequoia sempervirens, the second largest American conifer. The next major route that the public was advised to take was the path along the ‘botanical arrangement of the belt of trees which goes around the garden’.91 It began with the magnolias and ended with the oaks on the far side of the glasshouses. This formed the main walk and it represented the garden’s arboretum, including the lime tree planted on 2 November 1846 at the Trumpington Road entrance which marked the beginning of planting in the new location. Through the arboretum the visitor was alerted to the herbaceous beds, planted to represent the natural orders, and the collection of coniferous trees. With respect to the conifers the guidebook stated, ‘This most important and interesting natural order is allied to that of the tropical Cycads, both belonging, 184

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with a third order, the Gnetaceae, to the ancient group of flowering plants which had not evolved so far as to enclose its seeds within an ovary.’92 The tropical and temperate worlds were being brought together and the evolution of taxonomic complexity over time was stressed. By examining species closely the visitor was invited to understand some of the stages of the evolutionary hierarchy represented by the garden. The guidebook’s suggested route finished at the glasshouses where a visitor would have completed a full circuit of the space and would have sequentially moved from the indoor collections to the arboretum and systematic arrangements and back to the indoor collections. In so doing the consumer was aided in nurturing a scientific eye; recognizing plant species; gleaning a rudimentary knowledge of plant classification and physiology; and appreciating the evolutionary chain underpinning plant form. As Spary has noted in the nineteenthcentury Paris gardens, ‘Rapports were true, not arbitrary, and evident to the eye of the trained observer.’93 The fact that each plant was carefully labelled helped in educating the public consumer and student, and the narrative of evolution present in the text signifies the compelling scientific approach to observation being nurtured in this garden in the latter years of the nineteenth century. The absence of earlier guides restricts our knowledge of how the garden was to be viewed in the earlier part of that century. The first guide dedicated solely to the garden was published by the Director, Humphrey Gilbert-Carter, in 1922 and was revised and enlarged in 1947. It contained a plan of the garden (figure 30) identifying the main sections and the genera planted in them and this map broadly mirrors the descriptions offered in the earlier Clark guide. This new handbook was more detailed, naming all the plants contained in the garden as well as giving a fuller description of individual plants. For instance, in relation to the Cornus mas, it noted that in February and March it is ‘covered in yellow flowers. This species differs from our Cornus sanguinea in having the flowers arranged in umbrels. Each umbrel is subtended by four boat-shaped bracts.’94 Not only were their botanical features described but the horticultural value of the plants was also emphasized. The reader would obtain far more information but would also need to a have a reasonably high level of understanding of floral nomenclature. It was really more useful to the serious student of botany than to the general reader and it did not provide a route 185

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around which the garden should be visited. By the twentieth century visiting practices had changed as access widened and this guide was designed to educate. Presumably many visitors never purchased the book but relied solely on the plant labels to guide them through the glasshouses and outdoor collections.

30 Plan of Cambridge Botanic Garden (1922)

In Belfast the role of the gardens as a space for popular recreation as well as the promotion of botanical knowledge was much more significant than in Cambridge. As noted in earlier chapters, the foundation of these gardens was partly motivated by a desire to produce a pleasing and improving space for this industrial city’s labouring classes. Like the botanical garden in Sydney, which Endersby claims the people of the city regarded as ‘as place of entertainment’,95 playing a public function was always important in Ulster’s premier 186

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industrial city. From the outset the institutional structure as well as the geographical location in which the gardens emerged influenced the role the gardens would play in the life of the city. Only one detailed guide of the garden was published in the nineteenth century, in 1851, written by the Curator and priced at 6 pence. This text also contained a map (see figure 12, page 79) which highlighted the recommended route around the garden. The preface provided a brief outline of the purpose of the garden, particularly for those who would never travel outside the island. Travelling in garden space was travelling in time back to the Creation. The display of exotics, it proferred, would indicate ‘with considerable accuracy, the kind of climate to which the Creator first adapted them … a well stored Botanic Garden may, in some measure, supply the place of personal exploration’.96 As an exposition in Divine beneficence the garden would reveal the great variety of living species as well as provide a space for contemplation and serious reflection. The introduction provided a short history of the emergence of the study of natural history in Belfast and the foundation of the garden. Moreover the improving role of the garden was also signalled, noting ‘such a plan as would combine science with recreation, by forming a garden which, while it gave ample space for the Botanical arrangements, would also afford, by its extensive walks, a means of relaxation and rational enjoyment to the respectable townspeople and their families’.97 In a Presbyterian, commercial city, balancing a strong work ethic with sensible recreation was clearly a priority. The route recommended and the narrative attending it in the remainder of the booklet focused, to a large degree, on the glasshouse collections. The visitor was advised to progress towards the Palm House by either traversing the Main Walk or taking the path along the wall where climbing plants could be observed. Some individual plants on both routes were named but the pinetum, forming the principal feature of the Main Walk, was only alluded to, at this stage, as containing groups of evergreens. Although the central dome of the glasshouse was not completed by 1851, there was considerable detail presented on the contents of the east and west wings (the hothouse and greenhouse respectively). The heaths, for instance, were claimed to be ‘more remarkable for beauty than on account of any economical or medicinal properties’.98 Detailed botanical naming in Latin, as 187

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well as physiological and geographical information, was provided for the bulk of the indoor plants. The beauty, economic function and natural habitat of many of these plants was identified. The Passiflora coerulea was cited as thriving in South America and the West Indies and ‘producing flowers of exquisite beauty’,99 while the Saccharum officinarum is known as a ‘valuable product’.100 Utility and aesthetics could be combined. The first 14 pages of the 26-page guide dealt with the collections in the Palm House and the text stressed either their beauty or utility rather than their place in the taxonomic order. The visitor was then guided along the walk from the glasshouses towards the arboretum and hardy shrub collection, which included many species of rhododendron, before moving on to the pond and the aquatic species planted in and around it. This part of the tour emphasized the picturesque vistas provided over the River Lagan and out towards the Castlereagh Hills. There was a relatively short discussion of the beds planted to display the Linnaean and natural classification systems, without much didactic content, and the visitor was then invited to enter the Orchid House. Like the Palm House there was a lengthy analysis of the contents, with the reader reminded that ‘The Orchis family is noted for the gorgeous character of the flowers of some plants belonging to it, and on account of the grotesque forms they assume in others.’101 The epiphytic character of some orchids was explained. Tropical tree ferns and pitcher plants were described including the Dionoea muscipula or fly trap, ‘a native of Carolina; when an insect comes in contact with the small spines on the upper part of the leaf, the two halves of that organ close on the intruder’.102 By midcentury these species fascinated gardeners and popular consumers and it was as much their physical appearance as their scientific composition which allured the public. On leaving the glasshouse the visitor was directed along the final section of the circuit which led back to the pinetum from where the visitor began. Some of the main trees in this collection were identified, with the height they reached and their country of origin emphasized. At the back of the guide was a list of regulations governing the horticultural shows periodically held in the garden and an index to the chief plants held in the garden. The guide ran to a total of 30 pages, channelling the visiting eye to the exoticism of the indoor collections and the picturesque planting of the tree and outdoor shrub sections. 188

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By contrast in Dublin when the garden was initially planted there were catalogues immediately published by Professor Walter Wade and James Underwood. These books provided very brief introductions to the classification systems used in the garden and the principal divisions into which the plants were categorized, before providing long lists of plants sown. They were more reference texts for the professional than guides for the visiting public and at this early stage of planting it was deemed important to have accurate lists. For instance, Wade’s (1800) catalogue identified 15 sections in which the plants were arranged including the Linnaean section (which constituted the herbaceous, fruticetum and arboretum), a cattle garden, a hay garden and a hibernian garden, and this was followed by a list of plants.103 In Underwood’s 1804 catalogue all the plants were named according to their Linnaean name, English name, native country and time of flowering. They were also categorized as annual, biennial, perennial, shrub or tree. There was no introduction, plan or commentary in this catalogue; it simply comprised 117 pages of lists of plant names beginning with Class I and finishing with Class XXIV.104 The first guide designed for public visitors to the garden was Ninian Niven’s Companion, published in 1838. An elaborate manual of over 170 pages, it was divided into 23 chapters, including a map of the garden and some important tables of plant arrangements. It was specifically designed for visitors to buy and was reviewed as follows: ‘[We give] … our unqualified approbation, not only for the arrangement of the subjects of this elegant little work, but of the intrinsic usefulness and interesting nature of these subjects … [The] descriptions are conveyed in an elementary and pleasing language and will be found suited to the capacity of every reader’.105 In the preface, Niven hoped that the garden would appeal to all social classes and declared: ‘Of all public resorts, a scientific garden, when properly kept will be found not only one of the most delightful mediums for intellectual gratification and amusement, but also, one of the greatest of temporal blessings that can be bestowed on a people.’106 The botanical garden would serve the culture of Enlightenment improvement which had been promoted since the eighteenth century as well as provide a space for contemplative reflection. In the introduction, Niven briefly described the history of the garden and explained how the layout had changed since the garden’s foundation. These changes were represented in tabular form 189

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(figure 31) and the remainder of the guide was organized around the new arrangement of three primary divisions – the botanic garden, the experimental garden and the landscape garden whose ‘object has been, to render every portion of the surface of the grounds as interesting and useful as possible’.107

31 Tabular Representation of Arrangements at the Botanic Garden, Glasnevin (1838)

The botanic division, which comprised the largest portion of the garden (15 statute acres), was divided into eight sections and Niven discussed each section in turn, beginning with the hothouses and ending with the ornamental beds. The style of writing in general was scientifically descriptive with the occasional deployment of religious vocabulary and reference to the Bible where particular plants were concerned. Latin nomenclature was employed throughout in naming species. In the discussion of the arboretum and fruticetum Niven explained, in detail, the intricacies of the two dominant plant classification systems, Linnaean and Jussieuan, as well as providing a series of tables that graphically represented each system (see figure 7, figure 8, pages 57–59). In relation to the natural system Niven made the observation that because of the diversity of climates required for different plants, the classification cannot be fully represented without 190

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the ‘aid of artificial climates’108 thus making it impracticable to exhibit out of doors the complete system. Consequently the arrangement used in the garden exhibits the primary divisions of the system and ‘therefore, strictly speaking, [is] not a natural arrangement, but simply an arrangement of plants according to their natural orders only’.109 A detailed description of the natural arrangement of British plants followed. Here he drew attention to the general principles deployed in laying out the various sections and the popularization of plant taxonomy. He referred to particular species and their physiological characteristics and habitat requirements. The second major division of the garden – the experimental garden – occupied about three statute acres. Niven pointed out that no matter how important botanical science was considered philosophically, ‘an assemblage of specimens of those productions of the vegetable kingdom, that are more especially useful to man, and, that so much contribute to his health and comfort, is, after all, one of the most interesting portions of it that can be presented to him’.110 Here culinary plants, the growing of standard fruit trees, useful agricultural grasses and grains formed the basis of the description. Utility and practicality underpinned much of the presentation of this section of the garden and reinforced the RDS’s initial improving impetus. By contrast, the overriding concern in the final major division of the garden was the aesthetic and pleasing layout which was regarded as exemplifying a picturesque taste. This portion of the garden according to Niven comprised eight statute acres, being bounded by the River Tolka ‘along the bank of which is one of our most picturesque walks’.111 From the vantage point of the western end of the range of hothouses, Niven claimed, was ‘one of the finest views in the garden; looking back in the direction of the botanical division, and over the beautifully grouped masses of trees and shrubs in the valley below, the eye rests with peculiar satisfaction on the surrounding garden scenery, and richly wooded banks’.112 This segment informed readers on how to achieve a picturesque effect in the design of a garden space especially with respect to the grouping of trees or the display of individual dramatic species such as the cedar of Lebanon. The procedure described involved ‘In the first place, bringing out, by proper opening and thinning, all the picturesque features the locality was capable of; and then, in the second place, adding by planting 191

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and other means, such as we considered requisite for the finish of the whole.’113 Niven’s guide to the gardens was comprehensive in coverage and avoided being a simple listing of plants. It went a long way towards educating the public on the major classification systems and it provided a wide-ranging array of information from scientific to horticultural and agricultural matters. Although it was a long text it avoided too much technical language that would be more suited to the expert than the interested amateur and thus was a popular guide rather than a scientific manual. Although there was a map of the garden in the Companion there was no prescriptive trail for the visitor to follow. The guide was published the year that Niven resigned from his post as Curator at Glasnevin. Under David Moore’s curatorship the garden underwent a variety of changes to its layout, particularly with respect to the glasshouses and their collections. Consequently a new guide, sold only at the botanic gardens, was published in 1850 at a cost of 6 pence. Moore claimed that it was needed as the conservatory accommodation had increased dramatically and the herbaceous borders had been rearranged.114 It was to be sold at the lowest price possible to maximize affordability and the format followed the one published for Kew. In order to minimize the interruptions to garden staff, Moore proposed in the preface that ‘visitors will have the kindness to follow the walks in front of the hothouses, indicated by the dotted lines on the annexed plan of the Gardens, they will arrive at the respective divisions, according as they are numbered and noticed. By attending to this recommendation, the different plants will be easily found, and parties less liable to obstruction’115 (figure 32). The rules of the garden were also specified. This guide was revised in 1859 with some minor alterations, it was reissued again in 1861 and there was a fourth edition published in 1865 with some small amendments. The publication of four editions of the handbook indicated its popularity because by 1885 when William McNab produced a new revised and enlarged guide he noted that Moore’s one had gone out of print.116 Moore’s was also richly illustrated with many line drawings of particular species or parts of them (figure 33).

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32 Plan of the Botanic Garden (1850)

33 The Plantain Tree

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In the 1859 guide, Moore ‘beg[s] that visitors may first follow the walk leading to it [Octagon House], as indicated by the arrow on the dotted line in the small annexed map of the Gardens’.117 Visitors were being trained in how to develop an observing eye and their path was being carefully cultivated. It had been noted that in zoos the representation of animal life was intrepidly linear, moving from smaller to larger species.118 In the case of this garden, however, the gaze was more consciously directed at the indoor, glasshouse collections which formed the centrepiece of the route. One had to go inside to understand the faraway, especially the lands of the tropics. Visitors were invited to observe a ‘beautiful species, the Moretan Bay Pine, Eutassi cunninghamii … This plant commemorates the late Allen Cunningham, who held the situation of Colonial Botanist, at Sydney, NSW, through these indefatigable and successful explorations of that country and the neighbouring islands.’119 In the Heath House (part of the curvilinear range) visitors were advised that ‘The attentive investigator of Nature’s works may here observe a singular instance of instinct, displayed by the common bee, in extracting honey from the flowers of the Heath,’120 and that ‘In looking a little closer into this matter, the instinct of the creature is further manifest, as well as the design of the great Author of Nature.’121 Invoking design as the dominant lens for observation reflected Moore’s more general commitment to natural theology. In the great central house of the range, the Palm Stove, visitors were made aware of the significance of palms as they ‘are considered the most beautiful, as well as useful, tribe of vegetables known’.122 The collection included what were considered to be fine specimens including the fan palm of South America and the Mauritius fan palm, and Moore outlined the connection between form and function as follows: ‘The large leaves show how admirably they are adapted to afford grateful shade from the burning rays of a scorching tropical sun; thus farther exemplifying the wisdom of God in the Creation.’123 The gardens in mid-century and the glasshouse collection in particular were used to train the visitor’s eye and to provide evidence of the role of a transcendental Creator in the patterning of this intricate and planned floral world. The regime of affect encouraged by the guide was one of marvel and wonderment at God’s creation made manifest through the 60 pages of text dedicated to a discussion of the indoor collections. Moreover, one had to enter into an artificial environment to appreciate the wonders of a natural 194

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one and this earthly paradise exposed in the glasshouses was one ostensibly fashioned by humans. Having completed this tour, the visitor was directed to the ornamental ground. This was followed by a brief visit to the rockery garden and followed by a route through the systematic arrangements which Moore comments will contrast with the pleasure ground where ‘the more showy species of plants, [were] promiscuously grouped for effect’.124 There was a brief description of the natural arrangement of herbaceous plants followed by the arrangement of British plants and medical plants using De Candolle’s method. Visitors were then recommended to walk through the arboretum arranged according to the Linnaean system, but Moore suggested that this segment would be of interest ‘especially to those who contemplate planting, and wish to observe somehow the effect produced by different species when seen grouped together’.125 Specific trees were identified within their class and comment made on their structure and origins. The final subdivisions of the garden outlined in the Guide related to the aquarium and pleasure area of the willow garden; Addison’s Walk; and finally on to the horticultural and agricultural areas. Moore noted that ‘the careful observer may, perhaps, have perceived that the extent and natural beauty of the ground’126 are not to be found in any other botanical garden in Europe and that ‘The advanced student in botanical science, and the humbler inquirer after horticultural information, have alike been studied in the arrangement [of the garden].’127 Before leaving the garden, visitors were encouraged to enter the Botanical Museum. The guide ran to 83 pages, although around 70 per cent was devoted to the glasshouse contents and in particular the intricate beauty of tropical nature. The subsequent revisions and reprinting of the Guide would indicate its popularity as an instrument of information and guidance for visitors. Together, guidebooks regularly suggested paths through which nature should be understood in a geographical as well as a botanical sense. They provided routes to view the gardens and to gaining an understanding of the links between plant classification, physiology and appearance. They also acted as a surrogate globe – enabling the visitor to engage in virtual travel across a range of the world’s biogeographical regions. Botanical gardens were also popularized through other means and at other sites. Fêtes, public lectures, flower shows, scholarly meetings 195

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and royal visits were all part of the repertoire of events hosted in them. These events regularly disseminated information about the role of these gardens in the civic as well as educational life of the towns and cities in which they were located. Even if many people never visited their local botanical garden or did so infrequently, they might glean something of the role of these spaces as sites of scientific learning and of pleasurable marvel from reading about them in the press or in attending lectures delivered by employees of the gardens. One of the most significant instances of the gardens serving as a framework for the promotion of a public understanding of botany and its link to natural theology is found in the anti-evolutionary public address delivered by David Moore in Belfast in 1874 to which I now turn.

Science goes Public: David Moore’s Grand Design(ers) We must see and acknowledge the wisdom and power of God in clothing the earth with such kinds of plants as are best adapted for the use of man and other animals which inhabit the different parts of the globe where they are most required.128

David Moore drew this conclusion in his lecture to the citizens of Belfast in 1874 as part of a series of lectures entitled Science and Revelation. The series served as a riposte to the separation of science and religion advocated by key members of the scientific community, especially the keynote speech delivered by John Tyndall at the British Association for the Advancement of Science’s meeting held in the city that same year. As the curator of an important botanical garden, Moore was the chief scientific contributor to the series. With his long stewardship of a large botanical garden, his plant research and his connections with some of Britain’s main naturalists he constituted a significant voice among a group of speakers which largely comprised theologians and clergymen. Having spent a career observing and carrying out experiments on plants at the Dublin garden, as well as curating the layout and development of the garden for four decades of the nineteenth century, Moore was well positioned to promulgate his defence of the presence of a grand designer of nature. The botanical

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garden provided a space in which Moore could undertake detailed study of plant life and could uncover and expose, from his perspective, evidence of the hand of a transcendental designer. Notwithstanding his connections with Charles Darwin and Joseph Hooker, Moore was not persuaded by evolution by natural selection and his botanical garden seemed to confirm rather than deny the role of God in the design of nature. Moreover, institutions such as botanical gardens not only displayed prevalent systems of taxonomic regulation, but also became sites for the investigation of order in the natural world.129 In the case of David Moore, the structuring of the scientific garden and the botanical discourse attending plant life there confirmed for him the working of a natural theology. The classifying of plants into families, the orderly fashioning of the beds, the display of exotics in the hothouses all facilitated a particular reading of designed nature which, for Moore, underlined his commitment to the existence of a divine designer. While the relationship between science and religion animated scientific debate in the nineteenth century, particularly after the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859, it is clear that the terms of this debate varied spatially130 and that in the case of Moore the botanical garden provided a mediating link between his private convictions as a practising Presbyterian and his public role as a working horticulturalist and botanist. Although botanical gardens, as scientific spaces par excellence in the nineteenth century, provided impetus for popular understandings of botany,131 they also reflected and refracted broader theoretical debates about the workings of the plant world and the role of evolution in particular. For Joseph Hooker at Kew, for instance, Darwin’s theory won favour, as it did in Cambridge, whereas in Dublin, Moore remained unpersuaded. In Belfast, too, the evidence suggests that natural theology was the central interpretive motif at their gardens. The Dublin garden, I wish to argue, acted as a hybrid space in a double sense: a space that lies between ‘raw’ nature and the ‘scientific’ laboratory, as a well as a socially hybrid space which connected Moore’s private religious convictions with his public role as an exhibitor and disseminator of scientific knowledge. As John Brooke has noted, ‘The most palpable effect of natural theology in the fabric of science was the resistance it produced to theories of organic transformation.’132 197

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Moore’s botanical reputation grew in stature as his curatorship expanded, and his interest in insectivorous plants which he developed at the gardens drew enquiries from Charles Darwin. They corresponded on the matter of the butterwort and Moore’s name appeared in Darwin’s book on the topic.133 Theologians and the literary and scientific intellectuals of Belfast were not particularly hostile to evolution by natural selection and there is little to suggest that prior to 1874 Darwin’s theory ‘was causing any profound anxiety in Calvinist Belfast’.134 It was not until after the British Association meeting, especially the presidential address of John Tyndall, that the new biology was seriously questioned. In the weeks leading up to the meeting the city was warmly anticipating hosting a prestige conference. Papers were presented by the leading members of the rising scientific establishment including H.E. Huxley, Joseph Hooker and John Lubbock.135 Tyndall’s opening speech sought to set the tone by robustly distancing scientific interpretations of the earth’s origins and the cosmos from religious ones.136 In what was regarded as a performance of evangelical magnitude in Belfast’s Ulster Hall, he claimed that all ‘religious theories, schemes and systems which embrace notions of cosmogony … must … submit to the control of science, and relinquish all thought of controlling it’.137 Similarly, Joseph Hooker’s talk which focused on carnivorous plants ‘both highlighted Darwin’s work and presented him as the leading expert on these plants’.138 The endorsement of evolution and the plea for separating science from religion was greeted with a rapid rebuttal from Belfast’s theological elite. The Reverend Professor Robert Watts (Professor of Systematic Theology at the Presbyterian Assembly’s College) and other of the city’s Calvinist ministers used the pulpits of Belfast to query Tyndall’s claims. However, the most concerted effort to refute some of the stronger assertions of Tyndall was organized by the Reverend William Johnston (former Moderator of the Presbyterian Church’s Presbyterian General Assembly). He set up a series of lectures on the relationship between science and religion to be delivered at the Presbyterian Church in Rosemary Street, Belfast (figure 34). The lectures were advertised in the Presbyterian newspaper The Witness on 27 November 1874 and they were also advertised in the local press which helped to attract large audiences. The texts of the talks were later published as a book in Belfast and North America, entitled 198

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Science and Revelation: A Series of Lectures in Reply to the Theories of Tyndall, Huxley, Darwin, Spencer etc.139 The preface was written by Johnston and the lectures which took place over the winter of 1874– 75 comprised a series of addresses by eight Presbyterian theologians and one scientist. It was within this context that the scientist Moore presented his paper.

34 Rosemary Street Presbyterian Church, Belfast (c. 1831)

While the other speakers sought to examine the moral, theological and doctrinal implications of evolution, Moore’s contribution was much more firmly that of a natural historian, a curator of an important botanical garden and a researcher into the workings of the plant world. In that sense Moore’s address was far less connected to the effort of the series ‘to reaffirm systematically the cardinal doctrines of the faith so as to ensure that Presbyterian theological territory remained intact’.140 Moore’s intellectual connections placed him as part of the prominent scientific community and it is as a member of such a network that he situated his case for design in the vegetable kingdom. 199

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Moore’s lecture was delivered to a packed audience in Belfast and it was staged in specific ways. Newspapers reported that ‘the lower area of the spacious building was filled and the galleries had to be opened’141 (figure 35). The text of his paper, entitled ‘Design in the structure and fertilisation of plants: a proof of the existence of God’, was reproduced in the two main local newspapers, the Belfast Newsletter and the Northern Whig.142 It was reported that the talk was enhanced by ‘beautifully coloured diagrams of orchids, dionceas, nepenthes, sarracenia’.143 These illustrations were reproduced in black and white in the published version of the talk. In addition to pictorial illustrations which were projected to the audience with a lamp of limelight, Moore also used ‘living examples of them’.144 The beauty of living nature confirmed the divine hand of God and Moore sought to transpose some of the exotic exemplars of designed nature from his botanical garden in Dublin to the lecture podium in Belfast. Coloured drawings and live specimens would go some way towards achieving this. An aesthetic argument was employed to juxtapose the munificent design of a caring Creator with the raw, competitive and cruel laws of natural selection.

35 Interior of Rosemary Street Presbyterian Church, Belfast, c. 1923 200

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As the nineteenth century progressed, the claims of natural theology were being increasingly challenged. Robert Young asserts that ‘In the early days the effort is to retain harmony between science and theology, after about 1850 increasing efforts are made to separate them or to make the claims of theology so abstract that they cannot come into conflict with the discoveries of science.’145 By the 1870s, he posits, there was a fragmentation of the general intellectual context which had kept questions of science and religion closely linked, and this was reflected in the greater specialization and professionalization of scientific, philosophical and theological sub-disciplines. However, in the case of David Moore it is clear that the claims of natural theology remained important right through to the 1870s. Similarly, these debates about science and religion, although initially occurring among the scientific elite, were increasingly being popularized to lay audiences as the meetings in Belfast illustrate. Similarly, botanical gardens were part of this popularizing process. As Outram points out of the Paris Muséum, it was ‘a “professional space” which was also open to the amateur or even merely slightly interested public … The Muséum was a space where not only contestations about classification could take place, but also one where entirely new approaches to nature could be worked out.’146 In his address in Belfast, Moore used his observations in Dublin to defend a theological interpretation of the natural world but he did so in a manner that was not openly antagonistic to the views of his colleagues and friends working within an evolutionary perspective. As Young has suggested, outright conflict between evolutionists and advocates of a grand designer in the nineteenth century was rare. Moore was keen to defend his position as a natural theologian without alienating his professional colleagues who supported an evolutionary view. In Belfast his discussion of the evidence for a divine design rotated around three sets of interrelated claims. Firstly, in nature there is evidence of an ordered structure and while enlightened science reveals that structure through observation and development of plant taxonomies, the visible presence of a design logically requires the presence of a designer. Secondly, where plant adaptation to the environment is uncovered, it is God who provides the means for adaptation rather than processes embedded in nature. Thus rather than natural selection by chance variations providing the ultimate 201

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mechanism for understanding how plants adapt to their environment, it is the work of a higher power which guides this process. Thirdly, the beauty of plants, both in their visual appearance and their structured morphology, especially among exotic species, must arise from the wishes of a designer who seeks to provide humans with a pleasing world to inhabit. The aesthetics of nature sometimes revealed through scientific instruments (for instance optical gadgets) provided Moore with the intellectual weaponry to defend a theological interpretation of the plant kingdom. As such, nature’s beauty acts as a visible counterbalance to Darwinian claims about the low, horridly wasteful and cruel works of nature, guided only by the perpetual struggle for existence. In the opening of his address Moore made reference to the seventeenth-century Cambridge natural theologian John Ray, and thus put his own interpretation within a longer context. In examining the germ he stated that ‘we may readily observe order and regulation, the work of some intelligent being, in furnishing sustenance for the young germ which is contained in the seed’.147 Pre-adaptation was immediately invoked to explain the distribution of plants and animals across the earth. And once germination had taken place, for Moore the striking down of roots to seek darkness similarly represented ‘evident design for the nourishment and support of plants’.148 The roots’ ability to adapt to climatic conditions such as drought and to maximize the absorption of moisture also indicates ‘a striking instance of the beautiful correspondence which has been established between processes belonging to different departments of nature, and which are made to concur in the production of remote effects, that could never have been accomplished without these preconcerted and harmonious adjustments’.149 The role of God in providing the means for plant survival, involving a complex constellation of climate, soil and seed, is energetically expressed here. Looking at the stem, both in its role in transferring sap to the plant and in its physical structure, Moore also saw evidence of design. The leaves proved to be most important and ‘In no other part of the plant is design so strongly manifested.’150 Drawing from scriptural descriptions of the role of trees in providing shade to human and animal life, to a discussion of the appearance of leaves under a microscope, Moore claimed their ‘marvellously beautiful structure will command our admiration’. He went on to opine that ‘he must indeed be a stolid 202

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individual who cannot perceive wisdom and design of the highest order in all this cohesion of atoms. Again, how exquisitely beautiful and how manifold are the forms of leaves … It is not too much to suppose that all this wonderful change of form and of colouring was intended by the Creator to gratify and please the senses of His creatures. Had there been only one form of leaf, however beautiful that may have been, the eye would have soon become wearied of beholding it.’151 Leaves were viewed as visually appealing as well as perfectly formed to perform their function and this perfection could not, for Moore, be in itself explained by nature. An analysis of the role and functioning of carniverous plants occupied much of the remainder of Moore’s presentation. Insectivorious plants enjoyed widespread cultural fascination in nineteenth-century Britain. Poets, novelists, popular science writers as well as natural historians were all intrigued by the workings of these insect-eating plants. These species drew popular attention for their alluring physical appearance but paradoxically their beauty was also seen to disguise a violent and ugly dimension of nature. As Smith has put it, ‘insect-eaters lure their victims with enticing looks and tempting fragrances and empty promises of nectar, only to drown, dissolve, and dismember them’.152 Using detailed illustrations and acknowledging the work of Hooker and Darwin in highlighting how these plants capture insects, Moore asked ‘who gave this plant [Dioncea muscipula] these remarkable peculiarities and propensities? It will be found rather difficult to explain them on the evolution principle.’153 Drawing from examples of insect-devouring plants from across a range of regions, including North America, Ireland, New Holland and Europe, Moore offered detailed descriptions of their morphology. Based on the work that he had carried out in Glasnevin, Moore corroborated others’ observations: ‘I never observed our honeymaking bee approach the Sarraceniae or Nepenthes in our conservatories; nor did I ever find their dead bodies in the pitchers.’ He went on to state that ‘More recent observations might lead us to suppose that all this beautiful arrangement and adaptation may be necessary, and wisely designed, for keeping up certain links in the chain of insect life.’154 Again he interwove design, beauty and preordained adaptation in unison to account for the existence of these fascinating species and it is from observations carried out at the botanic gardens that he can draw these conclusions. 203

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Moore was also fascinated by the fact that there were certain insects which did not succumb to the trap of the fly-trapper and could survive contact with it. For instance, in the case of the Darlingtonia californica, the Calilfornian side-saddle plant, after fertilization occurred some insects were lured into the pitcher to feed off the plant without being devoured. Describing this process, Moore observed: ‘If such be the case, surely no man with ordinary reasoning powers, whatever his belief may be, can deny design of the highest order in this instance.’155 Similarly, the attractiveness and intricateness of the family of Nepenthes plants seduced Moore. He professed these ‘pitchers belonging to species in this group are among the most beautiful and curiously formed organs in the whole vegetable kingdom’.156 Accompanied by intricate drawings, Moore outlined how these plants worked and he made reference to the work of Hooker and Darwin. In so doing he was explicitly acknowledging the value of contemporary research of evolutionists while at the same time drawing different conclusions. Of a New Holland Caphalotus follicularis, which is smaller than any of the Nepenthes, he stated ‘but for the beauty of form and elegance of construction, it is not surpassed by any of the other pitcher-leaved plants’.157 In the final two sections of his address, Moore focused on flowers and fertilization. He began by observing that ‘The flower, in all its beauty and captivating loveliness, consists only of leaves, changed or morphologised so as to effect … the production of seed.’158 In examining the flower and its reproductive organs, Moore was consistently attracted to both the function and the beauty of the specimens. The stamens and pistils, while colourful and designed for attracting insects for pollination, were ‘as well, no doubt, as to please and gratify mankind, and to adorn and beautify the external world – thus leading us to look with thankfulness and adoration to the great God of the Universe through His manifold works’.159 He went on to claim that ‘the manner in which they operate [the stamens and pistils] for the reproduction of seeds is often very wonderful, and surely beyond the realm of chance’.160 Moore used examples from observations made in Glasnevin’s conservatories. With respect to the cactus he commented that ‘the perfume in most night-flowering kinds is also strong and agreeable … we have, no doubt, design displayed, both in the colouring of the flowers and the perfume emitted from them’.161 204

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Moore concluded his address with orchids, a species he had studied over a considerable period of time. By the middle of the nineteenth century, orchids had won widespread popular appeal in Britain. During the 1860s one plant-collecting firm is estimated to have imported to Britain between 100,000 and 200,000 orchids per year from the Brazilian highlands.162 The search for rare tropical orchids continued apace as the nineteenth century progressed.163 While they were of major botanical interest to scientists, they also had huge popular appeal as quintessential representations of tropicality. For Darwin, the orchid’s amazing flowers helped to demonstrate adaptation for pollination and they helped him puzzle through the role of sexual reproduction in evolution.164 Moore recognized the status of orchids in the popular imagination when he remarked, ‘The peculiar structure and forms of the flowers of this remarkable genus, along with the beautiful colours which adorn them, give them an interest which is not attached to any other family of plants at the present time.’165 Orchid houses formed important spaces within botanical gardens, and in addition to palm houses often formed the epicentre of the exotic collections.166 The pattern of pollination as well as the beauty of their flowers attracted Moore’s attention over his lifetime, but unlike Darwin, it led him to entirely different conclusions. He stated, ‘in the important phenomenon of reproduction, not only [are] unmistakeable instances of design manifested but indications of vitality’.167 While Moore may have focused much of his address on the tropical world, he finished his lecture by stressing the universal hand of a designer across the entire natural world. This episode is a particularly poignant instance of the popularizing role of botanical gardens in the spread or maintenance of particular understandings of natural history. And while this talk was delivered to a limited audience, its content found a wider appeal through its publication and dissemination in the popular press and through the printed version of the Rosemary Street lecture series published in 1875. Notwithstanding this particular popularizing of botanical knowledge through the use of evidence procured in botanical gardens, more commonly the public experienced these spaces through public events held in the gardens such as flower shows, fêtes and lecture series. Although all the gardens under consideration here were at various times under financial constraints, this varied between them and Belfast was, 205

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perhaps, the garden most in need of staging public spectacles to raise the popular profile of the garden and to generate additional income.

Fêting the Public Raising money and awareness of the Belfast botanical gardens was a constant preoccupation of the Belfast Botanical and Horticultural Society. As a private company, balancing the books was an important consideration as was the desire to make the gardens popular amongst Belfast’s public. Consequently the garden was the site for many public entertainments. In the summer of 1838 it hosted a musical evening featuring the band of the 22nd Regiment. The event was attended by 300–400 people where ‘the gay dresses of the ladies (who formed the larger part of the assembly), contrasted well with the vivid tint of the green sward’168 and people promenaded along the pathways as well as occupied benches erected to listen to the band. This correlates with Alberti’s claim that involvement with natural history events not only served an educational role but enabled middle-class women to participate in public culture and to display this through carefully manicured dress and behaviour codes.169 The evening was deemed a great success and it was declared that ‘if our fellow-citizens would take more interest in the affairs of the Botanic Garden such enjoyment as they witnessed on Thursday, would well reward them, for the trifling sum [charged for entrance]’.170 The gardens in Belfast also played host to some of the celebrations marking the coronation of Queen Victoria in June 1838. The Northern Whig noted that northerners were characterized by ‘our pleasure-loving southern friends, as plodding, speculating, money-hunting people of business, who have no time to waste on agreeable sights or sounds’,171 but on the occasion of the royal coronation were willing and enthusiastic about launching a public celebration. Contrasting a northern Calvinist sensibility with a southern Catholic one mirrored some of the more deep-seated political divisions prevalent in mid-nineteenth century Ireland. Although the weather proved inclement, nonetheless the populace ‘thronged the botanical garden’.172 The entertainment included rocket and balloon ascents, archery and other sports but the most 206

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attractive features reported were the band of the 22nd Regiment and the show of native plants. The latter were part of a competition for the Templeton Prizes and attracted submissions of greenhouse plants, bouquets and ornamental baskets. The prizes were inaugurated that year by the Committee of the Botanical and Horticultural Society to mark the contribution of John Templeton to natural history and in particular knowledge about native plants. It was hoped that these prizes would become an annual competition. The prize winner in the bouquet category arranged the flowers as an imperial crown, bearing the motto ‘Long Live Victoria’, a sentiment perhaps more deeply felt by Belfast Protestants than Dublin Catholics. Another prize winner was Charles Moore, assistant to the Geological Department of the Ordnance Survey, and brother of David Moore. He would later move to Australia and become Curator of the Sydney Botanic Gardens. Beverages and confectioneries were sold at marquees set up on the front lawn. The flower display, however, was regarded as the epicentre of the attractions in the garden to mark Victoria’s coronation and although there was no accurate head count it was reported that the tickets purchased brought in just under £300.173 The garden regularly became part of the city’s itinerary for the celebration of public holidays and royal events. The marking of this space as a site for the performance of acts of cultural and political loyalty to the Crown underscored the significance of its location in a predominantly Protestant, unionist and royalist city. Not all visits to the garden were to honour or accompany royal occasions. In 1838 the Professor of Botany at the University of Liege, Docteur Morren, visited the garden as part of a tour of Britain and Ireland he was undertaking, having attended the meeting of the British Association. He remarked of its ‘picturesque beauty as being superior to anything of the kind he had seen, even on the Continent of Europe’.174 The establishment of the herbaceous section of British plants was deemed a most valuable addition to the botanical student but the absence of a greenhouse and stove compartment was regretted and thus ‘We respectfully call on our townsmen to remedy this deficiency.’175 The link between the city and the garden was being regularly made in an effort to generate public support for the enterprise and popular funding to improve the site. By 1839 the committee could note with optimism that ‘we trust that the generous spirit of our townsmen, and 207

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the neighbouring gentry, will soon enable the respectable managers of this valuable establishment to accomplish their tasteful and judicious plans for rendering these beautiful gardens still more worthy of public approbation, and giving them that finish, which the erection of a range of glass will completely effect’.176 The 1840 Annual General Meeting reported that the gardens had received 50,000 visitors including those who attended the midsummer fête over the previous year.177 The fête of 1842 was deemed a great success with over 2,500 visitors including ‘Gentry from this town and from the distance of nearly twenty miles’.178 Dignitaries included the Marquis of Donegall and Colonel Napier. It became part of the social calendar of the city and the emerging popularity of this space enabled important social and gender identities to be forged, particularly among Belfast’s middle and upper classes.179 Monsieur Jullien’s band and the band of the 34th Regiment entertained the crowds. At four o’clock, after the conclusion of the first part of the concert, the crowds assembled at the pond for the ‘purpose of witnessing a submarine explosion’.180 The experiment consisted of the sinking of six or seven pounds of gun powder at the centre of the pond and its ignition by a wired, galvanic battery. The display was judged hugely impressive as ‘a column of water rose to the height of forty feet … a most beautiful sight was presented to the eye of the spectator’.181 Such spectacular displays were increasingly part of the popularizing culture as ‘forms of scientific showmanship were occasions for Victorians to celebrate the superiority of their industrial culture’.182 The experiment was repeated later in the evening, much to the delight of the audience, and the day was considered a great success with no real incidents to report apart from one youth being removed from the premises for being tipsy. The crowd dispersed in their carriages at 6 pm. Such public entertainment obviously attracted visitors and made the garden a backdrop for other types of entertainment. By 1843 the Annual General Meeting could report that the garden received 72,000 visitors representing ‘more than three times that of any Botanic Garden in the Kingdom’.183 It was also noted that the garden was performing one of it founding duties well, that is, the training of apprentices. It was acknowledged that the first apprentice, James Russell, had through the guidance of the Curator, Ferguson, obtained a position in the garden of the Duke of Buccleuch, thus fulfilling the desire that the instruction and training of native 208

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gardeners would form ‘one of the most important objects for which the institution was founded’.184 Another highlight for the garden in its early years was the visit of Queen Victoria to Belfast in the summer of 1849. Although not part of her official itinerary the Botanic Garden Committee ensured that the gardens were ‘in the most perfect order, in anticipation of her Majesty’s visit’.185 On Saturday, 11 August the Queen and Prince Albert arrived early in Belfast by royal yacht from Dublin. The royal cortege made its way through the city along the High Street, greeting the many thousands of people lining the route. The visit to the botanic gardens was brief, as it had not appeared in the original schedule. The couple and their entourage entered the garden through the new west gate and completed a quick circuit of the grounds. The crowd was sparse as many did not expect the Queen here;186 and Prince Albert asked a great many questions of Mr Ferguson about plants that were of interest to him.187 It was reported that ‘Her Majesty and the Prince seemed highly pleased with the garden, and expressed their admiration of its beauty and that of the surrounding scenery.’188 They left the gardens and went on to visit the adjacent Queen’s University before the party left Belfast Lough the following morning. Although her visit to the city was brief, the prestige of a royal visit to the gardens reinforced its status within the city. By and large, though, the gardens served the public under less ceremonial circumstances. On Easter Monday of 1853, for instance, large numbers of visitors had enjoyed the space: ‘The lawn was covered with children, who occupied themselves for some hours with rural games.’189 By this time the dome of the Palm House was completed, with only the side glazing to be finished. The two smaller domes at the termination of the wings had not been added, nonetheless ‘The conservatories were much looked at; and Mr Ferguson, the esteemed curator, evinced his usual urbanity in conducting visiters [sic] through the gardens, and in pointing out the various plants.’190 Later in 1853 the public were alerted to the flowering of the water lily Victoria regia and advised that they could see the plant, at a tariff of 2s 6d for the family of proprietors and subscribers and 6d for non-subscribers.191 Acquiring and succeeding with rarities was expensive hence the gardens in Belfast used such successes to raise further revenue. In 1869, Prince Arthur (the Queen’s son) paid a visit to Belfast and included an excursion 209

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through the gardens. Some 4,000–5,000 visitors were present and the conservatories were ‘crowded with rare and brilliant exotics’,192 which the Prince and the crowds enjoyed viewing. The Prince was accompanied around the garden by the Curator Mr Johnson and the 54th Regiment band played music including the national anthem. These royal visits became occasions to showcase the space, to emphasize the popular role it played in the life of an industrial city and to add social prestige as much as scientific status to it. Providing entertainment as much as education underpinned much of the public’s relationship with the Belfast gardens. Dublin also held a variety of different types of event to attract visitors to the gardens and to raise funds for particular building projects. But because the gardens were not funded primarily on the revenue generated by visitors, there was not as much need as in Belfast to stage spectacular events to increase visitor numbers. Consequently, many of the open events held in Glasnevin were as much about popular education as entertainment. The garden became a site for the public transmission of botanical and horticultural knowledge to the city’s middle and labouring classes. The British Association for the Advancement of Science met in Dublin in 1835. The meeting was organized and hosted by a variety of scientific communities including Trinity College, the Royal Irish Academy and the RDS.193 The RDS’s theatre, board room and conversation room were allocated as venues for the Geology (Section C) and Natural History (Section D) meetings. The Dublin organizing committee comprised 15 people which included Dr Litton and it was agreed that a subscription fund would be raised to provide entertainment to the BAAS visitors in the botanical garden.194 Delegates were also played host to by the zoological gardens. On Friday, 14 August a fête champetre was held in the gardens for the delegates. Thirteen hundred people were accommodated at the site and 18 marquee tents were erected there. Two tents were reserved for officers of the Association so that they could return to the city before other guests. Delegates complimented the gardens and ‘the still more admirable display of Irish beauty they contained’.195 While some botanists left the gardens after their meal – for instance, Professor Graham from Edinburgh took an excursion to Howth to view the coastal flora there – many delegates remained in the gardens promenading and examining the collections until late afternoon.196 The bands of the 18th Regiment 210

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and 7th Dragoons entertained them. The event generated a £96 profit of which £46 was set aside for improvements to the garden.197 Visiting different sites of scientific interest was characteristic of the annual meetings held by the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and this practice has been interpreted as part of a circuit of display spaces within the host city where ‘certain civic spaces were opened up for the consumption and display of science as were locale of significance nearby. The city no longer becomes the unit of assessment … rather the focus becomes certain sites.’198 The press coverage of the meeting in Dublin, broadly speaking, was divided into two camps. The Protestant conservative press (Dublin Evening Mail) and the liberal and O’Connellite news-sheets (Freeman’s Journal) took opposing views. The former was largely supportive of the event while the latter initially considered it an elitist anti-Catholic organization, but opinions mellowed as the week progressed.199 The BAAS met again in Dublin in 1857 and delegates were also entertained in the botanic garden. However, as scholars have pointed out, attending the meetings of the BAAS was prompted by many motives; the presence of Lady Caroline Howard at these Dublin meetings was stimulated as much by a social as an intellectual role as she found the opportunity to meet and interact with friends.200 In the botanical garden the Lord Lieutenant, the Mayor of Dublin and the general public attended, swelling numbers to over 7,000 who were served by 13 marquees.201 The presence of civic and political leaders gave the meetings status but also buttressed the constitutional position of Ireland within the Union which might appeal to the majority of the members of the RDS albeit not all of Dublin’s wider citizenry. As well as the formal lecture series run in the gardens by the Professor of Botany (see Chapter 5), there were also occasional public talks and demonstrations carried out by the professor and curator. For instance, in a presentation at Glasnevin by Professor Harvey in 1850, as part of a Grand Botanical Conversazione, he illustrated his talk with the display of a single leaf of a giant water lily which he had obtained from Kew. The audience reportedly marvelled at the gargantuan leaf and this provided further impetus to obtain and bring to flowering stage a new water lily.202 After several failed efforts, David Moore pleaded that ‘I would further beg to notice the want felt at present of an Aquarium House [for] the tropical aquatic plants … more especially Victoria 211

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regia, for which a house is set apart in most public gardens.’203 To raise funds a fête was held at Glasnevin in 1853, and 4,000 people attended including the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. This event generated £260 for the garden and the government paid the remainder for the building of an aquatic house. It also enticed the public into the gardens and brought to their attention the role of the gardens in the cultivation of these exotic species. Promenades in the gardens were also initiated in 1860 and occasionally the Lord Lieutenant attended them but by and large they were deemed not that useful and so were discontinued in the 1890s. While the royal visit of 1849 made an impact in Belfast, it also played a significant role in the life of Dublin in that year. The botanical garden provided the flowers that were used to decorate Dun Laoghaire pavilion for the arrival by royal yacht of the Queen and Prince Albert. Her Majesty visited the gardens somewhat unexpectedly, on Monday, 6 August, accompanied by her husband, the Lord Lieutenant and the Countess of Clarendon. The Prince and Lord Lieutenant rode on horseback through the gardens while the Queen and her entourage used a carriage. As there was little notice given of the visit, the crowds were thin except for members of the RDS and the Curator. Moore showed the royal party around the exhibits and they appeared ‘much delighted’ with the plants.204 The popular press covered their visit and included an engraving of the new glasshouses (figure 36). It prompted the request that ‘the leading members of the Royal Dublin Society will mark their esteem of the honour thus paid [Queen’s visit], by getting the noble house lately built properly heated, and filled with the plants intended for it’.205 Royal patronage gave public status to the scientific endeavours of the Royal Dublin Society and although there were few in attendance the press coverage afterward enhanced the public profile of the institution. Other royal visits would follow and the popularity of the gardens with Dublin’s public would enlarge as the opening hours were expanded to include Sundays. The site continued to carry out scientific research and training of apprentices but its role as a space for the public consumption of natural history in nineteenth-century Dublin is not to be underestimated.

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36 Curvilinear Range

Conclusion Providing a space for popular and amateur excursions into botanical science was to varying degrees a priority in the three gardens. Cambridge was by far the garden least concerned with its role as a space for the city’s public to enjoy and learn. Consequently it did little to provide cheap, popular guides to the garden and where they were available they were technical and scientific in their approach. Dublin and Belfast were both more concerned to attract the public and to provide competent information for the amateur to consult. In Belfast the financial situation of the garden necessitated a widening of access but this also reflected the improving impulse that animated many Victorians, particularly where the labouring classes were concerned. As a publicly funded garden, Glasnevin too was stimulated by the desire to reach a wide audience although it also kept a strong scientific focus to its activities. Sunday opening was an issue of concern in all three cases. From questions of supervision of visitors to the sanctity of Sunday as a day of rest there was a reluctance all round to open these spaces to the public on the Sabbath. That all three were located in a Protestant community or governed by a Protestant elite in part accounts for this reticence, but eventually all would open to the public. Guidebooks provide an insight into some of the ways in which the gardens were 213

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to be ‘read’ by the public. Appreciating the diversity of God’s nature underpinned much of the narrative in Belfast and Dublin, while a more taxonomic and evolutionary perspective seemed to gradually emanate from Cambridge. While ultimately visitors could choose their own routes through each of the gardens, the indoor collections featured strongly in all guiding texts and I suspect that they formed an important part of visitors’ excursions into these gardens. While strolling through the pinetum or inspecting herbaceous and shrub beds would have been pleasing, marvelling at the intricacies of tropical nature found in the heated and humidified glasshouses would have transported the visitors into arenas of the natural world not normally at their disposal. Temperate flora might be seen in other parks and gardens around each of the cities, but publicly accessible hothouses were much more of a rarity. The didactic role of these spaces was also evidenced by the provision of demonstrations, public lectures, spectacles and general entertainment. Their prestige could be heightened by royal patronage and their message diffused through press coverage of major events. As such, they became symbols of status especially in the Irish cities, whereas in Cambridge the garden was more firmly part of the standing of the wider university. Their ultimate roles were to varying degrees polysemic; the public had access to these prized gardens but that access was regulated through a whole series of cultural, educational and moral discourses that in part were locally constituted and performed.

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Conclusion Gardening is civil and social, but it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the outlaw.1 Henry David Thoreau

During the course of the nineteenth century, botanical gardens spread their tentacles and deepened their hold across the towns and cities of Britain, Ireland and beyond. From their origins in the Renaissance physic garden – laid out in geometric styles fashionable in the period and planted to nurture medical training – to their apogee as spaces for the embodiment of scientific knowledge about plants, these gardens represented in practical and theoretical ways much of what was known about the earth’s flora. Moreover they became sites for scholarly and popular understandings of botanical nomenclature, taxonomy and order. They displaced nature from the forest, the foothill and the flatland and rearranged it in the enclosed spaces of these gardens to reveal something of the scientific principles underpinning the apparent chaos of the wild. In so doing nature was tamed in order to divulge its hidden secrets and redisplayed in a fashion which at once heightened a sense of curiosity about its wonderment and simultaneously reassured that order could be disclosed. Creating a taxonomically accurate arrangement of plants exposed regularity but producing an aesthetically enticing design scheme bedazzled the senses and provoked awe at nature’s complexity. Of course botanical institutions themselves were embedded in the wider contexts of the cities in which they emerged. While the early physic gardens largely were born out of the medical faculties of some of Europe’s major universities, the modern botanical garden grew up in

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a more diverse range of places, and scholars have increasingly stressed the importance of locational context in moulding the manner in which scientific cultures operate. This study has concerned itself with three such locales: the university city of Cambridge where the emergence of a botanical garden was intimately bound to the promotion of botany within the university; Ireland’s capital city Dublin where the Enlightenment philosophy of the Royal Dublin Society in tandem with state economic policy encouraged the development of a garden to promote agricultural development and botanical knowledge; and finally the industrial city of Belfast whose Botanic Garden was primed through private capital and served as an educational and recreational space for the city’s expanding middle and working classes. While each city had its own set of pressing concerns for founding a garden, they also were part of broader culture of natural history, a culture where gardens were developing across the country and in Britain’s overseas empire. To some degree therefore there was a template for reproducing such spaces of taxonomic order, yet the precise manner in which each came to represent the world’s flora was divergent, reflecting their local circumstances and their position within a wider hierarchy of botanical institutions. In this book I have set about understanding how these sitings exerted an impact on debates surrounding the foundational principles, design practices and public accessibility to these prized institutions. For as Thoreau readily acknowledged, while gardening may be an intensely socially and civically produced activity, plants themselves are regularly unco-operative desperadoes in humans’ plans for their ordering and containment. The reasons for founding a botanical garden varied across these three case studies. The founding of the earliest garden, Cambridge, was animated by the desire to provide a space initially to support the teaching of medicine and more gradually the development of botany as a discipline within the institution. These early preoccupations found expression in the design of the first garden, modelled on the formal and geometric layout of physic gardens. The new garden on the outskirts of the city was more firmly conceived to reflect the imperatives of a modern botanical science. In Dublin, too, there were educational motives underpinning the founding of the garden. The Royal Dublin Society was keen to further agricultural experiment which might be beneficial to the Irish economy as well as advance a prestige scientific 216

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garden which would demonstrate the aspirations of this learned society to be one of the most influential in Britain and Ireland. In Belfast the stimulus for having a garden was more connected to the twin practical ambitions of training apprentice gardeners for future employment on the estates of Ireland and to provide a recreational venue for the city’s population. Although conceived by a local natural history society, the scientific purpose of the garden was less well formulated than in either of the other two cases and the funding of the project through shareholders reflected the status of the city as a centre of industrial capitalism. The internal layout of botanical gardens was dictated, to varying degrees, by the wish to demonstrate the dominant classification systems. Among the outdoor collections, and using either artificial methods like the sexual system or natural systems such as de Jussieu’s, species were arranged and planted into their classes. Intrinsic to this procedure was the need to nominate and accurately tag plants, but the vulnerability of this practice was apparent in all cases as the curators and gardeners struggled to maintain the labels and thus order. Whether it was visitors removing the tags or birds swiping them for nest-making, maintaining discipline over the arrangements proved a constant challenge in all three gardens but most especially in Cambridge and Dublin. Interspersed with the practice of classification were other design concerns which had both utilitarian and aesthetic motivations. All three gardens planted arboreta to represent the primary tree divisions, but the precise layout of these sections of the gardens was also informed by the physical characteristics of the site (for instance, soil type) and an aspiration to create an agreeable visual appearance. Consequently, trees were positioned to provide shelter for other parts of the garden; to enhance vistas or mask undesirable views; to create sightlines across the space; and in landscape terms to emulate the picturesque. Strict taxonomic order was regularly compromised with additional trees and shrubs added to arrangements to enhance their beauty. The characteristics of individual trees were also prized: their colour, shape, size and contour were valued for their elegance as much as for their place in botany’s classification schemes. All three gardens cherished their arboreta and expended considerable financial and labouring effort in establishing and maintaining them. Culturally, as well as economically, trees were of great importance 217

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in nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland. Native species connected with senses of national identity; in Glasnevin, for instance, there was a Hortus Hibernicus planted to celebrate the island’s floral heritage. Moreover the arboretum was often the superstructure around which the rest of a garden was designed and this varied across the three gardens. Balancing the aspiration to produce scientifically accurate gardens and ones that would appeal to all the senses was played out in all three cities and the final result was different in each. If the outdoor collections brought the more familiar, hardy plants together in a single space, it was with the indoor collections that the less familiar, exotic species were displayed. Glasshouses were important in all these case studies because the buildings themselves were exciting exercises in structural engineering, architecture, glass and heating technology. Consequently these structures were of intrinsic interest and sometimes the subject of considerable debate and criticism. Although housing tender plants was their ostensible function, they were never judged on their instrumentality alone – they had to serve a wider appetite for the buildings to mirror the beauty and exoticism of the plants inside them. And it was in the internal spaces of the hothouses that images of tropicality were purveyed. Although the tropics elicited quite mixed responses in Europeans – often negatively conjugated as spaces of hyperfecundity and moral laxity – in botanical gardens the hothouse collections represented tropicality at its most positive. Luxuriant, exotic, arrestingly beautiful in scale, and fascinatingly unusual in the vibrancy of colour and shape, these collections conveyed the hotter climates of the earth in a most favourable light and in that respect deviated quite significantly from more orthodox, and rather more pathological, interpretations of the tropical zones. In Belfast and Dublin in particular, the design of the glasshouses and their role for the understanding of nature with a wider public was extremely important. In Cambridge the houses were less innovative in design terms and of less consequence in the overall patterning of the garden. The survival and success of the gardens depended on cultivating contacts and networks of intellectual and material exchange across a range of institutions. As ‘sites of accumulation’, keeping a garden stocked with plants was an ongoing task. Cambridge and Dublin both developed strong links with other significant gardens in Britain, Europe and the colonies. Belfast managed to a lesser extent to court these 218

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contacts. Cambridge’s position meant that it had close relationships with important botanists at Kew and other prestige educational institutions. Moreover as a place to educate the student of botany, it was where a metropolitan academic elite was being trained and disciplined, as well as being a site of calculation and experimentation. Similarly Dublin’s professors of Botany and curators established close and reciprocal links with many botanical gardens in Britain, Europe and beyond, and a strong exchange network emerged. Glasnevin, too, became a serious space of scientific experiment, especially with respect to economic plants of commercial value to the Irish economy. In particular, studies into the cause of the potato blight in the 1840s emphasize this role. Botanical gardens were powerful expressions of the advance of natural history in the nineteenth century. They brought together in a single space some of the diversity of the earth’s floral bounty. They nominated, classified, systematically planted and experimented with plants from around the world. But they were also important spaces for the public consumption of this knowledge and for the development of an aesthetic appreciation of horticultural practices. To varying degrees all three gardens were open to the public as venues of education and entertainment. Attitudes towards access varied between the cities, and heated debates developed with respect to Sunday opening and the disciplining of the behaviour of visitors. In Dublin there was particular resistance to opening the gardens on a Sunday on account of the Protestant sensibilities of the majority of the RDS’s membership. The gardens acted as living embodiments of the rich abundance of plant life and for a viewing public they provided a lens through which this diversity could be understood. Guidebooks were one vehicle through which the public was tutored and they provided an interpretive framework for making sense of these sites. In Dublin the garden represented a microcosmic rendition of God’s design whereas in Cambridge a more evolutionary approach is evident. In Belfast, visitors were enticed to have their senses elevated by observing the beauty of individual species and the larger vistas created in the space. The ordering principle underpinning the arrangement of plants in each of the gardens was regularly interrupted by the allure of finding a spatial pattern that appealed to the aesthetic values of the day. And this book has sought to uncover some of the ways in which these efforts were 219

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expedited in the soils of the gardens in Cambridge, Belfast and Dublin but always taking seriously the sixteenth-century gardener, Thomas Hill’s, avowal that ‘The garden is a ground plot for the mind.’

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Notes

CHAPTER 1 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15

This is the first stanza of the poem ‘Sweetpea’ which appeared in Seamus Heaney (1984), Station Island, London: Faber and Faber, p. 46. Prest, J., The Garden of Eden: The Botanic Garden and the Re-Creation of Paradise (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981). Cunningham, A. ‘The culture of gardens’ in N. Jardine, J.A. Secord and E.C. Spary (eds), Cultures of Natural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 39. Harvey, J., Medieval Gardens (London: Batsford, 1981); Comito, T., The Idea of the Garden in the Renaissance (New Brunswick: Princeton University Press, 1978). Lazzaro, C., The Italian Renaissance Garden (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991); Woodridge, K., Princely Gardens: The Origin and Development of the French Formal Style (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1986). Cunningham, ‘The culture of gardens’, p. 47. Rhodes, D.E., ‘The botanical garden of Padua: the first hundred years’, Journal of Garden History, 4 (1984), pp. 327–31; McCracken, D.P., Gardens of Empire (Leicester: Leicester University, 1997); Tomasi, L.T., ‘Projects for botanical and other gardens: a 16th century manual’, Journal of Garden History, 3 (1983), pp. 1–34. Ritvo, H., Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); Ritvo, H., (1996) ‘The order of nature: constructing the collections of Victorian zoos’ in R.J. Hoage, R.J. Deiss and W.A. Deiss (eds), New Worlds, New Animals: From Menagerie to Zoological Park in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1996), pp. 43– 50; Rothfels, N., Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2002). Prest, The Garden of Eden, p. 55. Cook, H.J., Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 110. Cook, Matters of Exchange. Prest, The Garden of Eden, p. 40. Cook, Matters of Exchange. McCracken, Gardens of Empire. Desmond, R., Kew: The History of the Royal Botanic Gardens (London: The Harvill Press, 1995); Drayton, R., Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain and the ‘Improvement’ of the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000);

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16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23

24

25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

Brockway, L., Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens (London: Yale University Press, 2002); Bingham, M., The Making of Kew (London: Michael Joseph, 1975); Hepper, N. (ed.), Royal Botanical Gardens Kew: Gardens for Science and Pleasure (London: HMSO, 1982). Spary, E.C., Utopia’s Garden: French Natural History from Old Regime to Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 198. Examples of straightforward historical narratives of the development of particular gardens, especially through discussions of key curators, include Gilbert, L., The Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney: A History: 1816–1985 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); Fletcher, H.R. and Brown, W.H., The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh 1670–1970 (Edinburgh: HMSO, 1970); Nelson, E.C. and McCracken, E.M., The Brightest Jewel: A History of the National Botanic Gardens Glasnevin, Dublin (Kilikenny: Boethius, 1987). McCracken, Gardens of Empire. Desmond, Kew. Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion. Drayton, Nature’s Government. Spary, Utopia’s Garden. Fan, F., Naturalists in Qing China: Science, Empire and Cultural Encounter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Griffiths, D.A. and Lau, S.P., ‘The Hong Kong Botanical Gardens: a historical overview’, Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 26 (1986), pp. 55–77; Endersby, J., ‘A garden enclosed: botanical barter in Sydney, 1818–39’, British Journal for the History of Science, 33 (2000), pp. 313–34; Casid, J.H., Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonisation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Ginn, F., ‘Colonial transformations: nature, progress and science in the Christchurch Botanic Gardens’, New Zealand Geographer, 65 (2009), pp. 35–47. Livingstone, D., Putting Science in its Place (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Philo, C. and Wilbert, C. (eds), Animal Spaces, Beastly Places (London: Routledge, 2000); Whatmore, S., Hybrid Geographies (London: Sage, 2002); Wolch, J. and Emel, J. (eds), Animal Geographies (London: Verso, 1998). Ritvo, H., ‘Zoological nomenclature and the empire of Victorian science’, in B. Lightman (ed.), Victorian Science in Context (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1997), p. 336. Ritvo, ‘Zoological nomenclature’. Quoted in Rothfels, N., Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2002), p. 21. Veltre, T., ‘Menageries, metaphors and meanings’, in R.J. Hoage and W.A. Deiss (eds), New Worlds, New Animals, p. 20. Burkhardt, R.W., ‘The leopard in the garden: life in close quarters at the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle’, Isis, 98 (2007), pp. 675–94. Ritvo, ‘The order of nature’, p. 46. Ritvo, ‘The order of nature’, p. 47. Anderson, K., ‘Culture and nature at the Adelaide Zoo: at the frontiers of “human” geography’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 20 (1995), p. 276. Anderson, ‘Culture and nature at the Adelaide Zoo’, p. 282. Cosgrove, D., Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988); Cosgrove, D. and Daniels, S. (eds), The Iconography of Landscape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Andrews, M., The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760–1800 (Aldershot: Scholar Press, 1989); Bermingham, A., Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition 1740–1860 (Berkeley: University of

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37 38 39 40

41 42

California Press, 1986); Hunt, J.D. and Willis, P., The Genius of the Place: The English Landscape Garden 1620–1820 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); Lueck, B., American Writers and the Picturesque Tour: The Search for National Identity, 1790–1860 (New York: Garland, 1997); Daniels, S., ‘The political iconography of woodland in late Georgian England’, in D. Cosgrove and S. Daniels (eds), The Iconography of Landscape, pp. 43–82; Daniels, S., Fields of Vision: Landscape, Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Schama, S., Landscape and Memory (London: Harper Perennial, 2004); Watkins, C. (ed.), Woods and Forests: Studies in Cultural History (Wallingford: CAB International, 1998); Cronon, W., Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature (New York: Norton and Company, 1995). Hunt, J.D., Gardens and the Picturesque: Studies in the History of Landscape Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992); Carter, G., Goode, P. and Laurie, K., Humphry Repton: Landcape Gardener 1752–1818 (London: Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts, 1982); Daniels, S., ‘On the road with Humphry Repton’, Journal of Garden History, 16 (1996), pp. 171–91; Daniels, S., Humphry Repton: Landscape Gardening and the Geography of Georgian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); Daniels, S. and Watkins, C., ‘Picturesque landscaping and estate management: Uvedale Price at Foxley, 1770–1829’, Rural History, 2 (1991), pp. 141–69. Blunt, W. and Stearn, W.T., The Art of Botanical Illustration (London: Antique Collectors Club/Kew Gardens, 1994); Saunders, G., Picturing Plants: An Analytical History of Botanical Illustration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). Rudwick, M.J.S., ‘The emergence of visual language for geological science, 1760–1840’, History of Science, 14 (1976), pp. 149–95; Rudwick, M.J.S., The Great Devonian Controversy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). Latour, B., ‘Drawing things together’, in M. Lynch and S. Woolgar (eds), Representation in Scientific Practice (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 19–68. Jordonova, L., Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine Between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); Gilman, S., Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988); Livingstone, D.N., ‘Race, space and moral climatology: notes toward a genealogy’, Journal of Historical Geography, 28 (2002), pp. 159–80. Lenoir, T. (ed.), Inscribing Science: Scientific Texts and the Materiality of Communication (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988); Jones, C. and Galison, P. (eds), Picturing Science: Producing Art (New York: Routledge, 1998). Smith, J., Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

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Prest, J., The Garden of Eden: The Botanic Garden and the Re-Creation of Paradise (New Haven: Yale University Press), p. 47. McCracken, D.P., Gardens of Empire: Botanical Institutions of the Victorian British Empire (London: Leicester University Press, 1997). Brockway, L., Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens (London: Yale University Press, 2002). Drayton, R., Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain and the ‘Improvement’ of the World (London: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 113. Shapin, S., ‘The Pottery Philosophical Society 1819–1835: an examination of the cultural uses of provincial science’, Science Studies (1972), p. 313.

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27 28

29 30 31 32

He refused to assent to the Act of Uniformity and thus had to resign his position at the university. See Raven, C., John Ray, Naturalist: His Life and Works (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950, 2nd edition). Preface of Ray, J., Catalogus Plantarum circa Cantabrigiam Nascentium (1975, originally published in 1660, tr. Ewan and Prime). Raven, C.E., English Naturalists from Neckham to Ray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1947). Keynes, G., John Ray: A Bibliography (London: Faber and Faber, 1951). Ray, J., Historia Plantarum, 3 vols (London, 1688–1704). Raven, John Ray, pp. 109–10. Ray, J., Methodus Plantarum (London, 1682). Translated and quoted in Raven, John Ray, p. 193. Brooke, J.H., Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Primarily his successor John Martyn and his son Thomas Martyn had parleyed this view of Richard Bradley. More recent scholarship has offered a more balanced view of Bradley. See Thomas, H.H., ‘The rise of natural science in Cambridge’, The Cambridge Review (1937), pp. 434–36; Thomas, H.H., ‘Richard Bradley, an early eighteenth century biologist’, Bulletin of the British Society for the History of Science, 1 (1952), pp. 178–79; Roberts, W., ‘R. Bradley, pioneer garden journalist’, Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society, 64 (1939), pp. 164–74. Thomas, ‘The rise of natural science’, p. 435. See for instance, Bradley, R., A Survey of the Ancient Husbandry and Gardening (London, 1725); Bradley, R., A Course of Lectures on the Materia Medica (London, 1730). Quoted in Walters, S.M., The Shaping of Cambridge Botany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 25. Quoted in Walters, The Shaping of Cambridge Botany, p. 26. Bradley, R., The Virtue and Use of Coffee, with Regard to the Plague, and Other Infectious Distempers (pamphlet, London: Eman Matthews and W. Mears, 1721). Roberts, ‘R. Bradley, pioneer garden journalist’, pp. 164–74. Rowley, G., ‘Introduction’ to facsimile of Richard Bradley’s Collected Writings on Succulent Plants (London: Gregg Press, 1964). Hix, J., The Glasshouse (London: Phaidon, 1974), p. 29. Thomas, ‘The rise of natural science’, p. 435. Hix, The Glasshouse. For an overview of Joseph Banks’ work, see Miller, D.P., ‘Joseph Banks, empire, and “centers of calculation” in late Hanoverian London’, in D.P. Miller and P.H. Reill (eds), Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany and Representations of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 21–37; Drayton, Nature’s Government. Allen, D.E., The Naturalist in Britain (London: Penguin, 1976). His principal botanical works include Tabulae Synopticae Plantarum Officinalium (London, 1726); Methodus Plantarum circa Cantabrigiam Nascentium (London, 1727); Historia Plantarum Rariorum (London, 1728–37); and The First Lecture of a Course of Botany (London, 1729). Walters, The Shaping of Cambridge Botany, p. 38. Martyn, T., Plantae Cantabrigeinses (London, n.p., 1763). Sherbo, A., ‘Thomas Martyn (1735–1825), “P.B.C.”: his contributions to the Gentleman’s Magazine’, Archives of Natural History, 22 (1) (1995), pp. 51–59. University Archives at Cambridge (UA), CUR 25.1, Botanik Garden 1717–1883,

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33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

Item 5, ‘A proposal for an annual subscription for the Botanic Garden, at Cambridge’, 27 February 1765. Walker, R., A Short Account of the Late Donation of a Botanic Garden to the University of Cambridge, by the Rev. Dr. Richard Walker, Vice-Master of Trinity College; with Rules and Orders for the Government of it (pamphlet, Cambridge, 1765), p. 1. Walker, A Short Account of the Late Donation. Walker, A Short Account of the Late Donation, p. 5. Walker, A Short Account of the Late Donation, p. 5. Walker, A Short Account of the Late Donation, pp. 5–6. McCracken, Gardens of Empire. UA, CUR 25.1, Botanik Garden 1717–1883, Item 5, ‘A proposal for an annual subscription for the Botanic Garden, at Cambridge’, 27 February 1765. UA, CHAR.II.13, Botanik Garden Book, Minutes of the Botanic Garden Trustees 1767–1846, 7 March 1767. UA, CUR 25.1, Botanik Garden 1717–1883, Item 5**, ‘Appeal for subscriptions to render the garden useful’, date unclear. Preface to Martyn, T., Heads of a Course of Lectures on Botany (Cambridge, 1764). UA, CHAR II.13, Minutes of the Botanic Garden Trustees 1767–1846, 27 October 1768. Walters, S.M. and Stow, E.A., Darwin’s Mentor: John Stevens Henslow 1796–1861 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 28. Conan, M., Baroque Garden Cultures: Emulation, Sublimation, Subversion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). Smith, J.J., The Cambridge Portfolio (London: Parker, 1840). Walters, The Shaping of Cambridge Botany. Synnott, D., ‘Botany in Ireland’, in J. Wilson Foster (ed.), Nature in Ireland: A Scientific and Cultural History (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1997), pp. 157–83. From the Minutes of the Royal Dublin Society, and quoted in The Royal Dublin Society (pamphlet, Dublin, 1965), p. 1. Bright, K., The Royal Dublin Society 1815–1945 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004). Foster, R., Modern Ireland, 1600–1972 (London: Allen Lane, 1988). Craig, M., Dublin 1660–1860 (Dublin: Allen Figgis, 1980). Berry, H.F., A History of the Royal Dublin Society (London: Longmans, 1915); de Vere White, T., The Story of the Royal Dublin Society (Tralee: The Kerryman, 1955); Meenan, J. and Clarke, D. (eds), The Royal Dublin Society, 1731–1981 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1981). McCracken, E., ‘The Botanic Garden, Trinity College Dublin’, Garden History, 7, 1 (1979), pp. 86–91. Wade, W., To the Right Honourable and Honourable, the Knights, Citizens and Burgesses, in Parliament Assembled, 1790, PRONI, Foster/Massereene Papers, D562/7823. The Parliamentary Register [for the House of Commons, Ireland], 1793, p. 13. McCracken, E., The History of Irish Woods since Tudor Times (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1971). O’Kane, F., Landscape Design in Eighteenth-Century Ireland: Mixing Foreign Trees with Natives (Cork: Cork University Press, 2004). Clinch, P.E.M., ‘Botany and the botanic gardens’, in J. Meenan and D. Clarke (eds), The Royal Dublin Society, pp. 185–206. Malcolmson, A.P.W., John Foster: The Politics of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). Malcolmson, John Foster.

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62 Young, A., A Tour in Ireland (Dublin: n.p., 1780), Vol. 1, p. 113. 63 Malcolmson, John Foster, p. 2. 64 Lecky, W.H., A History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century (London: University of Chicago Press, 1972); Foster, Modern Ireland. 65 Malcolmson, John Foster; Nelson, E.C. and McCracken, E.M., The Brightest Jewel: A History of the National Botanic Gardens Glasnevin, Dublin (Kilkenny: Boethius, 1987). 66 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 22, 1790, p. vii. 67 Wade, W., A Statement of the Progress … Made for the Purpose of Instituting a Public Botanic Garden near … Dublin (Dublin: Sleater, 1793), p. 4. 68 Wade, A Statement of the Progress. 69 Wade, A Statement of the Progress, p. 7. 70 Royal Dublin Society Manuscripts, Minute Books, 5, 1795, p. iii. 71 Nelson and McCracken, The Brightest Jewel. 72 Smithers, P., The Life of Joseph Addison (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968). 73 Nelson and McCracken, The Brightest Jewel. 74 Wade, W., Catalogus Systematicus Plantarum Indigenarum in Comitatu Dublinensi Inventarum (1794). 75 Royle, S., ‘Industrialisation, urbanization and urban society in post-famine Ireland’, in B.J. Graham and L.J. Proudfoot (eds), An Historical Geography of Ireland (London: Academic Press, 1993); Royle, S., ‘Map 12 – Growth of Belfast, to 1833’, in R. Gillespie and S. Royle (eds), Belfast Part 1, to 1840: Irish Historic Towns Atlas, No. 12 (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2003). 76 Maguire, W.A., Belfast (Keele: Keele University Press, 1993). 77 Beckett, J.C. et al (eds), Belfast: The Making of a City, 1800–1914 (Belfast: Appletree Press, 1998); Beckett, J.C. and Glascock, R.E. (eds), Belfast: Origins and Growth of an Industrial City (London: BBC, 1967); Bardon, J., Belfast: An Illustrated History (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1982). 78 Gillespie, R., ‘Explorers, exploiters and entrepreneurs: early modern Ireland and its context, 1500–1700’, in Graham and Proudfoot, An Historical Geography, pp. 123–57. 79 See, for instance, the discussion on the social composition of mechanics institutes in Ireland, Neswald, E., ‘Science, sociability and the improvement of Ireland: the Galway Mechanics Institute, 1826–51’, British Journal for the History of Science, 39 (2006), pp. 503–34; Duffy, S., ‘”Treasures open to the wise”: the mechanics institutes of north-east Ulster’, in N. McMillan (ed.), Prometheus’s Fire: A History of Scientific and Technological Education in Ireland (Kilkenny: Tyndall, 2000), pp. 322–36. For natural history and other societies, see Bailey, G.W.D., Reflections and Recollections: 100 years of the Dublin Naturalists Field Club (Dublin: Dublin Naturalists Field Club, 1986); Ross, H.C.G. and Nash, R., ‘The development of natural history in early nineteenth century Ireland’, in From Linnaeus to Darwin: Commentaries on the History of Biology and Geology (London: Society for the History of Natural History, 1986), pp. 13–27; Synott, D., ‘Botany in Ireland’ in J. Wilson Foster (ed.), Nature in Ireland (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1997), pp. 157–83. 80 Allen, D.E., The Naturalist in Britain (London: Allen Lane, 1976); Allen, D.E., ‘The natural history society in Britain throughout the years’, Archives of Natural History, 14, 3 (1987), pp. 242–59; Elliott, P., ‘The birth of public science in the English provinces: natural philosophy in Derby’, Annals of Science, 57 (2000), pp. 61–100.; Gay, H. and Gay, J., ‘Brothers in science: science and fraternal culture in nineteenth century Britain’, History of Science, 89 (1997), pp. 425–53.; Inkster, I. and Morrell, J. (eds), Metropolis and Province: Science in British Culture, 1780–1850 (London: Hutchinson, 1983); Withers, C., Geography, Science and identity: Scotland since 1520 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

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81 Belfast Natural History Society (BNHS), Minutes, 5 May 1821. 82 Reverend Thomas Dix Hincks was Professor of Oriental Languages at the Academical Institution and member of the First Presbyterian Church. His speech appears in ‘Presidential Address’, 31 May1825, The Belfast Natural History and Philosophical Society Scrapbook, 1821–1860, PRONI, D/3263/E/1. 83 ‘Prospectus for the Museum’, Northern Whig, 28 February 1829. 84 Drummond, Professor J.L., Address of the President of the Belfast Natural History Society on the Opening of the Belfast Museum, 1st November 1831 (Belfast: Hodgson, 1831). 85 Brooke, J.H., Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Young, R.M., Darwin’s Metaphor: Nature’s Place in Victorian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 86 Livingstone, D.N., ‘Darwin in Belfast: the evolution debate’, in J. Wilson Foster (ed.), Nature in Ireland, pp. 387–408. 87 Drummond, Professor J.L., ‘Address – opening ceremony’, The Belfast Natural History and Philosophical Society Scrapbook 1821–1860, 1831, PRONI, D/3263/E/1. 88 BNHS, Council Minutes, 15 May 1824. 89 Dubourdieu, J., Statistical Survey of the County of Down with Observations of Improvement, Drawn up for the Consultation, and by Order of the Dublin Society (Dublin: Graisberry and Campbell, 1812), p. 128. 90 Gray, W., Science and Art in Belfast (Belfast: Northern Whig, 1904). 91 The founding members included Professor Drummond, George Hyndman, Robert Grimshaw, Edmund Getty and James McAdam. They were all BNHS members. 92 Gray, Science and Art, p. 19. 93 Getty, E., ‘Introduction’ in D. Ferguson, A Popular Guide to the Royal Botanical Garden of Belfast (Belfast: W. and G. Agnew, 1851), p. viii. 94 Drummond, J.L., ‘Botanical Gardens, Belfast’, Gardeners’ Magazine (1828), p. 66. 95 Loudon’s Magazine of Natural History, 1 (1828), p. 85. 96 Loudon’s Magazine of Natural History, 2 (1829), p. 202. 97 McCracken, E., The Palm House and Botanic Garden, Belfast (Belfast: Ulster Architectural and Heritage Society, 1971), p. 8. 98 Royal Belfast Botanical Garden Minute Book, 5 April 1864.

CHAPTER 3 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Daston, L., ‘On scientific observation’, Isis, 99 (2008), pp. 102–03. Latour, B., Science in Action (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1987). Ogilvie, B.W., The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006). Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 33, Thursday, 8 May 1797, p. 87. Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 36, Thursday, 28 August 1800, p. 158. Large inaugural poster ‘The Dublin Society’ (Dublin, 1796). A copy is held in the Foster/Massereene Papers (D562/7829C), Public Record Office of Northern Ireland. Moore, D., Handbook for the Botanic Gardens of the Royal Dublin Society, Glasnevin (Dublin: James McGlashan, 1859), p. 3. Meehan, J. and Clarke, D. (eds), The Royal Dublin Society 1731–198 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1981). Nelson, E.C. and Brady, A. (eds), Irish Gardening and Horticulture (Dublin: Royal Horticultural Society of Ireland, 1979).

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10 Nelson and Brady, Irish Gardening, p. 145. 11 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 33, Thursday, 1 December 1796, p. 16. 12 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 33, Thursday, 1 December 1796, p. 16. 13 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 33, Thursday, 1 December 1796, pp. 16–17. 14 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 33, Thursday, 1 December 1796, pp. 17–19. 15 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 33, Thursday, 1 December 1796, p. 19. 16 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 33, Thursday, 1 December 1796, p. 19. 17 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 36, Thursday, 10 July 1800, p. 22. 18 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 36, Thursday, 22 May 1800, p. 98. 19 Wade, W., Catalogue of Plants in the Dublin Society’s Botanic Gardens, Glasnevin (Dublin: Graisberry, 1800). This is attributed to Walter Wade but was probably compiled by John Underwood. 20 Underwood, J., A Catalogue of Plants, Indigenous and Exotic, Cultivated in the Botanic Garden, Belonging to the Dublin Society at Glasnevin (Dublin: Graisberry, 1804). 21 Spary, E.C., Utopia’s Garden: French Natural History from Old Regime to Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 12. 22 Loudon, John C., Arboretum et Fruticetum Britannicum: or the Trees and Shrubs of Britain (London: Longmans, 1845, 2nd edition). 23 Elliott, B., Victorian Gardens (London: B.T. Batsford Ltd, 1990). 24 Daston, L., ‘Type specimens and scientific memory’, Critical Inquiry, 31 (2004), p. 171. 25 Forgan, S., ‘Bricks and bones: architecture and science in Victorian Britain’, in P. Galison and E. Thompson (eds), The Architecture of Science (London: MIT Press, 1999), p. 192. 26 Foucault, M., The Order of Things (London: Tavistock, 1985 (first published 1970)), p. 131. 27 Veltre, T., ‘Menageries, metaphors and meanings’, in R.J. Hoage and W.A. Deiss (eds), New Worlds, New Animals: From Menagerie to Zoological Park in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1996), p. 22. 28 Ritvo, H., ‘The order of nature: constructing the collections of Victorian zoos’, in R.J. Hoage and W.A Deiss (eds), New Worlds, New Animals, pp. 43–50. 29 Outram, D., ‘The history of natural history: grand narrative or local lore?’, in J. Wilson Foster, Nature in Ireland: A Scientific and Cultural History (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1997), pp. 641–71. 30 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 46, Thursday, 21 June 1810, pp. 146–47. 31 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 46, Thursday, 28 June 1810, p. 154. 32 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 48, Thursday, 5 March 1812, p. 89. 33 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 48, Thursday, 5 March 1812, p. 89. 34 Johnson, N.C., ‘Cultivating science and planting beauty: the spaces of display in Cambridge’s botanical gardens’, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 31 (2006), pp. 42–57. 35 Latour, B., ‘Circulating reference’, in B. Latour (ed.), Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: University of Harvard Press, 1999), p. 29. 36 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 49, Thursday, 13 May 1813, p. 160. 37 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 49, Thursday, 20 May 1813, p. 169.

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38 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 52, Thursday, 20 June 1816, p. 202. 39 Report of the Committee on the Provincial Museums, 1887, Royal Institute of British Architects’ Archives (London, 1887), p. 121. 40 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 56, Thursday, 20 January 1820, p. 94. 41 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 60, Thursday, 27 May 1824, p. 185. 42 The first edition of John C. Loudon’s Arboretum et Fruticetum Britannicum: or the Trees and Shrubs of Britain, 8 vols (London: Longmans, 1838). 43 See Prest, J., The Garden of Eden: The Botanic Garden and the Re-Creation of Paradise (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981). 44 Wade, W., Prospectus of the Arrangements in the Society’s Botanical and Agricultural Garden at Glasnevin (Dublin: Graisberry and Campbell, 1818), p. 5. 45 Wade, Prospectus of the Arrangements. 46 Stevens, P.F., The Development of Biological Systematics: Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu, Nature and the Natural System (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). 47 Stafleu, F.A., Linnaeus and the Linnaeans: The Spreading of Their Ideas in Systematic Botany (Utrecht: Oosthoek, 1971). 48 Spary, Utopia’s Garden, p. 201. 49 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 62, Thursday, 18 May, 1826, pp. 176–77. 50 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 64, Thursday, 12 June 1828, p. 165. 51 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 66, Thursday, 22 July 1830, p. 237. 52 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society , Vol. 66, Thursday, 20 May 1830, p. 188. 53 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 67, Thursday, 10 February 1831, p. xviiii. 54 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 67, Thursday, 10 February 1831, p. xviiii. 55 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 67, Thursday, 10 February 1831, pp. xviiii, xx. 56 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 67, Thursday, 10 February 1831, pp. xviiii, xxv. 57 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 67, Thursday, 10 February 1831, pp. xviiii, xxi 58 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 67, Thursday, 10 February 1831, pp. xviiii, xxi. 59 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 67, Thursday, 10 February 1831, pp. xviiii, xxiv. 60 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 67, Thursday 10 February 1831, pp. xviiii, xxvii. 61 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 67, Thursday 29 May 1831, p. 194. 62 McCracken, E., ‘The arboretum, Dublin Botanic Garden, 1795–1878’, Quarterly Journal of Forestry, Vol. LXIII/3 (July 1969), p. 244. 63 Nelson, E.C., ‘Ninian Niven: Curtis’s Botanical Magazine and the art of advertising new plants’, Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, 15, 4 (1998), pp. 274–82. 64 Nelson, E.C. and McCracken, E., The Brightest Jewel: A History of the National Botanic Gardens, Glasnevin (Kilkenny: Boethius Press, 1987). 65 Niven, Ninian, Letter to the RDS, Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 71, Appendix VI, Thursday, 11 June 1835. 66 Kew Mss, English Letters, 8/99, N. Niven to W.J. Hooker, 18.iii (1836). 67 Niven, Ninian, Letter dated 2 Nov 1835 to the RDS, Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 72, Thursday, 4 February 1836, p. iv. 68 Nelson and McCracken, The Brightest Jewel, p. 90. 69 McCracken, ‘The arboretum, Dublin Botanic Garden’, p. 245.

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70 Niven, N., The Visitors Companion to the Botanic Garden, Glasnevin (Dublin: William Curry, 1838). 71 Latour, ‘Circulating reference’, p. 59. 72 Nelson and McCracken, The Brightest Jewel. 73 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 75, Appendix IV, Thursday, 30 January 1840. 74 Nelson and McCracken, The Brightest Jewel, p. 96. 75 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 80, Thursday, 6 January 1844, p. L. 76 Moore, D., Annual Report of the RDS’s botanic garden, Glansnevin, Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 81, Appendix II, 1845, p. vi. 77 Moore, D., Annual Report of the RDS’s botanic garden, Glansnevin, Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 82, Appendix III, 1846, p. xxix. 78 Harvey, W., Annual Report from the Professor of Botany 1848, Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 85, Appendix IV, 1849, p. xxi. 79 See Elliott, Victorian Gardens. 80 Harvey, W., Annual Report from the Professor of Botany 1848, Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 85, Appendix IV, 1849, p. xvi. 81 Harvey, W., Annual Report from the Professor of Botany, Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 86, 1850, p. 74. 82 Harvey, W., Annual Report from the Professor of Botany, Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 86, 1850, p. 74. 83 Moore, D., Report on the state of the RDS’s Botanic Garden, Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 86, Appendix IV, 1850, p. xxxvii. 84 Martyn, T., Catalogus Horti Botanici Cantabrigensis (Cambridge, 1771). 85 University Archives at Cambridge (UA), CHAR.II.13, Botanik Garden Book, 4 July 1772. 86 UA, CHAR.II.13, Botanik Garden Book, 18 December 1778. 87 UA, CHAR.II.13, Botanik Garden Book, 18 December 1780. 88 UA, CHAR.II.13, Botanik Garden Book, 15 January 1796. 89 Donn, J., Hortus Cantabrigiensis (Cambridge, 1796). 90 Walters, S.M., The Shaping of Cambridge Botany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) 91 UA, CHAR.II.13, Botanik Garden Book, 22 December 1819. 92 Walters, The Shaping of Cambridge Botany; Jenyns, L., Memoir of the Rev. John Stevens Henslow (London, 1862). 93 Layton, D., Science for the People (London: Allen and Unwin, 1973). 94 UA, CHAR.II.13, Botanik Garden Book, 1 March 1825. 95 UA, CHAR.II.13, Botanik Garden Book, 5 October 1830. 96 Part of the preamble of the Act of Parliament and quoted in Bateson, P., ‘The Botanic Garden: old and new’, in S.M. Walters and E.A. Stow (eds), Darwin’s Mentor: John Stevens Henslow 1796–1861 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 136. 97 Anon, ‘The Cambridge botanic garden’, Pharmaceutical Journal, October, 1 (1898), pp. 73–75. 98 Quoted in Bateson, ‘The Botanic Garden’, p. 135. 99 Henslow, J.S., Questions on the Subject Matter of Sixteen Lectures in Botany (pamphlet, Cambridge, 1851), p. iii. 100 Henslow, Questions on the Subject Matter, p. iv. 101 Spary, Utopia’s Garden, p. 195. 102 Kemp, M., Visualisations: The Nature Book of Art and Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 103 Daston, ‘On scientific observation’, p. 102. 104 Outram, D., ‘New spaces in natural history’, in N. Jardine, A. Secord and E.

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Spary (eds), Cultures of Natural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 249–65. 105 UA, Botanik Garden 1717–1883, Item 43, 2 November 1846. 106 UA, Botanik Garden 1717–1883, Item 17, Mr. Lapidge’s Report, 1830. 107 UA, Botanik Garden 1717–1883, Item 17, Mr. Lapidge’s Report, 1830. 108 This case is made by Bateson, ‘The Botanic Garden’. 109 Bateson, ‘The Botanic Garden’. 110 UA, Botanik Garden 1717–1883, Item 49, 15 December 1849. 111 Bateson, ‘The Botanic Garden’, p. 145. 112 Henslow, J.S., Address to the Members of the University of Cambridge on the Expediency of Improving, and on the Funds Required for Remodelling and Supporting the Botanic Garden (Cambridge, 1846), p. 15. 113 Henslow, Address to the Members of the University, p. 15. 114 UA, Botanik Garden 1717–1883, Item 107 (1), Botanik Garden Syndicate First Annual Report, 5 March 1856. 115 Spary, Utopia’s Garden, p. 209. 116 Allen, D.E., The Naturalist in Britain (London: Penguin, 1976). 117 Henslow, Address to the Members of the University, p. 14. 118 Bateson, ‘The Botanic Garden’, p. 148. 119 Bradley, J., Mr Roscoe’s Garden (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008), p. 12. 120 UA, Botanik Garden 1717–1883, Item 43, 2 November 1846. 121 Bateson, ‘The Botanic Garden’. 122 UA, Botanik Garden 1717–1883, Item 44 (2), 19 November 1846. 123 UA, Botanik Garden 1717–1883, Item 46, 1 November 1847. 124 UA, Botanik Garden 1717–1883, Item 47, 13 October 1848 125 UA, Botanik Garden 1717–1883, Item 48, 28 October 1848. 126 Murray, A., ‘Preface’, Hardy Perennials in the New Botanic Garden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1848). 127 UA, Botanik Garden 1717–1883, Item 49, 15 December 1849. 128 Murray, ‘Preface’. 129 UA, Botanik Garden 1717–1883, Item 49, 15 December 1849. 130 Babington, C., Gardeners’ Chronicle (1850), p. 58. 131 UA, Botanik Garden 1717–1883, Item 107 (1), Botanik Garden Syndicate First Annual Report, 5 March 1856. 132 UA, Botanik Garden 1717–1883, Item 107 (1). 133 See Whatmore, S., Hybrid Geographies (London: Sage, 2002). 134 UA, Botanik Garden 1717–1883, Item 107 (1). 135 UA, Botanik Garden 1717–1883, Item 107 (1). 136 Henslow, Questions on the Subject Matter, p. 5. 137 UA, Botanik Garden 1717–1883, Item 107 (6), 5 March 1861, p. 1. 138 UA, Botanik Garden 1717–1883, Item 107 (17), 2 March 1872. 139 UA, Botanik Garden 1717–1883, Item 107 (19), 21 March 1874. 140 UA, Botanik Garden 1717–1883, Item 107 (20), 25 May 1875. 141 UA, Botanik Garden 1717–1883, Item 107 (23), 30 March 1878. 142 UA, Botanik Garden 1717–1883, Item 107 (25), 8 June 1880. 143 Walters, The Shaping of Cambridge Botany. 144 Hartley, B., ‘Sites of knowledge and instruction: arboretums and the Arboretum et Fruticetum Britannicum’, Journal of Garden History, 35, 2 (2007), p. 35. 145 Daniels, S., Humphry Repton: Landscape Gardening and the Geography of Georgian England (London: Yale University Press, 1999). 146 Price, U., Essays on the Picturesque, 3 vols (London: Mawman, 1810), Vol. I, pp. 259–62.

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147 Elliott, P., Watkins, C. and Daniels, S., ‘Combining science with recreation and pleasure: cultural geographies of nineteenth-century arboretums’, Journal of Garden History, 35, 2 (2007), p. 6. 148 See, for instance, Anonymous, ‘The gardener’s school’, The Scottish Gardener, 16 (1865), pp. 358–61; Coats, A.M., ‘When Scottish gardeners came south’, Country Life (12 March 1964), pp. 572–73; Nelson, E.C., ‘Scottish connections in Irish botany and horticulture’, The Scottish Naturalist (1988), pp. 3–31. 149 Spary, Utopia’s Garden, p. 47. 150 ‘John Franklin’, Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004–08). 151 Coats, A.M., The Quest for Plants (London: Studio Vista, 1969). 152 Drummond, J.L., Minutes of the Belfast Botanical and Horticultural Society meeting of 5 January, Northern Whig, 10 January 1828. 153 Letter from T. Drummond to W. Hooker, Kew Ms, Vol. 44, p. 74, 13 June 1829. 154 Letter from T. Drummond to W. Hooker, Kew Ms, Vol. 44, p. 78, 12 February 1830. 155 Nelson, E.C., ‘James and Thomas Drummond: their Scottish origins and curatorships in Irish botanic gardens (ca 1808–ca 1831)’, Archives of Natural History, 17 (1990), pp. 49–65. 156 Arnold, D., The Tropics and the Travelling Gaze: India, Landscape and Science, 1800–1856 (London: University of Washington Press, 2006), pp. 68–69. 157 McCracken, E., The Palm House and Botanic Garden, Belfast (Belfast: Ulster Architectural Heritage Society, 1971). 158 Ferguson, D., A Popular Guide to the Royal Botanical Garden of Belfast (Belfast: W. and G. Agnew, 1851), p. 17. 159 Hunt, J.D., Gardens and the Picturesque (London: MIT Press, 1992). 160 Hunt, Gardens and the Picturesque, p. 179. 161 Ferguson, A Popular Guide, p. 19. 162 Ferguson, A Popular Guide, p. 19. 163 Ferguson, A Popular Guide, p. 19. 164 Ferguson, A Popular Guide, p. 19. 165 Royal Botanical Garden Belfast Minute Book, 1861. 166 McCracken, The Palm House. 167 McCracken, The Palm House, p. 24. 168 Ferguson, A Popular Guide, p. 23. 169 Ferguson, A Popular Guide, pp. 23–24.

CHAPTER 4 1 2 3 4 5 6

Ferguson, D., A Popular Guide to the Royal Botanic Garden of Belfast (Belfast: Agnew, 1851). Arnold, D., The Problem of Nature: Environment, Culture and European Expansion (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). Greenblatt, S., Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). Crosby, A.W., Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe 900–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Pratt, M.L., Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). See for an analysis of island tropicality, Grove, R., Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uuniversity Press, 1995).

232

notes

7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20

21

22 23

Arnold, D., The Tropics and the Travelling Gaze: India, Landscape, and Science, 1800–1856 (London: University of Washington Press, 2006). Stepan, N., Picturing Tropical Nature (London: Reaktion, 2001); Stepan, N., ‘Tropical modernism: designing the tropical landscape’, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 21 (2000), pp. 76–91. Driver, F. and Martins, L., ‘Views and visions of the tropical world’, in F. Driver and L. Martins (eds), Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 3–20. Livingstone, D., ‘Tropical hermeneutics and the climatic imagination’, Geographische Zeitschrift, 90 (2002), p. 65. Livingstone, ‘Tropical hermeneutics’, p. 78. Anderson, W., ‘“Where every prospect pleases and only man is vile”: laboratory medicine as colonial discourse’, Critical Inquiry, 18 (1992), pp. 506–29; Harrison, M., ‘“The tender frame of man”: disease, climate, and racial difference in India and the West Indies, 1760–1860’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 70 (1996), pp. 68–93; Kenny, J., ‘Climate, race and imperial authority: the symbolic language of the British hill station in India’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 85 (1995), pp. 694–714; Duncan, J.S., ‘The struggle to be temperate: climate and “moral masculinity” in mid-nineteenth century Ceylon’, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 21 (2000), pp. 34–47. Woods, M., and Warren, A.S., Glass Houses: A History of Greenhouses, Orangeries and Conservatories (London: Aurum Press, 1988). Dubbini, R., ‘Glasshouses and winter gardens’, in M. Mosser and G. Teyssot (eds), The History of Garden Design (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991), p. 427. Gallison, P. and Thompson, E., The Architecture of Science (London: MIT Press, 1999). MacIntosh, C., The Greenhouse, Hothouse and Stove (London: W.S. Orr and Co., 1838). Martins, L. and Driver, F., ‘“The struggle for luxuriance”: William Burchell collects tropical nature’, in F. Driver and L. Martins (eds), Tropical Visions, p. 61; Preston, R., ‘“The scenery of the torrid zone”: imagined travels and the culture of exotics in nineteenth-century British gardens’, in F. Driver and D. Gilbert (eds), Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display and Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 194–214. Taylor, W., ‘Living in glasshouses: vegetality and the curvilinear forcing houses of the early nineteenth century’, Journal of Garden History. 54 (1995), p. 209. Taylor, J., ‘Charles Fowler (1792–1867): a centenary memoir’, Architectural History, 11 (1968), pp. 57–74. Loudon, J.C., A Short Treatise on Several Improvements Recently Made in Hot-Houses (Edinburgh, 1805); Loudon, J.C., Remarks on the Construction of Hothouses (London, 1817); Loudon, J.C., Encyclopedia of Gardening (London, 1822); Loudon, J.C., The Greenhouse Companion (London, 1824). Loudon was also the editor of Gardeners’ Magazine. MacKenzie, G., ‘On the form which the glass of a forcing house ought to have in order to receive the greatest possible quantity of the rays from the sun’, Transactions of the Horticultural Society of London, 11 (1817), pp. 171–77 [Paper originally delivered to the Horticultural Society in 1815]. Koppelkaam, S., Glasshouses and Wintergardens of the Nineteenth Century (London: Granada, 1981). Chadwick, G.F., The Works of Sir Joseph Paxton, 1803–1865 (London: Architectural Press, 1961); Lees-Milne, J., The Bachelor Duke (London: Trafalgar Square Publishing, 1991); Elliott, B., Victorian Gardens (London: Timber Press, 1986).

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24 Hix, J., The Glasshouse (London: Phaidon, 1974), p. 117. 25 Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature. 26 Waters, M., ‘The conservatory in Victorian literature’, Journal of Garden History, 2 (1982), p. 281. 27 McCracken, E., The Palm House and Botanic Garden, Belfast (Belfast: Ulster Architectural Heritage Society, 1971). 28 The Belfast Botanic Gardens Park (Belfast: Belfast City Council Parks Committee, 1982). 29 Larmour, P., ‘Sir Charles Lanyon’, GPA Irish Arts Review Yearbook (1989–90), pp. 200–06. 30 Larmour, P., Belfast: An Illustrated Architectural Guide (Belfast: Friar’s Bush Press, 1987); Brett, C.E.B., Buildings of Belfast (Belfast: Friar’s Bush Press, 1985); Bardon, J., Belfast: An Illustrated History (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1982). 31 Hamilton, T. (rev. Larmour, P.), ‘Lanyon, Sir Charles (1813–1889)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 32 Ferguson, A Popular Guide. 33 Diestelkamp, E.J., ‘Richard Turner (c. 1798–1881) and his glasshouses’, Glasra, 5 (1981), pp. 51–53; Diestelkamp, E.J., ‘The conservatories and hothouses of Richard Turner’, Historic Greenhouse and Royal Kew (London: Kew, 1982), pp. 6–11. 34 MacIntosh, C., The Book of the Garden (London: n.p., 1853). 35 Koppelkaam, Glasshouses and Wintergardens, p. 30. 36 Ferguson, A Popular Guide, p. 2. 37 Nash, R., ‘The exporting and importing of nature: nature-appreciation as commodity’, Perspectives in American History, 12 (1979), pp. 519–60. 38 Arnold, The Tropics and the Travelling Gaze, p. 143. 39 Koppelkaam, Glasshouses and Wintergardens, p. 29. 40 Ferguson, A Popular Guide, p. 21. 41 McCracken, The Palm House. 42 Koppelkaam, Glasshouses and Wintergardens, p. 40. 43 McCracken, The Palm House, p. 44. 44 Koppelkaam, Glasshouses and Wintergardens, p. 40. 45 Wade, W., A Statement of Progress Which Has Been Made for the Purpose … Botanic Garden, 1793, PRONI: Foster/Massereene Papers D562/7828. 46 ‘Dublin Society’s Botanical and Agricultural Garden at Glasnevin’, The Dublin Magazine and Monthly Register, July 1800, p. 6. 47 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 37, Thursday, 5 February 1801, p. 66. 48 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 37, Thursday, 5 February 1801, p. 66. 49 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 38, Thursday, 8 April 1802, p. 157. 50 Nelson, E.C. and McCracken, E.M., The Brightest Jewel: A History of the National Botanic Gardens Glasnevin, Dublin (Kilikenny: Boethius, 1987). 51 Wade, W., Prospectus of the Arrangements in the Dublin Society’s Botanical and Agricultural Garden at Glasnevin (Dublin: Graisberry and Campbell, 1818), p. iv. 52 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 49, Thursday, 20 May, 1813, p. 169. 53 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 52, Thursday, 20 June, 1816, p. 202. 54 Letter from Charles Vallency to John Foster, PRONI, Foster/Massereene Papers, D207/46/34/ 30.iii, 1807. 55 Plumptre, A., Narrative of a Residence in Ireland During the Summer of 1814 … (London: 1817), p. 28. 56 Warburton, J., Whitelaw, J. and Walsh, R., ‘Botanic gardens’ in J. Warburton, J.

234

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57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67

68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86

Whitelaw and R. Walsh, History of the City of Dublin, 2 vols (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1818), Vol II, p. 1287. Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 51, Thursday, 20 June 1815, pp. 150–51; Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 52, Thursday, 16 May 1816, p. 245. Niven, N., The Visitors Companion to the Botanic Garden (Dublin: William Curry, 1838), Section I. Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 55, Thursday, 10 June 1819, p. 174. Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 56, 27 April 1820, pp. 159–61. Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 66, 17 June 1830, p. 213. It was estimated that initial repair work would cost about £80. Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 66, Thursday, 1 July 1830, pp. 220– 22. Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 66, Thursday, 22 July 1830, pp. 234– 37. Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 67, Appendix No. II, Report of the Professor of Botany on the state of the garden, Thursday, 10 February 1831, p. xxiii. Niven, The Visitors Companion. Nelson and McCracken, The Brightest Jewel, p. 91. David Moore presents a balance sheet of hothouse plants for 1838 in ‘Brief Report of the General State of the Royal Dublin Society’s Botanic Garden and collections therein’, Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 75, Appendix XI, 1839, p. lxxviii. Bright, K., The Royal Dublin Society, 1815–45 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004). Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 75, Appendix IV, 1839, p. xxii. Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 78, Appendix I, D. Moore Annual Report … 1841, 1842, p. v. Moore, D., ‘Brief Report of a professional tour through England’, Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 78, Appendix VI, 1842, p. xxxviii. Moore, ‘Brief Report’. Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 79, Thursday, 14 December 1842. Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 79, Thursday, 29 May 1843. Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 79, Thursday, 26 June 1843. Diestelkamp, ‘Richard Turner (c. 1798–1881)’; Diestelkamp, ‘The conservatories’. Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 81, Appendix II, D. Moore, Annual Report, 1845, p. iv. Moore, D., ‘Annual Report of the RDS’s botanic garden’, Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 82, Appendix III, 1846, p. xxx. Mr Turner’s final estimate was £1,695 and this was approved. Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol 81, Thursday, 20 January 1845. Diestelkamp, E.J., ‘The design and building of the Palm House, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew’, Journal of Garden History, 2 (1982), pp. 233–72. Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 83, Thursday, 17 May 1847. Harvey, D., ‘Annual Report from the Professor of Botany’, Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 85, Appendix IV, 1849, p. xiv. Nelson and McCracken, The Brightest Jewel, pp. 133–34. Moore, D., ‘Annual Report of the RDS’s botanic garden’, Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 87, Appendix V, 1850, pp. lxviii–lxxiii. Moore, D., ‘Annual Report of the RDS’s botanic garden’, Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 88, Appendix III, 1851, p. xxxviii. Moore, D., ‘Annual Report of the RDS’s botanic garden’, Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 92, Appendix III, 1855, p. xc.

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87 Porter, B. (rev. O’Dwyer, Frederick), ‘Owen Jacob (1778–1870)’, Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press; online edition http:// www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/21011, accessed 9 January 2009). 88 Robinson, W., ‘Notes on gardens XIX [–XXII]’, Royal Botanic Gardens, Glasnevin, Gardeners’ Chronicle (1864), pp. 998–99. 89 Robinson, ‘Notes on gardens’, pp. 1035–36. 90 Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature, p. 37. 91 A letter from Thomas Martyn to his friend Richard Pulteney, April 1761. Quoted in Walters, S.M., The Shaping of Cambridge Botany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 43. 92 Walters, The Shaping of Cambridge Botany, p. 44. 93 University Archives at Cambridge (UA), CHAR.II.13, Botanic Garden Book, 1 April 1767. 94 UA, CHAR.II.13, Botanic Garden Book, 4 July 1772. 95 UA, CHAR.II.13, Botanic Garden Book, 12 April 1786. 96 Hooker, W.J., Botanical Miscellany, 1 (London: J. Murray, 1830), pp. 48–78. 97 Smith, J.J., The Cambridge Portfolio (London: W.J. Parker, 1840), p. 84. 98 UA, CUR 25.1, Botanik Garden 1717–1883, Item 17, Mr Lapidge’s report 1830. 99 UA, CUR 25.1, Botanik Garden 1717–1883, Item 17, Mr Lapidge’s report 1830. 100 Koppelkaam, Glasshouses and Wintergardens. 101 UA, CUR 25.1, Botanik Garden 1717–1883, Item 17, Mr Lapidge’s report 1830. 102 UA, CUR 25.1, Botanik Garden 1717–1883, Item 25 (ii). 103 UA, CUR 25.1, Botanik Garden 1717–1883, Item 69, 24 March 1854. 104 UA, CUR 25.1, Botanik Garden 1717–1883, Item 69, 24 March 1854. 105 UA, CUR 25.1, Botanik Garden 1717–1883, Item 70, 28 October 1854. 106 UA, CUR 25.1, Botanik Garden 1717–1883, Item 107 (1), Botanic Garden Syndicate, First Annual Report, 5 March 1856. 107 UA, CUR 25.1, Botanik Garden 1717–1883, Item 107 (10), Botanic Garden Syndicate, Tenth Annual Report, 11 February 1865. 108 UA, CUR 25.1, Botanik Garden 1717–1883, Item 107 (15), Botanic Garden Syndicate, Fifteenth Annual Report, 29 March 1870. 109 UA, CUR 25.1, Botanik Garden 1717–1883, Item 107 (19), Botanic Garden Syndicate, Nineteenth Annual Report, 21 March 1874. 110 UA, CUR 25.1, Botanik Garden 1717–1883, Item 107 (23), Botanic Garden Syndicate, Twenty-third Annual Report, 30 March 1878. 111 UA, CUR 25.1, Botanik Garden 1717–1883, Item 107 (26), Botanic Garden Syndicate, Twenty-seventh Annual Report, 14 June 1882. 112 UA, CUR 25.1, Botanik Garden 1717–1883, Item 107 (26), Botanic Garden Syndicate, Appendix. 113 UA, CUR 25.2, Botanik Garden 1882–1925, Item 11, Report of Botanic Garden Syndicate, 11 December 1886. 114 UA, CUR 25.2, Botanik Garden 1882–1925, Item 13, 22 February 1887. 115 UA, CUR 25.2, Botanik Garden 1882–1925, Item 14, 6 May 1887. 116 UA, CUR 25.2, Botanik Garden 1882–1925, Item 16, 27 January 1888. 117 UA, CUR 25.2, Botanik Garden 1882–1925, Item 24, 16 October 1891. 118 Gilbert-Carter, H., A Guide to the University Botanic Garden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922). 119 Walters, S.M., A Guide to the Cambridge University Botanic Garden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).

236

notes

CHAPTER 5 1 2

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28

Cook, H.J., Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 48. Miller, D.P., ‘Joseph Banks, empire, and “centres of calculation” in late Hanoverian London’, in D.P. Miller and P.H. Reill (eds), Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany and Representations of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 21–37. Latour, B., Science in Action (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1987), pp. 215–57. Brockway, L., Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens (London: Yale University Press, 2002; originally published in 1979 by the Academic Press), p. 192. Drayton, R., Nature’s Government (London: Yale University Press, 2000). Allen, D.E., The Naturalist in Britain (London: Penguin, 1976). Endersby, J., ‘“A garden enclosed”: botanical barter in Sydney 1818–39’, British Journal for the History of Science, 33 (2000), p. 318. Endersby, ‘“A garden enclosed”’, p. 333. Alberti, S.J.M., ‘Objects and the museum’, Isis, 96 (2005), p. 564. Henslow, J.S., Address to the Members of the University of Cambridge on the Expediency of Improving, and on the Funds Required for Remodelling and Supporting the Botanic Garden (Cambridge, 1846), p. 5. Walters, S.M. and Stow, E.A., Darwin’s Mentor: John Stevens Henslow 1796–1861 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Walters, S.M., The Shaping of Cambridge Botany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Henslow, Address to the Members, p. 14. Allen, The Naturalist in Britain. Henslow, Address to the Members, p. 15. Anon, ‘Cambridge botanic garden’, Gardeners’ Chronicle, 15 March 1845, p. 167. Henslow, J.S., ‘Cambridge botanic garden’, Gardeners’ Chronicle, 3 May 1845, p. 291. Henslow, Address to the Members, p. 18. Darwin, Charles, The Voyage of the Beagle (London: Heron Book, 1968; originally published 1845), p. xix. Walters and Stow, Darwin’s Mentor; de Beer, G., Charles Darwin: A Scientific Biography (Garden City: Natural History Press, 1965). Jenyns, Leonard, Memoir of the Reverend John Stevens Henslow (London: Van Voorst, 1862). Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion, pp. 84–85. Drayton, Nature’s Government, p. 193. Henslow, J.S., Syllabus of a Course of Botanical Lectures (Cambridge, 1828), p. 6. The complete list included Smith, J.E., The Introduction to Physiological and Systematical Botany (London: Longmans, 1807); Smith, J.E., The English Flora, 4 vols (London: Longmans, 1824); de Candolle, A., Thèorie élémentaire de la Botanique (Paris: Deterville, 1813); de Candolle, A., Organographie Végétale, 2 vols (Paris: Deterville, 1827). Henslow, J.S., Sketch of a Course of Lectures on Botany for 1833 (Cambridge, 1833), p. 2. Henslow, Sketch of a Course of Lectures, p. 3. Secord, A., ‘Botany on a plate: pleasure and the power of pictures in promoting early nineteenth-century scientific knowledge’, Isis, 93 (2002), p. 30.

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29 The complete list as it appeared in his Sketch (1833) is as follows: Lindley, J., Introduction to Botany (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Longman, 1832); Lindley, J., Introduction to the Natural System (London: Longman, Brown, Rees, Green and Longman, 1830); Lindley, J., Synopsis of the British Flora (London: Longman, Brown, Rees, Green and Longman, 1835); Hooker, W., British Flora (London: Longman, Brown, Rees, Green and Longman, 1835, 2nd edn); Lloyd, G.N., Botanical Terminology (Edinburgh: Beel, 1826). 30 Allen, The Naturalist in Britain. 31 Secord, ‘Botany on a plate’. 32 Allen, The Naturalist in Britain. 33 Henslow, J.S., Syllabus of a Course of Lectures on Botany, Suggesting Matter for a Pass Examination at Cambridge on this Subject (Cambridge, 1848), p. 1. 34 Henslow, J.S., Questions on the Subject Matter of Sixteen Lectures in Botany, Required for a Pass-Examination (Cambridge, 1851), p. iii. 35 Henslow, Questions on the Subject Matter, p. v. 36 Secord, ‘Botany on a plate’, p. 32. 37 Henslow, J.S., Syllabus of Lectures on Botany with an Appendix Containing Copious Demonstrations of Fourteen Common Plants for the Illustration of Terms (Cambridge, 1853), p. 4. 38 Henslow, J.S., ‘Botanical lectures to the Royal Family [syllabus of lectures lately delivered by Henslow]’, Gardeners’ Chronicle, 1860, pp. 647–48. 39 Hooker, W.J., Botanical Illustrations: Being a Series of Figures Designed to Illustrate the Terms Employed in a Course of Lectures on Botany with Descriptions (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable, 1822). 40 Henslow, J.S., ‘On the registration of facts tending to illustrate questions of scientific interest’, Gardeners’ Chronicle, 1844, p. 659. 41 Henslow, ‘On the registration of facts’. 42 Henlsow, J.S., Loudon’s Magazine of Natural History, 8 (1835), p. 88. 43 Henlsow, Loudon’s Magazine, p. 88. 44 Babington, C.C., Manual of British Botany (London: Van Voorst, 1843). This book enhanced Babington’s reputation nationally. It ran to ten editions, the last one appearing in 1922. 45 Babington, C.C., Flora of Cambridgeshire (London: Voorst, 1860). This brought together all previous information on Cambridgeshire’s plants and new material gathered by both Henslow and Babington. The latter had been elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1851 and had done much botanizing in the county of his residence. See Walters, S.M., The Shaping of Cambridge Botany. 46 Morrell, J. and Thackray, A., Gentlemen of Science: Early Years of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 104. 47 Babington, C.C., ‘Observations made during a visit to Connemara and Joyce’s country, Ireland, in August 1835’, Loudon’s Magazine of Natural History, 9 (1836), pp. 119–30. 48 Babington, C.C., Memoirs, Journal and Botanical Correspondence (Cambridge: Macmillan and Bowes, 1898). 49 Anon, Gardeners’ Chronicle, 13 July 1850, p. 436. 50 Henslow, J.S., Gardeners’ Chronicle, 17 August 1850, p. 518. 51 Musgrave, T., Gardner, C. and Musgrave, W., The Plant Hunters (London: Seven Dials, 2000); Whittle, T., The Plant Hunters: Tales of the Botanist-Explorers Who Enriched Our Gardens (London: Lyons Press, 1997); Desmond, R., Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker: Traveller and Plant Collector (London: Antique Collectors Club, 2007). Endersby, J., Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science (London: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

238

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52 University Archives at Cambridge (UA), 25.1, Botanik Garden 1717–1883, Item 49, Report of the Syndicate, 15 December 1849. 53 UA, CUR 25.1, Botanik Garden 1717–1883, Item 49, Report of the Syndicate, 15 December 1849. 54 UA, CUR 25.1, Botanic Garden Syndicate, Item 107 (1), First Annual Report, 5 March 1856. 55 UA, CUR 25.1, Botanic Garden Syndicate, Item 107 (1), First Annual Report, 5 March 1856. 56 UA, CUR 25.1, Botanic Garden Syndicate, Item 107 (5), Fifth Annual Report, 28 February 1860. 57 UA, CUR 25.1, Botanic Garden Syndicate, Item 107 (6), Sixth Annual Report, 5 March 1861, 1. 58 UA, CUR 25.1, Botanic Garden Syndicate, Item 107 (7), Seventh Annual Report, 21 March 1862. 59 UA, CUR 25.1, Botanic Garden Syndicate, Item 107 (8), Eight Annual Report, 17 March 1863. 60 UA, CUR 25.1, Botanic Garden Syndicate, Item 107 (9), Ninth Annual Report, 8 March 1864. 61 UA, CUR 25.1, Botanic Garden Syndicate, Item 107 (10), Tenth Annual Report, 11 February 1865. 62 UA, CUR 25.1, Botanic Garden Syndicate, Item 107 (10), Tenth Annual Report, 11 February 1865. 63 David Moore donated 120 species, including very valuable species of ferns of orchids in 1865–66. UA, CUR 25.1, Botanic Garden Syndicate, Item 107 (11), Eleventh Annual Report, 15 February 1866. 64 It was noted that seeds were received from these two gardens in the report of 1867. UA, CUR 25.1, Botanic Garden Syndicate, Item 107 (12), Twelfth Annual Report, 27 March 1867. 65 UA CUR 25.1, Botanic Garden Syndicate, Item 107 (15), Fifteenth Annual Report, 29 March 1870. 66 UA, CUR 25.1, Botanic Garden Syndicate, Item 107 (19), Nineteenth Annual Report, 21 March 1874. 67 UA, CUR 25.1, Botanic Garden Syndicate, Item 107 (19), Nineteenth Annual Report, 21 March 1874. 68 UA, CUR 25.1, Botanic Garden Syndicate, Item 107 (23), Twenty-third Annual Report, 30 March 1878. 69 UA, CUR 25.1, Botanic Garden Syndicate, Item 107 (25), Twenty-fifth Annual Report, 8 June 1880. 70 UA, CUR 25.1, Botanic Garden Syndicate, Twenty-sixth Annual Report, 14 June 1881. 71 UA, CUR 25.1, Botanic Garden Syndicate, Item 107 (26), Twenty-seventh Annual Report, 14 June 1882. 72 UA, CUR 25.1, Botanic Garden Syndicate, Item 107 (26), Twenty-eighth Annual Report, 2 May 1883. 73 UA, CUR 25.1, Botanic Garden Syndicate, Item 107 (26), Twenty-eighth Annual Report, 2 May 1883, Appendix, 1. 74 UA, CUR 25.1, Botanic Garden Syndicate, Item 107 (26), Twenty-eighth Annual Report, 2 May 1883, Appendix, 2. 75 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 33, Thursday, 1 December 1796, p. 19. 76 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 33, Thursday, 8 May 1797, p. 87. 77 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 37, Thursday, 22 January 1801, p. 55.

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78 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 38, Thursday, 1 April 1802, p. 86. 79 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 48, Thursday, 5 March 1812, p. 89. 80 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 49, Thursday, 20 May 1813, pp. 169–70. 81 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 53, Thursday, 28 November 1816, p. 39. 82 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 54, Thursday, 5 March 1818, p. 109. 83 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 54, Thursday, 6 April 1818, p. 135. 84 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 54, Thursday, 6 April 1818, p. 135. 85 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 55, Thursday, 22 July 1819, p. 229. 86 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 55, Thursday, 19 November 1818, pp. 14–15. 87 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 56, Thursday, 13 January 1820, p. 89. 88 Arnold, D., The Tropics and the Travelling Gaze: India, Landscape and Science 1800–1856 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006); Desmond, R., The European Discovery of Indian Flora (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Thomas, A.P., ‘The establishment of Calcutta Botanic Garden: plant transfer, science and the East India Company, 1786–1806, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 16 (2006), pp. 165–77; Axelby, R., ‘Calcutta Botanic Garden and the colonial re-ordering of the Indian environment’, Archives of Natural History, 35 (2008), pp. 150–63. 89 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 59, Thursday, 17 November 1822, p. 4. 90 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 59, Thursday, 3 April 1823, p. 109. 91 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 60, Thursday, 11 March 1824, pp. 131–32. 92 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 61, Thursday, 16 December 1824, p. 47. 93 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 62, Thursday, 18 May 1826, pp. 176–77. 94 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 62, Thursday, 18 May 1826, pp. 176–77. 95 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 64, Thursday, 26 June 1828, p. 177. 96 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 64, Thursday, 6 December 1827, p. 37. 97 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 64, Thursday, 6 December 1827, p. 37. 98 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 64, Thursday, 14 February 1828, p. 81. 99 The popularity of Isaac Weld’s Travels Through the States of North America, and the Provinces of Upper and Lower Canada, During the Years 1795, 1796, and 1797 is attested to by the number of editions and translations in which it has been issued. Originally published in London in 1799, it appeared first in a onevolume and then in a two-volume edition. The next year a two-volume edition was followed by another in one volume, and in 1807 a final two-volume edition appeared. The 1807 edition has twice been reprinted (New York, 1968 and 1970). Several French editions appeared under various titles, the earliest of these being Voyage au Canada, dans les Années 1795, 1796, et 1797 … (Paris, 1799) and the last, Voyage aux États-Unis d’Amérique, et au Canada … (Paris, 1807). Two German versions, Isaac Weld’s des Jüngern Reisen durch die Staaten von Nord-Amerika, und die Provinzen Ober- und Nieder-Canada … and Reise durch

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die Nordamerikanischen Freistaaten und durch Ober- und Unter-Canada …, were published in Berlin in 1800; two subsequent two-volume editions appeared there under different titles in 1800 and 1805. Other translations include a Dutch version, Reizen door de Staaten van Noord-Amerika, en de Provintiën van Opper- en Neder-Canada …, translated by Sander van Hoek (The Hague, 1801–02), and an Italian one, Viaggio nel Canada’ …, translated by Pietro Spada (Milan, 1819). 100 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 64, Thursday, 21 February 1828, p. 92. 101 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 64, Thursday, 21 February 1828, p. 94. 102 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 66, Thursday, 17 June 1830, p. 213. 103 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 67, Appendix II, Report of the Professor of Botany, Thursday, 10 February 1831, p. xxiiii. 104 Prize Essays on the Potato, and the Cause of the Late Partial Failures, Which Obtained the Gold and Silver Medals of the Royal Dublin Society, 1835 (Dublin: Graisberry, 1835). 105 Niven, N., Essay on the Recent Failure of the Potato Crop, and the Best Means of Averting a Recurrence of the Evil (pamphlet, Dublin, 1835), p. 18. 106 Niven, N., The Potato Epidemic, and its Probable Consequences; A Letter to his Grace the Duke of Leinster (pamphlet, Dublin, 1846). 107 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 71, Appendix 1, Thursday, 3 November 1834. 108 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 71, ‘Letter from N. Niven to the RDS dated 28 February 1835’, Thursday, 5 March 1835, p. 117. 109 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 72, Thursday, 28 January 1836, pp. 81–82; Vol. 72, Thursday, 4 February 1836, p. 90; Appendix I, pp. i–vi. 110 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 73, Thursday, 3 November 1836, pp. 6–7. 111 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 73, Thursday, 13 April 1837, p. 148. 112 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 73, Thursday, 4 May 1837, p. 167. 113 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Thursday, 16 November 1837, pp. 25–27. 114 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 74, Thursday, 25 January 1838, p. 86. 115 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 74, Thursday, 25 January 1838, p. 86. 116 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 75, Appendix VI, 1839. 117 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 76, Thursday, 30 January 1840, p. 36. 118 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 76, Appendix No. IV, Annual Report for 1839, p. xx. 119 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 77, Appendix 1, Annual Report for 1840, pp. iii–iv. 120 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 78, Brief Report of the Professional tour through England (D. Moore), 1842, p. xxxv. 121 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 78, Brief Report of the Professional tour through England (D. Moore), 1842, p. xxxv. 122 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 81, Appendix II, Annual Report, 1845, p. iv. 123 There is now an extensive literature on the Irish Famine, from quantitative historical analyses of demographic change to analyses of the politics of the Famine and the literary and cultural interpretations of this period. The following are some of the most significant studies: Ó Gráda, C., The Great Irish

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Famine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Ó Gráda, C., Black ’47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1999); Morash, C., Writing the Irish Famine (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995); Mokyr, J., Why Ireland Starved: A Quantitative and Analytical History of the Irish Economy, 1800–1850 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1983); Eagleton, T., Heathcliffe and the Great Hunger (London: Verso, 1995); Gray, P., The Irish Famine (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995); Kinealy, C., The Great Irish Famine: Impact, Ideology and Rebellion (London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2001). 124 O Neill, T.P., ‘The scientific investigation of the failure of the potato crop in Ireland 1845–6’, Irish Historical Studies, 5 (1946), pp. 123–38; Bourke, P.M.A., ‘The scientific investigation of the potato blight in 1845–6’, Irish Historical Studies, 13 (1962), pp. 26–32; Bourke, P.M.A., ‘Emergence of the potato blight 1843–46’, Nature, 203 (1964), pp. 805–08; Bourke, P.M.A., ‘A contribution to the early history of the black leg disease of the potato’, Journal of the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries, Ireland, 63 (1966), pp. 103–09; Goodwin, S., Cohen, B.A. and Fry, W.E., ‘Panglobal distribution of a single clonal lineage of the Irish potato famine fungus’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the United States of America, 91 (22 November 1994), pp. 11591–95. 125 Nelson, E.C., ‘David Moore, Miles J. Berkeley and scientific studies of potato blight in Ireland, 1845–1847’, Archives of Natural History, 11 (1983), pp. 249–61; Nelson, E.C., The Cause of the Calamity: Potato Blight in Ireland, 1845–1847, and the Role of the National Botanic Gardens, Glasnevin (Dublin: Stationery Office,1995). 126 Price, J.H., ‘Miles Joseph Berkeley (1803–1889)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 127 Taylor, G., ‘Miles Joseph Berkeley’, Dictionary of Scientific Biography (New York: Charles Scriber’s Sons, 1818), p. 19. 128 Allen, The Naturalist in Britain. 129 Nelson, ‘David Moore’, pp. 249–61. 130 Lindley, J., ‘Editorial’, Gardeners’ Chronicle, 20 September 1845 (b), p. 639. 131 Moore, D., ‘On the failure of the potato crop’, Irish Farmers’ Journal, 10 September 1845, p. 787. 132 Andrews, W., ‘Report of the Dublin Natural History Society’, Saunders Newsletter and Daily Advertiser, 17 November 1845, p. 2. 133 Dowley, L.J., ‘The potato and late blight in Ireland’, in C. Ó Gráda (ed.), Famine 150 Commemorative Lecture Series (Dublin: Teagasc, 1997), pp. 49–65. 134 Berkeley’s main publications on the subject are as follows: ‘Disease in potatoes’, Gardeners’ Chronicle, 6 September 1845 (a), p. 608; ‘Disease in potatoes’, Gardeners’ Chronicle, 20 September 1845 (b), p. 640; ‘Observations, botanical and physiological, on the potato murrain’, Journal of the Horticultural Society, 1 (1846 a), pp. 9–34; ‘The potato fungus’, Gardeners’ Chronicle, 25 April 1846 (b), p. 269. 135 Moore, D., ‘Experiments on preserving potatoes conducted at the Glasnevin Botanic Garden, with remarks on parasitical fungi in general’, Irish Farmers’ Gazette, April 1846 (a), pp. 822–23. 136 Nelson, ‘David Moore’, reports that Professor Morren had suggested such a remedy in the Gardeners’ Chronicle in 1845 and Garret Hugh Fitzgerald had advocated the same treatment in a Limerick newspaper in early 1846. 137 Nelson, ‘David Moore’, p. 254. 138 Quoted by Nelson, ‘David Moore’, p. 254. 139 Lindley, J., ‘Editorial’, Gardeners’ Chronicle, 8 August 1846, p. 531. 140 Nelson, ‘David Moore’, p. 257. 141 Bayles, R.M., Science in its Local Context: The Belfast Natural History Society

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and Philosophical Society in the Mid Nineteenth Century, unpublished doctoral dissertation (Queen’s University Belfast, 2003). 142 Forsyth Johnson, J., The Natural Principles of Landscape Gardening or the Adornment of Land for Perpetual Beauty (Belfast: Archer and Sons, 1874).

CHAPTER 6 1 2

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16

17

18 19 20

Drayton, R., Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain and the Improvement of the New World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 180. Baigrie, B. (ed.), Picturing Knowledge: Historical and Philosophical Problems Concerning the Use of Art in Science (London: University of Toronto Press, 1996); Rudwick, M., Scenes from Deep Time: Early Pictorial Representations of the Prehistoric World (London: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Lynch, M. and Woolgar, S. (eds), Representation in Scientific Practice (London: MIT Press, 1990). Cooter, R. and Pumfrey, S., ‘Separate spheres and public places: reflections on the history of science popularization and science in popular culture’, History of Science, 32 (1994), pp. 237–67. Lightman, B., ‘The visual theology of Victorian popularizers of science: from reverent eye to chemical retina’, Isis, 91 (2000), pp. 651–80. Morus, I.R., Frankenstein’s Children: Electricity, Exhibition and Experiment in Early Nineteenth Century London (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). Crary, J., Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (London: MIT Press, 1990). Lightman, ‘The visual’, p. 660. Lightman, ‘The visual’, p. 680. Morus, I.R., ‘Seeing and believing in science’, Isis, 97 (2006), p. 109. Abir-Am, P.G. and Outram, D. (eds), Uneasy Careers and Intimate Lives: Women in Science, 1789–1979 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997); Shteir, A.B., Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora’s Daughters and Botany in England, 1760–1860 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). Forgan, S., ‘Building the museum: knowledge, conflict, and the power of place’, Isis, 96 (2005), pp. 572–85. Yanni, C., Natures’ Museums: Victorian Science and the Architecture of Display (London: Athlone, 1999); Winsor, M.P., Reading the Shape of Nature: Comparative Zoology at the Agassiz Museum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). Forgan, ‘Building the museum’. Livingstone, D.N., Putting Science in its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003). Forgan, ‘Building the museum’, p. 583. Appadurai, A., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Thomas, N., Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). Vergo, P. (ed.), The New Museology (London: Reaktion, 1989); Pearce, S.M., Museums, Objects and Collections: A Cultural Study (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1992); Daston, L. (ed.), Biographies of Scientific Objects (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Daston, L., Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science (New York: Zone, 2004). Alberti, S.J.M., ‘Objects and the museum’, Isis, 96 (2005), p. 566. For instance, see Guerrini, A., ‘Duverney’s skeletons’, Isis, 94 (2003), pp. 577–603; Lindqvist, S. (ed.), Museums of Modern Science (Catnon, MA: Science History Publications, 2000). Patterson, R., Belfast Newsletter, 22 May 1840.

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21 Prospectus of a Plan for Establishing a Botanic Garden in Belfast, February 1827. 22 McCracken, E., The Palm House and Botanic Garden, Belfast (Belfast: Ulster Architectural Heritage Society, 1971). 23 Quoted in Calwell, H.G., Andrew Malcolm of Belfast 1808–1856? Historian and Physician (Belfast: Brough Cox and Dunn, 1977), p. 76. 24 A Popular Guide to the Royal Botanic Garden of Belfast (Belfast: W and G. Agnew, 1851), p. viii. 25 Thomson, J., On Public Parks in Connexion with Large Towns, with a Suggestion for the Formation of a Park in Belfast (paper given to the Belfast Social Inquiry Society, March 1852). 26 Thomson, On Public Parks. 27 Royal Belfast Botanical Garden Minute Book, 5 April 1864. 28 Scott, R., A Breath of Fresh Air: The Story of Belfast Parks (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 2000). 29 Royal Belfast Botanical Garden Minute Book, 5 April 1864. 30 Royal Belfast Botanical Garden Minute Book, 27 March 1865. 31 Royal Belfast Botanical Garden Minute Book, 27 March 1865. 32 Northern Whig, 2 April 1865. 33 Royal Belfast Botanical Garden Minute Book, 14 June 1865. 34 McCracken, The Palm House. 35 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 36, Thursday, 22 May 1800, p. 98. 36 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 36, Thursday, 22 May 1800, p. 98. 37 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 37, Thursday, 11 June 1801, p. 151. 38 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 38, Thursday, 28 January 1802, pp. 47–49. 39 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 38, Thursday, 28 January 1802, p. 49. 40 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 39, Thursday, 31 March 1803, p. 80. 41 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 40, Thursday, 24 May 1804, p. 45. 42 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 70, Thursday, 26 June 1834, p. 229. 43 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 74, Thursday, 25 January 1838, p. 91. 44 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 91, 2 November 1854, 7 December 1854. 45 Haughton, S., Memoir of James Haughton (Dublin: n.p., 1877). 46 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 96, 9 June 1859 and 3 November 1859, pp. xcv–xcvi. 47 The Royal Dublin Society and the Citizens of Dublin. Why Should Exclusiveness and Sabbatarianism be the Rule at the Glasnevin Botanic Garden, Whilst under Her Majesty, at Kew, Free Admission is the Rule on All Days of the Week and on Sunday (pamphlet, Dublin, printed by M. Markey, 1860), pp. 6–7. 48 The Royal Dublin Society and the Citizens of Dublin. 49 Nelson, E.C. and McCracken, E.M., The Brightest Jewel: A History of the National Botanic Gardens Glasnevin, Dublin (Kilikenny: Boethius, 1987). 50 Gregory, William, Sir William Gregory K.C.M.G.: An Autobiography, edited by Lady Gregory (London: J. Murray, 1894). 51 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 97, 1862, Appendix V, ‘Correspondence between the Government and the Royal Dublin Society relative to the proposed opening of the Botanic Gardens on Sundays’, pp. xxxiii–xxxix.

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52 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 97, 1862, Appendix V, Letter from Science and Art Department of the Committee of Council on Education to the RDS, 27 April 1861, p. xxxvi. 53 This claim was based on a commitment by minute given by the Board of Trade on 11 April 1854 that their ‘Lordships would not interfere with its [RDS] general management’. Quoted in Bright, K., The Royal Dublin Society 1815–1945 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004), p. 236. 54 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Appendix VI, 1862, Letter from RDS to Science and Art Department, 3 June 1861, p. xlvi. 55 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Appendix VI, 1862, Letter from RDS to Science and Art Department, 3 June 1861, p. xlvi. 56 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 98, Minutes of the Council (Special Meeting), Thursday, 31 July 1861, p. 4. 57 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 98, 1862, Minutes of the Council (Special Meeting), Thursday, 25 July 1861, p. 7. 58 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 98, 1862, Report of the Curator of the Botanic Garden for the Year 1861, p. viii. 59 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 98, 1862, Report of the Curator of the Botanic Garden for the Year 1861, p. ix. 60 A comment in a letter written by Thomas Martin in 1761 to his friend Richard Pulteney and quoted in ‘The Cambridge Botanical Garden’, Pharmaceutical Journal, 1 October 1898, p. 373 [author anon.]. 61 Martyn, T., Catalogus Horti Botanici Cantabrigiensis (Cambridge: n.p., 1771); and a supplement or Mantissa was published in 1772 containing the plan of the garden. 62 Bateson, P., ‘The Botanic Garden: old and new’, in S.M. Walters and E.A. Stow (eds), Darwin’s Mentor: John Stevens Henslow 1796–1861 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 130–31. 63 Henslow, J.S., The Sketch of a Course of Lectures in Botany for 1833 (Cambridge, 1833). 64 Henslow, The Sketch of a Course of Lectures, p. 3. 65 Quoted in Walters, S.M., The Shaping of Cambridge Botany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 51. 66 Loudon’s Magazine of Natural History, 6 (1833), p. 500. 67 University Archives at Cambridge (UA), CUR 25.1, Botanik Garden 1717–1883, Item 70, Rules of the Botanic Garden, 28 October 1854. 68 UA, CUR 25.1, Botanik Garden 1717–1883, Item 70, Rules of the Botanic Garden, 28 October 1854. 69 UA, CUR 25.1, Botanik Garden 1717–1883, Item 70, Rules of the Botanic Garden 28 October 1854. 70 UA, CUR 25.1, Botanik Garden 1717–1883, Item 93, Amended report of the Botanical Garden Syndicate, dated 7 June 1877, recommending the Rules for Admission to the Botanic Garden be confirmed. 71 UA, CUR 25.1, Botanik Garden 1717–1883, Item 54, March 1851. 72 UA, CUR 25.1, Botanik Garden 1717–1883, Item 103 (2), 5 June 1880. 73 Babington, C.C., Memoirs, Journal and Botanical Correspondence (Cambridge: Macmillan and Bowes, 1897), p. xcii. 74 UA, CUR 25.1, Botanik Garden 1717–1883, Item 103 (2), 5 June 1880. 75 UA, CUR 25.1, Botanik Garden 1717–1883, Item 105 (3), Reporter, p. 496. 76 UA, CUR 25.1, Botanik Garden 1717–1883, Item 105 (3), Reporter, p. 496. 77 UA, CUR 25.1, Botanik Garden 1717–1883, Item 105 (3), Reporter, p. 496. 78 UA, CUR 25.1, Botanik Garden 1717–1883, Item 103 (1), Rules of Admssion, 31 May 1880.

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79 UA, CUR 25.1, Botanik Garden 1717–1883, Item 107 (27), 27th Annual Report of the Botanic Garden, 14 June 1882. 80 UA, CUR 25.1, Botanik Garden 1717–1883, Item 107 (23), 23rd Annual Report of the Botanic Garden, 30 March 1878. 81 UA, CUR 25.1, Botanik Garden 1717–1883, Item 107 (27), 27th Annual Report of the Botanic Garden, 14 June 1882. 82 Hooker, Sir William, Botanical Magazine, December 1884, p. 6790. 83 Examples include Wade, W., Catalogus Systematicus Plantarum Indigenarum in Comitatu Dublinensi Inventarum (Dublin, 1794); Wade, W., Catalogue of Plants in the Dublin Society’s Botanic Garden, Glasnevin (Dublin: Graisberry, 1800); Donn, J., Hortus Cantabrigiensis or A Catalogue of Plants Cultivated in the Walkerian Botanical Garden (Cambridge: John Burges, 1796); Murray, A., Hardy Perennials in the New Botanic Garden Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1848). 84 Ritvo, H., ‘The order of nature: constructing the collections of Victorian zoos’, in R.J. Hoage, R.J. Deiss and W.A. Deiss (eds), New Worlds, New Animals: From Menagerie to Zoological Park in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1996), p. 47. 85 Burkhardt, R.W., ‘The leopard in the garden: life in close quarters at the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle’, Isis, 98 (2007), p. 677. 86 Clark, J.W., A Concise Guide to the Town and University of Cambridge (Cambridge: Bowes and Bowes, 1910, 4th edition), p. 182. 87 Clark, A Concise Guide to the Town, pp. 182–83. 88 Clark, A Concise Guide to the Town, pp. 183–84. 89 Clark, A Concise Guide to the Town, p. 186. 90 Clark, A Concise Guide to the Town, p. 187. 91 Clark, A Concise Guide to the Town, p. 189. 92 Clark, A Concise Guide to the Town, p. 190. 93 Spary E.C., Utopia’s Garden: French Natural History from Old Regime to Revolution (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 199. 94 Gilbert-Carter, H., A Guide to the University Botanic Garden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1947), p. 23. 95 Endersby, J., ‘A garden enclosed: botanical barter in Sydney, 1818–39’, British Journal for the History of Science, 33 (2000), p. 330. 96 Guide to the Royal Belfast Botanic Garden ( Belfast: W. And G. Agnew, 1851), p. iii. 97 Guide to the Royal Belfast, p. viii. 98 Guide to the Royal Belfast, p. 2. 99 Guide to the Royal Belfast, p. 5. 100 Guide to the Royal Belfast, p. 9. 101 Guide to the Royal Belfast, p. 21. 102 Guide to the Royal Belfast, p. 23. 103 Wade, Catalogue of Plants. 104 Underwood, J., A Catalogue of Plants, Indigenous and Exotic, Cultivated in the Botanic Garden, Belonging to the Dublin Society at Glasnevin (Dublin: Graisberry, 1804). 105 Irish Farmer’s and Gardener’s Magazine, 5 (1838), pp. 357–63. 106 Niven, N., The Visitors Companion to the Botanic Garden (Dublin: William Curry and Co, 1838), pp. viii–ix. 107 Niven, The Visitors Companion, p. 4. 108 Niven, The Visitors Companion, p. 104. 109 Niven, The Visitors Companion, p. 105. 110 Niven, The Visitors Companion, p. 155.

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111 Niven, The Visitors Companion, p. 171. 112 Niven, The Visitors Companion, pp. 171–72. 113 Niven, The Visitors Companion, p. 173. 114 Moore, D., Hand-Book for the Botanic Gardens of the Royal Dublin Society, Glasnevin (Dublin: James McGlashan, 1850). 115 Moore, Hand-Book for the Botanic Gardens, pp. 6–7. 116 McNab, W.R., Guide to the Royal Botanic Gardens Glasnevin (By the late Davie Moore, revised and enlarged edition by Professor W.R. McNab, Dublin: HMSO, 1885). 117 Moore, Hand-Book for the Botanic Gardens, p. 19. 118 Ritvo, ‘The order of nature’, pp. 43–50. 119 Moore, Hand-Book for the Botanic Gardens, p. 21. 120 Moore, Hand-Book for the Botanic Gardens, p. 27. 121 Moore, Hand-Book for the Botanic Gardens, p. 28. 122 Moore, Hand-Book for the Botanic Gardens, p. 28. 123 Moore, Hand-Book for the Botanic Gardens, p. 29. 124 Moore, Hand-Book for the Botanic Gardens, p. 61. 125 Moore, Hand-Book for the Botanic Gardens, p. 67. 126 Moore, Hand-Book for the Botanic Gardens, p. 79. 127 Moore, Hand-Book for the Botanic Gardens, p. 79. 128 Moore, D., ‘Design in the structure and fertilisation of plants a proof of the existence of God’, in Science and Revelation: A Series of Lectures in Reply to the Theories of Tyndall, Huxley, Darwin, Spencer (Belfast: William Mullan, 1875), p. 4. 129 See Casid, J.H., Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonisation (London: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Fara, P., Sex, Botany and Empire (Cambridge: Icon Books, 2003); Spary, Utopia’s Garden. 130 Brooke, J.H., Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Young, R.M., Darwin’s Metaphor: Nature’s Place in Victorian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Livinsgtone, D.N., ‘Science, region and religion: the reception of Darwinism in Princeton, Belfast, and Edinburgh’, in R.L. Numbers and J. Stenhouse (eds), Disseminating Darwinism: The Role of Place, Race, Religion and Gender (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 7–38; Livinsgtone, D.N., ‘Cultures of science’, in J.S. Duncan, N.J. Johnson and R.H. Schein, A Companion to Cultural Geography (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 139–50. 131 Prest, J., The Garden of Eden: The Botanic Garden and the Re-creation of Paradise (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981); Fletcher, H.R. and Brown, W.H., The Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh 1670–1870 (Edinburgh: HMSO, 1970); Miller, D. and Reill, P.H. (eds), Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany and Representations of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); McCracken, D.P., Gardens of Empire: Botanical Institutions of the Victorian British Empire (London: Leicester University Press, 1997); Brockway, L., Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens (London: Yale University Press, 2002). 132 Brooke, Science and Religion, p. 216. 133 See Nelson, E.C. and Seaward, M.R.D., ‘Charles Darwin’s correspondence with David Moore of Glasnevin on insectivorous plants and potatoes’, Biological Journal of the Linnaean Society, London, 15 (1981), pp. 157–64. 134 Livingstone, D., ‘Darwin in Belfast: the evolution debate’, in J. Wilson-Foster (ed.), Nature in Ireland: A Scientific and Cultural History (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1997), p. 394. 135 Desmond, A. and Moore, J., Darwin (London: Michael Joseph, 1991).

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136 Tyndall, J., Address Delivered before the British Association Assembled at Belfast, with Addition (London: Longmans, Green and Co, 1874). 137 Quoted in Livingstone, ‘Darwin in Belfast’, p. 395. 138 Smith, J., ‘Une fleur du mal? Swinburne’s “The Sundew” and Darwin’s insectivorous plants’, Victorian Poetry, 41 (2003), p. 142. 139 Science and Revelation: A Series of Lectures in Reply to the Theories of Tyndall, Huxley, Darwin, Spencer (Belfast: William Mullan, 1875). 140 Livingstone, ‘Darwin in Belfast’, p. 401. 141 ‘Lecture on science and religion’, Belfast Newsletter, Tuesday, 8 December 1874. 142 The text of the lecture appeared in the Belfast Newsletter (Tuesday, 8 December 1874) and the Northern Whig (Tuesday, 8 December 1874). 143 Moore, ‘Design in the structure’, pp. 1–32. 144 Northern Whig, Tuesday, 8 December 1874, p. 5. 145 Young, Darwin’s Metaphor, p. 135. 146 Outram, D., ‘New spaces in natural history’, in N. Jardine, A. Secord and E. Spary (eds), Cultures of Natural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 250–51. 147 Moore, ‘Design in the structure’, p. 5. 148 Moore, ‘Design in the structure’, p. 6. 149 Moore, ‘Design in the structure’, p. 7. 150 Moore, ‘Design in the structure’, p. 9. 151 Moore, ‘Design in the structure’, pp. 10–11. 152 Smith, ‘Une fleur du mal’, p. 144. 153 Moore, ‘Design in the structure’, p. 13. 154 Moore, ‘Design in the structure’, p. 19. 155 Moore, ‘Design in the structure’,. p. 21. 156 Moore, ‘Design in the structure’, p. 21. 157 Moore, ‘Design in the structure’, p. 23. 158 Moore, ‘Design in the structure’, p. 24. 159 Moore, ‘Design in the structure’, p. 26 160 Moore, ‘Design in the structure’, p. 26. 161 Moore, ‘Design in the structure’, p. 28. 162 Dean, W., With Broadax and Firebrand: The Destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 163. 163 Short, P., In Pursuit of Plants: Experiences of Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Plant Collectors (London: Timber Press, 2004). 164 Darwin, C., On the Various Contrivances by Which British and Foreign Orchids are Fertilised by Insects (London: John Murray, 1862). 165 Moore, ‘Design in the structure’, p. 30. 166 Stepan, N., Picturing Tropical Nature (London: Reaktion, 2001). 167 Moore, ‘Design in the structure’, p. 32. 168 Northern Whig, Saturday, 26 May 1838. 169 Alberti, S.J.M., ‘Conversaziones and the experience of science in Victorian England’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 8 (2003), pp. 208–30. 170 Alberti, ‘Conversaziones and the experience’. 171 Northern Whig, Saturday, 30 June 1838. 172 Northern Whig, Saturday, 30 June 1838. 173 Northern Whig, Saturday, 30 June 1838. 174 Northern Whig, Thursday, 30 August 1838. 175 Northern Whig, Thursday, 30 August 1838. 176 Northern Whig Tuesday, 14 May 1839. 177 Belfast Newsletter, Friday, 22 May 1840.

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178 Belfast Newsletter, Friday, 26 August 1842. 179 Morus, ‘Seeing and believing’. 180 Belfast Newsletter, Friday, 26 August 1842. 181 Belfast Newsletter, Friday, 26 August 1842. 182 Morus, ‘Seeing and believing’, p. 104. 183 Belfast Newsletter, Tuesday, 4 July 1843. 184 Belfast Newsletter, Tuesday, 4 July 1843. 185 Belfast Newsletter, Tuesday, 7 August 1849. 186 Northern Whig, Tuesday, 14 August 1849. 187 Belfast Newsletter, Tuesday, 14 August 1849. 188 Northern Whig, Tuesday, 14 August 1849. 189 Northern Whig, Tuesday, 29 March 1853. 190 Northern Whig, Tuesday, 29 March 1853. 191 Northern Whig, Thursday, 28 July 1853. 192 Belfast Newsletter, Monday, 3 May 1869. 193 Bright, The Royal Dublin Society, pp. 106–110. 194 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 71, 1835, Minutes of Extraordinary Meeting, Saturday, 25 July. 195 Morrell, J. and Thackray, A., Gentlemen of Science: Early Years of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 176. 196 Morrell and Thackray, Gentlemen of Science. 197 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. 72, 1835, Thursday, 19 November, p. lxxii. 198 Withers, C.W.J., Higgitt, R. and Finnegan, D.A., ‘Historical geographies of provincial science: themes in the setting and reception of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Britain, 1831–c. 1939’, British Journal of the History of Science, 41, 3 (2008), pp. 385–415. 199 Bright, The Royal Dublin Society, pp. 106–10. 200 Bright, The Royal Dublin Society. 201 Nelson and McCracken, The Brightest Jewel, p. 128. 202 Kew Mss, English letters 29/341, W.J. Harvey to W.J. Hooker, undated. 203 This is quoted as being reported by David Moore in 1852 in Nelson and McCracken, The Brightest Jewel, p. 122. 204 London Illustrated News, 11 August 1849. 205 London Illustrated News, 11 August 1849.

CHAPTER 7 1

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263

Index

aesthetics, concept of, 11, 76, 217–18 Alberti, S.J.M., 131, 169–70, 206 Allen, D.E., 130, 133 Anderson, K., 9 arboretum, 75–76 Arnold, D., 87–88, 97 Babington, C.C. 136, 139, 181 Bateson, P., 179 Belfast Botanical and Horticultural Society, 12, 164, 206 Belfast Natural History Society, 12, 32, 33–34, 35, 164, 171 Bentham, W., 149 Berkeley, M.J., 159–63 biogeography, 89, 112, 124, 126, 127, 136–38, 195 BNHS see Belfast Natural History Society Botanic Garden, University of Cambridge, 12: aesthetics, 72–73, 83–84; arboretum, 72–73; design of old physic garden, 21–22; general layout, 71; glasshouses of old physic garden, 23, 62, 118–119; guidebooks, 183–186; labels, 72–73; networks, 132, 140–45; new glasshouses, 122–25; origin of new botanic garden, 63–64; origin of old physic garden, 16–20; plant donations, 141–44; popular access, 178–82; re–design of new botanic garden, 65–70 Bradley, R., 17–19 British Association for the Advancement of Science, 33, 53, 134, 138, 139, 156, 196, 210–11 British Flora, by Hooker, 136 British Museum, 176–77

Brockway, L., 7, 130, 135 Brooke, J.H., 197 Brussels, botanic garden, 121 Burkhardt, R.W., 183 Burton, D., 91 Calcutta, botanic garden, 149 Chatsworth House, 91, 108, 123 Clark, J.W., 183 Clusius, C., 5 colonial gardens, 130–31, 135 Cook, H.J., 129 Darley, F., 111 Darwin, C., 11, 63, 134, 138, 197–98 Daston, L., 65 Desmond, R., 7 Drayton, R., 14, 130, 167 Driver, F., 88–89 Drummond, J.L., 33, 77 Drummond, T., 77–78, 80 Dublin Microscopical Club, 160 Dublin Society see Royal Dublin Society Eden, Garden of, 2, 5, 76 Edinburgh, botanic garden, 6, 121, 141, 157 Endersby, J., 130–31, 186 Enlightenment, 7, 15, 25, 46, 189, 216 Ferguson, Daniel, 78, 87, 99, 165 Ferguson, Duncan, 109, 113 Forgan, S., 46, 169 Forsyth Johnson, J., 165 Foster, J., 26, 27, 28–29, 103 Foucault, M., 46 Gifford, H. Sir, 149 Gilbert-Carter, H., 185

NATURE DISPLACED, NATURE DISPLAYED

Glasgow, botanic garden, 78, 121, 157, 165 glasshouses, 89–90, 92–93, 95, 97–99, 126–27 guidebooks, general, 183 Hammersmith Works, Dublin, 96 Harvey, W., 60–61, 113, 160, 211 Haughton, J., 175–76 Henslow, J.S., 62: background, 63; botany teaching, 134–38; British flora, 138; modern science, 119, 132; natural theology, 74; networks, 133–35; new garden proposal, 68–70; visual training, 64, 137, 179–80 Hooker, J., 133, 197–98 Hooker, W.J., 53, 69, 78, 80, 111, 133 Hothouses see glasshouses

Melbourne, botanic garden, 143 Miller, C., 20, 21, 132 Miller, D.P., 129 Montagne, C., 161 Moore, C., 207 Moore, D., 40: aesthetics, 61, 202; anti–evolution lecture, 196–206; arboretum, 57–60; background, 57; glasshouses, 106–12, 114, 211–12; guidebooks, 192–95; networks, 157–58; potato blight experiments, 159–63 Morus, I.R., 168 Mudd, W., 123, 143–44 Murray, A., 69–72, 122, 133–34 natural theology, 17, 33, 74, 106, 168, 186, 194, 200, 201–05 nature, tropical, 88–89, 97–98, 110, 115, 126–27, 194, 205, 218 Nelson, E.C., 159 networks, botanical, 90, 126, 129–31 Niven, N., 53–54, 57, 105–06, 153–56, 189–92 nomenclature, 7–8 Norfolk Island Pine, 104

immutable mobiles, 39 Jenyns, L., 135, 180 Johnston, W., 198–99 Kew, botanic garden, 6, 7, 30, 129–31, 135, 141, 144

Outram, D., 46, 201 Owen, J., 114

landscape architects, 10–11 landscape gardening, 10 Lanyon, C., 93–95, 114 Lapidge, E., 65–68, 119–21 Latour, B., 10, 39, 47, 56, 129 Lightman, B., 168 Lindley, J., 133, 136, 161–62 Litton, S., 50–54, 60, 105, 150–51, 153 Livingstone, D.N., 89 Loudon, J.S., 75–76, 91 Lynch, I., 123–24, 144–45 MacIntosh, C., 96 MacKenzie, G., 91 Madden, E., 80 Martins, L., 88–89 Martyn T., 19, 21, 23, 62, 63, 118, 132, 179 Martyn, J., 19 McCracken, D.P., 6–7 McNab, W., 192 medical botany, 2–6, 12, 16–17, 20–21, 24, 26,–27, 29–30, 36, 42, 49, 52, 67, 75, 76, 82, 97, 98, 132, 134, 142, 144, 170, 187, 195, 215, 216

Paris, Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, 8, 183 Patterson, R., 171–72 physic gardens: Chelsea, 3, 19–21, 132–33, 144, 157–58; Padua, 3; University of Cambridge, 16–23; University of Leiden, 4–6; University of Oxford, 16; origins, 3 picturesque, 10, 11, 13, 40, 59, 66, 74, 76, 81, 84, 88, 92, 103–04, 126, 165, 177, 188, 191, 207, 217 plant classification,190–91, 217: de Candolle, A., 72, 195; debates about, 53; de Jussieu, A.L., 49–51, 56; Linnaeus, C., 46, 51, 56 plants, carniverous, 203–04 Plumptre, A., 103 Presbyterian Church, Rosemary Street, 198–200 Price, U., 10, 76 Queen’s University Belfast, 82, 95, 164

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Ray, J., 16–17 RDS see Royal Dublin Society reciprocal exchange, 130–31, 140, 145, 154, 219 Regent’s Park, botanic garden, 96, 99, 142 Renaissance garden, 2–3, 118, 215 Ritvo, H., 7, 183 Royal Belfast Botanical and Horticultural Company, 35, 77, 95 Royal Botanic Gardens, Belfast, 12: aesthetics, 80–81, 84, 208; general layout, 79–82; guidebooks, 186–88; labels, 82; location, 35; networks, 164–65; Orchid House, 98, 188; origin, 32–35; Palm House, 87, 93, 95–97, 187; popular access, 171–74, 209; royal visits, 209–10; taxonomy, 81–82; Tropical Ravine House, 98–99; visitors, 35, 208 Royal Botanic Gardens, Glasnevin, Dublin, 11: aesthetics, 84; Aquarium House, 113; arboretum, 41, 43; catalogues, 42–43; Curvilinear Range, 109–13, 177; early hothouses, 100–03; Epiphyte House, 103; general layout, 41–45; guidebooks, 189–95; labels, 47–48, 74–75; location, 30–31; Long Range, 104; networks, 145–50; new Palm House, 116; Octagon House, 106; origin, 24–29; Palm House, 114–15; plant donations, 147–50, 154–56; pond, 48; popular access, 174–78; re–design of garden, 49–62; royal visits, 212– 13; silk experiments, 151–52 Royal Dublin Society, 12, 51, 149, 151, 210: access debate, 174–78; foundation, 24–25; lobbying for botanic garden, 26 Rudwick, M., 10 Ruskin, J., 10, 11

science, popular Victorian, 167–71, 195–96 Secord, A., 136–37 Spary, E.C., 6, 7, 65, 77, 185 Stepan, N., 88 Stratton, J., 73, 122, 142 submarine explosion, 208 sublime, 13, 116 Sydney, botanic garden, 130–31, 186 systematic beds, 66, 119, 122, 125, 160 Taylor, W., 90–91 Templeton, J., 34, 207 Thomson, J., 172 Thoreau, H.D., 215, 216 Trinity College Dublin, physic garden, 24, 26, 99, 105, 141 Turner, R., 92, 95–97, 109, 111 Turner, W., 113 Tyndall, J., 198 Underwood, J., 40, 42, 50, 51, 53,100, 103, 104, 105, 106, 146, 149, 174, 189 Veltre, T., 8 Victoria amazonica/regia, 98–99, 113, 209, 211–212 Victoria, Queen, 206, 209–10 Wade, W., 26, 29–30, 31, 40, 42, 49, 50, 100, 146, 150, 174, 189 Walker, R, 20, 179 Walsh, R., 103–04 Weld, I., 151–52 zoological gardens: Adelaide, 9–10; Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle Paris, 8; Regent’s Park, 8; general, 7–9 Zoological Society of London, 8

267