Breeding ground for botanists
November 2009
Little Sparta: The garden constructed by Scottish poet Ian Hamilton Finlay in Lanarkshire was declared to be the most important single work of Scottish art. Hamilton Finlay’s garden is testimony – not to novelty – but to the long history of the garden in Scotland.
by Cairns Craig
Kew Gardens, on the Thames at Richmond, became, in the 18th century, the leading centre for the exchange of plants across the globe. Kew, however, was an outpost of Scottish gardening expertise.
Its first head gardener, William Aiton (1731-93), had been trained in Hamilton and was succeeded by his son, William Townsend Aiton. The post of director then went to William Jackson Hooker, Professor of Botany at Glasgow University, who was succeeded in turn by his son, Joseph Dalton Hooker who, though English by birth, had been brought up in Glasgow, attending Glasgow High School and graduated in medicine from Glasgow University in 1839.
The role of Scots in the development of
Kew, and the importance of the botanic gardens in both Edinburgh and Glasgow, put Scots not only in the forefront of plant exploration over vast areas of the world, but in the establishment of new botanic gardens.
The first imperial botanic garden was founded in 1765 on the island of St Vincent in the West Indies by General Robert Melville, a graduate of both Glasgow and Edinburgh universities. In India, Robert Kyd, from Forfar, proposed to the East India Company the development of a botanic garden to provide the navy with teak timber. The Calcutta Botanic Garden was established in 1787 and, after Kyd’s death in 1793, William Roxburgh, originally from Ayrshire, took over as director.
Roxburgh was not only to transform the Calcutta garden into one of the most important botanic centres in the world but, by his analysis of the properties of jute, to make possible the development of the jute industry in Dundee.
Roxburgh sent back to Kew over 2000 plant species which were documented in his major botanical work on Indian plants, Flora Indica, published in 1820, five years after his death. Roxburgh, however, was not the only Scot involved in the Indian botanic gardens: his assistant and immediate successor at Calcutta was Francis Buchanan, another student of Dr John Hope in Edinburgh, who had made pioneering surveys of Chittagong in 1798 and North Bengal from 1807-13, while Robert Wight from Edinburgh and yet another of Hope’s students, took charge of the botanic garden at Madras in 1823 and brought back to Britain over 3000 species of Indian plants.
The international role of Scots in the development of botanic gardens is underlined by the network that developed from the appointment of Ninian Niven as curator of the Botanic Gardens in Dublin in 1834. Niven, born in Glasgow, was so influential that in 1993 two gardens designed by him – Iveagh Gardens, Dublin, and Hilton Park, County Monoghan – were chosen as worthy of restoration by the European Union under the ‘Gardens of Historic Interest’ scheme.
David Moore at Glasnevin
Niven’s successor at Glasnevin was David Moore, who had been apprenticed to the Earl of Camperdown’s gardener and worked at James Cunningham’s nurseries at Comely Bank in Edinburgh. Moore had arrived in Ireland as assistant to another Scot, James Townsend Mackay from Kirkaldy, who was the first manager of Trinity College’s botanic gardens and who documented the plant life of Ireland in his Flora Hibernica in1836.
The global reach of these Scottish networks is indicated by the fact that Moore’s brother, Charles, was responsible for the development of the Botanic Gardens in Sydney, Australia, which had been established by two remarkable Scottish gardeners and botanists.
One was Charles Fraser from Blair Atholl in Perthshire, who arrived in Australia in 1816 at the age of 24 as a soldier guarding convicts. Having trained as a gardener, however, he quickly found himself in charge of the governor’s garden.
The other was Alan Cunningham whose family was from Renfrewshire, and who, after explorations in South America, was sent by Banks to Australia in 1816 as the King’s Botanist. Fraser took charge of the practical development of the botanic garden while Cunningham searched the unexplored Australian interior for plants.
On Fraser’s death Cunningham, who had returned to Britain because of ill-health, arranged for his brother Richard to be appointed Superintendent in 1833 – an appointment which proved disastrous for both. In 1835, on an expedition along the Bogan river, Richard strayed from his companions in search of plants, and was killed by a group of Aborigines.
When this news reached Britain Allan Cunningham agreed to succeed his brother, but quickly came into conflict with the local governor over the role of convicts in the garden and resigned in 1837. Already suffering from tuberculosis, he died in Sydney in June 1839.
Through these turbulent years of short-lived superintendents, the garden’s progress was maintained by James Kidd, a gardener from Fife who had arrived as a convict in 1830 but retired as an overseer in 1866.
It was the arrival of Charles Moore in 1848 at the age of 27 that transformed Sydney into a major botanic garden. Moore organised the garden both as a centre for scientific research and as means of public education through his popular lectures on botany, and during his 48-year tenure the structure of the garden as it still exists was established.
In the same period, James Hector, who had studied at Edinburgh, was responsible for establishing the botanic garden in Wellington, New Zealand in 1865, while John Davidon, who had been demonstrator for botany courses at Marischal College Aberdeen, established Canada’s oldest surviving botanic garden in British Columbia in 1916.
The Atholl plantings
This engagement with the plants of many different places put Scots at the forefront of what we would now describe as ‘environmental’ concerns. Scotland’s deforestation had been identified as a major cause of its agricultural problems and in the 18th century ‘enlightened’ landowners such as the Dukes of Atholl undertook vast woodland plantings. Indeed, between 1700 and 1830 the 2nd, 3rd and 4th Dukes of Atholl are reckoned to have planted 21 million trees.
Analysis of the impact of trees on the local environment was such a central concern of 19th-century Scottish culture that it was the subject of one of Robert Louis Stevenson’s earliest publications, On the Thermal Influence of Forests, read before the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1873.
This concern also informed the work of John Croumbie Brown, who had gone to South Africa as a missionary in the 1840s and was so appalled by the consequences of deforestation that he began a lifelong study of the management of forests, producing studies of forests throughout the world. In 1884 he was one of the organisers of an International Exhibition of Forest Products in Edinburgh designed to promote the ‘scientific management of woods in Scotland and [its] sister countries’.
It was no accident, therefore, that it was a Scot, John Muir (1838-1914), who campaigned for the preservation of the Redwood forests in California and helped establish the American National Parks. This Scottish concern for the environment can be seen not only in Muir’s preservation of the Yosemite Valley, but in the Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, the work of Muir’s friend John Hays McLaren, who was born at Bannockburn, trained at the Edinburgh Botanic Gardens, and whose aim was to create a park which would look as though it was entirely natural, despite the fact that it could only exist by the careful management of the fragile coastal sands and by the planting of over two million trees.
When, in 2004, the garden constructed by Scottish poet Ian Hamilton Finlay at what he called ‘Little Sparta’ – previously known as Stonypath – in Lanarkshire, was declared to be the most important single work of Scottish art, it was in part on the basis of the novelty of a modern artist choosing a garden as his medium. Hamilton Finlay’s garden, however, is testimony not to novelty but to the long history of the garden in Scotland.
Scottish sundials
Hamilton Finlay liked to decorate his gardens with sundials, but those sundials are not merely reminders of a pre-mechanical world: they recollect the survey of Scottish sundials undertaken in 1883 by Thomas Ross. Ross argued that these freestanding sundials were ‘among the most important class of monumental object bequeathed to this century by the seventeenth century and it is only when we come to realise how numerous they are and that many of them are fine works of artistic and scientific skill that we perceive how widespread must have been the appreciation of the sculptor’s art as combined with that of the landscape gardener’.
Ross’s sundials have been used as an indicator of the number of early Scottish gardens which have disappeared or been overbuilt, and as testimony to a Scottish culture which, in the 16th, 17th and early 18th centuries, did not identify Scotland with a sublimely barren and nobly savage landscape, but with its ornate, productive and well-tended gardens.
In 1600 Henri Duc de Rohan was surprised by the fact that there were 100 country seats within a two-league radius of Edinburgh and in 1661 Jorevin de Rocheford noted the large garden filled with fruit trees near to Glasgow University.
Far from being a country hostile to natural growth, Scotland was a well-tended landscape, and, as Patrick Geddes was to insist in the context of trying to revitalise the Old Town of Edinburgh in the 1890s, its urban architecture had, until population growth squeezed them out, always included gardens.
James Gordon of Rothiemay’s Bird’s Eye View of Edinburgh 1647 shows the city’s famous tenements not as a cluster of stone structures defiantly resisting the world of nature, but as thrusting skywards from their roots in formal gardens.
Despite all the aspersions on its climate and on its treeless, desert condition, Scotland, it appears, has always been a country of gardens and gardeners, and its botanic gardens, together with those they inspired, remain testimony to the fact that though the native wild thistle may be our national emblem, the tended and productive garden of plants from around the world has been our national obsession.
CAIRNS CRAIG is Glucksman Professor of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen. His recent book, Intending Scotland: Explorations in Scottish Culture since the Enlightenment (Edinburgh University Press), situates Scotland’s gardeners and botanists in the wider development of Scottish culture.
References
1 The Autobiography of Dr Alexander Carlyle of Inveresk, Ch. 9.
2 Quoted in Patricia Banks, Thomas Blaikie, from H.C. Cameron, Sir Joseph Banks (1966), 100, fn. 52.
3 His biographer, Patricia Taylor, describes him as the ‘Capability Brown of France’ but this underestimates the extent to which the ‘jardin Anglais’ was also the ‘jardin écossais’.
4 Details from ‘A Short Account of the Life and Writings of John Claudius Loudon’, written by his wife Jane after his death, and reprinted in Gloag, Mr Loudon’s England, Appendix II, 182ff.
5 See Ann Lindsay, Seeds of Blood and Beauty: Scottish Plant Explorers (2005).
6 Keith Lamb and Patrick Bowe, A History of Gardening in Ireland (1995), 116.
7 T.C. Smout, People and Woods in Scotland (2003), 139.
8 Miscellanea, Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (London, 1923), v. 26, 79-96.
9 John Croumbie Brown, The Modern Forest Economy (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1884), vi.
10 Forbes W. Robertson, Early Scottish Gardeners and their Plants (2000), 144–5.
11 Ibid., 11.
This is an article from the November 2009 edition of Leopard Magazine. To read much more like this every month, see our subscription details.