Book recounts zeal of early Canadian botanists
In 1828, Lord Dalhousie wasn’t enjoying his job as governor of Lower Canada. People were tired of his bombastic ways, and 87,000 citizens signed a petition asking Britain to ship him out.
So what were he and Lady Dalhousie doing in the crisis? Studying plants, of course.
Like many Canadians of the early 1800s, this Scottish couple loved learning about the huge array of plant life around them.
They gardened, they tramped through wild areas, they exchanged plant lore and samples with amateur botanists in many countries the way later collectors would trade hockey and baseball cards.
They read the work of Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus. And they continued until the British government finally shipped them to India, which they hated (too hot).
A new book by three Canadian academics with a love of natural history — among them Jacques Cayouette of the Central Experimental Farm — uncovers the zeal and skill of the people who collected and studied Canadian plants in the late 1700s and early 1800s.
The third and final volume of Curieuses histoires de plantes du Canada, covering from 1760 to 1867, has just been published. (The other authors are Alain Asselin and Jacques Mathieu.)
It described a time when Canadians needed to know their surrounding plant life. Plants provided food, medicine, lumber and, in a farming economy, a family’s income.
They also shaped the Canadian people, as this was the period when a little-known blight developed in North or South America and travelled to Ireland, where it wiped out the potato crop and caused famine and emigration.
Botany was a fascinating hobby for the well-read amateurs and collectors of the late 1700s and early 1800s. They formed clubs; they published in journals; many were accomplished artists.
And they rubbed shoulders with the professionals at universities, probably in ways that are unusual today.
In 1858, a priest named Abbé Ferland was leading a community of 12 Catholic families at La Tabatière, far down Quebec’s rugged North Shore — and supplying plant specimens to Harvard University. The good abbé called his community “the metropolis of the area.”
Olivier Giroux, a Quebec City pharmacist, sent 13 medicinal plants to London where they were shown in the International Exhibition of 1862.
All kinds of plants were sent to exhibits in Paris, but so were products made from them — maple syrup, herbal preparations, and white pine and spruce planks 10 feet long and an inch thick. The cheaper spruce sold there for 20 to 40 francs per hundred boards.
And they were breeders. The Scottish-born Robert Cleghorn (1778-1841) ran a Montreal nursery that offered 30 varieties of apple tree and 15 to 18 pear and plum varieties. He was active in the Société d’histoire naturelle de Montréal, and was a buddy of the Dalhousies.
Even the military was in on the action. In the summer of 1829, the government of Lower Canada sent an expedition under a British officer, Lt. Frederick Ingall, to survey the plants in the region of the St. Maurice River. He came back with 31 tree species and 117 other plants, including bushes.
Ingall’s work has parallels today; the Canadian Museum of Nature ran a botanical survey this summer in several parts of Nunavut.
This volume is blessed with famous artwork. Cayouette was a co-author of Audubon: Beyond Birds; Plant Portraits and Conservation Heritage of John James Audubon, and some of those images are reproduced in the new book.
Audubon was no casual visitor. He travelled down the St. Lawrence River to Labrador, where he observed that the fur trade was drying up, local people had increasing difficulty hunting and fishing, and he feared that the land might become uninhabitable after the fishing, trapping and whaling stripped it bare.
“Nature herself seems perishing,” he wrote. It was one of the first formal conservation warnings in Canada, and came in 1833.
The book is published (in French) by Septentrion, priced at $49.95.