Evening Telegraph (First Edition)
Seeds of botanic garden development planted more than 100 years ago
PLANS for Dundee to become home to a new Eden Project have recently generated much excitement in the city.
However, records held by archive services at Dundee University remind us that such a scheme can be seen as a natural evolution of Dundee’s association with botanical sciences.
The first Professor of Botany at University College, Dundee, was Sir Patrick Geddes, who arrived in the city in 1889.
A colourful character, he had a wide range of interests but is today perhaps best known as a pioneer of modern town-planning.
Other interests included ecology, an early concern about the environmental consequences of pollution, and sociology.
Indeed, student testimony suggests he seems to have found it difficult to focus on the subject he was supposed to be teaching during his classes.
He was also a firm believer in practical teaching and would lead students on field trips and saw the potential of gardens and structures to educate.
This caused him to have the garden in what is now the Geddes Quadrangle at the university laid out to be an educational tool.
Geddes planned it so the plant specimens planted in each bed were from the same scientific group and the various beds demonstrated the evolution of that group.
However, Geddes had ambitions for a much larger scheme that would benefit students and the wider community – a large botanic garden in the city.
As he outlined in 1906, this would have run from Perth Road to the edge of the railway at Magdalen Green, covering the site of what was then Clarendon Park Nursery.
The project lacked financial support and was not realised but he was undeterred and in 1909 he wrote to the secretary of University College with new developments.
For some years there had been suggestions that Dundee should have a winter garden built in one of its parks but no progress had been made.
Geddes reported that he had therefore approached the town council and asked whether it would consider a revival of his previous scheme as the basis for either a winter garden or a botanic garden.
However, he needed support from the college’s authorities, who told Geddes that the financial costs prohibited them from backing the project.
Although Geddes formally resigned from the college in 1920, he had in fact done no teaching in Dundee for several sessions before this. Yet botany continued to be an important subject at the college.
The work of lecturer, and later head of botany, Dr Edith Philip Smith – on staff 1924-60, helped the department maintain a high profile. However, the biggest botanical achievement was still to come.
Geddes’ idea of a botanic garden resurfaced in the 1960s, with the head of grounds at the college Alexander Machar being among its advocates.
The idea found a key supporter in James Drever who in 1967 became the first principal of the newly independent Dundee University.
With help from Sir Garnet Wilson, the former Lord Provost of Dundee, who had a long association with the university and its predecessors, funding was secured for the project.
In 1971 Edward Kemp was appointed as the first curator of the garden and work started on laying out a site on the south side of Perth Road about two miles west of the university.
The garden continues to benefit the university and the wider community and Patrick Geddes would have surely been pleased with its success.
There can also be little doubt that he would be keenly interested in the Eden Project coming to Dundee, and it can be seen as a fitting continuation of the work he started more than 100 years ago.