THE VICTORIAN PLANT HUNTERS WHO WERE NO SHRINKING VIOLETS PLANT HUNTERS SHRINKING VIOLETS
Botanical ‘guns for hire’, they travelled the world braving cannibals, pirates and jealous husbands to bring back exotic specimens for British collectors
WHEN Kew Gardens published its 10-year “manifesto for change”, one short paragraph near the end caught the attention: “We will move quickly to “decolonise” our collections, re-examining them to acknowledge and address any exploitative or racist legacies”.
Cue much gnashing of teeth. “Why should gardening be dragged into the culture wars?” people complained. “Leave our camellias alone!”
Kew has since removed the term “decolonise”, but the furore rightly invites discussion on the bucaneering adventurers who brought us the plants in the first place. The concept of the botanical “gun for hire” intrigued me, and seemed fertile ground for a potential novel so I began to research the curious world of Victorian plant hunters.
What I found went beyond anything I could have imagined. These men made Indiana Jones look like a shrinking violet.
I first became interested in the plant hunters about five years ago after chancing upon an 1865 Ordnance Survey map of Chelsea.
Situated all along the length of the famous King’s Road were large plots of land described as “nurseries”. At first, I assumed these must be connected to the Chelsea Flower Show, but as the event only came to the borough in 1912, it seemed unlikely.
Further investigations revealed the King’s Road was once the centre of the exotic plant trade in Victorian Britain, and that its nurseries – which turned over huge annual profits – obtained their stock from professional plant hunters.
The trailblazer for this rugged, reckless archetype was David Douglas (1799-1834).
Having grown up in rural Perthshire, Douglas was working at the Botanic Gardens in Glasgow when he was selected by the Horticultural Society of London to undertake an expedition to North America.
The Society – which first convened above Hatchards bookshop in Piccadilly – comprised of wealthy plant-lovers whose members were willing to pay through the nose to procure the newest and most exclusive specimens.
And Douglas proved an inspired choice to do so. Over the course of three expeditions, he covered more than 10,000 miles of terrain by canoe, horse and foot, introducing some 200 new species to Britain, the most celebrated of which – the Douglas fir – bears his name.
He survived several near-drownings, lost the sight in one eye battling blizzards and sandstorms, and used the gun he’d brought to blast down high-hanging pine cones to defend his camp from a grizzly bear. But it is the manner of Douglas’s death at the age of 35 that is most memorable.
Having cut ties with the society, Douglas embarked for Hawaii in December 1833 accompanied only by his Scottish terrier, Billy. It was to be his final expedition.
Arriving on the island, he befriended an escaped Botany Bay convict named Ned Gurney, who trapped wild cattle for a living.
Just as rumours began to swirl that Douglas was becoming a little too friendly with Gurney’s wife, the plant hunter was found dead at the bottom of one of his love rival’s cattle pits, gored and trampled to death by an angry bullock. Foul play was suspected but never proved.
The next character in this horticultural rogues’ gallery is Robert Fortune (1812-1880).
HAVING plucked the fruits of the Americas, the Horticultural Society was keen to find an intrepid hunter to explore China, which was finally opening its borders after the Opium Wars. Fortune, then aged 30, had only just started work as Superintendent of the Society’s Hothouse Department in Chiswick when he was talentspotted for the role.
Initially, he was supplied only with a lifepreserver (a stick weighted with lead, rather than a life jacket) for protection, but the society – no doubt mindful of David Douglas’s fate – eventually agreed to arm him with a fowling piece and a pair of pistols.
Arriving in China in 1843, Fortune set about amassing a glorious collection of azaleas, clematises and honeysuckles. But the ghost of Douglas was never far behind, not least when Fortune narrowly avoided stumbling into a wild-boar trap while seeking viburnums in the hills of Ningbo.
“The fate of my predecessor, Mr Douglas,” Fortune later wrote, “made me doubly thankful for my escape.”
The following year, he was travelling up the Chinese coast in a junk when he was roused from a raging fever by the news that pirates were approaching.
Scrambling on deck with his guns, he lay low until the attackers came into range, then sprang to his feet and gave the intruders both barrels. Fortune was forced to use his weapons on two further occasions before being safely conveyed to dry land.
The botanical haul Fortune brought back to England was so impressive he was able to command much fees for his next expedition, a commission to smuggle tea seedlings out of China on behalf of the East India Company.
Disguising himself as a Chinese mandarin, Fortune succeeded in this task, thus launching the Indian tea trade, an industry so lucrative the US government commissioned him to repeat the trick in 1858 on its behalf.
Although Fortune fulfilled his brief once again, the American Civil War intervened, stopping the fledgling tea industry in its tracks.
A more bookish character enters next in the form of Ernest – or “E.H” – Wilson (1876-1930). Recipient of the Queen’s Prize for Botany, Wilson was studying for a diploma at Kew, hoping to become a teacher, when he was approached by prominent King’s Road nurseryman Harry Veitch.
Veitch had been shown dried plant specimens collected from China by amateur botanist Augustine Henry and was struck by one particular item – the white flower of the
fabled “handkerchief tree”. Knowing how much money it could fetch in Britain, Veitch paidWilson to travel to China in 1899 to bring back a living specimen.
Having tracked down Henry to a remote town near the border with French Indochina, Wilson was given a hand-drawn map (quite literally marked with an “X”) indicating the location of a single handkerchief tree.
Stunned to learn the map covered an area of some 20,000 square miles,Wilson eventually honed in on a particular spot in the western hills of Hubei. But on arrival seven months later, he was devastated to find nothing remaining of his precious quarry but a stump, the handkerchief tree having been felled to build a house.
Battling despair, Wilson scoured the surrounding area until he finally found a living specimen, seeds of which he brought back to Chelsea in April 1902. Buoyed by this triumph, Wilson went on to enjoy a 30-year plant-hunting career, despite being caught in a landslide whilst looking for regal lily bulbs in 1910, breaking his leg so badly that he limped for the remainder of his life, a quirk he dubbed his “lily limp”.
Yet the most terrifying ordeal of the era was that endured by George Forrest (18731932). Employed by Arthur Bulley, a wealthy Liverpool nurseryman, Forrest was lodging at a French Jesuit mission in the foothills of the Himalayas in July 1905, in search of rhododendrons and primroses, when word reached him that a band of heavily-armed Tibetan monks was approaching. Enraged by the recent British invasion of the Holy City of Lhasa, they were determined to take their revenge and Forrest and the other mission residents fled to the hills. A massacre ensued, with one unfortunate priest having his heart cut out whilst still alive, before the monks beheaded him and then ate his brains and heart. Having survived the initial attack, Forrest escaped into the Mekong valley, where he spent eight days hunted relentlessly by the monks and their mastiff dogs.
“Whilst lying asleep behind a log in the bed of a stream,” Forrest later wrote to his wife, “I was awakened by the sound of laughing and talking, and on looking up I discovered 30 of them in the act of crossing the stream about 50 yards above my hiding place. It was a very near squeak.”
STARVING and exhausted, his hat pierced by poisoned arrows, he eventually found his way at last to a friendly village. Having rested there for three days, he was escorted over a mountain range to safety, but not before he’d impaled his foot on a firehardened bamboo spike, gifting him a limp to rival that of E.H Wilson.
Whatever one makes of Victorian plant hunters – indomitable heroes for some, imperialist plunderers for others – there can be no denying their adventures make for fascinating reading.
And with Kew’s pledge to dig deeper into the history of its collections, there is the promise of more remarkable stories to come – stories which not only enrich our knowledge of the plants we have come to know and love, but also raise awareness of their sometimes troubling origins.
●●The Plant Hunter by T.L. Mogford (Welbeck, £12.99) is out now. For free UK P&P on orders over £20, call Express Bookshop on 020 3176 3832 or visit expressbookshop.com