THE MULTIFARIOUS MR BANKS

FROM BOTANY BAY TO KEW, THE NATURAL HISTORIAN WHO SHAPED THE WORLD

TOBY MUSGRAVE

Yale, 327pp, £25 and ebook

In 1771, on his return from his round the world trip on the Endeavour, Joseph Banks was the most famous man in England. Yet nowadays, everyone remembers his companion Captain Cook and no one remembers Banks, the botanist whose discoveries in the terra incognita of Australia led to the creation of the botanical gardens at Kew.

Stupendously wealthy, bumptiously jovial and the heir to a Yorkshire baronetcy, Banks, with his many and varied enthusiasms, was dismissed and lampooned by many (perhaps enviously) as a mere jack of all trades. Reviewing garden historian Toby Musgrave’s ‘cleareyed and highly readable’ biography in the Spectator, Peter Parker noted that ‘When Banks announced that he

‘Banks was dismissed by many as a mere jack of all trades’

intended joining Cook’s expedition to Tahiti to observe the Transit of Venus, friends asked why he didn’t instead do the Grand Tour. “Every blockhead does that,” Banks replied. “My Grand Tour shall be one round the whole globe.”’ In the Literary Review, Patricia Fara praised the ‘exemplary thoroughness’ of Musgrave’s coverage of Banks’s early years of intrepid botanising but was disappointed that his final 20 years, just as innovative in their own way, get only short shrift.

John Carey in the Sunday Times also noted that by 30, Banks, by then a close friend of George III, was already regarded as an ‘eminence grise’. He was dead by the age of 50. Carey found the book ‘illuminating’ not least because it demonstrated that although he is now forgotten, Joseph Banks can justly claim to have changed our world. Not only did he ‘help to lay the foundation of what was to become the British Commonwealth, at a more domestic level he changed our gardens. The flowers that fill them are mostly not natives but the legacy of collectors often employed and financed by Banks.’