
Panax quinquefolius, Mark Catesby, The Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands, Biodiversity Heritage Library
In the age of exploration, growing exotic plants in gardens, botanic or personal, could be a challenge and “acclimatization” became an important goal: to have a plant from one climate and ecosystem thrive in a different one. Mary Somerset (see earlier post) did this on a small scale, but to introduce a plant into agriculture or horticulture required much more time and a larger operation. In 1652, the Dutch created a botanical garden at Cape Town, a trading post for the Dutch East India Company (VOC). Like many colonial gardens, its function changed over time, as the needs of the colonial government did. At first, it produced fresh vegetables, mostly European varieties, to supply VOC ships stopping at the Cape. Later many European and Indian food plants were grown there. When the garden was enlarged, it had a dedicated space for flowering plants and eventually a program for acclimatizing promising species collected from the parts of Asia involved in Dutch trade. In the 1690s, Henrik Bernard Oldenland worked for the VOC exploring parts of South Africa and collecting plants. Later he was superintendent of the Cape Town garden and created a 14-volume herbarium from the plants he collected, especially those he then cultivated in the garden. It is now at the Geneva Botanical Garden Herbarium (Gunn & Codd, 1981).
Successful cultivation at garden’s like Oldenland’s made more plants available for distribution to other colonies and to the home country. There were also studies on whether or not related species, or ones that were thought to be related, had similar properties. This issue arose with a form of cinnamon, now identified as Laurus cinnamomum, found in South America that was ultimately a disappointment to those looking for a new source of the expensive Asian spice from Cinnamomum ceylanicum native to Ceylon, now Sri Lanka (Bleichmar, 2017). Ginseng from Asia, Panax ginseng, with a root resembling a human form, had been highly prized in Europe for centuries, and when a similar plant, ultimately designated Panax quinquefolius, was found in North America, it spurred the hope that this new supply source would provide ginseng at a greatly reduced price (see image above). But did it have the same medicinal properties? For this work, there was no substitute for growing the plants and testing their potency, coupled with herbarium specimens for documenting precisely what was grown. Eventually, the two plants were deemed different species, though with similar medicinal properties (Stearns, 1970).
The story of Cinchona lancifolia, source of quinine and native to the Andes, is an example of how difficult it was to work out a plant’s chemistry. The Spanish struggled to learn both to extract the active ingredient from the tree’s bark and to find cinchona varieties that were particularly rich in it. In 1783, when Spain was seeking to better use their colonies’ botanical resources, the viceroy of New Granada asked one of his governors to supply “skeletons,” herbarium specimens, of the local cinchona trees, ones from which the precious bark was harvested. The governor was suspicious of this request, judging rightly that the botanists in Bogota, the capital, wanted to compare these specimens with ones from trees they were growing. There was a great deal of debate about the quinine level in different trees, and even how to measure it, with some arguing for chemical tests, and others seeing medical effectiveness as the only valid measure. One problem was that there were several species of the Cinchona genus that had varying quinine levels; purification also resulted in unpredictable yields (Crawford, 2016).
While South America was the only source for cinchona worldwide, other countries were attempting to raise the trees in their colonies. The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew grew cinchona seeds collected by Richard Spruce, a nineteenth-century British collector. The garden was also offered seed from a British expatriate living in Peru, Charles Ledger. Kew turned him down, not knowing the origin of the seeds, but the Dutch were willing to take a chance. Ledger’s seeds were from what was found to be a different species, now named Cinchona calisaya, that produced more quinine, allowing the Dutch in Java to corner the market until World War II. While Britain never competed in the international quinine trade, the Kew experiments led to transfer of Cinchona succirubra plants from Kew to Britain’s colonies in Africa and Asia that were plagued by malaria, so they could avoid paying the high Dutch prices (Brockway, 1979).
In the nineteenth century, Kew was center of a network of botanical gardens in British colonies with acclimatization as a major aim. As with the French and Dutch, some of these gardens had already been founded in the eighteenth century, such as one in Calcutta. The Calcutta Botanic Garden and others in India were under the control of the East India Company (EIC), a quasi-governmental body ruling large areas of India. Among the major interests of the EIC was forestry. Britain had long ago decimated many of its own forests, while its need for lumber continued to expand. Trees were an important element of economic botany in the colonies. In India, the exploitation and destruction of forests became so intense, it caused fears of future shortages and also environmental change: cutting down trees led to changes in local weather patterns, loss of soil fertility, and consequently environmental deterioration in large areas of the country (Noltie, 2016). Botanic gardens were used as experimental stations to study trees that might be grown on plantations to produce lumber and for reforestation projects. At one point the Singapore Botanic Gardens focused on growing large numbers of plants, particularly rubber trees, to be distributed throughout the country and to other parts of the British Empire (Barnard, 2016). In order to document what was grown and to understand the differences among various species and subspecies, herbarium specimens, wood samples, and drawings were collected.
References:
Barnard, T. P. (2016). Nature’s Colony: Empire, Nation and Environment in the Singapore Botanic Gardens. Singapore: National University of Singapore Press.
Bleichmar, D. (2011). Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Brockway, L. B. (1979). Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens. Interdisciplinary Anthropology, 6(3), 449–465.
Crawford, M. J. (2016). The Andean Wonder Drug: Cinchona bark and imperial science in the Spanish Atlantic, 1630-1800. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Gunn, M., & Codd, L. E. (1981). Botanical exploration of Southern Africa. Cape Town: Balkema.
Noltie, H. J. (2016). Indian Forester, Scottish Laird: The Botanical Lives of Hugh Cleghorn of Stravithie. Edinburgh: Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh.
Stearns, R. P. (1970). Science in the British Colonies of America. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.