Kew Gardens earns a substantial notice as an early site. Princess Augusta and her son George III supported efforts to make Kew a center for multiple varieties of trees. The first arboretum open to the public was not Kew but Glasnevin in Dublin. The Dublin Society opened the site by 1800. It included representatives of Linnaeus’s 23 botanical classes, as was thought appropriate, and in addition some examples of attractive variations of each, such as “all kinds of oddities among the fruit trees” (p. 126). Walter Wade, who selected them, may have shocked purists by these choices, “but Wade knew when it was time to play to the gallery.”
Of the many tree hunters in this book, David Douglas may be the most amazing. He collected in South America, in the U.S. on both coasts, and finally in Hawaii. His seeds gave Britain the Douglas fir and the noble fir among many dozens of others. In searching he drove himself to exhaustion repeatedly. In the end, in Hawaii, he died by falling into a hidden pit designed to trap cattle. Or was he murdered? Pakenham tells stories well.
The Tree Hunters recounts many fascinating adventures; it also includes much specific information. The excellent index, for instance, has 19 subtopics under “oak.”
Pakenham lists several reasons for this competition to create arboreta — a change in landscape design to one that popularized variety in trees; huge growth in the number of plant nurseries in Britain; and the development and growth of horticultural societies. Surely the dominance of the British empire in the 19th century helped the impulse as well. Something in the atmosphere must also have fostered that Victorian love of collecting things, of which these arboreta were a happy part.
