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The Multifarious Mr. Banks : from Botany Bay to Kew, the Natural Historian Who Shaped the World

[The Multifarious Mr. Banks] cover

Joseph Banks was indeed multifarious. Webster defines the term as “having or occurring in great varieties.” Garden lovers might know that Banks became famous after collecting plants on a round-the-world voyage with Captain Cook on the Endeavour in 1768-71, and that he developed and guided Kew Gardens for decades. Toby Musgrave does justice to these huge accomplishments. What he adds is the astonishing range of other ways that Banks influenced the horticultural world – and often other worlds – in late 18th and early 19th century England and beyond.

The book is organized chronologically through the account of Banks’s Endeavour voyage and a smaller one to Iceland, but then proceeds by subject through other areas of Banks’s activities.

Banks was very wealthy. He was endlessly curious. He apparently knew everyone of any importance in England and many others on the Continent and in America. He had an outgoing and friendly personality. James Boswell describes him as “an elephant, quite placid and gentle, allowing you to get upon his back or play with his proboscis,” (p. 187), as opposed to another world traveler (Scottish explorer James Bruce) who was “a tiger that growled whenever you approached him.”

Banks was also a firm believer in progress and in empire (which 21st century readers might be less enthusiastic about). Musgrave shows us Banks’s close relationship with King George III, that nemesis of the American Revolution. “Farmer George,” as the king was called, loved Kew Gardens and walked in it with Banks regularly. In Banks’s decades-long efforts finding new plants and acquiring them for Kew, he remained focused on how plants could be used as crops or resources to aid the empire.

Banks belonged to more that 70 clubs and societies. It’s hard to imagine how he did all this and still managed his own multiple properties, regularly updating them with new planting plans. The most prominent society activity for him was his position as president of the Royal Society, a title he held for 41½ years beginning in 1778. In all these activities Banks assisted other scientists in a multiplicity of areas, giving counsel, offering connections, and sometimes providing cash.

When England needed a new site for prisoners, after Georgia was no longer available due to American independence, Banks weighed in on proposing Botany Bay in Australia as an appropriate location. He also pulled strings and even arranged smuggling a prize breed of Merino sheep from Spain, to the benefit of Australia as well as England.

Through his connections and frequent correspondence with members of the Lunar Society of Birmingham (which included Erasmus Darwin, Benjamin Franklin, and Joseph Priestly), with a great many others, and through his own study, “Banks became an acknowledged expert in a wide range of subjects including agriculture, botanic gardens, canals, cartography, coinage, colonization, currency, drainage, earthquakes, economic botany, exploration, farming, leather tanning, Merino sheep, plant pathology, and even the plucking of geese” (p. 281). Multifarious indeed.

This is a real biography, based on copious research. Musgrave avoids fictional conversations and mostly stays away from suggesting what Banks “must have thought.” Fortunately, the author is not afraid to express an opinion, such as that Banks behaved very badly in breaking his engagement to Harriet Blosset. Mostly the story Musgrave tells is one of amazing positives, ending with his justified assessment of Banks as a “great and remarkable man”(p. 332).

Published in the Leaflet, November 2021, Volume 8, Issue 11.

The Earth in Her Hands: 75 Extraordinary Women Working in the World of Plants

Jennifer Jewell has gained a wide following for her blog “Cultivating Place.”  Produced from her home in northern California, it is self-described as a “conversation on natural history & the human impulse to garden.”

That same description could apply in part to Jewell’s first book, “The Earth in Her Hands: 75 Extraordinary Women Working in the World of Plants.”  This is a wide-ranging discussion on this gardening impulse, using a very broad definition of the idea of horticulture, captured in a series of pithy biographies.  The profiled women have careers in and a passion for plants, expressed in botany, landscape architecture, floriculture, agriculture, plant hunting and breeding, food justice, garden writing, and photography.

Many of the subjects are from the Pacific Northwest.  An example is Cara Loriz, the executive director of the Organic Seed Alliance in Port Townsend, Washington, advocating for community building and research for sustainable food systems.

Another is Christin Geall, a multi-talented writer/photographer and educator in Victoria, British Columbia.  I confess to having not heard of either woman prior to reading this book.  Jewell writes that for Geall, “flowers are a horticultural medium for leading and educating others about plants, acting not as pretty cages, but as colorful, Socratic-style critical thinking.”  Both women are examples of conducting important work at a local level that addresses global needs facing all cultures.

All these biographies provide a short list of women that inspired the subject.  Many are contemporaries, or cherished ancestors.  Some are important figures from history, including Sacajawea, Harriet Tubman, and Rachel Carson.  Others are women without recorded names, but for whom “horticulture is a human impulse, in all cultures, in all times, practiced, codified, ritualized, and valued across any and all social boundaries.”

The narratives about women in horticulture are evolving.  In public presentations, Jewell has been expanding on the process of choosing and researching the subjects of her book.  I’ve heard her speak twice in the last year and each time, she acknowledges that many additional women, from a wider breadth of ethnicities and nationalities, could be featured now.  This study is important, on-going work and I hope that Jewell or others will continue this undertaking.

Winner of the 2021 Award of Excellence in Biography from the Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries

 

Excerpted from the Summer 2021 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin

Wild Flowers of the Undercliff, Isle of Wight

book jacketThe Miller Library receives many donations of books each year, and sometimes we open a box and a particular book enchants us. A recent example is a small volume entitled Wild Flowers of the Undercliff, Isle of Wight, published in London in 1881. It is a field guide to a small area of the southern coast of the Isle of Wight, England. The region is prone to landslides and possesses a unique microclimate, as it is protected beneath an escarpment, facing south. The authors, Charlotte O’Brien and C. Parkinson, hoped the book would enable temporary residents of the Undercliff to acquaint themselves with the various plants blooming throughout the year. “As a rule, they are very timid, these ‘wildings of Nature,’ and recede before the advances of man and his bricks and mortar,” and this book seeks to help “seekers after one of the purest of earthly pleasures” [wildflowers] find them.

As a librarian, I have absorbed a concern for ‘bibliographic control,’ the attention to details that help people find the information they need. I was troubled by the lack of a first name for the co-author, and curious about the note in the preface in which the two authors thank “Miss Parkinson” for her colored drawings [8 plates] that illustrate the book. Our copy of the book was inscribed by M. Parkinson, with a dedication to “Miss Prince.” Who were these nameless Parkinsons, I wondered, wanting to give bibliographic credit where it was due.

I asked assistance from a friend who is a gardener and genealogist in England, and she found a reference to an article by David E. Allen (affiliated with the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland), “C. Parkinson, A mystery Wight Botanist identified,” which was published in the 2009 proceedings of the Isle of Wight Natural History & Archaeological Society. We could not obtain a copy, and that made both of us even more eager to solve the mystery.

The initials F.G.S. after Parkinson’s name on the book’s title page might stand for ‘Fellow of the Geological Society,’ and that led to a discovery of an obituary for a “Cyril Parkinson” in the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London Vol 26 (1920): “Cyril Parkinson was born at Hesgreave [Hexgreave] Park, near Southwell (Nottinghamshire), and died in London on August 20th, 1919, at the age of 65. During five years’ residence in the Isle of Wight (1875-¬80) he made a collection of fossils, which was acquired by the British Museum (Natural History). He became a Fellow of our Society in 1880. He was a member of the Worcester Naturalists’ Club, and an occasional contributor to ‘Borrow’s [Berrow’s] Worcester Journal’ on natural history subjects. He also contributed articles to various periodicals on natural history, geology, and botany, and brought out a handbook of the Isle of Wight Marine Algae in collaboration with Mrs. O’Brien, of Ventnor.”

book jacketNow that I had birth and death dates and a first name, I used genealogy resources like Ancestry.com and found that Cyril had a sister Marian who lived with him for a time, and she was undoubtedly the illustrator whose signature is in our copy. Census records indicate that she was a woman of “private means,” and this squares with the family’s history as landed gentry with their own coat of arms. At the time of the book’s publication, the 1881 census lists Cyril as a tile manufacturer living with his unmarried sister Marian in Bournemouth, not terribly distant from the Isle of Wight. Their parents were John and Catherine Parkinson of Southwell, Nottinghamshire.

A review of Wild Flowers of the Undercliff appeared in the October 11, 1901 edition of The British Architect and it makes special note of the illustrations: “There are eleven different species of the orchid tribe growing in the Undercliff, and this guide helps one to find these ‘wildings of Nature.’ The beautiful coloured drawings were executed by Miss Parkinson.”

It is very satisfying to list the full names of the co-author and illustrator in the bibliographic record for this book. I would love to discover whether Marian Parkinson illustrated any other botany books, but that is still a mystery.

PlantExplorers.com

A site with the ambitious goal of supporting and documenting plant exploration through history and modern times. The bulk of the pages are biographies of the more famous plant hunters of the last few centuries.