Showing 641 results

People & Organisations

McNab, James

  • GB/NNAF/P139723
  • Person
  • 1810-1878

James McNab was Principal Gardener at RBGE between 1848 and 1878.

McNab, William

  • GB/NNAF/P139913
  • Person
  • 1780-1848

Born Ayrshire 1780; died Edinburgh 1848
Starting work as an apprentice gardener on estates in Scotland, William McNab moved to Kew in 1801, being promoted 3 years later to foreman. In 1810, on the recommendation of Joseph Banks, he was offered the post of principal gardener at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh by the Keeper, Daniel Rutherford. Despite inadequate funding he set about developing the Garden, increasing the overall collection dramatically and introducing many new or rare plants, including mimosas, Australian banksias, and tropical water lilies. McNab was instrumental in the successful move of the Garden from Leith Walk to Inverleith under the Keeper, Robert Graham. He adapted a machine for transplanting well established trees, some over 40 feet high, details of which are included in his published paper on hardy evergreens (1830). His other main contribution to the literature was a treatise on cape heaths. McNab was a founder member of the Botanical Society of Edinburgh in 1836. Despite ongoing disputes over his salary, as a gardener and horticulturalist McNab was held in high esteem, as witnessed by the records of his testimonial dinner in 1844. He died in 1848 to be succeeded as curator of the Botanic Garden by his son, James.
Sources: Dictionary of National Biography; R. Desmond ‘Dictionary of British and Irish Botanists and Horticulturalists; HR Fletcher and WH Brown ‘The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh 1670-1970’; Deni Bown, ‘4 Gardens in One’; Gardeners Chronicle 1848, p 812
D.W.

Rock, Joseph F.C.

  • GB/NNAF/P141383
  • Person
  • 1884-1962

Born Vienna, Austria 1884; died Hawaii 1962
Relatively uneducated, penniless and often in poor health Joseph Rock left Vienna as a young man in 1902, travelling through Europe and on to the United States. Moving to Hawaii where he was appointed by the Division of Forestry as its first botanical collector, he became a naturalised American in 1913. Although self taught as a botanist, Rock was appointed lecturer at the College in Hawaii, established its first herbarium, and served as its first curator from 1911 until 1920. In 1920 he was appointed by the US Department of Agriculture to find a tree in south east Asia the oil from which was supposed to be useful in treating leprosy. This was the start of his new life as an explorer and in 1922 he arrived in Lijiang, Yunnan which was to become his ‘home’ province though he also travelled widely in Szechuan, Gansu and also Tibet. He was to spend the next 27 years living among the people of the Western Provinces of China collecting plants for western museums and exploring and mapping mountains on the Tibetan border. Working for organisations such as Harvard University’s Arnold Arboretum, the United States Department of Agriculture, the United States Natural History Museum and the National Geographic Society, he photographed and wrote about the indigenous plants, people and geography of the remote region. He entered the lamaseries of Tibet and became deeply involved in the social and political conditions that affected Western China, witnessing much brutality during various rebellions. He was forced to leave communist China in 1949, but continued travelling around the world, eventually returning to Hawaii where he died in 1962. Rock bequeathed his extensive photographic collection to the archives of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, alongside his diaries documenting his travels.
Source: ‘In China’s Border Provinces; The Turbulent Career of Joseph Rock’ S.B. Sutton. ‘Joseph Rock and His Shangri-La’ Jim Goodman. Archives
D.W.

Hayward, Ida Margaret

  • GB/NNAF/P142194
  • Person
  • 1872-1949

Ida Margaret Hayward was born in Trowbridge, Wiltshire, in 1872 to a family very much connected to the cloth industry. After her father died, she and her mother went to live near her mother's family in Galashiels in the Scottish Borders where her uncles owned the woollen mills of Messrs. Sanderson.
It was noticed by one of her uncles, William Sanderson, that many of the seeds brought in with the wool imported from Australia, New Zealand and South America survived the treatment process and went on to germinate on the banks of the Tweed. Encouraged by him, Hayward set about conducting a thorough study of this alien flora. She was greatly assisted in this by George Claridge Druce (1850-1932) who helped to identify the plants Hayward collected and became the editor of what was to become their joint publication "The Adventive Flora of Tweedside", published in 1919.
Following publication, Hayward toured the country displaying exhibits and giving presentations to such societies as the Botanical Society of Edinburgh, the Linnean Society of London, the Royal Scottish Geographical Society and the Botany Section of the British Association at Dundee in 1948. She was elected a Fellow of the Linnean Society in 1910 and the Botanical Society of Edinburgh in 1913. She died in Galashiels in 1949 after a brief illness. Before her death, she donated her herbarium of adventive (alien) plants to the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, along with her scrapbook and letters relating to the Flora.

Henslow, Prof. John Stevens

  • GB/NNAF/P142737; VIAF ID: 72173458 (Personal); ISNI: 0000 0001 2281 7482
  • Person
  • 1796-1861

Watt, Sir George

  • GB/NNAF/P146174
  • Person
  • 1851-1930

Born Aberdeenshire 1851; died Dumfriesshire 1930
After graduating with an MB from Glasgow University in 1872, George Watt was appointed Professor of Botany at the University of Calcutta in 1873 which in turn led to his entry into the Indian Government Service. His many appointments during 22 years in the service ranged from Secretary of the Indian Revenue and Agricultural Department 1884, Commissioner for India at the Colonial Exhibition London 1885-86, President of the Pharmacological Section, Indian Medical Congress 1894, Officer in Charge Industrial Museum, Calcutta 1894-1903, and Reporter on Economic Products to Government of India 1887-1903. He retired from the Indian Service in 1903 and returned to Britain where he continued scientific research. In 1912 he visited Portuguese West Africa to study cocoa cultivation and for 5 years lectured on Indian botany at Edinburgh University. He was a prolific author drawing on experience in his many Indian postings. After 1910 he became actively involved in county life around his home in Lockerbie, serving on the county council, the local education authority and as a JP.
Sources: R. Desmond ‘Dictionary of British and Irish Botanists and Horticulturalists; obituary folder.
D.W.

Davie, Dr. Robert Chapman

  • GB/NNAF/P146275
  • Person
  • 1886-1919

Robert Chapman Davie was born in Lisbon in October 1886, but moved to Glasgow and was schooled there at the Glasgow High School, before going to the University of Glasgow in 1904, where he graduated with a first class honours M.A. in English. This degree included some scientific courses, including one on Elementary Botany taken in 1905, and Davie found himself drawn more to that subject than English, so went on to pursue this by enrolling for another degree, a BSc. in Botany, Chemistry, Zoology and Geology, graduating in 1909 after winning the Dobbie-Smith gold medal for Botany along the way. He stayed at the University of Glasgow, becoming an assistant in the Botany Department before moving to the University of Edinburgh in 1912 to become a Botany lecturer under RBGE Regius Keeper and Professor of Botany, Isaac Bayley Balfour. Davie was given special charge of the large Teachers in Training classes and lectured on hepatics (liverworts) and mosses to Edinburgh University Botany students at the Garden. He carried on with his own studies throughout his teaching career, and soon had enough material to research a doctoral thesis on the subject of pinna-trace in ferns, and he completed this at the University of Glasgow, graduating with a DSc in April 1915 whilst still teaching and working at Edinburgh.

Davie’s research was interrupted in 1914, not by the war at first, but when he obtained a grant from the Royal Society to travel to Brazil to research comparisons between flowering plants. He was still working on the material he collected there when the call to join the military service finally came in 1917.

Due to effects of ill health when he was younger, it was known that Davie would not have been fit for a role in a combative branch in the army, and this may be why he wasn’t called upon to enter service until 1917, despite him apparently offering his services when war broke out. Another reason may be that his specialism in mosses meant that he was heavily involved in the work RBGE was doing in offering specialist advice to those engaged in collecting sphagnum moss to aid the war effort – the moss was used as an alternative to cotton in making would dressings, it being highly absorbent and antiseptic too. Finally though, in 1917 he was enlisted to the Royal Army Medical Corps, to a role which took full advantage of his scientific training – a Lieutenant, later promoted to Captain, and Senior Chemist in the 4th Water Tank Company, providing clean and sterile water to the troops on the Front Line, a vital and often forgotten service. He was in France with his unit during the German’s Spring Offensive, and the subsequent Allied advance in the last months of the war.

After the Armistice, in January 1919, Davie was granted some leave to return home to Largs to visit his wife and infant daughter who was born in 1917, and it was whilst he was there he succumbed to influenza, (possibly the Spanish Flu?) which turned to pneumonia with fatal effect; he died at home on the 4th February 1919 at the age of 32. https://stories.rbge.org.uk/archives/30481

Anderson, Thomas

  • GB/NNAF/P146417
  • Person
  • 1832-1870

Born Edinburgh 1832; died Edinburgh 1870.
After graduating with an MD at the University of Edinburgh, Thomas Anderson entered the East India Company Bengal medical service in 1854, serving in the North West Provinces and then Lucknow (he was present at the time of the Siege). He returned to Calcutta in 1858 as garrison assistant surgeon but ill health sent him back to Britain. He had developed an interest in botany at university and whilst in India studied the local flora and collected plants in the Himalayas. During his journey back to Britain he stayed briefly in Aden where his collections formed the basis of ‘Florula Adenensis’, a supplement to the Journal of The Linnean Society. Anderson returned to India in 1860 and took temporary charge of the Royal Botanic Garden, Calcutta, becoming superintendent in 1861, a post he held until 1868. In 1861 he went to Java to bring back plants and seeds of Cinchona calisaya a source of quinine for new plantations in India. He was invalided back to Britain in 1869, resuming his research on Indian flora, but died the following year from a liver complaint.
Sources: DNB; Desmond's Dictionary; Gard Chron 1870, Jnl Bot 1870
by D.W.

Keen, Sir Bernard Augustus

  • GB/NNAF/P146637; ISNI: 0000 0000 8437 2178: VIAF ID: 33360817 (Personal)
  • Person
  • 1890-1981
Results 71 to 80 of 641