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Anderson, Thomas

  • GB/NNAF/P146417
  • Personne
  • 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.

Balfour, Sir Andrew

  • Q2846555; GB/NNAF/P135012
  • Personne
  • 1630-1694

Born Fife 1630; died Edinburgh 1694
Brought up at the family seat, Balfour Castle in Fife, Andrew Balfour studied philosophy at St Andrews University graduating MA in about 1650. He spent several years in Paris studying medicine eventually graduating MD at Caen in 1661. Returning to London and having been presented to Charles II he acquired a position as a tutor to the earl of Rochester, accompanying him on a grand tour from 1661 to 1664. During his 15 years abroad Balfour acquired an extensive library of medical and natural history books, together with collections of antiquities, pictures, arms, instruments, plants, animals and fossils. In 1667 he returned to St Andrews, practising as a physician, before moving to Edinburgh to build up a medical practice there; it is claimed that he was the first doctor in Scotland to dissect the human body. In 1670, with his distant cousin and friend Robert Sibbald, he leased land for a small garden at St Anne’s Yards, Holyroodhouse, and later petitioned the town council for a larger plot adjacent to Trinity Hospital, in which were planted 2,000 non-indigenous species. He played a prominent role in Edinburgh’s learned society and opened his private museum collections, gallery and library to scholars. He was knighted in 1682 for his contribution to science and society and was active in establishing professorial chairs and in founding the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh, becoming president in 1685. He improved the infirmary and arranged publication of the first ‘Edinburgh Pharmacopoeia’ (1685) to which he contributed parts on materia medica. After his sudden death in the street in 1694 most of his collections were broken up and his library sold.
Sources: DNB; Fletcher and Brown ‘The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh 1670-1970’; Deni Bown, ‘4 Gardens in One’; (R. Desmond ‘Dictionary of British and Irish Botanists and Horticulturalists)
D.W.

Cooper, Roland Edgar

  • REC
  • Personne
  • 1890-1962

Roland Edgar Cooper was born in 1890 in Kingston-Upon-Thames, but lost both his parents by the age of four. He came to be cared for by his aunt Emma Wiedhofft who was married to William Wright Smith, eventual Regius Keeper of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. It was this association that was to shape Cooper's career - he travelled to Calcutta with Smith in 1907 when he became in charge of the Herbarium there, travelling and collecting botanical specimens in Sikkim, Nepal, Tibet and Bhutan. In 1910, Cooper and Smith returned, and Cooper took the Horticultural course at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh.
In 1913, Cooper returned to the Himalayas to collect plants for A.K. Bulley of Ness, near Liverpool. He travelled through Sikkim in 1913, Bhutan in 1914-15, and the Punjab in 1916.
In 1921, after the First World War, during which Cooper served in the Indian Army, he was appointed Superintendent of the Botanic Garden at Maymo in the Shan Hills of Burma, eventually returning to Scotland in the late 1920's for the education of his son. From 1930-1934 Cooper worked at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh as the Garden Curator's assistant, taking the role of Curator (Head Gardener) himself in 1934, a post he held until his retirement in 1950. Post retirement, he and his wife Emily Bartusek moved to Westcliff-on-Sea in Essex.
During his career, Cooper became a Fellow of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, the Royal Anthropological Institute, the Royal Caledonian Horticultural Society, the Botanical Society of Edinburgh (now Scotland), the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Scottish Anthropological Society. He was also the vice-president of the Scottish Rock Garden Club, of which he was a founder member.

Davidian, Hagop H.

  • DHH
  • Personne
  • 1907-2003

Born Cyprus 1907; died 2003
Hagop "David" Davidian graduated in botany from Edinburgh University in 1946 and in 1947 was offered a post at Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh by Sir William Wright Smith, Regius Keeper, to work on the taxonomy of rhododendrons. Rhododendrons became his life long specialism and enthusiasm. He contributed regularly to the RHS Rhododendron and Camellia Yearbook and at one stage identified 2,000 rhododendrons from the Arnold Arboretum in the USA. Honoured twice by the RHS and in Sweden, after his retirement in 1972 he set to work writing, in four volumes, books on the genus based on the Balfourian system.
Source; cuttings and obituary files
D.W.

Davie, Dr. Robert Chapman

  • GB/NNAF/P146275
  • Personne
  • 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

Dickson, Professor Alexander

  • Q4718732
  • Personne
  • 1836-1887

Born Edinburgh 1836; died Peeblesshire 1887
Alexander Dickson graduated MD from Edinburgh University in 1860, lectured in botany at the University of Aberdeen and in 1866 was appointed to the chair of botany at Dublin University, returning to Scotland as professor of botany at Glasgow until 1879. He was then appointed professor of botany at Edinburgh University (the first appointee solely to this discipline) and Regius Keeper of the Royal Botanic Garden, a post he held from 1880 until his death. While in post he inherited a number of problems over integrating the Garden with the Arboretum which remained unresolved. He was regarded as an excellent research and field botanist, his studies including work on phyllotaxis, flower and embryo development and carnivorous plants. He published around 50 papers in a number of journals including the Transactions of the Botanical Society of Edinburgh, of which he was twice president. He died in 1887 while curling near his Peebleshire home.
Sources: Dictionary of National Biography; HR Fletcher and WH Brown ‘The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh 1670-1970’; (Deni Bown, ‘4 Gardens in One’); (R. Desmond ‘Dictionary of British and Irish Botanists and Horticulturalists)
D.W.

Douglas, David

  • GB/NNAF/P136241
  • Personne
  • 1799-1834

Born Perthshire 1799; died Hawaii 1834
David Douglas was apprenticed at the age of ten in the gardens of Scone Palace, Perthshire; in 1818 he became under-gardener at to Sir Robert Preston at Valleyfield near Culross, from where he moved to the botanical garden at Glasgow. There he attended the botanical lectures of William Hooker who he accompanied on several expeditions to the Highlands. Hooker recommended Douglas as a plant collector to the Horticultural Society of London and in 1823 he was sent to the eastern United States and Canada and then in 1825 to the Pacific North West where he spent two years in pursuit of new species of plants, birds and mammals along the Columbia River. Returning to England, his rich collection of live plants was greeted with great enthusiasm by the botanical world. In 1829 he returned to north west America, first exploring the interior of Oregon and Washington, then collecting along the Spanish mission trail in California. In 1833 he sailed to the Sandwich Islands, arriving in 1834 where he met his death on the slopes of Mauna Kea on the island of Hawaii when he fell into a pit trap and was gored by a wild bull. Douglas made over 200 introductions including the Douglas fir Pseudotsuga taxifolia and the sugar pine Pinus lambertiana. His introductions can be seen in many of great houses of Britain. Most of the ‘big trees’ at the Younger Botanic Garden, Benmore were introduced in the first half of the nineteenth century as a result of David Douglas’s explorations and some of Dawyck’s largest conifers were raised from Douglas’s original seed collections.
Sources: Dictionary of National Biography; R. Desmond ‘Dictionary of British and Irish Botanists and Horticulturalists; Deni Bown, ‘4 Gardens in One’; Ann Lindsay and Syd House ‘The Life and Explorations of David Douglas’.
D.W.

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