Kingdom of Plants: A Journey Through Their Evolution. Will Benson
and seduction. Guests at Emperor Nero’s great banquets were showered with their petals, and it is documented that Cleopatra used the sweet scent of rose petals to lure Mark Antony. Flowers remain a huge part of our culture today, accompanying us on the most important days of our lives – our birth, our graduation, our marriage, our death. Our gardens are now awash with bright and showy blooms from habitats from all corners of the planet – magnolias from China, geraniums from the Cape of South Africa, primulas from the Himalayas and wisteria from the Orient.
In 1768 a botanist and horticulturalist named Joseph Banks set off with Captain James Cook on his first major voyage to the Pacific, where he would spend the next three years collecting, studying and cataloguing the wealth of fascinating new plant species that he found thriving on the tropical islands there. Following his return to England in 1771, Joseph Banks acted as an adviser to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, a position that was later formalised. Banks gathered together a team of like-minded botanists and explorers for further expeditions. His team included the explorer and plant collector Allan Cunningham, and Scottish botanist Francis Masson, who would later become known as Kew’s first plant hunter, and who would later join Captain Cook on his second major voyage. Under Banks’ supervision the gardens at Kew fast became the world’s foremost botanical garden. Impressive proteas, cycads and bird of paradise flowers from South Africa soon filled the greenhouses, with each species transported on its voyage enclosed in a mini-greenhouse, called a ‘Wardian’ case. It was the showy blooms and delicate scented flowers which drew the most attention back home in Britain. As the plant-collecting voyages pushed deeper through the thick vegetation of tropical jungles, increasing arrays of floral shapes and colours were collected, and made their way back to the collections at Kew.
Sir Joseph Banks
Under his supervision, Kew’s expanding collections of exotic plants saw it become a garden of international importance.
© RBG Kew
Continuing Banks’ legacy, his successor William Hooker, and later his son Joseph, maintained Kew’s spirit of exploration, leading further trips to the mountains of India and Nepal. Among other species they discovered a mass of stunning new species of rhododendrons, a plant popular with gardeners across the world today. However, their plant-collecting exploits weren’t always trouble-free, and during one of their trips to the Himalayas between 1847 and 1849, Joseph and his travelling companion Archibald Campbell were arrested and imprisoned for having illegally crossed the border from Sikkim into Tibet. The two men and their botanical specimens were only released when the British government threatened to invade Sikkim.
Sir Joseph Hooker
Pen and ink portrait by T. Blake Wirgman, 1886.
© RBG Kew
As well as the public botanical collections of the time, such as Kew, obsessive private collectors also set out to acquire rare and exotic or even undiscovered flowers, which was lucrative for the financiers and explorers alike. The expeditions were often shrouded in secrecy to prevent rival groups from acquiring information as to where new species were likely to be growing, and it wasn’t uncommon for false maps and information to be circulated in order to disorientate the competition. This was the age of orchidelirium, and successful collectors could sell their prized specimens at auction for colossal sums of money. It was these privately financed trips which brought back the first orchids to Britain, from the East, and in 1852 some of them made their way into the hands of London wine merchant John Day. Bought for the equivalent sum of £3000 in today’s money, Day’s first orchid flowers marked the beginning of a lifelong obsession. His house in north London was soon transformed with the delicate white and maroon petals of Dendrobium from Southeast Asia, Odontoglossum from tropical America and Cattleya from Costa Rica. Combining his love of orchids with his keen artistic eye, Day set about documenting his increasing collection of flowers in a set of watercolours. His meticulous paintings, complete with notes on the plants’ habitat, conditions for cultivating them and their price at auction, soon caught the eye of botanists and art lovers alike, and he was given special access to the orchid house at Kew to paint its plants. Over 25 years, Day compiled over 50 sketchbooks filled with his detailed, colourful visions of these captivating plants, and these drawings can still be admired in the collections at Kew today.
Plant hunting
From Joseph Hooker’s Himalayan Journals, 1854.
© RBG Kew
The Victorian obsession with acquiring the most ornate flowers was made all the more possible by an extraordinary network of vivacious plant fanatics, who were willing to use their work in the far corners of the British Empire as an opportunity to bring back exotic species from across the globe. Colonel Robson Benson, an officer in the British forces in India, used his time on duty in Assam, Bhutan and Cambodia to collect a multitude of new species of orchid for the British horticulturist Hugh Low. Painter William Boxall, working first in Burma and later in the Philippines, collected enchanting slipper orchids, magnificent Vanda, and a number of species of the genus that today fills the shelves of nearly every garden centre, Phalaenopsis.
The botanical gardens and private collections of Europe’s cities were soon overflowing with an explosion of fascinating and rare flowers, displaying an unfathomable array of shapes, sizes and colours. But as well as the aesthetic interest that drew most admirers to these flowers, their complexity and diversity provided biologists and naturalists with a wealth of material for them to study. One such naturalist was the young Charles Darwin, as well as Kew’s second Director, Joseph Hooker, who was a lifelong friend of Darwin. Darwin shared extensive correspondence with a long list of senior botanists and horticulturists at Kew, swapping notes on plants and exchanging specimens. During his time on the Beagle between 1831 and 1836 he gathered species of flowers from Argentina, Chile, Brazil and the Galapagos which he sent back to Kew for identification, and in turn Kew happily provided Darwin with plants for him to document and study at his house in Kent. Although at this point Darwin had not yet written his seminal work On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, he was already piecing together his ideas on survival and adaptation in the natural world. Perhaps more than anyone else at the time, Darwin knew that for all their beauty, the complex shapes, patterns and structures of every unique orchid flower must be a result of some advantage that they bestowed upon that species in its habitat. Darwin understood that the flowers of orchids were purely about coaxing animals to spread its sex cells.
Illustrations by John Day, taken from his ‘scrapbooks’.
Cattleya skinneri
A species of orchid found in Costa Rica and Guatemala.
© RBG Kew
Illustrations by John Day, taken from his ‘scrapbooks’.
Catasetum christyanum
An epiphytic orchid from northern South America.
© RBG Kew
Illustrations by John Day, taken from his ‘scrapbooks’.
Vanda coerulea
A species of orchid discovered in Sikkim by Joseph Hooker in 1857.
© RBG Kew
Illustrations by John Day, taken from his ‘scrapbooks’.
Dendrobium formosum
A species of orchid first discovered in northeast India.