Joseph Hooker Videos

Just to follow up on my last post concerning Sir Joseph Hooker and the fact Kew has made his correspondence available online, there are also some excellent movie clips about this remarkable man available online also.

Made by Jupe Productions and Peter Donaldson there are eight great short films to watch:

1    Why Joseph Hooker Went to the Himalayas

2    Finding the First Sketch of Mt Everest

3    Glacier Recession in the Himalayas

4    Rhododendrons of the Sikkim Himalaya

5    Effect of Altitude on Rhododendrons

6    Nango Glacier and the Theory of Evolution

7    Joseph Hooker 's 1848 Nepal Expedition

8    Joseph and William Hooker's Early Years

Enjoy!

The Joseph Hooker Correspondence Project

Another great result from Royal Botanic Garden, Kew where a team have been digitising and now make available online the Correspondence of Sir Joseph Hooker.  Hooker was true Victorian polymath who succeeded his father as the second Director of Kew, who was Charles Darwin's confidant, and who also plant hunted in Sikkim (and elsewhere).

This truly is a magnificent resource for garden and plant historians and botanists alike so do take a look at the website as it also has a whole lot more about the man and his work than just his letters.

There is even an article I wrote for Kew Magazine describing an expedition I made a few years back to north Sikkim to follow in Hooker's footsteps - a truly wonderful trip.  Scroll to the bottom of the page and there you can also download the article and read it at your leisure. 

Hooker had it on the nail when, in a letter to his father, he described the valley sides ablaze with Rhododendron flowers thus: 'The Mt sides here actually bloom white, scarlet, purple, pink, yellow no language can exaggerate their beauty.'

The Biodiversity Heritage Library does it again

I am a huge fan of the Biodiversity Heritage Library.  It is simply a fantastic resource for accessing old monographs and periodicals for free and without the hassle of having to travel to libraries.  You simply download the required tome / volume as a pdf - and to top it all, its FREE.

Now the BHL is offering another wonderful resource - the BioDivLibrary photostream of scanned plates of, for the purposes of this blog, flowering plants. The collection of images is ever increasing, but already there is a folder of plates from Curtis's Botanical Magazine and Walter Fitch's lovely rhododendrons from Joseph Hooker's The rhododendrons of Sikkim-Himalaya. 

But, of course, the site holds much more than just flowering plants.  So do take a look and make use of this superb resource.

The Plant Hunters for Kindle

Joseph Banks, the father of modern plant hunting by Sir Joshua Reynolds (1773)

 "Good God.  When I consider the melancholy fate of so many of botany's votaries, I am tempted to ask whether men are in their right mind who so desperately risk life and everything else through the love of collecting plants."

So said the famous Carl Linnæus in 1737.  

And in many way I think he was right, but also very glad that these men undertook the challenges, for gardens would be far duller places had they not.

The cover featuring Ernest Wilson's beautiful Lilium regale in the Min valley, Sichuan

Back in the 1990s I spent a year researching the history of the Lost Garden of Heligan.  During the course of this fascinating work I got up close and personal with so many of the plants introduced by those most brave and forgotten heroes of horticulture - the plant hunters.

Ernest Wilson, one of the most successful plant hunters employed by the Veitch Nursery

Inspired by the men, the tales of their adventures and both 'their' plants and the impact that they had had on garden fashions I, together with good friend and colleague Chris Gardener and brother, Will penned a tome entitled The Plant Hunters.  It did well, but after two hardback and two paperback the publishers decided not to reprint.

Discovered by Joseph Hooker, Rhododendron hodgsonii in the Zemu valley, Sikkim

Then came the wait for the rights to return.  Now we have re-edited the text   and are delighted to announce that today The Plant Hunters is published as a Kindle version.

The Plant Hunters features 10 of the most influential of all the plant hunters:  Sir Joseph Banks, Francis Masson, David Douglas, Sir Joseph Hooker, William and Thomas Lobb, Robert Fortune, Ernest Wilson, George Forrest and Frank Kingdon-Ward. 

Sir Joseph Hooker whose arrest in Sikkim changed the map of the Empire and whose Rhododendron discoveries kick-started 'rhododendromania'

Together these men discovered and introduced literally tens of thousands of new plants that revolutionised gardens all over the world.  Yet for the most part they did not make much money, but they surely suffered hardships and ill-health, occasionally giving their lives for the love of plant hunting.

Meconopsis lancifolia on the Daxueshan mountains of Yunnan

The Plant Hunters pays tribute to these men.  It tells their stories as people, it follows them to remote parts of the globe which had often times not been visited by Westerners before and tells of their adventures in the field.  It reveals the beautiful plants they discovered and explores how 'their' plants revolutionised garden fashions.

Even if I say so myself, these are damn good stories - and the book will  make the perfect Christmas read!

New Plant Hunter Article & Stats

An interesting press release from the University of Oxford saying that new research proves that 'more than 50% of the world’s plant species have been discovered by 2% of plant collectors'. 

But I don't understand why RBG, Kew wasn't a data set since the Herbarium holds the plant hunting collections of Sir Joseph Hooker, those of the Veitch nursery plant hunters, and I would assume those of Robert Fortune and Frank Kingdon Ward also. For that matter Arnold Arboretum must have a lot of Ernest Wilson's stuff, too.

Love and the Plant Hunter

The Zemu Valley, Sikkim

A few years back I traveled in the footsteps of the plant hunter Sir Joseph Hooker, in search of 'his rhododendrons' in their native habitat of Sikkim.  Part of the safety kit was a satellite phone and a GPS, with the former also used for personal calls.  I remember the delight of being able to ring home from literally the middle of nowhere.  I also remember thinking how hard it must have been for those plant hunting pioneers - and their families at home - in the days when it took 6 months or more to receive a personal letter from home or to get one from the wilds. 

A recent discovery in the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Library and Archives offers an insight into the poignancy of such letters from Sir Joseph Hooker to his second wife Hyacinth and from Frank Kingdon Ward to his second wife Jean.

Sir Jospeh Hooker (1817-1911)

On this, the last day of 2011, I wanted to celebrate the greatest botanist of the 19th century, who died 100 years ago on 10 December 1911.

Sir Joseph Hooker in 1896.  The image is from Hookers own website.

Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker was the younger son of Sir William Jackson Hooker (1785-1865) the first official Director of Royal Botanic Garden, Kew.  While Joseph succeeded his father to the Directorship at Kew - his most notorious act was probably the ‘botanical piracy’ to obtain seeds of the rubber tree, Hevea brasiliensis.  Subsequently, natural rubber produced by plantations in British colonies in the Far East destroyed the Brazilian rubber industry - he also led an incredibly full and fascinating life.

There is insufficient space here to recount all Sir Joseph’s achievements - do visit his own website for many more details.  Suffice to say that he traveled with Capt. Ross his Antarctic expedition (1838-42) and in 1844 was the person first Charles Darwin told about the Theory he was working on.  As Darwin’s confident it was Hooker far more than Huxley who fought Darwin’s battles, for example arranging the reading of Darwin’s (and Alfred Russel Wallace’s) paper at the Linnean Society on 01 July 1858.  And a year later Hooker was the first scientist to publicly endorse Origin of Species in Introductory Essay to his Flora Tasmaniae.

The Zemu Valley, Sikkim

From the garden historian’s perspective Hooker is remembered primarily as a plant hunter.  Between 1847 and 1851 he became the first Westerner to explore the then-kingdom of  Sikkim in the eastern Himalaya.  The account of his adventures he published in the best-selling Himalayan Journals (1852).  It remains a fascinating read and may be downloaded free from Project Gutenberg.  

The landscape of Sikkim from Himalayan Journals

It was using this text that I followed in Hooker’s footsteps in what is now a state of India and a buffer military zone with Tibet.  Because of this the landscape Hooker saw remains relatively undamaged.  To the extent that I even found a fireplace of stones beneath a large rock under which he camped in the Zemu valley.

Rhododendron hodgsonii in Sikkim

Hooker’s most significant discovery was over 20 new species of colourful rhododendrons, which upon their introduction became a huge garden fashion - here you can download Hooker’s The rhododendrons of Sikkim-Himalaya (an original copy will set you back between £13,000 and £18,000).  In 1871 the garden writer Shirley Hibberd claimed the same amount of money had been spent on rhododendrons in the past 20 years as was the nation debt.  Then the figure of £738 million,  the equivalent of £51,200 million today!