Strangers who put down roots
Henry Hobhouse
THE ORIGIN OF PLANTS by Maggie Campbell-Culver Headline, £25, pp. 260 ISBN 074727214X This is a handsomely produced, well illustrated book that will be looked at, it is safe to say, more than it will be perused. It is titled in a rather Darwinesque way, but the theme is different. In the foreword it is said,
After the retreat of the last ice age. Britain had the distinction of having the smallest natural flora of any country in the world, yet by the start of the 21st century, it contained the widest range of any nation on earth.
This is what the book seeks to prove by relating which plants arrived here in each century up to the present. The early, mediaeval chapters are rather legendary, the later times better authenticated.
In 6000 BC about the only fruits of the earth in the tundra (after the ice age) were, the author says, bilberries. So after the thaw early immigrants would have brought to Britain not only agricultural technology, but also cereal and grass seed. Neither is mentioned, though Roman introductions are specified: the grape, several species of forest tree, the nettle and much else besides. All those areas, once under ice, could only have reached today's rich pattern if plants were introduced from places free of the ice age. This explains, as does nothing else, the early husbandry of the Mediterranean and the Middle East while Britons were cavorting in woad. Plant transfer dates are difficult, as the author admits in 'Notes for the Reader', but new techniques are being developed that will help in the future.
This book, which is really about garden plants, is also about plant-hunters, who were institutionally encouraged by all advanced European countries, some before, some after 1700. Explorers had led the way. Columbus brought back maize, capsicum and, it is said, tobacco and much else. European settlers took cereals, grasses, citrus and other fruits, and, above all, sugar to the New World. Even weeds were relocated; plantains became, in at least one Amerindian language, The White Man's Foot.
The transfer of seeds, cuttings and live plants became intercontinental after 1500. The Portuguese, Dutch, French and English, as active traders in plant products, built up commercially important botanical establishments at home and sent plant collectors abroad. Many plant-hunters are here described and most had more than garden significance. One, not noticed, is Robert Fortune, who, though he 'discovered' Chinese azaleas, bamboos, peonies and camellias, should be primarily remembered for his work on tea cultivars. He made possible the now huge Indian tea industry and he was in many ways typical of those who in the 19th century hunted and transferred plants of great economic significance. Some expeditions were promoted by Kew and the Colonial Office, others, as in Fortune's case, by the East India Company. (The author, incidentally, gives credence to the hoary old myth that it was imperialist Englishmen who 'stole' rubber plants from Brazil.) Is it really possible to claim that we now have in the UK 'the widest range of any nation on earth'? What about France, with vast areas of grapes, olives and grain-maize unknown in England, and what about the USA, with great botanical differences between north and south, or, indeed, China. Chile or Brazil? Or is this claim only about pleasure gardens, expenditure on which here in England must be ten times in real terms what it was 20 years ago. There are now millions who watch television gardening programmes and most of them take for granted what can be found in good garden centres, few television addicts having any interest in plant origins. For the curious, this is a book for Christmas, if not for the scholarly.
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