Essay Review

The man who would be king of botanical classification

Imperial nature: Joseph Hooker and the practices of Victorian science Jim Endersby; University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2008, pp. 400, Price £18.00 US$35.00 hardback, ISBN 0-226-20791-9.

In 1868, a British ethnographic survey of India described the Lepcha people’s remarkable knowledge of the wild plants of Sikkim. They gathered many of these (‘ferns, bamboo, roots, fungi, and innumerable succulent plants found wild on mountains’) when their haphazardly cultivated grains were scarce, and also fermented a sort of beer from harvested plants.¹ The botanic garden in Bengal, then called the Royal Botanic Garden, Calcutta, wisely made use of this botanical familiarity and hired some Lepcha to collect for them. When a new garden curator sent one of his first routine batches of plant specimens to Joseph Hooker at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, he pointed out that the bamboo species were organized by their Lepcha names, noting elsewhere these collectors’ excellent knowledge of edible plants.²

Hooker, however, was not interested in such ‘local knowledge’, as Jim Endersby points out in his engaging and well written book Imperial nature: Joseph Hooker and the practice of Victorian science. Hooker had no use for indigenous names of plants, even if their translation and associated information could tell of a plant’s locality, community, or characteristics, and Endersby writes of the Maori plant names that William Colenso sent to Kew, in vain, with specimens from New Zealand. Not only did Hooker ignore this information from those who knew the plants better than any colonizer, but he overruled his European correspondents’ chosen scientific names, even if those plants were collected from a country he had never visited. As Endersby explains, Hooker discarded information that might otherwise be perceived as marvelously helpful to a botanist sitting at a desk in England because ‘acknowledging its validity would have tilted the trading terms too far in the colonist’s favor’ (p. 93). Hooker was trading dried specimens, live plants, and sometimes books for specimens from colonies throughout the world, and he was intent on maintaining his hold on the classification of species while building up the Kew herbarium. He wanted to be absolutely certain that Kew was the center, and the colonies were the periphery.

While Endersby is fully aware, along with other recent authors, of the limitations of viewing the metropole as the hub of the wheel and the colonies lying at the ends of the spokes, he falls back on this model more than once, perhaps inevitably because that was the view of his subject. Hooker built much of his career on classifying plants according to his conviction that too many collectors and botanists were creating far too many species; he wanted to ‘lump’, not ‘split’, and was certain this could only be done correctly and ‘philosophically’ at Kew where incoming plants could be compared with others in its herbarium full of specimens from distant corners of the globe. Those dried plants on sheets of paper supplied the information needed for him to fit a new plant in its rightful place, establishing its relationship to allied species.

Hooker’s insistence on naming plants at Kew, and disdaining any names devised in the colonies, made him the despot of British botany. In this way, he might epitomize the nineteenth-century transformation in attitudes towards indigenous knowledge; in earlier centuries explorers and colonizers had more often been open to learning from native people’s familiarity with local flora and fauna. By the mid-nineteenth century, a European chauvinism vilifying, or simply ignoring, local knowledge had grown more common.³ Hooker did make enormous contributions to botanical classification as described so well in Endersby’s book, and his patient and dogged practice of botany culminated in Generum plantarum, authored with George Bentham, and in Index Kewensis; at the same time Hooker effectively stopped short some of the knowledge that otherwise could have been in transit.⁴

With Hooker championing an empire of British botanical knowledge, resorting too easily to the notion of the metropole as center and the colonies as the periphery may conceal important complexities of the information (and plant) exchange. Roy MacLeod’s proposed ‘moving metropolis’ model, or the ‘polycentric communications network’ of David Wade Chambers and Richard Gillespie (2000), could provide useful means of considering the additional centers developing outside of Kew as botanic gardens in, for example, Sydney, Cape Town, Trinidad, or Singapore, created their own herbariums.⁵

The collections at the Calcutta botanic garden, for example, always grew larger as consecutive superintendents and curators exchanged specimens not just with Kew, but with other gardens in India and throughout Southeast Asia and Africa. Endersby may not have wanted to overlap with accounts of botanic gardens offered by Nicholas Drayton (2000) and others but it would be of great interest to learn of Hooker’s efforts to also control the botanical knowledge developing around expanding herbariums in a host of British colonies. Were all directors of botanic gardens also nefarious ‘splitters’, or could Hooker have censored their classifications less severely?

Hooker’s relationships with these directors added another layer to his handling of botanical information. In 1866, he wrote to the superintendent of the Royal Botanic Garden, Calcutta: ‘You Indian fellows are so overwhelmed with multifarious duties that it is difficult to manage you’.⁶ The comment, though delivered light-heartedly, also suggests a persistent anxiety about his control of distant colonial gardens. It appears in the midst of a generally cordial correspondence that could also grow downright cranky on Hooker’s part when he repeatedly demanded particular specimens or complained about plants that arrived dead. This tension may have exceeded the strain described by Endersby between Hooker and his old friends Colenso in New Zealand and Ronald Campbell Gunn in Tasmania who were collecting independently, outside of any institution. The directors of botanic gardens were often men with similar gentlemanly status as Hooker; they usually had been educated in British medical schools and would have taken botanical classes in materia medica. It would be enlightening for Endersby to apply his careful analysis of social relationships in English science to botanists in colonial institutions.

There is only so much you can fit in a book, however, and Endersby’s welcome account of Hooker’s interactions with a few of his far-flung correspondents offers the beginning of what can only be an increasingly involved story of mid to late nineteenth-century imperial botany. How did Hooker flex his botanical muscles with collectors in countries not controlled by Britain, such as Henry Fletcher Hance in China?⁷ To what extent did he correspond with Spanish, French, or Dutch collectors based in colonies of other countries? How far did his botanical despotism reach into the Continent? Additional forays into the enormous Hooker correspondence at Kew would also help show how, or if, Hooker communicated with directors of other European herbariums. It was not just Britain collecting specimens from all over the world, and Hooker’s letters might open a window to understanding the extent to which different European botanical institutions and their colonial gardens interacted with one another after 1850. While more is known of Hooker’s friendship with Asa Gray in America, Endersby’s book suggests that evaluating his correspondence with, for example, German, Danish, or Dutch botanists, would be a means of understanding global communication in science as Europeans sought to understand plant distribution, and the cultivation of economically viable crops in their colonies.⁸ Hooker’s eschewal of German botany, described by Endersby, also resulted in the sort of comment he wrote privately in regard to a colonial botanist: ‘A German scientific man is the most impractical & impracticable pig in Christendom’.⁹ (This is only one of many statements demonstrating that Hooker’s perception of ‘gentlemanliness’ and ‘character’ was limited to more public discussions.) Hooker’s whining to friends, along with more diplomatic correspondence with continental botanists, could provide intriguing material to the historian trying to determine Kew’s nineteenth-century intersections with other colonizing countries.

What about the indigenous knowledge that Hooker cut off? Possibly not all of it was lost, and Hooker’s control may not have had the lasting effect he hoped for. Even Hooker had to acknowledge that some plants could only have been found by native collectors, as when a Lepcha plucked a rare arboreal orchid deeply hidden in the vegetation, but that he knew grew on that tree. In addition, indigenous names and information still snuck into the scientific currency, if not by way of Hooker’s herbarium. For example, some of the Lepcha names that Hooker discarded as he examined Indian specimens appeared in an 1870 paper on Sikkim tree ferns that was published in London’s Linnean Society Transactions.¹⁰ Botanical articles like these, composed outside of Europe represent some of the information exchanges that were never one-way: Europe sent botanists to colonies with their Western background in science, specimens were delivered in both directions, and some botanists gathered knowledge from those colonized, dispersing it both within the country (in scientific societies and journals) and back to Europe. Hooker encouraged most of this traffic, and though he obstructed flow of information that didn’t bear his stamp of approval, his control was not always complete. Endersby has enticingly started to tell a story of which there is more to tell.