Gaps in the historiography

The Glasgow committee’s decision to establish a botanical garden in their city was not born in a vacuum. Throughout the nineteenth century, the rise of public curiosity in all matters botanical, as well as the growing political attention paid to the economic and commercial potential of new agricultural crops, was triggered by an unabated scientific interest in the novel field of botany, heavily supported by imperial conquest. Dozens, if not hundreds, of scientific explorations – sponsored by learned societies, such as the Horticultural Society of London and the Royal Society; by official bodies, including the Royal Navy and the Colonial Office; and by merchant companies, notably the East India Company – went well beyond the borders of Britain’s growing imperial power. The result was the (re)discovery and circulation of botanical knowledge in Britain and throughout Europe.Footnote ¹² Plant collectors and botanists had a lasting and nefarious impact on the lands they explored – and on the peoples that inhabited them.Footnote ¹³ Additionally, the introduction and acclimatization on British soil of thousands of new botanical specimens – some very rare and exotic – also transformed the fields of agriculture and horticulture at home, irremediably linking the nation to its colonized territories. As historian Richard Drayton has remarked, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, ‘Political and economic circumstances made necessary this marriage of science and British imperial power, to which botany was to be central’.Footnote ¹⁴ This unflagging pursuit of botanical knowledge echoed the gradual emergence of a new imperial ideology centred on progress and improvement, justifying colonization and territorial expansion.

While a renewed interest in the links between botany and empire(s) has been a key feature of recent research in the field, the history of the Glasgow Botanic Gardens has been surprisingly absent from the academic literature, with scholars of British history tending to concentrate on the better-known case of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew.Footnote ¹⁵ Arthur D. Boney devoted a short chapter to the first botanic gardens in his 1988 work on the University of Glasgow gardens, but it was predominantly statistical in nature, and neither the scientific, nor the political or imperial aspects were thoroughly addressed.Footnote ¹⁶ Another book covering their history from 1817 to the present was published in 2006 by the former curator of the gardens, Eric Curtis. Although a highly informative work, and addressing a few critical milestones in their development, it was aimed above all at a popular audience, and lacked a detailed historical and historiographical contextualization.Footnote ¹⁷ There still remains, therefore, no in-depth academic study of the gardens’ origins and history. The contention here is that this gap in the historiography needs to be filled, for it will be seen that the Glasgow Botanic Gardens stood at an important crossroads of political and economic interests, scientific discovery, cultural innovation and imperial motives.

Historians have also tended to downplay Hooker’s twenty-one-year residency in Glasgow and focused on his later directorship at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. Indeed, they often only mention Glasgow in the briefest of terms, explaining how Hooker was merely biding his time in the city, dreaming of Kew and itching to leave Scotland. In The Hookers of Kew (1967) by Mea Allan, the only comprehensive (if flawed) biography to date of the whole Hooker family, the Glasgow years are largely reduced to three short chapters.Footnote ¹⁸ The result of such summary treatment can be seen in works like Ray Desmond’s The History of the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew (1999), where the emphasis is firmly placed on Hooker’s eagerness to leave: ‘Only two years after his arrival in Glasgow, Hooker enquired about posts in the south of England, the centre of Britain’s scientific life. He desperately wanted to be part of it’.Footnote ¹⁹ Even Richard Drayton, in his seminal 2000 work Nature’s Government, did not linger on Hooker’s life in Glasgow, only alluding to his achievements in relation to his future position at Kew.Footnote ²⁰ For many historians of botany, then, it seems that the Glasgow years of William J. Hooker deserve little more than a footnote. Yet the work that Hooker undertook during the two decades he spent in the Scottish city proved to be of considerable significance, both for his scientific career and for the prominence of the gardens. As a professor at the University of Glasgow, Hooker became extremely popular. His lectures were scientifically challenging, but they drew an ever-increasing crowd of eager students, which helped to popularize botany. Hooker also greatly benefited personally from his position, expanding his scientific and diplomatic networks in Europe, North America and the colonies. He was also very keen to promote the gardens, which flourished under his tutelage, boasting a remarkable plant collection, which attracted many visitors in the 1820s and 1830s.

The Glasgow Botanic Gardens and their imperial roots

The principal aim of the Glasgow Botanic Gardens was to collect, grow and acclimatize new species of plants. Their initial success in that respect owed much to the colonial connections of the gardens’ director, William J. Hooker, and certain of their proprietors. Anchored in a local context informed by the industrial and commercial development of the city, the gardens were indeed, from the very beginning, shaped by global concerns and benefited from Britain’s colonial expansion.

When established, the Glasgow Botanic Gardens housed around three thousand plants, many of them originating from the personal collection of Thomas Hopkirk.Footnote ²¹ In the following years, hundreds more plants were introduced and catalogued in the collections. Many were donated by other British or European botanical establishments, especially in the wake of a visit by the curator, Stewart Murray, to the Horticultural Society of London in 1821 and 1824 and to other public and private British gardens in 1827.Footnote ²² At the time, the success of botanical gardens rested primarily on the principle of reciprocity, and exchanges of plant specimens without any financial component were the norm – one of the reasons being the limited funds of many of these gardens.Footnote ²³ Jim Endersby explains in Imperial Nature, ‘Friendship was often the glue that held informal networks together’.Footnote ²⁴ In that context, Hooker’s many personal acquaintances played a key role in the growth of the Glasgow Botanic Gardens’ plant collection, as the vast majority of the new plants that were added to the gardens between 1820 and 1841 can be solely attributed to his exertions. Hooker was truly the driving force behind the gardens. As exemplified both in his correspondence and in his published works, he regularly acknowledged the assistance of fellow British botanists in collecting many of the specimens that either grew in the gardens or became part of his personal herbarium. It was through such connections that, over time, some of his correspondents, such as the systematic botanist George Bentham, became close friends.

The Glasgow Botanic Gardens therefore functioned as a dynamic site for the accumulation of botanical knowledge.Footnote ²⁵ During one of his public lectures in around 1830 (delivered before a lay audience interested in the field of botany), Hooker noted,

Hooker’s mention here of ‘friends … abroad’ indicates that his professional network was not solely rooted in Britain, as several of his correspondents scoured remote foreign territories. A certain Oliver Adamson, for example, sent him a rare specimen of the ipecacuanha – whose dried root was used as an emetic – from Pernambuco in Brazil, and John Tweedie, a Scottish botanist who explored parts of Argentina, corresponded with him for decades, sending many specimens to the Glasgow Botanic Gardens, such as the seeds of a variety of Solanum (Solanum tweedieanum), which flowered there in 1833.Footnote ²⁷ Prominent foreign botanists – such as the Swiss Augustin-Pyramus de Candolle, and the Americans John Torrey and Asa Gray – also sent Hooker packets of seeds and information related to newly discovered specimens. The majority of botanical specimens sent to him from abroad, however, came from his ever-growing scientific network of professional and amateur plant hunters – a group of varied employment and social standing, scattered across the British Empire. The specimens found by David Douglas, Thomas Drummond, John Scouler and George Gardner are well documented in Hooker’s publications, but there were many others who would contribute to the Glasgow Botanic Gardens’ collections.Footnote ²⁸ For instance, Charles Sandbach Parker dispatched seeds of the small-flowered cuphea (Cuphea parviflora) from Demerara in 1824, and the Reverend Lansdown Guilding sent specimens of the Taenitis from Saint Vincent in 1825.Footnote ²⁹ Women also participated in these exchanges as amateur collectors.Footnote ³⁰ Among them, Lady Dalhousie, living in Quebec and married to the governor general of British North America, sent valuable botanical information that Hooker used in his Flora Boreali-Americana.Footnote ³¹

While Hooker and the other directors of the Glasgow Botanic Gardens focused mainly on the outcome of these exchanges – the successful arrival of seeds (and sometimes live plants) in Glasgow – they never fully acknowledged the colonial context in which many of these botanical specimens were acquired. In countless instances, the collection of specimens amounted to an appropriation of knowledge to the detriment of indigenous populations. Plant collectors like Douglas, Tweedie and Drummond were trained botanists, but the flora of the countries they criss-crossed was often quite foreign to them. Consequently, they often had to rely on local knowledge for their discoveries. Jim Endersby has defined this local knowledge as having

Travelling across long distances, Douglas, Tweedie and Drummond had partial ‘topographic’ and ‘endemic knowledge’, as there had been previous European explorations of some of the regions they crossed, but ‘indigenous knowledge’ was also crucial to the success of their botanical missions.

Evidence of the use of indigenous knowledge was manifest, for example, during David Douglas’s botanical expedition along the Columbia river in the Pacific Northwest in 1826, an exploration sponsored jointly by Hooker and the Horticultural Society of London.Footnote ³³ Douglas was intent on finding the sugar pine, a conifer he called the ‘most princely of the genus – perhaps the grandest specimen of American vegetation’.Footnote ³⁴ He had heard of its existence while conversing with members of the Kalapuya nation.Footnote ³⁵ A few indigenous people were willing to assist him in his quest, but many others were either reluctant or openly hostile, as his subsequent account revealed:

Douglas also tried to steal a number of tobacco plants (Nicotiana pulverulenta) from a garden plot, thinking that his theft would go unnoticed. Stumbling upon the angry ‘owner’ of the plot, he gave the man ‘two-finger lengths of tobacco from Europe’ (a type of tobacco of lesser quality) to appease his wrath, while also calling him a ‘savage’.Footnote ³⁷ Having tried to rob the man, Douglas bargained his way out of trouble by knowingly offering something of significantly lower value than the specimen he had just seized. This example illustrates the imbalance of power in botanical transfers, especially in colonial contexts. Alongside his theft, Douglas perpetuated a colonialist vision of ownership of land: he called the man that he met the ‘owner’ of the plantation, dismissing his own deliberate trespassing, while being simultaneously unaware that indigenous peoples did not view land as a commodity. In fact, Douglas only apprehended the natural environment surrounding him with regard to its potential as a valuable resource. This case offers a blatant example of extractive colonialism: Douglas considered that this specimen of Nicotiana pulverulenta was there for the taking, completely ignoring and disrespecting the cultural and spiritual value ascribed to tobacco, a plant considered sacred by many indigenous peoples in North America.Footnote ³⁸

Conflictual encounters such as these often occurred in regions nominally under British control, but whose sovereignty was disputed by indigenous peoples. These regions were ‘contact zones’, which Mary Louise Pratt has defined as ‘the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality and intractable conflict’.Footnote ³⁹ As Douglas’s actions demonstrate, more often than not botanizing took an exploitative form, exemplifying how colonial oppression could manifest in multiple ways. Colonists robbed indigenous peoples not only of their lands but also – as Douglas’s theft from indigenous tobacco cultivators demonstrates – of something more intangible, pertaining to ancestral and cultural knowledge. Often seized in ‘contact zones’ in wanton acts of biopiracy, the specimens were then shipped to Europe, where they were grown and propagated in the greenhouses of botanical gardens, including those in Glasgow. Among the many seeds and plants that David Douglas, John Scouler and fellow collectors dispatched to Hooker from North America in the 1820s and that went on to thrive in the Glasgow Botanic Gardens, were the Gaultheria shallon (‘salal’ in vernacular language), whose fruit was ‘much esteemed by the natives [Chinook nation], and made into cakes, which keep for a great length of time’. In his Flora Boreali-Americana, Hooker noted that it was ‘a great acquisition, bearing copious blossoms and abundant fruit’.Footnote ⁴⁰ This appropriation of botanical knowledge had a further exploitative dimension, as it also represents a form of linguistic imperialism. Native plants were often named after the plant hunters who collected them, thereby erasing their previous indigenous names and reinforcing their disconnection from indigenous cultural landscapes. Such was the case, for example, of Phlox drummondii, a flower collected by Thomas Drummond in Texas in the 1830s, added to the Flower Garden section of the Glasgow Botanic Gardens, and later widely distributed by nurseries throughout Europe.Footnote ⁴¹ The flower still bears his name to this day. Another case in point is Solanum tweedieanum, mentioned above, a species found in Argentina and named after John Tweedie. Both plants owe their name to William J. Hooker.

On an individual level, then, botanists, professional plant collectors and amateurs were key contributors to the gardens’ collections. Alongside the activities of these collectors, the gardens’ collections also grew in size and variety thanks to institutional exchanges with gardens elsewhere in the British Empire. These were not one-way exchanges, however, as many seeds transited through Hooker back to the colonies or to other botanical centres in Britain and Europe. In the 1820s, Nathaniel Wallich, superintendent of the Calcutta Botanic Gardens, sent Hooker many specimens, as did Charles Telfair, deputy curator of the Royal Gardens at Pamplemousses (Mauritius), and Charles Fraser, colonial botanist of New South Wales – all of whom were honorary members of the Glasgow Botanic Gardens.Footnote ⁴² To ensure the successful acclimatization of such ‘tropical’ specimens, several buildings were erected in the gardens, such as a conservatory facing west in the mid-1820s. In December 1830, the directors remarked,

The central role played by the gardens in providing the specimens featured in many of Hooker’s publications, including his Exotic Flora (1823–7), was mentioned by the author himself: ‘[my] chief recourse has been the collection of the Royal Botanic Garden of Glasgow’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Among other plants, the Flora featured a specimen of Pholidota imbricata, collected in Nepal and sent by Nathaniel Wallich to Hooker, and a new species of Catasetum, which was sent by Baron De Shack of Trinidad and ‘blossomed in the stove of [the] Botanic Garden in November 1824’.Footnote ⁴⁵ This Exotic Flora also revealed how the gardens were part of a national network of botanical gardens thriving on the discovery of new plants in colonized territories, as it listed numerous ‘tropical’ specimens sent as gifts by Henry Shepherd, sub-curator of the Liverpool Botanic Garden; William Townsend Aiton, superintendent at Kew; and Robert Graham, Regius Keeper of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh.Footnote ⁴⁶

From the 1820s onwards, the Glasgow Botanic Gardens thus became increasingly connected to British imperial expansion. This was not in the least surprising, as the gardens had always been closely entangled with colonial politics. This is best exemplified by the career of James Ewing: Ewing was a founding member of the gardens in 1817, and also a powerful sugar merchant and founding secretary of the Glasgow West India Association, a political lobby created in 1807 to promote mercantile and slave-owning interests in the British Caribbean.Footnote ⁴⁷ Ewing is not alone in this regard, as many other proprietors of the gardens had financial or mercantile ties with the British colonies, such as Mungo Nutter Campbell, both lord provost of the city between 1824 and 1826 and an absentee planter and a slave owner in Demerara (a British colony in the Guianas).Footnote ⁴⁸ As a result of such ties, colonial capital consistently funded the Glasgow Botanic Gardens in the first decades of their existence. The contributions of these wealthy and powerful colonial merchants and planters were not only pecuniary, however, as their personal and professional connections also greatly facilitated the importation of plants and seeds from the British colonies. The Literary Gazette remarked in 1818 that ‘hardly a ship now arrives in the Clyde from foreign parts without bearing rare seeds or plants for the Establishment’.Footnote ⁴⁹ This particular fact was acknowledged numerous times in the minutes of the Botanical Institution: ‘To the Owners and Captains of vessels and their agents, the Institution continues to lie under many obligations for their zealous attention, which has been above all estimation in promoting the interests of the Garden; and for their Valuable services, which have been frequently bestowed gratuitously.’Footnote ⁵⁰ While the institution’s minutes seem to imply that the proprietors were first and foremost interested in supporting scientific progress, the fact that a large proportion of them were involved in colonial pursuits in the British Caribbean points to another motive. Since 1807 and the abolition of the British slave trade, many Glaswegian merchants and absentee sugar planters (among whom were a number of the gardens’ proprietors) had been fighting a propaganda war to win over public opinion.Footnote ⁵¹ By the 1820s, the tide was turning, and abolitionist campaigners calling for the end of chattel slavery in the British colonies were slowly gaining ground. Thus the gardens may have acted as a medium for many proprietors to seek to restore a tarnished reputation in a fast-evolving political landscape – and potentially to explore new avenues of income and influence. Yet, for all the hard work conducted by Hooker, the gardens played a more significant role in accumulating and circulating botanical knowledge and plants from colonized territories throughout Europe than in actively participating in the mass production of commercial botanical specimens from these regions. Hooker did receive specimens that would later transform European forestry and agriculture – a case in point being the Pseudotsuga menziesii tree (or Douglas fir, from the Pacific Northwest) grown in the gardens from seeds sent by Douglas and one of the first Douglas firs to be successfully acclimatized in Europe at the time. However, because of the modest size of the gardens and the limited funds available to him, Hooker did not spearhead any botanical production scheme on a large scale during his tenure in Glasgow.

Botany in theory and in practice

Although influenced by the imperial context, the Glasgow Botanic Gardens never relinquished their role as a centre for scientific education intended to popularize botany. This was by no means a straightforward task – even for a man of William J. Hooker’s talents. As Richard Drayton remarks, in the nineteenth century, ‘among those involved in shaping the idea of science in Britain, botany did not receive the respect as a profound and serious discipline which it had enjoyed one hundred years before. Where the touchstone for scientific pride remained Newton’s physics and Herschel’s astronomy, taxonomy seemed a lesser discipline.’Footnote ⁵² Yet Hooker took his academic position seriously and taught prospective botanists a rigorous scientific method, encouraging them to develop their knowledge and skills both in the classroom and outdoors, either in the gardens or in the more distant Highlands. He regularly presented his students with the latest discoveries in the scientific field while firmly grounding the latter in the theories of natural theology. He trained many young men who went on to become active participants in the development of botany in the British colonies, a development which would also prove beneficial to the gardens and one that underlines the close relationship between science and colonial expansion.

As in other botanical gardens, such as the Glasnevin Royal Botanic Gardens in Dublin, where the educational purpose was paramount from the outset, the Glasgow Botanic Gardens had always been intended as a teaching establishment, with a lecture room included in the original plans.Footnote ⁵³ Access to the gardens for students of medicine was indeed made a prerequisite for the University of Glasgow’s financial contribution to the creation of the gardens in 1817. First with Robert Graham (1818–20), then from 1820 onwards with Hooker, medical students at the University of Glasgow had to attend classes on botany – the Regius Chair of Botany being part of the Faculty of Medicine.Footnote ⁵⁴ Hooker was quite an inexperienced academic when appointed to his post, but over time, as noted earlier, his lectures proved extremely popular. They were held every year for twenty years, one hour a day, five days a week at eight o’clock in the morning. The lecture series ran from the beginning of May to mid-July for the first fifteen years of his tenure, with a course of lectures in late winter (from February to April) added for the remaining five years.Footnote ⁵⁵ In the 1830s, more than a hundred students attended his classes; he also gave public lectures to an enthusiastic lay audience.Footnote ⁵⁶ His university curriculum was divided into sixty lectures and broached various topics, from the history of botany to systematics – which he called the ‘grammar of botany’ and considered quite tedious, yet essential.Footnote ⁵⁷

Both in the classroom and in professional circles, Hooker defended botany tenaciously, considering it a science with a noble tradition that should rightly be associated with medicine but also studied as a discipline in its own right.Footnote ⁵⁸ He fought in particular against the misconception that the possession of theoretical botanical knowledge alone (such as knowing the Latin names of plants) made one a botanist. Botany was a science, Hooker maintained, that had to be studied in the classroom and in the field, and he made no effort to conceal his contempt for armchair botanists who never set foot outside. While he relied for his academic lectures on his own work, Flora Scotica (1821), and on colourful drawings of plants on display, he also encouraged observation in situ.Footnote ⁵⁹ He was well known for organizing field trips with his students to the countryside outside Glasgow and to the Highlands, and considered botanical gardens an essential component in the education of prospective botanists. This view was shared by his colleague John Stevens Henslow, professor of botany at the University of Cambridge from 1831 onwards, who regarded them, according to Nuala Johnson, ‘as a training ground for sharpening the senses, focusing on what was significant, and engaging in the critical task of comparison’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Hooker would thus have wholeheartedly agreed with the opinion expressed in a meeting of the gardens’ directors in 1830 that his establishment was ‘so important to the education of young men in Scotland from being in a state of great perfection, and [their] utility being universally acknowledged not only in this country but by all scientific men and students of Botany in Europe’.Footnote ⁶¹ His students were therefore encouraged to spend many hours in the gardens and observe the natural world closely.

Two areas of the gardens were specifically devoted to a scientific display of plants. One was arranged according to Carl Linnaeus’s classification method, presenting his sexual method for herbaceous plants and his natural method for medical plants, while the other larger plot was arranged to illustrate the ‘Natural Method of [Antoine-Laurent de] Jussieu’.Footnote ⁶² Jussieu’s natural method had been prevalent in Paris at the Jardin du roi since the end of the eighteenth century but it was met with much resistance in Britain.Footnote ⁶³ It was, however, later popularized by botanical textbooks and gradually became accepted as a valid method by the mid-nineteenth century.Footnote ⁶⁴ In Glasgow, this dual organization was jointly decided on before Hooker’s time (the first reference dates to 1818) by Thomas Hopkirk, then the vice president of the Royal Botanic Institution; Robert Austin, one of the proprietors and a nurseryman; and curator Stewart Murray.Footnote ⁶⁵ While Hooker favoured Jussieu, he acknowledged the scientific legacy of Linnaeus during his public lectures.Footnote ⁶⁶ Thus he seemingly carried on with this organization as the plant collection grew in size, as attested by John Claudius Loudon’s 1827 plan of the gardens in his Encyclopædia of Gardening (Figure 1).Footnote ⁶⁷ In its display of various taxonomy systems, the Glasgow Botanic Gardens’ layout was on a par with that of several British botanical gardens at the time, such as the Edinburgh Botanic Garden, which presented both a Linnaean and Jussieuan arrangement, and the Glasnevin Botanic Gardens in Dublin, which displayed two sections, called Hortus Linnæensis and Hortus Jussieuensis in 1818.Footnote ⁶⁸ The general organization of the Glasgow Gardens was also quite similar to these botanical gardens, offering visitors a representation of the geographical division of plants. The plants were arranged in distinct categories, such as ‘British plants’, ‘American borders’, ‘Alpine plants’, ‘Medical plants’ and ‘Plants used in agriculture and commerce’, and a small space was dedicated to ‘rare plants’ (Figure 2).Footnote ⁶⁹ The hothouses harboured the more fragile ‘tropical’ plants which required heat to thrive.

Figure 1.

Plan of the Glasgow Botanic Gardens, in John C. Loudon, An Encyclopædia of Gardening, London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1827, p. 1090.

Figure 2.

List of sections in the Glasgow Botanic Gardens, in Loudon, op. cit., p. 1089.

While a keen professor, Hooker was perfectly aware that many of his students did not share his all-consuming passion for botany and were not likely to pursue a career in the field. This was especially true after 1831, when it became compulsory for surgeons who wished to enlist in the army or the navy to attend botany classes as part of their training.Footnote ⁷⁰ For this reason, he made sure that his lectures were lively. He also emphasized the practical aspects of plant collecting and herbarium techniques, as some of his students would be posted to the colonies, and were expected to collect new exotic specimens for metropolitan botanical gardens like Glasgow’s. In this way, Hooker’s teaching proved instrumental in launching the careers of many former students, among them John Scouler (mentioned above) and James Macfadyen, who tried to establish a botanical garden in Bath in Jamaica in the 1820s and sent many specimens to the Glasgow Botanic Gardens.Footnote ⁷¹ Closer to home, Daniel Ferguson, curator of the Belfast Botanic Gardens from 1836 until his death in 1864, was trained in the Glasgow Botanic Gardens in the 1820s and maintained a good professional relationship with Hooker.Footnote ⁷²

During his public and academic lectures, Hooker was determined to prove how essential botany was to the understanding of the world. He did not consider this objective to be purely a matter of science, for his passion for botany was deeply intertwined with his personal faith. For him, as for many of his contemporaries, the botanical world was part of divine creation, and understanding it was one way of bringing men closer to God. This conception of botany was not novel; it had been the raison d’être behind the first botanical gardens founded in Italy during the Renaissance, as John Prest explains:

Relying on a non-literal interpretation of Genesis rather than discarding it altogether, Hooker viewed botany as a necessary and fundamental key to understanding divine creation. Classifying new botanical specimens and adding them to an ever-expanding list were thus a means to honour the Almighty.Footnote ⁷⁴ In this context, it is telling that his concluding remarks at the end of his last public lecture mentioned God as ‘He who clothes the Lilies of the Field, and who takes thought even for the Grass’, an indirect quote from Matthew 6:28.Footnote ⁷⁵ Hooker’s strong belief in natural theology was shared by many fellow botanists, and this take on the natural world was only beginning to be challenged in Britain in the 1850s, more particularly in the wake of the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.Footnote ⁷⁶

By the 1830s, the gardens were slowly becoming a landmark in Glasgow, and their scientific reputation by this point had reached far beyond the city limits. This was partly thanks to William J. Hooker’s prolific publishing career. The English botanist was not solely motivated by scientific ambition in this matter. With his salary as professor of botany (a meagre fifty-pound emolument per annum at first, plus class fees) quite insufficient to sustain a whole family, he took on the additional position of editor of Curtis’s Botanical Magazine in 1826, and also published an impressive body of work to supplement his income, including Flora Scotica (1821), British Flora (1833, 1838), Exotic Flora (1823, 1827) and Flora Boreali-Americana (1829–40).Footnote ⁷⁷ His dedication to advancing his career and social status consequently benefited the Glasgow Botanic Gardens. The latter became known in the scientific community and beyond as a repository for some of the rarest botanical specimens (re)discovered by European plant collectors during the nineteenth century, and Hooker regularly cited the gardens in his writings.Footnote ⁷⁸ In 1825, he published a catalogue of the plants in the Glasgow Botanic Gardens, updating the previous list that had been drawn up in 1818.Footnote ⁷⁹ While it was understandably not exhaustive – the collection included several thousand plants – its aim was both to publicize the botanical diversity of the gardens and to provide an inventory to other botanists so that they could request duplicates or send new specimens.Footnote ⁸⁰ It was, however, not destined for the general public and no generalized guide seems to have been issued at the time – the first known guide of the Glasgow Botanic Gardens (those located in the West End) was published in 1902.Footnote ⁸¹

Hooker gradually became well known and universally praised for his scientific liberality, placing him at the centre of a dense network of scientific study and relationships. This is exemplified by the staggering number of letters he received during his tenure in Glasgow – around 6,500 – the majority of them requesting his scientific insight and professional opinion.Footnote ⁸² His generosity attracted many enthusiastic botanists who wished to see and study rare plants at the gardens. In 1824, for example, visitors included ‘Dr Fischer, of the Imperial Garden, S. Petersburgh; Mr Burchell the celebrated African traveller; [and] Mr Nuttal[l] the no less celebrated American Botanist’.Footnote ⁸³ Additionally, Hooker opened the doors of his own house on Woodside Crescent in the West End of Glasgow to show eager botanists the treasures contained in his personal herbarium, considered by the American botanist Asa Gray as the world’s greatest herbarium in private hands.Footnote ⁸⁴ The gardens also gradually began to welcome the general public, though emphasis was placed on attracting the ‘right’ kind of visitor. Yet educating these visitors does not seem to have been much of a priority in the 1820s and 1830s, as no mention of the popularization of science can be found in the minutes of the Royal Botanic Institution of Glasgow from this period. Similarly, there is no indication of how botanical information was displayed in the gardens, whether there were labels or other information provided, for example. While, in their first phase, the gardens were used above all as a teaching resource for Hooker’s students, they appear to have been advertised as a recreational space rather than an educational one when it came to public outreach.Footnote ⁸⁵

In essence, the Glasgow Botanic Gardens’ scientific reputation at home and abroad owed much to Hooker’s personal aura. It is undeniable that without his professorship at the University of Glasgow and directorship of the gardens, he would probably not have been given the same opportunities and acquired the same social and professional status. Yet his work in publishing, in educating many young men and in developing an intricate network of international correspondents versed in botany all contributed to making the Glasgow Botanic Gardens stand out as a dynamic centre of imperial botany in the 1820s and 1830s. Evaluating the scientific contribution of the gardens in the first decades of their existence is a complex task, as it is very much tied up with their director. At first glance, there is little room for equivocation: the sheer number of Hooker’s publications and the growing number of specimens in the plant collections (including some very rare ones) would seem to leave little doubt that the endeavour was a resounding success. And yet, as successful and ground-breaking as those achievements appeared at the time, they were continually threatened by a catalogue of financial pressures that dogged the Glasgow Botanic Gardens during the whole duration of Hooker’s tenure.

Science subservient to profit?

In the nineteenth century, botanical gardens were more often than not ephemeral sites of knowledge. Burdened by logistical and financial issues, many were abandoned or underwent radical transformation.Footnote ⁸⁶ The first phase of Glasgow’s Botanic Gardens was no exception. Although shaped by imperial ambition, they were very much grounded in a local context that often hampered their development. They fell victim to economic circumstances and were forced to adapt. This purportedly scientific establishment gradually segued into a more capital-oriented venture, with mixed results.

From the time of the gardens’ inception in 1817, its founding members were keenly aware of the costs incurred by the establishment of a botanical garden, and therefore set out a financial plan intended to guarantee its smooth development. Yet this plan proved utterly inadequate, and the Royal Botanic Institution of Glasgow was placed under considerable financial strain in the years that followed. Initial funding came from a variety of sources, mainly donations and the sale of shares. In a very short period during the spring of 1817, the institution received grants and donations of almost £6,000; enough to buy a tract of land for £1,600 which became the garden grounds. However, the financial situation became increasingly unsustainable over time, as the money donated for the initial land purchase was spent and not renewed. The main grant came from the University of Glasgow, which contributed the princely sum of £2,000. Yet this was a one-off donation. Surprisingly, perhaps, the university was not expected to make any further contributions, despite the fact that its members were given unlimited access to the gardens (but no voting rights at general meetings). A further sum of £2,000 was donated a year later in 1818 by royal charter. This provided welcome additional funds, but again it was a one-off payment. The remainder of the initial funds were collected through the sale of shares, which offered shareholders the title of ‘proprietors’, access to the gardens and voting rights at general meetings. In April 1817, a committee of management was specially appointed to look into the establishment’s finances. The committee chose to set the price of shares at ten guineas each. Because of the eminence and good reputation of many of the founding members and new proprietors, early shares sold quickly. That initial success proved deceptive, however. The directors were soon confronted with an unanticipated rise in running costs, as a result of the wages of the curator and gardeners, repairs to the greenhouses, insurance, coal and water supplies, and so on. True, acquiring new plants was rarely costly, as many were exchanged or donated, yet the logistics of accommodating and caring for them were expensive, especially in the damp and cold Scottish climate. One proprietor thus remarked as early as 1823 that the gardens had ‘the appearance of premature decay from want of funds’.Footnote ⁸⁷

The gardens’ precarious finances were the result, first, of the initial decision to fund the institution mainly via shares. This had become evident as early as 1819, when the management committee remarked, ‘It is with extreme regret that your Committee have to point out in this statement, a great falling off of the funds.’Footnote ⁸⁸ The reasons behind that fall were both conjunctural and structural. First, there had been a short recession in 1819 and consequently a period of inflation. Second, the gardens’ regulations adopted in 1817 did not require proprietors who had bought shares to make an annual payment as well. As a result, although the institution boasted six hundred proprietors in 1822, and new proprietors were added each year – many of whom held multiple shares – the revenue stream did not increase as fast as the expenditure.Footnote ⁸⁹ This situation was by no means uncommon as other botanical gardens often struggled to balance the books. Founded in 1827, the Belfast Royal Botanic Gardens also relied on the sale of shares, with incremental voting and access rights depending on the number of shares held by subscribers. Annual subscriptions were available as well. As they were not financially supported by a university – like other sites such as Cambridge – they faced mounting economic pressure. Thomas Drummond, who took the post of head gardener in 1828 before being dismissed in 1831 for inadequate work, lamented to Hooker that the limited funds prevented him from employing qualified assistants and from creating a garden with suitable infrastructures such as a glasshouse.Footnote ⁹⁰

As time went by, the Glasgow Botanic Gardens’ finances thus became a recurring and increasingly alarming leitmotif. Reliable and regular income had to be found and this dire situation dictated many of the choices made by the directors. They managed to navigate some of the difficulties of the 1820s by petitioning the British government for pecuniary assistance. At first this was to no avail, but then in 1824 they received a government grant of £2,000. That same year, the books were finally balanced, but the new funds offered only a momentary respite, and debts soon began to pile up again. In 1832, the directors applied to Glasgow Union Bank for a loan of £1,000. The question of asking proprietors to make annual payments was raised multiple times, and many often lamented that omission in the 1817 regulations:

Despite such comments, the management committee consistently shied away from imposing a compulsory annual payment, and left it to the goodwill of proprietors, with predictably disappointing results.Footnote ⁹² Other options were also considered. As early as December 1819, annual subscriptions at one guinea were proposed for those who did not want to buy shares. And in June 1822, tickets for ladies who were not married to proprietors were sold at the price of five guineas, granting them life admission to the gardens but no other privileges (such as voting rights at general meetings). Another source of income came from sales of duplicate plants, which were regularly advertised in the local press. Minutes of the Royal Botanic Institution of Glasgow reveal that, year after year, proprietors were vigorously encouraged by the directors to find new potential proprietors and annual subscribers, and constantly pressured to contribute an additional annual payment (half a guinea in 1827) and to publicize the sale of duplicate plants among their personal acquaintances.Footnote ⁹³ Their ‘indifference … to encourage this object’ was decried by the directors in 1831.Footnote ⁹⁴ Yet the sale of duplicates was never a satisfactory solution because the profits made were low at best.Footnote ⁹⁵ These plants crowded the gardens, and were costly in terms both of space and of coal, being housed in glasshouses. The directors remarked in 1837 that ‘the extra profit arising from this source will be more than counterbalanced by the excess of the expenditure for coals occasioned partly by the long and severe winter of 1836–7 but chiefly by the high price of that essential article of consumption’.Footnote ⁹⁶

In the light of the heavy financial burden borne by the Glasgow Botanic Gardens, the directors repeatedly explored other ways of generating revenue. In their annual report for 1838, for example, it was stated,

Driven by economic interest, the proprietors and directors increasingly favoured the purchase of plants they thought would appeal to the visiting public, without paying much heed to their scientific value. Such priorities were clearly visible in an 1825 reference to the ‘department of Fancy Flowers … a department perhaps generally interesting to the majority of the Proprietors’, and the cultivation of the hyacinth ‘in a portion of the Garden set apart for that purpose’ so as to ‘render [them] less dependent on Holland for an annual supply of this beautiful flower’.Footnote ⁹⁸ Similarly, in 1836, the curator and the gardeners were instructed to grow camellias because the flowers were sold for balls and private parties.Footnote ⁹⁹ As the gardens were becoming too small for the growing plant collection, the directors and Stewart Murray were often faced with difficult choices, such as considering sacrificing rare specimens to make more space available for duplicate plants for sale. This issue was raised as early as 1826:

There was, therefore, a literal spatial struggle between ornamental plants grown for public enjoyment and financial return and those grown for scientific study. This tension was also potentially damaging for the public perception of botany. Although botanists in general were striving not to be confused with horticulturalists, the fact of selling duplicate plants and cut flowers to the public – thus presenting plants as commodities – meant that the gardens did in reality blur the line between botany and horticulture. In this way, for all the avowed scientific purpose of the gardens defended by staunch botanists, a more mercantile conception of botany was always present in the background. The broader context is important here. In a city where the Industrial Revolution was in full swing and where the profit motive reigned supreme, the gardens became increasingly torn between, on the one hand, the pursuit of scientific progress, often slow, unrewarding and costly, and, on the other, short-term considerations of productivity and profitability. To ensure their survival, the gardens needed to place botany in an economic framework and demonstrate its pecuniary potential. As such, the plants that seemed to hold pride of place in the reports of the Royal Botanic Institution were those considered useful, and that could turn a profit. This tension between the economic and the scientific value of plants was evidenced during the 1838 annual general meeting of the proprietors:

These examples highlight how the development of botany was envisioned in terms of its political, economic or cultural contribution, and was heavily influenced by the demands of the agricultural sector, both at home and abroad. As Franklin Ginn remarks: ‘By the 19th century, botanic gardens had evolved from havens for the abstract contemplation of God’s wondrous creation, to economic and scientific laboratories where botanists brought the natural world under rational scrutiny and attempted to provide new products for colonial economies’.Footnote ¹⁰² The directors believed that the work of the gardens could reap benefits for the agricultural sector, potentially opening very profitable new markets, and thus they pushed constantly in that direction, seemingly unaware that the size of the gardens and the economic situation were too limiting for such ambitions. In the end, then, despite Murray’s and Hooker’s best efforts at placing the emphasis on the diversity and rarity of the plant collection, science seems indeed to have become less of a priority than financial solvency in the Glasgow Botanic Gardens.

By the 1830s, the gardens’ debts had increased yet again and new sources of income had to be found urgently. Besides the sale of duplicates, annual tickets, proprietors’ shares and annual payments from proprietors, it was decided in 1830 that ‘strangers’ (defined as those residing farther than five miles from Glasgow) could obtain a one-day entrance ticket for the price of one shilling.Footnote ¹⁰³ Thousands of visitors flocked to the gardens each year, either invited by the proprietors and granted free entrance or, from 1830 onwards, as paying visitors: there were 4,000 in 1827, 3,000 in 1830 and 2,300 in 1837 (548 of whom were paying visitors that particular year).Footnote ¹⁰⁴ This greatly contributed to the reputation of the gardens, but only partially alleviated the establishment’s financial woes. Expenditure remained high in the years leading to the sale of the garden grounds in 1841, with inevitable mounting maintenance costs. The botanical institution also fell victim to external circumstances. The economic crisis that struck the mercantile class in 1825 had a direct knock-on effect on the number of annual subscriptions and the sale of shares, as did a devastating outbreak of cholera that swept through the city in 1832, considerably limiting the number of paying visitors that year. Despite the management committee’s best efforts, the financial situation never improved. When the garden grounds in Sandyford were sold in 1841 for £12,000, the institution was still more than £4,000 in debt and faced new challenges with the establishment of a new and larger botanical garden.Footnote ¹⁰⁵