British Botanic Gardens and Stations

Abstract

IN the article on British botanic gardens and stations in the jubilee number of NATURE (p. 263) the statement is made that by the middle of the eighteenth century, when Kew and the Botanic Garden at St. Vincent were founded, “the purpose of botanical collections had become largely limited to the assemblage of plants interesting because of their rarity. Presently a healthy reaction against this rather narrow outlook arose . . .,” and the example is quoted of the Calcutta Garden, founded in 1786 for the purpose, not of collecting rare plants as articles of curiosity, etc., “but for establishing a stock for disseminating such articles as may prove beneficial to the inhabitants, as well as to the natives of Great Britain, and which ultimately may tend to the extension of the national commerce and riches.” Your contributor appears to have overlooked the fact that a very similar purpose underlay the founding of the St. Vincent Garden, as shown by the advertisement which appeared in the Transactions of the Society of Arts for 1762, offering a reward “to anyone who would cutivate a spot in the West Indies in which plants useful as medicine and profitable as articles of commerce might be propagated, and where nurseries of the valuable productions of Asia and other distant parts might be formed for the benefit of his Majesty's Colonies.”