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Explorers
The Explorers
'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.'
Carl
Linnaeus, Glory of the Scientist (1737)
Plant exploration has been going on since before tha dawn of recorded
history. These pages start with a general overview of the earliest
known expeditions...
A time of great adventure and discovery couched in the
Age of Reason, a time when Botany was merely a branch of medicine
and practiced almost exclusively by doctors and surgeons, and
a time when the world was opening up to the concept of scientific
discovery.
The defining individual of the 'Golden Age
of Botany' would have to be Carl
Linnaeus, but there were many who worked on theories that
would later influence Linnaeus in developing his system of
classification. More |
An age defined by a deceptively simple invention, a tool
that would allow for the transportation of the most delicate
plant specimens, for scientific examination and to enhance
the collections of wealthy enthusiasts. But an invention that
would also allow for the establishment of the tea industry
in India, the rubber industry in South East Asia, and the establishment
of banana, coffee, citrus, cocoa, and vanilla plantations throughout
the world's tropical regions, forever changing the planet. More |
An age of great growth, and of great destruction, a time when humanity began
to truely believe that it understood the world around it, yet so often failed
to notice that very world slipping away.
'We may well wonder whether there can be
any new plant left to be introduced, so great is the variety
we possess, and so far afield have collectors searched'
Frank Kingdon-Ward,
1930
When Frank Kingdon-Ward wrote those words a lifetime ago,
little did anyone suspect that many new plants were yet to
be discovered, and many more would disapear. From the earliest
years of the 20th Century the evidence was clear
that the race to save endangered species had begun. More
|
The period from the earliest recorded plant finding expeditions
to the days when the science of botany was first emerging.
It is almost certain that early nomadic peoples valued certain
fruit trees they would encounter on their travels, and would
likely have 'assisted' the development of groves of these
trees to ensure good crops on their seasonal return to the
region. Since the production of fruit suitable for human
consumption takes considerable resources on the part of the
trees, these groves would have occurred in areas where natural
resources were already abundant. More |
The Botanical Artists
While plants have been portrayed through the ages using simple or
stylized drawing methods, the art and accuracy of the botanical
artist is a relatively recent development, paralleling the development
of the science of botany itself.
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