Publications

The Garden
January 2004

Pressing matters for Council

A new addition to the Lindley Library reminds Brent Elliott of a dilemma the Society once faced

The recent acquisition by the library of an album of pressed flowers has thrown
an interesting light on the Society’s history.

In 1864 the RHS Council, in order ‘to encourage and extend the study of British botany throughout the country’, announced a prize for the most complete collection of dried specimens of a given county’s flora.

Ruefully, Council then had to publish in its Proceedings no fewer than four petitions against its competition, signed by a respectable chunk of the botanical community, from Sir William Hooker and Charles Darwin to John Stuart Mill.

Their complaint, to put it in modern terms, was that amateur collectors were already damaging local biodiversity, and that the Society should not encourage this. Council amended the proposal to the best collection of 200 specimens, rare plants to be excluded.

The prizes were announced in 1864: four gold medals, 26 silver and 11 bronze. The winner for Hampshire was Miss M L Kirkman, of Westhill, Winchester. Her medal, and an album of her pressed plants, have now been deposited with the library by Colin Plant, who discovered and salvaged them some years ago. The album bears the introductory date of 1835, but since so many of the plants included come from areas outside Hampshire it is probably not the prize-winning album.

There are 84 pages of specimens in varying degrees of preservation, providing a glimpse of amateur botanising in the 19th century, as well as a reminder of one of the Society’s more ethically complex moments.

‘The Hidden Herbarium Revealed’, an exhibition featuring images and specimens of 20th-century garden plants, will be held from 20 January to 20 February in the Upper Reading Room of the Lindley Library.

Brent Elliott is RHS Librarian and Archivist

The RHS Lindley Library holds more than 50,000 books, 1,500 periodicals, 25,000 botanical drawings, and the UK's largest collection of horticultural trade catalogues. These are held in the RHS Lindley Library and may be consulted at the London branch at 80 Vincent Square, London, SW1, which is open to the public Monday - Friday, 9.30am - 5.30pm.
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