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| The newly refurbished and opened Temperate House at Kew |
On Friday 11th May I was invited to attend a workshop on ‘Economic Botany in the UK’ at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. With large thanks to Kew’s first Director, Sir William Jackson Hooker Kew Gardens holds a substantial collection of material classed as ‘economic botany’ a term which is unfamiliar to most. Economic botany is the study of useful plants. Such collections combine raw specimens with cultural artefacts which the raw material has been crafted into, combining natural history specimens with cultural ‘ethnographic’ objects, often referred to as ‘biocultural’ collections.
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| Kew's economic botany collection as displayed to the public as a Museum in 1847. The Museum closed in the 1950s. |
At the height of Empire such collections were amassed and displayed in dedicated museums and galleries during the Victoria era to demonstrate the successes of Imperial expansion, global trade and exploration (which can be translated as exploitation of natural resources in the colonies by the British Empire and underpinned negative legacies of Empire such as colonisation and slavery).
As part of a three-year AHRC funded project ‘The Mobile Museum’ will examine the circulation of objects into and out of Kew Museum between 1847 and 1987. The Museum of Economic Botany at Kew was originally established by Hooker in 1847 to house ‘all kinds of useful and curious Vegetable products’ However, in the 1980’s the Museum buildings closed, the displays were disbanded and the Economic Botany collection moved to a purpose-built research store. Today, the collection, numbering some 100,000 items is a key resource. Throughout its history the entry and exit books provide clear evidence of the Museum as an important centre of knowledge exchange between other institutions, with a large number of exchanges and transfers from Kew to Museums in the UK and overseas, of which the Pitt Rivers Museum was one recipient.
The workshop visited the project at its half way stage whereby lots of data about the collection has been gathered and the team are now looking more at data analysis, interpretation and education. We heard of a concurrent project looking at one of Kew’s eminent donor’s, Richard Spruce, an English botanist who spent many years collecting specimens from the Amazon rainforest. The theme of duplicates ran through the day with Spruce amassing a great number of specimens with the endless distribution of duplicates to Museum collections back in the UK evident in collection histories. Presentations from Manchester Museum, Warrington Museum, and Glasgow Museums followed, all institutions having significant botany collections and having benefited from the various redistributing of economic botany objects from Kew, which have largely been split between botany and ethnographic collections for curation and display today.
I was struck by the similarities of Warrington Museum with the Pitt Rivers Museum with its galleried layout and wall cases. The botany gallery at Warrington displays material by use and purpose such as ‘the plant as dye’. For a long time, the botany gallery served as a vocational gallery for the local population highlighting that many local industries such tanning, weaving and chemical manufacture depends on plants. We heard how at Glasgow, of the thousands of specimens that were transferred from Kew, only a handful are known to survive today and no raw materials, only the end products of economic botany. Collections care, conservation, limitations of record keeping and changes in classification could explain the unaccounted-for material. However, of the material accounted for the most cohesive outcome of the economic botany collections to have come from Kew are the bark cloth including important samples of Hawaiian and Tahitian bark cloth from the voyage of HMS Blonde accompanied by naturalist Andrew Bloxam in 1824 and HMS Galatea in 1867-1869 commanded by Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, Queen Victoria’s second son.
A tasty lunch the Orangery at Kew, a building which once exhibited the wood samples of the economic botany collections was followed by a fascinating tour of the economic botany collection as it is stored today led by Mark Nesbitt and Caroline Cornish. At the stores we were able to view the entry and exit books kept by Kew, the exit book being of particular interest as the project is focusing on dispersal as much as acquisition, unusual in collections research where it is more common to give greater weight to how, when and why the object was acquired rather than its afterlife should it leave the Museum, which we are learning from this project can be just as colourful and interesting. Also brought to our attention at the store was a ‘Wardian case’ invented by Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward. The Wardian case proved an ideal way to transport plant specimens from the colonies aboard ship as the wooden framed glass case provided the most suitable micro climate for plants to survive in.
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| Warrington Museum |
The workshop visited the project at its half way stage whereby lots of data about the collection has been gathered and the team are now looking more at data analysis, interpretation and education. We heard of a concurrent project looking at one of Kew’s eminent donor’s, Richard Spruce, an English botanist who spent many years collecting specimens from the Amazon rainforest. The theme of duplicates ran through the day with Spruce amassing a great number of specimens with the endless distribution of duplicates to Museum collections back in the UK evident in collection histories. Presentations from Manchester Museum, Warrington Museum, and Glasgow Museums followed, all institutions having significant botany collections and having benefited from the various redistributing of economic botany objects from Kew, which have largely been split between botany and ethnographic collections for curation and display today.
I was struck by the similarities of Warrington Museum with the Pitt Rivers Museum with its galleried layout and wall cases. The botany gallery at Warrington displays material by use and purpose such as ‘the plant as dye’. For a long time, the botany gallery served as a vocational gallery for the local population highlighting that many local industries such tanning, weaving and chemical manufacture depends on plants. We heard how at Glasgow, of the thousands of specimens that were transferred from Kew, only a handful are known to survive today and no raw materials, only the end products of economic botany. Collections care, conservation, limitations of record keeping and changes in classification could explain the unaccounted-for material. However, of the material accounted for the most cohesive outcome of the economic botany collections to have come from Kew are the bark cloth including important samples of Hawaiian and Tahitian bark cloth from the voyage of HMS Blonde accompanied by naturalist Andrew Bloxam in 1824 and HMS Galatea in 1867-1869 commanded by Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, Queen Victoria’s second son.
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| Wardian case in the collections at Kew |
A tasty lunch the Orangery at Kew, a building which once exhibited the wood samples of the economic botany collections was followed by a fascinating tour of the economic botany collection as it is stored today led by Mark Nesbitt and Caroline Cornish. At the stores we were able to view the entry and exit books kept by Kew, the exit book being of particular interest as the project is focusing on dispersal as much as acquisition, unusual in collections research where it is more common to give greater weight to how, when and why the object was acquired rather than its afterlife should it leave the Museum, which we are learning from this project can be just as colourful and interesting. Also brought to our attention at the store was a ‘Wardian case’ invented by Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward. The Wardian case proved an ideal way to transport plant specimens from the colonies aboard ship as the wooden framed glass case provided the most suitable micro climate for plants to survive in.
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| Walking sticks manufactured by Henry Howell & Co. |
We were also walked down aisles of wood specimens including a sample of Acacia dealbata which formed part of the Tasmanian Timber Trophy, a defining feature of the 1862 London International Exhibition. I found most interesting a collection of walking sticks acquired from manufacturer Henry Howell & Co. The relationship between Howell & Co and Kew proved mutually beneficial as Howell donated hundreds of walking sticks, both the final product and the ‘blank’ for each wood. Kew were able to advise on the durability and suitability of the particular wood specimen for purpose. Of course there were items which one would expect to find in an economic botany/ethnographic collection today such as temple models carved from pith and samples of lace bark which one curator observed had been catalogued as ‘dusters’ in her collection due to the natural shape. We were also shown an incredible bark cloth poncho called a tiputa from Tahiti which had been carefully conserved by conservator Misa Tamura during the project ‘Situating Pacific barkcloth in time and place’ We have similar tiputa in the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum.
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| Tiputa from Tahiti in the Kew collection |
The final presentation of the day came from Caroline Cornish and Iban textile expert Traude Gavin. Traude visited the Pitt Rivers in 2017 to investigate further the complex history of a very old Iban cloth in the collections. Traude and Caroline’s talk looked more at the provenance of the cloth and how it came to be at the Pitt Rivers, another example of the complex exchange networks taking place in 19th-century collecting of botanical, natural history and ethnographic specimens and artefacts.
The cloth has a complex history. It found its way to the Pitt Rivers Museum in 1886 having been transferred from the Ashmolean Museum. However, it would appear that the textile was originally one of thirteen cloths considered of duplicate value to have been sent from Sarawak by Sir James Brooke, the first Rajah of Sarawak. Brooke sent the cloths to his friend, scientist and botanist William Hooker, first director of Kew Gardens. The cloth was sent by Brooke with commercial enterprise in mind, Brooke was interested in opportunities for economic development in Sarawak and the cloth demonstrated that it was possible that natural cotton used in textile manufacture could be grown in a region of Borneo effectively under British rule and ripe for exploitation. Hooker decided to keep one of the thirteen cloths for Kew and sent a number of them to his friend at the British Museum Augustus Wollaston Franks. Franks, in turn was trustee of the Christy collection along with Hooker’s son and predecessor Joseph Hooker. The Henry Christy collection formed the basis of the ethnographic collection of the British Museum. In 1869 the textile destined for the PRM was included as part of an exchange with the Ashmolean Museum which in turn was sent in 1886 to the Pitt Rivers Museum just as the Museum opened to the public. Since then the cloth has been studied by researchers and information about the cloth has been accumulated and added to the Museum database.
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| Iban textile at the Pitt Rivers Museum; 1886.1.259 |
This particular case study acts to illustrate the concept of the ‘duplicate’ and the network of exchange between institutions driven by individuals in place during the 19th century. The project team hope to discover more about the dispersed collections from Kew including the items that eventually came to the Pitt Rivers Museum so do follow the projects progress via the Mobile Museum website.
Faye Belsey
Deputy Head of Collections
