Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
of Kew Garden's first director, and became a close
friend of Charles Darwin. After studying medicine,
between 1838 and 1843, he was assistant medical
officer on a southern hemisphere expedition on
the ships
Erebus
and
Terror
that reached close to
Antarctica. He was able to visit Tierra del Fuego, New
Zealand, southern Australia, South Africa and several
mid-Atlantic islands. There followed a four-year period
in Britain, which enabled him to pursue an interest in
palaeobotany. Between 1847 and 1851, he travelled
extensively on the Indian subcontinent, collecting
25 previously unrecorded species of rhododendron
(such as
R. cinnabarinum
,
R. falconeri
,
R.hodgsonii
,
R. thomsonii
and
R. griffithanum
) in the eastern
Himalaya region. He also recorded several
Primula
species such as
P. capitata
and
P. sikkimensis
.
In total, he collected 700 plant species from the
subcontinent.
In 1877, his journey around the USA with the American
botanist Asa Gray was notable in establishing a
similarity in distribution between some plant genera
(such as
Thuja
,
Tsuga
,
Magnolia
and
Catalpa
) in both
southeast China and in the far distant southeast
USA. Perhaps the most striking example is that of
the
Liriodendron
genus (
tulip tree
see Figure 2.12).
There are only two known species within this genus.
Liriodendron tulipifera
,
a quite common British Isles
garden tree, has a native distribution in the eastern
states of the USA from Vermont down to Louisiana,
especially in the southern Appalachians.
Liriodendron
chinense
,
however,
occurs 10,000 km away in the
montane forests of East Asia, from the Yangtze River
in China into northern Vietnam. Fossil evidence of
Liriodendron
shows that this plant genus was formerly
distributed over the northern hemisphere, and that the
present two tulip trees are '
relic species
' (a similar
situation to the two widely separated
tapir
mammal
species of Malaysia and South America).
Charles Maries
(1851-1902) was born in a
Warwickshire village, the son of a shoemaker. An early
influence was Reverend Henslow, his headmaster,
who was to become Professor of Botany at the Royal
Horticultural Society. From the age of 18, Maries
worked for seven years in his elder brother's nursery
in Lytham, Lancashire. He then made the move to
join the large London branch of the Veitch horticultural
company, where he specialized in Japanese and
Chinese plants.
He was sent in 1877 to Japan to obtain seeds of
'new' conifers. In the north of Honshu Island, he
collected
Abies mariesii
and
Abies sachalinensis
(previously described but not introduced to the west).
On Hokkaido, he collected the shrubs
Acer nikoense
,
2
(a)
(b)
Figure 2.20
(a) Charles Maries who collected
H
ydrangea macrophylla
in Japan (source: Wikimedia
Commons) (b)
Hydrangea macrophylla
Azalea rollisoni
,
Hydrangea macrophylla '
Mariesii
'
,
Styrax obassia
and
Viburnum plicatum '
Mariesii',
the tree
Abies yessoensis
, the climbers
Actinidia
kolomikta
and
Schizophragma hydrangeoides
, the
perennial
Platycodon grandiflorus
and the epiphytic
fern
Davallia mariesii.
In 1878, Maries visited China, travelling first to
Mount Lushan in Jiangxi Province where he collected
Cryptomeria japonica
,
Hamamelis mollis
,
Larix
kaempferi
,
Lilium lancifolium
,
Liriodendron chinenses
,
Pseudolarix amabilis
and
Rhododendron fortunei
. Then
began his intended main project in China, to visit the
Yangtze valley, but poor communication with the local
population led to only a few species such as
Primula
obconica
being collected. On a short visit to Japan,
he collected the square bamboo (
Chimonobambusa
quadrangularis
). He returned to England in 1879.
A year or two later, Maries moved away from plant
collecting, taking up a post of garden superintendent
