Author: Henry NoltiePage 1 of 6

The Indian botanical drawings reproduced in Ocean Flowers

In Spring 2004 a memorable exhibition curated by Carol Armstrong and Catherine de Zegher was shown at the Drawing Center in New York, and later that year at…

The South Indian cereal drawings of P. Mooroogasen Moodelliar

During my work on Hugh Cleghorn I became very interested in the Madras School of Art, the first of its type in India, established on 1 May 1850…

Two liliaceous drawings by Stella Ross-Craig

Stella Ross-Craig (1906–2006) is best known for her unsurpassed, uncoloured, pen and ink Drawings of British Plants (1948–1973). However, she was also an accomplished painter in watercolour. From…

The Wardie Cottages: the deaths of Edward Forbes and John Goodsir

Intrigued by the recent Botanics Story concerning letters from the anatomist John Goodsir to his Edinburgh University professorial botanical colleague John Hutton Balfour, and involving their mutual friend…

A tangled Calcutta-Caledonian web: James Kerr, John Fleming and John Hope’s engravings of asafoetida

One of the few benefits of getting older is that, assuming one still has one’s marbles and keeps one’s eyes open, new evidence can crop up and fall…

When is a Nepalese pine not a Nepalese pine?

At the Natural History Museum I’ve recently catalogued a collection of 314 botanical watercolours made at the Saharunpur Botanic Garden in northern India between 1843 and 1866 for…

A Yorkshire copy of Bentham’s Illustrated Handbook of the British Flora

Elsewhere I’ve admitted to suffering from a condition called beziehungswahn, a mania for making connections. There is a particular satisfaction when the connections made are between divergent and…

A visit to Leny Glen

A party from RBGE was invited to see the recent restoration work undertaken by Janis Binnie on the plantings in the lower part of Leny Glen, Callander, Perthshire….

Shock! Horror! Alien invader reaches genteel Moray Place

Moray Place is the dodecagonal circus, 325 yards in diameter, which forms the centrepiece of that masterpiece of buildings and gardens designed by James Gillespie (Graham) in the…

Two little-known temporary Superintendents of the Calcutta Botanic Garden: George Swinton and James William Grant

In a book chapter on Indian sculpture in the collection of the National Museum of Scotland (NMS), I recently came across the names of two collectors (and indirect…

Chloris Via-Melvilliana – addendum, June 2020

Botanopithecus has continued to watch for the arrival of new plants in the street. Six of those recorded in 2005, but not seen on 6 May, have now…

A Calcutta botanical drawing of Hamiltonia suaveolens with an interesting provenance

Some years ago, as part of the barter economy, I acquired a handsome, but all but empty, early nineteenth-century album, its calf spine lettered in gilt ‘CHINESE PAINTINGS’….

A Lockdown Flora of Melville Street, Edinburgh: Chloris Via-Melvilliana

Henry Noltie Introduction In 1823 Robert Brown published an account of the plants collected on Melville Island in the Canadian Arctic during the first voyage (1819–20) commanded by…

Yew trees, the Canaries and a Darwinian Connection in a Perthshire Churchyard

The kirkyard at Fortingall in Perthshire has, for several centuries, been a magnet for tourists with an arboricultural bent – for the sake of its ancient yew. This…

Botanical Drawings made in Nepal for Nathaniel Wallich in 1821 by Vishnupersaud and Gorachand

When the museum and library of the East India Company, following its inheritance by the India Office of the British government, was dispersed in 1879 its fragments were…

Francis Buchanan’s Bengal Survey botanical drawings and specimens reunited after 203 years

Since September I have been working, on and off, on the fantastic collection of Indian botanical drawings at our sister organisation, Kew. This started out when asked to…

Sir Henry Raeburn and Indian Botany

Recently I was looking at the catalogue of the memorable exhibition of Raeburn portraits held in the Royal Scottish Academy in 1997. In it is reproduced a radiant…

The Strange Grotto

The definite article is important: the feature referred to, part of a gigantic designed landscape at the gateway to the Scottish Highlands, is romantic rather than peculiar. The…

Early flowering of Prinsepia utilis

  Walking along the path at the foot of the Chinese Hillside last week I noticed that recent clearing has exposed some interesting plants from among the previously…

Bruce’s Abyssinian plants in the Leith Walk Garden

Following some hair-raising adventures, James Bruce of Kinnaird (1730-1794) was the first white Anglo-Saxon Protestant to reach the fountains of the Blue Nile in Ethiopia. He discounted the…