Provincial authorities and botanical provinces: Elizabeth Warren’s 'Hortus Siccus of the Indigenous Plants of Cornwall'

Naylor, S. (2007) Provincial authorities and botanical provinces: Elizabeth Warren’s 'Hortus Siccus of the Indigenous Plants of Cornwall'. Garden History, 35(Sup 2), pp. 84-95.

Abstract

This paper traces the rise and demise of a regional botanical mapping project: Elizabeth Warren and the Royal Cornwall Horticultural Society's Hortus Siccus of the Indigenous Plants of Cornwall, compiled in the latter half of the 1830s. It looks at the Society's Indigenous Plants Exhibitions, Warren's curatorship of the resulting dried herbarium and the wider regional botanical culture in which the project was developed. It also examines the way in which Warren developed and promoted the collection and its collectors, most notably through her connections with William Hooker at the Royal Botanic Garden, Kew. It then considers the effects of the natural historian H. C. Watson's criticism of Warren's botanical survey and John Ralfs's response to it - his manuscript 'The Flora of West Cornwall' (1878-84). The paper concludes by reflecting on the changing relations between regional studies and larger national endeavours to survey Britain's plant life.

• Item Type: Articles
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Naylor, Professor Simon
• Authors: Naylor, S.
• College/School: College of Science and Engineering > School of Geographical and Earth Sciences
• Journal Name: Garden History
• Publisher: Maney Publishing
• ISSN: 0307-1243