Plantae Henryanae. SeamusO'BrienChina, Mother of Gardens, in the Twenty‐First Century, Volume 8 (part 2): 43–619. Published in 2025 by China Forestry Publishing House. ISBN 9787521931198.
Year: 2025
Type: book-review
Abstract: There can be no doubt of the importance of the Irish medico, botanist, dendrologist and forester Augustine Henry in the exploration of China's flora.Employed from 1881-1900 in the service of the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs Service, he was posted to several different parts of China, notably Yichang in Hubei (1882-1889), Hainan (1889), Taiwan (1892-1895), Mengzi, Yunnan (1896-1898) and Simao, Yunnan 1898-1900, as well as shorter periods in Shanghai.One of his duties at Yichang was to impose customs duties on materia medica being transported down the Yangtze: these included quantities of medicinal plants, known only by their indigenous names.Keen to know more, in March 1885 he wrote to Joseph Hooker at Kew, offering to collect specimens in exchange for determinations.This was too good an offer to pass up, and Hooker wrote back advising Henry to collect in multiples of ten vouchers for each collection number.The result was extraordinary: 15,862 collection numbers, or 158,620 specimens, representing 5,364 taxa.Any field collector will recognise the immense amount of work this entailed, though Henry was assisted in both collection and management of the specimens by Chinese assistants.Sadly, they are seldom named, but an important member of the team in his second stint in Yunnan was 'Old Ho.'It is the result of this labour that is catalogued in Plantae Henryanae, itself an amazing achievement by Seamus O'Brien, who started working on it in 1999 (pers.comm.), an expression of a life-long interest in Ireland's premier botanist.A previous publication by him is In the Footsteps of Augustine Henry and his Chinese plant collectors (Garden Art Press, 2011).As Curator of the National Botanic Gardens, Kilmacurragh, in County Wicklow, O'Brien also has an active interest in cultivating Chinese plants, and this is a strong feature of the present work.After an introductory essay, the bulk of Plantae Henryanae is a catalogue listing (alphabetically by genus) all the plants known (from a literature review) to have been collected by Henry in China, using current POWO nomenclature.Names used in Henry's day are provided as synonyms, and literature citations of specimens/collections are given.Collections made under Henry numbers are listed by province, location and collection number.This is followed (or not, in the case of more obscure taxa) by an informative discursive paragraph (or several for important species, e.g.Camellia sinensis, found as a wild plant by Ho; Davidia involucrata; Eucommia ulmoides, Henry's collections of which founded both a new genus and family; and the hugely popular garden plant Lilium henryi.The famous hoax specimens, prepared by a collector,
Source: Curtis s Botanical Magazine
DOI: 10.1111/curt.70019
Author: John Grimshaw
Language: English
Subfield: History and Philosophy of Science
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4413936271