ClegExhib

29. Hopea ponga (Dennstedt) Mabberley (DIPTEROCARPACEAE)

Ilappongu (Mal); haiga (Kan).

Like many ‘dipterocarps’, this is an important timber tree; it can reach 20 metres in height and occurs in evergreen forest of the Western Ghats from southern Maharashtra to southern Tamil Nadu. This drawing was made (and a specimen collected, still in the RBGE herbarium – see Display Case II) in 1857 on Cleghorn’s route from Bangalore to Mangalore, at the start of his first forest tour. The drawing shows the wings that develop from two of the calyx lobes (which help to disperse the fruit), but does not show the most characteristic feature of this species, the spiny galls, caused by the scale insect Mangalorea hopeae, that commonly occur in leaf axils and on the inflorescence. These figured prominently in Rheede’s illustration of ‘Ponga’ in the fourth volume of his Hortus Malabaricus of 1683, where they were mistaken for fruits (see Display Case III). This misled taxonomists and the German botanist A.W. Dennstedt took it to be an Artocarpus (related to breadfruit and jak fruit). The genus was named by William Roxburgh after his teacher John Hope, Regius Keeper of RBGE 1761–86. Francis Buchanan, another Hope pupil, had (like Dennstedt) tried to identify the plants depicted in Hortus Malabaricus, but identified it as a Broussonetia (paper mulberry). Only in 1960 was it finally realised to be a dipterocarp, previously known as Hopea wightiana.
Annotations: Hopea. Boon Ghaut, April /57.

Signed P. Govindoo.

231 x 301 mm.

CNS 17
30. Vateria indica L. (DIPTEROCARPACEAE)

White dammar tree, piney varnish, Indian copal; dhoopada mara (Kan); vellaikoondricam (Tam)
This species was named by Linnaeus, based on a description and illustration under the name ‘Paenoe’ in Rheede’s Hortus Malabaricus (1683). At this time very large trees must have existed, as Rheede described trunks being hollowed out to make boats that could hold 60 or more men! The timber is not greatly valued, but has been used for making coffins and packing cases, and is now in demand in Kerala for plywood. However, this large evergreen tree, which occurs in the forests of the Western Ghats of Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu (up to an altitude of 1220 metres), has other economic uses, as shown by the common names. The resin from the bark, as also noted by Rheede (boiled with oil), is used as a pitch or varnish. Up to 50 % of the seed is made up of a fat, known as Malabar tallow, which has traditionally been used to make soap and candles. This drawing, which shows the fruit, with its characteristic persistent and reflexed calyx, was made at Mangalore on the Malabar Coast, the day after Cleghorn finished writing the first of his Forest Reports for the Madras Government. Cleghorn admired the beauty of this species as an avenue tree in Malabar and Canara, but in December 1855 lamented the waste of the fruits that were allowed to rot, and recommended that experiments be made on the tallow for use as a lubricant for the wheels of railway rolling stock: he thought this a possiblity as the fat remained solid at 95˚F.
Annotations: Vateria Indica. Mangalore, 2 May /58.

230 x 272 mm.

CNS 18
31. Garcinia morella (Gaertner) Desrousseaux (GUTTIFERAE)

Gamboge; aradaala, arisina gurgi (Kan).

One of the chief motives of the EIC was to find economically useful plants in India to reduce the need for expensive imports, and here is an example. In 1852 Cleghorn srote: ‘Finding my colour-box becoming exhausted, I have been enabled to supply ... all its deficiencies without difficulty from the natural products of the surrounding forests of the Malabar Ghauts, including yellow from the Garcinia’.

The pigment gamboge then came from Ceylon and Siam, so Cleghorn, while accompanying a party making a road survey in the Nuggur district, was delighted to find it growing wild in Western India (see Display Case II). The gum is used not only as a pigment but has medicinal uses and Cleghorn sent specimens back to Edinburgh where they were analysed by Robert Christison, his old teacher and Professor of Materia Medica. This drawing was copied and sent to Christison who published it as a woodcut in the Pharmaceutical Journal (see Display Case IV). The genus (to which the mangosteen also belongs) is difficult taxonomically and there was much discussion in which Robert Graham, Regius Keeper of RBGE 1820–45, was involved. He placed this species in a new genus, based on the circumscissile dehiscence of the anthers, from which he derived a generic name Hebradendron (literally Jew-tree), which, perhaps fortunately, has been subsumed back into Garcinia.

Annotations: 118. ‘Arashanagorag’ [in Kannada script]. Garciniaceae. Hebradendron Cambogioides (Grah[am]). Garcinia pictoria (Rox[burgh]). ordinary [i.e. life-] size [against a leaf outline]. A tree 30 to 50 feet high. Nuggur, 27 Feb 1846.

178 x 228 mm.

CN 118
32. Santalum album L. (SANTALACEAE)

Sandalwood; gandhada mara, shreegandha (Kan); sandhanam (Tam); chandana (Sans).

In the Jury Report of the 1855 Madras Exhibition the wood of this small tree was described as ‘chiefly remarkable for its agreeable fragrance, which is a preservative against insects. It is much used in making work-boxes, walking sticks, penholders, and other small articles of fine ornament, but cannot be procured of a large size’. Alexander Hunter at the Madras School of Art made ‘many hundred of engravings’ upon the wood, and found it almost the equal of boxwood. In Karnataka it is still highly valued for carving, for the extraction of oil, making incense and the powder, as a paste, for making tilak marks on the forehead. In Cleghorn’s time sandalwood was still ‘found in abundance in Coorg and Mysore, and sparingly in Canara’, occurring in ‘a belt between the Mulnàd (rain country), and Maidan (open plain)’. One of Cleghorn’s jobs as Conservator was to preserve this valuable timber, and to prevent smuggling – Mapillas (Kerala Muslims) were in the habit of entering Mysore territory and taking it back to the coast where they exchanged it with Kurumbas for salt-fish and coconuts. The plants regenerate freely from seed and in Mysore Colkars managed wild stocks by preventing their being over-run with creepers; after about 20 years the stems could be ‘cut into billets, which are classed according to size, and disposed of [i.e., sold by Government] by weight’.
Annotations: 35. ‘gandhadha mara’ [in Kannada script]. Santalaceae. Santalum album L. Shemoga, 15–10–’45.

195 x 314 mm.

CN 35
33. Tectona grandis L. f. (LABIATAE)

Teak; saaguvaani mara, thaegada mara (Kan); thaekku maram (Tam); saaka (Sans).

One of the most important timber trees of India, in Cleghorn’s time much prized for ship building. This drawing (and a related herbarium specimen – see Display Case II) is of great significance for the history of forest conservation in India. During a survey of Mysore in 1800/1 Francis Buchanan (who studied at RBGE under John Hope in 1780) noted teak in abundance to the west of Shimoga. When Cleghorn revisited this area 45 years later he was shocked by the decline in teak, which he attributed to the burning of forests for shifting cultivation (‘kumri’). It was this that ignited his own interest in forest conservation; to his writing a seminal report on the effects of tropical deforestation for the British Association in 1851/2; and, in 1856, the setting up of the Madras Forest Department. In 1862 Cleghorn wrote: ‘This well-known and far-famed tree grows straight and lofty, with cross-armed panicles of showy white flowers. It seems to require eighty years to attain perfection. The wood is very hard but easily worked; it is soon seasoned, and, being oily, does not injure iron [tools], and shrinks little. It is probably the most durable timber known; hence its value in ship-building ... It is a matter of regret, considering the vast importance of teak timber to England as a maritime nation, that the preservation of the teak forests was so long disregarded’.
Annotations: 18. ‘thyaga’ [in Kannada script]. Verbenaceae. Tectona Grandis Thun[berg]. Shemoga, 15–9–’45

194 x 313 mm

CN 18
34. Murdannia spirata (L.) G. Brückner (COMMELINACEAE)
Though this exquisite plant was drawn in a Madras garden, it is, technically speaking, an arable weed – showing the subjective nature of such definitions. It would not, however, make a good garden plant as the flowers are extremely short-lived. It is a widespread annual, occurring from India and Sri Lanka, through SE Asia to the Philippines and Java. This genus was described in 1840 by John Forbes Royle, whom Cleghorn assisted arranging Indian plant products for the Great Exhibition. The name was given by Royle ‘in compliment to Murdan Aly, a plant collector and keeper of the Herbarium at Saharunpore ... who had acquired a remarkable tact and quickness in detecting new plants, as well as in remembering the characters by which genera and families are distinguished, so as to be able at once to arrange a new discovery in its appropriate place’. Murdan was only the second Indian to be commemorated in a generic name. The plant is related to the tradescantia, and the distinguishing characters of the genus are well shown in the ‘exploded’ flower at bottom left – opposite the three sepals are three fertile stamens with bearded filaments; between which are three sterile staminodes, each with a three-lobed antherode.
Annotations: Commelina sp. [Agri-]Horticultural Gardens, 1856.

231 x 267 mm.

CAH 139
35. Hygroryza aristata (Retzius) Nees (GRAMINEAE)

Valli pullu (Tam)

This floating, aquatic, feathery-rooted grass can form large masses on lakes, tanks and slow-moving streams. It is the only member of a genus described by the German botanist Christian Nees von Esenbeck in the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal in 1833. The generic name, literally ‘water rice’, is appropriate as it belongs to the same Tribe of the grass family as the cultivated rice, Oryza sativa. This relationship is seen in the structure of the spikelet shown on this drawing mid-left – the single flower consists of an ovary with two feathery stigmas, six stamens (most grasses have three), two white, basal lodicules, an awned, pink-tinged lemma (to right), a greenish palea (to left), with no subtending glumes. The species, widespread in India and Sri Lanka also occurring in SE Asia and into southern China, was first described by the Swedish botanist Anders Retzius from material sent to him from India, possibly by J.G. König from the Coromandel Coast. The grass is palatable to cattle and the seeds are said to be eaten by people, though probably only as a famine food. When Rheede described and illustrated it in his Hortus Malabaricus in 1690, he recorded an arcane medicinal use: that ‘tickling of ears, contracted slowly from blocking by phlegm, is removed by this plant boiled in the oil of Sergelim’.
Annotations: Floating in shallow tanks – Common. H.C[leghorn]. A[gri-] H[orticultural] Gardens, [Madras], Oct 1855.

207 x 244 mm.

CAH 144
36. Cynodon dactylon (L.) Persoon (GRAMINEAE)

Bermuda grass; hurryallee grass (Cleghorn); arugam pul (Tam); durva (Sans); garika gaddi, ghericha (Tel); doob (Hind).

This species occurs throughout tropical and warm temperate parts of the world, and was described (in the genus Panicum) by Linnaeus based on specimens from Portugal. It was known to earlier authors including Caspar Bauhin, from whom Linnaeus took the epithet, meaning ‘finger’, from the narrow, radiating spikes of the inflorescence. Due to its leafy stolons it is a popular tropical lawn grass, and makes good fodder, especially for horses. Cleghorn had this drawing lithographed for his 1855 ‘Memorandum on Indian grasses’ for the Madras Military Department (see Display Case IV). The plant is used medicinally, and is of significance to Hindus as one of the plants on which the nectar of immortality (amrita) fell during the churning of the primeval ocean. It was one of the 78 Indian plants on which Sir William Jones published in 1795, quoting the A’t’harvana Veda: ‘May Dúrvà, which rose from the water of life, which has a hundred roots and a hundred stems, efface a hundred of my sins, and prolong my existence on earth for a hundred years’. It is sacred to the elephant-headed god Ganesh, used in funeral rites, and given to newly wed daughters when departing for their husbands’ homes. The artist who has taken such pains with this drawing doubtless agreed with Jones, who thought ‘its flowers, in their perfect state, are among the loveliest objects in the vegetable world, and appear, thro’ a lens, like minute rubies and emeralds in constant motion from the least breath of air’.
Annotations: Cynodon dactylon. Doob. Hind., Gerickay. Tel. ... Tam. St Thome, Nov^r 1855.

220 x 270 mm.

CNS 158
37. Rubia cordifolia L. (RUBIACEAE)

Indian madder; manjitti, poovatthu, shevelli (Tam); manjishta (Sans)

The root and woody stems of various species of the genus Rubia (including the European R. tinctoria) yield the red dye madder. There is, however, confusion over the correct name for what is probably a complex of similar, untidily sprawling, species occurring in hilly parts of Asia and Africa. The dye-yielding species of the Himalaya is now known as R. manjith, but the South Indian form shown here is still known under the name R. cordifolia. In Cleghorn’s second Forest Report (1859) he wrote, under the name ‘munjit’, of the plant depicted here that ‘Samples of this dye-root have been sent to Calcutta and England for experimental trial and report. The product is abundant upon the slopes of the Nilgiris; and if it could be prepared for export so as to be packed in small compass, a trade would probably spring up. There appears to be very little difference between the Nilgiri and Punjab article’. This exquisite drawing resembles the copies that Cleghorn’s artists made for him from engravings, but as no model can be found it must represent a carefully composed plate, perhaps prepared for publication in connection with Cleghorn’s commercial interest in the plant.
Annotations: Rubia cordifolia. Nilgiri.

225 x 279 mm.

CNS 77
38. Impatiens parasitica Beddome (BALSAMINACEAE)
The genus Impatiens is richly represented in the Western Ghats, and species still remain to be described. This one was described only in the year of this drawing – by Lieut. Richard Henry Beddome in a paper in the Madras Journal of Literature and Science (of which Cleghorn was an editor). Beddome was Cleghorn’s assistant Conservator, responsible for the rich forests of the Anamallai (‘elephant hill’) range, and this species may have been collected on the expedition to the area with Cleghorn the previous year. This species is restricted to the Anamallai and adjacent hills, growing on tree trunks between 1500 and 2100 metres. When Beddome published a plate of this species in 1874, he noted that it was by then cultivated in the Nilgiris: ‘a most profuse bloomer, a small mass in a pot being often covered with 60 or 80 flowers and remaining in full bloom from May till November; it is quite hardy in the open air in Ootacamund, never being injured by the slight frosts we experience, it grows admirably in lumps of brick and charcoal’. This drawing is unusual among the collection in showing the plant in a habitat setting; the 1874 lithograph, though based on a different drawing, signed ‘Alwis’, shows a similar habitat, and it is therefore just possible that this drawing may also be the work of one of the de Alwis family of botanical artists who were based at the Peradenyia garden in Ceylon.
Annotations: Impatiens nov. sp. I. parasitica. Anamallai, Sept. 59.

227 x 276 mm.

CNS 24
39. Rudbeckia amplexicaulis Vahl (COMPOSITAE)

Clasping coneflower

An annual herb to 70 cm, which occurs in moist, disturbed habitats in the south-eastern states of the USA and Mexico, but is widely cultivated and sometimes escapes. It was grown in botanic gardens in Madrid, and probably also Vienna, in the 1790s, but was introduced into cultivation to Britain forty years later, by Thomas Drummond from New Orleans and Texas. Drummond, who for a period took over the running of George Don’s botanic garden in Forfar, was a significant North American plant collector, who, after 1831, collected for the Glasgow Botanic Garden before coming to a sticky end in Havana in 1835. From the annotation on the drawing the plant may have been sent to the Lalbagh garden in Bangalore from the Cape of Good Hope. This North American genus was named by Linnaeus for his teacher Olof Rudbeck, professor of medicine at Uppsala, and is characterised by its prominent conical receptacle to which the disc florets (shown here in details top and bottom right) are attached. The disc florets are often dark in colour, giving rise to another common name for the genus: black-eyed Susan. (This species is sometimes still placed in a segregate genus as Dracopis amplexicaulis, the name on this drawing).
Annotations: Senecionidae. Dracopis amplexicaulis, Cass[ini]. (D.C. prod[romus]. V. 558.). [C(ape of) G(ood) H(ope) – deleted]. Mexico. Lalbagh Garden, 25 Nov 1859.

248 x 319 mm.

CMG 37
40. Oenothera tetraptera Cavanilles (ONAGRACEAE)
This evening primrose was described by Antonio Cavanilles from plants growing in the Madrid botanic garden, which had been sent from Sotoluca in Mexico and flowered in 1795. According to William Curtis, who described and illustrated it in the Botanical Magazine in 1800, it was introduced to Britain by way of seeds given by Casimiro Gomez Ortega, director of the Madrid garden, to the Marchioness of Bute. This was Charlotte (née Windsor), whose husband, the first Marquess of Bute, was British Ambassador to Spain from 1795 to 1798 (his father, the third Earl, was the botanical Prime Minister whose patronage allowed John Hope to move the RBGE to its Leith Walk site in 1763). According to Curtis when the flowers of this species open they are pure white, ‘but in the morning they change to a purple colour, fade, and their place is supplied by a fresh succession’. Clearly those shown here are in the latter stage; also shown in the drawing is a fruit with the four wings from which the epithet is derived. It is not known when this species, which is native from Texas, through Mexico to Colombia and western Venezuela, was introduced to India, but by the 1880s it had escaped and become naturalised both in the Nilgiri Hills and on the grassy slopes below Simla in the Himalaya.
Annotations: Onagraceae. Œnothera. Richardson’s Garden, Yercaud – Salem.

217 x 273 mm.

CMG 28
41. Combretum coccineum (Sonnerat) Lamarck (COMBRETACEAE)

Scarlet Poivrea (Brown cat.), Madagascar or scarlet combretum; L’aigrette (Sonnerat); chigonier de Madagascar (Lamarck)

This spectacular climbing shrub was a favourite in British hothouses in the nineteenth century and was in cultivation at RBGE by 1827. It is native to Madagascar, and one of several spectacular plants introduced from there to Mauritius, and thence to the rest of the world. It was first described by Pierre Sonnerat while naturalist on an expedition to India and China (1774–81) sponsored by Louis XVI. Sonnerat later worked as a naturalist based in Pondicherry, where he commissioned botanical drawings from Indian artists, but William Roxburgh was dismissive of his botanical abilities. According to the nurseryman George Loddiges the flowering panicles of this plant could be ‘above a foot in each direction ... composed of an innumerable mass of blossoms, which are of the most brilliant red that can be conceived’. In his 1866 Handbook of the Madras Agri-Horticultural Garden, R.N. Brown noted that it was ‘a very elegant climbing shrub, well adapted for covering trellis work’. The generic name on the drawing is one given by A.P. de Candolle to include this and several other species and commemorates Pierre Poivre, Sonnerat’s uncle, and founder of the Mauritius botanic garden, but the genus is no longer regarded as distinct from Combretum. (See Display Case I).
Annotations: Poivrea. Horticultural Gardens [Madras], May 1855.

234 x 294 mm.

CAH 39
42. Furcraea cf. foetida (L.) Haworth (AGAVACEAE)

Mauritius hemp; seemai katthaalai (Tam)

A genus of about 20 species of large, succulent, rosette plants from tropical America; the flowers have characteristically swollen filaments (top right) and styles. Most are ‘hapaxanthic’, that is, die after flowering, and several, including this one, are cultivated for fibre extracted from the leaves. This species propagates itself by bulbils that develop into plants, which arise on the inflorescence where flowers have fallen. The genus was named, by E.P. Ventenat, after Antoine François Fourcroy, a distinguished chemist and naturalist with a somewhat clouded reputation for the role he played (or didn’t) as a member of the Convention during the French Revolution in which the great chemist Antoine Lavoisier lost his head. In 1855, under the name F. gigantea, fibre from this species (5–6 feet in length) was exhibited by A.T. Jaffrey from the Agri-Horticultural Garden, which was said to be ‘a little finer than the Agave fibre, but possessed of similar properties’. In South India the plant is widely naturalised: in Karnataka, at least, growing in slightly wetter areas than the various naturalised species of Agave. In common with many groups of which it is hard to make herbarium specimens, the taxonomy and definition of species within the genus is uncertain, and J.R. Drummond and D. Prain in 1906 doubted the identity of the ‘Mauritius Hemp plant of S. India’ with true F. foetida.
Annotations: Amaryllidaceae. Fourcroya gigantia Vent[enat]. [Agri-]Hort[icultural] Gardens, 2^nd August /53.

254 x 364 mm.

CAH 138
43. Pelargonium cf. inquinans (L.) L’Héritier (GERANIACEAE)

Scarlet geranium (Cleghorn cat.)

In the wild this species is a softly woody shrub up to two metres in height, restricted to the area between the Eastern Cape and Transkei of South Africa. It is used there medicinally (for headaches and colds) and to assist with (or at least disguise) personal hygiene problems. It was one of the first pelargoniums to be cultivated in Europe and has been widely used in hybridization (the drawing may not be the ‘pure’ species). It was described in the genus Geranium by Linnaeus, who cited earlier descriptions and illustrations including one made in James Sherard’s garden at Eltham published by J.J. Dillenius in 1732, but it was first grown in England by Henry Compton, Bishop of London, in his garden at Fulham Palace. The species was transferred to the genus Pelargonium by the French botanist Charles-Louis L’Héritier de Brutelle during his stay in London in 1786/7. The circumstances were strange: L’Héritier had fled France with the South American herbarium of Joseph Dombey, which became the subject of a diplomatic incident between France and Spain. He took the opportunity to study the plants in London herbaria and gardens, and left a manuscript on Geraniaceae with Joseph Banks, some of which (including this species) were published in Hortus Kewensis. The full manuscript was never published as L’Héritier’s life was cut short in 1800, the victim of an unknown assassin. The epithet, which means ‘stained’, refers to the leaves which Linnaeus believed turned brownish when handled.
Annotations: Geranium. Garden, Bangalore.

185 x 275 mm.

CMG 8
44. Ochroma pyramidale (Lamarck) Urban (BOMBACACEAE)

Balsa wood tree, down tree, downy-leaved ochroma (Cleghorn cat.)

This tree, which grows to 20 metres, is native to tropical America (from Mexico to Brazil) and the West Indies. It is renowned for its extremely light wood, which (at least until the advent of computer games) was much favoured by small boys for making model aeroplanes. Given its properties and handsome, bat-pollinated, flowers it was noted by early travellers to the Antilles and formally described in the Linnaean system under various names at the end of the eighteenth century. Although Antonio Cavanilles coined the name Bombax pyramidale and made an excellent description and plate of the plant, it was J.B. Lamarck who first published Cavanilles’ name. The Swede Olof Swartz first described the genus in which it is now placed, and called it Ochromus lagopus, one of the names on this drawing. Humboldt and Bonpland found the tree in Mexico in 1787, and the latter described it in his account of the botanical finds of their travels under the other name appearing on this drawing – Cheirostemon platanodies. This generic name, literally ‘hand-stamen’, refers to the five fused stamens, which wrap like a hand around the spirally-twisted stigma. The inside walls of the long, five-angled fruit are covered in long brown hairs, called by Lamarck a ‘duvet’. This was one of the ‘silk cottons’ exhibited at the 1855 Madras Exhibition, then used only for stuffing pillows, but of potential use in paper making. Alexander Tulloch (1788–1878) was a senior officer with the 33^rd Madras Regiment of Native Infantry, and in 1855 was one of the Vice-Presidents of the Agri-Horticultural Society.
Annotations: Bombacaceae. Ochroma lagopus. Cheirostemon platanoides H[umboldt]. & B[onpland]. Gen^l. Tulloch’s Garden, Madras. Fl. Feb ’57.

482 x 305 mm.

CMG 1