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The journey of exploration undertaken by Charles Darwin FRS during the voyage of HMS Beagle has a central place within the historical development of evolutionary theory and has been intensively studied. Despite this, new facts continue to emerge about some of the details of Darwin's activities. Drawing on recently published Darwin material and unpublished letters in the archives of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, we document a hitherto unexamined link between Darwin and John Tweedie (1775-1862), a relatively obscure Scottish gardener turned South American plant collector. All of the available evidence points to a meeting between the two men in Buenos Aires in 1832. Tweedie provided Darwin with information about the geography of the Rio Paraná, including the locality of fossilized wood eroding from the river bank. It also seems likely that Tweedie supplied Darwin with seeds that he later shipped back to John Stevens Henslow in Cambridge. Although this brief meeting was at the time relatively unimportant to either man, echoes of that encounter have resonated with Tweedie's descendants to the present day and have formed the basis for a family story about a written correspondence between Darwin and Tweedie. Local information supplied to Darwin by residents such as Tweedie was clearly important and deserves further attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper examines how communities of naturalists in mid-nineteenth-century Britain were formed and solidified around the shared practices of public meetings, the publication and reading of periodicals, and the making and printing of images. By focusing on communities of naturalists and the sites of their communication, this article undermines the distinction between amateur and professional scientific practice. Building on the notion of imagined communities, this paper also shows that in some cases the editors and illustrators utilized imagery to construct a specifically British naturalist community. Following three ‘amateur’ natural-history periodicals (Science Gossip , Midland Naturalist and the Journal of the Quekett Microscopical Club) the article demonstrates how the production and reproduction of natural history in the nineteenth century was contingent on community debate – and that this debate both was highly visual and moved across printed and geographical boundaries. This paper investigates images both for their purported success and for their ascribed value to natural history. Additionally, it considers the debates over their limitations and alleged failures of printing. Altogether, the article argues that investigating the communal practices of observation, writing, drawing and engraving allows for a better understanding of the shared practices of nineteenth-century natural history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the topics of natural history and botanical research done in Jamaica during the eighteenth century, the article explores how such knowledge was translated in speech. It considers oral culture in the communication in science, historical geography, and the British Atlantic world. Topics considered include printed texts, science and imperialism, the cross-cultural communication of traditional ecological knowledge, and slavery. The relationship between Scottish doctor and Jamaican botanist William Wright and English naturalist and botanist Sir Joseph Banks is explored.

In 1868, Lydia Becker (1827-1890), the renowned Manchester suffragist, announced in a talk before the British Association for the Advancement of Science that the mind had no sex. A year later, she presented original botanical research at the BAAS, contending that a parasitic fungus forced normally single-sex female flowers of Lychnis diurna to develop stamens and become hermaphroditic. This essay uncovers the complex relationship between Lydia Becker's botanical research and her stance on women's rights by investigating how her interest in evolutionary theory, as well as her correspondence with Charles Darwin, critically informed her reform agendas by providing her with a new vocabulary for advocating for equality. One of the facts that Becker took away from her work on Lychnis was that even supposedly fixed, dichotomous categories such as biological sex became unfocused under the evolutionary lens. The details of evolutionary theory, from specific arguments on structural adaptations to more encompassing theories on heredity (i.e., pangenesis), informed Becker's understanding of human physiology. At the same time, Becker's belief in the fundamental equality of the sexes enabled her to perceive the distinction between inherent, biological differences and culturally contingent ones. She applied biological principles to social constructs as she asked: Do analogous evolutionary forces act on humans? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Charles Whitlaw (otherwise Whitly) was born in Yester, East Lothian, and received training in Edinburgh as a horticulturist before emigrating to North America where he spent about two decades from 1794. He collected botanical specimens, some of which are preserved in the herbarium at the National Botanic Gardens, Glasnevin, Dublin. In the United States, Whitlaw obtained a patent for processing the fibres of Urtica whitlawii which was named after him by Muhlenberg. On returning to Britain, he was proposed for election as a Fellow of The Linnean Society of London, but was black-balled. Returning again to North America Whitlaw gave lectures on botanical topics to general audiences using hand-painted 'transparencies' acquired from Dr Robert Thornton. Later Whitlaw established 'patent medicated vapour baths' in which he employed various North American plants with reputed medicinal properties. Claiming to be able to cure diseases such as scrofula, Whitlaw outraged the medical establishment and he was branded a charlatan and a quack. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thomas Alan Stephenson (1898-1961) was a greatly gifted marine biologist and artist. The British sea anemones (1928, 1935) and his essay on beauty in nature and art, Seashore life and pattern (1944), both of which he illustrated himself, are his best-known works. A participant with his wife Anne in the Great Barrier Reef Expedition of 1928-1929, the couple subsequently travelled world-wide studying rocky-shore zonation patterns, summarized eleven years after Stephenson's death in Life between tidemarks on rocky shores (1972). During those travels Stephenson painted marine organisms (mostly invertebrates and algae) and shorescapes, many of which were reproduced in books and scientific papers. His paintings represent a valuable artistic and scientific resource of international significance that deserves to be better known. Some are listed in the catalogues prepared for a memorial exhibition in 1964. Others were discovered from letters between Stephenson and museum curators, and yet more were identified from further diverse sources. Catalogued here are 99 paintings on various marine themes in watercolour, gouache or oil, of which 55 are known in institutional collections or in private hands; the rest could not be traced. Yet more marine biological artworks probably remain undocumented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the introduction of native Japanese plants to Great Britain, focusing particularly on the introductions of Aucuba japonica and Larix leptolepis during the nineteenth century. It considers the exchange of horticultural knowledge and the traditional medicinal use of plants between botanists and doctors in China, Japan, and Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The authors assert that plant introductions go through three phases, they are first introduced as exotic plants, then become culturally assimilated after proving adaptable and hardy in their new environment, finally they become subjects of hybridisation, such as the creation of Larix eurolepis from Larix leptolepis and the European larch.

The article presents an examination into the career history of the 19th century British archaeologist Edmund Tyrell Artis, focusing on the paleobotanical contributions which he published between 1816 and 1821. Introductory details are given noting Artis' scholastic fame as an excavator of Roman cites in Northamptonshire, England. Comments are given highlighting how his early paleobotanical research helped form his personal archaeological methodology. The publication and contents of his monograph "Antediluvian Phytology" are also examined.

This article discusses the career of the Danish botanist Nathaniel Wallich, who served as the superintendent of the Calcutta, India Botanic Garden between 1815 and 1846. In this period Wallich developed scientific approaches to the plant life of South Asia that influenced the commercial position of the English East India Company. The interpretation of Wallich's life as a botanist and forester is reinterpreted as an economically interested approach to the management and improvement of the East India Company's commercial projects. Wallich had been accepted uncritically as a pioneer of forest conservation because of his advocacy on behalf of forestry restoration, but this author maintains that his work followed the commercial interests of the East India Company.

Focuses on the introduction of oak species in Great Britain and Ireland. Role of oak in the broader landscape development of estates; List of oak species introduced in the regions; Distribution of oak species and development of cultivars and hybrids.

People from ethnic minority groups have a range of experiences of living in Britain, some of which are significantly different from those of white British people. Previous research and case studies suggest that the physical environment has a positive or negative role in perceptions of everyday life. It is argued that landscapes have a symbolic dimension, and aspects of landscapes can be recognized as familiar or alien, welcoming or excluding. A wide variety of case studies in Britain are used to discuss design and management practices that reflect a range of cultural experiences. The need for landscape architects and managers to be aware of how places may be interpreted in different ways by different ethnic minority groups, and to work towards inclusive design, is highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a list of publications on the economic and social history of Great Britain and Ireland. Some of them are "The Religious Census of Sussex 1851," edited by J.A. Vickers; "The Robert Hall Diaries, 1947-53," edited by A. Cairncross; "The Catholic Question in Ireland and England, 1798-1882: The Papers of Denys Scully," by B. MacDermot; "The Correspondence of Robert Dodsley, 1733-64," by J.E. Tierney; "Returns of Papists, 1767," by E.S. Worrall; "The Rabbit and the Medieval East Anglian Economy," by M. Bailey; "A History of Laxton: England's Last Open-Field Village," by J.V. Beckett; "Transhumance Economy, Setting and Settlement in Highland," by A. Bil; "The Empty Fields: The Agricultural Strike of 1914," by R. Brazier; "Towards an Agricultural Geography of Medieval England," by B.M.S Campbell; "The Cost of Capital and Medieval Agriculture Technique," by G. Clark; "British Agricultural Policy, 1912-36: A Study in Conservative Politics," A.F. Cooper; "Harvests of Charge: The Royal Agricultural Society of England, 1838-1988," by N.P.W. Goddard.

The author reviews two centuries of the history of "Curtis's Botanical Magazine." He notices trends in the popularity of certain plants during particular periods such as the interest in new species in Great Britain from South Africa's Cape province, horticultural novelties from China, and the discovery of the families Iridaceae and Amaryllidaceae in the first half of the nineteenth century. He suggests that the current issue which features Chinese species will mark another historical peak.