Augustine Henry Exhibition

A major project that the BSBA has taken on is to illustrate some of the many plants that Augustine Henry sent back from China to the herbarium at The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. During his 20years as a customs officer in the late 1800’s he collected (with local help) and sent 158,000 herbarium specimens to Kew and many to several other botanical gardens. Some 1,500 were new to science and most were unknown in the West.

Thus, for the first time the wild flora of large areas of China came to be revealed, which opened the floodgates for collectors to select the best from the herbarium, go and find them, then bring live plants to Western nurseries and thence to gardens.

On his return to Europe in 1900 he trained in forestry in France and visited every European country, collaborated with H.J.Elwes in producing a seven-volume treatise on trees. Finally he was appointed as the first Professor of Forestry at the Royal College of Science, Dublin.

Therefore the incentive for this project has been through Barbara Phillips who is Henry’s great-niece and we have been able to develop a collection of botanical paintings of plants associated with the great man.

Resulting from the successful Bath exhibition of the collection in autumn 2008, we have been invited to exhibit the paintings at The National Botanic Gardens of Ireland, Glasnevin, Dublin, later this year.

Dennis Neate. February 2009