Leonie Paterson, Archivist at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE) will be speaking about George Forrest (1873 – 1932), a Scottish botanist, who became one of the first western explorers to the remote southwestern province of Yunnan, generally regarded as the most biodiverse province in China.
Forrest made seven botanical collecting expeditions to Yunnan in southwest China between 1904 and his death there in 1932, collecting samples and seeds for study and for avid collectors willing to pay for species new to the U.K. to add to their collections. During his career he added over 31,000 pressed and dried plant specimens to the RBGE herbarium and would also send seeds of the most desirable so they could be introduced to British gardens including primulas, rhododendrons, gentians, pieris and iris, many of them named after him using the epithet forrestii. Forrest’s botanical specimens are also held at herbaria around the world, most notably at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, the Royal Horticultural Society, London, the Beijing and Kunming Institutes of Botany and the Hong Kong Herbarium.
How did he manage to collect such a vast range of plants? And what parts of his story do we often not get to hear?
The Speaker
Leonie Paterson, Archivist at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE), who has been working in the Archives at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh for over 23 years. Not being a botanist, she finds herself drawn more to the stories of the individuals who created the records she looks after, in particular those of the plant collector George Forrest and his mentor, the Regius Keeper or Director of the RBGE at the turn of the 20th century, Sir Isaac Bayley Balfour. Reading Forrest’s letters are, to her, as if she’s receiving emails from him today – his voice comes through clearly and has opened up a fascinating new world of travel, experiences, risk and intrigue. She’s currently in the process of cataloguing the Forrest archives in order to make them more accessible.
PROGRAMME DETAILS
Time: 7 pm - 8 pm, Hong Kong Time
(11:00 am – 12:00 noon London Time)
Venue: Online event by Zoom
Admission: Zoom links are free for members of RASHK and sister societies, and members of The Hong Kong Gardening Society only. Non-members are welcome and required to make registration in advance.
Registration: Please email<membership@royalasiaticsociety.org.hk> and provide your membership number, if applicable, at the time of registration.
Registration will be closed at 12 noon HK Time on 5 December 2023.
Zoom links will be sent before or by 4 December 2023.