The Lakeland Gardener

Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817-1911) is recognised as the most important botanist of the19thand one of the key scientists of his age.    A close friend of Charles Darwin (1809-1882), Joseph Hooker was an extraordinary man - a prolific author, the second director of the Royal Botanical Gardens Kew (today a UNESCO World Heritage Site) and he instigated "rhododendromania". Rhododendron arboreum From late 1848 Joseph Hooker spent three and a half exhausting years in India exploring some of the most inaccessible terrain in the world.    He arrived home to rapturous welcome on 26th March 1851. The first expedition arrived back in Darjeeling on 2nd January 1849 with a collection so great that it took him six weeks to arrange a catalogue and pack the "80 coolie loads" of specimens that were to be sent back to Kew. The second exhibition took Hooker to the Chola and Yakia Passes in eastern Sikkim, a wild, mountainous and inhospitable country squeezed between Nepal, Tibet and

Autumn Flora in my garden non-native to the UK The Railway came to Windermere in 1847 and to Keswick in 1864. With the railway came visitors from Northern industrial cities - Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool, Middlesbrough and Newcastle.      The wealthy purchased land, built houses and created gardens.     Plant hunters were employed to bring rare species to these gardens.     This was a horticultural boom time in Cumbria and the Lake District. Today Cumbria is almost swamped with horticultural treasures.   At the end of the last great Ice Age, 8000 years ago, there appeared a poor and mean landscape full of waterlogged sedges, ferns;   probably less than two hundred plants that had survived the onslaught of millions of years of ice.     The plants included the bilberry (Vaccinum myrtillus), sundew (Droseras), some Alchemillas and the Teesdale Violet (Viola rupestris).  Rudbekia fulgida var. sullivantia 'Goldsturm' from Missouri USA  and Aster ageratoides'Ezo Merasaki