The Island of the Colorblind

‘You are the one living soul from whom I have constantly received sympathy’ Darwin wrote to him. From the time when [Hooker] slept with the proofs of the Voyage of the Beagle under his pillow so as to read them the moment he woke up, to the day when he helped to bear Darwin’s pall to its last resting place in the Abbey, [he] was Darwin’s closest and most frequent confidant. It was to Hooker that Darwin, in 1844, sent the first hint of his theory of natural selection and, fifteen years later, Hooker was his first convert. In 1858, when Darwin received one morning from Alfred Russel Wallace an essay setting out the identical theory of natural selection which he himself was about to publish, it was Hooker, overruling Darwin’s quixotic desire to resign his undoubted priority to Wallace, who arranged for the famous double communication of the theory to be read at the Linnaean Society. And at the centenary of Darwin’s birth in 1909, Hooker, then 92, his tall figure still full of vigour, was present at Cambridge to do homage to the friend he had helped so much.

But quite apart from his role in the history of Darwinism, Sir Joseph Hooker stands head and shoulders above his contemporaries as systematic botanist, plant geographer and explorer.

‘Few ever have known, or ever will know, plants as he knew them,’ wrote Professor Bower. His early years were spent at Glasgow, during his father’s professorship. The house, in which were accumulating the herbarium and library later to form the basis of the Kew collections, was near to the botanic garden, and he must have lived and breathed botany from morning to night. The intense love of plants acquired at Glasgow dominated his life.

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Philip Henry Gosse, in his (anonymous) 1856 guide, Wanderings through the Conservatories at Kew, describes the cycads:

Clustered at the south-east extremity of the house, a considerable area of which they occupy, we see a group of plants having a common character, notwithstanding the various botanical appellations that we read on their labels. They bear, in their arching pinnate leaves, radiating from the summit of a columnar stem, a certain resemblance to palms, and also to the tree-ferns, but have neither the stately grace of the one, nor the delicate elegance of the other, while their excessive rigidity, and the tendency of their leaves to form spinous points, give them a repulsive aspect.